Four nuggets: not worth a damn

• There are certain gems, stones, and minerals that only seem to crop up in English translations of Italian authors. I am thinking here of chyroprase, chalcedony, sardonyx, chysolite.
• My barber refused to cut my hair the way I asked today. I hadn't asked him to peel his eyelids back, remove his pants, dance an Irish jig, and graft bear fur onto my head. I had merely asked him to use the #4 clippers all the way around. This is what you get for going to the barbershop in Presbyterian Hospital.
• This is the dark, cold, lonely season for sports: no football, no baseball, before the NCAA tournament. And I just can't get into the Olympics without Jim McKay. A lot of bodegas & bars up here in Washington Heights get Dominican baseball games on satellite, so that helped in January. But February... even Yard Work isn't updating these days.
• I close with some lines from my favorite Frank O'Hara poem: "Everyone, look at me/I'm Frank O'Hara/writing some of my po-et-ry/I'm a big city poet/fancy fancy me/look at me, everyone."