In Woody Allen movies, New York is romantic.  Through my lens, it may contain crazy people.  Or leopards, but also, a little romance:

Don’t worry.  Wrong Side of the Camera has more snow leopards:

1. Ice cream and cake

2. Peanut butter and jelly

3. Me and Hubert Keller

4. Ice cream and diamond rings:

Gus the Polar Bear is one of those New York City secrets that only the locals know about.  Gus has been at the Central Park Zoo since it re-opened in 1988.

Other than the fact that he is covered in white fur and would probably be too warm in your average refrigerator, Gus is your typical New Yorker.  He has large clawed hands and feet, like all New Yorkers and he is cranky, most if not all of the time.

One other thing unites Gus with the denizens of the bedrock on the Hudson.  He takes or used to take Prozac.  Like all New Yorkers, Gus was depressed for a time, but instead of letting it out on their unsuspecting co-workers, Gus started to swim back and forth in his enclosure.  All the little children were delighted, but the zoo keepers started to get slightly worried, so they brought in an animal psychologist to treat Gussy.

But the troubles didn’t end there for Gus.  His enclosure mate, Ida, passed away earlier this year and obviously, this made Gus sad. Really, really, really sad:

Well, I’ve done it:

Then you are having a bad day.  A really, really, really, really bad day:

You walk through New York and you think “this place is full of blank spaces.”  Alive, but empty.  A lot of right angles, a lot of sky, not a lot of ornamentation.  Witness:

But wouldn’t it be great if it was all ornamentation, like Venice or Rome or Florence?  Imagine if the entire city were covered in these kinds of things, from top to bottom:

And by ugly, I mean beautiful:

If there is one, this guy comes out:

90% man, 10% sheep, completely insane.

We all have our little rituals that we do when times get tough.  Some people do things like smoke, or other more exotic things.

I’m a simple creature.  I look at photos of snow leopards.  But whenever I type “snow leopard” into the internet, I see Mac OS X.  Much as I enjoy looking at operating system information, I’d much rather see a photo of a snow leopard.  So, well, I’m taking matters into my own hands.  I hope that from now on, people will search Mac OS X Snow Leopard and see this entry.

The snow leopard is an extremely rare cold weather leopard that lives high in the Himalayan mountains in Nepal.  Or, you can go to the Central Park Zoo, wade through all the children and get your shots of the snow leopard.  Guess what I did.

I went to the Himalayas.  No, are you insane?  I went to the zoo.  Anyway, who cares, like you can tell where this is.

Focus on the snow leopard:

And finally, for that human element: