Special guest photo by Alex, who is almost 8.

Alex.

I could use some help on a story I'm writing. It's about traffic tracking on personal Web sites. If you have a Web site, what's your favorite tracking service? Why? How often do you check your stats? Which stats do you watch the most? Is there such a thing as stats addiction? How do the stats affect what you put on your Web site or how you think about your Web site? Your responses are off the record unless we both agree otherwise. Thanks!

Corkscrew-balloon.com: Wanted! This site is very odd. Online lifestyles of the rich and idle.

Concrete castle full of priceless American junk.

Artifacts hang on the ceiling over a five-story atrium. A giant attic.

I'm not a big link-swapper, but here are some sites that are worth seeing, found in the traffic logs and the in-box: hunkabutta (brand-new photo weblog thing from Tokyo) retrospection (ridiculously articulate and self-conscious kid in California) madorangefools (photos and stuff... Pittsburgh rocks!) fredshead (slick close-ups of New York junk).

Dog in passenger seat.

A frequently asked question about GM's OnStar vehicle information service:

Q. Why can't I buy the Bat Mobile?
A. Batman and the Bat Mobile are used solely for advertising purposes and are not available through OnStar.

See also 11.27.

A reader on the Upper West Side writes in reference to the entry of 2.16:

my favorite pizza place around the corner has a sign pointing towards its entrance that says "pizza.com upstairs." pizza.com is not accepting connections or may be busy. why isn't there a pizza.com? there should be.

"Orange cones are the typographical dingbat of public spaces." (I found this at Metafilter.)

This sign on the side of a deli has been displaying the same sad little message for at least a year. I think it's waiting for someone to tell it what to do. Either that or Jenny Holzer is getting lazy.

The very funny Rebecca sent fan mail from her Joymail account. Research indicates that Joymail is superior to Hotmail etc. because it puts Chinese-related ads, and ads in Chinese, at the bottom of your correspondence. If you don't have the right software, the non-Western characters just look like an explosion in a typography discount outlet.

Register Chinese Character Domain Name- ONLY US$17/year! 100 Chinese Domain Names are registered every minute! Time is clicking, what are you waiting for? Go to http://www.chinese-dns.com Register NOW!!! Verisign���哻�Ű�W�{�b�?怀�T �C�������100�Ӏ����W�Q��U�M�z�ٜb������O�S �C�Ӻ�}���17��/�~�T�{�b�N�� http://www.chinese-dns.com ��U�T

Rebecca says she just uses Joymail because trapperkeeper@hotmail.com was already taken.

McSweeney's: Clarification. Ouch!

Cartoon cloud by Vik Muniz c/o Creative Time. We want more!

Beach grass.

Speaking of URLs, one of my all-time favorites is saranwarp.com. In this case, Dori makes sure the site lives up to the promise of the killer address.

This is rapidly becoming my favorite skyscraper. See also 1.16.2001.

Added to clips: My story about being mistaken for the other David Gallagher, published today by my friends at Ironminds. This story is for those of you who have come to this page looking for photos of your teen idol.

Out the front window of the train. Why had I never done this before? It's an extreme subway experience, especially in the fast stretch under the river. All this for only $1.50.

Research indicates that people are very confused about this whole Web thing.

Do not deposit waste of explosive nature.

Soho, Manhattan.
How to avoid Web fame.

Special Sunday bonus link: Eggs Benedict New York. Watch out for that food coma.

And a photo from acute.org.

Jesuses etc. in the window of La Botanique de St. Jacque [sic] Majeur. Religious articles, statues, bibles, perfumes, graven idols, plenary indulgences, wholesale and retail.

Yahoo -- I'm sorry, 'Yahoo!' -- has decided that because I am a journalist who also takes photos, I must be a photojournalist. Doesn't that imply that I'm getting paid for this? I wish.

Chelsea, Manhattan, Wednesday.
Today's theme: Unlikely URLs in the Urban Environment. Mmmm, operative cake. (Distributors of fine Bon Ton products.)

West Village, Manhattan, last week.
The owners of this grocery decided that a catchy URL was more important than the store's actual name ("Banana Express," which is itself quite catchy). Apparently it was also more important than actually building a Web site.

Ditto for the flower shop next door, which is under the same management.

Some depressing reading: Get off the Internet.

G is for ghost.

Some nice photo layouts from a reader in Peapod, Australia's fifth-largest city.

Another reader writes:

From: <...@na.dragoco.com>
Subject: visit to lightining field
Date: Wed, 14 Feb 2001 17:04:00 -0500

To whom it may concern,
I would be most interested in visiting this site any time in the first 2 weeks of July 2001 if possible
Thank you kindly

I sent her in the right direction. My site is pretty much booked through August.

