It was August 19th, 2004 when I launched Population Statistic, in all it’s green-hued glory, upon the InterWebs.

Two years to the day before that, I first gave this blogging thing a whirl on The Critical ‘I’. That was the 2002 version of Blogger/BlogSpot, meaning pre-Google — oldschool, y’all.

So today would be my four-year anniversary of running this dedicated blog website, and six-year anniversary of embarking upon blogging as a daily hobby/discipline/timewaster. Given that the average abandonment rate for most blogs is still measured in weeks, I’ve demonstrated persistence and endurance, if nothing else (although hopefully, the countless wordcount contained within these posts demonstrates something more).

As the content well hasn’t run dry yet, and I still somehow manage to eke out time, I guess I’ll press on until next August.

This is my first, and maybe only, blog posting using the WordPress for iPhone app on my iPod Touch.

Considering that the preceding sentence just took me five minutes to tap-type out, I’m leaning toward “only”…

Actually it’s a pretty slick little app to have, just in case an on-the-go blogging emergency crops up. And as a free app, the price is right. It beats trying to publish via Safari; the WP backend isn’t really optimized for the small mobile-device screen.

The obvious drawback is the lack of cut-and-paste on the iTouch. My posts tend to be link-laden, and manually typing in permalinks isn’t feasible — from memory, yet! And using those “blog this” links ain’t my style. (I’m cheating on the links above — I’m actually sitting in front of my computer checking the URLs. I’m a geek, I know.)

One note: The app’s FAQ claims it requires WP 2.5.1 or higher, but I’m using it on 2.5 and it appears to be working fine.

And now that this rather short post took up the better part of an hour to craft, I’ll end this little iPod-blogging adventure. Keeping the capability in reserve, for now.

UPDATE: Based on the just-accomplished publishing of this post via the iTouch, here’s the resultant shortcomings of the WordPress for iPhone app, version 1.1 (I’ve switched over to full-sized computer keyboard to type out this part :

- Categories don’t seem to register upon publication, despite selecting them. When publication goes through, the post ends up Uncategorized. (I’ve since corrected that on this post, on the main computer).

- Timestamp doesn’t reset to actual posting time, instead keeping the time/date of the original drafting of the post. You can manually reset the time, but that’s an extra step; and I imagine that’d be a royal pain when it comes to live-blogging, a situation for which this portability is otherwise ideally suited.

- No way to include trackback URLs for referenced links.

Overall, not bad. It’ll do in a pinch, but not as a preferred substitute for the full-fledged WP backend.

Is it an indicator of how far back in my personal rear-view mirror the drinking-age debate is that I’m not at all convinced of the merits behind the Amethyst Initiative, an organization advocating a switch back to 18-year-old imbibing and founded by — improbably enough — college presidents?

“This is a law that is routinely evaded,” said John McCardell, former president of Middlebury College in Vermont who started the organization. “It is a law that the people at whom it is directed believe is unjust and unfair and discriminatory.”

Other prominent schools in the group include Syracuse, Tufts, Colgate, Kenyon and Morehouse.

Not that all school administrators are onboard:

McCardell cites the work of Alexander Wagenaar, a University of Florida epidemiologist and expert on how changes in the drinking age affect safety. But Wagenaar himself sides with MADD in the debate.

The college presidents “see a problem of drinking on college campuses, and they don’t want to deal with it,” Wagenaar said in a telephone interview. “It’s really unfortunate, but the science is very clear.”

Another scholar who has extensively researched college binge-drinking also criticized the presidents’ initiative.

“I understand why colleges are doing it, because it splits their students, and they like to treat them all alike rather than having to card some of them. It’s a nuisance to them,” said Henry Wechsler of the Harvard School of Public Health.

But, “I wish these college presidents sat around and tried to work out ways to deal with the problem on their campus rather than try to eliminate the problem by defining it out of existence,” he said.

And in fact, my Spidey-cynic tells me that the college presidents pushing the “debate” are engaging in subtle marketing for the much-sought-after incoming students: When word gets out that they’re pushing for a lower drinking age, I’m sure it’ll carry weight in many a final enrollment decision. To wit:

“Yeah dude, Tufts was just my back-up safety school, but when I heard that their prez signed a petition to change the drinking law to 18, I moved them to the top of the list! Party!”

Gotta keep those matriculation numbers up, y’know.

I’d never had occasion to visit the intersection of Lafayette and Worth Streets in Manhattan before skating past it during the City’s Summer Streets event two Saturdays ago (as well as this past Saturday).

