It’s Spring Break this week, and kids are swing­ing from the trees all over the city. I took the dog on a Full Park power walk today, and ran across a lit­tle knot of them back in the woods. Mid­dle school­ers, it looked like, so of course I feared the worst. Your aver­age mid­dle schooler is capa­ble of both sleep­ing with teddy bears and huff­ing sol­vents; what would this group be doing? Smok­ing pot, giv­ing one another blow jobs or just hang­ing out. Answer: The lat­ter, along with some seri­ous bicy­cle acro­bat­ics. They’d gone to some trou­ble to craft a BMX course out of found objects in the woods, and had made a nice jump between two hillocks. One was lying in the gap tak­ing pic­tures as each one took his or her turn in flight. I admired his courage, as I’m sure sooner or later he got hit by a falling friend.

My edi­tor men­tioned see­ing the same thing in a dif­fer­ent venue not long ago, and the kid was crash­ing over and over, leap­ing up after each one to try again. My edi­tor, rid­ing in pain from a torn rota­tor cuff, which he suf­fered after a fairly rou­tine spill, was envi­ous. I know how he feels. It occurred to me today I couldn’t do a cart­wheel at gun­point. Maybe I should try one next time I’m back in the woods, just to be sure.

So it was with this vision fresh in my mind that I came home to dis­cover my child clomp­ing up and down the side­walk in her brand new Junior Rollerblades. Deb was buy­ing them for her own, and gra­ciously agreed to get a pair for her, too. She was attack­ing them with the phys­i­cal fear­less­ness of the preschooler, although to be sure, she was better-armored than Rus­sell Crowe in “Glad­i­a­tor.” She hasn’t really fig­ured out the glid­ing part yet, just stomps around and falls on her butt every 12 feet or so, but I sup­pose she’ll pick it up sooner or later. I grabbed the cam­corder and shot some footage, which has some con­ti­nu­ity prob­lems — the sun went behind a cloud and the tem­per­a­ture dropped mid­way through prin­ci­ple pho­tog­ra­phy, so we’ve got some jackets-on/jackets-off, shadows-and-light dis­crep­an­cies. I don’t care. I got what I needed, marched it inside and edited it while they played Bar­bies. The whole thing rang in at two min­utes, which I fig­ure is just about right.

It was a movie kinda day. I dis­cov­ered film­wise today, although I didn’t have much time to explore the site, only swing by its most mad­den­ing quiz, Invis­i­bles. Here’s the setup, which sounds like pathetic pornog­ra­phy, but isn’t: Basi­cally, an Invis­i­ble is a screen shot from a movie in which some or all of the actors have been com­pletely removed from their cloth­ing. It’s your job to fig­ure out what the movie is. This doesn’t mean naked actors, only empty suits cre­ated by Pho­to­shop whizzes. I think I got ONE cor­rect answer. Is some­one paid to do this? Amaz­ing.

Speak­ing of which, I also found this, a set of dirty pic­tures with the fig­ures removed. This was fas­ci­nat­ing, as I’m as fond of exam­in­ing back­grounds in pho­tos as I am the osten­si­ble sub­jects of the pic­tures. Check out the bed­side lamp in this one. I think my grand­mother had one like that.

I hope this link works, too. It’s a tran­script of some­thing I heard on NPR this week­end. Their search engine is unbear­ably slow, but “Call­ing Dante’s Inferno” made me laugh.

I have to sign off early. There’s Lieu­tenant Fancy’s farewell on the barely breath­ing “NYPD Blue,” plus I have to write the Arts United let­ter. The less said about that, the bet­ter. So I’ll say no more.

Until tomor­row.