Because of the Super Bowl, the music of The Who was everywhere yesterday. The moment I got into my car to drive to Long Island, I heard the song “Bargain.”
And whenever I think of The Who, I think of my old buddy Tom who died of a heart attack at the age of 45 back in 1999. No one loved The Who more than Tom. One summer, he and I went to Who concerts in NYC and L.A. There was something about the group’s power chords that spoke to Tom. That was not surprising. Friends often joked that Tom was “too intense for reality.” His email address began with the initials TNT, and he lived life the way Keith Moon played the drums — all out!
Yesterday, hours before the Super Bowl, I found myself driving to Long Island for an engagement party when I realized that I was driving on Glen Cove Road. I almost never go to Long Island but this road was eerily familiar. Now you should know that I’m terrible at giving directions but I have an almost photographic visual memory of places I’ve been, even if only once.
And suddenly, I realized I was on the road where Tom was buried. I began watching for the cemetery I was sure was there. And moments later, there it was — East Hillside Cemetery. Incredible! I gave Tom a wave, and remembered he was buried along with a copy of a Rolling Stones CD, Tom’s other favorite group. I can’t remember if The Who had a place of honor also but I hope so.
So last night, I watched with new intensity as The Who took the stage at the Super Bowl. As usual, the show was wildly over the top and Daltry and Townsend can no longer sing as they once did. But the performance was great anyway. They’re The Who, and for sure Tom would have loved it.
When he died, one of the men who worked with Tom said, “I’ll always think of him as one of the nicest people I’ve ever met.” That’s just about the best eulogy anyone can have.
What to do about our housekeeper? She’s a nice woman except for a few foibles. She’s hard to communicate with, stubborn, forgetful, and lately she’s taken to watching television and using our computer.
Her mishaps, at least in our family, are legend:
Remember the time she left a bag of garbage on our new white couch?
Or when she Windex-ed one of our birds to death?
Or how she sewed a pocket closed on a pair of my gym shorts?
Or what about how often she leaves our back door unlocked after finishing for the day?
Our house is plastered with homemade signs reading “Do not touch.” This is a relatively new development bought on by the purchase of a complicated German-made dishwasher. I begged our housekeeper not to monkey with it and she promised she wouldn’t, or so I thought. But soon after, I happened to be home when I saw her spinning the dial like she was Vanna White and I firmly told her to stop. Machines tend to be complicated, you know, and a pain in the ass to fix. After that, I began putting up signs whenever we bought a new appliance.
My wife and I spend a fair amount of time each week hiding the clothes we do not want her to “fix.” We scramble for that last good hiding place, the one the housekeeper has not yet found. It’s not easy.
Just last week, I noticed that someone was looking up Turkish song lyrics on our computer. It wasn’t too hard to figure out that it was our Turkish housekeeper, who lately has also been watching our television. I don’t really mind her using either device except, after she leaves, they’re not normal. I ask myself, do I really want a keyboard that only features Cyrillic characters?
My favorite moment lately was the time my wife bought three shower curtains, figuring she’d keep the one she liked best. My wife hid the curtains but, when we came home, the housekeeper had picked out the one SHE liked best and had put it up. We went with her choice.
The obvious question is, why do we keep her? Well my wife would sooner move than fire her. This is a woman who once told her dentist — who she hated — that we were moving to Florida so she could go to a new dentist. Two weeks later, we ran into him on the soccer field where we were watched our sons compete against each other. “He’s on the traveling team,” she yelled.
For now, we’re keeping our housekeeper. I think we’d miss the entertainment.
So I have this friend and she’s a single mother. Let’s call her Karen. She has a regular job that keeps her busy 5 days a week but the salary doesn’t come close to covering the cost of her daughter’s $25,000 private school tuition in Manhattan. Looking around for a way to make extra cash, Karen turned to eBay a few years ago.
Today, she makes enough to pay her daughter’s private school tuition, and has enough left over to help with payments on her Manhattan rental, her Southampton house, and her brand new BMW X5. All that, thanks to an extra $50,000 courtesy of eBay.
How does she do it? Karen has an eye for fashion, a tremendous work ethic, and a burning desire that she and her daughter live a good life.
The key is buying clothes low and selling (relatively) high. Karen scours thrift stores to find good quality items to sell online. But she needs volume and so once a week, Karen attends a thrift store warehouse sale where she can fill up a bag of clothing for $20. Better quality items — items even the thrift store people recognize as designer duds — go for $10 each.
At a recent haul, Karen told me she grabbed shirts and other clothing from Gucci, Hermes, Burberry, Marc Jacobs, and Chloe. She also found two Dale of Norway sweaters on the floor that she bought for a dollar each. Nearly all these clothes are brand new. On this particular day, she wound up spending $600 at the warehouse for some 20 shopping bags full of clothing. (Pictured is a Giorgio Armani black label suede bomber jacket.)
But that’s really only the beginning of her work. Then she has to clean some of the clothes — that includes hand-washing some items — photographing them, and listing them on line. Finally, if they do sell, she has to package them — she uses a distinctive wrapping tissue — and takes them to the local post office where they know her well.
Aside from finding tons of adult designer clothing, she also finds a lot of duds for her daughter. “She looks like she’s stepped out of the pages of Vogue,” Karen says. “She never wears the same thing twice.” The same could be said of Karen who cuts a stylish figure whenever I run into her.
All this is in addition to her regular job. It’s hard work, and not for the faint of heart or someone doing this as a lark. “You should see what my apartment looks like,” she says. “There’s clothing everywhere.”
But it does pay and pay well. Karen is hoping for a banner year. In December, she took in $7,000 and in January, she had her best month ever — $8,700.
J.D. Salinger was all over the NY Times this morning, including a memorial ad placed by his publisher Little, Brown and Company that included the famous last paragraph of “The Catcher in the Rye” where Holden Caulfield explains just what a catcher in the rye would do….catch children as they come through the rye before they fall off a cliff.
