This is not a Giants ticker tape parade

Giants ticker tape, originally uploaded by trexfiles23.

There are no more ticker tape machines on Wall Street, hence no ticker tape. What we have instead is -- you guessed it -- environmentally friendly recycled shredded paper, which isn't quite the same thing. The pieces are bigger, which means the snowfall effect I loved in pictures from the early-mid-twentieth century isn't here.

What is here, though, is a lot of interesting behavior in regard to crowd behavior. I've enjoyed watching the micro- and macro-patterns among the observers, and the paper swirling is great. In fact, in the building across from me someone is unrolling a rather spectacularly long roll of what I guess is bathroom tissue, which is now streaming across Broadway.

One thing I was glad about while walking the route this morning was that the U.S. is not an aggregate of rival city-states. Just now I can hear it again--the crowd chanting "Boston sucks!" If this were 2000 years ago, the "sucks" would no doubt be "delenda est"!