Entries Tagged 'traffic and weather reports' ↓

St. Isidore, Patron Saint of the Internet. The Pope has deemed Isidore Patron of the Internets. (And here I thought it was Saint Al of Gore.)

Maybe things will run a bit more smoothly from here in?

Divali 2006 in Jackson Heights, Queens, NYC

First, a note: blogger and vlogger extraordinaire (and fellow inhabitant of Queens) missbhavens is one of my few and beloved readers. Missb– I do not know why you are getting caught by my spam filter! I am trying to rectify it, please bear with me.

Now, did I ever mention that I am addicted to the podcasts of Flight Attendant Betty in the Sky with a Suitcase? Click that link for her blog with podcasts, or go to iTunes and subscribe (she’s in there). On a recent round-trip to Europe on her employer’s airline (which shall remain nameless, but loyal readers know), I secretly hoped she’d be on my flight. (Luckily, she has a distinctive voice., so if she offered me a soft drink, I’d know.)

I am not sure if it is Betty’s sparkling personality, or the way she gets fellow crew members, and even passengers, to tell the funniest stories of life in flight or her globe-trotting travels, but I am glued to my headphones. (I have a hunch that I could get into well-made podcasts even on topics I have no interest in, but there’s not enough time in the day to test that out in any systematic way!)

It might also be the fact that the verbal chameleon has a weak connection to the airline industry, having once spent a summer working security in the busiest airport in the U.S. It was there that I met fellow security guard Ibrahim, a Cuban marathon runner, who whiled away our long night shifts regaling me with tales of his three girlfriends (two of whom were otherwise attached, which meant many of the stories were of near-escapes, three steps ahead of potentially life-threatening situations).

It’s also where I met Mazur, the cleaning man who knew no English, but taught me my first words of Polish (note: I still only know a few.) Mazur was always mopping and buffing the walkway in Terminal One at 2:30 in the morning, when I went to “lunch.” This was the walkway where the rainbow neon lights flutter above, and Gershwin’s Rhapsody in Blue booms out.

In the daytime, filled with people, it doesn’t boom. But at 2:30 a.m., the tune ends slowly in the darkened walkway, barely lit at night except for the decorative rainbow lights above, and the recorded woman’s voice warning “the moving walkways are now ending:”

Boom boom boom
Boom boom
Boom boom boom
Boom boooooom boooooom boooooooom boooooooooooooooooom!

The effect was downright eerie. Mazur was a welcome sight.

When I left at the end of the summer to go to college, Mary and Wally and the other security guards gave me a silver pen and pencil set, engraved with my initials.
I still have it. I used it today.

I would like, Dear Reader, to blog you some wee photos from a recent vc tour. But I have temporarily misplaced my camera’s USB cord. It’s some A male to B mini-male contraption that I simply don’t have extras of. It might have fallen out in the airport when we discovered the Sicilian’s backpack had come open. I should have a replacement shortly. In the meantime, I can only try and entertain you with camera phone pictures of beautiful Long Island City.

A boy and his (somewhat-anatomically-correct) mannequin were waiting for the subway at Broadway-Lafayette.

And then, they just rode off.

These are some amazing photos that flickerer Runs With Scissors dug out and scanned, from his teenage years — the early 80′s. Start the photoset here, or go to Gothamist, which has blogged it as yesterday’s Photo of the Day.

They’ll take you back. For those of us who weren’t in NYC in the 80′s, they’ll take you there.

I could not be more proud of the Grannies Peace Brigade, currently on trial in NYC on disorderly conduct charges. The women, aged 50-91, were arrested after trying to enlist in the Army at a recruitment station, as a protest against the war in Iraq. Though they had previously been holding vigils outside Rockefeller Center to protest the war, Manhattanite Joan Wile got the idea for this recruitment center action from the Tucson Raging Grannies:

When Wile, a Manhattan grandma of five, heard about the Tucson event, she grew inspired. By then, she had formed Grandmothers Against the War and had organized the Rockefeller Center vigils. Yet the attempted enlistment seemed fresh, provocative, the kind of protest the average person would notice.