When I did, I immediately noticed the ceremonial name attached to this stretch of Worth: Avenue of the Strongest.

Who are these “strongest”? They are, of all things, New York’s sanitation workers, and were bestowed this honorific back in 1996.

I’ve got no particular quibbles with giving these civil servants a street to call their own. But “avenue of the strongest”? I’m sure strength is a laudable virtue of the garbage collector, but to exalt to this degree seems extreme. The name comes off as vaguely totalitarian, like something that you’d come across in a history of Stalinist Russia or Nazi Germany.

[image credit]

The whole John Edwards/Rielle Hunter scandal rolls on, including the late revelation that Hunter’s roots are murkier than originally thought.

Which is something of a disappointment, actually. Because her established backstory to this point was more than satisfying, as it melded ’80s nouveau literature with modern political machinations.

After writing Bright Lights, Big City, ’80s lit sensation Jay McInerney wrote a far less well-known book titled Story Of My Life. What I remember about the book (and why I remember it) was that it was done first person from the perspective of a slutty, drugged-out party girl named Alison Poole. I was writing a lot of fiction at the time, and always found it difficult to write female characters. So, to me, McInerney convincingly doing so for an entire book was a neat trick

It must have also impressed fellow ’80s lit sensation Brett Easton Ellis, because he wrote McInerney’s Alison Poole right into the cultural earthquake that was American Psycho. Being American Psycho, Poole’s scene was short and includes brutal sodomy–and the Kentucky Derby, if memory serves.

While McInerney and Ellis were friends, it always bothered me that Ellis had his fictional creation do what he did to McInerney’s fictional creation. It seemed the height of disrespect, especially since fictional characters are often based on real people. And McInerney admits that Alison Poole was directly based on his girlfriend at the time: Rielle Hunter. The same one who is now, 20 odd years later, tangled up with John Edwards.

If the rumors are true, Hunter doesn’t give Edwards the presidential gravitas a Marilyn Monroe would, but anytime you share a woman with the great Patrick Bateman, it’s got to be worth something.

So, if Alison Poole is really Rielle Hunter, then ipso facto, that would make John Edwards… Patrick Bateman? Just as well that Edwards’ Presidential bid went nowhere this year — think about carrying out a serial-killing career while fulfilling your duties as Commander in Chief.

The Completely Automated Turing Test To Tell Computers and Humans Apart method of comment-spam prevention is, at best, a tolerable annoyance. It’s better than requiring registration just to leave a quickie note; on the other hand, lots of people can’t bear even so minor a speed-bump in the feedback process.

But if you’re going to muck up your website thusly, you might as well reap some greater benefit from it. reCAPTCHA, a second-wave filter guard, multitasks the retyping task by tossing in some digital decryption work that stumps computers.

The key to this new method is that it presents not one, but two words:

One of these is the real security word: Type this one correctly and you’re in. The other image is something that has mystified the digitizing software.

If people recognize that word, they type it in. This image will actually be shown to several people. If they all agree on what the word is, it will be considered accurately transcribed. And [CAPTCHA inventor Luis] von Ahn says it will be incorporated into the digitized copy of the book or the newspaper that it came from.

“And the number of words that we’ve been able to digitize like this is insanely large, it’s like over a billion. It’s like 1.3 billion by now,” von Ahn says.

In the journal Science, he and his colleagues report that over the last year Web users have transcribed enough text to fill up more than 17,600 books, with better than 99 percent accuracy.

So we have spambots to indirectly thank for digitized archives of the New York Times and public-domain books. There’s a certain karmic balance coming out of that.

The ongoing Olympics has brought into focus the curious pronunciation problem that English-speakers have with the name of China’s capital city:

Beijing used to be known as Peking to English speakers. It officially changed in 1949, when the new Communist government adopted the pinyin transliteration method for proper names, according to Logoi.com, which sells software for learning languages. The change came into popular usage in the West when the Chinese began using Beijing on all official documents in the 1980s.

[College professor S. Robert] Ramsey said he believed Bay-zhing came into usage because it sounded more foreign, more mysterious. Some in the West may subconciously believe the harder-sounding “jing” sounds like a slur against the Chinese, he said.

What strikes him odd is that the “zh” sound isn’t used in the English language.

“You have to work to get it wrong,” he said.