“That’s all I’d do all day. I’d just be the catcher in the rye and all. I know it’s crazy, but that’s the only thing I’d really like to be.”
When I re-read that graph (there’s more in the ad on page C7 of the Times), I remembered why this book is my all-time favorite. Salinger wrote so elegantly and thought in a way no one else did. The “catcher” concept is “crazy” as Holden says and yet, through his writing, Salinger turned that crazy thought into one of the most memorable titles ever published.
The Times also has a story today on the way Salinger interacted with his neighbors in Cornish, New Hampshire where he retreated a half-century ago to live in peace. They claim he was not a recluse at all but a “townsperson” who regularly went to church dinners. He valued his privacy and he found it in Cornish. His neighbors would give bad directions to any visitors trying to find Salinger’s house. I love this quote: “(He) was like the Batman icon. Everyone knew Batman existed, and everyone knows there’s a Batcave, but no one will tell you where it is.”
What always gets me about Salinger’s story is how he wound up having a well-documented affair with the writer Joyce Maynard when she was 18 and he was 53. As opposed to Salinger, Joyce’s life has been an open book since she was 18 years old as she’s documented her pregnancies, children, divorce and everything else in between.
I’ve also always been a fan of Joyce’s writing and just about a year ago, I attended a writing workshop at her home in Guatemala. She couldn’t have been more open and friendly. The workshop was based at her home on the beautiful Lake Atitlan and nothing in her home was off-limits Everyone there knows where she lives.
So when Salinger died, I began thinking of Joyce. Another workshop there is about to begin, and she’ll once again welcome everyone into her home, the kind of behavior that would have driven Salinger completely out of his mind. It’s incredible that fate brought these two writers and polar opposite personalities together. Sometimes, the universe does have a keen sense of humor.
I’m glad Salinger got the privacy he sought but I hope that the books he apparently were working on finally see the light of day now that he’s gone.
For once, I agree with Mayor Bloomberg. He wants to take all those fire and police call boxes off the city streets and save $2.5 million. I say, take ‘em out, although, of course, the fire dispatchers union thinks otherwise. Any move you can conceivably think of in this city, you can bet there is a union to take the contrary position. When you think of it, it’s a miracle we don’t have fire towers anymore. Where was the fire towers sitting union when that happened?
Every once in a great while when I’m stuck in traffic (insert sarcasm emoticon here), and I’m looking around, I spot one of those fire and police call boxes and think to myself, “Why the hell do we need those when everyone — and I mean everyone — carries a cell phone.”
I swear to you I saw a homeless guy with a cellphone last week. He may not have really been homeless but he did have five shopping bags with him and appeared quite dirty and was hanging around a Starbucks — looking at his cell phone.
Street call boxes have already been pulled from cities all over the country. They seem like an anachronism to me, better suited for the Museum of the City of New York than a street corner. Of course, a law has to be overturned for this to happen, and I’ll bet the legal costs of that to the city will probably be, oh I don’t know…I’m just guessing here…maybe $2.5 million?
A friend of mine is in debt and not just any old debt. This is the kind of credit card debt that can make your teeth hurt. We’re talking six-figure debt here.
He’s a pretty normal guy who doesn’t wear pinkie rings or drive a Mercedes so it’s rational to ask, how in the world did he or does anyone get that deeply in debt? The answer is twofold:
#1. You spend a lot more than you should.
#2. Banks send you tons of offers for cheap credit cards at 0 percent interest.
My friend admits he’s “80 percent” at fault for spending more than he earns but he blames the banks issuing the credit cards for 20 percent of his troubles. And, you know what? I think he’s still being generous with the banks.
Consider that, as his debt grew and he began paying more and more interest, the banks bombarded him with offer after offer for more, more, more. They might as well have included a shovel with their offers because they were helping him bury himself.
They knew they had a sucker on the line, someone who could not resist the offers that most of us junk each day, and in the boom years (it was just a couple of years ago, before our Great Recession), the banks were throwing money at him. They had access to his credit history. They knew what they were doing and, frankly, I have no sympathy for them now that he cannot pay.
To his credit (pun acknowledged but not intended), he’s whittled his debt down from the six-figure range to about half that but that’s still a hell of a lot – and more than he can afford if he wants to eat anything other than beans and pasta. He’s been negotiating with them, telling them he can’t pay and offering what he can. Now it’s a game and he told me how it works.
“First off, you have to stop paying so that the banks call you,” he said. “When you call them, they won’t negotiate anything.”
Ah, but when you stop paying, the calls start a-coming. And my friend has realized exactly what to offer – 55 percent of the amount he owes. Why that figure? Because banks know that debt collectors typically get back about 50 percent. Getting a little more appeals to them. “You’d be surprised how quickly they accept getting back 55 percent,” he said.
Sometimes, they do it immediately on the phone; other times, they send a letter a day or two later. The catch is that, once they accept, you have to pay what you owe in three months.
There’s no doubt all these money problems prey on his mind. He spends a lot of time going over the numbers. They don’t add up. They never did. But for a long time, the banks didn’t care – they just piled interest charge on top of interest charge. It’s obscene how much interest they can charge – 30 percent or more — while at the same time offering a tiny fraction to thrifty customers who want to save money!!
I’ve advised him to file bankruptcy but so far he’s resisting. He really wants to pay off his debt…or at least half of it. I think the banks deserve him as a customer – after all, they begged him to become one.
I find it interesting the way real estate giant Tishman-Speyer, realizing it would lose tons of money on its ridiculous Stuyvesant Town investment, decided to just walk away from the deal, turning the middle-income enclave back over to the deal’s creditors. Isn’t that exactly what a lot of middle-class homeowners are doing with their homes, only to be roundly criticized for being morally weak because they can’t live up to their obligations?