“It was obviously the thing to do,” says Corrine Willinger, 78, a local Raging Granny who heard about Tucson through the grapevine and who attended Wile’s vigils.

Willinger and Wile got cracking, sending out word to the Gray Panthers, the Raging Grannies, and Code Pink, calling any activist in their Rolodexes. To grandmas all over, they made their pitch to enlist, thus symbolizing a desire to spare kids—their grandkids—from a senseless war. It wasn’t an especially tough sell.

“I said, ‘Sure, see you there,’ ” recounts Marie Runyon, the oldest of the New York brigade at 91. Runyon is legally blind and walks with two canes, yet she trekked from Harlem to Times Square. “I thought it was a great idea to get the message through to that son of a bitch in the White House,” she explains. “Our men are dying and the Iraqi people are dying and for what—for that idiot Bush!”

Betty Brassell, 76, of the Lower East Side, decided to shuffle uptown with her walker after spotting a leaflet on the enlistment. She didn’t know the grandmas who would become her fellow defendants. Simply put, she says in a soft Southern lilt, “the flyer said Grandmothers Against the War and I’m strongly against this war.”

By October 17, 18 grandmas had committed to enlist. They convened in Times Square across the street from the recruiting center, where they met their attorney, veteran New York civil liberties lawyer Norman Siegel, who was serving as a witness, not to mention dozens of senior supporters draped in “RAGING GRANNIES” signs and signature floppy hats.

When the anti-war grannies approached the station, the door was locked. No one appeared inside, though Wile says she saw someone peek from behind a desk. Evidently, the military had foiled the grannies’ plan, so they improvised what occurred next. “I was so angry,” Runyon recalls with a chuckle, “I started banging on the door, singing, ‘If I had a hammmerrrr!’ ”

The grandmas took over a building ramp near the station door and, one by one, crouched to the ground. “That was the hardest part,” Wile confides, “all these old, beat-up broads with arthritic problems getting down on the ground.”

Eventually, a police officer warned the grannies to disperse or face arrest. Minutes later, a half-dozen cops were gingerly escorting them to a midtown precinct, where the grandmas remained for four hours.

I applaud the Grannies. I think it’s ridiculous that they’re being prosecuted (and apparently in such a time-consuming fashion), but I think the publicity from this is all good. Apparently, they have the same idea. People have been packing the courthouse to support them, and Cindy Sheehan was there today, I was told by a Quaker friend who was also there. And what if the worst happens, sentence-wise? Well, Marie Runyon, (yes, I have to repeat this:) the legally blind 91-year-old lady with two canes who walked from Harlem to Times Square for the protest isn’t afraid:

“Oh hell!” says Runyon. “I would go to jail if I had to just to make the goddamn point! You’ve got to make a statement.”

What have you done to protest the war today?

…not right now. But I walk a lot. And I have been taking some photos here in beautiful Long Island City (LIC, NYC). For the uninitiated, we are in Queens, just over the East River. It’s only technically Long Island (like Brooklyn is Long Island, you know?)

Soon the water taxis will be running and the “beach” bar will be up and everything will be rocking and rolling here in LIC.

Enjoy!

This is the view northwards: Queensborough Bridge, the illuminated Pepsi sign (that’s the big red light you see, which looks like a hand pointing to the heavens, or maybe one of those foam hands people buy at sports games, which proclaim “We’re Number One!”).

This is an old railroad gantry, next to the pier (from which all these other shots are taken):

And this is the view across the river: that’s the Empire State Building lit up on the left, and the large rectangular building towards the right is the UN. This one’s especially for Warwick in Australia, whose folks lived in NYC a few years back while his dad was a UN delegate.

Okay, that was pretty easy. It isn’t high art–they’re all taken on my camera phone.

I will be doing more photo-blogging, kids. Stay tuned!

