freshblog

31 diamond rings returned gets cabbie $100 tip

2007-02-07T16:47:24-05:00

NYC Cabbie Returns Bag of Diamond Rings ASSOCIATED PRESS NEW YORK (AP) - A taxi driver returned a black bag carrying 31 diamond rings to a passenger who earlier had given him a 30-cent tip on an $11 ride. Hours after Osman Chowdhury dropped off the passenger, he tracked her down through a flurry of phone calls and returned the bag, which she had left in the taxi's trunk. The unidentified woman, who said she was a jeweler, offered a $100 reward. Chowdhury accepted the money to cover the fares he lost while tracking her down. Chowdhury, a native of Bangladesh, told the New York Daily News that he didn't so much as consider keeping the gems. "I'm a hard worker," the soft-spoken cabbie said. "I enjoy my life. I'm satisfied. I'm not going to take someone else's money or property to make me rich. I don't want it that way." "When I find something left in my cab, and I can return it to the owner, I feel very happy. I feel proud," he said.

Tags: diamond rings, reward, taxi

It's the First of December and...

2006-12-01T10:23:13-05:00

It's 65 degrees outside, with 24 shopping days (today included) before Christmas. And do you have your poinsettia yet?

Tags: christmas, poinsettia, shopping

Tribeca's bleeding guilty conscience

2006-11-12T11:18:05-05:00

Did you read today's Real Estate section? The two cover stories are vastly illuminating about liberal guilt. Let's say you are like Ginger Strand: you think you are eco-conscious, yet you buy a Prius to ferry your daughter to and from school (that's 10 trips a week) from TriBeCa to the Upper East Side. “It is so ironic that I had to buy a car,” she said. “I had never owned a car in my entire life. I was very holier than thou. I wanted to go to my grave without owning a car.” Why do you feel that's ironic, Ginger? "There was a lot of tween misery involved with the subway,” she said. “It would be really crowded and these kids have these massive backpacks and it wasn’t even convenient to the school once we got off the subway. So then we started taking cabs. And then it occurred to me that if we considered parking fees part of our maintenance, it would still be cheaper to buy a car and park it than to live uptown.” Reminds me of those nice movie stars in southern California proud of driving hybrid Priuses (hello, Julia Roberts) who have been outed taking gas guzzling private jets to balmy destinations (hello, Bahamas). Read between the lines: Ginger feels guilty because she doesn't want her daughter miscegenating with the kids of color on the subway. So she switched to taxis, most of which are driven these days (it cannot help but be noted) by people of color. So Ginger does the southern California thing now: shuttles around the daughter in a private, confined space, where there is no fear of miscegnating with other peoples. And daughter loves this! Her daughter adores the car. “She hugs it,” said Ms. Strand. “She has completely anthropomorphized it. It has a personality. It gets jealous when we rent cars. She named it Totoro after Hayao Miyazaki’s anime movie about benign forest sprites that sort of look like the car.” People, this is not normal. Ginger wants to you think she's just like a normal person. Heck, before she started living like Weezy and George Jefferson's white neighbors in a dee-luxe apartment in the sky, they lived like the regular folk: “He had a grubby little studio in Brooklyn Heights, and I had a grubby little one-bedroom on the Upper West Side, where I was living with my daughter and sleeping in the living room.” she said. “Neither of us had any furniture. We moved in with two futons, bookcases and books and that was pretty much it.” Now she declares from her 1,650-foot loft (with Prius parked in nearby garage): “You can’t buy furniture in New York because it is ridiculously expensive,” she said. So instead, the reader thinks, you should either jet off to Michigan or drive your Prius (“It very reliably gets 49.6 miles per gallon, torturing you with its refusal to go over 50.”) to save money in Michigan on furniture. (Note: Scott Jordan, within walking distance of TriBeCa, sells very well-made, reasonably-priced furniture made in Brooklyn. Sorry, no parking spots out front for your Prius.) Then there is the other cover story in the Real Estate section—which by now I am thinking ought to be renamed "lifestyles of the extravagantly confused solipsistic glass-enclosed hermetic bubble dwellers" section. Except that's too many characters. This other story is about a $38,500 closet. Mind you, these are cover stories, so the editors therefore believe they are of great importance to the average reader. Of course, since I already declaimed driving from TriBeCa to the Upper East Side (uh, six or seven miles, depending on the circuitous route you take to avoid those taxi drivers of color) as extravagant, surely walking or taking a taxi (driven by a driver of color) to the nearest Manhattan Mini-Storage would be a stretch of the imagination, right? (Note: there is usually parking for your Prius at most Mini-Storage locations. South Street Seaport especially, though the one-way streets nearby are confusing to Prius drivers.) So, since you don't want to drive to Mini Storage ("it's tooo far," you whine) or pay the extravagant $29 monthly rental ("that's only at South Street!" you Prius drivers exclaim), you shell out $38,500 for a closet in your condo. Which is much more conveniently located, to be fair. And of course your California closets are already packed with the excessive amounts of clothing you own—and that was beforeUniqlo opened and started selling those cheap Chinese Cashmere sweaters. If you divide $38,500 by $29, that's 1327 1/2 months of Mini-Storage, or 110 1/2 years worth of storage. So this closet had better be valuable. And it is! Listen to this: “Closet space is so precious in Manhattan,” said Monica Klingenberg, an executive vice president of Marketing Directors Inc., an agency that markets and sells luxury co-ops and condos. “We’re all trying to eke every square inch out of our living space, so the ability to have additional storage space is just a gold mine.” Monica sees closets as worth their weight in gold (when full, obviously). Moreover, "Most important, the Prius made it possible to continue living happily in TriBeCa." (Sorry, I couldn't help but insert that sentence from the other article here. I actually meant to insert this one: “We collect everything, so we really needed this extra storage,” Mrs. Alonso said.) And a Ms. Levitan summarizes the essential nature of all things for the reader: “The city is all about scaling down,” she said, “and I work very hard at not being a pack rat. But if I didn’t have my closet for overflow, all my things would get ruined. They’d all be wrinkled.” Summary: It's all about wrinkles. With apologies for all my parenthetical asides, there was an election this past week. Will that have an influence on Real Estate? You're reading the wrong paper if you want to know about that. But if you want to know more about wrinkles, you hopefully read the review of the Times' critical shopper Alex Kuczynski. Because if you don't feel guilty about ferrying your daughter around in a Prius in Manhattan, and you don't feel guilty about spending $38,500 on an extra closet for hold things you don't need (note: that's why the Container Store was invented), then it's time to move on to dealing with wrinkles. But first make sure to read No Parking: Condos Leave Out Cars. Because even though there was an election this past week (which might possibly have an influence on future Real Estate prices as well as our denial of global warming), parking is a big issue for condo dwellers. Just ask Ginger Strand!

