Subwaycat

When I lived in Odessa, Ukraine, I once encountered a most strange cat. Odessa used to have a huge open air book market, right in the middle of the city. Kind of like a much larger and organized version of the street booksellers in front of NYU. Me and my dad spent a lot of our time and money there. On one of our trips, my dad pointed out a cat sitting in a tree near the book market. On a number of our visits there that stretched over weeks and months, the cat was still there. Water and food dishes appeared there. Somebody told us that the cat apparently went a bit crazy and refused to leave the tree (even though it wasn’t a very high one). Kind hearted booksellers started to feed the cat. I am not sure exactly how long the cat stayed in the tree, or if he or she ever left it.

New York has strange cats of its own. Subway cats. The most famous one of those, Schatzie the cat that lives in the Fulton Street station, according to Randy Kennedy’s book “Subwayland : Adventures in the World Beneath New York.” The mice and rat population must make living near the deadly third rail and moving trains possible for cats. Sadly, eating those rodents must be pretty dangerous too, because they are frequently poisoned.

Well, I found a subway cat of my own under the platforms of the Kings Highway station.

Actually I spotted two, a tabby and a tuxedo, but was able to take a picture only of the tabby. She sat there calmly, not bothered by my flash. I hope she’ll stay safe there.

Subway Doves

While a far cry from the exotic subway riding pigeons of Far Rockaway (I need to pay them a visit some time) described in Randy Kennedy’s “Subwayland“, there are some pigeons that live underground in subway stations. I missed my train to take this picture:

The black splotches of gum that cover so many sidewalks and subway platforms in NYC always make me think of a passage from “Roadside Picnic” (English translation is available on the official site for download) by Russian sci-fi writers brothers Strugatsky”:

“And, as was to be expected, there was nothing else to be seen on the road, except for the black twisted stalactites that looked like fat candles hanging from the jagged edges of the slope, and a multitude of black splotches in the dust, as though someone had spilled bitumen. That was all that was left of them, it was even impossible to tell how many there had been. Maybe each splotch represented a person, or one of Buzzard’s wishes.”

The 47-50th Street station has stalactites as well. It’s a very special station indeed. :)

You know, I feel that “pigeon” is just a pejorative for “dove“. Many of the pigeons that I see are probably descendants of the ones that Tesla fed.

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.

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”.