Winter Storm Jonas in Washington Heights, Manhattan, NYC

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Facing South on Broadway at 168th Street

My wife and I went out walking around in Winter Storm Jonas for a while, just to see what the blizzard was doing to the city. The last time there was a storm like this, we stayed indoors and by the time we went out, there was nothing left but slush and those crappy puddles on the corners that you have to wade through to cross the street.

When we went out, the snow was still coming down really hard, but it was supposed to snow well into the night, so that wasn’t surprising. It was oddly quiet outside, besides the wind. There were more people out than we expected, but the neighborhood was mostly deserted. Even Starbucks was closed. We didn’t expect anything to be open. We just wanted to have a look around. I was pretty surprised to see a few stores open and some people trying to deliver food. Gristedes was open. It looked like Famiglia was open. I saw two guys come out carrying delivery bags. They ran to a car though and drove off so I’m not sure if they were trying to do a delivery or leave for the day. One of the guys was the franchise owner. I recognized him from when they were moving and renovating the store.

Delivery man pushing his bicycle through the snow.
Delivery man pushing his bicycle through the snow.

There was a delivery guy trying to ride his bicycle through the snow in the road at 168th Street and St. Nicholas Avenue, but he wasn’t really doing too well and gave up. I watched him get off his bike and then start pushing it through the snow. There were no snow plows on the roads keeping them clear, or if there were they weren’t doing the job well enough because of the rate of snow accumulation. I felt bad for the guy.

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After we took some pictures we decided to go grab a few things from Gristedes. It was fun walking inside, covered in snow and I took some time to warm my hands by the rotisserie chicken display. When we left the store, we saw a dog sitting there in the snow, tied to the guard around the bottom of the tree. I was pretty concerned. The dog had a layer of snow on its fur and it was holding one paw up. The dog was obviously uncomfortable and didn’t want to stand in the snow. He was angry and barking. We couldn’t leave until we knew the dog was okay. Other people walking by kept commenting that they couldn’t believe someone left the dog like that. People inside Gristedes were looking out the window at the dog. A guy walked out of Gristedes and said he’d seen the dog sitting there when he went into the store about 10 minutes prior, so me and the guy went inside to look for the owner.

It’s too much, you know? Leaving a dog out there, tied up with snow falling on him. So, I went inside and yelled out, “Does anyone here own the dog that is tied to the tree outside? It’s been there for more than 10 minutes. That’s really inhumane! If you don’t get your dog I’m going to call the police!” When people realized a dog had been left outside in the blizzard, a few people started to comment angrily on the situation. No one acknowledged that they owned the dog, so I walked further back into the store and yelled, “If someone owns the dog that has been tied up to the tree outside for more than 10 minutes, you need to go get your dog and take him home. It’s inhumane to leave a dog outside in a blizzard and I’m going to call the police. Also, you’re an asshole!” Because really, you have to be an asshole to leave the dog tied up outside, exposed to weather conditions so severe. This was the second worst blizzard the city has ever had and the wind chill brought the temperature down to about 14° F.

While I was doing this, my wife and another woman untied the dog and brought him under the shelter of the canopy along the edge of the building. The dog was visibly relieved. By the time I got back outside, the owner had run out there to take the dog home. I hope she doesn’t do it again. I wonder if I should have just called the police and/or animal control anyway? What if this is normal for this person?

Anyhow, it was sort of a damper on the fun we were having, but we were glad we saved the dog from a bit of suffering he might have otherwise experienced if we had chosen not to go out, or not stop. We also enjoyed the adventure of walking around out in the blizzard. We were going to try to do our laundry today, but it just didn’t happen. I looked at the news about how the transit system wasn’t even up and running around noon today, so we just did some cleaning around the house and I’ll have to do the laundry tomorrow night after I get home from work. By then, shop owners should have salted the sidewalks and everything should be open. It would have been really disappointing to haul laundry through snow drifts to the laundromat only to find out it wasn’t open.

We never lost power or heat or any other service, so it was a pretty cozy, awesome kind of weekend, mostly holed up at home watching TV and staying warm. I have my snow boots ready for tomorrow.

