Lest the W train think it barely registered in our consciousness, a batch of hardy New Yorkers turned its last ride into a party last weekend, reports the NY Times. Running from Astoria to lower Manhattan and back, the Dubya was one of the casualties of the MTA’s budget cuts. It had only run since 2001, giving it a similar tenure to that of another famous W, our 43rd president, notes the Times. 

It sounds as though most of the “mourners” were more interested in a fun happening and the chance to drink booze on a train than actually celebrating the train’s last run.

Writes the Times: 

Dozens of mourners were on hand when the final southbound W eased out of the Astoria-Ditmars Boulevard station at 10:17 p.m. (Novelty and boredom were the most cited reasons for showing up.)

The train’s caboose quickly morphed into a party car, as the young crowd stood on benches, drank beer and cheered upon entering every station on the route. When an N or Q train arrived on the other side of the platform, the group booed loudly.

Quietly observing this bacchanal was Renee Alexander, who stood in the far corner of the car and assumed the studied stare of a subway rider who finds herself inches away from chaos. “I am feeling like my train was hijacked,” she said.

As companies cut costs and wireless technology improves, we’ve seen a handful of co-workers get pushed into permanent work-from-home status. The company shaves off some overhead, and the worker avoids commuting costs–and hassles–as he or she sets up the home office.

So here’s the hypothetical question for ya, dear readers: If you were presented with the opportunity to permanently work from home, would you do it? Granted, the notion of working from home now and then is a favorable one, a mini-vacation from the rigors of commuting. But would you opt to do it full-time?

On the plus side, you’d save that $250 or whatever (and rising dramatically!) a month in commuting costs. You’d avoid the day-to-day humiliations of commuting–a seat on the end of the Stench Bench, the middle seat between the cellphone yakker and the buffalo wings eater. You’d take back that two or three hours a day. You would not have to wear a shirt with a collar for weeks on end. Or any shirt, for that matter.  

You’d get more family time.

Then there’s the not insignificant issue of, ya know, guys trying to bomb our city.

On the downside, you would not set foot in the Greatest City in the World each day, and get to witness all of its sites, including some of the most pulchritudinously blessed people on the planet. You’d inevitably lose touch with your City Friends. You’d sever that tenuous tether to the city, and be a full-time Suburban Person.

And you’d get more family time.

I want to hear from readers on this one. If you could skip the commuting altogether and go full-time from the home bureau, would you cut your ties to Gotham? Hit us in the Comments section.

UPDATE: The NY Times’ New Jersey blog picked up the story and has some interesting comments from readers.

I’ve found myself reading a bit of Jonathan Lethem lately. Lethem is a terrific writer, and has found his niche writing about Brooklyn boys with no mothers. If you think I’m lying about that, the guy even wrote a book called Motherless Brooklyn.

MB was a fabulous novel about Kings County orphans who do side jobs for local Crooklyn thugs; the protagonist ends up as a private detective–with Tourette’s, no less.

The follow-up, Fortress of Solitude, is the story of young Dylan Ebdus coming of age, and the story of the Boerum Hill nabe coming of age at the same time. Dylan is awkward. His whiteness makes him stand out in the neighborhood. He takes part in the Fresh Air Fund and finds the Vermont countryside perplexing. He finds refuge in comic books, which will remind the reader at times of the also very good Amazing Adventures of Kavalier and Clay.

Dylan’s mother, an eccentric hippie named Rachel, has left. Dylan’s best friend is his next door neighbor, a super-cool, year-older black kid named Mingus Rude whose father is a somewhat famous musician.

Like any good Brooklyn tale, Manhattan is seen as a far-off place, a different land with a different language and peculiar customs–peculiar, at least, to the people of Brooklyn.

In this excerpt, both Dylan’s and Mingus’s fathers are both on a rare trip, separately, to Manhattan for work-related reasons.

Two men, two fathers. Two fathers expelled from their lairs, headed to Manhattan for a change, dressed for a day threatening rain, having shaved their chins to make some nominal impression at their target destinations, tightening scarves with momentary vain glances at hallway mirrors before flushing themselves out of hiding, onto the street. Two fathers each sighing as they plunge down stairwells to underground trains, to endure the shoulder-jostling crowds which mill on platforms and pass through the jerky opening doors, then hang wearily from straps or clutch poles in the blinking, grinding trains.

Here’s a much longer excerpt from the publisher, Random House.

Finding myself in insomnia’s grip the other night, I padded down to our bookshelves and grabbed a book of short stories edited by Salman Rushdie. If Salman couldn’t help me sleep, I reasoned, nothing good.

In fact I found another Lethem yarn, which had appeared in The New Yorker. It was called “The King of Sentences”–a fitting title for an author who crafts some beauties–and it was about a young couple in the city who’s infatuated with a certain unnamed author for the picture-perfect sentences the man has filled his novels with for decades.

The couple finds where the author lives, Hastings-on-Hudson, and hops a Metro-North train to stalk him.

The appointed day came upon us like a sickness, and though each in our privacy might have preferred to stay in bed and sweat it out, we couldn’t have looked at each other in the eye if we hadn’t staggered out of doors, to the subway, up to Grand Central Terminal. During the short ride we held hands, fever-sweaty at the palms. Exiting Metro-North’s Hastings-on-Hudson station under a thundercloud-clotted sky, we found ourselvs the sole travelers not claimed by family members waiting in Subarus or bleeping their driver-side doors unlocked as they crossed the parking lot with cell phones clammed to their ears. The train continued on behind us, and the station depopulated as if neutron-bombed.

“This is the town of the King of Sentences.”

“This little town.”

“He could be watching us now, don’t act stupid. With a telescope.”

We blundered along something called Main Street, seeking the post office, until a passerby directed us to Warburton Avenue.

