February 26, 2006
Lost diners of Manhattan include the infamous greasy spoon on the edge of the East Village, the Jones Diner (which dear old proprietor George frequently misspelled as Jone's). From one of the cozy vintage naugahyde booths on Great Jones Street, you could enjoy a view of Time Cafe, now also buried at the graveyard of Manhattan restaurants. But most of all you could enjoy the ambience. Let me take you back in time to this temple of grease, à la Tom Waits' "Nighthawks at the Diner," a bloggish stroll down memory lane from the early '90s:
April 24, 1993 At the Jones Diner, a female customer's complaint about the filthy bathroom reminds me that I was wise to eat at primitive cook shacks in Guatemala, thus building up resistance to food poisoning at restaurants such as this.
April 14, 1993 Leaving the Jones Diner and walking east, a bum at the corner of Bowery and Great Jones Street, selling cigarettes two-for-a-quarter
April 11, 1993 Espied from Jones Diner, a large faded mural that encourages one to "help needy ophaned children."
October 24, 1992 Lunchtime at the Jones Diner, where today's special is HOT CHILLY for $1.75, oxymora included:
"No ice" is heard frequently.
"Hey Harry, gimme a glass of milk whenever you're ready."
The waitress pours a mysterious opaque liquid from a gallon jug into a milkshake tumbler.
Two men sit at the counter:
Nr. 1: How you doin', young fella? Chopped steak.
Nr. 2: Why you work so hard? You work every day.
Nr. 1: I got too many kids. I'm a shipper's helper. Shipping clerk. (turns toward cook) Yo! Chopped steak. You talkin' too much. You workin'?
Cook: I'm listening!
Nr. 1: Better hurry up before you get tired. I've come a long way. Be workin' before you be sleepin'! (to Nr. 2) He knows what I want. Especially on a Saturday. (to cook) How 'bout a soup?
/>Cook: Chopped steak por capitano!
Nr. 1: He ain't even got the steak on! He put it in the toaster! (plate crashes to floor) Gonna get a new cook?
Cook: Whole wheat toast or white toast? (aside) If they order whole wheat toast, they get it.
Nr. 1: That's a good steak he cooked me! (said between mouthfuls of soup)
October 17, 1992
Another fine Saturday luncheon at the Jones Diner (or, according to the menu, Jone's Diner), where amid the frying cheeseburgers various rogues who inhabit this gallery of grease are hard at work. Big Mama, shawl around shoulders, occupies the back booth, its table heaped high with "It is our pleasure to serve you" coffee cups and an enormous steel basin filled with sugar. She deftly shovels one plastic spoonful of sugar into each cup, then pinches the cup between thumb and forefinger, stacking the filled cups far apart from the empty ones. Occasionally the sous chef takes a few dozen cups cash registerward, separted carefully from those that will be filled with black coffee only. A big fella comes in for a cup of ice. The proprietor, George, smacks a fly mid-air, wipes it off with his left hand, then uses the same hand to scoop ice into the cup. A fat man in a cheap raincoat and his greasy friend come in with an agenda: Nr. 1 Man complains that George forgot "her" home fries from the take-out order; when he got home, "she" noticed it. Could he have his 55 cents refunded? George happily refunds the money. Big Mama grimaces. One of Big Mama's dugs pokes through the side of her wrinkled polyester apron. Nr. 1 Man will go home now to see if "she" still wants her home fries. A smallish fellow enters, and omits no detail when ordering his lunch: he explains the toastedness he requires of his toast and that the "to go" portion of his order should include three iced teas, two with three sugars and one with sweet-and-low. And does his plate of food comes with fries? "It is our pleasure to serve you."
Tags:
bowery, diner, george, great jones street, jones diner, lafayette street, nighthawks, time cafe, tom waits
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Posted on 2/26/2006
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February 23, 2006
Now the Donald is fuming over Martha Stewart's scheme to fire him and become the chief on "The Apprentice". "What moron would think you're going to fire the guy with the No. 1 show on television?" Trump told Newsweek yesterday. This is the same multibillionaire who it seems hasn't got the net worth he claims to have, according to a recent book, whose author The Donald is suing.
As today's Daily Snooz reports, Trump has written her a poison-pen letter, likening her deception to the insider-trading scandal that got her prison time.
