This fall's successful Gap ad campaign made layering the mantra of autumn apparel. However, this has had far-reaching effects: for example, it now takes forever to change at the gym. You can't just replace one shirt with your t-shirt; you have to remove your jacket, then your zip-up, half-zip or sweater, and then t-shirt underneath. A one-minute process now takes five. I'm looking forward to summer.

I'm about to download Eudora version 6.2. It is unbelievable that I am still using this email application. I first started using Eudora in 1992, when Yale first adopted a campus-wide UNIX-based email standard. Eudora put a crisp, simple graphical interface right on a desktop, with great stability and humorously-worded user preferences to boot.

Twelve years later, Eudora is still simple, powerful and stable. Its search feature is terrific, locating relevant subject lines or body text in seconds from hundreds or thousands of email messages. The current version can still read old mailboxes from years ago. I think Eudora is one of the best applications ever developed for anything.

One of my favorites at Lenny's Cafe is a hero with turkey, roast beef, sweet pepper, avocado and honey mustard. This sandwich is absolutely perfect.

So when I wound up in Columbus Gourmet instead today, I figured that what made it perfect was the combination and not a specific place. I mean, how much could the same sandwich vary from one place to another?

A lot, it turns out. Although Columbus Gourmet dishes out great food, this sandwich just did not compute. I don't really know why--I have to try the Lenny's one again and compare more closely. Who knew? But for now, it lends even more support to Lenny's slogan, "the best sandwich you'll ever have."

We could be in for some thunderstorms on Thanksgiving morning. I don't remember this happening recently. We've had quite a number of wet Thanksgivings, but thunderstorms after mid-November are extremely unusual. (Sometimes with very intense coastal snowstorms, you get "thunder snow," but that's not really the same thing. Here, it would be a thunderstorm in a warm air mass followed by a cold front passage.)

The National Weather Service office in New York City has compiled this list of high and low temperatures on Thanksgiving, along with precipitation amounts for each year and occasional comments.

Just in case anyone hasn't noticed, I think when it comes to the stock market, "chartists" are living in a world of phony baloney. All of these supposed patterns -- "value dip," "pivot point," "triple peak" -- are supposed to predict, in and of themselves, future stock prices. It's nonsense. The way these people attempt to prove themselves is by citing one or two stocks that fit the pattern. The truth is that you can always find a stock to fit any pattern, including a correlation relating to World Series winners or the weather. The more important truth is that past performance does not predict future performance.

With this in mind, I was intrigued by the latest dispatch of mythology from Investors Business Daily. It's the publication's umpteenth roundup of various chart patterns and their supposed predictive value. But the best sentence is this one:

Studies by IBD of the market's biggest winners over the past 50 years show that the pivot represents the best time to attain superior gains with less risk.

The pivot, of course, is the point in time when a stock starts rallying. So in other words, "studies" of stocks that have risen the most show that the best time to buy stock is at the beginning of a long rally.

What insight. My own study shows that the best approach to the market is avoiding chartist fiction and circular logic.

Fifteen years ago was the Thanksgiving Day Snowstorm of 1989--pure magic. You don't usually get the real snowstorms around here until mid or late December. The ocean temperature is still relatively warm, around 50 degrees, and you need wind in exactly the right direction and a cold core of air over Quebec. If the storm center or high pressure system move just a bit and shift the winds to a more onshore direction, the snow will change to rain. It's a tough balance to achieve in November and that's why snow is so rare then.

The night before, as the snow started to fall, my friends and I were in a movie theater watching Back to the Future Part II. Scary.

December 1989 wound up being a bitterly cold month, with daytime temperatures often below 20 (at least in the northern suburbs). But January brought a mild pattern with highs in the 40s and 50s. After two brutally cold Januarys over the last two years, it would be nice to have a mild one again.

Is Crema Lita already overgrown? I learned today that the store on 77th and Broadway closed. I am surprised, even though there is also one on 72nd and Broadway. Starbucks doesn't seem to have a problem with stores within 5 blocks of each other. I don't know the reason this store closed.

In addition, the Crema Lita on 8th Avenue and 21st Street has started featuring Crumbs desserts--loudly. So when you walk in intending to get fat free ice cream, you're overwhelmed by triple-size slices of Oreo cake. I think this dilutes the brand. Crema Lita is arguably right not to get distracted in the business of winter foods, instead staying focused on what it does best. But that doesn't mean it should feature Crumbs desserts in a way that overwhelms its own store. I think a Crema Lita line of hot chocolate or other warm chocolate and vanilla beverages, cross-promoted with Crumbs desserts as a side snack, would have been a good balance.

