Brooklyn Flea

This morning I enjoyed a delicious peach clafoutis that Laura made. I know, cla-WHO-tee, you may ask? It sounds funny but it's a delicious fresh fruit baked in a light batter. Yumm! Then I went to the fabulous Brooklyn Flea Market and bought these four antique tin ceiling tiles. I've been wanting to hang a tableau of old tiles for a long time now and couldn't resist these beauties from the booth of Olde Goode Things. This is how they're now hanging on the wall. What do you think?

Too Strange for Words

"A 'dead' man's son spots him on television after eight years," reports the Telegraph. Long after he thought his dad was dead and buried, this guy in the UK sees him on a show about missing people. Apparently, he had been in an assisted living facility nearby the whole time, but could not remember his name.

"Police have apologised for an extraordinary series of errors which led to him being declared dead and an unidentified man being cremated in his place." Um...

Walk this Way

A new study in The Journal of Sexual Medicine finds that you can infer a woman's history of vaginal orgasm by observing the way she walks.

"Trained sexologists were able to correctly infer vaginal orgasm through watching the way the women walked over 80 percent of the time. Further analysis revealed that the sum of stride length and vertebral rotation was greater for the vaginally orgasmic women. "This could reflect the free, unblocked energetic flow from the legs through the pelvis to the spine," the authors note.

This is weird.

Sounds to me like some scientists were having fun watching young women "videotaped from a distance while walking in a public place" and placing wagers on their "orgasmic history."

A Mass E-mail

Now as you may or may not know, I'm a bit of a technology curmudgeon lately -- go figure! So I thought Amy Ozols' paen to the mass e-mail in this week's New Yorker was super funny. Absolutely everybody prefaces their mass e-mails by apologizing for sending them! And you know those e-mails that get sent out because someone lost their phone and can't remember anyone's number? That's what she's talking about and she knocks it out of the park!

Two work lunch faves

There's nothing like a steaming bowl of matzoh ball soup from Ben's Deli! My other favorite lunch spot near work is just a few doors down at Pick-a-Pita. A pita jam packed with falafel, tabouli, carrots, onions, cucumbers and pretty much anything else you can think of. At $5, it's pretty much the best lunch deal in this neighborhood. Both are on West 38th street between seventh and eighth avenues. They also both happen to be kosher. This area is an interesting mix of fabric shops, kosher food, and tourists looking for Times Square!

Say what?

Cindy McCain's RNC outfit priced at $300K!

And the GOP keeps talking about getting back to basics and how they are "real people." Ironic, eh? Cindy McCain scares me.

Labor Day Fun

I can't believe I haven't written about the lovely (and very last minute) vacation I took with my sister and her two little kiddies. I had been jonesing to get out of the city for weeks and wanted to get on the beach for Labor Day. My ill-fated attempt to do a house swap came up short.

If you can believe it, I called a rental cottage that I found online in Watch Hill, Rhode Island on Friday morning before the weekend and they had a vacancy! I even managed to talk the woman down in price. I happen to be fact checking an article about vacation rentals and all of the questions you're supposed to ask and how to prepare in advance. I did none of that. I just asked when we should show up. And it worked out perfectly (thank God). Kat was an incredible trooper agreeing to hop in the car at a moment's notice. We piled the trunk with the requisite high chairs and blankets and diapers, cranked the Deb Talon and we were off!

The cottage was simple and suited us perfectly. The one glitch was the terribly soft bed, but after wine and unisom Kat and I slept like babies. There was an adorable antique carousel down the road from the cottage that Gracie got to ride each day and we all had our share of the local homemade ice cream. The ocean was super refreshing and Charlie kept us on our toes chasing seagulls and making a bee-line for the surf. A seagull pooped on me and I thought it was sunscreen at first and then ran into he ocean to wash it off--no biggie! And we walked to the Watch Hill lighthouse with stellar views and friendly locals. What a way to end the summer -- small town bliss!