The Electric Egg Cream

 ” Just pulling your leg on the New York subway.”
Photo: REUTER

AP:

The No Pants Subway Ride amused and bemused New Yorkers for the sixth time in as many years at the weekend.

Organised by the comedy group Improv Everywhere, the event is intended to make people laugh and have an interesting New York experience.

When asked, participants are not supposed to reveal the purpose. Instead, they are asked to respond with something such as: “I forgot my pants today.”

Not that everyone gets the joke. During last year’s No Pants ride, a police officer stopped a train at 59th Street, ordered all the passengers off, and handcuffed eight of the pranksters on the platform.

A judge later threw out the disorderly conduct charges, noting that it was not illegal to wear underwear in public.

Improv Everywhere’s founder, Charlie Todd, says the event starts slowly, with one person boarding the train in boxers and briefs.

“It’s subtle at first, and it’s hard for people to explain what could possibly be happening,” he said. “By the end of the ride, when there’s 20, 30, 40 people in their underwear, it becomes something that’s obviously meant to be funny.”

theage.com.au

 The great William F. Buckley is dead at 82. I call him great, not because of his political views (I often disagreed with his conservatism), not because of his renowned intellect (intellectuals, like heroes, are based on current trends of supply and demand), but because of his engagingly eccentric sense of humor and warm personality. Even historian Arthur M. Schlesinger Jr. (of all people), who labeled Buckley “the scourge of American liberalism,” admired his “wit, his passion for the harpsichord…his human decency.”

In 1965, he ran for mayor of New York City. His was a lighthearted, almost comical campaign that he just as lightheartedly lost. When asked by reporters what he would have done if elected he replied, “demand a recount.”

I’ll miss him.  He should rest in peace.

The day was very much like today: cold, damp and cloudy with the further addition of wet snow. At around 12:00 p.m. on February 26, 1993 a massive blast ripped through the World Trade Center and, thereby, opened a new phase in terrorist warfare. The bombing killed 6 people and injured 1,000 others. We had thought, after being saturated with media coverage, that we had “been there-done that”…whereas it was merely the opening act in a succession of opening acts that never seem to close. Oh, but this interminable, peculiar war on terror is predicted or, maybe, slated (by our staunch and wise leaders…whoever they are) to last for the next 100 years…maybe give or take a year or two. I guess, since there won’t be any cut-to-the-chase finish, none of us will be around to see how this story turns out and how it was actually written.

The past finds a bittersweet reflection on crumbling billboards and signposts. Fading words and dying colors, once brightly hopeful with promise, are now relics ignored in the sunlight and battered by the rain.

I often pass these silent testimonials, echoing in the stillness and finding a voice in the heart. My new and richly-tailored sport jacket, well-polished shoes and current designs cannot disguise nor ignore the fact that I am inextricably connected to these vanishing images painted on decaying bricks and corroding tin. The complex fonts and varied colors, which composed and enhanced yesterday’s tomorrows, leap out at me. Theirs is a language arcane to younger ears but well-remembered by those fluent in their archaic vocabulary.

Colors and letters reveal and resurrect themselves: the italic emphasis in RED, once prompting us to play and to freedom before danger was realized, emerge from a rusted crustiness; the GREEN of tranquility, before anxious expectations set in, is also there amidst a coagulated paleness; the alluring mystique of AMBER, before mystery divulged itself and disappointed, lies encrusted in darkness. The colors and writings through childhood’s spectrum before these and other words and shades were confined to traffic signals and life’s routine mundaneness. The scattered billboards and signposts of a brief summer that, in the suddenness of a moment or two of sleep, arose on an everlasting, approaching winter…in which memory desperately strives to repaint and reword eager, dying ambitions.

Photo: forgotten-ny.com

Ten years after a Palestinian English teacher opened fire on the 86th floor observation deck of the Empire State Building, Ali Abu Kamal’s daughter finally admitted that the attack was politically-motivated. The attack, which killed one tourist and injured six others, was initially blamed on Kamal being depressed over a bad business venture, according to his wife. However, Linda Kamal said that the family was advised by the PLO to say that “the attack was not for political reasons because that would harm the peace agreement with Israel.”