Tags: container store, leo decaprio, liberal guilt, prius, scott jordan, tribeca, upper east side, wrinkles

Uniqlo finally opens on Broadway

2006-11-10T12:44:20-05:00

SoHo has yet another chain store, this time the Japanese-based Uniqlo that opened just after 11 am this morning. At 546 Broadway in the new box-store district of SoHo, Uniqlo has a lot of competition—Old Navy and H&M are within spitting distance. And despite the slick flooring, glass elevators and very neat displays, the stuff is all made in China. I examined over 40 different articles of clothing—blazers, gloves, hats, coats, jeans, underwear and socks—and every single item was made in China. In case you were wondering why the prices are so low, that's why. While Old Navy might not exactly have the greatest interior designers, obviously it's that audience Uniqlo is targeting. To quote Uniqlo's chairman Tadashi Yanai: The UNIQLO SoHo NY global flagship store is the cornerstone of our plan to develop a strong presence in the United States by offering consumers of all ages the perfect balance of fashionable, basic casual wear at the lowest prices in the market. The fast fashion concept is wearing thin, to crib from an article in today's New York Times. And visiting Uniqlo, you can readily see why. But if you're a fan of garish lighting and all-white displays, then head up lower Broadway a bit to the NoHo branch of American Apparal, where you can get the finest garments made in the sweatshops of Los Angeles, as opposed to the sweatshops of Shenzhen.

Tags: old navy, Tadashi Yanai, uniqlo

this business is trash!

2006-06-13T11:32:35-04:00

I was biking along like Kermit the Frog this morning, having a wonderful time tooling about on my way to Trader Joe's. (Word of warning: most of the frozen foods I was about to buy were thawed. That means summer is here, the time when milk is already expired by the time you buy it because the morons at the supermarket have left it sitting outside in the sun for 45 minutes.) Anyhow I pulled up to the light alongside a garbage truck at Irving Place and 14th Street. (You wonder why a bicycle would bother to stop for a light, right? Well, there were many big trucks on 14th Street and I didn't need to get squashed. I have bills to pay!) The driver looked down at me and I looked up and said, "How's everything in the garbage business?" His reply: "Picking up!" Speaking of all-time worst jokes ever, I was again on said bicycle last night, heading home after dodging pedestrians on the bike path. I was biking alongside two coppers in a thick SUV. The one on the passenger side was singing Big Country's "In a Big Country," and I was about to tell him that he'd make more money at The Village Vanguard when I observed both coppers were extremely busy observed some girls' butts. They were totally mesmerized. The ladies walked away and I struck up a conversation with them: "Kinda reminds me," said I, "did you hear the one about the rope?" "Naw," cop #2 replied. "Skip it," I said, pedalling away.