January 2016 Winter Blizzard

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Earlier, 6:55 PM:

So, we’re moving into a blizzard weekend. Two weeks of laundry to do, groceries to get. I thought we had until tomorrow afternoon, but now I’m checking the weather channel (online of course) and I see that we’re going to start getting snow around 11:30 PM here. Whiteout conditions, until sometime tomorrow. 24 hours of snow. 14 inches of blizzard apocalypse. Can a guy get laundry done during a blizzard? I wonder what things will be like on Sunday?

I have to prioritize food. I don’t want to rely on food deliveries that might be cancelled tomorrow. I don’t think we’ll be going anywhere either. Maybe we’ll just lay around and watch TV. That’s not so bad, as long as the heat stays on.

Now, 11:51 PM:

Going to the grocery store was like walking into madness. It looked like everyone in the neighborhood was jammed into Key Food on 172nd Street. We got there just in time to grab a jug of water. They ran out while we were in line. We figured it would be best to stock up, just in case a pipe broke and repairs couldn’t be done for a while. Mostly we just got regular food and some snacks. The lines snaked around to the back of the store and people were constantly squeezing past each other or bumping into each other. Something that we noticed was that no one was losing their temper or acting crazy, though. Everyone was pretty friendly, in fact. Camaraderie in suffering, I guess.

Anyway, we’re home now, relaxing, and ready.

A case of Stella Artois.
Stella Artois

Allegiance, with George Takei & Lea Salonga

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In November, I told my wife that we would go see Allegiance for her birthday. She wasn’t so much interested in the show for the sake of the story, but because she’s a big fan of Lea Salonga and Miss Saigon. Miss Saigon hasn’t played in New York City since we’ve been here, but Lea has a starring role in Allegiance. As a bonus, George Takei stars in the play as well and I’ve really enjoyed him as an actor and as a person since I first saw him in Star Trek as a kid. His Facebook account is hilarious.

I was told later that Allegiance was based on Takei’s childhood. He actually went through a Japanese internment camp during World War II. We really did go into the show blind, but it didn’t stop us from enjoying the story or the actors’ performances. The parts were well played. Everyone knew their lines. There was no stuttering. The dancing scenes were a lot of fun. The music was good.

I think what I enjoyed most about the show was the way it attempted to address complex ideas of identity, belonging and citizenship. Questions 27 and 28 of a loyalty questionnaire given to Japanese internees played a prominent role in the play. The audience is told what those questions are, but I felt like there should have been more explanation about why answering “yes” to those two questions was such a huge moral dilemma for many Japanese-Americans. Having the main character’s father say it impinges Japanese “honor” did not really convey the complexity of being singled out as a group and being made to affirm loyalty to the United States when one was already an American by birth and upbringing. You kind of pick up on it throughout the play, but only if you’re really paying attention. I suppose one doesn’t go to a play to be mindlessly entertained, though. It’s supposed to be thought provoking.

Not to take away from the suffering of Japanese-Americans during World War II, but I was reminded of the problems that many Muslim-Americans are facing today. They are being singled out as a group and subjected to additional scrutiny. Their loyalty, or allegiance to the United States, is questioned in the same way that Japanese-Americans’ allegiance to the United States was questioned.

The fact that Muslim Americans weren’t rounded up and placed in internment camps shows that most of us learned something from our previous mistakes, or at least the people who can make those sorts of decisions learned something. But, we’re walking on a thin line. It wouldn’t be hard for the balance to shift and to wake up one day and find people being deported to concentration/internment camps again. I mean, look at how popular Trump is with Republican voters. Sometimes the guy says something that makes sense, but even a monkey could type a coherent sentence if he sits in front of a keyboard long enough. Trump represents the worst of our past and the desire of some to return to a period of selective privilege that leaves everyone who isn’t a white male in second place at best.

Anyhow, coming back to the topic of this post, the play was excellent, thought provoking, a critical look at our past and relevant to contemporary affairs. I would recommend it to anyone interested in human drama, history, US politics, race relations, or just a good story.

