Report from New York City

[MegalosSkylaki]

There is no city for old dogs. Except maybe New York. Today I took a walk in it with the Consort.

And I was amazed.

The story is not Hurricane Irene but the social contagion among New Yorkers it has engendered. Recently a professor at the City University of Coastal Geology was interviewed on tv and he remarked the most dangerous thing in New York is another New Yorker. Now watching all the people line up at stores, docile to the nth degree, waiting their turn to buy – and this stunned me - whatever they were buying at a small hole-in-the-wall Bagel Store showed another side . . . who would have imagined?

Down the avenue, stores that received deliveries were not open, leaving goods outside to perish or be swiped. Starbucks was closed but the New York Times and Wall Street Journal was stuck in their door handles. Crates of pita bread outside a restaurant, all probably an outcome of closing down the New York City subway at noon. If New York City is the city that never sleeps it is its subway system that keeps it awake. Paris sleeps but its Metro closes down at midnight. At least it used to. New York City would find that ridiculous. In fact it is ridiculous.

People come to New York City for various reasons but frequently it’s to do a job they can’t do where they came from or because they know somebody here who came to do a job or to go to a school here like Parsons School of Design or some other school they couldn’t find at home. Whatever the reason, rarely do they join together as they do when something drives them together and often, I regret to say, it is something that is not good.

September is around the corner and it’s obvious what I am talking about. Still, New Yorkers rise to the occasion and back in 1975 or so, when the headlines in the New York Daily News read “Ford to New York: ‘Drop Dead’” the city shows itself like Tombstone, Arizona, “the town too tough to die”.

Still, this is only a lowly hurricane, a Cat One, we’re told. One of the things the CATT and I noticed walking down an avenue was that most of the people in this congenial parade today were on the younger side. Perhaps they never lived through a bad event in NYC before. Perhaps the stories about big cities being alienating places are true and they needed the jolt of some untoward event to provide the gentle camaraderie of waiting on line at some variety store for batteries or a gourmet grocery for hummus to bring them together for a rainy afternoon.

DOOG is back home now. Windows are taped up. Flashlights have new batteries. Catt is tired of typing this report. For all those who have sent their blessings, the Catt says “thank you”. She is part of this report from New York, a survivor in a city of survivors and a blessing to me. Those in other cities and other towns and no towns have something in common with New Yorkers. I just need to find the right poem that captures it. I suspect it will have been written by Gerald Manley Hopkins.

Megalos Skylaki

[tony_j15]

Good to hear from da DoooooooG!

Take care, sir! My hope is the storm continues to diminish as it moves up the coast.

[MegalosSkylaki]

Good to hear from da DoooooooG!

Take care, sir! My hope is the storm continues to diminish as it moves up the coast.

So far the storm isn't much. Just an ordinary rainy night. We had a thunder storm that cracked the sky wide open about a week ago ago. Couldn't sleep for a week after that...sheer explosions that seemed ten feet away from you.

Worse, I've had three migraines in last week, probably due to barometric changes.

Lightning is an awful danger and I've lived through "Supercells" in FL that wasted the sky with light with headers coming up from the ground to the sky.These are fairly ordinary events in FL so this isn't all that scary. Actually almost a party atmosphere.

And a poem by Gerald Manley Hopkins has a lot of accents.

But wait!

Hurricaine is on the way.
Maybe I should stay up, keep guard.
Don't want to wake up to surprises...protect the Catt.
Danger always lurks behind the next cloud.

MegalosSkylaki

[no1_vern]

Um, well, as of right now its still, what, 300 - 350 miles away?? Of course its just a heavy rain right now.

Be safe, keep everyone safe that you can Doog! Good luck.

[MegalosSkylaki]

I would wish you the same for those on its Itinerary.

4:33 AM and DOOG still can't sleep.
CATT just plunked outhours ago.

Rain on AC a damn nuisance.
Kind of a grinding sound to rain, maybe because of wind.
Seems like everything is conspiring against me....toothache...headache...backache...defies medicines.
Maybe too hyper....or hyper vigilant.
Old instincts in times of danger, although a good FL storm on any given summer nite can be much worse.

New York bedded down...or vodkad down.
Sense of "it's coming"...never of "it's here"...bounderies not clear but 5:00AM the Official Story .
Eerie to look out the windows on either side...very few lights on.
Very strange even at 4:00 AM on a Saturday nite for so few to be up. Hey, this is the Big Apple, not Peoria. No offense, Peoria, but I'm lived in (like 4 days: D) in those Towns).