I love having Silvercup Studios as a neighbor. But doggonit, now they’ve joined the ranks of people trying to block out the river views. I suppose its inevitable. I love the cool movie action, but I am not so hot on the 24/7 leisure community. This is their projected new development by the Pompidou Center architect. Okay, I will give them this: even though their high-rises are butt-ugly, I like their plan better than the rest of the plans to block out the water views. From this and other developments, soon hundreds of thousands more people will call my neighborhood home. I hope they like Fresh Direct and making their own coffee. Cause some of their real estate booming ilk just ran Ten63 outta town. And the only teeny tiny local “supermarket” is lousy.

I love New York. Because only in New York would one young, macho, early-20′s American male walk out of a store, turn to his friend (of similar demographic) and say,

“I’m just going to grab some hot nuts.”
“Hot nuts?” his friend said, and he was not horrified, just intrigued.

Of course, by then he could smell them.

I think I spent too much time teaching ultra-homophobic Catholic republican teenaged boys in the midwest. I love New York.

I just want you to know that in the last few days before this current post was written (and this post will no doubt skewer my statistics contained herein), googlers found my site rated:

#4 with the search “Picture of a man giving chapati to a dog”
#5 for “sagittarius chameleon”
#6 for “the strangest chameleon”
#9 for “Matt Groening volunteering”

I’m also inexplicably #2 on yahoo for “Jorge the chameleon,” and people also surfed in from Yahoo searches for “washing machine humor,” and the more disturbing “video of jeff weise walking through hallway.”

Let me also take this moment to apologize to all those students (Hello Birkbeck College, London!) whose attempts at finding entries for +chameleon and +zoology here so miserably failed them. As an education professional, let me take this moment to encourage you to begin your research in your university library’s electronic databases.

Today I was walking down Jackson Avenue, and I came to an intersection. On a lamppost near the corner, there was a piece of paper (carefully affixed) and a string holding a pen. The piece of paper said, “Write what happens here.” And some drunk people had written something about being drunk. And I wrote something mundane about waiting for the light to change (I was not feeling very inspired, dear reader, but I did participate, you have to give me that). As lame as the responses were, I liked the idea. It was nice to be asked. Perhaps someone else will pass by with a better story.

There was no explanation of who put this there or why. But when I encounter such things in my neighborhood, I always attribute them to the artists.

Another example: the appearance last year of plastic professionally-printed stickers (about 3 x 4 inches) pasted over the “push button for walk signal” button on crosswalk posts. Last February, New Yorkers found out from the NYTimes that those buttons–in the vast majority of cases, I believe it was something like 75% or 80%–do not work. Here’s a link to the article, but it’s no longer free. (Hey, I am an academic, I must compulsively document my vaguely remembered sources.) Anyway, the stickers that some wise folks had posted over the directions now said, “Push Button for Luck.”

They gave me many smiles, and I consider that lucky, don’t you?

The other thing that’s great about living in this neighborhood, with its low population and high percentage of arty folk, is that fashion-wise, anything goes. I am not talking about the dirty old 70′s t-shirts that pass for arty on the less-creative hipsters who stumble off the G-train from Williamsburg, confused and disoriented, looking for that happening party at PS1.

I’m talking women on bicycles with spiked hair, orange workmen’s boiler suits, and combat boots (dirty, not couture) speckled with paint. You can wear anything in this neighborhood and not look strange. And if you’re a woman with no makeup, they assume you’ve got something else going on. (That’s kind of true of true in NYC in general, except that on the big island of Manhattan, the tourists are always there to gawp and point at the more creative locals, like my tripped out transvestite comrade riding the D train, looking like a Chrismahanakwanzakah Tree in full technicolor-patterned skirt and very-much-contrasting blouse, faux fur, and tinsel. He was beautiful.) But here in artist-central, anything goes. It’s heavenly. Perhaps a bit on the mundane side of daring, but it suits me.

By the way, you’ll notice that the new verbal chameleon does not apologize for not posting in a month. The new verbal chameleon is an older, wiser, more economical, less apologetic, shinier, fluffier verbal chameleon. In short, the new verbal chameleon has been busy, but will do her best to keep you informed.

She wishes you all the best for the season. Um, if you’re still there?

Gee whiz. It wasn’t a year ago when I mentioned here and here a fabulous local friendly arty coffee hang-out Ten63. And now it’s closing. And there’s even an article in today’s Times about it.

