Jolt Country

Well, we are back. I'm going to put it all down in a doc or text file first then copy and paste it here. Just going to throw some random pictures here for tonight and get cracking on the post tomorrow after work if I can find an hour or two.

This is a hot pastrami and mustard on knich (sp?) some jewish bread.. they called it ' #5. The beastie boy' Sorry it's blurry. I left my bifocals in the hotel room. Looked allright when I took the photo...


This is a Cuban rice car. Couldn't tell if the owner thought it was funny or cool.. nice hood ornament in front of the scoop.



This was in the men's room at Lincoln Center. Such wit they have there...It says Julliard acting diplomas; take one.

I thought this was funny until we tried to go through the Lincoln tunnel. they take six lanes of tollbooths and have everyone squeeze down to two lanes. Unreal!

!It's only three hundred something miles away but it might just as well be a different world.
hell, it IS a different world. One of the first things I noticed was the change in language, even though we were all speaking English. In New York you don't wait in line, you wait on-line. you don't swipe your ATM card, you dip your card. And there is the previously mentioned 'stayogo' preference selection when ordering food. English really is a second language there, even the tourists only speak some kind of Spanish or Russian. Makes you wonder why the dudes in the United Nation building always wear those headsets when everyone on the streets outside can do just fine without them. It's the biggest naturally occurring tourist trap in the world. Disney was planned to be a clip joint. New York has had hundreds of years of practice separating tourists from their money. And they do it well, there can be no doubt. Seven bucks for a beer. Ten for a mixed drink. Parking is anywhere from thirty to fifty dollars a DAY. Three bucks for a bottle of water. the next time I want to go to an island and pay 3X prices, I 'm going to Hawaii





I will say this, they have the people moving thing down pat. You can hit the subway and be anywhere in the five boroughs in a half hour or so. Can't be done in a street vehicle.



The center of the world that is New york. Where all the wack-a doodles meet. There are just way too many people there doing strange things. I saw a guy dressed in silver paint, standing on a bucket doing robot moves. For tips, of course. Didn't see naked cowboy, tho. Saw SpongeBob waving at people with his tip bag in the other hand.

AArdvark wrote:This was in the men's room at Lincoln Center. Such wit they have there...It says Julliard acting diplomas; take one.

Haha, sick burn on an acting school nobody has ever heard of once five steps beyond the city, NYC native! That's NYC in a nutshell right there. The entire world rises and falls in their miserable cocoon of awful.

I hope you're having a good time, but more, I hope you understand that for the next few weeks, any time a topic is started it's because the original poster is inviting bile and hatred, and for the topic itself to be Garbage Dayed.

Whenever the topic of "filming locations" comes up, I have a couple of stories. That scene in Rain Man, where the two of them stay overnight in the hotel? That was filmed like 20 minutes from my house. And then there's Twister, which was filmed here but could have been filmed anywhere. Oh, and there's The Outsiders, which was filmed in Tulsa. I used to could point out where Matt Dillon got shot, but the tore down both the hotel and the payphone he was using, which makes the intersection hard to find.

And then there's Weird Al's UHF, which was also filmed in Tulsa. A few years ago I visited all the filming locations in the movie, took pictures, and put it on the web.

And ... that's it. I've lived here my whole life and I have, what, four movie locations I can point out?

Then I went to NYC. The week I was there, I saw more movies than that being filmed. On top of that I saw location after location that I recognized from films. I saw guys in Ghostbusters outfits hanging around the Ghostbusters building. I watched two or three movies that week that took place in NYC. It's crazy. When you are there, it really does feel like the center of the universe.

Re: Ghostbusters

Did you mean the firehouse or Sigourney Weaver's place?

I meant the firehouse. I'll dig out a picture tonight.

I've developed a theory about all the Asians all selling the exact same tourist crap, such as I (heart) N Y t-shirts, shot glasses, belts and pink sparkly Yankee hats. First, some background.

These places are everywhere! You can't walk fifty feet without going past a sidewalk table hawking this stuff. There just cant be that big a demand to support all these people. We went into one of these places, it was an actual shop, not just some random table on Sixth Avenue, they wanted five bucks each for t-shirts. Or five shirts for ten bucks. Friends of ours who were with us, have a large family. They wanted eight shirts for fifteen dollars, here is a ten and a five dollar bill. Sales lady says 'No' They promptly replaced the pile of shirts and walked out, money still in hand. Sales lady waits until they reach the door and she shouts: 'OK! You buy!'
So it is possible to haggle, but not many tourists can do it.

Net loss to sales lady: one dollar. (There is no tax on clothes in NYC, something to do with the fashion industry, no doubt) She is probably pissed because she might have been able to sell them for five bucks each.

Anyway, my theory:

They let these people leave their homeland and come here provided that they take a huge carton of cheap goods with them. (All the stuff is made in China or Korea anyway) They have to sell the entire contents of the box within eight months and mail the profits back home or the secret clothes police show up one dark night and murder them with cheap vinyl rhinestone belts. They live in fear of that day arriving and will stop at nothing to get random tourists to cough up five bucks for a cheap fanny pack that proclaims, 'New York Fuckin' City'.


THE
WHERE'D WALDO-SAN GO
AARDVARK

And another thing...Every night is garbage night in NYC. Pickup was around midnight Thurs, Friday and Saturday.
there is just no end to the amount of garbage placed out by the curb. Makes you wonder...


THE
OVERWORKED SANITATION
ENGINEERS
AARDVARK

AArdvark wrote:And another thing...Every night is garbage night in NYC. Pickup was around midnight Thurs, Friday and Saturday.
there is just no end to the amount of garbage placed out by the curb. Makes you wonder...

Hah! I noticed the exact same thing when I was there! And there is no "out behind the building" trash pickup, or trash dumpsters. It's just piles of trash bags, out on the sidewalk, every day.

I was also going to add that NYC has some of the most elaborate graffiti I have ever seen, some of it in places that only Spider-man could access. Sorry, no pix.

I have like 100 pictures of graffiti that I took out my train window while riding between NYC and Chicago. Seriously, some of that stuff is crazy elaborate.

By the way, I spent the weekend (or at least one day of it) in the exact opposite of New York City. If NYC was at the North Pole, I was at the South Pole. In Superman's world, I was hanging out at Lex Luthor's pad. You get the drift.





There was no electricity, A/C, or Internet. BUT THAT DIDN'T STOP THE MOSQUITOS!