Oh, the things you can find to do to kill time while your loved one is dutifully studying for the bar exam. While I wait out this final week and a half of suffering, my camera and I went on a morning jaunt down to Bensonhurst, heretofore only really known to me as neighborhood where "Welcome Back, Kotter" took place. (For those of you familiar with northern Brooklyn, Bensonhurst looked to me a lot like an Italian Ditmas Park.) New Utrecht Reformed Church is best know for being the site of the only remaining Liberty Pole, which was apparently a mast of some sort stuck in the ground during the American Revolution to fly the U.S. flag. I didn't get a shot of the that because, frankly, it just looks like an old flag pole. But here's one of the front entrance:

A handful of other shots from today's Bensonhurst adventure, as well as a trip to Red Hook yesterday, are newly up at my photo blog Trooantroo.

I can't take credit for this one. My s.o. Jane took snapped it on her iPhone on her way to class this morning. We've since looked it up and it's indeed true -- people are still getting home deliveries of seltzer in these parts. (See the first story at that link, "Shlepping Seltzer.") I'm guessing that it's just that with so many New Yorkers, there are niche markets for quite a few things that might not have survived elsewhere. As I wrote over on trooantroo, my newish Brooklyn photo blog, it's stuff like a soda-seltzer-beer home delivery truck or the knife-sharpening truck that also rolls through the neighborhood that makes me love living here. As I put it over there, it's "the frequency with which you walk down the street and say to yourself, 'now, what in the the hell is that?'" Makes even walking to the subway a trip. (Photo credit Jane Andersen)

In Prospect Park this weekend a giant group of both kids and adults were playing parachute with a giant American flag. You know, parachute, right? It's where you pull a big piece of fabric into the air, move underneath it, and then sit on the edge, forming something of a bubble. We used to play parachute about once a year in grade school, which was one of the more exciting days of the year.

This photo was an accident. I was in the process of focusing when I slipped and took a picture, but there's something I like about how the sharpness of the grass contrasts against what almost seems like a mirage in the background.

I'm not all that surprised that the New York Times has decided that the hatred of my home neighborhood of Park Slope has reached the level of "trend" deserving of a Sunday style-section story. After all, New York City seems to be locked in a battle over its soul, and Park Slope is the most high-profile habitat of the sort of self-obsessed urban dweller that every New Yorker loves to demean and is terrified of becoming. And seriously, the number of strollers on Slope sidewalks on any given weekend can indeed be downright maddening. What I do find surprising is that in that piece the Times used "Twittering" as a capitalized adjective with no explanation:

By the same token, when we talk about "people who hate Park Slope," we are talking in large part about a certain stratum of the chattering, Twittering class. "This whole thing sounds like white people being annoyed by and jealous of other white people, which I find kind of funny," said James Bernard, a union organizer and a member of the local Community Board 6.

I can't imagine that Twitter has reached the level of shared cultural trope. How many people do you think read that and thought "what the huh?"

As the sun was shining for at least some part of this weekend, I decided that it was time to break out the old camera again. Prepare yourself for an onslaught of Brooklyn photos! This first one of the season comes from the side wall of a church in the happening neighborhood of Fort Greene. We walked by while leaving the new Brooklyn Flea, and while the wall was mostly one big expanse of gray, this bit of stain-glassed color caught my eye.