What pisses me off is that they’re not closing for want of business. The place is a local hub. Instead, they’re closing because their building wants to expand and put in more residential space. And they haven’t yet found a local space to move the shop to that’s affordable.

My vision of the gentrification of my beloved neighborhood has been wrought with impending doom, in the form of high-rises crowding out the river access and local skyscape, in the ever-increasing popularity of the place which will eventually mean my rent goes even higher and I am out of here.

But since more rich and trendy people means more business, especially for amazing businesses, I never thought Ten63 would go away. But then I am not much of an economist.

The Times story notes:

The triangular three-story building that houses the cafe, and that once housed municipal offices for the borough, has been bought by developers who want to make it taller and convert it to residences.

For many in the neighborhood, such a change would be a great loss. With its high ceiling, concrete floors and staggeringly large windows, Ten63 has served as the central gathering place for the neighborhood’s growing crop of young professionals and families for nearly three years. They love its high-backed metal benches and hearty scones and its ample supply of glossy magazines. News of the cafe’s departure, which is scheduled for Saturday, has infuriated residents who believe that developers are rushing to build in a neighborhood before it acquires the grocery stores, schools, hospitals and other amenities it will need to support a growing population.

And later, it says,

On most days, Ms. [i.e. owner Talitha] Whidbee can be found seated behind the counter of Vine Wine, her new store farther up Jackson Avenue, where she sells inexpensive wine from small vintners. But the closing of Ten63 dismays her. “It’s been the community center in a lot of ways,” Ms. Whidbee said. “We have people who have met their neighbors from across the hall in the cafe.”

Before Ten63 arrived, there were few places in the neighborhood simply to hang out. When the cafe opened, neighbors at first couldn’t believe it was real, Ms. Whidbee said. Some thought it was a set for the now-defunct television drama “Third Watch,” which was often filmed in the area.

There comes a point when we will have crammed an awful lot of yuppies into an awful lot of new luxury condos. They’ll pay slightly less than they’d pay across the East River in Manhattan, but a lot more than people in older, local, less luxury digs. But they won’t have a school large enough to fit their kids, or a grocery store (yes, people, as opposed to an overpriced deli) that sells intact, non-rotting vegetables and fruits. Do you hear me, oh proprietors of the C-Town on 21st Street?

LIC, next Saturday, loses just a bit of its soul. Let’s hope it’s just temporary.

I got the strangest fortune cookie today, the likes of which I’ve never seen. In a tone I associated with a sci-fi robot leader giving orders to hypnotized humans, it said:

Only listen to the fortune cookie;
disregard all other fortune telling units.

Fortune telling units?

You’ll note the sophisticated sentence structure, with correct use of semi-colon. What is going on? Who wrote this fortune cookie message? And will the uber-robot be coming back in another form to give us further instructions???

My heart goes out to everyone in New Orleans. Those who are surviving somehow. Those who are helping out their fellow people. And also to those who are surviving via means that they’d be ashamed of normally. Given the crisis, and given that people are trapped and can’t purchase supplies even if they have the money to do so, I fall into the mindset of “looting for food and water, and heck, maybe even beer: okay; looting for DVDs and various levels of bling: not okay.”

The fact that the poor and the auto-free were in many cases simply trapped in N.O. is awful (the Greyhound Station closed on Saturday!?!).

The reports of guns and violence, and suicides and rapes in the stadium bathrooms are horrifying.

Most of us like to think that people band together in a crisis. I still believe most do–especially when they have something to do (e.g help others around them). But when you simply lock 20,000 people in a stadium, with nothing to focus on but their troubles, with insufficient supplies, no resources for hygiene, and a lack of “staff” to organize things, disaster is going to happen on some level.

On a more positive note, the live updates from a bunch of folks who are keeping their ISP afloat in New Orleans via a generator remind me of those early days of the current war, when the US first invaded Iraq, when everyone was tuned into Salam Pax’s website,* to find out what it was like on the ground. Yes, yes: I realize the two situations are very, very different. But the Internets just give us this ground-level view that we never had before.**

*This is the new version of the site. I believe the old one was stamped out by censors. But I could have that wrong.

