nikhil.io

Snapped this whilst walking the dog around the East Village. It’s a reflection of our State Capitol building. Downtown gets very calm and beautiful in the evenings.

This was my first car, a 1992 Buick LeSabre I christened Brunhilde. I bought it off my friend John for $1,000¹. She was a lovely vehicle and came with bench seats, a CD changer, and boombastic speakers. She braved over 250,000 miles. Every car-person and occasional mechanic would extol the 3800 Series II V6 under the hood with the word “bulletproof” after asserting that it was the “last good engine outta GM”. Just a very solid car. I wonder where she is.

1. And had to sell it back to him for that amount due to temporary undergraduate impoverishment…↩︎

I saw this at the hospital my little niece was born in. It was offered as gift to the maternity unit by a “grateful former patient” and is a Farsi poem by Saadi Shirazi called “Bani Adam”. Here are the first few lines:

Human Beings are members of a whole
In creation of one essence and soul
If one member is inflicted with pain
Other members uneasy will remain
If you have no sympathy for human pain
The name of human you can not pertain

Saadi! I found out much later in life that a powerful French bureaucrat named Lazare Carnot was so enamored by Saadi Shirazi’s poetry that he named his eldest son Sadi (Carnot) of Carnot Cycle fame. We had to memorize this thing (the Carnot Cycle) in high school and I only understood what he was on about about 15 years later.

My favorite watering hole is The Locust Tap. I met this old regular named Phil a while ago. Loves his Jack Daniels. He sets up his homemade telescope outside the place about once or so every week for passersby to peer through in amazement. He’s been doing this for the past twenty years. He let me take this picture through it with my phone. Built his first telescope in 1987.

Lunabear attends to her Mamabear.