Christmas in Richmond

We drove from New York to Richmond late Sunday, with Bianca and Chris, to spend Christmas with our other daughter Danessa and other son-in-law Bobby and their three kids. I cooked and performed the ancient art of turkey shredding and now we are laying around gorged. That's a universal tradition. We indulged in a more limited Richmond tradition Tuesday night and rented a limo for the nine of us to travel around and view the Tacky Lights (yes, the capital letters are appropriate, it is that established a tradition.) Some houses have over 150,000 lights worth of Santa, elf, deer, Peanuts characters, etc, etc displays, in trees, on lawns, blanketing front yards. Our driver who, impressively, says he researches the displays by seeking out the owners in the off-season told us that the most lights are 170,000, 65 percent of which were designed by the owner of the house, and that the guy's electrical bill for December is $15,000.

Tis the season.

Not On This Tour with Those White Pants, Buddy

Yesterday I went with my sister and her two little girls on the NBC Studios tour. Aside from another opportunity for the network to siphon more money from (mostly) out of towner pockets, it offers little beyond the opportunity to stare at the empty desk where Brian Williams delivers the Nightly News, at the empty Saturday Night Live stages, at the empty and tiny Conan O'Brien studio. You move through the corridors like so many cattle, your ticket around your neck in a badge holder. Our best moment was at the very beginning where the prepper, for whom English was a second language, ran through through the list of No's for the tour, ending with "no wah-pans." The people behind us, some distance from the speaker, said, "No white pants??" Yes, folks, that's right, it's after Labor Day and Blessed are the Placekickers.

Praise the Lord Dental

A pillar (of some sort) of the neighborhood is no more. Praise the Lord Dental has undergone a name change, a change of dentists and management, and -- perhaps -- a change of business. It may actually now be a dental office, for there were a number of people sitting in its storefront waiting room as I walked past with Sam a few minutes ago. We always had our doubts about Praise the Lord, which never seemed to be open except during the oddest hours, like nine o'clock at night, and even then never had anyone in it who looked like they might be waiting to see a dentist. These suspicions were only deepened once when our daughter and son-in-law walked by and saw a dumpster-like container parked in front and, because its top was slightly ajar, they could see inside it a pile of slot machines. Anyhow, just another mystery of New York that we will never learn more of beyond its wonderful name.

Annals of True Crime

That crime story rag the New York Times reported this week on two men who beat and robbed a 70 year old woman in a Bronx housing project one recent afternoon. They grabbed her wallet with $149 and fled. On the street they flagged down what they thought was a livery cab, one of the large, usually black sedans that cruise the New York streets, supplementing taxi service, especially in the sketchier neighborhoods of the city. Unfortunately for them, the Crown Victoria turned out to be an unmarked police vehicle responding to reports of the robbery. Asked for identification, one of the men accidentally pulled out the victim's wallet and she, from the back of the ambulance about to carry her off for treatment, identified them as her attackers. I've recently been summonsed for jury duty. If among the citizens selected for their case, I'm guessing we'll spend considerably less than the eight days the average trial consumes in New York.

The Classroom in Penn Station

By any standard I'm aware of, Penn Station is an atrocity, especially when compared to the temple of trains across midtown and to its former self (below). Chopped up spaces, low ceilings, every junk food outlet on the planet crowding its corridors, public areas apparently uncleaned since the Giuliani years...the list goes on. I read on line that Thomas Wolfe ("Look Homeward, Angel") called the original Penn the only man-made space that was large enough to “hold the sound of time." And today even Brangelina could walk through the place and look crushed in spirit.



But tonight, heading through the Long Island Railroad (LIRR) space to the subway after the Rangers exciting shootout win over the Penguins, I learned something. On the electronic message board, LIRR announced that in autumn trains on the lines sometimes travel at less than maximum speed because of the "slip-slide" (no Paul Simon reference here) effect. It seems that falling or windswept leaves when they land on the tracks and get crushed by trains slick the tracks with a substance called pectin and cause less adhesion between the train wheel and the rail during braking. The LIRR noted that "slip-slide" is very similar to a car's wheels skidding on an icy road and that it is taking a three-pronged, pro-active approach to resolving the problem.

Ah, "pro-active prongs"-- this decade's "synergy" or "parameters."