Category: Personal

In case you were looking for a reason not to shoot anyboday today, here’s one: today is Peace Day, [Correction: Peace Day is September 21, so shoot away until then] which the UN declared should be “observed as a day of global ceasefire and non-violence, an invitation to all nations and people to honour a cessation of hostilities during the Day.”

If you’re keen on irony, you can celebrate by buying yourself an assualt weapon for “for target shooting, shooting competitions, hunting, collecting, and most importantly, self-defense,” as the NRA puts it. Because they’re legal now. You might also be interested in the awkwardly named National Police Shooting Championships, which sounds like some sort of gangsta-rap fantasy camp. But it isn’t.

Yesterday was my birthday — I’m now 30, thank you very much — and along with an awe-inspiring chocolate mousse cake from Balducci’s, my wife gave me the Smithsonian Folkways Anthology of American Folk Music, a reissue of the famous Harry Smith collection, first released in 1952. From the Harry Smith website:

So, did you enjoy yesterday’s commute? An early morning downpour brought sections of the subway to a halt, leaving commuters stuck for extended periods in nonmoving trains, or else waiting endlessly on hot, sticky platforms for trains that weren’t coming. I managed to make it to work just a half-hour late, riding the 2 train, which normally runs on the West Side, from Brooklyn into Grand Central. For others, the commute was worse.

As the New York Times notes, yesterday’s episode was eerily similar to a subway tangle on August 26, 1999. I remember it well because I was leaving the city that day for California to attend my sister’s bat mitzvah. At that time, my commute was from Forest Hills, Queens, to DoubleClick’s offices near Madison Square. Hauling a suitcase and a garment bag with my suit in it, I spent two-and-a-half exhausting hours getting to work, including an ill-advised transfer and much walking around Court Square in Queens. When we finally crawled into Manhattan and just stopped, I climbed out of the subway to try for a bus, but they were all full, so I made the final stretch in a shared cab. And the whole time, I kept thinking how ridiculous it was to work this hard to get to Manhattan, when I’d be leaving at 2:30 to go back to Queens for my flight out of LaGuardia.

All of this raises the question: why hasn’t the MTA prepared for this sort of thing? It’s sort of worrying that a heavy downpour can paralyze New York. It’s going to happen again, guys. Can we maybe thing about how to improve things the next time?

Oh, and that picture you see in the Times of the flooded street is just a couple of blocks from my good friend’s new apartment, and also close to a giant Lowe’s store that is mysteriously full of Chassidic Jews late at night. If anyone can explain either the flooding of Smith and Ninth or why the spiritual descendents of the Baal Shem Tov shop nights at Lowe’s, let me know.

Yesterday I went to the West Indian Day Carnival and Parade on Eastern Parkway in Brooklyn. I saw much booty and ate jerk chicken and generally had a fabulous time at this giant but surprisingly mellow event, wandering through the crowds from Grand Army Plaza all the way to Kingston Avenue, then back again on side streets to which I will have to return for some serious Carribean eats.

Check out pictures of the day’s festivities. [via Gothamist]

Have you ever wondered why New York City streets leak steam, usually from manhole covers and occasionally from barricaded orange-and-white stacks? It’s an iconic NYC image, and lots of movies and TV shows have used a quick shot of people walking through street steam to establish location and a certain urban noir feeling. But what’s the steam doing there in the first place?

Powering the city, that’s what (or at least powering Manhattan up to 96th Street, which is why you never see the steam vents out in Brooklyn). Or as ConEd puts it:

So I watched the president’s speech this morning, downloaded from C-SPAN. Ick. Tepid applause for his various plans for the poor, a giant roar of approval for tax reform (i.e., elimination of tax on capital, shifting the whole burden onto labor), a giant roar for tort reform. A reiteration of the misquote that John Kerry believes the heart and soul of America is found in Hollywood (in fact, he said that a group of entertainers gathered in Radio City Music Hall in New York City “conveyed the heart and soul of our country” [emphasis added]). Lots of bullshit about making America safer and the world more free.

Probably the weirdest aspect of the speech was Bush’s pronunciation of “rather.” He used the word twice, each time pronouncing it “rohther” with a fine New England prep-school cadence that a young John Kerry might have adopted in his Kennedy-conscious youth. It seemed like a last trace of the elitist background that Dubya has tried to bury under an adopted Texas twang. Someone should tell him that real Texans don’t say “rohther.”

But they’ve gone home now, right? We can have our city back? And then maybe next January we can have our country back?

