One of Bloomberg’s parting legislative gifts to New Yorkers, a ban on electronic cigarettes anywhere that analog (is that what the kids call it? idk) smoking isn’t allowed, goes into effect today. This is a blessing for soft, pusillanimous vapers; they now have common cause with the genuinely aggrieved smokers of real cigarettes and the intriguing hit of illegality when they furtively puff indoors, their heads tilted low toward their belly, hand wrapped completely around their mechanical nicotine stick to obscure the glow from that stupid little light at the end of it.

Photo by Lindsay Fox

“’The whole idea of a signboard is to get people to stop, without being overtly crass,’ said Brian Peck, manager of the Meatball Shop in Williamsburg, Brooklyn, whose own sign read ‘Spring For Our Balls’ on Wednesday.”

It is 2014, can we stop referring to women as “coeds”? I mean, the way things are going maybe we should just reserve that designation for men.

It begins this afternoon around 2 p.m.

It ends Thursday at noon.

So set your “New York is the weather-complaining center of the world” social media presences at their loudest settings, for you will be wet and miserable and cold, and how can the rest of the world compete with that?

by Matthew J.X. Malady

People drop things on the Internet and run all the time. So we have to ask. In this edition, writer and editor Josh Fruhlinger tells us more about the ridiculous things one sees while searching through Flickr.

cool perk of doing tech slideshows: judging whose fingernails are least gross in creative-commons licensed pics of various gadgets on flckr

— Josh Fruhlinger (@jfruh) April 21, 2014

Josh! So what happened here?

For one of my freelance gigs, I write a couple slideshows a month on tech topics for ITworld. This may sound like dull content creation drudgery, but I get to do them on subjects that interest me — the one I was working on when I posted this was about the etymology of various terrible web buzzwords and phrases — and I get to put jokes into them, so I’m generally pretty pleased with how they come out.

Finding the images is always the trick. ITworld doesn’t have an account with one of the stock image companies (at least not one that freelancers get to use), so I generally hunt for public domain or Creative Commons licensed imagery. This means I spend a lot of time on Wikipedia and Flickr, which include some stuff that’s very professional and useful and other stuff that’s…less so. But, honestly, I prefer it! There’s something a bit more spontaneous about it: You’re more likely to get goofy, enthusiastic pictures of people who are genuinely excited about getting their new laptop out of its box or whatever. It’s not staged — you can see all the stuff on their desk — and the charm makes up for the bad lighting.

In this case, I was trying to track down a product shot of the original Dell Streak, because that seemed to be the first phone that was referred to as a “phablet.” Which meant that I saw a lot of close-up pictures from 2009 and 2010 of people holding a Streak in their hand at trade shows and electronic stores (while holding another phone in their other hand to take the picture, probably?). And since a close-up on the phone also meant a close-up on their fingernails, I spent some time trying to figure out whose were the least unsightly. It came down to these two, and I think you’ll agree that #2’s were better, though I’d say still not great.

(As a side note, after the article was published I heard from linguist Ben Zimmer that the first phone called a phablet was actually the older Nokia N900, which meant I ended up swapping in a sadly fingernail-free photo from Wikipedia.)

What are some of the more crazy things you have come across in doing these searches in the past?

Sometimes I have to search not just for specific items or people but more abstract concepts, so I put some pretty weird search terms in and get some weird results back. Once I was looking for “Duke of Cool” — I have literally no memory why, but the result has been burned into my brain, for obvious reasons:

The uploader titled this “Duke of Dork,” so I’m not even entirely sure why it came up. Does Flickr know “cool” and “dork” are semantic flipsides of one another, somehow?

Also, I wouldn’t call this “crazy,” but one of the most common genres on Flickr is “photoset of dozens of pictures taken by nonprofessional photographer at some kind of government/professional conference and then uploaded indiscriminately.” These can be good places to find pictures of public figures who might be otherwise hard to track down, but they’re generally poorly lit and composed photos of some of the dullest forms of human interaction that our society tolerates. Somehow I stumbled once onto the following picture from a youth panel on texting and driving at what appears to be a government-sponsored “distracted driving summit,” in which literally every person in the photo looks like they want to kill themselves out of boredom. I kind of love it.

Finally, there’s a Creative Commons–licensed picture on Flickr of TechCrunch founder Michael Arrington hanging out with Chamillionaire of “Ridin’ Dirty” fame:

I’m honestly not sure why every single article about Arrington (or, for that matter, Chamillionaire) doesn’t use this as an illustration. I did it, Wikipedia does it, and I urge you to do it too.

Lesson learned (if any)?

Really, keep your nails clean and well trimmed. Actually, you should be good about grooming in general — especially if high-res pictures of any of your body parts are going to go online, because you never know where that image is going to end up. Maybe it’s in a slideshow about stupid tech portmanteaus, or maybe it’s in a supermarket ad in Prague. Hygiene first! Also, even if you just stand next to someone long enough for a picture to be taken, people will be assuming the two of you are pals who hang out all the time (sorry, Chamillionaire).

Just one more thing.

I don’t think it’s a secret that Flickr is past its heyday — which means, from my perspective, that the heyday of photos from random people that have been explicitly tagged to allow reuse is also past. Honestly, it’s easier to find a picture of a phone from 2009 than it is to find one from 2014 on there. Assuming Yahoo doesn’t go bankrupt/accidentally unplug the servers, at some point it’s going to become this weird time capture, a slice of an archaeological dig representing the second half of the ’00s.

Matthew J.X. Malady is a writer and editor in New York.

