Tag: New York

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Dances With The Dolls in Subwayland

From Randy Kennedy’s outstanding book “Subwayland : Adventures in the World Beneath New York“:

“Despite the laughter and applause that follow Mr.Diaz every time he draws his partner from her suitcase, he acknowledges that many subway riders have never quite known what to make of a grown man dancing with a buxom, life-size doll, even if the man dances very well. “They think that I am lonely or a sad man,” he said. “They make jokes about what I do with the doll when I am alone.””

My illustration:

Just now I noticed that my post about top 5 books read in 2004 post has only 4 books because I forgot to put in “Subwayland”. Thank you, attentive readers, for pointing that out. I positevely get the impression that either nobody is reading or my email and comments are broken.

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That Tactical Sensation

Today I am going to explore the geek/NYPD cop connection. Let’s see:

Geeks have Dockers Mobile Pant. I am not sure why Dockers marketing people all of a sudden decided to use the singular form of the word, but I guess they wanted to play on the connotation of “panting”. “Mobile Pant(s)” are dorky and ugly khaki pants that somewhat lessen the bulges from cellphones and pdas. I used to own a pair, and can’t say that I liked it much.

NYPD has “Patrol Tactical Pants”. Most New York newspapers ran gushing stories about NYPD being oh so very fashionable with the introduction of these pants. You can still find regurgitated bits of those stories over at Gothamist blog.

Moving on. Geeks have their Darth Vader lightsaber replicas. You can purchase a a cool plasma one with crazy effects or in a true Jedi manner build one out of a Heiland photo flashgun, just like the real thing.

Traffic cops started to appear with red led lit batons – mmmm, dark side color :

You can purchase your own pair of “Patrol Tactical Pants” over at Galls. They also have duty jackets (these are perfect for fishing), buckle less belts (these just look neat) and gloves.

Police gloves are cheaper, look and fit better than most good quality civilian gloves. I always hated wearing gloves because taking them off when I need to pay for something, use a camera or a phone. Some police gloves are made so that you can pick up a small coin in them easily. Just look at these: “enhanced tactical sensation”, cut resistance and “Water-resistant kangaroo leather palms”? Can you say the perfect winter fishing glove?

They also have more esoteric equipment:

Cold Water Immersion Suit – for NYC sewer diving

Rhino® 14″ Wheel Immobilizer – for that dumbass whose car alarm wasn’t letting you sleep all night

Holding Cell and Holding Cell Bench (perps sold separately) : as a gift for everybody’s favorite night club owner

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Another Disjointed Post In Which The True Owners Of America’s Senior Citizens are Revealed

I have about 30-40 very exciting posts planned, but don’t have the time or willpower to actually sit down and write them. Besides, I should really be working on two very interesting projects.. Three very interesting pro.. No, actually five. The Spanish Inquisition should really give me some Ritalin. Anyways, meanwhile I need to dash off a small observational post. I mean without these and cat pictures a blog is not a blog, right?

I am using SharpMT, a very nice little Movable Type client, to write this. I hope having a client that is similar to awesome Semajic will improve my blogging frequency. But I am very much annoyed at the fact that in this day and age almost all of what The Joel calls “real-time spell checker(s) with wavy red underlines” do not understand html markup and wavy-underline all a href= ? I mean, the spellchercker in this MT client is bad enough to not understand the word “blog”, but Outlook and Outlook Express are not any better.

Hmm.. Where was I? Oh, right, observational post. Last Monday was a miserable rainy day. I was already a little late for work when I boarded my train. The train was slow as usual – people who are already late are not in a hurry, right? And then the conductor uttered the two words that make every NYC Subway rider groan. “Sick passenger”.

You see, if somebody faints on a train the train usually stays in the station until an EMT arrives. The EMT arrival times are amazingly fast in NYC and MTA even has a few of its own paramedics stationedat major stations, but the delay in getting the “sick passengers” of the train makes the trains stack up and forces the dispatchers to rerout them sometimes causing major delays. There is a passage about the “sick passengers” in Randy Kennedy’s awesome Subwayland : Adventures in the World Beneath New York. One of the interesting observations there is that the highest percentage of “sick passenger” incidents happens on Modays. Amen to that.

The train that I was on was rerouted to Penn Station. I got out right next to the theater that plays “Monty Python’s Spamalot”. The street was full of actors dressed up as knights and there was a SPAM truck involved in distribution of free Spamwitches. As I was already pretty late I did not even have time to indulge in taking a picture with the knights or in free luncheon meat.

Later in the week I finally had a big ol’ titanium screw screwed in where I used to have a tooth before. Now I have a titanium wedding ring, titanium watch, titanium glasses, titanium coffee tamper and a titanium implant.

