Mr NYC to Tourists: Please Get a Subway Map!

I truly love and adore anybody and everybody who visits our fair city during these rough times and drops money into our city's economy. Keep it coming, your business is very much appreciated. But ... would all of you tourists, for the love of all that is holy, please look at a map before you get on our subways?

Today, a woman comes up to me before I'm just about to board an N train: "Can you tell me how to get to 125th street?"

"West Side or East Side?"

Big shrug. I sent her to the 2/3 line, hoping that'll get her to her destination.

This isn't even the worst of it. Past examples:

• While on an R train, uptown: "'Scuse me, will this take me to Rector street?"
  
  
• Tourists on a train in Queens thinking it was taking them to 39th street -- in Manhattan.
  
  
• "Where's Canal Street?"
  "Downtown?"
  "Where's that?"
  
  
• Or once when I was in Soho. "Excuse me, I need to go to Midtown."
  "Take the 1/2 train. The entrance is right there."
  "But that goes to uptown."
  "Midtown is uptown from here."
  "Oh ..."
  

When I went to London and Paris earlier this year, I made sure to look at the underground maps of those towns and plotted my journey around town. Looking at a map -- that exhausting, mind-numbing exercise -- has helped me get around on the Metros and subways of other cities like Chicago, Rome, DC, and St. Louis. Can't our tourists do the same? The subway map is not that hard to read, most routes, particularly in Manhattan, just go up or down, one way or another.

So, again, Mr NYC, like most New Yorkers, loves our tourists. I just ask them to look at subway map before getting on it.

Central Park Zoo

During these lovely fall days and tough economic times, the Central Park Zoo is a fun and affordable treat for you and your friends and loved ones.

Located at 64th street and Central Park, it's $8 for adults, $3 for kids, and $4 for seniors. It's a small but easily navigable space and provides a breezy and enjoyable hour and a half of fun. The highlights include the polar bear and the penguins exhibits, as well as the rain forest exhibit where you exotic birds and some of the most beautiful reptiles (yes, you read that right) I've ever seen.

The sea lions, located in the middle of zoo, are the most fun attraction and at 11:30 AM and 2 PM every day you can see them getting fed. This is more of a show where the zoo workers direct the sea lions to dive off the big rocks and perform various tricks. In between, the zoo workers masterfully throw fishes of various sizes down the sea lions throats.

Check out the zoo website for more info.

Fait Accompli?

City Council Speaker Christine Quinn has thrown her support behind Mayor Bloomberg's plan to extend term limits. It's not clear if the bill they want will actually pass but when the richest, most powerful people in the city are behind it, is there any stopping it?

Speaker Pledges Support, but Mayor Needs More

To be continued ...

Frugal New York

In these tough economic times, with money tight, it gets a little harder to enjoy NYC. There's lots of great to do here but, of course, a lot that costs tons of money. That's why you should read this article in today's times, about fun things to do and good places to eat that are either free or cheap.

Frugal New York

Some things I learned from this article: there are a lot of Indian restaurants on Lexington Avenue between 25th and 30th streets and I've gone to several of them (including a Kosher Indian place once). What I didn't know is that this stretch of restaurants has a name: Curry Row. Also, there's a second Chinatown in this city, out in Sunset Park in Brooklyn. Apparently there are some great, cheap restaurants out there. Check it out on Chowhound.

Did you also know (this isn't in the article but I'm just remembered it) that the area between 5th and 6th avenues between 31st and 36st streets is called Koreatown? Some friends and I went to a restaurant there once and they actually cooked the food in a stove in our table. You order something, then they bring out the food and throw it stove, and then you eat it right off it. From what I'm told, this is very typical in Korean restaurants but I hadn't experienced this before and it was very cool. I don't remember the name of restaurant but highly recommend going to Koreatown and checking one of these places out.

Christopher Buckley Endorses Obama

You know that something is seriously wrong with the Republican party when the son of William F. Buckley -- godfather of modern conservative thought, founder of National Review, and intellectual mentor to Ronald Reagan and generations of Republicans -- has decided to vote for a liberal Democrat for a President, and a black liberal Democrat at that.

Christopher Buckley has announced that he cannot support John McCain for President. He indicates that, among other things, choosing Sarah Palin as his VP shows a scary lack of judgment. Buckley believes that Obama, on the other hand, posses a "first class temperament and a first class intellect" and has reluctantly decided to jump onto the "Obama bandwagon."

This is a must read: "Sorry Dad, I'm Voting for Obama"

President Bush's Statement on the Economy

Yesterday our fearless leader told us that he and his very competent administration are doing "everything" they can (whatever that is) to fix the economy.

