R-E-A-D-A-B-O-OK?

So I've been getting my read on a lot more since moving to the city, thanks to the whole subway commute thing. I even just finished reading a book on the history of cannibalism, Flesh and Blood: A History of the Cannibal Complex, that I got as a sort of oddball/gag gift in college... though I did go through that cannibalism phase for a bit there, hmm...

The first chapter conveniently reminds the reader that, according to the snooty and judgmental author, eating people is wrong. I think she's British.

I've read most all the books I had brought from home. I even bought a book (it was a really cool financial history of the world). Hell... I've even been reading from the library! The next book I'll read is call "Black and Tans." I bought it a long time ago for real cheap... I'm not sure why I bought it, it's not actually about booze.

Oh wait, it's about the British Special police in Ireland, so it's presumably about abusing Irish folk - Micks and Paddies and such. Now it all makes sense.

Now that I'm starting to get the reading thing down I think I'm going to try to incorporate all the life lessons in this video my buddy Emacy Gay, we just shorten it to Emacy, in Florida told me to check out. (NSFW... and apparently some people found this video made by BET to be shown on BET offensive :( some people are just no fun)




Oh man, some guy on the train last night obviously missed the part about deodorant. I think he was Eastern European or something. Holy crap, he smelled so bad my roommate and I actually got up and moved to the end of the train. We could only go one direction though because on the other side of the train was a ranting crazy hobo yelling gibberish and I think yelling that someone needed to be arrested, I'm not sure, but he pretty much cleared out his half of the train. As a fun bonus, he would yell out the doors to all people waiting on the platforms.

As for the whole reading thing... I even read a whole biography of Jack Daniel, which was pretty interesting - and leads nicely into my next point... apparently I can do shots again, which is probably not a good thing. The other night I went to Revival and learned that I could indeed down Jack Daniel's shots if the cute girls next me at the bar challenged me to do one with them. All down hill from there... then I took my roommate the wrong way on the subway and we ended up in Brooklyn.

Fast forward to Friday night where the shots were flowing all night (my roommate reminded me Saturday that it had been one of the bartenders' birthdays...)

I ended up staying longer than the roomie and ended up going the wrong way on the L train again... basically all night. I woke up in Canarsie at least twice. I kept falling asleep on the train and ending up in kind of the far east side of Brooklyn. Then I would say to myself I need to stay awake this time, then I'd wake up again at Canarsie (the last stop). It's a bad sign on the subway to wake up and see open space and trees out the window instead of subway walls (which tends to be indicative of being far from Manhattan) and an even worse sign to wake up and see sunlight out the train window...



I eventually got home around 9:30 Saturday morning. I found out later, that it was my luck that the train was under construction that night and wasn't even going my direction from Revival at all, so the whole thing was a measure in futility. Luckily, by the morning when I did stay awake enough to get all the way home, the late night construction messing up the L train was done for the night and they were back on the day schedule. So it was just all part of my plan.

I told Emacy about it and he was kind of enough to wonder aloud the next day that he bets hobos and other folks teabagged my sleeping self. :( I hadn't thought of that...

Also, I've been watching a lot of Hulu lately. It's pretty much like my new favorite site. I can watch all the Simpsons, Galactica 1980 (the awesome but short-lived sequel to Battlestar Galactica after they've found Earth, word), Charlie's Angels, It's Always Sunny in Philadelphia and whatever else I want!

They also have random clips, and I came across this random old Simpsons clip which is one of my all-time favorites...



And of course (especially for Crazy Carl), some Overheard, L train style...

Homey #1: Yo, hold up...Jesus was a virgin?! He went from 12 to 33 with nothing?
Homey #2: Fuck that shit. He definitely got his dick sucked or buttfucked some bitches.

--L Train, 8th Avenue


Black guy opening engineer's door after 15 minutes of standstill: Yo, move this shit, or I'll drive it myself!

--Canarsie-bound L train

Who knows, maybe a few weeks from now they'll be one looking like this:

Drunk guy wakes up: Canarsie, again!? Shit!

-- L Train

I got my lunch from the "Bloody Angle" today

I got my lunch from the "Bloody Angle" in Chinatown today.

It is featured in one of the chapters in Gangs of New York, which I finished on the subway ride home today. It was actually a really enjoyable read and was filled with neat tidbits on the history of city.

As for the Bloody Angle, it dates back to when rival Chinatown gangsters were killing each other regularly around the turn of the century give or take.


This is totally how I imagine things were in the dirty (dirtier than now?) and dangerous streets of Chinatown back in the day. (The clip really isn't too bad, but it's probably not too work friendly I guess...)
Anywho... back to the Bloody Angle, here's how the author describes it (and yes, he is prone to exaggeration and yes it was written in 1928):

The police believe, and can prove so far as such proof is possible, that
more men have been murdered at the Bloody Angle than at any other place of like area in the world. It was, and is, an ideal place for ambush; the turn is very abrupt, and not even a slant-eyed Chinaman can see around the corner.