Come on! Let’s be real here. More and more middle-class families, realizing their homes are under water — meaning the amount they owe is far more than the house is currently worth — ought to borrow a page from Tishman-Speyer and just walk away. It’s a calculated, financially-sound decision. Rather than pay out thousands in interest for a worthless house, just cut your losses.
Not a banker in the country would do anything different, except they will criticize the homeowner for being weak and shiftless because they become owners of said worthless houses. Now that’s funny, given how many deals they walk away from. The banks are nervous because more and more people are realizing that the best thing to do when a loan has gone bad is to do what Tishman-Speyer did — walk away and turn the property over to the creditors.
Will Tishman-Speyer be hurt by its decision? Here’s a graph from the NY Times story:
Any collateral damage to Tishman Speyer, which manages a $33.5 billion portfolio of 72 million square feet of property in the United States, Europe, Asia and Latin America, was expected to be minimal; real estate experts said that Tishman’s reputation might suffer, but that the firm would still be able to put together deals and raise capital.
I’m not someone who normally talks to the taxi drivers who shuttle me to and from the airport. I’m not rude – it’s just that I don’t initiate the conversation but, if they do, I’m happy to chat. It was like that the other day coming back from JFK.
“Do you have any children?” the driver asked.
I told him I had two, a girl and a boy, 24 and 20 years old.
“Ah, I thought you might have younger children. My wife is having a baby.”
Turns out, he wanted to know what I thought about him preserving his wife’s core blood with a company charging him $2,000 out of pocket, along with a yearly storage fee. I told him that I thought it was unlikely he’d ever need it but that, if he did, he’d be glad he spent the money. I also told him I was surprised how aggressively companies were marketing such a service since nothing like it existed when my wife and I had our children.
This led to a general conversation about his life and why he’d come to this country 16 years before which must have been when he was a boy.
“My father was afraid of all the terrorism in our country and sent all his children to America.”
“There was terrorism in India 16 years ago?” I asked.
He assured me there was, mainly by what he called “religious fanatics.”
He and his siblings have a good life in this country but he thought often about moving back home to take over his father’s business holdings which he assured me would fall into the wrong hands if a family member did not take charge.
“So tell me about your wife. I assume you have an arranged marriage?” I asked.
He did but he told me that he had rejected at least eight women before settling on his wife. He said Indians always choose wives from the same caste and try to find people from the same area of the country since, he said, that India has many languages.
“Dialects, you mean?”
“No, different languages,” he said. “If I meet someone from another part of India and they don’t speak the national language (Hindi) then I can’t understand a single word they are saying.”
I had no idea. He continued speaking about his arranged marriage. “And her family, they checked me out as well. They want to make sure I’m a good guy, that she will be well-provided for.”
“How do they do that? Do you show them your bank account?”
“No,” he said, “they just ask around. People know.”
He said because he owns a house in Queens as well as India, he passed the test. He continued telling me about his wife’s pregnancy and how Indians pick out names for their children. He said he and his wife have to go to “the temple” and a holy man would at random pick a letter from A thru Z from a book. Whatever letter he picked, that was the letter the baby’s name would have to begin with.
“So we have to pick out 26 names,” he said with a chuckle.
“Don’t you mean 52? Boy and girls names?”
“No, we know it’s a girl so we’ll all prepared with 26 possible names.”
Huh, go figure?
I have to admit that this conversation, which taught me a think or two I didn’t know, made me wonder if I should talk to taxi drivers more often. I mean, that’s the great thing about NYC, right? We have all these different cultures right in front of us all day long.
News that Goldman Sachs has trimmed back its bonus pool so that each employee at the company gets an average of $500,000 reminds me of the only time in my life when I did get a bonus. It was the first year I worked at the NY Daily News and I believe there are a couple of FB friends who can back me up on this.
I was a copyboy making $127 a week (I think that was gross, not net) out of college and The News was the largest circulating newspaper in the country. The newspaper was fat and bonuses were given out at Christmastime, depending on what group you were in. The groups ran from 1 to 10 with 10 being the highest-paid — the reporters. I was Group 1.
The bonus was totally dependent on your pay scale (or so I was told. If they were lying about that, then they must have thought I was doing a terrible job). I only got the bonus that first year because everything started to go bad for The News after that and bonuses were eliminated (again, that’s what they told me).
My bonus was so embarrassing that for a long time, I couldn’t bring myself to cash the check but I did eventually. Wanna guess the amount?
$9.99 after taxes. I kid you not. It was the last bonus check I ever received so, of course, I really can relate to a lot of Wall Street executives.
I’ve been thinking a lot lately about aging. After all, my mother, God bless her, is 83 so….
No surprise that there’s a vast difference between the way people age, and how men and women do it gracefully or not. Women, generally speaking, do a lot to keep up appearances and men, again generally, do not.
I work in television and I know correspondents of both sexes who are in their 50’s. It’s a dangerous decade because there’s a lot of younger people on the air and television, after all, is about appearances. Why do you think I work behind the camera?
What kills me — and it surely must aggravate the women to no end — is how hard they work to keep up appearances while the men do little or nothing. No spinning classes for the men. It’s more along the lines of, “I’ll have the Porterhouse tonight and do you have a full-bodied Burgundy to go with?”
But that’s television where everyone who appears on camera is telegenic to begin with; they were blessed with good genes from the get-go.
And then there’s real life, and again I’m talking about people in their 50’s. I recently ran into a former colleague I have not seen in 20 years, give or take. When I spotted him, he was smoking outside an office building in Manhattan on a freezing cold day. This guy was always a bit out of shape but my God, he’d grown to three times the size and now he looked like a body double for President Taft.
