Two trains collided in Connecticut during the Friday evening rush. Sixty are injured, including five with critical injuries, reports the NY Times.
An eastbound train derailed around 6:10 p.m., colliding with a westbound one just east of Fairfield Metro Station, in between Fairfield and Bridgeport.
Metro-North suspended service between South Norwalk and New Haven, and Amtrak suspended its service between New York and Boston.
I waited…and waited…and waited for the 6 train at 28th yesterday. It was lunchtime, and I was heading down to the East Village to drop off flyers for a book party I’m having next week.
See, after the wild success of The New York Commuter’s Glossary, I’ve ventured into fiction–publishing the novel No Never No More a few weeks back. I’m reading from the thing at an Irish pub called Dorian Gray on Wednesday the 22nd. It shall be fun. C’mon by. If you say you saw this on Trainjotting, I will buy you a Guinness.
I also had a handful of copies of the new book on me: one to leave on the bar at Dorian Gray to, hopefully, drum up a bit of interest, and a few to put on the shelves of St. Mark’s Books.
The “Next train arrives in…” digital sign said the downtown train was due in four minutes. Then it was three, and two–and back to four again.
A train goes by, honking its horn, stopping for no one.
Finally, around 10 minutes after I arrived on the platform, and after I’d read the whole of AM-New York…twice…the 6 arrived.
I got on and found my usual spot, standing, back to the door between cars. Claustrophobia thing.
And who’s sitting adjacent to the door but the filmmaker Jim Jarmusch…you know, Down By Law (the jailbreak one with Tom Waits) and Night on Earth (the taxicab one with Winona Ryder) and Broken Flowers (the one that showed, along with Lost in Translation, that Bill Murray could be serious) and Mystery Train (Joe Strummer! Steve Buscemi!) and Ghost Dog (Forest Whitaker as a ninja!). Cool indie stuff, as you can gather.
He’s chatting with some NY Film Academy-type hipster, who gets off at the next stop.
There’s really no one around but me and Jarmusch, sporting a helmet of bright white hair and black shades. I’m looking for reasons not to do what I’m about to do, and really can’t come up with one. He’s not sleeping, he’s not talking, he’s not listening to music.
Most important, he’s not reading.
So I take a copy of my novel out of my bag, and hand it to him.
“Something for you to read on the train,” I said. “I wrote it.”
He smiled.
“You wrote this?” he said. “You’re Mike Malone?”
“Yup,” I said.
“I love the cover,” he said.
I looked for signs from him to back off–I’m really no good at this self promotion thing.
Sensing none, I told him a bit of the back story about the book. I’d written it in 2000. It had a different title and a lot more coarse language. I had an agent, and another agent. (For the full back story, you can see what they said about me in the Mount Pleasant Daily Voice). I had near misses with editors. I had a kid and moved out of the city and finally, a year ago, vowed to get the damn novel over the finish line.
He smiled and congratulated me.
We spoke a bit about his current stuff–a film called Only Lovers Left Alive that will show at Cannes, starring Tilda Swinton, as half of a couple that’s been in love for 200 years. “Vampires,” he added.
He got up to leave at 14th Street. We shook hands. He thanked me for the book.
No, seriously, dude–thank you.
The stretch of Park Avenue South below Grand Central, just east of the Pershing Square Diner and dotted with tourists and luggage waiting for shuttle buses to JFK, is closed to traffic–with a stack of the city’s controversial bike-share bike racks in place.
The stretch also features that rubbery-sandpaper-y stuff underfoot, which elsewhere in the city marks spots where traffic has been closed for pedestrian plazas.
You’ll recall this spot was once the home of a swimming pool made of shipping containers.
The TV networks like to give flashy code-names to their internal projects. If you caught the recent NY Times Magazine cover story about morning television, you noticed that the Today show honchos titled their efforts to eliminate Ann Curry from the morning show “Operation Bambi.”
Well, ABC made a splash at what are called the “upfront” presentations this week, when the networks rent out giant theaters such as Carnegie Hall and Radio City Music Hall to show off their fall shows, while Netflix sets up a stand selling frozen bananas to promote the rebooted Arrested Development. ABC revealed a new live-streaming app so that you can watch ABC stuff, along with news from your local ABC affiliate, on your iPhone or Ipad.
The proper name of the product is Watch ABC.
The code name of the initiative? Project Acela.
So if you order it, don’t be surprised if it arrives 60 minutes late, and breaks down just short of New Brunswick.
It was 8:14–two minutes to spare as I pulled up to the bike rack at Hawthorne.
My plan: Hop on the 8:16, dismount at White Plains, collect my earnings from Waxman’s Newsstand, which has been selling my NY Commuter Glossary for the past year (the newsstand is moving out of the White Plains station soon), and hop on the next Gotham-bound express.
I went to lock my bike at the rack when, dohhh!–utter confusion. The lock that coils around my bike’s sissy bar (there is an actual name for the bar that goes from under the seat to under the steering wheel column, but I don’t know what it is) was gone. Had I lost it on the ride to the train? Was it back in my garage? WTF?