This is not really an intended series, but another outstanding hole-in-the-wall establishment is Chirping Chicken on 77th and Amsterdam.

It's one thing to serve great food. Subjecting that food to delivery raises an entirely new layer of issues. How well does the food travel? How is it packaged? Does it stay the way it should be? Does it get cold? Does it come fast enough? Does the food become agitated during delivery and then lose its distinctive characteristics by being mixed with side dishes? All of these are potential problems.

Chirping Chicken scored well on all fronts. The white meat chicken was extremely moist and pleasantly flavorful without any sauces or ketchup. The side green salad featured a mixture of greens, shredded carrots and tomato. The French fries, shoestring variety, were crisp and most importantly their styrofoam packaging preserved them well. The chicken also traveled marvelously, not losing any of its flavor or moisture along the way. (The salad was fine too, but salad is less challenged by delivery.)

In fact, this chicken was just as good or better as that delivered from City Grill or Dallas Barbeque--far fancier (that is an understatement) establishments with real tables and service. If you walk by Chirping Chicken, you cannot believe this place dishes out some of the best (and best-traveling) food on the Upper West Side.

Quick--where's 1100 Second Avenue? What about 750 Broadway? It would help to have a cross street, wouldn't it?

This is the problem with the latest LensCrafters subway ad campaign. It lists LensCrafters locations, but with no cross streets. So you have to go back to your Web browser to learn that 1144 Third Avenue is actually on the corner of 67th Street.

Where were these ads written, Nevada?

I think "Someday" by Nickelback will emerge as one of my all-time favorite songs.

While I enjoy a variety of music genres from jazz to pop, I've always had a thing for melodic hard rock--stuff that pushes the envelope with rough sounds but is still a song you can hum. This is why I was really turned on to Bush (the band, not either president) in the mid 1990s; the band's hit "Everything Zen" demonstrated a great balance of in-your-face guitar sounds and infectious hooks.

Nickelback's "Someday" is just as effective and maybe even better. Scratchy vocals over a crisp acoustic guitar lead to an irresistible chorus and an simple but unbeatable bridge. Judging from other Nickelback songs I've heard, they're good at pegging this sound, but "Someday," somehow, stands out.

Manhattan is known for its many fine restaurants. However, I am just as impressed by the little hole-in-the-wall places serving outstanding food.

One such example is Burrito Box, on 9th Avenue between 57th and 58th Street, serving a mixture of Fordham students, Lincoln Center musicians and Midtown professionals (and, I guess, me). In this tiny establishment, you can choose from tacos, burritos and wraps.

I got the grilled steak wrap and it was incredible. The steak was cooked just the right amount, and the wrap contained a light layer of chipotle mayo. Fresh mesculin greens--not iceberg lettuce--surrounded the steak inside a fresh spinach shell. The wrap came with a side portion of fresh tortilla chips, in their own small bag, and a little portion of salsa.

Judging from the other combinations on the menu, this little place knows how to combine quality ingredients into a fresh, affordable meal. Many people probably walk right by Burrito Box without even knowing it's there, but this nearly invisible place serves up some of Lincoln Center's best food.

ABC may have made the wrong call in broadcasting its opening to "Monday Night Football" this week. But the posturing going on by the NFL since then has made me wonder whether the league actually planted this incident.

Consider today's opinion piece in the Times by Dan Rooney, owner of the Pittsburgh Steelers. He contends that the NFL isn't just a sports league; it's so much more, a great force in the development of community values, hard work, helping youth all over the country, an institution with an "extraordinary work ethic" and "diverse meritocracy."

I would consider myself a casual football fan (I was less casual when New York had teams worth watching). It's a fun sport to watch. But we are talking about a sports league. "Diverse meritocracy?" A league with "values nourished in urban, suburban and rural America?" Please. Maybe watching the NFL should be part of a faith-based curriculum.

A simple reminder that the league is overall a good source of entertainment would have been enough. The holier-than-thou posture of these defensive responses is ridiculous.

What's up with all the mergers of losers?

First, Blockbuster--the #1 name in a dwindling business--goes after Hollywood Video, the #2 name in a dwindling business. This should create some nice synergies of irrelevance.