That last part is laughably inaccurate — the “zh” sound is common enough in English: Vision, illusion, usual, seizure, measure, prestige, etc. Furthermore, the common “j” sound is really close to “zh”, so it’s not all the much “work” to have the tongue slip when applied to Beijing. I suspect that the unconventional “ay” sound for the “ei” combination in this case also leads to linguistic second-guessing when gliding into the word’s second syllable. Finally, our familiarity with the French “zh” sound for the letter j probably also contributes.

All that said, we should toe the line. Personally, the “jing” pronunciation was impressed upon me in college, when a professor of Chinese studies went through essentially this same argument. I guess it stuck, even though I also lapse into the wrong sound.

For what it’s worth, the Greek translation of the city’s name is Πεκίνο, which translates to “Peking”. I guess Athens never got the memo on the name revision.

Being Americans, we just assume that everyone on the globe speaks American English.

But apparently, when you’re spreading the Good Word, you don’t take any chances, as exemplified by this sidewalk sandwich-board display I cameraphoned on 42nd Street earlier today. It contained Christian religious flyers, translated into a few dozen languages. What I found to be the most amusing part: The only misspelling in the whole lineup? “Englishn”.

Go see the embiggened version on Flickr. And for completeness’ sake, here’s the row-by-row list of all the languages represented. I realize there’s probably no particular rhyme or reason to it, but I find the resultant grouping of disparate tongues interesting nonetheless:

First row: English, French, Arabic, Hebrew, Urdu
Second row: Armenian, Farsi, Afrikaans, Chinese, Bengal (sic)
Third row: Creole, Croatian, Czech, Albanian, German
Fourth row: Dutch, Latvian, Georgian, Estonian, Burmese
Fifth row: Cambodian, Greek, Tibetan, Hungarian
Indian dialects: Hindi, Tamil, Malayalam, Marathi, Punjab (incomplete; I didn’t get a clear look at all these)

No doubt buoyed by last year’s movie adaptation, Ian McEwan’s “Atonement” seemed to be a popular read this summer, based upon the number of copies I saw in the hands of many many women throughout New York City. (Yes, only women — are you really surprised?)

For reasons I cannot explain, I have an irresistible urge to express said title in a mock-French pronunciation — “a-TONE-mahnd”, instead of the sensibly-English “a-TONE-ment”.

This, despite the fact that the novel has little if anything French about it. Heck, even the French word for “atonement” doesn’t even match (”expiation”). So where this compulsion is coming from, I can’t say.

It’s earned me more than one quizzical look.

Earlier this week, I pondered whether or not toll-free telephone numbers (i.e., 800, 866, 877, and 888 area codes) were even necessary these days, with the current state of telecommunications. I narrowed it down to two reasons:

1. The issue of “toll calls” is largely irrelevant, as both wireless and landline phone packages generally are structured as unlimited local and long-distance services. So you don’t pay anything extra anyway, no matter where you’re calling.

2. In the case of cellphones with a limited number of monthly minutes, toll-free numbers aren’t even “toll-free” — they eat up the same number of plan minutes as any other call. So for an increasing segment of consumers who use wireless as their only phone, there’s no added benefit/incentive to call that number.

In both cases, the penalty of paying for a call is erased. The very purpose of these special telephone exchanges disappears. So why should businesses even bother getting them, much less touting them?

But there is the marketing-message potential, as illustrated by this appropos number I spied today, on the side of a truck owned by cargo company Delaware Valley Express:

1-800-HAUL-ASS

Once I saw that, I decided: Yes, there is a purpose to the continuation of toll-free telephone numbers. “Haul ass” indeed.

Pop quiz: How many legs does an octopus have?

Wrong! Despite a name that literally means “eight-footed” in Greek, new research into the animal’s behavior reveals a distinct division-of-purpose among those eight tentacles:

Octopuses are reckoned to be the world’s most intelligent invertebrates and are able to use tools with their sucker-covered tentacles.

Helped by more than 2,000 observations by visitors, teams of aquatic specialists carried out a study showing that the creatures seemed to favour their first three pairs of tentacles for grabbing and using objects, Sea Life aquariums said.

“One can assume that the front six tentacles have the function of arms, and that the back two take over the function of legs,” Sea Life biologist Oliver Walenciak said.

Time for a new name, apparently. How about “sea-sucker”?

No telling how this will affect the Detroit Red Wings’ playoff octopus-tossing tradition.

I admit my ignorance of graffiti tagging, so maybe the handle “pneumonia” is commonplace in the five boroughs.

It’s new to me, though. This simple magic-markered markup was spied (and cameraphoned) near the corner of Madison Avenue and 40th Street in midtown Manhattan. Check out Flickr for the embiggened version.