Like more people decided to sleep it through, although maybe their windows covered by curtains and stuff to stop flying glass...must be it. Surely others, too, can't sleep.
Yet one thing stops me in gentle contemplation...freezes me like no storm can do.

Seeing Linda asleep...protected...well...knowing how close and how others came out of her kind of surgery it's clear no danger around me can be too great. Those who had a loved one go into surgery and stood vigil...it's the family that suffers while the quiet blanket of anesthesia is drawn. Those who can out on the long side may understand what I mean and even now, do it now, watch them in their sleep, and realize the greatness of what you have received.

And those who came up on the short side-again, when someone goes over to the other side, it is those who love them that truly suffer. I would assuage your grief if I could. The French Foreign Legion had a saying when one detail...division...would relieve another:
"We, too, are Legionnaires.
Alas, in that sense...on losing a loved one to the outcomes of a medical procedure, I too am a Legionnaire.

But not this time.

Love sleeps quietly in a bed through a storm. New York, the World, is happy place.
See those you love and recognize what you have. Nothing can be really bad with all that.

MegalosSkylaki

[MegalosSkylaki]

The 'Caine that never was leaves the Apple,
leaving behind taped windows to pull down.

Allright, so we dodged the bullit
No reason to second-guess.

For a brief moment--a day-- New Yorkers
kept their elbows in check as they waited on
the same lines for some batteries or milk.

Good training I would think for the future.

MegalosSkylaki

[MegalosSkylaki]

Power Walk
to reconnoiter
what the Storm hath lefteth us.

And it was mostly leaves...a lot of leaves, like that of an Autumnal rain storm except these were not not soggy browns and reds but greens..upon greens.

From the ground things looked worse than it felt
from our eyrie--
or maybe I just slept through the worst.

the bon homie of yesterday was replaced by a forlorn look as if others eyes, too, were cast to the ground and debris.

Then we arrived at a famous bar/restaurant...a hangout it seems and spirits were.errr.imbibed with ....uhm...spirits.

The announcement--not clear--is that trains (the Subway) will be started up at 3:00PM.

Err...was does started mean? Pump out the water? How will the engineeers get to their jobs anyway? No one did this before.

But the DOOG is not worried. Well stocked with grubs--food, too.
Time to watch a movie on Netflix.
That kinda day.

Yeah, and no newspapers to be found.

MegalosSkylaki

[sharder8]

Well, it's good to hear you and the TopCat came through okay!

We're choking on smoke here . . . wildfires north of us are causing poor air quality and allergy issues for many.

Harder

[Toadman]

Absolutely! Good to hear from you and that all is well, D00Gie!
Transit up and going?

[MegalosSkylaki]

Transit is my four pawz and my sashaying tail for x-tra balance.

The Subway is running too!

(But it took awhile to catch up to me.)

Ever wonder how the people who work on the subways get to the subway to work on it when it's nor running? Is there a hotel at the end of the tracks.


NYC (along with Berlin) drew a compliment from Jarod Diamond (Documentary Nat Geo on future Collapse) for having a mass transit system to avoid burning fossil fuel and you might see the documentary (also Collapse) with Michael Ruppert about "Peak Oil' i.e. we're (the World) on the downslope of production and it only gets worse from here.

Ah! putting our food in our gas tanks....that's an idea that has promise
not.
Mayan cities burnt wood to make charcoal to turn limestone into plaster to make reliefs celebrating their accomplishments and burned down their surrounding forests to make the charcoal till they could no longer grow food and had to leave behind their accomplishments.

We're on the right track , though.
We're only burning down the Amazon to make charcoal for furnaces to turn iron to steel so we're good to go for food. Except for CA central Valley farmers who can do better by selling their water allotments south and tearing up food trees that gobble up water.

Uh,...air another story...

MegalosSkylaki

[sharder8]

Should add . . . got our first frost last night.

Talk about a surprise when I went out to the truck this morning.


Harder

[MegalosSkylaki]

And now the newz has come in from upstate New York, and it ain't good.

First there was damage to homes, a lot of damage.

Second, much of the damage was from flooding---not wind damage which might be covered by Homeowners Insurance. Unless the homeowner has flooding insurance as well...well you figure it out what BeeG Insurance will do.

Now, the way I figure a house could have been damaged by wind first (covered) and later flooded out(not covered).