When I called out his name, he tried desperately to take off his glove to shake my hand but he couldn’t get his glove off. His fingers were too pudgy — that glove was welded onto his hand. I shook his gloved hand and asked him what he was doing but all I could see was how much he’d grown. It suddenly dawned on me why I never run into the dozens of people I used to work with, many of whom I know still work in Manhattan. They’d probably changed so much I didn’t recognize them. I had barely recognized this guy.
After a few pleasantries, I wandered off. Hey, I know I’ve aged too. What little hair I once had is long gone so maybe he was saying the same thing about me.
That same day, a woman who used to work with both of us, sent me an email. It directed me to a photo layout on a website I’d never heard of. I was so sure it was some kind of virus that I called my friend and asked her if she’d really sent this. She had. It seems she had done some modeling and wanted me to judge some of her photographs.
I opened the link and I was stunned. This friend had sent me nearly 100 photos of herself in lingerie!! They were sexy, she looked great, and, well, she’s 55 years old!!! You go girl! Seems a photographer friend of hers was trying to get older women interested in boudoir photos for their husbands and boyfriends and was using my friend — a very pretty woman but not a model — as her model. Wow!
All those workouts, all that makeup, all that careful eating had paid off. My former colleague, the same age, had not fared nearly as well but all those cigarettes, all those hamburgers, all that beer had left their mark.
So yes, women may be paying a lot more attention to the way they age but, you know what? It shows!!
Not only is crime down in NYC, so is ‘crazy crime’
Yep, there’s no doubt that NYC in 2010 is a much cheerier place than it was in the bad old days of the late ’70s and early ’80s. The murder rate has dropped from 2,200 homicides a year to under 500. And major crime is also down in every category, including ‘crazy crime,’ a category in which NYC was once the unabashed leader.
‘Crazy crime’ is my own term, and it refers to a crime so off the charts, that it makes you say, “That’s crazy.” It can be brutal or just plain stupid, murder or not, but it attracts your attention for how odd it is. The Son of Sam case (photo left: David Berkowitz) is the perfect example: a serial killer roaming the streets looking for couples kissing in cars and then just opening fire without saying a word.
It’s not that I miss the old days but I can’t help but recall a very different NYC. Strangers would push strangers off subway platforms, stab them in the back as they walked down the street, hit them in the head with bricks. Someone even killed a violinist at the Met — during intermission! These days, Google “Murder at the Met” and you learn of a scavenger hunt by the same name. It’s a very different and more civilized city than in once was imo.
Remember, for instance, when women were afraid to walk down the streets of midtown for fear of being pricked by some crazy guy with a hypodermic needle? Those things don’t happen anymore. With the plummet in sheer numbers of crime, crazy crime is also way down. The last crime I can remember that falls into this category is that mentally ill guy in 2008 who stabbed a shrink to death on the upper East Side, a psychotherapist who was just sitting in her office. The guy even killed the wrong shrink so that is truly ‘crazy.’
It’s not that I long for those crazy old days but I think about them from time to time. I guess you can take the reporter out of the tabloid but not the tabloid out of the reporter, huh?
Printer’s Devil: celebrating the good in journalism…
Favorite photo: You gotta love this photograph on the front page of the Sunday NY Times in which two lovely female anchors on Fox are just so taken with their boss, Roger Ailes. Draw your own conclusions as to the witty conversation Ailes was offering but the ladies certainly appear to be, well, over appreciative. A stark visual example of pleasing the boss or is it sucking up to said boss?! Please write your own caption!
Favorite headline: From the Daily News during the recent cold spell — “It’s not getting colder but New Yorkers may be getting wimpier.” Article goes on to state the this winter’s temperature are not even 2 degrees colder than last year.
Favorite columnist: For those of us who travel on business, it doesn’t get any better than Joe Sharkey’s weekly columns in the NY Times. He represents the everyman among us, questioning the stupid new TSA rules on flying and lending a common sense approach to the most frustrating travel experiences. This recent column is about a TSA employee checking under his pet parrot’s wings!!
Best column to get a quick response: NY Times columnist Jim Dwyer takes retailer H & M to task for shredding perfectly good clothing that could go to New Yorkers in need. The next day, the store promises not to do that anymore.
Best obit: NY Times writer Margalit Fox obit on Art Clokey, the creator of Gumby. Full of fascinating detail including that Gumby’s career was resurrected by the caricature Eddie Murphy did of an angry, swearing Gumby on Saturday Night Live. Life is strange.
Best TV piece: On Sunday morning, I loved the gentle profile of 94-year-old Chuck Williams who founded Williams-Sonoma by correspondent Martha Tiechner.
It’s a constant battle between my wife and me. I’ll begin to cross a city street in the middle of the block and she’ll say in that prim sort of voice, “I’m crossing at the light.”
To which I always say in that irritated sort of voice, “That’s why you’ll never be a real New Yorker. Real New Yorkers jaywalk.”
What does she know? She’s from Akron, Ohio. I’m a native New Yorker and I jaywalk and I’m proud of it. I never met a light I wanted to cross at, not when you can save tons of time by going diagonally across the street. My wife likes to cross at the light — even when there’s no cars coming!!
I have to admit feeling a little proud when reading the story of the “great” Joe Rollino, the 104-year-old strongman from Brooklyn who was killed by a minivan while crossing a street after buying his morning newspaper. Buried in the NY Times version of events was this sentence: “Mr. Rollino had been walking about 40 feet from the nearest crosswalk when the minivan hit him, according to the authorities.
A small smile crossed my face. Attaboy, Joe. At that moment, I knew I was reading about a gen-u-ine New Yorker. That’s the way I’d want to go.
In all my years in NYC, I’ve never been hurt crossing wherever I please. Except once. I didn’t get hit by a car but I did get creamed by a bike. I was crossing Sixth Avenue in the Village and looked downtown, the direction where the cars should be coming from. There was not a car in sight so I stepped out between cars in the middle of the block and wham, I got smeared by a bike going the wrong way.
