Archives for December 2006
A Very Nice Christmas Story
Recharger adores Christmas hypocrisy, especially the part where he gets presents and doesn’t give any. But something about this story made him pause mid-sip in his Jack Daniels.
Nancy has received money from the New York Time Neediest Cases Fund so she can pay off her Con Ed bill. In July 2004, Ms. Caballero, who lived in Bushwick, Brooklyn, traveled to Puerto Rico to be with her daughter, Rosa Corsino, who was hospitalized with a serious intestinal infection. While helping Corsino [...]
Posted in The City on December 15th, 2006 | 
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Fake Blood
To: Leo DiCaprio
From: Recharger The Dog
Re: Blood Diamond.
Dear Leo:
Saw your film, “Blood Diamond.” You recall that after The Aviator, we said you looked like a 12-year-old with a fake mustache, and that your naked scene in the room with the milk bottles was as believable as Ronald Reagan without legs. We take it back. A little. “Blood Diamond” isn’t more realistic, but the story is more important—how illegal diamonds, with the complicity of diamond syndicate DeBeers, helped Sierra Leone warlords [...]
Posted in Books/Films/Media, The City on December 15th, 2006 | No Comments »
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Nightmare On Tenth Avenue
Recharger, at Maimonides Hospital in Brooklyn last week to visit his uncle recovering from a heart attack, noticed that “the pre-eminent treatment facility and academic medical center in the Borough of Brooklyn” gives garbage a good name. “I don’t want to be here anymore- you’re lucky. You get to leave,” said Rose Chen, in for chronic depression. Then she showed us her room. Because orderlies hadn’t cleaned for three days, trash was piled up, her bed was unmade, old [...]
Posted in The City on December 14th, 2006 | No Comments »
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Island at the Center of the World: by Russell Shorto
Dear Mr. Shorto:
Trademark your name; I will drink any chocolate milk called Shorto.
As for your enlightening, lugubrious history of New Amsterdam—Manhattan–I was disturbed for the following reasons:
It gave me a creepy case of the academics. I did not like slogging through a book. I wanted to feel as if I were in Mr. Peabody’s Way-Back machine; the thrill I got from Jack Finney’s Time And Again (yes, a novel, and the setting was 200 years after yours). I wanted [...]
Posted in Books/Films/Media, The City on December 14th, 2006 | No Comments »
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Suckers!
ASK RECHARGER THE MOST BORING NEWS ITEM OF THE YEAR, and he’d waver between any story about Derek Jeter and Black Friday, the day after Thanksgiving, so named because stores, flush with cash, go in the black. But Black Friday stupidity this year was downright fun. By midnight, 500 morons, er, bargain hunters were lined up outside a Circuit City store in Rego Park, Queens, hoping to buy one of the $200 Toshiba laptops. At the head of the [...]
Posted in The City on December 13th, 2006 | No Comments »
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See Gerritsen Beach and Die
Gerritsen Beach, the predominantly white, one-time fishing village located in South Brooklyn, a neighborhood, Congressman Anthony Weiner claimed “whose residents don’t put up with violence, and certainly do not tolerate hate,” has become hate crime central.
Let’s start with the four black teenagers who, this past June 26, lost in the neighborhood riding their bikes, were attacked by a mob shouting racial slurs. Three managed to escape, but the all-white mob, according to the DA’s indictment, beat the fourth and stole [...]
Posted in The City on December 12th, 2006 | 1 Comment »
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Stop the presses!
Recharger, striving to fill gaps in his education, attended The Sixteenth Annual Albanian Festival at Lehman College, a three-hour variety show.
More than 3,000 fans came to wildly applaud dancers, singers, instrumentalists, comedians and, tragically, poets who performed a touching paen to Albanian unity. Heart-warmingly named “Zonja e Shkodres,” and organized by the Albanian Catholic Church, the event was a tip of the hat to the 160th birthday of Naim Frasheri, the father of modern Albanian literature, whose epic poem [...]
Posted in Arts & Events, The City on December 9th, 2006 | No Comments »
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This just in: machine detects eyeball bombs.
COME MID-DECEMBER, RECHARGER WILL RELAX AS HE PASSES THROUGH SECURITY CHECKPOINTS AT JOHN F. KENNEDY INTERNATIONAL AIRPORT. Verified Identity Pass, a private security firm, is starting a program that charges a $100 annual fee to travelers who get an ID card that includes the holder’s eyeball and fingerprint information. A machine also scans the holder for bombs, a process that will allow Recharger to keep his shoes on and breeze through check-in. In fact, all told, it will take him [...]
Posted in The City on December 6th, 2006 | No Comments »
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Condoms in a Jelly-bean Jar?
Sheesh. Till now, Recharger pictured Columbia University students pulling all-nighters for Professor Jackson, napping in the library, and argueing existentialism in the malt shop. Turns out the school where tuition costs $33,000 is a breeding ground for sexual deviancer that would turn a white man grey. According to the Daily News, Columbia students spend every spare minute going to strip parties, broadcasting porn on campus, and playing an increasingly popular game called “Guess the Number of Condoms in the Jelly-Bean [...]
Posted in The City on December 6th, 2006 | No Comments »
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