About 15 years ago I remember being on the subway and seeing something that shocked me: a woman got into the car at 57th Street and, affixed to each of her 10 fingernails, were highly sculpted, three-dimensional unicorns. All different. All really pronounced. At the time I just stared. What I didn’t know is that the image would continue to haunt me this long after. I wondered at the time whether this was some crazy new trend in nail art. Why yes, yes it was. Here is but the teensiest smattering of nail art paraphernalia. The first image is fascinating. Photos are from here, here, here and here.

When we moved back to the Lower East Side back in July, this was one of the first photos I took. I saw this small-ish rodent (rat) on Division Street, on my way into the depths of Chinatown. He looked rather peaceful. And while I know this is a picture of a dead rodent, I love all the geometry going on here. I have had encounters of this sort before. See here.

Lendy’s Electric, on Grand Street in Manhattan, is one of those holdouts from an earlier time when small scale manufacturers and their accompanying tradesmen (tradeswomen?) dominated the downtown landscape. I always enjoy my visits there: so many unfamiliar things to look at, and I always learn something new. Even if that means appropriating some strange slang for a particular electric receptacle or seeing these schematics for plugs and whatnot. These Select-A-Spring photos are from a visit a couple of years ago.