Handbill Handout

At one end of the South/Midland beach boardwalk on Staten Island there is a round plaza called Freedom Circle that has several flag poles flying various incarnations of the American flag and a large plaque detailing the evolution of said flag. It was built to “pay special tribute to the women and men who have fought to defend our freedom over the years” according to o ne borough website . The name “Freedom Circle” sounds vaguely Soviet to me, but maybe our BP was just trying to make the growing Russian population of Staten Island feel at home at our fine beaches. In any event, the Mrs. and I were walking on the boardwalk the other night and as we approached that end of the boardwalk I noticed a flashing light, the sort that one sees on one of those red light cameras. We drew nearer and saw the source of the flashing was a box on one of the flagpoles. As we reached the plaza the box flashed again and a robot voice spoke to us. “You are committing an illegal act. You are in a restr...

I was born on Staten Island but I grew up in Bay Terrace. There are restaurants in Manhattan, some of them are in Greenwich Village and some are on the Upper West Side. “In” versus “on” vis a vis location. What’s the rule? I Googled and Binged the subject and didn’t come up with much. I guess most people are like me and they just play it by ear. It still seems very arbitrary to me and just so I make it clear that it’s not exclusively a New York thing, I’ll note that when I visit the Chicago one speaks of being “In Chicago” but if you go to Wrigley Field you’re “on the North Side” as opposed to being in an area downtown where you’re “in the Loop.” Back in New York, you can be both “in Brooklyn” and “on Coney Island”. In France you can be “in Paris” and “on the Champs-Eysee”, though I think the distinction there is that one is almost always “on” a particular street or avenue while “in” a city. Still, none of this addresses one of the great regional linguistic conflicts: Friends and reade...

Psst. I’m not trying to get your attention. That’s just the sound of that Beck’s tall boy purchased at a Staten Island Ferry snack bar makes when you open it, which happens to be where we start today’s chronicle. I was standing outside at the back of the bottom deck of the Staten Island ferry. One of the newest boats in fact, so I was standing on the edge of the large empty space intended for the eventual return of vehicle transport. Right now that large space is fenced off and the only things resembling vehicles in the middle of the bottom deck are a few bicycles scattered at either end outside the fences. The space does make for a pretty cool wind tunnel with the boat is moving across the harbor and on a humid, disgusting, urine-scented New York City day like yesterday it is a fine place to stand and drink a cold beer. Not surprisingly, few other riders were taking advantage of this. The bottom deck is the unspoken “locals only” area of the ferry especially on the newest boats which ...

Intellectually speaking, of course. Thanks to Jeff P from the curling club for sending this along, from the New York Times of all places! I guess someone was slumming here or here . Or maybe they just noticed the same thing I did. Whatever, I can now proudly say I scooped the New York Times on a story that appeared in their pages. So there. In related news, I saw one of those guy-walking-fast-with-a-Blackberry-in-one-hand-and-a-coffee-in-the-other zooming up 6th avenue this morning carrying a cup from Tim Horton's. It made my smile, you bet it did.

I still have no desire to ever eat at a Cheesecake Factory, but this is in an interesting take . Full disclosure: even though I like to think I make better food choices now, at age 41 than I did even ten years ago I still have a couple of chain food guilty pleasures: Popeye's Fried Chicken and Timbits. Not necessarily in the same meal, of course.

It’s gritty. It scratches and irritates. It cleans. It makes things shiny. It can make you bleed. Usually only one side does all the work, or the damage depending on how you use it. It’s used as a metaphor in hockey, a term with a strictly positive meaning for a player or a team that plays tough, physical and sometimes irritating (to the opponent) hockey. You don’t want it in your shoe. You don’t want any of your clothes to be made out of sandpaper, in fact, unless you have some kind of fetish or a particular strain of masochism. I don’t know where the sand on sandpaper comes from, nor am I going to go search the internet to find out. I don’t know if it’s even really sand. I suspect it isn ’t. Sandpaper comes in different sizes, “grits” I think they’re called. I could be wrong. I’m not very handy. The different “grits” (if that’s the term) make different noises when used. Different types of surfaces make different noises when sandpaper is rubbed against them. Metal sounds d...

I think I finally have the breakthrough idea that will put me on easy street. No, it’s not an invention that could’ve been pitched by the late, great Billy Mays. It’s not anything useful at all really. What it is is an idea. An idea for a movie. A film perfect for our times. I want to write a movie about zombies. In supermarkets. But not human zombies. I want to write a movie where all the meat and fish in the meat cases and fish cases in supermarkets become undead and attack unwary shoppers. It has something for everyone. It has zombies, which after vampires are everyone’s favorite undead (and really I could make some of the critters vampires, maybe the fish?). It is a timely story. It has a “ripped from the headlines” feel based on all the terrible stories about our industrialized food system. The film (film is what serious movie types call movies, you know) is set in supermarkets. Supermarkets are somewhere almost everyone goes which just adds to the TRUE HORROR of it al...

The new bus fares kicked in last week and now I have numbers that aren’t zero to the right of the decimal point when my Metrocard scans. It annoys me. You have no idea how much it annoys me. For years we had the symmetry of a two buck subway fare and a five buck express bus fare which made it easy to run your card right to zero when it started getting worn down. I’m not one of those people who buys a new card every time the old card runs out of money; I think if more people reused their cards the TA might save a few dollars and not raise the fare as frequently. Or I’m just naïve. Or I’m just bugged by the piles of cards people leave scattered on the floor by the vending machines and the turnstiles and on the edifices-formerly-known-as-token booths that are now “information centers”. In any event, the change to having change on the card bugs me. Sometimes you don’t know what you had until you have something else. The other day I heard the bass line of my cuckoo clock's hourly c...

One of my " fictitious " readers has gone. Thank you Don for all the kind words and the encouragement since I started this thing. I'm putting this up before your noon deadline so you can read it at lunch like usual, wherever lunch is now. Listening to the new Dylan record too. Never did get to ask you what you thought of it. Never will now. You know, now I couldn't be happier that you beat us in that last game last season. Not that you cared much either way, you always preferred a good game to a blowout win and it was a good game. Hell, I was paying attention to the very end. It must've been good! Thank you for one of the finest jokes anyone ever pulled on me. I'll never look at a Wild Turkey box again without wondering if there's really a bottle in there or if it's just two cans of Coke. Thank you for indulging me when I tried to get you back by duct taping your car doors shut while you were "asleep". Thank you for buying us 'kids...