On my lunch break today, I noticed that Third Avenue in the 40s was crawling with police, and that barricades lined the sidewalk. As I watched, police cars began blocking the cross-street traffic while officers on foot dragged additional barricades into place, preventing even pedestrians from crossing the avenue. Unhappy pedestrians caught on the wrong side asked the cops how long it would be until they could cross the street. “Maybe a half hour.” A woman next to me called her boss to explain that she’d be late from lunch because the president was blocking her way. Across the street, a man waved a sign that said something about Israel and the United States, but his precise political position remained inscrutable.

I suppose Clinton used to cause just as much of a mess, but at least we liked him. After a week of increasingly siege-like conditions, this wholesale shutdown of a major avenue, executed without prior warning, felt like a final insult.

When the president drives by, he doesn’t do it alone. After all of the marked and unmarked police cars and vans had pulled into place, the motorcade itself finally pulled into view, watched by helicopters hovering overhead. First came the contingent of motorcycle cops zooming in double file down either side of the avenue, which put into my mind the incongruous image of the Dykes on Bikes who always lead off the Gay Pride Parade. Then came more police cars, and finally a tight formation of two armored limos and a black SUV. And there he was, his waving hand and large head darkly visible through the blue-tinted glass of the limo on the left, furthest from me. It was the closest I have ever been to any president of the United States.

Having witnessed the driveby, I headed back over to the UN to get my lunch. In the plaza across the street from the Secretariat, about 25 people, mostly African but with a few white American supporters, held a demonstration demanding action in Darfur. The leader shouted phrases through a loudspeaker and the rest chanted after him, sounding weary: “Peace in Sudan! Justice in Sudan! Democracy in Sudan! Peace in Darfur! Freedom in Darfur!” No one paid much attention. Having nothing to say, nothing to add, I stood there dumbly until the light changed, then crossed the street and headed for the cafeteria.

As usual, the swirl of international voices and faces and costumes cheered me up immensely. At a table near mine, a man asked the fellow across from him, in heavily French-accented English, whether he was from a mission or an NGO; the second man ignored the question, staring off into the distance. The cafeteria was just redone — a new paint job, nicer chairs — and new blinds veiled the usual wide view of the East River. When they were suddenly raised mid-meal, several people applauded. There was Queens again, with the Pepsi-Cola sign and the Citicorp tower, as a tugboat slowly pushed a vast port-listing hulk of a ship toward the sea.

After I ate, I still had some time to kill (I have two-hour lunches), so I wandered across to the General Assembly Building and puttered around in the UN Bookstore. Toward the back is a computer where employees play MP3s of world music, and I stopped to listen to Caetano Veloso singing the Talking Heads’ “(Nothing But) Flowers”:

While France’s ban on religious symbols in state schools, including headscarves and turbans, takes effect today, the Victorinox company in neighboring Switzerland is rolling out a new product: the Swiss army Kirpan, a high-end version of the ritual knife that Sikhs are required to wear.

On my first trip to India, in 1996, I was startled by signs in banks banning weapons, but with an exception for “short knives for Sikhs.” (This was only one of the many things that startled me during that trip, and on balance was probably one of the least startling startling things, far less weird than, say, burning bodies bobbing in the Ganga or the monkey that leaped onto my dinner plate in Agra. But I digress.) There are those who argue that the kirpan is not a weapon, or at least is not intended as such, but I doubt they’ve convinced airlines and governments in these security-conscious times.

For more information on Sikh legal issues, including the wildly misguided discrimination they’ve faced in the US since 9/11, check out The Sikh Coalition, which includes a section of the USA Patriot Act specifically condemning anti-Sikh discrimination, as well as recommended guidelines for airport personnel dealing with Sikhs. (Should veiled women be required to show their faces to prove their identities? Yes, but a female security guard is preferable. Should Sikhs be permitted to wear the kirpan into the secure section of an airport? No, they should be required to place it in checked luggage.)

In this time of political division, as the Republicans strut their stuff in the hostile environs of New York City, Palaverist bravely steps in to answer the question that is burning in the hearts of all Americans:

What’s with the donkey and the elephant?

The Democratic Donkey began as an insult against populist Democrat Andrew Jackson, who was called a jackass. He decided to incorporate the symbol into his campaign, and later it came to represent his stubborn streak. But it was Harper’s Weekly cartoonist Thomas Nast, the famous opponent of Boss Tweed, who lodged the donkey symbol most firmly into the public imagination — probably with no prior knowledge of its earlier association with Jackson.

The Republican Elephant was also Thomas Nast’s creation. The story behind it is complicated, involving both accusations that President Grant was engaging in “Caesarism” and false reports of a mass breakout from the Central Park Zoo (you can’t make this stuff up, folks), and originally the elephant represented the Republican vote, as opposed to the party. But the image stuck.