The snow’s been coming down at a steady clip for a couple of hours here in NYC, the wind’s really starting to kick in, and Biscuit, once again, just brought her special version of hell down upon us, so we’re going to run outside and play in the beautiful, beautiful snow. I know a lot of our staff and readers are in the line of today’s blizzard, so here’s an open thread to discuss what’s going on in your neck of the woods.
I finally figured out why New Yorkers are so reliably liberal. It’s not because of their education level, their cultural sophistication, or the fact that they’re constantly rubbing elbows with people from every country, creed, and background. It’s simply because, in this day and age, you have to be a grade-A chickenshit megapussy to be a conservative.* And that option simply isn’t open to New Yorkers; you either toughen up quick or run home to mommy in Tom’s River (or you could try Hoboken, though putting up with all the double-wide strollers and guys pushing 30 who still wear their letter-sweaters requires its own kind of resilience).
It’s a cheap jab, and it only occurs to me because of the third party, but what strikes me about Mark Green is that his name is something voters never do.
If you have an election where the winner gets four percent of the eligible electorate, is that a functioning democracy? Having just lost such a runoff contest in New York City, I congratulated the winner for running a skillful campaign according to the rules. But are there better rules?
Private investigators hired by New York City to pose as illegal gun buyers at seven firearm shows in Ohio, Tennessee and Nevada were able to buy weapons in three out of four attempted purchases, according to a report released by Mayor Michael Bloomberg.
The $1.5 million investigation showed 35 illicit purchases were successful from a sample of 47 transactions and that of 30 private sellers, 63 percent “failed the integrity test,” by selling a gun even after someone told them they probably couldn’t pass a background check.
Let’s see if this undercover project gets as much attention from the media and Congress as the ACORN videos did. My pessimistic side is guessing “no.” Maybe Bloomberg should have thrown in some African-Americans and fake hookers.
Listen, I love pizza. If I had to pick a last meal, chances are pretty good it would solely consist of or at least include pizza. I would have sex with a well-made pie if it had a hole in it. I LOVE PIZZA THAT FUCKING MUCH. But I’d never ever pay $5 for a plain slice regardless of where it was made.
And let me tell ya something very few people are willing to admit (because they’re assholes), Di Fara’s pizzeria is probably the most overrated eating establishment in all of the five boroughs. Don’t believe the Chowhound message boards, home to some of the most loathsome, crumb-covered, head-butt-deserving douchebags in the world, where Di Fara’s is adored and fawned over like a cheesy Holy Grail. DI FARA’S IS NOT WORTH IT. Getting there is a pain in the ass (even if you live in Brooklyn), the whole ordering process is about as pleasant as getting a colonoscopy, and the resulting pie, which you NEARLY HAVE TO DIE FOR, ain’t all that. It’s way too oily, the crust is overly-charred, and even the goddamn fresh basil (fresh=grown in the window of a decrepit Brooklyn pizzeria), which Domenico meticulously (and slowly ... SO FUCKING SLOWLY) cuts over each pie with a pair of scissors, is really nothing more than the equivalent of an erratic BeDazzling.
I mean, look at this pie that I had to shoulder-out a sneering Russian day laborer to get for nearly a half hour (after already waiting twenty minutes at our dirty table) AND I ORDERED THE DAMN THING:
Inappropriately burnt crust, enough olive oil on it so that I could slip ‘n’ slide my way home instead of taking the bus, expensive as shit (before this latest price increase), an ordering process that’s just plain fucking cruel (TAKE YOUR NAME WITH YOUR ORDER? WHY WOULD THE DI FARA ZOMBIE STAFF WANT TO DO THAT?!?), and, on top of it all, look at the crap basil job I got from Dom, the only person allowed to touch the pies at Di Fara’s BECAUSE HE IS JESUS H. CRUST. If I’m going to wait even longer for basil to be slowly scissored over my pie a) I want it all cut and b) I want it somewhat evenly distributed.
So thanks to the vastly (and, obviously, maddeningly) overrated Di Fara’s, plain slices in NYC will probably be $3 by the end of the summer. And I can’t even enjoy a $2.25 slice now, while it still exists, because I’m on a goddamn diet. SO I WANT TO KILL EVERYONE NOW.