What happens then?? Covered or not? And how do you show sequence unless you had a vidcamara running all day and nite and kept it powered and memored.

All I know is that there is a tort called "insurance bad faith" when an insurance company insures--and then doesn't pay. I think the litigation lawyers upstate will be busy for quite a while. Unless some industry-wide settlement is reached and agreed to by homeowners.

Good luck to homeowners.

MegalosSkylaki

[MegalosSkylaki]

Well, it's good to hear you and the TopCat came through okay!

We're choking on smoke here . . . wildfires north of us are causing poor air quality and allergy issues for many.

Harder

Choking on smoke ? ?

ArrrGgHhhhh !

Been there, done that.

Wildfires out west are terrible....I would get outta town for awhile...few things worse than not being able to breath. DooG and CaaT are Bi-Coastal.

Here in NYC we get poor air quality and allergy issues all-year around.

Now they are building another subway line for ten years and has already been cited by EPA for poor monitoring of air quality near construction sites, like monitoring would stop the clouds of abrasive fine dust.

I rode through them in taxi and started to choke--but bussineses remain open but have lost business. Last subway line built here at great cost is not used because of bad construction, low ceilings and flooding rusting tracks.

Get well. Stay well.

Everybody. Everywhere.

DOOG and CAAT

[MegalosSkylaki]

DOOG back after some time in an MRI toob.
This past week was not the best time to be a New Yorker, but then not the worst time either.

Now that we have the 9/11 Tenth Anniversary is behind us...well you have probably heard of the 'Anniversary Syndrome wherein upon the anniversary of some significant event you relive some of the emotional state of that event.
If you want more information, check out Edger Allan Poe's poem called Ulalume wherein he finds himself at the lake where...well read the poem.

Anyhow, that was a day of terror for me as the CaaT CAAT was working 2 1/2 blocks away and last I heard from her was "We are evacuating the building"
New York went into cellphone silence or rather more likely the bandwidth was clogged so the next I saw her was maybe four frantic hours and 2000 cellphone attempts later emerging from a crowd carrying much dust and debris, a result of the wind blowing west to east sweeping the lower end of Manhattan that morning,

So we go through this every year.

Anyhow, the main thing I can say is that the streets seemed deserted yesterday morning as we went to Church. The Church later went to Ground Zero. Another Greek Orthodox Church, St. Nicholas which was crushed that day as it was located in the middle of a parking lot near to the Towers is still waiting to be rebuilt in another NYC-style embroglio dispute.

Anyhow, best to look forward I always say and God has been good to me lately.

MegalosSkylaki

By the way, there is a poem whose name I forget that contains the line,
"and the confounding of foreign tyrants"

[surreal]

[MegalosSkylaki]

While da DOOG was doing a GooGle search for the origin of that line ("the confounding of foreign tyrants") his DooGship came across this bit of wisdom:

A few months after the execution of Charles I in January 1649 the.... classicist Salmasius leapt to the defence of absolutist monarchy. In February 1651 John Milton (1608-1674) penned a witty and devastating chapter by chapter refutation of Salmasius’s views and defended the right of the people to overthrow a tyrannical king. He lamented the fact that tyrants always could find scholars like Salmasius to spring to their defence, whilst Liberty sometimes had to struggle to find its advocates:

Milton on the ease with which tyrants find their academic defenders (1651) | The Portable Library of Liberty

[MegalosSkylaki]

Anybody want the UN General Assembly ?
Especially on opening day ?

Here's what it's like:
A) terrific prestige for any town or city
B) total gridlock when it opens up
C) total gridlock when some bigshot visits town, including some foreign dignitaries who hate your guts and don't pay their bills
D) hiways closing down
E) Prez visiting town with more gridlock and street closings and...well, you get the picture
F) lotsa of illegally parked cars
G)Lotsa illegally parked cars that can't be towed, let alone ticketed
H) did I mention terrific prestige?

Walked to Vets' office and was only patient...guess those not in walking distance cancelled or never arrived.

[MegalosSkylaki]

But don't think today in NYC was all work and no Fun.

No way was it all work and no fun.

Why some people downtown even wore masks and it isn't even Halloween or some other important Holiday.

Problem is, seems like there is a law--that's right a law in NYC which I never knew about maybe because it's only enforced very selectively--against wearing masks by more than ONE (you read right one) person.

So the busts.

