Before This Afternoon's Rain . . .

...there were great clouds over Manhattan at lunchtime.

Click the image to embiggen this iPhone panorama.

Maybe it's a post-Sandy feeling, but I sometimes think that Manhattan Island looks so thin and vulnerable between the Hudson River and a cloudy sky.

Language Matters: "Die Wolkenkratzern von New York"

On very rare occasions, le mot juste just happens to be in German.
On days like today when the sky is low over New York, I always think that the best word for the city's tallest buildings is not "skyscraper", but "Wolkenkratzer." The German word translates literally as "cloud scratcher."

Keeping with yesterday's space theme . . .

I didn't have a real camera at work today, but here are a couple of phone pictures of the Space Shuttle Enterprise making its final journey up the Hudson River earlier this morning as it passed the new World Trade Center and the Empire State Building.