Shoveling snow is definitely one of the things I don't miss about Canada. Here is my Dad, knee-deep in the white stuff, clearing a path, so the trash can be taken to the alley. I know this kind of cold day well, with the snow squeaking under foot as you make your way along. It doesn't do that in NYC! You get nothing but heavy wet slush. Keep up the good work Dad!

Just picked up Chris and Karolina up at JFK. A little peckish from their cross-country flight, I detoured to Katz's Delicatessen in Manhattan off of Houston Street, wherein they devoured a mountain of pastrami, a couple of potato pancakes and two Brooklyn lagers to boot. They wanted an "authentic" NY experience. I can't think of a better or tastier one.

Val, Julia and I had our annual Boxing Day get together and many friends made the day. Randy gave us this illustration with a truly motley crew waiting to be picked up. As you can see it is on the corner of Kerr St. and Rex Blvd. Hidden in the crowd is my dad, mom, Joel Cohen, his wife Diane, along with the artist and his wife, Susann (with two "n"s.) Julia, Val and myself are situated in the front. Considering the entire segment could fit under an average thumb, Mr. Jones did quite a masterful job! Thanks to all who came out, it was fun.

Sunset in NYC, Christmas Day 2008.

On top of the building and took this shot of Shea at sunset. Looks like the lower deck is completely gone on the inside. Merry Christmas!

Julia's back home and we started her visit by decorating our Christmas tree. This year, Val and I went to the great backwoods of home depot and picked out a suitable evergreen. We both got a kick out of the fact that this particular tree was "Made in Canada" as pointed out by a prominent label attached to the trunk. To all who visit the blog, have a great holiday season!

Avast! Here be me contribution to the scurvy Inx package for this week. The head-wrap is the Somalian flag, the requisite reflection of a tanker appears in this fellow's cutlass. Will it appear in a newspaper near you? Stay tuned... In the mean time, shiver me timbers, pirates are fun to draw.

There is no mistaking it now, looks like the deconstruction of Shea has begun in ernest. If you look to the interior you can see the upper deck getting knocked down and the lights too. If this picture looks sharper, it is due to the tripod I put under the camera. I think it makes a real differance. If you look to the pier towards the bottom--in Flushing Bay--you'll see a couple of locals pondering the scene.

I'll escalate the frequency of the photos at this point. I figure it will come down pretty fast if this is but a days work, which it is.

Two Moon shots in one month? Well, this one is a little special. As it turns out, the Moon is at it's closest to earth today than it has been in about a decade. The term for it is called Lunar perigee. Tonight, the moon appears 14% larger than at it's apogee. It won't be this close in orbit until November of 2016, so I took a chance and snapped away. The moon doesn't often yield good photographs in it's full phase. The direct moonlight tends to wash out details on the surface. That fact didn't seem to make too much of an impact on this shot, I think it came out pretty well. Enjoy!

Latest illustration for a story in the National Law Journal about whales and other marine mammals and the awful effect military sonar has on them. The Supreme Court ruled on this recently, rejecting a lower court's ruling prohibiting the practice. The Navy's argument was that emergency readiness outweighed the need for a sonar-free ocean. My drawing shows a plaintive whale, assaulted by a sonic barrage. I converted his tale to a human ear with two ideas. one to demonstrate the problem, the other to reflect the deafness of the decision. I've also attempted to enhance the image by contrasting the quiet aquatic world of the whale, with it's streaming light, against the bands of sonar descending from above. In the end, the whale bends to the shape of this sonar, having to graphically accept his noisy fate. Poor leviathan.

Here is this month's first post. Yes, it is a moon photo, with a difference, in the technical sense. I finally put a tripod under my camera! The resulting photo seems to have turned out sharper. I took this shot with a adjusted ISO of 80 with an f-stop of 3.6 for a 125th of a second with my zoom and teleconverter combining to give me the equivalent of a 530mm telephoto lens. I'm kind of pleased with the picture, but I think it could have been better if the moon was higher in the sky than it was and if the atmosphere was a little less dense. I always find these shots a little hard to get, but fun and interesting. The Moon, it seems to me, is taken for granted. To the naked eye, it appears little more than a blotchy disk, so this wonder sits in the sky, ignored. Yet, with a little magnification, a whole new world comes into relief. The blotches become craters, mountains and vast basins. Not everyone is into this kind of thing, but I guess I'm just one of the nerds who is.