over-sampling a certain kind of quirk and under-sampling bland-looking people

Absolutely, this will ruin his chances of getting his work published in any respectable journal of sociology.

I think you're supposed to be overcome by the magicalness that is New York or something.

That low-poly rave-y backpack is sweet.

I associate HoNY with a libertarian FB friend from high school who, best I can figure, puts almost every single article he reads in a given day on Facebook. Accordingly, I have a definite Pavlovian annoyance with the site.

I've been to New York a few times now, and other than seeing lots of Hasidic Jews in Crown Heights (go figure, right?) everybody has always just looked like regular folx to me. Same with LA, except the time when I turned a corner and almost ran into a couple of women who looked like they had just stepped out of a softcore porn film, tiny bikinis and everything. That was indeed a little weird.

That's some kind of cufflink.

I dunno, the pictures don't look all that aggressively quirky to me. Or, they look like the guy was looking for the most interesting person he saw in a given short period of time, but not like he'd have to look for more than ten/fifteen minutes to find the people he got.

I liked the father/daughter/Australian Shepherd shot -- with no actual resemblances, that could have been Buck, Sally and DogBreath.

I think the web site is charming, and the OP oversamples reflexive contrariness.

Perhaps the rest of the country just suffers from a lack of magic?

9: Lack of magic is silly, of course, but I think it probably is a bunch easier to find people dressed a little oddly here than in the rest of the country. We've talked about this before in terms of tourist-spotting.

So you're saying you're better than me?

Define "oddly." I think you mean "oddly in a way that isn't obviously lower class."

One thing I noticed when we were in Harlem in December was how many women seemed to have really long medium-sized extension braids, often tied in bun styles, and so I was happy to see some of that (this is a more extreme example) on the site. It wasn't a style I'd really seen locally, but a very fashionable young woman at church has had blue braids in that style for a few months now and then one of the teenagers had the same look at Easter, so I think it's filtering in.

Or maybe not. Anyway, the pre-game wearing of Steeler jersey's by most medical workers who aren't doctors is pretty odd to me.

(I am actually a bit infatuated with New York, and if it weren't for the sound pollution, I'd enjoy living there.)

15: You need to be somewhere that you can hear yourself toot.

15: You should try Lincoln. Not much pollution, cooler in the summer than Texas, but nearly as sophisticated as New York (if you live you first 18 years on a farm).

I bet Lincoln's not actually that much cooler in the summer, and that the difference is that peak of summer just doesn't last as long.

To be all technical, yes.

But in the winter, it is both colder and the peak of cold lasts much longer.

12: Well, some of it's lower-class oddly, and some of it's middle-class oddly.

I, myself, went to work this morning in a sleeveless navy-blue shift with a little anchor on it, because the weather is gorgeous and I like pretending I just escaped from a cocktail party at a low-rent yacht club. I think that counts as middle-class oddly.

20: To be all technical, yes.

21.2: I don't see what's odd about that. The dress, not the pretending.

I'm still wearing pajamas. Soooooooo quirky!

Yeah, what's odd about a navy shift dress with an anchor?

23: The clown wig.

I find that site neither interesting nor annoying. I don't think the people are unusually super quirky, though.

My vague general impression is that there's a narrower range of style of dress in NY than LA, that is to say people generally look more "the same" even if well dressed. That could be totally wrong though.

No, mostly it's that I jumped the gun dressing for the weather rather than the calendar. People are mostly still in boots and scarves, despite it being in the seventies.

Then it's them that are odd.

My vague general impression is that there's a narrower range of style of dress in NY than LA, that is to say people generally look more "the same" even if well dressed. That could be totally wrong though.

I don't have a sense of LA at all, so I couldn't tell you. I think, though, this probably involves a restricted definition of 'people'. Like, professionally dressed middle-class white people might be a narrow range of style, but they're not all that large a chunk of the population on the street.

Everybody here has switched to warmer-weather clothing. Being near a campus, it is very noticeable in really great ways.

My ex-student who I mentioned recently as a FB trainwreck new mother posted some meme this morning about "APRIL UR DOIN IT WRONG!!" over a picture of heavy snow. She lives in San Antonio, where it was 88° yesterday. I find her so confusing.

