Tomorrow is Earth Day

The city has a whole bunch of free events that you can be a part of. Especially with the weather playing spoilsport.

Earth Day at Grand Central

Green Apple Music & Arts Festival

NY Green Events and Ideas

Stop Global Warming

Here is some history about Earth Day.

Here is the official site of the Earth Day Network

Image courtesy Fight Global Warming

Remember the famous line “If its Saturday, it must be Chinatown”.

Ok I made that one up, but this Saturday, Chinatown is surely the place to be.

A street food festival is in order, and that is where i will be. The weather seems to want to play spoilsport, but what the heck, I am going.

As their official site informs

Back by overwhelming demand, over 50 restaurants, tea houses, bakeries and specialty food shops will offer $1 or $2 tasting plates throughout tasting corridors on Mott, Mulberry, Baxter, Bayard, Pell, Doyers and Mosco Streets in Chinatown, NYC. Mott Street will be closed to traffic from Canal to Worth for your strolling and munching pleasure. The only traffic will be from the other eaters and the occasional dancing lion! [ link ]

There are other activities planned around…..like writing the funniest fortune cookie message, et al.

My advice, dont get distracted, just EAT !!

When: Saturday, April 22, 2006, rain or shine
Where: Mott, Mulberry, Baxter, Bayard, Pell, Doyers and Mosco Streets
Getting There: 6, J, M, N, Q, R, W, Z to Canal St station
Hours: 1:00 – 6:00 pm
Admission: $1.00 and $2.00 a plate

The doormen of New York are on the verge of striking out !! The New York Doormen’s Union has set tonite midnight as the deadline for their talks, otherwise from tomorrow, only doors, no men !!

Doormen are a luxury in most New York buildings. But they are as integral a part of the city as the hot dog !!

Doormen are as quintessentially New York as the Statue of Liberty, yellow cabs and bagels. So ingrained are they in the culture that Jerry Seinfeld devoted an entire episode of his television comedy series to a doorman, and in Sex and the City the sassy redhead, Miranda, was dumped by her boyfriend via the doorman. [ link ]

What this means for all of us (or rather those !!) is that we gotta now

OPEN our own doors……

TAKE OUT our own GARBAGE

HAIL our own CAB

CLEAN our own hallways.

SORTING our own mail

My Oh !! My…….so much agony.

Aren’t we a spoiled population. Thankfully only a million of the nearly 7 million NYCers have the luxury of a doorman. For the remaining of us….and yes i live in a brownstone…..and am my own doorman….life will just go on.

As much as this develops into another labour dispute, whose side are you on ??

For the most part, doormen serve people for whom a few dollars more is no issue. On the other hand, developers and building owners dont want to pay the doormen more. In the recent past NYC is slowly developing into a labour-strifed city !!

(image copyrights)

New Guinea blend coffee as sold at various locations – particularly Porto Rico trading company (I go to the one in the E. Village) – is probably a blend beyond all others. Every morning I wake up and almost in a drone-like manner make 2 cups of this delicious coffee. Why do I love it so much? It’s probably because it has a flavor added to it that most other coffees don’t. It’s tropical. It’s downright delicious.

My favorite used to be Rainforest Crunch but they stopped serving it at the Organic Grill and then I was sad. I could still order it online, but haven’t gotten around to doing it yet.

I just wanted to let all those coffee fans out there know that New Guinea is probably the greatest blend, except the one they’re serving over at Starbucks. Their New Guinea tastes god awful.

Last night on the Q train on my way back home, I’m sitting there somewhat drunk reading the NYer (that I always get a day later than everybody else!) when we stop at DeKalb Ave. I’m not really paying attention to the people around me for the above-mentioned reasons UNTIL a woman says “hey sir, your bag!” I look up tentatively, see an empy seat, a black backpack, and through the window the man who had just been sitting there, walking down the platform.

The guy sitting next to me jumps up, stands between the doors, and tries to get the outside man’s attention saying things like “Sir! You left your bag!” But outside guy is not listening/hearing and keeps walking away. At this point, the whole section of the car is sort of excited about the commotion. The conductor says Stand Clear of the Closing Doors! and the doors start closing on the guy still trying to get backpackless man’s attention who is still walking away. Somebody says, “Throw out the bag!” and soon everyone is saying some version of “Throw out the bag!” “Throw it out!” as the doors are closing on the guy standing between them. He hesitates for a couple seconds, as our exhortations get louder, then he grabs the backpack and throws it through the closing doors onto the platform. The train leaves the station and we collectively breathe a sigh of relief.

I wondered for a second whether I’d be hearing some kind of news story about a backpack bomb in DeKalb the next morning and pondered how the phrase “in a post 9/11 world…” suddenly acquired meaning for me.

If you’re going to have rats running around in Theater 1 during the movie, please encourage them to race down the aisle during the slow, unimportant parts of the film. Otherwise, it makes the movie kind of hard to follow.

(I’m guessing the rats are regulars, because when I mentioned their appearance to a worker as I exited, he did not seem at all surprised.)

Thanks,
Lisa

The Roosevelt Island cabel cars lost power last night while people were riding inside. The rescue efforts started at 5:15 pm and ended at 5 am today. Should it really take 12 hours to rescue 69 people? I thought that was kind of slow…but at least everyone survived.
I have always wanted to ride those cable cars . . . now I’m questioning whether or not I still should want the same.

(Ruth Fremson/The New York Times)
(AP Photo/Dima Gavrysh)

ABC (Channel 7) is running a “Breaking News Story” about how the Roosevelt Island Tram is stuck on the cable in mid-air.

A 4 minute ride has turned into a 6 hour ordeal.

More here….check out the live images.

Whole Foods is expensive. Your local (Chinese/Indian/Non-Native New Yorker) grocer* is probably going to be fresher and cheaper. I just bought some awesome garlic cloves from this Queens grocer instead of going to Whole Foods which would have ended up costing me more because I have a bad addiction to plump vegan cookies. But it’s not just the cloves; you can even find fresh tofu – the particular grocer I go to make their own and serve it up in these little green plastic containers – they’re so awesome, cheaper seltzer water, and of course your pick of various garden/veggie burgers. I’m beginning to like these even better than supermarkets. . .

*I didn’t want to make it about the origin of the country of your grocer – there may be a fresh vegetable & fruits store out there that is owned by a family of New Yorkers that have been around for ages – I just have never shopped there.

You know you haven’t left New York in a long time when the sight of manicured lawns and planned communites shocks you back to suburban reality and it hits you that this is the way most people live outside our self-contained universe.

Three months in NY and I start getting that urge to travel and escape and breathe fresh air again.

Two days away and I’m almost sure I must have missed something important in the city.

The best part of leaving though is when you get back and everything is just as busy and normal as you left it. And you know you haven’t really missed anything in the two days while you were away, except perhaps living in New York.