Friday, June 3, 2011

not Sal's meat market


... the reference, of course, being a quintessential NJ one, back to The Sopranos, and the bloody site of many gruesome dispatchings of meat not fit for human consumption.   This is on Santa Monica - "cut it out," i.e. the gun, along the dots (and nb the clever incorporation of the telegraph pole) in a little bit of semi- gangland on my walk to the bus stop.

Yes, the bus stop - we just have the one rental car, and Alice had to stay behind to greet the man reading the gas meter when I had meetings.   So I reverted to my 1988 habits of getting around LA and caught a bus straight down Vermont, which proved to be a wonderfully rapid and convenient and hassle free way of getting to work.   Doubtless I am about to start displaying worryingly English behavioral characteristics, determinedly navigating Los Angeles by public transport.  Luckily only two people remarked on my accent in a whole day of meeting with various bits of officialdom (payroll, etc).   And how wonderful, after the completely incomprehensible inauguration at Rutgers back in 2001 - which largely consisted in working out how to get a bus over to Busch before I had a campus map, and before I knew that the campuses were not a little spread out and separated by a large river (a map turned up in a bag on my office doorknob, together with an umbrella, a notepad, and two football tickets for a game that had already been played, sometime in November) - to be able to walk from one office to another, and to emerge to a faint but persuasive smell of jasmine.   There are various ways in which this isn't, indeed, New Jersey.


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