Interesting stories from the New York Times

I love the New York Times. I feel like the NYT has a lot of good information about things that are going on, and there are often interesting articles that are about random things. I like those.

The New York Times makes my life more interesting. A few days ago I was reading the paper while I waited for my train. A guy sat next to me, and he joked about how I was in Utah, not New York! “Ohhhhh.” I pretended I’d actually gotten the newspaper because I thought I was in New York. He appreciated me playing along with his little joke, and asked if I would share the horoscopes with him. Ummm, I told him, I don’t think The New York Times has horoscopes. (It doesn’t.) So he asked the guy next to me if he could see the horoscopes from the newspaper that he was reading. He didn’t know where they were or if he had them. The guy was obviously a little disappointed, so I told him I would give him his horoscope. “Today is full of possibilities,” I started. The man loved it so I kept going. “You’ll need to exercise patience, but good things will happen.” Or something like that. It was pretty funny. I gave him a good little paragraph’s worth of vague-but-encouraging “horoscope”. Afterwards, he protested, “But you don’t even know my sign!” I told him I didn’t even need it. It was a funny conversation. And after that, he sat on the row in front of mine on the train and we chatted until his stop.

Normally though, the New York Times is fun because of the amusing articles.

On 2 June, there was a story about this guy Dan Walsh, who started altering Garfield comic strips by removing Garfield from them. The article says “Without the cutesy thought-bubbles of his lasagna-loving cat, Jon’s observations seem to teeter between existential crisis and deep despair.” Jim Davis is flattered by the site, and occasionally reads it. The site is here.

Then yesterday, there was an article about a guy, Everton Wagstaffe, who had been imprisoned for 16 ½ years for a murder that it looks like he didn’t commit. There was one witness, and she was a drug addict and prostitute, and it looks like the case was in a long line of cases where there were witness tampering. So this guy has been waiting, and he’s served his minimum 14 year sentence, and he’s still there because he refuses to express remorse to the Parole Board since he’s still saying he didn’t do it. As part of the interview they’re talking about how he’s held up, and he says “There are times I feel beaten down. But then I read about these other people being cleared, and say, ‘My day is coming.’” There was a ton of evidence, too, because the poor murdered girl had hair in her hand, stuff under her fingernails and hairs found near her genitals. Except! The evidence had been lost and they finally just found it last July. They’re not done with the DNA testing yet, but so far there’s no trace of this guy. At the end of the article there’s another quote from him, “During all these years, I learned the importance of strangers. One does not really have to know somebody to help somebody. Just being a human alone is enough.” I just always like stories of people who are optimistic and positive, and hopeful.

There was another interesting story recently, about these berries that make everything taste sweet for awhile, but Jeremy Blachman wrote a sweet post about it already, so I’ll just link to his. He also links to the original article, which is very interesting.

Today I’m planning on (finally!) making cheese, so I’ll probably have a post about that soon.