You know, it's the one with Matt Damon as a post-feminist kung-fu cowboy with magical powers in ancient Texas.

Can one put a price on something as precious as a man's own good name?

Bonus link: Maybe the Web is about you.

International Sign Day. Rome, July. Further along it intersects with Manipulation Boulevard.

Melbourne, Australia, January 2000.
But you know what the funniest thing about Australia is?
What?
It's the little differences. You know what they call Burger King in Australia?
They don't call it Burger King?
Nah, man, they call it "Hungry Jack's."
"Hungry Jack's."
That's right.

Am I going stir crazy? Yes.

Flâneur, "the website devoted to the impassioned ramblings of urban dwellers," has finally updated. Some nice NYC photo essays.

Brooklyn, April 1994.
The neighborhood as seen from the sky. Photos from the U.S. Geological Survey via Terraserver, which I rediscovered yesterday. See also dead B-52s in Tucson.

You are here.

Aftermath of a high-speed collision involving two air conditioners. The tedium of the long idle winter months often drives them to engage in reckless behavior.

"That's a picture! That's a picture." -- Man walking by as I took this. He was wrong. It's not much of a picture.

Great retro murals by someone named Owen Smith, who, as it turns out, also does New Yorker covers. I ended up here after taking the wrong train. It's a good thing I did.

New link on the clips page: "On Campus, Free Fast Internet Access Is No Longer a Given," published Wednesday at nytimes.com.

Morbidly obese snowflakes.

The friend in Greece sends this bulletin:

Date: Wed, 07 Feb 2001 00:42:24 +0200
Subject: O-OLA, O-OLA

the song NO ONE can get out of their dumb greek-pop brains
KRATA TA OLA!!!!!!

The new "Yummy Taco" restaurant in the neighborhood is not your typical Mexican joint. Clue #1: The huge backlit cityscape in the dining area, visible from the street, which looks suspiciously like Hong Kong. (I don't remember Mexico City having a harbor.)

Clue #2: The odd slogan, written in a language closely related to Engrish.

The Chinese have, of course, been muscling in on the Mexican restaurant market for several years -- see the Fresco Tortilla chain. Coming soon: Russian sushi, Korean falafel?

Mayor Giuliani, still unwilling to increase the puny salaries of city teachers, announces new EduBench program in cooperation with the Metropolitan Transit Authority. Teachers participating in the program will be allowed to live on subway platforms without fear of police assault. (Their friends can sleep over too.)

An update on yesterday's entry from a sharp-eyed PhotoDude:

Your image of the sign of a sign at Times Square struck me. The sign that "promises photo opportunities at a nearby roadside tourist trap," well, that trap is "Bedrock City", just outside the Grand Canyon.

I have a very similar image of that sign squirreled away somewhere, from my trip, but don't have it online.

As Steven Wright says, "It's a small world. But I wouldn't want to have to paint it."

Good spotting. I pictured something more rustic. But in a way this is perfect. If you liked the Flintstones theme park, you're sure to love the New Times Square. (It keeps getting better.)

A photo of a sign with a photo of another sign on it. Both signs encourage photo-taking. One promises photo opportunities at a nearby roadside tourist trap. The other promotes photo-taking with a particular brand of film. Times Square is a tourist trap where people go to take photos of signs. I didn't use any film. I have no real point here.

After a long day in the big cold city, nothing warms the soul like a soft-boiled geoduck.

Karaoke fever.

A journalist friend in Greece writes:

I'm currently researching a bunch of taxi-related articles, so if you have any good taxi stories let me know. How you pick up taxis in different countries (it's insane here in ways too long to enumerate, and in Kiev/Moscow i'm told there is little difference between taking a taxi and hitchhiking for example...), how do you flag one down off the street (taxi stands or moving, arm up or down, finger up your nose, whatever). How do people screw each other out of taxi rides (you know, one person moves past another to be first in oncoming traffic), weird ways taxis are regulated (i read in NY that taxis can't stop/park at all even to pee), devilish ways taxis cheat people/hurt people (in Czech R. for a while a bunch of taxis were fitted with electroshocks to force exorbitant sums of money out of unwilling people), weird taxi services (I have bought mobile phone calls from so many taxi drivers and people are always surprised by this...), the worst and best taxi cities, taxi strikes (Athens excels here, but I think Paris is also a candidate)... If you have friends in foreign countries who might have some taxi lore that would be good. (feel free to forward this to anyone relevant -- they can write me at: <joyce@aias.gr>)

There was something here but I took it down.