It’s unusual, anyway. I’d suspect The Gap of having something to do with defacing their own outdoor ad, but I can’t imagine what the advantage would be of associating hipster apparel with infectious disease.

Everyone knows that Twitter is the very latest of the greatest in Web 2.0.

But does anyone know if the site’s user-generated and now-famous Fail Whale mascot is at all related to one of the quirkier outputs hosted on Twitter: A tweet-by-tweet republishing — which, by the nature of the service, is restricted in frequency — of Herman Melville’s “Moby-Dick”?

Something about microblogging is conducive to whale-wondering, apparently. Who knew?

When the Department of Homeland Security was created in the wake of 9/11, its purpose was to be an umbrella organization that would streamline the efforts of national security entities like the CIA, FBI and others.

Six years into the job, that mission’s pretty much out the window: Far from consolidating and coordinating existing Federal resources, the DHS, ironically, is further muddying the waters by setting up its own, separate counterintelligence unit.

Homeland Security is creating a counterintelligence system now, because there is currently no place for such a function in the department — which was formed by 22 disparate agencies — said a senior U.S. government official who requested anonymity because he is not authorized to publicly discuss intelligence.

“We are still a relatively young department,” Homeland Security spokesman Russ Knocke said, adding that the memo reflects the department’s maturity over the past five years.

Twenty-two agencies, and no counterintelligence efforts among any of them? Nonsense. It means the DHS has been wholly unsuccessful in eliminating the clout/turf battles that prevented a united front versus al-Quaeda in 2001. Basically, the CIA and FBI are back to their fief-like SOPs, so the DHS has to duplicate espionage efforts that it can’t extract from the other agencies.

As for this being a “reflection of the department’s maturity”: It certainly is. It reflects how much the DHS has matured into a standard Federal bureaucracy. Back to business as usual, until the next security breach.

Birth-control pills may give a woman peace of mind, but apparently it screws up her pheromone-olfactory detection to the point where she winds up sleeping with incompatible men.

On the plus side, of course: At least she won’t compound the error by getting pregnant. It’s contraception on a biological and relationship level.

There’s an insidious tone accompanying the news that Apple’s iPhone 2.0 firmware contains a “kill switch” component that can delete applications remotely, without the consent of the device’s user.

(Note that this affects iPod Touches as well, as they run the very same firmware. I suppose you could avoid exposing one to this never turning on the wi-fi nor syncing it with iTunes Store — a highly unlikely scenario.)

I don’t disagree that having to subject your gadget to this big-brotherish remote management is dicey, despite Apple’s good intentions of using it only in the event of a malicious app slipping through. If anything, it points to a deficiency in Apple’s vetting of additions to the App Store if it relies upon a backup guard like this.

However, it occurs to me: A remote way to kill off functions on an iPhone — mainly in cases of lost phones containing sensitive information — was a key request from corporate IT departments, and really the only software-based requirement that could have been included in the 3G. So it’s quite possible that this “kill switch” is nothing more than a concession to business adopters. And since BlackBerries already sport this feature, what’s the big deal about Apple now including it in their offerings?

I’m still not crazy about it, but if the more ubiquitous BlackBerry already does this, I don’t see why Apple’s emulation should spook anyone.

A marriage of fantasy sports and social networks seems like a pretty solid bet: If you’re going to spend all that time online anyway, you might as well be tweaking your roster and trash-talking while you’re at it. I guess that’s the plan behind Citizen Sports‘ foray into a Facebook-based fantasy football league co-branded by Sports Illustrated.

Despite the obvious synergy, it is an uphill climb, thanks to an entrenched fantasy sports landscape:

“The switching costs for people to leave a league to come over to another site is a significant hurdle,” [Sports Illustrated’s president of digital operations Jeff] Price said. But he believes it will be easier for Citizen Sports because having its program run on Facebook, where millions of people already spend hours every day, “brings fantasy football to the player instead of having the player come to you.”

The field is led by Yahoo Inc., whose fantasy football site drew 6.6 million U.S. visitors in the opening month of the season last year, followed by ESPN.com at 2.6 million visitors, according to comScore Inc.

And Yahoo isn’t taking its advantage for granted. The company has developed even more tools for its fantasy football service, including more graphics and audio alerts, while making it easier to play on mobile phones.

Based on the current balance of power, Citizen Sports’ best strategy would be to court fantasy virgins who aren’t currently hooked into other leagues. Facebook and MySpace would seem to offer that with their 13-to-34 demographics. The negative: Those same youngsters tend not to gravitate toward the traditional team sports that fuel the fantasy leagues.

