Things I Learned Today.

1. Arbitration hearings in lawsuits over car accidents that happened three years ago take slightly less time, once they are under way, than a really, really good flossing of the teeth.
2. All the ingredients necessary to produce quiche can be found in a single aisle at my local supermarket. Within about 20 yards of each other.
3. The newsstand just outside the Hoboken, NJ PATH station sells Aero bars, along with several other candies I've never seen before in the States.
4. They're Aero bars with mint filling.
5. The uptown-bound D train becomes an express somewhere before 81st Street.
6. Cold, grey, wet, and rainy is not the right set of conditions under which to test out your new sandals by walking from 125th Street and Cathedral Parkway to 81st Street and 5th Avenue in Manhattan.
7. The Metropolitan Museum of Art's statue of the 11th century CE Tibetan Great Teacher Marpa, part of their Tibetan collection, looks suspiciously like a statue of a man wearing Buddhist robes who is about to stand up and introduce himself as "Lenny Lefkowitz, NYPD".
8. Staring too long at the stylized masks in the ancient Sichuan traveling exhibit causes you to blink an awful lot when you encounter one that looks anything close to human.
9. Taxi drivers won't stop for anyone outside the Met at 5 PM on a Thursday afternoon, no matter what their race is.
10. The Italian deli Biaggio's, in Hoboken, is owned and operated by a very nice man who deserves your custom if you are ever in that city.
11. Ill-designed stationary bicycle seats, just like ill-designed mobile bicycle seats, can choke off blood to areas of the body that probably really ought to have blood.
12. The return of blood to semi-choked-off areas of the body after 25 minutes on a badly designed bicycle seat is a very disconcerting experience.

Thank you.

Today's pulp survival tip is #100: If anyone seems particularly reluctant to abide by the warning on a tomb or wall or whatever not to remove any of the contents, make them stand guard instead of coming in with you. Cursed tomb guardians see no difference between the gold filling in the mummy's back molar and the mummy's entire sarcophagus.

Oh yeah.

Since a trip to the Met is nothing without a sketchpad...

Here's another one of the masks from the Sichuan exhibit. This one is physically smaller than the original one I drew, but I like its proportions better. I keep rendering the humanlike masks as too narrow despite my best efforts.

And speaking of humanlike...

This one is just plain odd in person. It's in the midst of all these highly stylized heads with ridged cheekbones and stuff that'd make a Nocker go 'bwah?', and it looks... human. Human with many features of the odd style found at Sanxingdui, anyway... Again, it is too narrow. you really need to see this head in person to understand how peculiar it is.

I so need to buy the catalog of this exhibition. These things are just breathtaking to look at. I can just about see the original creators of the things sculpting them from clay, all lines and angles and peculiar proportions... These people were cartooning in bronze, I'm almost sure of it. They were drawing out only the most important bits of what they were trying to depict, and instead of doing it with pen and ink, they were doing it with bronze. It's cartooning, made solid.