Three days after the shooting, Kamal’s relatives received a letter that was found on his body. The letter stated his intentions to commit the attack as a political statement. Linda Kamal said that her father explained in the letter that he wanted to “take revenge from the Americans, the British, the French, and the Israelis on “the highest building in America to make sure they get his message.” The letter, along with Kamal’s diary (which was burned), has convinced his family that “his goal was patriotic.”

And around and around the hates goes on…where it stops, no one knows nor cares to find out.

Source:

littlegreenfootballs.com

Today New York City experienced its first significant snowstorm. What was hoped for (by those of us less friendly towards winter’s powdery fun and games) was possibly a few flakes quickly turning over to rainfall and, just as quickly, to clearing skies. Alas, this wasn’t the case and we received about 6-inches of the white stuff. “Was that all?,” you ask, especially you residents of Buffalo, New York and Cleveland, Ohio and similar cities famous for their snowbound winters. Yes, that was all; but in this town it’s enough.

In a city where a car with a flat tire could back up traffic for ten miles, a trash pail fire become a major spectacle of fire trucks and closed-off streets, (probably even someone slipping on a banana peel shutting down half the city down), six-inches of snow is indeed a lot of snow…it follows, of course, that blizzards are the closest NYC comes to the end of the world. But these are the ups and downs of any metropolis (especially this one): the crowded steel/concrete unreality lies at the hilarious mercy of nature’s whims.

Of course, I had to join that deliriously broken throng of happy people shoveling snow and ice off their respective sidewalks, cars, walkways and other paths of ingress and egress. Risking sprains and strains, with accompanying moans and groans, my exhausted neighbors were busily at work with their shovels. That metallic slushy-scraping sound, at monotonous intervals, reverberated in the air and carried on the stoic wind as patches of this and stretches of that were cleared away. It’s at times like this that I appreciate not being a homeowner and that my only snow clearance project is my car (luckily it was parked beneath a giant, spreading chestnut tree…or some sort of tree) and had little snow upon it.

When I briskly finished that sweet task and came back into my cozy apartment, the inevitable weather reports were inevitably playing-up this current snowstorm as if all of New York City would be sadly paralyzed for hours…maybe days to come. There the stock character aka on-the-scene reporter was, bundled-up to the whiskers, excitedly describing the fact of a few inches of snow as if it were in truth a few feet; emphasizing his account by choosing some isolated wind-driven heap of snow as indicative of the storm’s severity. This was followed by reports of traffic jams, subway delays, minor accidents,…as I downed my third cup of coffee, I said to myself: This is the same snowstorm we get everyday in New York City…so often we’re actually starting to believe in it.

This rather peculiar-looking residence has long been called the “Gingerbread House.” Not as fantastical as the house of the same name in “Hansel and Gretel” nor as delectably delightful as gingerbread houses gracing holiday tables, it nonetheless is a curiosity to be reckoned with.

The Gingerbread House is located in Brooklyn at 83rd Street and Narrows Road (across the street from Fort Hamilton High School) and is an example of the Arts and Crafts School of Architecture, a whimsical school of design championed by Oscar Wilde and others. The house was built in 1916-17 by J. Sarsfield Kennedy and was quickly referred to as the “Gingerbread House” even though it’s more properly the Jones’ House after its original owners.

I borrowed this from an absolutely superb site called “Forgotten New York.” For anyone interested in the strange, unusual and forgotten, FNY is the place to visit:

forgotten-ny.com

I found this item of interest at weirdlongbeardpress.com, for those of you with a taste for the fiery and ironic, and have copy/pasted it here for your potential reading enjoyment. Even though the story is a year old (Feb. 7, 2007), NYC’s weird and unusual footnotes are eternal: