Thing-a-day.com

I watched one of the movies I had recorded on the tee-vee tonight.  To be honest, The 47 Ronin part II was hard for me to get through and not a favorite.  Maybe it would’ve helped if I had see part I?  I wanted to check it out because the synopsis looked promising: samurai seek revenge and all 47 of them are sentenced to death by suicide based on a true story. Visually the film had some nice stuff to look at (costumes, hair, a look into different country and different time period). 

This drawing is a paused screenshot from the movie jotted down on paper.  I roughly sketched out the courtyard that these two dudes were sitting in, but later decided to paste over the green-blue notebook paper background instead.  As the movie was in black and white, I was also able to color it however I liked.

Tonight I started out doodling with no direction whatsoever….

Then I got to thinking about my Thing-A-Day partner Joonbugg (who IS participating and participating well, she just doesn’t post as often as me) and did this for her…

“Never was a cornflake girl, I hung out with the raisin girls…”
It’s a reference to the Tori Amos song “Cornflake Girl”. I may not have got the last part of the lyric right (she pronounces things funny) but you get my drift.

I decided illustrating song lyrics might be fun, so I went to the next one that popped in mind…

This next one is posted in thumbnail format because it has a tiny amount of female nudity, and I am a little unsure of the TAD terms & rules. I don’t wanna get kicked off the blog.

“She liked to keep her body clean, clean… She thought the world to be quite obscene”
From “Oedipus” by Regina Spektor.

And the last one, also in thumbnail format because it features a little male anatomy lesson that everyone who’s ever watched Shin Chan on Adult Swim knows… Please be forewarned before you click, lest you be offended by Mister Happy…

“To be a man you must have honor, honor and a penis.”

Well you can pretty much see every object in the drawing’s thumbnail anyway. Oops! Oh well, if you’re offended by the tiny THUMBNAIL weewee, you may just need to lighten up some.  SRSLY.

(You can tell I was a little shy about drawing the penis, I didn’t bear down with the Ebony pencil near as much as the rest of the sketch. I’m such a shy little girl sometimes. Nevermind that I’m almost 25 and married. LOL.)

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…

So, my days are filled with non-stop running and by the time I have a chance to post my TAD, I am horizontal in bed..so, this is my catch up post. Not that any of these are necessarily horribly creative, but, such is my life these days.

TAD #2 - CLEANING AND SEALING THE COUNTERTOPS

This was Saturday and I felt like crap. I had attempted to do a little too much the day before and I was having aches in places that I shouldn’t have. So, my big thing was to clean off all of the tools, adhesives, pieces/parts and so on that were cluttering up my onyx countertop. I cleaned it really well and then sealed it.

TAD#3 - MAKING A CLOSET WHERE ONE DIDN’T EXIST BEFORE

Sunday was a whole new task. I had to figure out how to install a somewhat decent looking rod to hang my clothes in my new closet. The problem is, the wall is on a roofline and most pre-made closet things you buy are made to go in square, not slanted spaces. So, after spending a good deal of time in the hardware section, I came up with a solution using hitching rings, 1×4’s & a nice chrome closet bar. It’s amazing how much time this took to install. I still need to stain the 1×4’s, but I am very happy with the final product.

TAD #4- THAT’S ENTERTAINMENT

Last night the task was to figure out how to set up the new TV with the legacy receiver, DVD, CD and make it all work with the in-ceiling speakers.

My first collage: