You know you've made a name for yourself when there is a South Park episode in your honour. Some years ago it was Russell Crowe, courtesy of his anger management problem and beating people up (like this for example). Now it's Alec Baldwin with an attitude problem, and a South Park episode to boot.

Baldwin was arrested in New York this morning for verbally abusing the police after he was stopped for riding his bicycle the wrong way up Fifth Avenue hahaha! As he does, he immediately took to Twitter and lamented, "New York City is a mismanaged carnival of stupidity..." More info here.

Among other humourous encounters, Baldwin made headlines in August last year for beating up this photographer, then in November he chased another one down the street and called him a "cocksucking fag" (video here), and back in 2011 he was booted off an American Airlines flight for refusing to turn off his cell phone hahaha! What a dude, and he seemed like such a nice guy in Beetlejuice :)

America's obesity problem, illustrated in art :)

Despite some of the ominous clouds around, Kristina and I spent the day in Central Park again after our day here last weekend was cut short when those clouds opened up.

Central Park covers 778 acres (315 ha) in the middle of Manhattan island. To put that into perspective, it covers 51 city blocks from north to south, and three much larger blocks from east to west. The park contains a one-way ring road that is only partially open to vehicular traffic at specific times of the day. There are also four east-west roadways through the park (this is one of them) but they are depressed below the elevation of the park itself.

As such, traffic noise is virtually non-existent, and instead it's all just people, nature and street performers. In other words, Central Park is a welcome relief from the chaos that is New York City, and it's a bloody great space to wander through and get lost in!

Central Park is the most visited urban park in the United States, and in fact the park constitutes its own United States census area. According to the 2000 census, 18 people claimed to permanently live in Central Park hehe, but officials have denied this. By the way, spot the castle in the background.

This is Belvedere Castle, and I had no idea it was here until we spotted it today. I cycle through Central Park often, but this this is obscured from the ring road. The castle serves no real purpose, and was merely designed as an additional feature of the park by architects tasked with overseeing the park's construction in 1865. It does, however, house the official Central Park weather station, which is the primary station used for tracking and reporting the city's weather conditions.

The castle overlooks the Great Lawn and Turtle Pond. The Great Lawn off to the left there is an oval patch of turf with eight baseball diamonds, and Turtle Pond is, well, full of turtles. Signs demand you not feed the wildlife, but evidently people can't read too good. That's a massive wad of bread someone hurled in there hehe.

If I ever have a statue erected in my honour, this is the pose I want.

We found a good wee spot to set up the tripod I lugged around all day and snap some quick ones for the album, and then continued following our nose heading north.

We live a few blocks from the southern part of Central Park on E 74th Street in Manhattan's Upper East Side, so we know that part of the park pretty well but haven't explored much of the north. And the park is so damn huge it really is like exploring.

Elsewhere we found more performers...

Picnics and sport...

And more people feeding the wildlife hehe.

This is part of the ring road that lops around the park. I'm usually one of the cyclists, but lately I've been one of the runners as I get myself trained up for the New York City Marathon in November.

Ever wonder what Kristina does while I'm trying to get a photo of something? She wanders off and then waits around, and talks to lampposts and trees ;)

This is the Jacqueline Kennedy Onassis Reservoir (named after JFK's wife), looking towards the Upper East Side. This thing covers 106 acres (43 ha) and holds over a billion gallons of the wet stuff. The reservoir opened in 1862 and distributed water to Manhattan for 131 years until it was decommissioned in 1993 after being deemed obsolete. It's got a nice fountain over there on the right.

It's just like me first thing in the morning.

The reservoir is encircled by a 2.5km (1.6 mile) jogging track, which although popular, must be a pain in the ass to use thanks to the number of pedestrians in the way (like us).

You'd get a pretty decent view of it all from up there, if you've got a few million to spare.

After a some more portraits and aimless meandering we ran out of day. There are a couple more areas buried in the park that I still want to check out, which will likely take a whole other day to do. To get a better idea of just how huge Central Park is, check out my shot of it here from the observation deck atop the Rockefeller Center.

This was on the subway this morning during one of my random trips to our Jersey City office across the Hudson River in New Jersey. Michael Bloomberg just recently finished his term as mayor of New York City, and was a big advocate for cycling in the city (my kind of mayor). I don't know what the new guy's stance is, but regardless this how not to advertise to the likes of me!

The view from the Jersey office over the Hudson to the Financial District in Lower Manhattan, with One World Trade Center standing tall and proud.

And looking in the other direction, the Empire State Building also standing tall and proud with the Chrysler Building standing slightly shorter in the distance. Not a bad view :)

Yup, we're going to Mexico! :) Kristina and my first wedding anniversary is upon us already (May 31st) and I turn 32 the following day, so after a quick stop in San Antonio, Texas for someone else's wedding this weekend, we're heading down to Mexico for a week. Not the area where these hombres hang out however, but the more touristy towns of Cancún and Playa del Carmen on the Yucatán Peninsula for some much needed sunshine. So, adios amigos!

Most of our vacations involve anything but this. No relaxation, no all-inclusive resorts, none of it. In fact they're usually non-stop and exhausting. As such, I've felt like a fish out of water for the last week or so hehe. Anyway, we made it back from Mexico tonight in one piece and it's back to the normal life tomorrow. Photos and (several) videos to follow.