So kc’s heading to college next month and needs a laptop. If you remember from Mrs. P.‘s Roastapalooza wrap-up of the sensational Roastacon party, kc became enamored of Mrs. P.‘s adorable red mini laptop and felt she had to have one too. Not wanting to discourage this idea, because they’re like $400 or so cheaper than full size laptops, I did voice the reservation that they are too small to contain a CD/DVD drive and she would need one for loading on necessary software. A little research allayed this concern since external CD/DVD drives are available and don’t add much to the price. Ditto with a RAM upgrade. After sorting through the various itty bitties out there, she eventually settled on this adorable blue one (clad in its cunning decorative protective gelskin):
To appreciate the miniscule size, here it is on top of my full size laptop:
Yet, it has a comfortable full size keyboard:
Best of all it is very lightweight (important for lugging it around campus) and will fit into the bootleg *Coach* purse from Canal Street. Which reminds me. Did I ever tell you guys about the excellent Canal Street bootleg *Coach* purse adventure that Mrs. P., kc and I had after dim sum on Sunday morning?
The Break Out in Song troupe performed “If My Friends Could See Me Now” for some surprised shoppers at Manhattan’s Time Warner Center yesterday. Via Runnin’ Scared’s Roy Edroso, who didn’t enjoy it as much as I did. Hey, it’s no Hammer Pants, but it made me happy to be human and that’s good enough.
As my lovely wife Chris and I were headed to Sunday’s Williamsburg Waterfront concert we took a detour through the Our Lady of Mount Carmel Feast and were lucky enough to catch the dance of the Giglio. Even better, we got to catch the Giglio meeting “la barca” (“the boat”) at the intersection of Havemeyer and 8th (video below the fold). I’ll let the chairman of the festival explain:
The Giglio [weight: 3+ tons—KK] is a statue on top of about a 65- or 70-foot tower decorated to look like a lily, and the statue on top is St. Paulinus. The Giglio is made up of a steel and aluminum frame, and it’s in three or four sections that are hoisted into place with a crane. The face of the Giglio, which is the lily, is made out of papier- maché and wood and cardboard tied to the frame ... and the face of the statue is painted. So the statue of Paulinus sits at the very top of the lily tower, and on the base is a 10-piece band that plays music (and the guys in the band like to eat - they’re pretty heavy!) and the Giglio “dances” to that music when lifted.
So why do neighborhood men risk throwing out their backs to hoist it?
Well, it’s a reenactment of the ritual that took place. Roughly about 100-130 guys pick up the statue, and the statue is lifted several times through the afternoon, and we dance through the streets to the music. And then, of course, the boat [another 3 tons, requiring another 100 men] is lifted at the same time, which signifies St. Paulinus coming back to Nola, and the Giglio is the lily meeting him. And the boat and the Giglio are lifted together a few times during the festival and come together. The dancing of the Giglio happens three different times during the 11-day festival, beginning today.
Marshall McLuhan’s influence on middlebrow intellectual thought reminds me of a joke I heard a stand-up comic tell once: “Y’know how much karate you can learn in a year? Just enough to get your ass kicked.” I’m assuming, of course, that pronouncements such as “the medium is the message” aren’t to be dismissed outright, an assumption it continually pains me to make, as no one has ever managed to explain anything beyond the difference between “hot” and “cool” media to me in a satisfactory fashion.
Virginia Heffernan’s “The Medium” column in the New York Times Magazine isn’t helping me any.
Our colleague Michael Feingold told us some very bad news today: a former Voice sales rep, Joe Holladay, in town on business, was jumped and beaten Saturday morning by a group of men who called him a faggot.
Holladay tells us that he walked out of John Jerome’s apartment on East 85th Street between York and East End Avenues, where he’d been staying, at about 4 a.m. to smoke a cigarette on the sidewalk, and five or six young men swarmed him. [...]
Jerome, an acting coach, heard the fracas and came downstairs to find his friend “in a pool of blood. I thought he was dead. He wasn’t moving.” [...]
Holladay says his doctor told him his injuries suggest he was hit with a blunt object. “The mark on my forehead looks like it was made by the base of a gun,” he says.
If you check out the post you can see a picture of Holladay after the attack. Pretty brutal. And sad. We still have a long way to go. Even in New York City.
Too late to be a metaphor, this celestial freak show filled the sky with luminescent cherry tomato clouds, and set the skyscrapers of New York afire. Had it only been yesterday, every cablehead would have been lauding it as a fit end to the day Michael Jackson died.
The clouds are called Mammatus clouds, from the Latin root for what we all very well expect it to be for: Mamma, breast.
They form on the underbellies of severe thunderstorms as they are breaking up, and according to Wikipedia are indicative of extreme conditions such as wind shear that pilots are advised to stay well away from. They’re obviously more common to the stormy summertime, but still, they’re rare in the Northeast and people remember when they’ve seen them.