Nowadays it's just known as Doyers Street. A little less flashy, but I guess it works.



One of the other things that also made it a perfect place for jumping people was that there is an underground passage from Doyers to Chatham Square where gangsters would escape.

It's still there, just not marked in English. You go down a couple of flights of stairs and the passage is still there, its just lined with doctors and acupuncture offices and such. Unlike the streets, which are filled with signs in Chinese and English, in the passage there was very little English and most offices had absolutely no English signage. I definitely stuck out like a sore thumb as the only white dude down there. It was kind of neat.

Doyers Street, surprisingly wasn't too crowded. I guess because it was mostly hair salons and more things for locals, not too many restaurants or doodad stands. The lady I ordered from at the restaurant I did eat at didn't speak much English at all. After a painful few minutes of trying to order, she pulled out a little "touching memories" looking photo album and opened it up. It was filled with pictures of food and she had me just point to something. I'm assuming that means I wasn't the first to have so muh trouble there.

I guess a picture really is worth a thousand words, especially when nobody understands any words being said. That being said, I still don't think I actually got what I tried to order... but at least what I got was really good.

The story of the Bloody Angle is just one of the many fascinating things I learned about the city from that book.

The book was also fun because it was filled with random things like this about how "gentlemanly" one of the nastiest gang leaders in the history of the East Side around 1900 - Monk Eastman. He talks about how brutal he was and how often he would beat men up, but...

But Monk was always a gentleman; he was proud of the fact that he had never struck a woman with his club, no matter how much she annoyed him. When it
became necessary to discipline a lady for a lapse in manners, he simply blackened her eye with his fist.

"I only give her a little poke," he exclaimed. "Just enough to put a shanty on her glimmer. But I always takes off me knucks first."

At least he took his brass knuckles off, how chivalrous.

Now that I've finished that book, I swung by the library on the way home and got Ladies and Gentlemen, the Bronx is Burning. If you haven't heard of it or heard the phrase, it's in reference to New York City's "issues" in 1977. Hopefully it will be interesting... though unfortunately I already know it includes a lot about the va-jankees and them winning the World Series that summer... so well see.

New York City in 1977 also had the Son of Sam, riots, a blackout and a crazy mayoral races so hopefully it'll be a good read.

Well, in honor of this post being focused on Chinatown, here's something pretty random...

An explanation can be found here... sort of.
This was on the Cake Wrecks blog, which has some of the goofiest cake failures around. My brother and his wife introduced me to it, and I got a decent number of good laughs from it. That particular cake was apparently originally from a blog called Basic Instructions.

Libraries, jogging and the Olympics are all free

Another day, zero cents spent. Heck, I'm making money. I found a dime on the ground on the way home from the library.

It was an interesting little library. About a quarter of the books were in Spanish, which makes sense I suppose. There was also a little section of Russian-language books... there was an old lady checking it out, so I guess it sees use.

Come to think of it, we must have some Ruskies around here. There is a little Russian grocery store a few blocks down the street... as a bonus, they have a rack with their potatoes for sale out on the sidewalk... 49 cents a pound, word?

If only Ivan Drago could read, maybe I'd bump into him in my library. He was too busy getting served to learn how to read though I guess.

The selection at the library was pretty random... they actually didn't have Pride and Prejudice, but it may have been checked out and I couldn't use their electronic card catalogue so I couldn't check.

I did see Stan Lee and the Rise and Fall of the American Comic Book, which is actually a good read. I thought about picking it up and reading it again.

One of the interesting parts in that one is when they tell about Lee's failed attempt to pitch his sex-themed comic strip to Playboy... it was deemed to weird and creepy. Believe me, it was. And no, that's not something I randomly made up either... and yes, it was weird.

I ended up getting The Gangs of New York, as in the book that inspired the movie. Apparently it was written in the 1920's... who knew?

I haven't seen the movie, so it will all be new to me.

So far it is just giving a history of the area where the book is set, which is really cool... since it is giving a history of basically where my office building is. My work subway stop is like a block from what it describes as "Negroes' burying ground....on the outskirts of town."

That probably made for a gross time when putting in the subway routes...

He also makes reference to the when "the present Times Square theatrical district was a howling wilderness where the savage Indian prowled." I'll have to picture next time I'm there and surrounded by the sea of neon commercialism.

After the library, I went jogging... to New Jersey.

I walked to the George Washington Bridge and jogged across the Hudson River (to where it becomes the the Jersey Turnpike) and back... about a two-mile trip total.

They have a little walking/biking trail set up, and if you look to the south, you can see the city's skyline... which is a pretty cool sight as your jogging along. It kind of reminded me of the jogging scene in Punch-Out!!...


Technically though, I guess Little Mac is actually jogging in either
Brooklyn or New Jersey in order to have that awesome view.
Side note:Some of the best video game music, ever.

