Today, as I casually pondered what I would do with my day off, I had a jolting moment that I’m sure many people in the tri-state area have experienced. I thought to myself that maybe I would head over to my beach, particularly its recreation areas– and then was struck with the memory that I couldn’t.
Yesterday, I received the one phone call I’d been dreading for over 30 years: “Howard Stein is dead.” It turns out Howard died back on October 14, 2012 after an eight-day hospitalization, but I didn’t learn of his death until yesterday. I knew he was deathly ill the last year, and when his surgeon recently refused to do a final operation, Howard told me his heart had finally turned against him and become a “ticking time bomb.”
As I paged back through my calendar for the last six weeks to memorialize the final events of my life with Howard, I reflected back on our final telephone conversation on October 1, 2012. He told me how much he appreciated the letter I wrote celebrating his 90th birthday. He said he read the letter every day. That meant a lot to me. He was my master.
One the first day of October, Howard and I left it that Janna and I would visit him in Stamford, and that he would check his doctor schedule and call me back to let us know what day would work best.
I never heard from him again.
A week later he was in the hospital — never to see the sky again.
As you can see in the graphic below, I tried to call him on October 5th and 11th to check on our visit date. There was nobody home when I called. On October 22 and November 13 I wrote him letters — our one, ancient, guaranteed way of always getting in touch when time and tide and humanity and the phones failed us — to inquire about the visit.
I had no idea was writing to a dead man.
Now I know how Bartleby really felt working in the Dead Letter Office.
Monday night, at 11:00 pm sharp in Jersey City, New Jersey, the lights went out and stayed off until last night at 7:43pm. That’s three days without power or heat. Hurricane Sandy was a massively nasty beast, and we’re just now starting the recovery process. We are hungry and scavenging for food. Supermarkets are closed. Few places have power.
I read something interesting online a while ago, but I can’t remember the source material. The gist of the story was that the pre-recorded automated announcements you hear in train stations – and other public transit hubs and modes — are purposefully driven by subconscious sexual stereotypes. The female voices you hear provide “information” about the current stop and next stop, while the pre-recorded male voices give you warnings and orders like, “Get out of the way!”
I had high hopes for Verizon and their LTE network when I first unboxed my new iPad. I knew the LTE spec could be as high as 20Mbps down and 10Mbps up — but I’d settle for half of those numbers. I’d read reports that people were getting LTE speeds in NYC of 10Mbps down and 6Mbps up and I’d love to be able to live that fast on the web.
Unfortunately, my initial tests in Jersey City were lousy, and yesterday, I did some informal LTE testing around Bryant Park in New York City. You’d think at 6th Avenue and 40th Street you’d have a saturating LTE signal from Verizon. Here are the results of my first, dismal, test: Two Verizon LTE bars and 1.7Mbps down and 1.47Mpbs up. Ugh. That’s miserable 3G territory!
Years ago, when I was teaching at several New Jersey colleges and universities, a few of my students randomly confided in me how they felt purposefully ripped off by their Newark college admission offices. They believed they were tricked into studying in Newark instead of New York City.
Today is Opening Day for baseball in New York City and I love this time of year. We enjoyed six weeks of Spring Training and now the season proper opens today — we hope, if it doesn’t rain all day! — and the time for renewal and freshness is now.
I love mashups that give you a different perspective on living. We love Urban Cave Art and now there’s a new treat for your ears called — YouAreListening.to — where you sit and listen to the police sounds of the city set to a random soundtrack.
Janna and I are delighted to announce we will be teaching our “Hardcore ASL” style of American Sign Language as a new series of American Sign Language courses offered by CUNY-SPS — the City University of New York’s School of Professional Studies in the Off-Camps College.
CUNY — The City University of New York — is a unique institution dedicated to teaching “regular people” really great things at a highly affordable, yet sophisticated, intellectual level. If you have a high school diploma, or an equivalent degree, a CUNY college is required to accept you as a student.
When I attended graduate school at Columbia University in the City of New York in the late 1980′s, one of chits of living on the Morningside Heights Campus — believe it or not — was getting a phone number with a 212 Area Code. I know that may sound silly to some, but if you had a 212 phone number, that meant you lived in the exclusive borough of Manhattan, and you were desirable and important and to be envied by the rest of the world.
David Paterson is the legally blind, outgoing, Governor of the Great State of New York. He was an abject failure as Eliot Sptizer’s replacement and the residents of New York have been biding their time until he finally disappears from office in the dark of night.
The weekend snowstorm that tackled us into Monday opened 23 inches of Whoopass here in Jersey City, and many pockets of humanity in and around the Tri-State area are still trying to dig out of the drifts. We lost power several times Sunday and Monday and lots of neighborhood trees were tipped into felling by the heavy, wet, snow. Streets are still unplowed. Sidewalks are still impassable. It’s a winter whiteout of neighborhood morality and city leadership.
When you grow up cold in the Midwest, one of the first impulses is to flee from the gloominess and the misery surrounding you: No oceans. Few lakes. Lots of ponds. Faraway mountains in non-neighboring states encapsulate you and make Summers stiflingly hot and humidified. When we reach the age of consent in our time of reason, many of us bolt West to Los Angeles or East to New York. Not many head up North to Minneapolis or Chicago and, fewer still, move Southward to Kansas City. If you are a tender Californian, I urge you to stop reading this article right now. You will not be happy with the continuation of my argument.