My my, all the financial fraud, the demonizing of former convicted felons, and the teenage-girl teevee spats reminds this old blogger of high school. Which girl from what clique used to talk like this? "What I didn't like is that I defended Martha many, many times and I never got a note. I never got a phone call saying, 'Donald, thank you very much,'" Trump said. "See, you get a little bit tired of it. Then when her show fails, she blames me on top of everything else."
Ringelmatz has an idea: get Bill Gates in the middle by having him take over the show. He can fire all the programmers working so hard to make Windows Longhorn perform more slowly than your cellphone.
Tags:
daily news, donald trump, lawsuit, martha stewart, new york times, the apprentice, warner books
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Posted on 2/23/2006
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February 09, 2006
That's right, the bathroom is 450 square feet, larger than your average Manhattan one-bedroom apartment, and even bigger than the master bedroom. Motoko Rich notes the truly outsized rooms and lavish excesses of this apartment at 27 N. Moore Street. Although the apartment has apparently been on the market for two years, it's a steal at $8,250,000 (plus monthly maintenance of $2,823 and taxes of $5,500). And to think that just a few years ago this building was a plain old warehouse across from JFK Jr's condo.
Tags:
enormous bathroom, n moore street, tribeca condo
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Posted on 2/9/2006
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February 02, 2006
If January seemed very warm to you, it's because it was. RealClimate.org explains the regional differences, as well as why the United States as a whole was anomalously warm. Perhaps that groundhog will become unemployed in the coming years?
Fortunately, we have a president who now wants to wean us off Mideast oil by 2025, something that both climatologists and ecologists say will have minimal impact by then. We know we are addicted to oil, but what's our methadone going to be? Well, many want to switch to biodiesel, although a reowned professor at Berkeley says this too will have minimal impact. And there are numerous myths about hybrids out there as well. But we are also addicted to coal, which accounts for about half of our energy needs. Yesterday, the West Virginia governor has ordered coal mines shut down after yet more mining deaths there (and in Pennsylvania, home of the beloved groundhog). You might wonder: are we going to emulate China in 2006, with high numbers of mining deaths? Well, it was this Administration that ditched mine safety laws in 2001.
Our president also fortuitously realizes that human-animal hybrids are a bad thing; that was just a SOTU free-throw to crazy religious fundamentalists who also fear the mark of the beast in RFID chips. How nice that the vapid href="http://www.nytimes.com/2006/02/02/fashion/thursdaystyles/02tags.html">Thursday Styles section has an article today on RFID skin implants; with implants, you can do important stuff like remotely start on your car or power on your laptop. (Apparently, dorks can't implant these chips under their epidermis fast enough.) But our president fails to see that God might not bless America if we destroy the environment. Also, while he's jetting around the United States to talk about our oil addiction, he's burning up a lot of it: The Daily News reports today that our Guzzler in Chief gets less than one m.p.g. on his 747, and about .014 mpg on his "car plane" (the C-17 that ferries his limousines around): Bush's 700-mile trip to give his State of the Union encore speech in Nashville yesterday cost $19,594.25 in fuel alone just for Air Force One, according to government figures. He will carry his message over the next few days to Maplewood, Minn., Albuquerque and Dallas before heading back to Washington. That's another 4,341 miles.
Dear addicts, our addiction (if you believe climatologists— WWJD?) is increasing the number of natural disasters. Of course, as Hurricane Katrina showed, we're completely unprepared for natural disasters, and a report today shows that Homeland Security's Mike Chertoff himself was directly to blame for the poor response. But there are positive effects of global warming, aside from ending biodiversity and life as we know it. For example, new shipping lanes in the Arctic could be opened up. We'd have a huge supply of delicious ice cubes from the melting of Antarctica to cool us down on those hot winter nights. And most importantly, the Upper West Side's infamous Mole People could teach us all a thing or two about living underground. Oh wait, wasn't that the fate of the human race (and New Yorkers specifically) in Beneath the Planet of the Apes? Happy Groundhog Day!
Tags:
air force one, antarctica, artic, biodiesel, bush, coal, dork, ethanol, global warming, groundhog day, homeland security, ice cubes, implant, mideast oil, mike chertoff, planet of the apes, president, punxsutawney phil, rfid, too many tags, wwjd
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Posted on 2/2/2006
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