I had one minute.
Could I actually leave my bike out all day, unlocked? Granted, it’s a cheap-ass Wal-Mart ride. But down there in the city, thieves go through considerable effort to steal bikes that are locked up. The vast majority of people in my town would never steal a bike. But then again, there are the day-trippers who attend a school in town because schools in the city will no longer have them. Would they steal a bike?
If I simply leaned my bike against the rack, might that fool any potential bike thief? Was it worth the risk?
I wondered.
Forty five seconds to go.
I decided to roll the bike over to the space under the staircase heading up to the overpass; with more eyes on that spot, I figured, my station bike was less likely to get stolen.
I stopped at the same spot I’d parked the bike at yesterday–one I opt for when it’s raining, as the overpass provides a bit of shelter from the elements, which the rack on the other side of the cafe does not.
And yes, sitting there like a neglected pet, coiled around the metal fence, was the lock I’d inadvertently left since yesterday.
Twenty seconds to go. I locked up and bounded up the steps.
Black 47 got hot in the early ’90s when they were the house band at Paddy Reilly’s, performing colorful, character-driven songs about the Irish experience in New York, and still continue to play the Irish festivals and pubs. Lead guy Larry Kirwan, a shanachie in the true sense of the word, has a bunch of novels and plays out too.
He writes:
Empty vessels make most noise, my granny used to mutter. Jeez, she should be around today – the unrelenting chatter would drive her up the walls.
I write this on a train to New Haven. Directly in front of me a master of the universe has made at least seven noisy phone calls berating, cajoling and generally ramming his opinion down a succession of reluctant throats.
Now you might say I should interrupt and demand that he take into account the silent majority suffering around him. I would counter, however, that there are over 300 million guns in this country and nearly as many stressed out people; besides this gentleman does not strike me as a follower of Mahatma Gandhi.
And anyway he’s only at the same annoyance level as the lady across the aisle who seems to think she is the only one who has ever been blessed with children, and that the universe waits with bated breath for the next pearl of wisdom that may drop from the bratty three-year old Einstein accompanying her.
Whatever happened to the etiquette that once governed the sharing of public space? Gone with the cowboys, I suppose.
Well, well, well.
We feel like a guy who fell asleep on the train in the tunnel out of Grand Central, and woke up three months later in Poughkeepsie.
See, sometime around the first of February, our web hosting company, Lunarpages, shut us down due to the appearance of “malicious scripts” in some of our files. They’d sent us emails in advance, telling us we better fix those scripts, or we would be shut down.
Well, if you haven’t studied coding at Carnegie-Mellon, you’re probably not well enough equipped to solve the condundrum of malicious scripts floating around your back end.
So they shut me down.
Getting the site back online was something like how I imagine getting a visa was in ’50s Soviet Union. See, Lunarpages, after shutting down your site, then offers to get it online again–for a handsome fee.
Thankfully, Trainjotting pal G. Francis–the mayor of Mamaroneck, the sultan of the Sound Shore, the It boy of I.T.–was kind (and patient) enought to finally…finally…sort through the malicious scripts mess, and get Trainjotting back on the rails.
Well, what did I miss while I was gone? Grand Central turned 100. A Hawthorne man, Joseph Bondi, was killed walking home from the train station after work. He was 47 and a father; he was you and me. Hopefully the town of Mount Pleasant can make something positive happen out of this tragedy and consider more crosswalks or sidewalks in the more dangerous pedestrian spots around town.
Our friend Emily at the fabulous IRidetheHarlemLine is going strong.
Our Commuter Glossary is a heckuva clever Father’s Day gift.
And there’s a “parade” of classic trains at Grand Central this weekend.
It’s good to be back. We hope we’ve not completely slipped off your (or, perhaps more important, Google’s) radar.
Happy rails.
The scene in the Metro-North bathroom Saturday night.
I added one vacated vessel to this rogue’s gallery of empties.
Hint: It wasn’t the Bud Light, the Bud Light tallboy, the Four Loko or the toilet paper.
It was a beer brewed a few miles from my house.
With our elected leaders seeing fit to expand the amount of pay we can deduct for transit expenses, I was poking around the Metro-North site, finding out precisely how much I cough up for my monthly ticket.
Well, that apparently depends on which page I access on the Metro-North site.
According to this one, we Zone 5′ers, including commuters out of Tarrytown, Ossining, Chappaqua and Hawthorne, pay $266 a month.
But I have to say–I like this one better, where the Zone 5 peeps pay a mere $163 a month.
With Metro-North is playing up its 30 year anniversary this month, I can’t help but wonder what year it was where a monthly ticket out of Hawthorne cost just $163.
1998? ’99? Earlier?
The squash Tournament of Champions begins in Grand Central’s Vanderbilt Hall tomorrow.
Ramy Ashour of Egypt is favored.
Social Widgets powered by AB-WebLog.com.