Both of us got knocked down. It was a female rider. We dusted ourselves off and made sure all my parts where intact as she did the same. “I’m sorry,” she said.
“It’s a one-way street,” I said, “Doncha know that?”
“Yeah, I know,” she said. “I was in a hurry.”
I detected a Queens accent. I nodded and told her I was okay, no harm done. I wasn’t going to give her a hard time. She was a kindred spirit, going the wrong way down a one-way street. Can’t blame her for that. If it was me, I would’ve been riding on the sidewalk.
My son recently asked why I’m a Jets fan, given that I spend half of every autumn complaining about what torture that entails. This was, of course, before their now-jubilant playoff run.
“Two words,” I said, “Joe Namath. When he and the Jets won Super Bowl III, it was the greatest sports moment of my life.”
His eyes widened. “You were alive for Super Bowl III?”
Uh, yes. In fact, I was in high school back then and so nerdy that after the Jets won the game, I was so moved that I actually spent the next day sketching a picture of Joe Willie (I know, it makes me gag too). Considering that I couldn’t draw, it was especially pathetic.
But my obsession didn’t end there. On the day the Super Bowl champs were feted at City Hall, I finished my Latin AP exam (amo, amas, amat) as quickly as I could and headed downtown. I missed the parade but saw the boys at City Hall where I managed to snag a giant Jets button that I still have.
My fascination with Broadway Joe went on and on. The next year, when the team was in the AFC championship game against the Chiefs, I took a day off from school and bought one ticket to the game. There I stood in the frigid cold by myself while the Jets failed to score from 1st and goal. The Chiefs won the game and the Jets never made it back to the Super Bowl again. It was heartbreaking….
But I remained a fan. A year later, still in high school, I was working in a deli at E. 67th Street and Third Avenue, not very far at all from the Bachelors III, Namath’s East Side eatery. Every chance I got, I wandered by the bar hoping for a real-life spotting of my hero. I imagined the parties he went to, the girls he had. I wanted to be Joe Namath.
I finally did come face to face with him. The next season, I went with my younger brother to a Jets game. After they lost, we ran onto the field which was fairly traditional in the days before taser-armed cops would fire at any fan who even leaned over a fence. My brother got close enough to Joe that he was able to pat him on the back. I watched in awe until Joe pushed him aside. “Get away from me,” he said.
It was kind of a bummer but I didn’t let that affect my adoration. After all, it wasn’t me he pushed away.
The Printer’s Devil: celebrating the good in journalism….
Favorite Headlines:
– “Duck, duck, moose” in the NY Daily News about a mounted moose head that fell off the wall onto a woman’s head. Even the followup story was funny when someone pointed out that the said moose head actually was that of a caribou.
– “What a scary world — it’s draining men!” in today’s (1/08) Daily News about the latest vampire-related movie.
Stories that struck my fancy:
– A NY Times sports story by Pete Thamel about substitute basketball player Mark Titus who makes the most of his bench time by writing a blog followed by nearly 2 million people last year. Talk about making something out of nothing.
– Dear John letter written to the Lower East Side by longtime resident and writer John Vorwald who opines that he doesn’t recognize his sweetheart anymore now that she’s all gussied up with the interlopers. Nice execution of a good idea.
– Great obit in the NY Times by writer Margalit Fox about strip club impresaria Alice Schiller (photo) who opened the Pink Pussycat College of Striptease in Los Angeles after her husband bought a strip club. Schiller just might be the founder of the modern stripper. She managed to get the infamous Rat Pack boys to stop by after giving her strippers names like Fran Sinatra and Deena Martin. You’ve got to love people like this.
– Touching followup story by Michael S. Schmidt in the NY Times about the mother of an NYU student — Andrew Williamson-Noble — who recently jumped to his death in the school’s Bobst Library. The mom is organizing to bring awareness to student suicides just as she did years ago when another of her children died from Sudden Infant Death Syndrome. You can read more on this mother’s blog.
Best Television: There are a lot of things that television does better than print. Showing emotion is one of them and so is the feeling of “being there.” And 60 Minutes did that better than anyone last week with a piece on “Birdmen,” a crazy bunch of guys who jump from mountains wearing nothing more than a wing suit and “flying” next to sheer cliffs at 150 mph. Fantastic video. You have to see this piece to believe it and I still don’t.
Following up on my blog post yesterday about crazy yet authentic office emails, I give you the following. All I can say about it is that it is 100 percent genuine. Read on….
“The Office” — the NBC comedy — makes me uncomfortable. I watch it and generally enjoy it but not like I enjoyed “Seinfeld.” Michael Scott is too stupid. He makes me cringe. It’s all I can do not to change channels. No one could be that nutty in real-life, could they?
Well, I’m here to report that actual offices are every bit as crazy, if not more so. I’ve been collecting real-life office tales and emails from people I know and present them here. All are absolutely true but the names of people and companies have to be omitted to protect the idiotic.
Just this morning, a friend forwarded me this email sent out by a company drone:
Subject: FYI -Ball Point Pens- Blue (Retractable)
Hi All,
You’ll find them in our supply closet along with our other pens.
Now that’s breaking news!
Another friend missed a meeting and received this facetious though true email informing her of what took place:
Subject: Meeting Minutes
9:42: I take one of the chocolate chip cookies on the conference table. XXX looks disappointed and remarks that she wanted that one. I tell her there are others in a nearby bag. She laments that everyone takes her too seriously and curtly advises me to “lighten up.”
9:56: We briefly discuss the dress code. XXXX implores us to read the policy and keep in mind that “the seasons are changing.”
10:12: XXXX announces that she would like to begin an employee walking club. Sometimes she walks to FDR Drive, other times to Houston. She enjoys walking. Sometimes she even stops at a firehouse. She suggests that employees be issued pedometers to help them track the distances they cover.