So if converting Facebookers into fantasy geeks isn’t feasible, then Citizen has to, more or less, convert fantasy geeks into Facebookers. As noted, it’s a tall order to poach Yahoo! users away to a new site, even one that’s a multiple-times-a-day destination. The enticement has to be tangible — not just better/cooler features, but solid incentives that would make it worth the hassle to switch.

It’s noted that Citizen’s track record includes ProTrade, the fantasy jock-stock market that appeals to hard-core sports addicts but doesn’t attract a wider audience. I wonder if integrating ProTrade into the Facebook fantasy widget would serve as a lure, to sort of broaden the depth of fantasy play — manage the players on both a team and individual level in one package.

Earlier this year, I posited that the chief reason why CBS bought Web media company CNET Networks was just to acquire the coveted news.com domain.

Since I still believe that, I was happy to come across this somewhat apocryphal recounting of just how CNET came to own that Web address:

[CNET co-founder Halsey] Minor’s volatility could make employees uneasy. In fact, he could be unnerving even when he was doing the right thing. CNET’s longtime editorial director, Jai Singh, recalls that after arriving at the company in 1996, he pitched his idea for a tech news site to Minor, suggesting that the company buy the News.com URL. Minor left the room midsentence with no explanation.

“I said, ‘Okay, I totally blew it,’” recalls Singh. “Halsey walks back in and says, ‘Okay, we got it.’ He had gone out and registered the domain name.”

Is this true? It’s hard to believe that such a basic keyword-based domain name was still floating around unclaimed as late as 1996. Did Minor actually register news.com in a matter of minutes, as related here, or did he have to pry it from some squatter? It wouldn’t have gone for the astronomical price it would have commanded at the height of the dot-com boom, nor even now, but even by then it was becoming apparent that domain names had value.

Mystery not quite solved, but getting closer.

The end of last week saw the euro decline in value versus the US dollar.

Now we know the real reason why: News must have reached the currency traders that a euro-coin in Spain was discovered to have been re-engraved with the image of one Homer J. Simpson.

Don Juan Carlos’s austerely regal Bourbon half-profile topped by a full head of curls had morphed seamlessly into the pop-eyed, big-nosed, bald-headed features of beer-glugging Homer Simpson, complete with his 5 o’clock shadow.

“The coin must have been done by a professional,” Jose Martinez said when he found it in the cash register of his shop in the Asturian town of Aviles. “It’s an impressive piece of work.”

I can’t think of a more economically-destabilizing event than having “The Simpsons” imposed upon your cash. European dough goes d’oh!

Yesterday marked the 20th anniversary of the hockey-rocking trade of all trades, when the Edmonton Oilers shipped Wayne Gretzky out of Canada and off to Los Angeles, thus proving that no pro athlete is ever untouchable.

The impact for the National Hockey League was significant enough, with Gretzky’s arrival in Southern California effectively making him the godfather of expansion/relocated teams in the Sunbelt. I question how much it raised the league’s profile; it was still clearly the weak sister among the Big Four team sports, and it remains so today.

For as much as the trade altered the fortunes of the Kings, the impact on the Oilers has been somewhat overlooked - specifically, how little Edmonton did with the package of players and draft picks they got in return for the NHL’s most valuable commodity.

Let’s review the specifics of the trade:

Kings got: Gretzky, D Marty McSorley, F Mike Krushelnyski

Oilers got: C Jimmy Carson, W Martin Gelinas, the Kings’ first-round draft picks in 1989, 1991, and 1993, and $15 million in cash

For Los Angeles, it began and ended with acquiring Gretzky; the supplemental players were gravy (although it’s been rumored they wanted Jari Kurri in the deal, the one roster player Edmonton owner Peter Pocklington refused to throw in). The $15 million was a ton of money in those days — well above most NHL teams’ payrolls — but Kings owner Bruce McNall understood that the cash infusion was what Edmonton was really after, and considered it the pay-to-play price for acquiring hockey’s only household name. The first-rounders would hurt, but if Gretzky’s addition turned the Kings into winners, they would be low enough to sting less; and indeed, the highest pick of the bunch went No. 16 in 1993.

As for Edmonton? Gelinas helped the team to their only post-Gretzky Stanley Cup win in 1990, and Carson indirectly helped that run via the players he yielded back when he was traded to Detroit that season. Neither ultimately stuck with the Oilers long, which was something of a disappointment as they were rising young players (both former high first-rounders) at the time of the trade.

