Do you really need that "Omaha" coffee mug made in China? Eric Lucas thinks not.

Photo: Photo by zaqi, via Flickr (Creative Commons)
The hotel concierge was aghast.

"No, you cannot walk all the way down to Wall Street," he said. "Sir, let me call you a cab."

He looked at me as if I had proposed rowing from New York to London a whim requiring herculean effort and exposing me to incalculable danger.

Nonetheless I asked for a map. I was in Midtown Manhattan, and the distance from there to Wall Street, where I had a lunch appointment, was three miles or so. If I can't walk three miles, it's time to set me on a rock in the woods and send me off to the next incarnation. It was 10 a.m., plenty of leeway. I shouldered my day pack and set off, concierge wide-eyed in my wake.

Thus I had a very enjoyable stroll through Manhattan, on a fine spring day. My route took me through the Garment District, where workers still careen up and down the street hauling buggy-racks of fur coats. Who knew?

Read the rest of Eric's list here, via World Hum.