New Yorkers love their sport and their sports teams, and right now they're particularly (ice) hockey mad with the New York Rangers having made it to the annual Stanley Cup finals against the Los Angelese Kings. Incidentally, I saw a Rangers game when I visited New York back in 2008 :) While out on the bike on Wednesday after work a crazed crowd of Rangers fan passed me at a red light on their way to the first game of the finals at Madison Square Garden, and all decided to give my high fives hahaha! The Rangers went on to lose that game hehe, but it's a best-of-seven tournament.

The Suze Orman Show is a weekly financial advice show presented by Suze Orman. The show is now in its 13th year, and Kristina put me onto it when I first arrived in the US. Frankly it has taught me (or led me to research for myself) everything I needed to know from a financial perspective about living in US and how things work here. Late last year I sold a house in New Zealand that I co-owned with my Mum which netted me around US$120,000. My intention was to invest that money somewhere and have it grow until such time Kristina and I are ready to buy a home of our own in a few years. However, at the time I was in two minds about where best to invest, specifically in stock market or in bonds. Stocks are risky for anything less than a long-term investment but have the potential to yield a greater return. Bonds on the other hand are much safer. With points in mind I already knew the answer to my own question and have invested accordingly in safe bonds, but I figured an email on the subject to the Suze Orman Show couldn't hurt. Fast forward to March and I was contacted by a producer for the show asking if I would be interested in starring on a webcam feature of the show regarding my question hehe. Sure, why not :) Filming was done early one morning in April, and the show just aired tonight. Video here :)

Every weekend, summer and winter, there seems to be at least one huge market going on somewhere in Manhattan. They just seem to randomly pop up all over the show, and ruin the flow of traffic. This one was along First Avenue yesterday at the end of my block. Many a random goodie and foodstuff to be found.

And they all seem to have at least one balloon guy.

Then down in the Flatiron District today surrounding Madison Square Park below the Flatiron Building was this - the Big Apple BBQ Block Party! This is an annual weekend event each June to "celebrate America's authentic culinary and musical traditions".

The primary draw of the event is the BBQ! The event features award-winning barbecue and Southern-inspired fare from the country's top pitmasters from barbecue capitals like Texas, North Carolina, Alabama and Illinois. As much as I wanted to get into some of this, the lines were ridiculous. This is the 12th year of the event and it now attracts over 100,000 meat-lovers. Doesn't matter. When we move to Texas I can gorge myself stupid on BBQ whenever I please :)

This guy here is Pumpkin, a nine-year-old chestnut gelding and one of many horses pulling carriages of mostly tourists through Central Park. They have long been a subject of heated debate in New York. On one side of the fence, people think it's cruel and dangerous, and want them off the street and into loving adoptive homes. On the other side, people don't give two shits. I'm not really sure where I stand, but given New York's propensity for temperature extremes in the summer and winter, not to mention this ridiculous traffic they have to tolerate, I wouldn't want to be hauling a carriage full of people around.

Anyway, shortly before I turned up on my way home from work tonight, Pumpkin somehow lost his bridle while 'parked' on 59th Street (Central Park South) here and bolted off! He then ran out of control into Central Park, following the same route he's taken countless times before. That route eventually loops back out of the park, at which point his carriage ploughed into this taxi's open door and mangled it. He was eventually surrounded by other carriage drivers who managed to stop him and calm him down. No one was hurt and Pumpkin was given the all clear by a vet, but the cab driver appeared to be highly pissed off hehe. Like 'em or not, the new mayor of New York City has vowed to outlaw the horse-drawn carriages as early as this autumn, so that will be the end of that. News story and video here.

This is The Cloisters museum, a branch of the Metropolitan Museum of Art (the "Met"), located on the northern tip of Upper Manhattan. The museum was built in the mid-1930s and incorporates parts from five European abbeys which were dismantled and shipped over. Pretty damn nice!

The Cloisters exhibits the Met's extensive collection of art, architecture and artifacts from Medieval Europe, including medieval vegetables and salad :)

The Cloisters gets its name from its several medieval-style cloistered herb gardens, planted according to horticultural information obtained from medieval manuscripts and artifacts.

The whole building is just as impressive inside as it is on the outside.

The Cloisters collection contains approximately five thousand European medieval works of art, with a particular emphasis on pieces dating from the 12th through the 15th centuries. It includes sculptures, stained glass, tapestries, paintings and metalwork. Amazing to think this stuff has been kicking about for over 500 years.

There is also a library containing 15,000 volumes of books which includes many medieval manuscripts. Impressive stuff!

The Cloisters is plonked atop a hill overlooking The Bronx on one side, and the Hudson River across to New Jersey on the other.

The whole complex is located within the 67-acre (27 ha) Fort Tryon Park. The park was the creation of one of the Rockefeller family, John D. Rockefeller Jr., who in 1917 began purchasing real estate in the area. He engaged the son of one of the designers of Central Park to design the park, which he then gave to the city of New York in 1931. Rockefeller also bought a collection of medieval art and gave it the Metropolitan Museum of Art, which then built The Cloisters to house it. Generous man that Rockefeller!

Nice spot for a wedding, being set up on the left there.

Gotta love Manhattan :)