when in doubt, swab

Crash! Boom! Splash! Yesterday afternoon's thunderstorm was really thrilling, or at least very, very loud, especially from my position squeezed up against the plexiglass of the b63 bus shelter, watching the lightning streak down the sky and the thunder sound like it was rending buildings apart right down the street. Thrilling and then scary enough to send me scuttling home to close the windows and watch the basil on the balcony get pounded with water.

So, with Brooklyn awash, instead of the silent Hitchcock movies in Prospect Park, Amy and Paul and I hit the Cobble Hill Cinema for a 2 1/2 hour date with Johnny Depp. Fun, but dopey, mostly because the whole movie pretty much grinds to a halt when the CGI sea monsters and undead half-human/half-crab creatures get in on the action, which they do at tedious length. And even a decent British character actor like Bill Nighy can't do much with a face overrun by a giant squid-tentacle weave, while Orlando Bloom, cut-glass handsome as he may be, is flummoxed by the demands of conveying any emotion more complex than square-jawed resolve. Which leaves Johnny Depp, whose flouncy pirate captain has more than enough surface interest--what with the eyeliner, the eyeshadow, the straggling facial hair, the headscarf, the multiple belts around his hips and little beady tchotchkes in his white-boy dreads--to make the rest of the nonsense (the three-way fight on a runaway millwheel that plays like the freakout of swashbuckling hamsters; the even more ridiculous fight in which Depp, roped to a long bamboo pole, ends up with both ends of the pole skewered with tropical fruit like a human mai tai) bearable, at least with popcorn and air conditioning.

And speaking of air conditioning, since I would not stop for the air conditioner, the air conditioner kindly stopped for me. When you've been whining about needing an air conditioner for weeks (well, years really) without figuring out a way to get one home from the hardware store, and then you come back to your apartment building on yet another sweltering day to find one of your neighbors holding a stoop sale on your very own steps, with a never-used, still-in-the-box air conditioner for sale, with her willing friend ready to carry the box up two flights and drop it in your living room, well, who am I to say no? So now I have a brand-new AC unit ready to be plugged in. Once, of course, I get some wood blocks or something to prop it on, since my window has these weird metal screen-and-storm-window ledges inside that make balancing an air conditioner in the window somewhat of a dicey prospect.

But at least now I, and all guests of the future, will no longer have drip in what was the sauna of PQ Castle. And while it's been much too hot to cook, the cocktails at the Brooklyn Social Club on Smith near Carroll are just the thing to chase the summer blues. Especially the pretty-in-pink Neopolitan, a cosmo-ish mix of citrus vodka, cointreau, lemon, and pomegranate juice. Mmmm.