Early Tuesday evening I was walking down Central Park West when I looked up at the sky and asked myself a variation of the classic trinity of cliché questions:
Me: Is it a pigeon, is it a chopper (about to head downtown to hover over Operation Wall Street), is it an orange blimp?
It was indeed an orange blimp floating over Central Park. Since my eyes must be following the lead of my increasingly deaf ears, I first thought that printed on the side of the blimp was Conair, the hair dryer company, and assumed that they had revised their logo.
I also happened to have Conair hair dryers on my mind because I use mine to defrost my frost-filled freezer. Even though I had recently left my freezer unplugged for fourteen hours, it was stubborn and remained as frozen as an igloo. Milton told me to boil a pot of water and sit it inside my refrigerator, but instead I sat in front of my freezer while aiming my hand-held Conair hair dryer at the block. Eventually, after what seemed like a week of firing hot air on an avalanche, it melted. I don’t expect this novel approach to defrosting a freezer to catch on, but it might win me a Darwin Award should I eventually electrocute myself.
Back to the blimp, whenever I see an interesting site I whip out my camera and photograph it. This air ship qualified as a site worth shooting. When I zoomed in I realized that it was The Conan Blimp. Conan O’Brien is taping his talk show this week in The Big Apple. There is a web site dedicated to Conan’s blimp since basically there seems to be a web site dedicated to practically everything short of my socks, but I have been known to write about those here. I was not aware of this blimp or its web site until I Google searched “conan blimp” and got 293,000 results in 0.16 seconds.
Conan has one very popular blimp up there, but trying to photograph it with my camera’s zoom with my hands in sudden delirium tremor mode proved challenging. When I zoomed my lens in on this deceptively (to the naked eye) snail slow moving dirigible, it seems to accelerate full throttle as if it’s a speeding bullet, or better yet, fame-whore Kim Kardashian fleeing her 72-minute (or however long it lasted marriage) to that tall chump. Yet, I did finally get an okay shot and I was almost compelled to drink to that, but instead, I just kept walking.
The Conan Blimp at full throttle.
Lame Adventures 