**Well… okay, technically we still don’t have the ground-level view. (Note to cultural theorists: it’s like Gayatri Spivak’s idea that “the subaltern cannot speak.” When the subaltern speaks, you know s/he isn’t really the subaltern.) I mean, digital divide and all, what we have is not the view of the have-nots, but the “creative geek’s ground-level view.” But it’s a nice addition to the major media outlets to be sure.

While riding shotgun in a car, I saw an astronaut walking the streets of Manhattan.

Perhaps s/he is looking for the Giant Hungarian Schoolboy.

30 stones is 420 pounds. That’s a lot of schoolboy.

Amazing the things you can catch in New York, with a lousy camera phone.

We don’t have many of them in my neighborhood. Back when I lived in the North Bronx, those suckers were always wailing — at 12:26 a.m. as it is now, there would be at least 2-3 of those bastards taking alternate turns at irritating everyone. Sometimes they’d all go off at once. And they all had different patterns, so you could tell how many there were.

There were the ones that went:

Beeooooww beeooooww beeooooww beeooooww!
Beeooooww beeooooww beeooooww beeooooww!
Beeooooww beeooooww beeooooww beeooooww!

And the ones that go:

Noo-nee-noo-nee-noo-nee-
beow-beow-beow-beow-beow-beow
moooiiiirrrr-moooiiiirrrr-moooiiiirrrr-moooiiiirrrr-
kniu-kniu-kniu-kniu-kniu
Waaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaa!

And my personal favorite (if I have to have one), the ones that announce, with clipped enunciation,

This vehicle is protected by cobra. Step away from the vehicle.
KNIW! KNIW! KNIW! KNIW! KNIW!

(pause.)

This vehicle is protected by cobra. Step away from the vehicle.
KNIW! KNIW! KNIW! KNIW! KNIW!

I always picture a robot voice from some 50′s sci-fi speaking the first part. And then the “KNIW! KNIW! KNIW!” reminds me of a robot flailing around, shooting off lasers: “Exterminate! Exterminate!”

On and on, all night long.

But in my current, classier (if more industrial) environs, they are a rare occurrance. Why, the Sicilian’s car alarm went off once and we heard it from 1/2 a block away, disabled it immediately, and never used it again. That’s the kind of life you have in this neighborhood: quiet is prized, and neighbors try and keep it down, in my building at least.

So imagine how shocking it is that one of those suckers is going off now and has been for some time. It’s just a plain one, like an emergency vehicle siren.

Wait a minute: I just got up, verified the source of the noise was a building, not a car, and was just calling 311 so the city could have someone come and disable it, when the alarm abrubtly stopped. 311 is the city’s catch-all non-emergency call center. I’ve called them when I’ve found a burned-out car someone apparently abandoned (it was still smoldering), and when a colony of rats took up in the next street.

I also called them to try and get free nicotine patches during a recent health promotion, but I did not qualify. Apparently, I don’t smoke enough. That’s reassuring, I suppose.

What I really want to complain about right now is that suddently when I zoom Mozilla view to 120% of original size, I get layer-upon-layer of text: all the text from the page layered together in the space of 3 lines. 150% works fine, as do other settings. I have only noticed this with Typepad and Blogger sites (so far), not websites in general. The Verizon page, for example, works fine. Odd that. But the internets does not have a 311, and there is no-one to call. I fear contacting Mozilla would be too time-consuming, what with all those Amnesty International urgent action letters that will remain un-written, and calls to congresspeople so often un-made. I will just avoid 120%.

I did not used to be someone who bothered calling such numbers. Am I prematurely entering busybody old-lady-hood? Or just enjoying a bit of distraction from what I ought to be doing?

Right now, ladies and gents, that’s sleeping. G’night.

After my requisite subway ride in, I went walking tonight in Manhattan at 6pm, the other end of rush hour, and noticed lots of suspicious activity:

A man sitting on the benches in a subway station, but not on a subway platform (therfore not waiting for a train). Any sensible person would wait outside; the heat index outside was around 110 degrees with breezes; inside the subway platform it was hotter, more humid, and stagnant air. I thought about calling the police but decided that he was more likely a madman than an explosive one. And madmen are a dime a dozen.

