Alcalde 2009

If there's one thing worse than political campaign ads...



It's political campaign ads featuring rich, educated, white politicians doing a piss-poor job speaking another language. I guess you could say at least he tried, but apparently he was supposed to be fluent by this year....

To be filed under: things they do better than us

When I first was on a New York subway platform, I couldn't figure out what these huge black cylinders were:



In London -- in fact, all over Britain -- litter bins were removed from train stations long ago, but New York found some giant, solid scary-looking bins and decided to stick with rubbish collection on its public transit. (Well, kind of. The subway is definitely dirtier than London underground. Possibly this is because the over-sized, iron-cased bins are not only impossible to empty but also difficult to accurately fill, since the hole into which you put your rubbish has just the diameter of a pint glass -- all the rest of that beast is made up of bomb-proof iron cladding.)

I wasn't even 100 percent sure they were bomb proof so in the interests of Journalism I thought I'd do some research. Five minutes using Google didn't produce much in the way of enlightenment -- although I found this article from The Brotherhood of Locomotive Engineers and Trainmen which suggested they are, indeed, bomb proof (to an extent) and they arrived in NYC's subways a little before I did in 2004.

Some more googling time later and I had found various articles about the arrival of bomb-proof bins in London - is that right Londoners? How things have changed since I left....

An expensive night at our local

Having cooked for ourselves four nights in a row (which is an act of extreme self-discipline in NYC, where supermarkets are expensive and cheap eateries are plentiful) we decided we deserved a night off and wandered over to a bar across the road... Where we discovered it was NYC Craft Beer Week and they had more than 20 local beers on tap - and free samples, and a raffle... We had a couple of pints each (I had an Otter Creek (Vermont) Oktoberfest to begin with -- which was alright -- and then a Southern Tier (NY) Harvest, which was supposed to be like an English bitter... It wasn't, but it was tasty enough) and apart from somehow managing to order three baskets of fries/chips by accident and looking like the biggest pigs at the bar, we were having a good time. It being Thursday, though, we decided to call it a night after two pints and some samples* so we wandered back across the road...

At which point we discovered that neither of us had our keys with us. Some swear words later, I used my work-issued blackberry (which I had never before appreciated) to google East Village Locksmith -- and 15 minutes later a nice young Israeli had drilled a hole in our lock, put in a new lock, given us two new keys and charged us $285.... Ah, New York.

(To be honest, I'm a dab hand at getting locked out and I'm pretty impressed I've lived in this place for more than a year without this happening before. Growing up, my parents never let us have keys to the house (actually, I think my brothers got keys -- I was spoiled and picked up from everywhere I went -- the benefit of being the only girl, although I whined about my lack of independence at the time...) so I didn't learn to use keys (ie, remember to take them with me everywhere) until I went to uni... Where the showers were outside of my room and I regularly locked myself out while only wearing a towel first thing in the morning. I set some kind of record for the towel-clad 'walk of shame' across the lawn to the porters' lodge at least 10 times in my first term... By my second term, I learned to leave my door on the latch, which meant I'd come back from rowing or even from the occasional lecture and discover half my year group in my room drinking tea.)

*I also tried the Wolaver's pumpkin ale, which I liked a lot. I'm becoming a fan of pumpkin beers - I like the Smuttynose pumpkin ale too, and not just because it's from Portsmouth, NH.

Will you vote for my mom?

Not that I wasn't sympathetic to the causes of the American Revolution to begin with, but after three years living here I definitely know what taxation without representation feels like.

Tomorrow, there are 'primary' elections for New York City offices including ones I've heard of like Mayor and City Council and ones I haven't heard of like borough president and comptroller. I have amassed such a stack of Vote For Mayor Bloomberg flyers (even though I can't possibly be on the voters' register) that I might have a teaparty to throw them off the Brooklyn Bridge. And as I left the supermarket this evening, a balding guy handing out leaflets with a picture of a blonde and beaming woman on the front asked me if I'd vote for his mom. Sometimes, it's hard to take this democracy business seriously.

Bank Holiday Monday

Just as our finances started to improve with distance from the wedding, one of our wedding presents needed expensive hip surgery*, I was persuaded to splash out on some swanky new glasses (and a year's worth of contact lenses. I know. But he told me what nice eyes I have....) and I passed an entrance test for a graduate course that I hadn't expect to pass and then had to cough up a grand in tuition... AND THEN we spent the few dollars I had left over from my wages paid on Friday on some tasty German beers to celebrate Bank Holiday Sunday.... So yes, I did indeed spent my Bank Holiday Monday slightly hungover, mostly broke and on the sofa watching a Later With Jools Holland marathon on a channel I'd barely ever made it to before, somewhere up in the 80s.

From time to time, between reflections on what a remarkably terrible interviewer Holland is (he makes me cringe - I almost expect him to forget the name of the person he's talking to) how old the lead singer from James looked, or whether Paul Weller or Spiritualized were being deliberately made to look old by the presence of some young whipper snappers like the Fratellis, I wondered about the BBC. I think I've discussed my mixed feelings about the beeb before, but I just can't figure it out -- their general strategy seems to be to try and sell whatever they can sell to the cable channels, and then they put what's left on BBC America, along with some cheap crap they picked up from ITV (although Footballers Wives is one of my favourite guilty pleasures). I know this, because the quality of what is on BBC America is so dire (their U.S. charter appears to dictate that at least 75 percent of their airtime must be devoted to You Are What You Eat and some or other Gordon Ramsay vehicle). So how on earth did they manage to sell Jools Holland, even though it was to an arty channel I known for showing hours of Julliard rehearsals and not a whole lot else? I do love a bit of Jools, but I hardly think it's the best of the beeb - low quality production, painful-to-watch two-minute interviews and a hodge-podge mix of old farts with guitars and embryonic popsters wearing cast off eighties fashions. Clearly, though, some exec over here thought it would go down a treat, and who's to argue. I watched it.

I just don't understand the telly here - it was so much simpler when I had four channels and none of them had anything I wanted to watch on.