The stock market just suffered it's worst week ever. Literally trillions of dollars of wealth have been wiped out. Some of that includes my own, as I can personally attest after getting my various financial statements.

Right now those irascible people who stuff money in the mattress are looking a lot smarter than all these financial hotshots who told us that we had to invest, invest, invest. Oh what a tangled web they've weaved.

Fight Term Limit Changes

If you want to know how you can get involved in fighting against this high jacking of the city's term limits laws, the Working Families Party has a website giving you all of the info you need. You can find out how to petition against the changes and where there will be public forums against this.

It's Our Decision

Media City

Last night I attended a panel discussion on the upcoming election with Matt Taibbi and New Yorker writer Hendrik Hertzberg. They provided some interesting perspectives about the fickle nature of the American electorate, how wedge issues and cynical tactics are used to scare people into voting against their interests, and how Obama is really a once in a generation, maybe a century, presidential candidate. Matt and Hendrik provided some fascinating political insights that I hadn't really considered before.

Hendrik pointed out that conservatives -- who so often think of things in black and white, right or wrong, this-side-of-the-fence-or-other terms -- have an ironically postmodernist view when it comes to reality and truth; namely, they don't believe that objective truth exists, or that reality is even real. Obviously, the awfulness and dishonesty of the Bush administrations forces them to believe this but isn't it interesting how, when its their ox that's being gored, conservatives suddenly believe in, other all things ... New Age relativism.

Matt, who I blogged about here a couple of days ago, made another interesting point about how conservatives are now more guilty of practicing identity politics than liberals. Sarah Palin is proof positive of that. She was chosen as McCain's VP merely because she's a female "hockey mom" who loves to shoot things. Her qualifications are, clearly besides the point.

You can see this panel discussion yourself -- and some of the fireworks that erupted there -- on NYCTV, Sundays at 8:30 PM. Go to the Media City website for more info.

Postscript: shortly before the panel I bumped into Matt Taibbi and told him what a big fan I am of his work. Reading his super-smart, razor-sharp prose, you'd never think that he's a really nice, modest guy in person. He shook my hand, asked me about myself, and was very cool and gracious. Matt isn't only a great writer, he seems to be a really great guy.

You can pick up his brand-new book, The Great Derangement: A Terrifying True Story of War, Politics, and Religion at the Twilight of the American Empire, on Amazon or at major bookstores.

Matt Taibbi Nails It

Matt Taibbi is fast becoming the best political writer in America. In this week's Rolling Stone, he perfectly sums up not only what's wrong with American politics (in this case, embodied in Karl Rove) but with America itself -- and that makes our politics so vile. He writes:

"Rove is not a genius, or even very clever: He's totally and completely immoral. It doesn't take genius to claim, as Rove ludicrously did last fall, that it was the Democrats in Congress and not George W. Bush who pushed the Iraq War resolution in 2002. It doesn't take brains to compare a triple-amputee war veteran to Osama bin Laden; you just have to be a mean, rotten ..."

The reason Rove continues to survive is the same reason that Johnnie Cochran was called a genius for keeping a double-murderer on the golf course — because this generation of Americans has become so steeped in greed and social Darwinism that it can no longer distinguish between cheating and achieving, between enterprise and crime, and can't bring itself to criticize winners any more than it knows how to be nice to losers. He survives because an increasing number of Americans secretly agree with Rove's vision of rules, laws and "the truth" as quaint, faintly embarrassing rituals that only a sucker would let hold him back."

Hear, hear.

News About New York News

In the last week there has been a quiet mini-revolution in the world of NYC newspapers.

First, The New York Sun went out of business on September 30. Never read the Sun? Never heard of it? That would make you like most New Yorkers, and that's why it's gone. It was established seven years ago as a forum for neo-conservative political thought and to challenge the "liberal media" in this town. Well, it looks like the big bad liberal media won this round, don't it? And like its other discredited patrons -- the Bush Administration and the Republican Party -- the Sun has set on neo-conservative thought. But I'm not entirely happy that the Sun is gone. It has some really great arts coverage and that will be a loss to the cultural life of this city. And it's a shame that this town that use to have so many newspapers circulating around it now has one fewer.

Second, and more importantly, the Metro section of The New York Times is no more. That's right, the newspaper of New York City no longer has a section devoted exclusively to New York City. Obviously if you read the Times on the web then you won't notice this. In fact, it's because most people read the Times on the web that the Metro section is no more. All local news is now tucked at the back of the main news section, right after international and national news. I guess it now puts us New Yorkers properly in its place -- ba dum bum.

So life goes on. Most New Yorkers won't notice or care. But these are changes for the worse in my opinion. The media landscape is changing faster than we can imagine. Sad, but not unpredictable.