Me walking an unnecessary extra mile before going to my destination, in the name of some minimal kind of exercise, despite the heat. Very suspicious.

But some sightings that might seem odd were not-so-suspicious:

The crazy man all zipped into a leather pilot’s jacket (the thick kind) in said heat, nodding to himself, shaking his head, and spitting, on the grates outside Bryant Park Station. He’s there every day.

Piles and piles of giant suspicious black packages on every street corner: it’s garbage collection night in Midtown.

Thousands of people milling around very slowly (um, loitering?) — each wearing a backpack, or sporting a briefcase, large purse, Macy’s bags or cargo pants with enormous bulging pockets. That’s just business as usual around these parts.

I myself had an open topped small bag large enough to contain something troublesome. In fact, it contained a liter of water, a handkercheif, some smokes, and a cellphone. You know what you can do with cellphones. I smuggled the water into my library-of-choice. We all break some kind of rules, even us seemingly law-abiding folk.

According to Nedstat I had 62 page views last week and one of the last ten visitors was logged in at Halliburton. Surely they have more profitable things to do than read extremely-low-volume blogs with messages about tweaking WordPress Templates and being disappointed by the driving-music-of-choice of animated middle-aged white men.

It’s a strange, strange inkernet, folks. That’s all I’m saying.

1. 16 July 22:27 University of Wisconsin, Milwaukee, United States
2. 17 July 11:50 NTL Internet, Luton, United Kingdom
3. 17 July 14:27 University of Wisconsin, Milwaukee, United States
4. 17 July 17:02 Road Runner, United States
5. 17 July 18:08 Comcast Communications, United States
6. 18 July 06:04 Philippines (logisticsoftware.ph)
7. 18 July 10:17 Halliburton, United States
8. 18 July 11:40 The J. Hopkins Med. Inst., Baltimore, United States
9. 18 July 11:45 The J. Hopkins Med. Inst., Baltimore, United States
10. 18 July 13:23 Eozaen GmbH, Usingen, Germany

I was chugging along the Long Island Expressway today at a glorious 12-15 mph, when a man zipped by me in the right-hand lane. (Yes, on a bumper-to-bumper LIE, the right-hand lane is the fast lane, but oh, watch out for those disappearing lanes and merging vehicles.)

The man in question was middle-aged, with ginger hair and freckles from here to Tipperary, and he was blasting a lovely tune, and jammin’ away, dancing and singing loudly. “Got to admit, it’s getting bettah, it’s a little bettah, all the time. It can’t get no worse!”

Ahh, I thought, the Be-atles, as Ed Sullivan would say. I loves me some Beatles (as Ed Sullivan would not say.) I turned off my beloved Hugh Hamilton to hear my only-slightly-more-beloved Beatles (sorry Hugh, truly–you’re just a millisecond behind, really.)

And I basked a moment. Then the man jutted ahead, and I popped Hugh’s “Talkback Live” back on, WBAI (Pacifica Radio NYC). He was, as he always is, balanced and fair (note, I did not say fair and balanced), and he was tempering some over-zealous caller’s unsupported rant, with decorum, style, grace, intelligence, and that damned fine Guyanese accent.

If you don’t know Hugh Hamilton, you should. He does the best radio call-in show ever, and he’s progressive, but never lets things get cheap or sleazy or stupid. Unlike some.

A little later, the right lane slowed, and the happy singing freckled man returned to my side. And he was still singing, but this time it was “Band on the Run.” And I realized, with some dismay, that he was not listening to the Beatles at all. It was Paul McCartney and Wings. It was a concert and the road was loud, so it is not surprising that the former song sounded right.

What a disappointment, freckle-man.

I smiled again, but this time the smug smile of a true Beatles fan. I cranked Hugh up as he threw down another crazy caller, propped up another wise one, and kept everything just so.

I hope to blog more frequently soon, as Hugh says when he signs off every day, “The Good Lord Willin’, and the creek don’ rise.”