Next day I was standing in front of a drugstore counter waiting for my antibiotic and painkiller prescription to be filled out. The drugstore had a really cool ScriptPro Robotic Prescription Dispensing System. It works kind of like one of those mainframe tape retrieval systems – a robotic arm moves around in a glassed in cabinet, scans compartment barcodes and dispenses pills into bottles. To think of it, I think I’ve seen modern backup handling systems like that too. I always wanted one of those for my bookshelves.

Two oldtimers seated in the corner were obsessively discussing their prescription plans. What drew my attention was an interesting choice of words they used to describe their relaionship to the plans – it was always “belong to”. Not once did they say “what plan did you have” – it was always “what plan did you belong to”.

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Victorian Prank 96 Years In The Making

Here’s my latest eBay acquisition – a wonderful 96 year old postcard featuring currently 340 year old Van Pelt Manor (aka Van Pelt Mansion and Van Pelt Homestead) located at 18th Ave & 82nd St. in Brooklyn.

Ethics of publishing other people photographs and letters are rather questionable to me. This seems to be a gray area. For instance I feel that many posts in found_objects, foundphotos and vintagephoto communities of photos that were ripped up and thrown out, or of embarrassing nature, or personal letters overstep some ethical guidelines. But on the other hand I enjoy them nevertheless.

I don’t think that the writing on this postcard could likely hurt or embarrass anyone, so I decided that I’ll publish it.

It came from someone at 182 Garfield place. A little note on the right says “look under the stamp”.

On the back it says:
New York is a great place, we are “Forty five minutes from Broadway”. Do you see “Kitty” very often. She ran away and never did say good-bye to me. Pump up your Airship and sail over to see me some evening soon.
Youre “Soda Water Tessie”.

The stamp was still attached. The mystery of what was under the stamp was solved rather quickly : being a stamp collector I know how to properly take stamps off. My wonderful espresso machine provided some steam and I carefully peeled back the 1 cent green Ben Franklin (Scott Catalogue # 300). “Was it hard to get off?” – the little prank that “Soda Water Tessie” pulled on Mr. Ray Feathers of Toledo, OH finally saw light of day 96 years later.

I wonder, did Mr. Feathers actually own an airship?

P.S. Taking stamps off is generally a capitally bad idea. Dang early collectors liked to steam off stamps so much that we have very few surviving stamps on envelopes (which are often referred to as “postal history”). “Postal history” items usually sell with a high multiplier to the value of every stamp on the envelope.

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Still Round The Corner There May Wait A Restaurant or a Hidden Starbucks

Advertising might be the engine of commerce, but there is a surprising number of NYC businesses are hidden inside skyscrapers with almost no indication of them on the outside.

For instance, me and my co-workers often go to a Starbucks that is located in a lobby of a skyscraper. There is no sign outside, and inside you need to pass a security guy (who surprisingly lets you through) and turn a corner. I could not believe my eyes – you absolutely had to know where that Starbucks was.

There is nothing special about our hidden Starbucks, except it is the closest one to us and the lines are usually shorter. They do have an old style La Marzocco machine not yet replaced by the new superautomatics, but the barrista has no idea about how to grind the coffee and tamp it properly. I guess they don’t teach that anymore at Starbucks U.

There is a more interesting hidden place that we frequent. It’s a restaurant called Taam-Tov (46 West 47th Street, 4th floor 212-768-8001) which happens to be located on the fourth floor of a dumpy and decrepit art deco building in the middle of the Jewelry district on 47th street. To be fair I have to mention that there is a little sign on the step of a staircase that can be seen from outside. But you have to climb 8 flights of stairs, past dirty walls, an exposed phone comm. box and frequent full trash bags. There you will see an unmarked closed door and a small open order window.

Alternatively you can enter a jewelry store on the first floor and take a tiny little elevator, which will deposit you inside the restaurant. I strongly discourage you from using it.

Once me and three of my co-workers, one of whom is “portlier” than I am (and I am pretty “portly” myself), two have asthma and only one inhaler, despite my reluctance chose to take that tiny elevator. We let a bunch of people go up before us, waited for the elevator to come back and boarded it. Immediately what seemed to me like three shady looking Russian jewelers squeezed in after us. To my horror I noticed that in fact there was a fourth guy with them, just as sweaty and unshaven, but really short and skinny. Of course we got stuck between the floors and it took me and one of the jewelers few very uncomfortable minutes to figure out how to open the doors. Oh, and I forgot to mention – the co-worker who insisted the most on the elevator was not only slightly asthmatic, but a bit claustrophobic as well.