Tags: big country, bike, bike path, cop, kermit the frog, west village

overheard—as in all of my calls, ever

2006-06-06T16:27:00-04:00

There was a foul-mouthed chica on the subway platform in Williamsburg yesterday saying dirty things. It would have been impossible to overhear her, except maybe if I'd had those Bose noise-cancelling headphones plugged into my iPod. Even then I likely would have heard this stream of abuse, laced with profanity. But then I realized: that you're paying too much for long distance. Actually, if you're reading this, you're probably not paying too much for long distance. You probably switched to Vonage a while ago. (Isn't it neat how Vonage can play the NSA for you, giving you a handy cross-referenced list of everyone who's called you and everyone you've called. Don't let your mom know about this feature, ok?) Or maybe you got so pissed that you simply decided to use SkypeOut for all your outbound calls now that it's free. As for the inbound calls, you decided just to let ppl contact you at your leisure—i.e. when you are online. No way the NSA can archive those calls, right? Wrong. But what difference does it make? When every single call every made gets archived, then what's there to worry about? The telcos' lawyers sure aren't worrying about it...they got the PR people to issue statements denying they had helped the NSA at all. Naw, they just let their tech guys walk in and jigger the wiring in those 'closets', though they aren't admitting that either. Which reminds me of a funny story. Remember that massive snowstorm in February? Well, my phone line got so bad after the storm that it became unusable. So I phoned up ye olde evil empire, and got them to check my line via computer. Of course, their computer said my line was fine. I was calling from a payphone, because I did not want to waste my precious cellphone minutes on speaking with the evil empire's computerized system that takes several minutes to get you to a human. Anyhow, the empire dispatched a technician from its lower Manhattan deathstar, and this fellow was more charming and helpful than the last guy they sent in September '05. (The last guy got three parking tickets during his 30 minutes at my old residence, and was gleeful his employer was getting screwed by the city. After all, it was his last day of work.) So this fellow and I went searching for the dreaded switch box, the repository of copper wire that connects the deathstar's remote nucleii to your apartment building. Seems the only way to access it was through a greasy restaurant kitchen with much slop lying around. "¡Hola amigos!" he gleefully shouted out to the campesinos busy doing all those tasks which gabachos for immigration reform claim native-born no longer are willing to do. We went outside and found the deathstar's switch box, which was wide open, with a heaping portion of metallic copper spaghetti cable twisted in all directions. "How tough would it have been for the last repair guy to close this up?" he mutters. We then returned to my fire escape, coated with a thick layer of construction dust, discussing property values in Puerto Rico while he laid fresh cable. Anyhow, after all that nonsense I ditched the evil empire and got Vonage. Back to the profanity: there is a tremendous government database lurking in some data storage facility that is the world's greatest encomium of vulgar words, an entire web of who's-calling-whom and swearing up a blue streak. In sum, this might be a great research tool for academics to determine the extensive use of four-letter words rather than an insidious government plot to keep track of everyone's phone calls. Besides, as a friend pointed out recently, if we all use the word Osama twice per phone call, then the government is going to need to order a lot more data farms. update: Republican Senator Specter decided late today that he won't bother questioning the telcos. That prompted Vermont Senator Leahy to respond: "Why don't we just recess for the rest of the year...and simply say we'll have no more hearings, and Vice President Cheney will just tell the nation what laws we'll have--he'll let us know which laws will be followed and which laws will not be followed."

Tags: cable, data farm, deathstar, evil empire, phone, profanity, verizon

Fat man to arrive NYC thinner

2006-05-08T21:30:36-04:00

Steve Vaught will arrive Tuesday in New York after his cross-country walk to highlight morbid obesity. He's lost over 100 pounds, having started out at over 400 pounds. Some quick facts, courtesy of The Guardian: Vaught, 40, left Oceanside, California, on April 10 last year. It has taken him 394 days to reach New York, covering 2,843 miles and wearing through 14 pairs of shoes. He weighed 186kg (409 lbs.) when he started, and was 127kg (280 lbs.) by last month. He has put on weight recently and is now 140kg (308 lbs.). His website, fatmanwalking.com, receives 2m hits a month and he has been sent 80,000 emails. He has suffered a knee injury and kidney stones, and separated from his wife. Update: He made it! And was also on the Today show. more here

Tags: fat man, steve vaught

mailman burned sacks of mail

2006-05-04T10:07:50-04:00

Every New Yorker's worst nightmare: the letter or check never arrives. Where did it go? In today's New York Post I read about a mailman arrested for stealing mail yesterday after firefighters discovered hundreds of undelivered letters smoldering in his boarded-up Brooklyn apartment, authorities said. Seems the postal police wanted to know about those ten bags of mail dating back to 2002 stashed in his building. Even weirder, according to Newsdaywas that the stuff only got discovered because the mailman's house burned down last month after Michael Adams, 22, plowed a friend's BMW into two houses at 125 mph. Adams was killed as the car when up in a fireball. Only in Brooklyn, folks....

Tags: burning mail, mailman, usps

25th annual Sakura Matsuri cherry blossom festival at Brooklyn Botanic Garden

2006-05-01T15:37:50-04:00

The perfect weather on Saturday and Sunday made for yet another wonderful cherry blossom festival at the Brooklyn Botanic Garden. Fresh brought the digital camera to capture the great canopy of cherry blossoms...and also brought a big appetite for those wonderful bento boxes. So many activities in the cherry esplanade and throughout the garden, it was no wonder the place was packed within 30 minutes of opening on Saturday!

Tags: bento box, brooklyn botanic garden, cherry blossom festival, sakura matsuri

NYC sewer doormat

2006-04-13T21:17:20-04:00

Sheer genius: bring a little touch of the outside inside with the NYC Sewer doormat.

Tags: doormat, nyc, sewer