Archives for March 2007
Great website on civil servants, doctors, etc. who abuse parking privileges.
Example: cop parks his $70,000 Corvette on River Terrace at Warren Street. Parks in the exact same spot for 14 months. Uses his unmarked car to hold his spot when he takes his Vette out. In the above picture, said Vette with car cover that hasn’t been moved since before last months’s storm cannot possibly be on ‘official police duty.’
Transportation Alternatives, champion of drug-addled cyclists and 12-step pedicab drivers, says [...]
Posted in The City on March 28th, 2007 | 
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parking Swapon Nath
CONTRARY TO URBAN MYTH, THE L TRAIN IS NOT THE WORST, SLOWEST, UGLIEST SUBWAY LINE IN NEW YORK HISTORY. Running from the miraculous bowels of Carnarsie—a neighborhood with more auto repair shops than people—through the dope-addled Williamsburg wasteland, to 8th Avenue and 14th Street in Manhattan, the L, out of 22 subway lines, ranks third in cleanliness, punctuality and in-car announcement, according to subway watchdogs, The Straphangers Campaign.
Better yet, 91% of L trains arrive “with above average regularity,” better than [...]
Posted in The City on March 22nd, 2007 | 1 Comment »
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Omobolanle Kazeem subways
The Airbus A380, the world’s hugest passenger plane, landed yesterday at JFK on its “trip to nowhere.” Clunky and slow-moving, like the six-footer in your eighth-grade class who sucked at sports, the jet is capable of carrying 800 passengers, bringing to mind fiery crashes into the Atlantic, grieving relatives, and somber FAA investigators in windbreakers.
Still, even at $300 million, everyone needs an Airbus A380. It’s that cool. First, it’s a double-decker jet with doors on both levels, and a [...]
Posted in The City on March 20th, 2007 | No Comments »
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Mohammad Taher
WE DON’T REALLY LIKE MAKING FUN OF KIDS, BUT WITH A WAR ON, and up to 64,000 Iraqi civilians dead as a result of the American invasion, and another war in Afghanistan, and you know, the history of civilization being more or less defined by war, war, and more war, and the world facing nuclear annihilation, we find an organization that trains kids at an early age to dress in army uniforms, march around, and participate in annual sham battles [...]
Posted in The City on March 14th, 2007 | No Comments »
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Swapon Nath
Here’s the thing: you are Jonathan Lethem, bookish writer, raised by bohemian parents in the Boerum Hill section of Brooklyn, as a kid read a lot — books, magazines, the newspaper — graduated high school and went to college. Now, you write a novel called Motherless Brooklyn about a street tough you kind of knew in the Brooklyn neighborhood where you grew up, but didn’t really hang with. Your main character, an oversized orphan with Tourette’s Syndrome who works [...]
Posted in Books/Films/Media, The City on March 10th, 2007 | 1 Comment »
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Jonathan Lethem literature reviews
Each time we eat at Tom’s Restaurant in Brooklyn (not to be confused with the sleazy Tom’s in Manhattan, famed Seinfeld locale), we marvel at the energy owner Gus and his wait staff put into being friendly. Watching the staff scurry through the Normal Rockwellish setting, serving orange slices and cookies to patrons scarfing down pancakes and eggs , we are half-inclined to think they are putting us on, that at any moment Gus and staff will pull off their [...]
Posted in Food & Fashion, The City on March 5th, 2007 | 1 Comment »
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diners
We think having dummies for friends is, on a scale of 1 to 10, a solid 11 on the creep meter. Last Friday, traffic cops stopped Timothy Tietjen, 32, of Middle Island for driving the L.I.E. with his unhealthily-tanned CPR dummy buddy. Tietjen had been doing this for six months so that he could use the HOV lane (reserved for drivers with two or more passengers), shaving hours from his weekly commute. Why the cops took so long to stop [...]
Posted in The City on March 1st, 2007 | No Comments »
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Bizarre Brooklyn commuting Olena Adames traffic
