Lauren Fleishman

​After freelance photographer Lauren Fleishman's grandfather died, she found a book next to his bed containing love letters written to her grandmother. "That inspired me to start seeking out couples that have been married for over 50 years," she told Runnin' Scared on the phone today. Fleishman has been working on the project for three years, and is now seeking funds on Kickstarter to help her photograph more couples and turn her work into a book. We admit we have been cynical about the current onslaught of love-themed media, but we are smitten with these stories of long-lasting New York-area romance.

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​Back in September we noted that Mayor Bloomberg announced that the amount of New Yorker smokers was down to 14 percent. But then, we wondered what might be the next killer of our population. Could it be "getting old and dying?" Well, rest easy, because Mayor Bloomberg announced today that New Yorkers are doing well in the living long department. Not only are they are staying alive for longer than ever before, they are also beating the rest of the country in doing so.

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​On his weekly John Gambling radio show appearance, Mayor Bloomberg touched on the issue of young men wearing their pants hanging down, a topic near and dear to old people everywhere.

A caller named Eddie called in to tell the mayor about an incident on the bus in which a young man with low-hanging pants stood near his young daughter. "There was a gentleman on the bus with his pants down, I mean really grossly down," Eddie said.

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Esther Zuckerman

​If you read Runnin' Scared regularly, you'll know that we have a thing for yarn art. Unfortunately, it's made it onto Neil Genzlinger's list in the Times this weekend of things in NYC that should be banned. He'd like to ban pan flutes, for example, and fedoras (we endorse this one), "anyone caught using a cellphone," and twin strollers containing only one baby -- and "yarn bombing": More >>

This is a TV appearance from 1956, by a 96-year-old man named Samuel Seymour:

As a five-year-old boy, he saw John Wilkes Booth shoot Abraham Lincoln. Which happened in 1865.

[Kottke]

[@_rosiegray]

The 2012 Cherry Blossom Centennial Stamp

​Yesterday, the dying government institution that is the United States Postal Service made one last attempt at staying relevant by offering sneak-peeks of new 2012 stamps over Facebook and Twitter. They will post a new stamp every weekday for some undetermined amount of time. The USPS social-media person must be too old to appreciate the irony in trying to save snail mail on the interwebs, or maybe the Postal Service has finally realized that the only young people who are going to buy stamps are irony-loving hipsters.

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Herrick and his bride.

​Ladies, just because your man won't commit now doesn't mean that's forever. Gilbert Herrick, who is 99 years old and a World War II veteran, finally married for the first time in his life after meeting Virginia Hartman-Herrick, a youthful 86-year-old he met at Monroe Community Hospital in Rochester, New York. He said, "I never met the right woman until I met Virginia." Their philosophy: do the things that make you happy, pass a lot of love notes but tear them up before anyone else can see them, and get married so you can live in the same room. "You can't do that here unless you are married," said Gilbert. "So she asked me, and I said yes." And that's basically how it goes. (Kudos to the bride for wearing red.) [Democrat & Chronicle via NBC NY]

via WestSideRag

​This "Got Milk"-riff ad, the latest in the city's efforts to get old people to put on condoms if they're going to have sex, comes our way via WestSideRag, who sighted the sign at right on West 72nd Street near West End. "Age is not a condom" -- no, no it isn't. But even though you'd think over-50s would know that, having not been born yesterday, or even, say, 20 years before yesterday, people in the senior community are still going ahead and having sex without condoms. The dark side of this is the growing numbers of people who've contracted HIV at age 50 and older. The ironic side is that these are the same people who preached safe sex to us youngsters back in the old days. The sort of hilarious side is how parents will answer their young children's queries about the nekkid lady in this prominently positioned ad. Practice what you preach, grams and pops! STDs are not cool. [WSR]

Not Eddie.

​There is a sweet/weird and all too brief interview with 84-year-old Chelsea resident Herbert Rauch in DNA Info today. Aside from being one of those quintessential New York characters, Rauch is a bird person -- we don't truly understand bird people, but we respect their right to be bird people -- and he has a parrot named Eddie who, for 35 years, has walked up and down Tenth Avenue with Rauch (presumably on his shoulder). Rauch and Eddie are close, as well as, clearly, a fixture of the neighborhood.

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​CBS has this awesome vintage report from the '90s today. It's about blogs, or as people used to say, "weblogs," and how they're gaining power and clout and whatnot. Interesting to see how new and exciting it was back in the beginning. LOL, the "blogosphere."

Hold up, the dateline says this story is from June 12, 2011. That must be...a mistake?

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