10:21: XXXX shares details about the upcoming benefit. Although she isn’t sure how many people in our department will be allowed into the event, she says, firmly, “We should dress like we might, one day, be able to shop at Saks Fifth Avenue.”
I could go on and on. A close relative told me that a female co-worker gave her a Christmas card advising, “Merry Christmas to you and all your lovers….” even though she knows this relative is in a committed relationship. The same woman walks around kissing and touching the bellies of pregnant co-workers without asking….although I guess asking if you could kiss someone’s belly would get an immediate turn-down so why bother?
This relative works in an office where an obese supervisor inhales any and all food that happens to be left out in the open. Workers began putting hot sauce and pepper on the cookies but it didn’t matter. The obese fellow ate them. Finally, they put out a plastic chocolate pretzel. The guy took a bite but threw it out because it “tasted funny.”
The same guy later PRINTED OUT 200 pages of pornography and left it in the printer for all to see!!! Now who prints out pornography???!!! Not even Michael Scott would do that.
When you watch this video, please understand that I do not hate pigeons or this guy feeding them. The only thing I dislike is him feeding them continually with stale bagels on my block when he hangs out on the next block. Why, I wonder, can’t he simply feed them where he hangs out?
I’ve asked him nicely a bunch of times but he ignored me so I do what I always do — resort to videotaping. People really hate being photographed or videotaped in public even though it’s perfectly legal. If you’re in a public place, you have no expectation of privacy and I can tape away. (BTW, for you privacy advocates out there. NY happens to be a one-party state so I can even tape you without your knowledge — i.e. you’ll never see the camera — as long as one party agrees to it and that one party can be the photographer.)
Anyway, see what happens when I catch the pigeon man of Park Slope, as I’ve dubbed him, feeding pigeons again on my block. Please click on link below to see the ‘violent’ confrontation….ouch!
So I go to this elegant New Year’s Eve party in a Manhattan coop, high above the hoi polloi struggling against each other to get a glimpse of the ball. Feeling smug and sophisticated, I begin a conversation with a well-dressed, stylish woman and we’re having a nice conversation and all when I notice that she is covering the front of her mouth with her hand.
After this goes on for a while, I say, “Is something wrong with one of your teeth?”
She nods, “Uh-huh. One of my caps is loose. I go to this terrible dentist.”
“Why do you go to him if he’s terrible?”
“Because he’s a cool guy. He’s a Buddhist but he’s terrible. The caps on my two front teeth keep falling out and he replaced one but it was the wrong color and it still doesn’t fit.”
“Why do you keep going to him?”
“That’s what everyone says. I feel bad because he’s a cool guy and has a place in Woodstock and plays great music in his office.”
Right now, I’m thinking this is an episode of Seinfeld or Curb Your Enthusiasm and begin to look for a hidden camera. She continues: “I called him tonight when my tooth came loose and his answering service said he was in Costa Rica on vacation. When I reached him, he told me to put Superglue on it.”
She wanders over to the host to ask about Superglue but though he has three different kinds of wine, he has no Superglue. Alas. She comes back to continue out conversation. “Ok, I can still talk but I can’t say any words that begin with an F,” she says.
At this point, my wife and another woman join the conversation and we’re talking until this tooth-challenged woman begins telling us about one of her FRIENDS. The moment she says the word, the cap on her tooth flies out of her mouth and lands squarely in her wine glass.
I crack up, she looks mortified and the others don’t have any idea what’s happening. She retrieves the cap from her wine glass, pops it back in her mouth and continues talking.
Just then — and I swear this is true — our host tells us we’re all going next door to see the ball drop in a bigger apartment where two of his friends live, both of whom are DENTISTS!!!!
I look at my toothless friend and raise my eyebrows. “Sounds perfect for you,” I say.
“Uck you,” she tells me, turning on her heel and walking out the door.
How clueless is the TSA (Transportation Security Administration)when it comes to airline security? Consider this story….
Years ago, when the TSA began confiscating liquids of three ounces or more, my wife and I were flying somewhere and, while we were online to go through security, she noticed that she had in her purse some tube of cosmetics that was more than 3 ounces. It was still pretty small — about 4 ounces as I recall. It was expensive and she did not want to just throw it away.
“No problem,” I said, “just put it in your pants pocket.”
As a flying veteran I knew that, while those machines detect metal, they do not detect anything else. If you wanted to get something through security, all you had to do was to stick it in a pocket.
Then you had to hope that you were not patted down. If they found it, you could look all embarrassed and then let them throw it out. But I’ve NEVER been patted down. I have undergone the wand thing a few times but that does not pick up anything but metal either.
My wife walked through with her tube of cosmetics no problem.
Now if I could do an end-run around the system so easily, how long do you think it took terrorists to figure it out? It’s a wonder (and I’m thankful) that nothing more serious has happened to our planes.
But I think we’ve been living in a fantasy land. Without those x-ray machines that can see through clothing, we’re never going to find explosives sewn into underwear. Even if that poor schmuck was patted down, it’s unlikely a security person would have found it.
Of course, they should have stopped him because he had no luggage, and bought a one-way ticket with cash but that’s another story…and another failure.
This is the week that is to donate to your favorite charity…
I never really thought about it much but of course it makes sense — this week, the last of the year, is the prime season for giving to the charity of your choice. According to a NY Times article, December 31st is THE most lucrative day of the year for online giving.
And that brings me to the Catholic schools of New York. They need money. Please give!! Regis Philbin, a graduate of my alma mater, Cardinal Hayes High School, and a very generous donor to the Catholic schools in NYC, is the spokesman and public face of a newly-launched a website called clickyes.com. Its purpose is to encourage alumni to donate to their alma maters.