Photos by Paul Swansen, Jung-nam Nam, Ludie Cochrane, Jason Meredith, and Brian Solis, respectively.

★★★ The two-year-old exclaimed about the blowing clouds out the window, and did not need to be asked twice to get on his scooter and head out of the apartment. No scooter-riding in the lobby, the doorman told him, intending it for his adult supervisor. At the playground gate, the two-year-old had to be persuaded to leave the sidewalk, with its slow-moving elderly people and their shopping carts, for the uncluttered spaces inside. Didn’t he want to go faster? He supposed he did. The flags hissed as the stirring wind made them undulate back on themselves. The two-year-old pulled up beside two other children, scooters parked and chain-link shadows patterning their helmets, to watch another child practice tee ball. Then he took off across the paved yard, circling unerringly for the one truly substantial pool among the various scattered puddles. He splashed through it, leaving wet tire tracks and a single repeating footprint after he emerged. Another small child was stomping in the puddles, and they came to an agreement on a coordinated assault on a lesser puddle, the shoe soles of the infantry and scooter wheels of the cavalry scattering the water up and out, over and over, into a ragged smear. The playground was filling up — there were near-collisions now, and the occasional actual collision — but every time the yard seemed about to get warm, more and bigger clouds would cover the sun again, and the chill would deepen. A parent gathered up a child, telling her they’d have to come back after they’d put on more clothes. The two-year-old, soaked to the knees with cold puddle water, wanted to shed his sweatshirt.

In which we re-answer questions sent to The Ethicist.

I know of someone who has lived mortgage-free for three years while the bank foreclosed on his apartment. During that time, the man paid his monthly maintenance to the building but did not pay his mortgage. His rationale: He had been in the furniture business and lost much of his income with the financial crisis, and not one of the bankers responsible for the meltdown has gone to jail. And furthermore, as a result, his apartment was worth less than he paid for it. Does any of that matter? Is strategic loan default ethical? NAME WITHHELD

You’re a nosy one aren’t ya!

But your actual question is about the ethics of loan default, and whether it may be done “strategically.” Nowhere do you reveal, or reveal that you know, a “strategy” on the part of this withholder. That’s a canard anyway — would your question be different if this non-payer was “strategically” seeking to keep his adorable wee children in bread and water?

The bank is free to seek repair for its harm as it wishes. Presumably it is, as all institutions slowly and surely do. But this person’s building remains funded and presumably solvent; a most ethical choice. By what other means should we express disgust at companies like Bank of America, who are literally so bad at doing their jobs that they can’t even do their accounting right? Who are so bloated that they can accommodate a $4-billion math mistake without blinking? Someone should pay, and they seem prepared to. After all, they’re going to have to cough up something like $15 billion, on top of $9.5 billion they’d already been forced to eat, oh and on top of another almost-billion dollars over their whole deceptive services thing.

To hell with Chase, Citibank and Bank of America! If your acquaintance really had his act together, he’d be making his mortgage lender pay him. The very least he can do to make things right in the world is to withhold his payments.

___________

Email queries to ethicist@nytimes.com, or send them to the Ethicist, The New York Times Magazine, 620 Eighth Avenue, New York, N.Y. 10018, and include a daytime phone number.

Astronauts like to talk about the feeling they get when they see Earth from space for the first time. The sensation has a name: the Overview Effect. I will never experience this and neither will you, but we might one day end up on an empty subway car, which is close enough.

What are you supposed to do when you’re the only person in a subway car? The possibilities feel endless and are therefore paralyzing. I sit absolutely still and stop whatever else I’m doing. No reading. No playing with a phone. A friend of mine used to walk-run from one end of the car to the other; he would send videos of this silent process to his friends as soon as he came back above ground.

The solitary subway ride, it turns out, is a vibrant YouTube category. It’s a secret genre concealed under the much more common and popular “crazy people doing crazy things” subway videos, but it is certainly different. The mode is usually testimonial; the content is urgent and confused.

“This goes down in history. I’ve never been on a train by myself in New York City.” Keith felt the need to justify his taking the subway in the first place: “Well, whatever. My flight doesn’t leave until like five,” he says, “but I don’t want to pay $30 to get to the airport.”

“I am completely alooooone in this subway car. That never, ever happens.” Pacing, smiling, laughing, yelling. “What can I do here? Oh my god, so much freedom.”

This performance of Madonna’s “Holiday” followed by a near-miss stage lick up the subway pole captures a common secondary condition: If you are alone on the subway, there is a good chance you are alone and drunk on the subway.

The most staged of these videos (and technically not solo) is easily the most relatable. Climb. Swing. Run. Scream. This car is yours for one stop, maybe two. This is a pure expression of Solitary Subway Psychosis, aka Tube Time.

“This is the first time this has ever happened,” is something a lot of these people think to say, not knowing that the second time it happens is as consuming an experience as the first.

“When is the last time you’ve seen a subway with nobody on the damn car. I could do anything I wanted in this joint. I could have sex in here.” But then you wouldn’t be alone?? Not worth it, but this is the effect SSP has on your cognitive abilities.

“Woooo,” she says, switching to English, swinging halfway around the pole. “Getting crazy all over the place.” This is an expressive case; it is no more or less felt, however, than the subtler ones:

Bliss.

by Awl Sponsors

Today The New York Times reveals its new video platform, Times Video.

Expect news, documentaries, interviews and original series like Verbatim (above) which features dramatic reenactments of legal transcripts. But mainly, expect to spend even more time being charmed and informed by excellent video content.

You should probably just go ahead and check it out.

Video Promises, Delivers.