Now K-Mart shells out $11 billion for Sears. Supposedly this will compete with Wal-Mart. Except there's one problem: Wal-Mart management actually knows what it is doing.

I hope that Pedro Martinez does not join the Yankees. I don't want him on my team.

First of all, Pedro has proven his inability to pitch at Yankee Stadium. If he can't handle the pressure as a member of a visiting team, wait until he's subjected to the New York media every single day.

Second, I think Pedro is a bad person. When he gives up a home run, he intentionally throws at the next batter. This isn't strategic pitching; this is being a sore loser.

Pedro can go somewhere else. He doesn't deserve to be on the Yankees.

The Upper West Side food landscape continues to change. Lenny's has moved across the street to the space formerly occupied by Diwan's Curry House.

The new Lenny's is terrific. Although the space seems narrower, it is much more efficiently designed, with more seating space than in the old establishment. Operationally, it's better too: when you place an order, you now get a yellow slip to take to the cash register. When your sandwich is ready, you match the yellow slip number with that on the white copy, and you're done. Lenny's also now offers choose-your-own-salad, with ingredients conveniently grouped into four price categories.

Analyst Bill Lennan of W.R. Hambrecht is making news today for calling Netflix "fatally flawed," issuing a price target of $4 and putting a sell tag on the stock. Fine. In the post-Henry Blodget era, it's nice to see someone doing something other than screaming "buy."

But a look at the Hambrecht Web site shows that only 4 months ago, the firm was rating Netflix a buy with a price target of $40. So according to Hambrecht's analysis, Netflix has lost 90% of its value in 4 months.

This nonsense makes a Tim Wakefield knuckeball look as straight as an arrow.

Covers are tricky. You can't simply redo the song without a new twist--this is why The Ataris' cover of Don Henley's "The Boys of Summer" is so dreadful; it merely kicks up the tempo and makes the song louder. On the other hand, something too far afield can also make a great song sour.

No Doubt's cover of Talk Talk's "It's My Life" is as close to a perfect cover as I've heard. The sound is unmistakably No Doubt, yet the cover preserves the essential feel of the original. What makes it even better than most covers is that the musical aspect of the lyrics--numerous long stretches dragging out one-syllable words--is made for Stefani's voice. It exposes the way she can add so many dimensions to one note even in the span of several seconds.

No Doubt's "It's My Life" is sure to stick around as one of the great covers of all time.

I've always wondered how Manhattan can sustain so many delis and small green grocers (Canadian French has a great word for these, depanneur, taken from the verb meaning "to tide over" or "help out") all of which seem to have exactly the same products. So it made sense when one finally closed.

The Arista Deli, on Columbus Avenue between 69th and 70th for who knows how long, was one too many. I'm not sure why, but this deli appeared to have no particular appeal. The deli on 71st and Columbus has an especially good selection of produce; the one on 68th and Columbus is close to ABC and the furthest south before Lincoln Square. I never saw anyone in the Arista Deli.

In more than 10 years here, it is the first time I've ever seen a deli go out of business in Manhattan.

Today's New York Times features a great article on what happens when blogs disclose too much information, specifically in the context of dating. It echoes some of the immediate observations I had when I first learned about blogging two-and-some years ago. This blog didn't launch until a year and a half later, with a refined purpose and after a lot of thought about its boundaries.

I make a living on selecting and packaging information, so this analysis was probably more thorough than usual. That said, for reasons that are evident from the terrific article, this blog does not discuss my friends, what we did or talked about, who I am dating or other areas where information leaks can cause trouble. I think when people feel like they may be discussed in a public forum later, they become reluctant to share information; thus, this supposed next wave of democratic journalism actually winds up upsetting the delicate optimal exchange of dialogue underpinning wholesome social relationships.

Conversely, I continue to be amazed by blogs whose authors seem to lack any notion of boundaries. (Indeed, this Times article's author, judging from some of what we learn about her in the article, seems to lack this notion herself.) You have to wonder what the next leak will be. As someone whose livelihood depends on confidentiality and trust, I prefer to post observations about things most people can share in--and to save the really good stuff for personal converations with close friends.

People had enough trouble distinguishing between AT&T and AT&T Wireless. Now that AT&T Wireless has been acquired by Cingular, there is yet another layer of confusion.