It was generally thought, though, that those three first-rounders could vindicate the unthinkability of trading The Great One. Unfortunately, the Edmonton brain trust didn’t do much with them — nor with their own picks during those drafts:

1989 Entry Draft: Edmonton shipped the first Gretzky-compensation pick to the New Jersey Devils for defensive prospect Corey Foster. Foster was a bust-and-a-half, never playing for the Oilers and totaled just 45 NHL career games. He was part of a later trade that netted the 1991 Oilers Craig Berube, Craig Fisher, and Scott Mellanby. Essentially, this first first-round asset was parlayed into spare parts. (For what it’s worth, the Devils had no more luck on their end of the deal, as their draftee with that acquired pick, Jason Miller, never stuck with the NHL.)

What’s more, Edmonton’s own first-round pick that year, D Jason Soules at No. 15, never suited up for the Oilers. A forgettable draft year overall for Oil Town. In hindsight, it would signal the start of the organizational ineptness that had set in; consider that, from the next year’s Entry Draft (1990), not a single Oilers draft pick made it to the NHL — neither in an Oilers sweater nor for any other team.

1991 Entry Draft: The Oilers had already given up on Foster by the time their next Gretzky-yielded first-round pick rolled around. Perhaps not wanting to risk another bust, they held onto this pick at No. 20 and took Martin Rucinsky. Rucinsky wound up being a serviceable winger — he just completed his 16th NHL season this year, and will presumably play out the rest of his career in Europe. But he lasted only two games in an Edmonton uniform before he was traded for Ron Tugnutt and Brad Zavisha. So once again, the fruits of the Gretzky trade were parlayed into spare parts.

As for their own first-round pick at No. 12, the Oilers drafted Tyler Wright. He struggled through parts of four seasons, bouncing between Edmonton and the minors before leaving as a free agent.

Again, hindsight being what it is, an alternative could have been packaging one or both of these picks to move up in the first round. This 1991 draft was a star-studded one, with the infamous Eric Lindros maneuvers taking center stage. The Oilers couldn’t have traded up to No. 1 overall, but they could have done something to move into the top 5, where stalwarts like Peter Forsberg and Brian Rolston would have been available.

1993 Entry Draft: By now, the wheels were coming off the Oilers organization. The fallout of the big trade was punctuated by the Gretzky-led Kings’ run to the Stanley Cup Finals that past summer, and by Edmonton’s corresponding decline in the standings. The team didn’t have enough talent in the system to replace the players that were being shipped out over money issues, and rumors persisted that the team would soon be sold to American carpetbaggers who would relocate the franchise to Houston or elsewhere. In other words, the Gretzky trade, far from forestalling these types of problems, only ushered them in.

Against this backdrop, the Oilers used the final LA-delivered first-rounder on D Nick Stajduhar. Not much to say about him, because there wasn’t much to him — he suited up for two games for the Oilers, and that was it for his NHL career. He’s probably gotten a disproportionate amount of attention only because he was the final link in the blockbuster deal.

Edmonton did pick a winner with its other first-round selection at No. 7, Jason Arnott. He did become one of the many youngsters to eventually exit Edmonton during the ’90s as the team struggled to compete, but managed to stick around long enough to play some meaningful hockey for the club.

And once again, while Arnott was a quality pick, it’s worth wondering if the Oilers could have converted two first-round picks into something more in a fairly deep 1993 draft year, and thus perhaps salvage something out of the Gretzky transaction.

Incredibly, I managed to remember today’s kickoff of New York City’s Summer Streets, which turned over seven miles of Manhattan roadways to pedestrian-only traffic (except for some traffic-controlled cross-streets).

I had intended to rollerblade the length of the course, and so I did. I didn’t get it together in time to hit the 7AM start; it was more like (ahem) 11AM by the time I strapped on the skates and made my way up and down the path.

My verdict? It’s a lot shorter than I thought it would be. Even with the relatively slow pace required by the crowds and the sometimes-treacherous pavement (I tripped up only twice, and never did spill — a triumph!), I managed to do the up-and-down circuit twice by the time the 1PM ending time hit. From there, I cruised into Central Park and skated the loop there before calling it a day with a late lunch.

I tried to take a few pictures, but my cameraphone didn’t deliver. Plenty of others filled the photographic void, though. I haven’t scanned them all to see if I appear anywhere.

I might or might not go back next Saturday for round two. If I can convince someone to come with me — even a bicyclist — I’ll be more motivated to get off to an earlier start.