The Longacre theater, where the play is shown, is a little cold. The seats are a little close together and they didn’t open the doors until 6:30 PM, meaning the line was still out the door at 7:00 PM when the curtain was supposed to go up. If you’re planning on going, show up around 6:15 PM to be at the front of the line.

Also, the concessions stand wasn’t impressive, but I haven’t been to a lot of plays so I don’t have a frame of reference and I imagine the audience is expected to be different from the one you find packed into a typical movie theater.

 

Winnie the Pooh at the Charging Bull

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The office building I work in is at Bowling Green. According to the New York City Parks website, “Bowling Green is New York City’s oldest park. According to tradition, this spot served as the council ground for Native American tribes and was the site of the legendary sale of Manhattan to Peter Minuit in 1626.” So, the area is a popular tourist attraction. The Smithsonian’s Native American museum also faces this park.

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The most popular attraction in the park seems to be the Charging Bull rather than the museum. Every day there are people crowding around this bronze statue to have their pictures taken with both its face and its balls. The balls seem to be more popular. I suppose that’s not surprising. The bull is supposed to represent the power and unpredictability of market forces and represents Wall Street and the Financial District.

Winnie the Pooh Costume Scammer

Winnie the Pooh Costume Scammer

This week I spotted a new arrival: a Christmas themed Winnie the Pooh and accompanying muscle, presumably to strong-arm tourists into giving up money after taking a photo with the costumed person. This is a pretty common thing in the Times Square area and became a point of public conversation during the debate over topless women posing for photos in Times Square in exchange for cash. I’d never seen them in the Bowling Green area, though, and after that one time I never saw them again. I wonder if they were driven out by the police, by crowds of tourists telling them to get out of the way so they could take photos with the Bull, or by the police, or some combination of those three?

Regardless, I’m glad to see those two assholes gone. The crowds of tourists around the office building can be aggravating, because they obviously aren’t in a hurry during my lunch break and they sometimes block the sidewalk, but it’s understandable and I can’t be mad at them for coming to this city and having a good time. These people that dress in costumes and strong-arm people into taking photos with them and giving them cash afterwards, though? They’re parasites and they’re disgusting. It’s better than outright robbery, but not by much. I hope they stay gone.

Amazon Prime Offline Viewing on the Subway

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Ragnar Lothbrook crossing a river in England with heads on his boat.

So, I was on the train today enjoying the fact that I can watch TV shows on my iPad using Amazon Prime. I’ve always wished I could download shows on Netflix and watch them offline while I ride the subway here in New York City, but that was never an option. Amazon seems to have that covered though, at least for Prime content. Things that are rented don’t have an option to download, but that’s fine. There are plenty of Prime shows I want to watch and can watch during that long commute to and from work every day.

For example, I’ve been trying to get around to watching Under the Dome season 3 for a while now. I also want to watch Vikings season 3. I’m not sure Vikings is quite tame enough for the subway, though. The show has episodes of random and gratuitous violence. I don’t mind, obviously, but while I was watching the show today, an older woman got on the train and sat down next to me. For a few minutes she was looking at my iPad screen, being nosy, but in a scene in episode 2 of season 3, Rollo decided to hack a prisoner’s leg off, because why not? It looked funny. With each downward stroke of the ax, I could see the woman next to me jumping or cringing a bit. She eventually just turned and looked out the window for the remainder of the time I was on the train.

 

Ragnar Lothbrook crossing a river in England with heads on his boat.
Ragnar Lothbrook crossing a river in England with heads on his boat.

I felt sort of guilty about that. I mean, it’s the type of show where people ride around in boats that have heads dangling off of them as a scare tactic. I guess I’ll just stick with Under the Dome on the train, and then move on to other shows that are a bit more tame.

The Man in the High Castle

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The Man in the High Castle movie title logo and background imagery.

I haven’t updated this blog in a while, other than a few pictures over the summer. I haven’t always been really busy, but I suppose I’ve just been trying to keep up with other things and this just fell to the wayside. I’m going to try to get back on top of this soon. I’m working on finishing up an MA class this semester on top of working full-time. I also have one more MA class to do in the Spring, maybe. Maybe two more. We’ll see how it goes.

