Omelette

The discount available to anyone who contests a parking ticket made the front page of today's Times: "Parking Fine Too Big? Well, Just Say So." But my favorite story today was the tiny item about the truck driver carrying eggs who fell asleep on I-94 in Ypsilanti, Michigan. According to Trooper Jim Smiley, "His rig hit a guardrail and a bridge support beam that tore the trailer open and spilled hundreds of cartons of eggs along a 300-foot stretch." The broken eggs froze on the road and had to be scraped up with front-end loaders and carted away in dump trucks. The driver is O.K., though he got a ticket, and he probably should have been carrying gallons of coffee to go with his eggs.

I am busy filling orders for the deluxe version of the Alternate Side Parking Calendar 2009, featuring a self-portrait taken in the ladies' room of the Brooklyn College Library. Meanwhile, I received my first alert from the Parking Bot at IsAlternateSideParkingInEffect.com, a new site that provides a whole slew of information from the DOT and whose mission is to keep parkers updated in real time—in the event of a snowstorm, say—and send updates via e-mail and Twitter. Very high tech. Makes me wonder what I'm doing with this X-Acto knife and rubber cement.

Speaking of calendars, mark yours for Friday, January 16th, when the fabulous Baby Dee will play the Cleveland Museum of Art. Dee's album "Safe Inside the Day" was No. 1 on the Plain Dealer music critic John Soeder's Top Ten list for 2008. Dee's appearance, with Daniel Isengart, at the Cabaret Artistique, from 8 P.M. to midnight, is in conjunction with an exhibit called "Artistic Luxury: Fabergé, Tiffany, Lalique." Ah, what could be more luxurious that Cleveland in January?