Friday, November 20, 2009

New York Day Two

Well, all by myself, I found an activity for the day.  Seems the folks at Discovery bought the old New York Times building (an interesting enough location all by itself) to set up "Discovery Times Square Exposition."  And they had a new exhibit opening today, so I thought I'd check it out.

(I checked their website to see if I needed to pre-order tickets.  They were sold out all afternoon, so I had to get an early ticket.  Turns out the place was empty.  They weren't sold out -- they were closing in the afternoon to prepare for the Grand Opening tonight.  So, there's an extra $4 down the toilet for pre-ordering unnecessarily.)


Anyway, the exhibit was called "Da Vinci's Workshop," and had about 20 (only a handful full-scale) of recreations of some of Da Vinci's mechanical designs.  Also reproductions of pages from his notebooks, and various computer displays that let you flip cyberpages in one of the notebooks, and then zoom in on a particular design for a 3-D model.  All of which was quite cool, but if you ask me, it wasn't really worth the $20.  Because, I mean, it's $20 for a lot of reproductions and recreations -- that sort of thing should be cheap.  You want to charge actual money, display some actual notebook pages in one of your glass, temperature-controlled display cases.


Thereafter, I decided to walk over to Bryant Park.  There's a "free" ice skating rink there, and also lots of little artisan shops set up for your holiday shopping pleasure.  The "free" is in quotes because, while skating is free, skate rental is $12 and, while locker rental is free, a lock is $9.  In other words, free for locals, $21 for tourists.  Note to self:  bring skates and a lock next time you go to New York in the holiday season.  I poked around the shops for a bit -- bought the perfect gift ... for someone I'm not entirely sure I'm exchanging holiday gifts with -- and then got the hell out of there when I realized I have 2 scripts (in pdf) I have to read tonight (critic business).


It was about 5:00.  I have a show tonight at 7:30, and couldn't figure out how to read both scripts and grab dinner before the show, without carrying my netbook to the restaurant and then take it with me to the theatre.  And my netbook won't fit in my purse, so I'd have to take a backpack, which they'd make me check, and damn, damn, damn.


Checked the email (which transmitted the scripts as an attachment) on my Droid and...


Holy Crap, the damn thing reads pdfs.


I love this phone.


No comments: