Thing-a-day.com

This is part 2 of a small 3-part project on New York apartments I started yesterday.

I thought it would be interesting to figure out the address of various characters’ apartments in New York-based TV shows (related to the actual building shown in establishing shots on the program and/or the address referred to on the program) and do a comparison with equivalent apartments posted on craigslist. Today, I did some research on Jerry’s apartment on Seinfeld.

On the show, Jerry lives at 129 West 81st Street on the Upper West Side of Manhattan. The exterior shot of the building that they used on the show (see below) is actually located in Los Angeles.

The real 129 West 81st Street, where the real Jerry Seinfeld actually lived at one time, is the building below.

On the show, Jerry lives in a 1-bedroom apartment with a pretty large living room and kitchen area. The whole apartments seems to be about 800 square feet. Though sizable by Manhattan standards, Jerry’s apartment is not as obscene as Monica and Rachel’s place on Friends. Here is an interior view from the Seinfeld set.

I did a search on craiglist for a 1-bedroom, 1-bath apartment on the Upper West Side, and then filtered for apartments in the vicinity. The price range seems to be around $2300-3300. The images below are from a place at 89th & Broadway for $3200. Not horrible, but kind of stodgy. Looks like a place some of my great-aunts used to live.

But this place below is the kind of super depressing posting that craiglist searchers are often faced with. The link says it’s a 1-bedroom, but then you go to the page and it says “spacious studio” for $2400. Kill me now.

There was a running joke on an episode of Seinfeld about New Yorkers obsession with their apartments and finding good deals in the face of the city’s continually skyrocketing rental costs. This observation is definitely true. But what is even more amusing about Seinfeld (and really, every other television show situated in Manhattan) is how far off base they are in terms of actual New York apartment square footage.

I thought it would be interesting to figure out the address of various characters’ apartments in New York-based TV shows (related to the actual building shown in establishing shots on the program and/or the address referred to on the program) and do a comparison with equivalent apartments posted on craigslist. Today, I did some research on Joey and Chandler’s apartment on Friends.

Here are a couple of shots of Joey and Chandler’s apartment. The exterior view is the actual building shown on the program. It is located at 90 Bedford Street at Grove Street in Greenwich Village. The two interior views of the kitchen and living room are from the Friends set. The two rooms, which are not really separate rooms but continuous, seem to be about 600 square feet. The entire apartment is probably around 1000 square feet with 2 bedrooms and 1 bathroom — this is quite large by Village standards.

So I did a search on craigslist for a 2-bedroom, 1-bath apartment in Greenwich Village, and then filtered for apartments in the vicinity. I found one on Bedford at Carmine (4 blocks away) for $2700. Here are some pictures:

The living room is listed as 12 x 11′, one bedroom is 11 x 9′, second bedroom is 9 x 7′. Relatively speaking, the price doesn’t seem too outrageous as far as Greenwich/West Village goes, but man, those bedrooms are small…this place is about half as big as Joey and Chandler’s.

In general, the apartments were around $3000-$4500, but one can always pay more. For comparison’s sake, here is what you get for $6400. Actually, with those parquet floors, it kind of looks a lot like Joey and Chandler’s place…

Today’s “search-a-day” is a selection of image search results for a Democratic presidential campaign buzzword in which the candidate most associated with the word is not a featured element. A secondary effect of the search resulted in images related to global warming, or the more newly fashionable term, climate change. Those images have been filtered out as well.

Today’s “search-a-day” is a selection of image search results for a Democratic presidential campaign buzzword in which the candidate most associated with the word is not a featured element.

Walking home from work tonight, I saw this fairly impressive pile of garbage bags being thrown out at closing time outside the Starbucks on 9th Avenue and 15th Street in Manhattan. While in and of itself it’s a fair amount of trash, you have to remember that most people get their coffee to go at Starbucks, meaning they don’t throw out their cups in the store but someplace else. I don’t have any hard statistics on this, but it’s probably fair to say that about 75% of all Starbucks customers get it to go, so these 20 bags outside of the 9th Avenue store is really just the tip of the iceberg. Furthermore, since Starbucks sells primarily one product, the range of refuse and total size of waste per customer is fairly small — mostly cups, lids, coffee grounds and related packaging.

Using the Starbucks website store locater tool, it appears there are about 220 Starbucks locations in the New York area (the 5 boroughs + the very eastern edge of Jersey). If each store produces 20 bags of garbage every day, you’re looking at close to 4,500 plastic bags full of cups and coffee grounds. If this is potentially only 25% of the waste produced by Starbucks and its customers on any given day in New York City…yikes.

My girlfriend is traveling through Southeast Asia for a few months, and commented today on the sheer abundance of skin whiteners that she was finding in pharmacies throughout Thailand, Laos, and Hong Kong. Whiter is considered better, more attractive. One explanation is that the obsession with lighter skin is rooted in a centuries old concept (common also to European cultures) that light skin is a sign of nobility or aristocracy — those with lighter skin weren’t working out in the fields all day getting tan. Light skin was a privilege. But of course, another interpretation would suggest that the powers of colonialism and the continued mass infiltration of US/EU cosumerist ideologies have a nefarious effect on cultural self-image. One look at any fashion spread, advertisement, movie, TV show, etc. would tell the story that “whiter is better”.

Needless to say, the skin whitening products on the market (usually over the counter) are nasty stuff. There has been a serious increase in cases of mercury poisoning in China due to skin whiteners over the past few years. It’s both very popular and a very contentious issue throughout Southeast and East Asia.

From CNN.com:
“In what may be the biggest toxic cream outbreak ever, 1,262 people flocked to a hotline set up by Hong Kong’s health department [in May 2002], after warnings that two whitener creams — Rosedew and La Rose Blanche — had mercury levels between 9,000 and 65,000 times the recommended dose.”

So for my “search a day”, I thought I’d check out some of these products. Here are a couple of selections from the advertisements that I found.

Catching up — I’m already behind, so posting twice today. That “Greener Gadgets” conference I went to yesterday is still on my mind. During one of the panels, Sony, among other corporations, were hyping their (highly flawed) recycling program. A lot of emphasis was put on electronic products’ “end of life” (how consumers need to be educated on how to properly dispose of them), with little discussion or responsibility being taken for the environmental impact of resource mining, energy consumption in the production stage of the product, labor practices, and on and on.

Anyway, while checking the status of my video camera repair on Canon’s website today, I checked out their recycling policy. The page had a rather incongruous image of bears in the wilderness, and was I reminded of how certain images/ideas had been (and apparently continue to be) used to represent environmental concerns — a fairly depoliticized image that functions as a kind of short hand for the issue. As if to say the problem is out *there*. It’s pretty common to pull out the mediagenic , guilt-trip inducing images to demonstrate corporate kinship with the world. So I thought I’d do an image search on keywords related to corporate recycling programs in the electronics industry. Here are a couple of samples. I’ll post an expanded version on my site soon.

I was at a conference called “Greener Gadgets” yesterday, targeted at the consumer electronics industry and featuring corporate innovations/sales pitch on sustainable practice…

One interesting tidbit I learned: “All natural” was the second most frequent claim made by food products in 2007. I started to do an image search based on that phrase to see what I’d come up with. I decided to expand beyond just food to include cleaning and beauty products, but might filter it later. Here are a couple of initial samples. I’ll post a more expanded selection on my site soon.