Anyway, the place is rather unique. The patrons are mostly jewelers – you might see them exchanging large sums of money and gold or diamonds, but there are a lot of programmers from surrounding offices who also found that place somewhere. Since the place was featured in the last issue of Time Out New York dedicated to cheapest restaurants, there the mix will be a bit more eclectic in the future.

The cuisine can be described as Middle Eastern/Russian, typical of the Baku region. Everything is cooked on site (in fact I’ve witnessed a small kitchen fire once that was quickly taken under control while everyone continued eating), kosher and very tasty. Shish kabobs are excellent (my favorite is rib kabob), so are soups. Just don’t ask for sour cream for your Borscht – and you can be sure that they don’t use Ukrainian pork fat. Other than that it’s very good. There are good salads, golubtsi, pelmeni, shawarma, etc. They even have kompot – Russian fruit punch and green tea served in small “piala” cups with sugar cubes (for drinking “vprikusku”).

Over the years I had lunch at Taam Tov with my boss, my boss’ bosses there, my co-workers, three different livejournal users and many other people. And until I’ve read Time Out New York article I did not know that one floor below Taam Tov there’s a second hole in the wall restaurant called Sabor Latino.

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Crouching Tourist, Hidden Bathroom

One of the most annoying things about New York and many other American cities is the lack of pubic bathrooms. There are no paid privately ran WCs like in Europe, so tourists mostly rely on McDonalds and Starbucks stores for bathroomage (if it’s not a word, we have the technology to make it one).

There are a few other esoteric choices like subway bathrooms – despite the popular wisdom that there are none, most terminal stations and big hubs have open bathrooms, which are scary and extremely dirty, but are sometimes functioning. In all of my years in NYC I wasn’t brave enough to actually use one. I have seen a few experimental high tech bathrooms, sort of 24th century port-o-johns around the city. The one that I used once had a five minute time limit after which the doors opened and the floor was automatically cleaned.

But if you are to experience the NYC’s ultimate hidden, but public bathroom, you need to visit the Trump Tower (725 Fifth Avenue at 56th Street ). There is a doorman next to a set of doors that you can see swung open when an unlucky Apprentice is being expelled, but it’s not going to open for you. You need to enter through revolving doors reserved for regular shmoes. But inside you’ll find a huge pink marble lobby housing a public mall, complete with a multistoried lighted waterfall, Starbucks, Tower Records, a small booth hawking “You are fired” t-shirs and mugs, a bunch of luxury stores, a deli counter and – you guessed it – one of New York’s best public restrooms.

Almost everything in the building is adorned with a “T” or with Turmp’s “family crest”. I was expected to see it on trashcans and urinals, but I guess The Donald did not want to go that far with branding. Men’s bathroom has grey marble surfaces and is well maintained. I expected it to be more lavish, but it is still better than the rest.

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Jingle Bells, Jingle Bells Jingle All Ma Bells

Manhole tents are used to provide protection from rain and falling pedestrians, as well as to keep all the delicious asbestos inside.

Upon seeing this tent the first thing that came to my mind was – hey, shouldn’t it say Verizon? I guess it would be too expensive to rebrand all the manhole tents.

I also remembered the old radio jingle “We’re All Connected, New York Telephone”. I wonder if anyone created an mp3 of it. I think later New York telephone became NYNEX (can’t make a jingle out of that, can you?), then Bell Atlantic and then Verizon. And with Verizon, instead of a melodic jingle we got the stupid dork saying “can you hear me?” in commercials.

I was very amazed when the unholy union of NYNEX, Bell Atlantic and GTE (you can read all about crazy little Bell matings here) they decided that all of their brands with years of history (apparently history of bad customer service) were not worth crap and decided to come up with a new name.

Yes, it looks like maybe one of them Voice Over IP companies will create a good jingle. It’s not that hard – Sirius Satellite Radio has an awesome jingle (unfortunately I can’t find an example online).

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I Need 150 mg of Trimethylxanthine IV Push Stat!

Recently I visited New York offices of a certain Redmond based corporation. The corporation in question always has free snacks and soft drinks in its numerous kitchens (the home campus having an especially fancy selection at that).

Their office coffee machine fascinated me even more than “Colombian Supremo” vs “Colombien La Vereda” K-Cups and content of “Milds” in Mother-Parkers’ packets. (As a side note I’d like to add this rumor that Tim Horton’s coffee made by Mother Parkers is so addictive that some people think it contains cocaine).

Anyway, the Redmondsoft coffee machine is made by Flavia and uses packets that look like miniature iv bags:

I asked to keep one as a souvenir – they were out of coffee and this is actually a hot chocolate packet. The coffee packets were probably all injected by employees. They also had tea packets which were smaller in size.