Valuable Data

I've been blessed this week with an yet another cold - it first manifested on Sunday as a sore throat, but since then it's basically been all sinuses all the time. In light of this, our Halloween was pretty sedate. We butchered some pumpkins when I got home from work on Tuesday night (pictures forthcoming) and then set up camp on the couch to munch Halloween Peeps and freshly toasted pumpkin seeds while watching Bela Lugosi do his thing. I have had worse Halloweens, illness aside.

This morning I was walking to work and saw a man crouched over one of the grates in the sidewalk, dangling something on a long string down into it. I have seen this man before (though I'm not sure I've mentioned him) so I paused to have a cigarette and observe his work. What's on the string is a magnet, and he dangles it down through the grate while looking around with a flashlight until he finds something of interest. If the object turns out not to be magnetic, he pulls up the string again and coats the magnet in peanut butter from a jar he keeps in his coat pocket before dropping it back down. This morning he did this several times before he was finally victorious - the peanut-buttery magnet came up with a ring attached. Whether the ring was valuable in any way, I can't say, but you have to give the guy points for creativity.

Comments

[jackdorf]

Don't feel alone in having the cold.

It seems like half of London has the same cold right now.

I know I do.

Where I come from, if we want to get something that's under a grate, we usuall open the grate.

I guess grates are more securely places in NYC.