Not surprisingly, once I got on solid ground in Jersey, there was actually a noticeable, not too pleasant, smell. Go figure.

I spent most of the rest of the day watching the Olympics and cooking with my gas stove... and gas oven. I was quite surprised to look under the oven where I stored my baking trays to see a ginormous blue flame right on top of them... I think I'll move those to somewhere less like a fireplace.

As for the Olympics, we totally dominated fencing.

That's right, gold, silver and bronze. Word.
I also watched, like, the most ridiculous pommel horse routine ever. All the other Americans basically took it easy on the horse and just tried not to mess up, but not Alexander Artemev. I couldn't get a clip of him in Beijing, but here's what looks like the same routine at a different recent competition.

"Reading totally sucks ass" - Officer Barbrady

So, though I joked about being an avid non-reader, I actually tore through a book this week that was great... until about the last 75 pages. It was called With a Tangled Skein.


It's part of a series, and I read another book in the series, On a Pale Horse, and it was great. So that's why I picked up this one... and it was great too, until I got toward the end. Then it started sucking like a Dyson. Once it started sucking, it just kept sucking all the way to the end... I swear, it "never lost suction."

Those last pages were literally painful to finish, but I figured I had read the first 300 or so pages and they were enjoyable so I'd see it through to the end and maybe the very end would be good. Wrong.

The end involved a stupid maze of puzzles that were either really easy to figure out (thus making the ten pages it took the heroine to "figure it out" painful) or they were just so dumb they weren't worth pondering.

This puzzle maze went on until the very end. I just kept reading and seeing there were less and less pages and then BAM! It was over. The solution to the whole book was the simplest, dumbest thing. I thought of the solution pretty much as soon as the problem was presented, as anyone over three (except apparently the heroine) would figure it out pretty quickly.

I swear to God. Ridiculous.

Since I doubt any of you will read the book, I'll oversimplify the plot and spoil it...

The main character is the Incarnate Fate (made up of three people)... who, along with several other powers, can ultimately cause people to die if they want, because they determine fates.

Long story short, Satan has rigged the Senate and filled certain Senate seats with people who will do his bidding and prevent the right, good people, from getting their seats in the future.

So Fate is stumped, for about 100 pages, on how to fix the problem and get some of the stacked Senators out of the Senate and set the world's fate right.

So about 25 pages lead up to the puzzle maze, and then the main character goes through this massive 75 pages of stupid puzzle maze to find the answer...

Any ideas? Bueller? Bueller?

Put overly simply, at the end the heroine is like "Oh yeah, Fate can determine the Senator fates and ultimately cut them short, thus getting rid of them."

I just about shat myself. I was so pissed. The first 300ish pages were great. Heck, I tore through the book in four days, which is crazy for me... but the end that I read today just hurt my brain and made me begin to question the value of the written word.

When I finished it, I couldn't help but think of Officer Barbrady's speech from the South Park episode where he learns to read. He was tricked into learning to read by a crazy bookmobile driver who was having sex with chickens and leaving clues that forced Barbrady to learn to read in order to catch him... brilliant.

They hold a parade to celebrate his learning to read and this is part of his speech to the crowd...

Officer Barbrady: "Well, first of all I'd like to thank the town of South Park, the town that borne me and eventually will rob me of my life precious.

Second, I'd like to say to all those out there who think they can screw chickens just to teach people to read... Your days are numbered!!!

And finally, I'd like to say that READING TOTALLY SUCKS ASS!!"

That scene played through my head in loop once I put the book down in disgust.

The bookmobile driver had given him the breezy read that is Atlas Shrugged by Ayn Rand... which led to his rage against reading.

Side note: Apparently an Atlas Shrugged movie is in the works and may star Angelina Jolie... weird.

This whole book reading experience has left me a bit jaded. I think it's time to go back to reading the Post on my subway ride to and from work again. Books and me are not friends at the moment. Seriously.

Besides, I almost feel like I'm cheating on my newspaper guy in the morning. He stands outside the train station entrance with stacks of papers every morning and for a while I would like clockwork pick up a Post every morning. Since I started reading the book though, I've walked by, novel in hand, and just tried not to make eye contact.

Anywho... it's T-minus one day until my open house... we'll see if anyone shows. I met some nice people in the elevator who seemed nice and vaguely interested in coming. They may swing by. Who knows. No matter what, it should be an interesting evening. We'll see...

Follow up: The bronze bull is back at Bloomingdale, and apparently it was indeed some very stupid kids. It sounds like they were probably from Brandon high, so it makes sense that they're stupid I suppose.

Other follow-up: I think I'll stop checking...I'm fairly certain Sue Bird rejected my friend request on MySpace :(

That's ice cold... and I maintain it's also not a great way to help build a fan base for the WNBA. Despite the hurt, I think I'll still try to go see Bill Laimbeer when his team comes to Madison Square Garden. I'll soldier, somehow.