The Man in the High Castle movie title logo and background imagery.
The Man in the High Castle

Anyhow, no matter how busy things get, my wife and I take the time to enjoy a show together, usually with dinner. Game of Thrones, The Walking Dead, Gotham, Fear the Walking Dead, and so on. Lots of good shows lately. When there’s a lull in what’s coming on TV, we have Netflix and Amazon Prime for stuff like House of Cards and this new show, The Man in the High Castle. I had heard about it before, but it really sort of popped to the front of my “to-watch” queue when I read about all the butthurt generated by the controversial ads placed on the shuttle train here in Manhattan, which I think runs between Grand Central and Penn Station.

"...it's Tuesday..."
“…it’s Tuesday…”

Anyway, the shower is really, really well done. The acting is first-rate, the visuals are well done and the story is very engaging. It’s also very, very intense in ways that I had expected. I just didn’t expect them to be placed so well into the story I guess, like when the highway patrolman casually mentions the dust in the air is ash from the incinerator, because “it’s Tuesday” and that’s just the day for burning invalids and the terminally ill. It’s just such a casual drop of something so inhuman, that it really puts the world you’re becoming a part of through this series into much clearer perspective, in just a few seconds of dialog. Then, at the end of the second episode, so much was said and not said in those few minutes. I’m just amazed at how much is conveyed by this story, with the use of camera work and clever dialog. “I’m not a monster” indeed.

I need to get around to reading the book for this at some point, and after seeing the first two episodes of this, I’m going to just put Philip K. Dick on my reading list.

Shall We Play A Game? (WarGames, 1983)

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I am reading a book called Ready Player One, by Ernest Cline. It’s about a bleak but believable future when the Earth has nearly exhausted its natural resources. People flock to the cities to be near reliable infrastructure and mostly live in sprawling shantytown areas called “the stacks”, so-called because they are constructed of trailer homes, RVs and even shipping containers that have been mounted into steel, vertical frames. Jobs are scarce and food is rationed. There is very little hope in the average person’s life for rising above the poverty level.

To escape this reality, people log into a 3D simulation called The OASIS. That stands for something, but I can’t remember what right now. Access requires a visor and haptic feedback gloves at a minimum, but there are higher end devices like full body suits that offer greater sensory feedback. The whole simulation is free to use and is maintained by charging real money for teleportation fees to reach other worlds and areas. The majority of commercial and leisure activity shifts to the OASIS and eventually, even school is held within the OASIS, since it eliminates travel costs and the software prevents misbehavior during class.

The creator of the OASIS dies as the sole owner of Gregarious Simulation Systems. He has no heir and creates an elaborate contest built into and hidden within the OASIS to determine who will win everything. The prize is open to anyone, but making it through the contest requires extensive knowledge of the 1980s, a decade that the OASIS’s creator was particularly obsessed with. The book takes place in (I think) the 2040s, but the promise of hundreds of millions of dollars for completing the quest first causes the entire world to become interested in the 1980s again.

Because the book relies so heavily on 1980s pop culture for its plot, there is a lot of name dropping. I was born in the early 80s so some of it is familiar to me. Other stuff I read about and it feels familiar, like going to the arcade and dropping quarters in a machine, or using pay phones in the street, or mentions of bands that I recognize and still remember hearing on the radio regularly in the early 90s. I wonder if this book would even be interesting to anyone who wasn’t born in or near the 80s? It’s nostalgic in a way, but I don’t know that I would care to read this book if it was based on, say, the 50s or 60s.

In addition to reminding me of a lot of cool stuff, like Atari game cartridges, Ready Player One is also introducing me to some great stuff that I’d never seen or heard of before, like this movie called “WarGames”, produced in 1983. After noticing the movie title in the book I found it on Netflix and watched it.  It has a great Back to the Future vibe to it. There’s this shift in movie and TV now, where everything seems to be post-apocalyptic or focused on the imminent demise of the human species. In the 80s movies were about progress; now people seem to be fixated on decline, myself included. I can’t wait for the next season of The Walking Dead to start, for example.

Anyhow, if you get a chance, both the book and the movie are worth checking out.