New York police have made a handful of arrests -- two on Saturday when protesters tried to enter a Bank of America office and six more on Monday. At least four on Monday were held for wearing masks, which is illegal for groups of two or more, police said.[Emphasis DooGplied] A video posted on YouTube Monday appears to show police arresting at least one protester

Bottom Line - Wall Street protest enters fourth day

I would suggest that if you and your spousal unit visit NYC, only one of you wear a mask. This will save you money and will keep you outta the Toombs (aka NYC House of Detention). Errr..for the one mask you might get a william Shatner mask and paint it white. This will further save you money as it can double for Halloween. Errr...Guess which movie took a W.S. mask and painted it white for effect. No kidding.

[MegalosSkylaki]

Here's another hint for visiting New York:

TaxiCabs must work a double shift to be available for street hire at all hours in the city that never sleeps. Now around 4:00PM is the turnaround time as Cabs change drivers so as 4:00 PM approaches they put up their OFF DUTY signs. Right?

Wrong!

It used to be from around 3:00pm to 5:00pm you'd see cab after cab with their off-duty sign on and you might wonder, "Err..how come no cab mannaged to change drivers yet?"

That was BB--Before Bloomberg went Third term.

Mayor Bloomberg has made it more and more difficult for motorists to get around town, building pedestrian malls, bus lanes and other nice stuff. Then came the Second Avenue Subway which meant there went Second Avenue. Construction will take ten years and will result--if like the last effort---in a waterlogged tunnel to nowhere. So cabs sit in traffic, a $10 cab ride takes twice as long and costs $20 and....well, you get the picture.

As for OFF DUTY signs, well any cab driver who is "light" i.e. empty of passengers is picky as to where his next passenger is taking him so up go the "of Duty" signs expect to be quizzed --illegally I might add, "Where you goin'?" Dang! Imagine a cab changing drivers at 10:00am in the morning !

Today da DooG DOOG had a Vet's Visit at 42 Street--that's near the UN. So the far-sighted DooGship called a car service knowing that no way would he get a cab this afternoon with the esteemed guest to the UN General Assembly --who just caused a walkout of esteemed US and French delegates-- was in town. Ruined my day too.

Well....."Err..sorry..we're booked in Manhattan from 1:00PM to 6:00PM" said one car service. So did another. And another. Seems like Manhattan is being blacked-out by car services that remember Tuesdays opening of the UN General Assembly.

So I renew my kind offer: Anybody want a General Assembly in their Home Town ? I can let you have it , CHEAP!
Would I kid you?

MegalosSkylaki

[MegalosSkylaki]

But don't think today in NYC was all work and no Fun.

No way was it all work and no fun.

Why some people downtown even wore masks and it isn't even Halloween or some other important Holiday.

Problem is, seems like there is a law--that's right a law in NYC which I never knew about maybe because it's only enforced very selectively--against wearing masks by more than ONE (you read right one) person.

So the busts.

Bottom Line - Wall Street protest enters fourth day

I would suggest that if you and your spousal unit visit NYC, only one of you wear a mask. This will save you money and will keep you outta the Toombs (aka NYC House of Detention). Errr..for the one mask you might get a william Shatner mask and paint it white. This will further save you money as it can double for Halloween. Errr...Guess which movie took a W.S. mask and painted it white for effect. No kidding.

More busts and to this DOOG looks more like the sheep were lead to slaughter but the fuzz have galvanized their cause by using what looks to me more like entrapment than a sting.

Nw the DOOG is a radical capitalist which means he's opposed to bailouts of failed billionaires so what the demonstrors are doing by showing the shabbiness of Wall Street which has walked away with Taxpayer money and are payng bigger bonuses to the same people now than before the 2008 bust from which they were bailed out.

Did I mention the layoffs of ordinary workers on Wall Street and more to come ? Wall Street has long since abandoned capitalism and has married itself to Big Government.

One thing I've learned about this town is that one something put an idea into enough peoples minds its doesn't go away for a long time. I don't know if Police Commissioner Kelly or Third-term Mayor in a two-term town Mayor Bloomberg who thought up this fishnet operation, but it will backfire.

These were not Battle-of-Seattle anti-globalism demonstrators who arrived with gas masks and vasiline to confront tear-gas swat police but self-perceived disenfranchised middle-class people. By giving them national publicity in a town that thrives on publicity, this can only expand from here.



Read>>>About 700 arrested in Wall Street protest - US news - Crime & courts - msnbc.com



MegalosSkylaki