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I was reading my new issue of Foreign Affairs yesterday and noticed a 4-page color insert ad touting the wonders of Kazakhstan. I laughed.

Evidently, it’s no laughing matter.

I get wired, and my wife gets lucky.

We visited Ground Zero on Saturday, so we could see Jon Hyman’s photo exhibition: 9/11 and the American Landscape. We took the ferry over from NJ, then a subway down to the site. It was the first time I’d ever taken the subway to that area. The station is inside the pit, so we saw Ground Zero from a different perspective as we headed for the street.

This morning, I dreamed I was arranging a trip to Australia to see an Underworld concert.

I got my tattoo the Sunday after 9/11. While I was in the booth/studio/parlor (?), the girl at the front desk came in to ask if it was okay if a guy came in to watch. He was planning to get a 9/11 tattoo and wanted to see what we were doing.

I assented, and a burly guy walked in. He told us that he worked in WTC #7, and then related the story of Tuesday morning. After the first plane hit, his building went into lockdown. They didn’t want people running around in a panic while the first responders were getting into action.

When the second plane hit, the #7 workers revolted and started streaming out of the building as fast as they could. I don’t remember what he told me about the buildings’ collapse. I hadn’t slept much that week, and some details are lost. Others come back when I least expect them.

The exhibition had some wonderful photos, but it focused more on murals and graffiti, with only a half-dozen examples of 9/11 tattoos. It did, however, include The Big One, a tattoo covering the entirety of firefighter Tiernach “T.C.” Cassidy’s back, including sky-blue ink for the background. Jon showed me that one when we were going through his portfolio. I can’t find his picture of Cassidy online, but here’s another photo of him:

I’ll try to scan it from my exhibition program, but if you’re in the area, you really should go to the exhibition to see Jon’s pictures.

Amy & I had lunch at the World Financial Center after the exhibition and we talked about our memories from those days, intercutting world history with personal anecdotes, criscrossing apocalypses, affairs, paralyses, sightsoundsmells: The American Landscape.

I thought about the incalculable permutations of our lives, about all the things that had to go right for us to meet and fall in love.

Keeping with last post’s high school fixation, I bring up the fact that my first serious girlfriend (in my first way-too-boringly-serious relationship) drove a Chevy Corvair, that car Ralph Nader springboarded his career by denouncing.

I bring this up because of a gentleman in Iowa who takes issue with Nader in a way that the state’s DoT really doesn’t approve of:

State highway officials are setting up a roadblock of sorts for John Miller, a Boone man whose sporty 1966 Chevrolet Corvair has personalized plates that say, “F NADER.”

The Iowa Department of Transportation plans to send a letter to Miller advising him the license plates will be revoked within 10 days because of the objectionable combination of letters, said Andrew Lewis, the DOT’s assistant director of vehicle services.

Steve Irwin got killed by a stingray off the Great Barrier Reef.

Ron Rosenbaum, one of my favorite living writers, is keeping a blog! Check it out!

And he recommends another one! So there!

Thursday night, Amy & I watched Soapdish, which she hadn’t seen before. She enjoyed the heck out of it, but marveled over how much I liked the movie. I’d seen it a few years ago after a friend of mine told me, “It’s one of the only movies he’s in in which Robert Downey, Jr. doesn’t have the best performance.”

Watching me cracking up over the over-the-top bitchiness of the women’s performances, Amy asked me, “How did you ever end up marrying a woman?”

I replied that at least I wasn’t an opera fan, but that didn’t provide much of a defense.

Last night, we were clicking around when I noticed that Sky High was just starting.*

While I was making drinks in the kitchen, I heard Amy say, “Ooh! Lynda Carter!” and “Ooh! Bruce Campbell!” within two minutes.

I walked back into the living room and said to my wife, “And you’re amazed that I got married?”

Thank gosh we found each other.

* I recalled a short writeup in GQ that mentioned this flick as one of the least appreciated movies of 2005. Instead of tedious Disney kid-fare, it was actually supposed to be pretty witty (especially with two Kids in the Hall making appearances in it) and entertaining for semi-developed adults. Unfortunately, GQ has the least-helpful website in the world, so I can’t pull up that recommendation.

But it turned out to be right. The movie was a hoot, at least for geeks like us. And with the, um, mature sexiness of Ms. Carter and a straight-haired, brunette, glasses-wearing Kelly Preston, Sky High may have the highest MILF-factor of any movie in years.

In Page 6 today, there’s an item about the believability of Tom Cruise’s heroic exploits:

The wacky superstar and fiancée Katie Holmes were widely reported to have pulled over when they saw an accident on L.A.’s 101 freeway last Saturday, and waited with motorist Jon Henningsen and his wife until police arrived at the scene.

But that was hardly the first time that Cruise has supposedly come to the rescue of some lucky civilian. According to various press reports over the years:

* In 2003, while filming “The Last Samurai” in New Zealand, Cruise supposedly helped a local family change a flat tire on a country road and assisted a young girl in catching her runaway horse. He also donated $3,800 to a local school that needed a “sun shelter.”

* In 1998, Cruise rushed to the defense of a woman being mugged on a London street and stopped thieves from making off with more than $150,000 in jewelry.

* In 1996, he summoned an ambulance to help an aspiring actress who was the victim of a hit-and-run, then paid her $7,000 emergency room bill.

* While he and then-wife Nicole Kidman were vacationing on a 210-foot yacht in Capri in 1993, they were reported to have come to the aid of a family whose yacht had caught on fire. Cruise and Kidman allegedly rescued the family from their life raft and took them aboard their luxury yacht until help arrived.

* That same year, Cruise was said to have pulled two young boys to safety after they were almost crushed in a mob of out-of-control fans at the London premiere of “Mission: Impossible.”

The item (I’d link to it, but the page’ll be dead within a week) casts doubt on whether all this stuff actually happened. Cruise’s new publicist comments, “I don’t know about the rest of them, but the one on Saturday night actually happened. The others happened before I represented him.”

Now, I subscribe to the Howard Stern school of How To Tell When a Celebrity Has Gone Batshit. Namely, if the celebrity claims he has super-powers, he’s nuts. Think you can heal sick children by making a publicity-visit? You’re losing touch with reality.

But what if all this stuff with Cruise did happen? It doesn’t necessarily mean that he’s particularly heroic, nor a magnet for trouble. It could mean that he’s deliberately been causing these incidents just so he can step in to protect people and seem heroic!

I’d liken it to Angel Heart or Fight Club or something, but it reminds me more of the finale of Murder, She Wrote, when the viewer discovers that it’s been Angela Lansbury committing all those murders over the years, and framing a different person each week!

According to this NYTimes article, my coffee habit may reduce my risk of getting type 2 diabetes, cirrhosis, liver cancer and, if I were a chick, cardiovascular disease. Hooray, coffee!

I like that one of the reviewers of the article is named Rob Van Dam.

Um… there’s a group blog for baseball groupies.