hottie alert

Finally! A decent celebrity sighting after a month in New York! He's not a major celebrity but he is a major hottie... Patrick Wilson, who you've seen in Angels in America (the gay Mormon), Little Children and Hard Candy (which I watched literally three nights ago). We rode the subway together this morning. Well, he rode it with his friend and I watched. Very closely. My new very-black sunglasses were such a good buy! He even got on at my local stop, so we could be neighbours! It actually took me a few minutes waiting on the station to even notice him, let alone recognise him. He's kind of ordinary-looking in person and nowhere near as statuesque. But very good skin, and had he been wearing a suit, there may well have been some kind of incident. And it has to be said: the man knows how to fill a pair of jeans.

In other news, my flu has all but left the building and I'm back to venturing out and about and resuming human contact, just in time for some amazing spring weather. Today I actually wore too many layers (and I thought it was Patrick making me sweat). I had a hair cut too, thanks to the extremely well chosen gift voucher concept bestowed by Ancy, Sara, David, Zhan and Ro, in a lovely salon down on Bleecker St. Except for a glass or three of bubbles (I didn't think to say that, when they asked what they could get me), it couldn't have been a nicer hair-do experience. Not my Jasmin, of course, but a suitable temporary replacement.

I also went to a really great lecture at NYU this week by Sherry Turkle, who's a big-name cyberspace scholar. She talked about some of her concerns with how people are seeking more and more intimacy from their machines - mobiles, computers and especially blackberries (and you can't move for blackberries in New York). She managed to keep it away from "the machines are taking over" territory, so it was actually really stimulating. And at one point she got me all teary, telling the story of an elderly woman in a nursing home whose son had decided not to visit her anymore. As an experiment, the woman had been given some kind of robot as a companion. So on hearing the awful news, she turned to the robot and started stroking and comforting it, saying "Yes, it's hard out there" and so on. As Turkle said, it's very familiar for people to comfort others or their pets in their own times of distress, but what about when it's a robot that has, as she put it, "no idea what's going on"?