It’s a worthy website but when I went to it this week, I was dismayed that the grammar school I attended — Blessed Sacrament School in the Bronx — was omitted from the list! So I need to call attention to BSS again this year. It’s been a big year for the school — ever since President Obama appointed Sonia Sotomayor to the Supreme Court. It just so happens that Justice Sotomayor is a graduate of BSS.
That fact, together with a few choice articles and blog items, helped former BSS graduates find each other and revitalize the alumni association. The school teaches poor kids (like Sotomayor was) in the Soundview section of the Bronx and it needs all the help it can get.
The priests and nuns there did me a world of good and I would not be the person I am today if it hadn’t been for BSS. So I’m donating money to them and I hope you will too. I wish it were easy to donate to BSS online but it’s not. Instead, please send your donations to the school itself. Here’s the address: Blessed Sacrament School, 1160 Beach Avenue, The Bronx, NY 10472. Thank you.
Ten things about NYC that make me smile at Christmastime….
I’m burying my usual sardonic nature for a sweet column at Christmas. So here are ten things about NYC that make me smile and I’m thankful for this time of year:
1. My family, of course.
2. The three great ice skating rinks of NYC — Central Park, Rockefeller Center and Bryant Park. Take your pick. Each one is worth visiting for its own reasons but my favorite is Central Park. There’s just something about being in a park and looking up and seeing all those skyscrapers.
3. The globe in the lobby of the old Daily News building at 220 E. 42nd Street. It was the first place I saw Santa when I was a kid, and was so bowled over that I became a reporter there years later.
4. The churches and cathedrals of NYC. Yes, the city is bustling and can be crazy this time of year but you can always find an oasis in its giant churches. I sometimes take a timeout from the day and go sit in one just to be quiet and tranquil. Better than a shrink.
5. Central Park in the snow. The city’s natural cathedral is never prettier than when its covered in the white stuff. Watching children play there makes it all the more beautiful. You could do a lot worse on a winter’s day than just walking across the park.
6. The Oak Room at the Plaza Hotel. Sumptuous and worth visiting for a drink. When I was a teenager living in a housing project in the Bronx, I once visited the city on my own, stumbled across the Oak Room, and realized all NYC could be.
7. The magic of tiny Christmas lights on trees everywhere in the city.
8. A walk down Fifth Avenue to see the store display windows, eat some overpriced chestnuts from a street vendor and ogle the jewelry at Tiffany’s.
9. The interior of the Time Warner Center.This is the best newly-designed interior space in the city in recent years imo. It has grand views of Central Park South, and it even snows indoors there sometimes. You have to be there to see what I mean.
10. The Christmas tree salesmen and women throughout the city. Visitors from another planet (okay, another state) who brave our cold weather to make enough to support themselves for months. They provide a true service and are part of the romance of Christmastime in NYC. Who wants to buy a tree at a bodega?
[Note: This is another blog written by a friend of mine, in this case Kevin Hayes. Like a lot of New Yorkers, Kevin is well aware of the smells of the subway which, depending on what someone is eating, can take on the aroma of a full-blown McDonald's. In this blog item, Kevin attempted to sneak some gourmet food through the underground -- it didn't work! Read on...]
From Kevin Hayes:
I leave work and walk across town to the #5 train. I stop in at David Burke’s at Bloomingdales and pick up some takeout, then continue home on the #5 subway line. All the seats are full, but the train isn’t crowded. I set up in the aisle, place the Bloomingdale’s bag of takeout between my legs, and pull out “Freedomland.” I start reading (Richard Price is like methadone to “The Wire’s” heroin, but it’ll do), and don’t surface till we’re between 86th St. and 125th.
People are upset in the car. “What the hell is that?!” I look around. Five or six people on the train have their faces – their noses, really – tucked into their jackets. One woman has gone so far as to wrap her scarf around her face. “That shit is nasty.”
Coming from a family of professional smokers, I have unreasonable pride in the fact that I have an utterly average sense of smell. It always seems like a minor superpower to me – especially as my sense of smell has recovered in the ten years since I lived with my parents. When I smell something before my wife, I act like I’ve figured out how a magic trick was done. “See, Tara, I told you someone had stepped in dogshit. Dogshit. I totally smelled that before you.”
I breathe in through my nose. Someone is wearing a musty winter jacket? I breathe in again. Someone had been burning incense? Again. Someone’s wearing too much cologne? Nothing strange for the subway. A guy at the end of the car: “Somebody got corn chips in their shoes. Somebody got cheeto feet.” Why is my superpower not working? The only thing that smells sort of strong are the delicious, delicious truffle fries I got at David Burke’s.
Uh-oh. Truffle fries. French fries topped with truffle oil and asiago cheese. It’s me. I smell like cheeto feet.
Casually, oh-so-casually, I glance around. All those horrified people, hiding their noses, all of them are looking toward me, but none of them are looking at me. Nobody seems to have locked in on me as the source of the smell. I raise my nose and theatrically flare a nostril. A woman wearing a face of absolute disgust says, “I don’t know if I can take much more of this.” I look around the car, playing confused, trying to project some, “What the hell is that?” of my own. At 125th people bolt, and I can see some are running to the next car on the train. A seat opens up – actually a bunch do – but the one I take is furthest from the truly appalled people – furthest, in other words, from where I’ve just been standing.
Acting like I’m simply re-arranging my subway belongings, I take the hardback copy of “Freedomland” and place it on top of the food in the bag, hoping that the 700 pages (thank you, Richard Price’s editor) will dampen the worst of the smell. I fold over the top of the Bloomingdale’s bag and slide it under my seat – again, like I’m doing it just to make room. I start screwing around with mp3 player really, really intently.
The commotion dies down. The doors open and close a few times, letting in some fresh subway station air. Nobody is screaming about cheeto feet. I risk a glance around the car. Everyone is fine until I look at the woman sitting directly across from me. She is texting with one hand, and holding her nose with the other. We make eye contact, and my brain starts screaming, “ABORT! ABORT!” She cocks her head and grimaces. “I know it’s you,” the look says. I briefly consider offering her a fry, but think better of it, and go back to studying my mp3 player.