According to reports on Howardforums.com, some AT&T Wireless stores now have Cingular banners in them. Cingular itself has a new logo and slogan--changed from the orange color and the clever "Cingular fits you best" to AT&T Wireless blue and the insipid "Raising the bar." AT&T Wireless ads are still running in The New York Times, and the AT&T Wireless Web site says the company has "joined forces with" Cingular.

After an acquisition, brand replacement doesn't have to be absolute; I think Bank of America has done a good job phasing in its replacement of Fleet. However, AT&T Wireless had a dreadful reputation and the acquisition provided the perfect opportunity to dispense with that name immediately.

If this is any clue of what's coming with the complex integration of the companies' technology systems, I can't wait to see what happens next.

I'm a longtime Subway fan, but I had my first visit to a Blimpie today. I just have never gotten to one. Subway always seems to be in the right place. Here are my observations.

Decor: Subway wins. Even on a national scale, each Subway has that unmistakable wallpaper of the old NYC subway map. I love reading the station names and looking at each line every time I'm at a Subway. If you're on line, it makes great reading.

Meat: Blimpie wins. Blimpie cut my turkey and roast beef fresh, while Subway's meat portions are pre-packaged in measured portions. It's not that the meat at Subway is bad, but there was something nice about having it sliced fresh.

Toppings: Subway wins for variety; however, the tomatoes today at Blimpie were far more vibrant than those I saw at Subway last week. Especially considering the high tomato prices these days, this is impressive. Blimpie has maybe half as many choices, but they were all of high quality.

Bread: Subway's bread is great--I like to alternate between whole wheat and honey oat--but the Blimpie toasted bread was a nice touch. The down side was that it was just plain white bread. If warm toasted bread is your thing, Blimpie is better; the flavor selections at Subway are more impressive though.

Chips: This Blimpie's selection (maybe others have more of a selection) was limited to Lays potato chips and pretzels. Subway has regular and baked potato chips, pretzels and Sun Chips.

I think I will probably continue to lean towards Subway, but if Blimpie is the closest alternative, it's not a bad situation.

We're finally settling in to a typical New York sports winter. The Jets and Giants both lost this weekend, and the Knicks lost their home opener to the Celtics 107-73. Should be a fun few months ahead.

I loved the story in the Times today about the band called The Postal Service and its business relationship with the U.S. Postal Service. Kudos to both parties for turning a potential dispute into a mutually profitable opportunity.

That said, any claim to the phrase "the postal service" by the U.S. Postal Service is ridiculous. I slept through most of trademarks class, so I'm not an expert, but there is no way the U.S.P.S. should have a right to this generically descriptive phrase. The U.S.P.S. hasn't made any attempt to brand this descriptive phrase as its own (generically descriptive phrases may become trademarks if they acquire a secondary meaning, through persistent marketing or other methods, so they are associated with a specific owner). Moreover, there is no chance of consumer confusion--is anyone really going to think a rock band is somehow a new, innovative branch of a mail service? Give me a break.

It would be one thing if FedEx started a cheap letter delivery service and named it "The Postal Service." Then you would have a real chance of confusion. With The Postal Service band, though, even though the outcome is noble and it's nice to see the U.S.P.S. thinking creatively to sustain itself, the whole thing began with a ridiculous claim.

A baseball team finally came to its senses and hired Willie Randolph, as classy an act as anywhere in sports, as its manager. Even I will be rooting for the Mets next season.

On a Yankees team loaded with egos in the 1980s, Willie Randolph was as steady as you could get. His trademark base hit to right field always seemed to occur at the perfect time, and Randolph never clamored for any recognition for it. Granted, it's nice to be even a third base coach for a team that wins 4 World Series championships, but Randolph finally has the shot he has always deserved.

I'm impressed so far with shoes.com, although I don't know how they make money.

Over the last few years, I have had continuous bad luck with shopping for sneakers. It doesn't matter what day or time it is, or what store: whatever kind I want, the store doesn't have it in my size (12, which is a mainstream size).

Last week I tried shoes.com and found it to be a pleasant experience. Since I have looked around so much for sneakers, I pretty much know how they will look when they arrive, so I was comfortable selecting them online. I ordered a couple of pairs and enjoyed free shipping. I returned the pair I didn't want using the prepaid postage label and the original box.

I'd prefer to support the nice people at Tip Top Shoes, my local shoe store, but I've had bad luck there just one too many times. This seems better for now.