I do miss living somewhere where people are willing to dress flamboyantly. I loved that about Austin.

I'm getting increasingly fascinated by the FB posts of a guy I went to grade school with. He's now doing tech support work in some department of the local university, but he posts to FB about every fifteen minutes, and it's usually a short sentence followed by a string of about 20 increasingly weird hashtags. #whatisthis #idontgetit #noreallywhat #facebookweirdness #idontunderstandpeople #yougettheidea

34 sort of to 32 and sort of to I am bored and should be working.

33: Then you probably wouldn't like Lincoln at all. I don't know why you brought it up.

I use the word "increasingly" too much.

Well, compared to the rest of Nebraska I bet it's the most flamboyant, right?

Omaha is the flashy place.

On game days at UN-L, the stadium is the third biggest population in the state.

And the range of fashion is narrower in the stadium than New York or LA.

I kvetched about Humans of New York weeks ago and was given to understand that I was being a stick in the mud.

Everybody here has switched to warmer-weather clothing. Being near a campus, it is very noticeable in really great ways.

"Teenage Girl Blossoming into Beautiful Object"?

40: And because it's in Lincoln, it can never take second place unless it gets bigger than Omaha.

43: I already said how ghastly that was, right? I can't think of another Onion article that's actually nauseated me that severely.

I am actually a bit infatuated with New York, and if it weren't for the sound pollution, I'd enjoy living there.

That's more or less how I feel.

"Humans" is twee -- why not call them "people"? And New York is overexposed. Aren't there other interesting cities for street photography?

"Humans" is twee -- why not call them "people"?

Because of "People of Wal-Mart"?

Also, as someone who occasionally refers to persons as humans, I am hurt, Bave. Hurt. You know I am not twee.

Tweeflow makes sywup.

Also, I like the pix [NO TWEEO], so I don't care if he's selecting to avoid the dull, the humdrum, the bland.

45: I think you posted about it!

"Humans" is twee -- why not call them "people"?

Not to wax excessively nerdtastic, I always liked the salutation in an '80s comic book, "Gentle sentients...."

OT: Anthony Weiner? Again? God, no. Kill it with fire opposition research and public opinion surveys.

"Humans" is twee

SOME OF THOSE TWEE WERE MY FWIENDS.

Smoky the Bear, Ent Lover. Discuss.

53 was not me, in case anybody just assumed it was.

51: So I did. My memory's shot to hell these days.

34 - that's his twitter feed posting to Facebook, isn't it.

I just spent ages looking through the last month or so - he has a lot of very appealing photos on there.

52.1: Uh-oh, you've lit the helpy-chalk signal!

52: Better him than Quinn, though, right?

8 to 42, and also to 47. Whimsy is a fine thing, even if it makes you an easy target for cynics.

over-sampling a certain kind of quirk and under-sampling bland-looking people

Or photographing people all on their quirkiest days -- the people themselves seem fairly average to me.

How come Donald Trump doesn't pretend to run for mayor?

I'm not sure what the distinction being drawn in 61 is.

Or how you'd tell.

You can see the blandness in their eyes.

I miss New York.:-(

Aw.

Less self-consciously quirky than I'd expected. Although it's funny - NY has changed so much from when I was familiar with it (basically up through the 90s, with an interregnum from '80 through '85) that the pics don't grab me the way that any random street scene from anything filmed there during the first 30 years of my life does.

Being near a campus, it is very noticeable in really great ways.

The first days of spring were always a firm reminder that Pitt girls really were significantly more attractive than their CMU counterparts.

I'm sorry if that's sexist, but I was a lot more sexist when I made that observation, 20-odd years ago.

I dunno, the pictures don't look all that aggressively quirky to me. Or, they look like the guy was looking for the most interesting person he saw in a given short period of time, but not like he'd have to look for more than ten/fifteen minutes to find the people he got.

That's certainly my experience, though of course it depends in part where in the city you are.

This has been another installment of Sir Kraab's Belated and Non-Value-Added Agreement with Earlier Comments.

Pitt girls really were significantly more attractive than their CMU counterparts.

Racist.