Whenever poor judgment gets me stuck in downtown Manhattan, I take respite from the t-shirt hawkers and 9/11 gawkers—whatta rhyme!—by staring at the ground. On Broadway's prepostrously named "Canyon of Heroes," plaques commemorate those historical badasses whose arrival in New York was greeted with a ticker tape parade. This morning, my brother sent me a link to Wikipedia's list of those names. Setting aside the peculiar fact that some Wikipedia drone felt a need to catalogue this, the list makes for good reading. Some observations:

The first such parade was in honor of the Statue of Liberty—New York's original diva. Wikipedia claims the parade was "spontaneous," a designation that makes me yearn for the days when a statue could get office boys so excited that they'd empty their trashcans out the window.