RANDOM THOUGHT
So, what will be the first Law&Order about the strike? Will it be an episode about a guy that tries to cross the picket lines being found dead or an SVU about a young college coed who got in a stranger’s car to go to her job in Brooklyn, turning up dead?
Pink Cadillacs and other things I saw, learned or imagined during the Strike of ‘05
Making my way downtown
Walking fast
Faces passed
And I’m home bound
Staring blankly ahead
Just making my way
Making my way
Through the crowd
-Vanessa Carlton
Two teenage girls taking turns pushing each other downtown in a wheelchair.
Two businessmen trying to pay a horse-drawn carriage to take them uptown.
A taxi refusing to pick up a well dressed white woman on Park Avenue.
A man in a businesssuit handing his doorman the bag of his dog’s poop.
A pink Cadillac squeaking and billowing smoke as it crawled across Seventh Avenue.
A middle-aged woman in heels riding a scooter in Midtown.
Two car drivers fighting over who got to take a guy across the Queensboro bridge, only to have the guy decide to walk.
A monument to sled dogs smack in the middle of Central Park
The prettiest public Christmas tree I ever saw
Two women on the Upper East Side, who hadn’t left their apartments all day, congratulating each other on how resilient they are.
That guy who claimed he would walk 500 miles and then 500 more, never had to walk two miles to and from work.
Turns out, First Avenue runs uphill from both the North and South.
Ari’s mom hoping to get grandchildren out of the strike.
Jessica berating herself for not having cojones after folding to a reraise from Karol
Dawn’s theorem of distance walking, which is something like every subsequent block taking twice as long as the block before it to finish.
A woman grabbing a pretzel off a cart to throw at a car that just cut her off — and then giving the vendor two dollars for it.
I will not walk a thousand miles just to see you tonight.
THE CITY THAT WAS
To be able to just walk around the neighborhood is my secret revenge on all those forces and policies that tried to erase me. A secret revenge too, on the privileged who grew up safely in healthy streets like those of the Upper East Side, who felt so intelligent reading Balzac and Dickens, not caring that those same stories were happening in their neglected backyards. Their visions of the city are always of a magical place, where you see Sarah Jessica Parker eating in a chic restaurant, where there is always jazz playing, just as in a Woody Allen movie. I, too, have seen those visions. I, too, believe in that glorious New York City.
My greatest romance has always been with the city’s streets, but I have also witnessed and lived through its horrors. The burning of the ghettos is a chapter of New York history that has not been fully told. Those who are profiting in today’s age of gentrification, renaming my neighborhood SpaHa, would like to forget the burning of the ghettos. And so the African proverb still holds true: “Until lions have their historians, tales of the hunt shall always glorify the hunters.” But as a cub, I was there, saw it and lived it. And so I will fill the empty spaces with stories of a people who persevered through winters and snow during a time when the city was on fire.
CONVERSATION OF THE DAY
Me: What do you want for Christmas?
Mom: A million dollars.
Me: ME TOO!
Mom: Hmm. So who is going to drive the getaway car?
ON SECOND THOUGHT
Who needs unions, when you’ve got lawyers.
The world’s largest retailer was ordered to pay $57 million in general damages and $150 million in punitive damages to about 116,000 current and former California employees for violating a 2001 state law that requires employers to give 30-minute, unpaid lunch breaks to employees who work at least six hours.
The class-action lawsuit in Alameda County Superior Court is one of about 40 nationwide alleging workplace violations by Wal-Mart, and the first to go to trial. The Bentonville, Arkansas-based retailer, which earned $10 billion last year, settled a similar lawsuit in Colorado for $50 million.
STRIKE’S OVER
ALRIGHTY THEN
They are then put to sleep next to Elizabeth’s own favorite stuffed animals, Blue Teddy, a bear, and Lovey, a lamb.
Twice a day, they are fed a gourmet mixture of paper clips, Snapple bottle caps, miniature plastic hamburgers and invisible food from a domino case.
“A lot of people have a special doll,” Elizabeth explained, noting, like a true concierge, that she “would love them as much as I love my other dolls.”
RANDOM THOUGHT
The problem with beating someone with a lead pipe for calling you a thug, is that, well… it would sorta prove their point.
BILL CLINTON LOOKS LIKE HE’S DYING