The Printer’s Devil, celebrating the good in journalism….
So here is the second edition of my Printer’s Devil, reviving an old Daily News tradition of celebrating what’s good in this week’s newspapers.
There were two articles this week that I very much enjoyed reading. It’s kind of a tossup which I liked better but here goes:
Clever Writing: This has to go to Corey Kilgannon of the NY Times for his article on TV pitchmen.
“You’ve seen them in stores, you’ve watched them on TV, but if you want to see how those “As Seen on TV” products — bunion scrapers, kitty claw clippers and the like — go from concept to prototype to wonder item starring on late-night infomercials, welcome to Telebrands headquarters here off Route 80.
“But wait, there’s more.”
You gotta love it, and Kilgannon keeps the theme going with some very lively writing. Read it for yourself here.
Best Storytelling: Denis Hamill still writes a column in the NY Daily News though these days it’s buried in the Brooklyn section. Lucky for me, I live there and can still read it. His “ale of a tale of Jimmy Breslin” last week was a gem. Glasses were hoisted last week to celebrate Jimmy’s 80th birthday (pictured above with News’ cartoonist Bill Gallo, another age-old gem of a guy). Denis Hamill missed it but turned his favorite Breslin story into a column this past week. I can’t do justice to it and why should I try when you can read it here yourself.
Here are some other stories that caught my attention:
Fascinating: Zillions of words have been written about child abuse but this week the NY Times had a unique take on the subject, highlighting the story of the little girl who made child abuse a household term. It happened in NYC in 1874 and the abused girl was Mary Ellen McCormack. I never thought in terms of the first child abuse case until I read this story. Amazing tale.
Humanizing a Crime Victim: The NY Times’ Julie Bosman wrote a tearjerker this week about Lakisha Scriven, a city social worker shot in the head as she loaded her children into her car but here’s what was really interesting about the story — the victim was black. It’s not all that often that the news media humanizes black crime victims but this was a great example of doing just that.
Sometimes, it’s funny how things work out.
What to do about our housekeeper? She’s a nice woman except for a few foibles. She’s hard to communicate with, stubborn, forgetful, and lately she’s taken to watching television and using our computer.
So I have this friend and she’s a single mother. Let’s call her Karen. She has a regular job that keeps her busy 5 days a week but the salary doesn’t come close to covering the cost of her daughter’s $25,000 private school tuition in Manhattan. Looking around for a way to make extra cash, Karen turned to eBay a few years ago.
J.D. Salinger was all over the NY Times this morning, including a memorial ad placed by his publisher Little, Brown and Company that included the famous last paragraph of “The Catcher in the Rye” where Holden Caulfield explains just what a catcher in the rye would do….catch children as they come through the rye before they fall off a cliff.
For once, I agree with Mayor Bloomberg. He 
A friend of mine is in debt and not just any old debt. This is the kind of credit card debt that can make your teeth hurt. We’re talking six-figure debt here.
I find it interesting the way real estate giant Tishman-Speyer, realizing it would lose tons of money on its ridiculous Stuyvesant Town 
I’m not someone who normally talks to the taxi drivers who shuttle me to and from the airport. I’m not rude – it’s just that I don’t initiate the conversation but, if they do, I’m happy to chat. It was like that the other day coming back from JFK.
News that Goldman Sachs has trimmed back its bonus pool so that each employee at the company gets 
I’ve been thinking a lot lately about aging. After all, my mother, God bless her, is 83 so….
Yep, there’s no doubt that NYC in 2010 is a much cheerier place than it was in the bad old days of the late ’70s and early ’80s. The murder rate has dropped from 2,200 homicides a year to under 500. And major crime is also down in every category, including ‘crazy crime,’ a category in which NYC was once the unabashed leader.
Favorite photo: 
It’s a constant battle between my wife and me. I’ll begin to cross a city street in the middle of the block and she’ll say in that prim sort of voice, “I’m crossing at the light.”
My son recently asked why I’m a Jets fan, given that I spend half of every autumn complaining about what torture that entails. This was, of course, before their now-jubilant playoff run.
Favorite Headlines:
Following up on my 
“The Office” — the NBC comedy — makes me uncomfortable. I watch it and generally enjoy it but not like I enjoyed “Seinfeld.” Michael Scott is too stupid. He makes me cringe. It’s all I can do not to change channels. No one could be that nutty in real-life, could they?
When you watch this video, please understand that I do not hate pigeons or this guy feeding them. The only thing I dislike is him feeding them continually with stale bagels on my block when he hangs out on the next block. Why, I wonder, can’t he simply feed them where he hangs out?
So I go to this elegant New Year’s Eve party in a Manhattan coop, high above the hoi polloi struggling against each other to get a glimpse of the ball. Feeling smug and sophisticated, I begin a conversation with a well-dressed, stylish woman and we’re having a nice conversation and all when I notice that she is covering the front of her mouth with her hand.
How clueless is the TSA (Transportation Security Administration)when it comes to airline security? Consider this story….
I never really thought about it much but of course it makes sense — this week, the last of the year, is the prime season for giving to the charity of your choice. According to a 
I’m burying my usual sardonic nature for a sweet column at Christmas. So here are ten things about NYC that make me smile and I’m thankful for this time of year:
[Note: This is another blog written by a friend of mine, in this case Kevin Hayes. Like a lot of New Yorkers, Kevin is well aware of the smells of the subway which, depending on what someone is eating, can take on the aroma of a full-blown McDonald's. In this blog item, Kevin attempted to sneak some gourmet food through the underground -- it didn't work! Read on...]
So here is the second edition of my Printer’s Devil, reviving an old Daily News tradition of celebrating what’s good in this week’s newspapers.