Summer Camp – I Want You by VHSLove

Sunday. vodka palmer’s. nothing else to do except blog stupid pictures of hippos alongside urban love songs.
sigh.

“Keeping Honey Bees” by Malcom Sanford and Richard Bonney

re: beekeeping.

DO NOT EXPERIMENT DURING YOUR FIRST YEAR OR TWO.

oops. too late…
hahaha
Im filing this under doomed but adding a ? to the end of the tag.

This country is muffed.

Filed under “research”.

Watching the Bay…

Watching….the streets.

Hide the children, the Black Pearl never sleeps…

The World is burning in case you havent noticed. Why? Why now? Its visceral out there, isnt it. I remember my Mother telling me years back that violence and global turmoil was cyclic and everything would be better once it had run its course. Made sense, I think back then she was right, now though its a new level every day; there seems to be no cyclic trend, no turning back. I read this article tonight on pickpockets and it got me thinking about ……..well read for yourself. The two block’s below are what got me thinking the most, especially the last.
Im filing this under a category I dont use often: Doomed.

Read the article: the lost art of the hook.

The decline of dipping on the rails is extraordinary. Subways were always the happiest hunting grounds for pickpockets, who would work alone or in teams. There were classic skilled canons—organized pickpocket gangs—at the top, targeting wealthier riders, then “bag workers” who went for purses, and “lush workers” who disreputably targeted unconscious drunks. Richard Sinnott, who worked as a New York City transit cop in the 1970s and ’80s, also admiringly recalls “fob workers,” a subspecies of pickpocket who worked their way through train cars using just their index and middle fingers to extract coins and pieces of paper money—a quarter here, a buck there—from riders’ pockets. “They weren’t greedy, and they never got caught,” says Sinnott. Bit by bit, fob workers could make up to $400 on a single subway trip; then they’d go to Florida in the winter to work the racetracks. Many of the city’s pickpockets trained elsewhere, “and if they were any good, they came to New York,” Sinnot says, with a touch of pride. “In the subways, we had the best there were.” Pickpocketing remained fairly rampant for years. Glenn Cunningham, who was part of an elite NYPD anti-pickpocketing task force in the 1980s and ’90s (he currently handles security for Robert De Niro’s hotel and film festival), says that pickpocketing in spots like Times Square was “out of control” at that time. “I made tons of arrests with those guys. We were like cowboys.”

But even if Fagins abounded in the United States, it’s unclear whether today’s shrinking pool of criminally minded American kids would be willing to put in the time to properly develop the skill. “Pickpocketing is a subtle theft,” says Jay Albenese, a criminologist at Virginia Commonwealth University. “It requires a certain amount of skill, finesse, cleverness, and planning, and the patience to do all that isn’t there” among American young people. This is “a reflection of what’s going on in the wider culture,” Albenese says. If you’re not averse to confrontation, it’s much easier to get a gun in the United States than it is in Europe (though the penalties for armed robbery are stiffer). Those who have no stomach for violence can eke out a living snatching cell phones on the subway, which are much easier to convert to cash than stolen credit cards, or get into the more lucrative fields of credit card fraud or identity theft, which require highly refined skills that people find neither charming nor admirable in the least. Being outwitted mano a mano by a pickpocket in a crowded subway car is one thing; being relieved of your savings by an anonymous hacker is quite another.