So widespread is the practice of New Yorkers behaving badly on public transportation that we have two separate user-generated websites dedicated to their transportation transgressions, a.k.a. “trainsgressions”. (And so widespread are camera-equipped smartphones that we now have armies of citizens willing and able to snap pics of these offenders.)

Here’s a peek at SeatHogs.com, which, just as it sounds, offers photos of people occupying multiple seats on the train, as snapped by the “pigparazzi” out there.

And here’s TrainPigs.com for your viewing pleasure, which shows people indulging in New York’s fine selection of takeout grub as they sit on trains.

Party in the Bottle

It used to be the advertisements were subliminal for alcohol. If you looked carefully at the ice in the glass of scotch in the ad, you’d see a naked or half-naked woman, or a man and a woman, and sometimes more than that.

But the reason was the advertisers painted the ice into the picture. The lighting at a photo shoot was way too intense for the ice not to melt. So … they took advantage of the opportunity by putting in sexy messages that suggested the party was in the bottle or the party was in the glass.

There were whole drug prevention strategies over 20 years ago that addressed the subliminal messages in alcoholic beverage advertisements. I did drug prevention work in schools at the time and we uncovered the subliminal for the students so they didn’t get fooled.

Ahh, those were the days.

Now at the Bryant Park Station on 42nd Street I noticed new adds for Puerto Rican Rum. The subliminal is no longer sub. It’s right there in shades of mixed drink color. The party is in the bottle.

You’ve come a long way baby.

A couple Russian novelists take a shot at describing the horror that befell commuters as the Moscow subways were bombed in two places yesterday. The essays appear in today’s NY Times Op-Ed section.

Sergey Kuznetsov writes “Moscow Under Attack”.

Peter Aleshkovsky shares his experiene in “Alive, Alive”.

Nearly seven years since the subway token was rendered essentially worthless, the former symbol of loud, sweaty, in-your-face Noo Yawk is still very much in demand, reports AMNY’s Urbanite blog.

Heather Haddon writes:

Straphangers who have held onto the iconic coins redeem thousands of them every year, and sales are on the upswing for retro token jewelry.

“It’s nostalgia, and nostalgia is everything,” said Ward Wallau, head of a California company that refashions tokens into jewelry.

Last year, straphangers turned in 27,000 tokens to NYC Transit, up 13 percent from the year before. Those who redeem the predominantly brass discs receive what they were worth when decommissioned, from 20 cents to $4 for express bus tokens.

Around 13 million tokens still exist in people’s change jars and on their shelves.

Wallau buys mounds of them from the MTA to make jewelry and collectibles out of them; his biggest seller are the $125 cuff links. His company is called Tokens & Icons.

Benjamin Kabak at Second Avenue Sagas offers some perspective on the token’s 50-year run.

Stoopid

We taught my son that stupid was a bad word. We didn’t want him calling things (“Stupid game” or “Stupid dog” or “Stupid anthill”) or people this word so we told him it was a baaaaaad word.

Then of course it happened that he tried to tell us that someone used the word only he couldn’t use the word because he knew it was a bad word so… he asked us if he could spell it and if spelling it was the same a saying the word out loud. We said yes, he could spell it and wasn’t quite the same as saying the word.

So he looked around, as if he was doing something wrong and someone would overhear him and whispered. “That boy said the Franklin was s-t-o-o-p-i-d.”

And so the parenting world goes.

Yesterday I saw the ad from Diesel at 42nd Street, Bryant Park station by the 5th Avenue entrance. It’s a series of wall advertisements with captions like this:

“Stupid might fail. Smart doesn’t even try.”

The picture that accompanied it was a man trying to fit himself into a mailbox. His head was in the top and his feet were up in the air. The tag line in the bottom right corner stated,  “Diesel for successful living.”

Here are the next four.

“Be stupid.” Maybe that one just spoke for itself.

“We’re with stupid.” The picture next to this had the infamous yellow smiley face next to it on a black background

“You can’t outsmart stupid.” This one had a woman’s face six inches away from an open mouthed white tiger.

“Smart had one idea and that idea was stupid.”

And finally…

“Stupid ain’t dumb.”

Now my son no longer spells stupid with two “o’s”. I miss those days. Especially when I see an advertisement campaign like this one.

It’s just s-t-o-o-p-i-d.

 –Joe Lunievicz 

It being that time of year when New Yorkers are nice and all, I sign off for the Christmas holidays with this bit of seasonal cheer from the New York Times’ Metropolitan Diary.

Dear Diary:

One night in late October, as I was riding a packed express subway on the 2 and 3 lines, a seat opened up. A man in his 30s went for the open seat and, in doing so, pushed aside the jacket of a younger man who was already sitting. The seated man said something like, “You have no right to touch my property.” The older man replied angrily, “This is a public place.”

An argument immediately ensued, and, after a brief silence, the older man yelled at the top of his lungs, “I’m going to punch you in the face!”

The younger man quickly got up and joined the stare-down, exchanging threats; each was waiting for the other to throw the first swing.

Just as the tension came to an apex, a petite woman, probably in her 50s, yelled even louder: “Will you two shut up!”

The entire train, including the two arguing men, stopped and looked at this little woman as she continued to fulminate: “What’s wrong with you two? You are acting like children!”

The two men actually looked ashamed. The woman then demanded that they apologize to each other; I couldn’t believe it when I saw the younger man offer his hand to the other. The older man, somewhat reluctantly, and with his head down, shook his hand.

As if that weren’t enough, the woman then insisted that the two men apologize to the entire train car.

At this, the passengers broke into applause.

Ken Charkalis

Happy holidays!

[image: cartoonstock.com]

The W and Z trains will go the way of automats and guys calling strangers “Mac” if planned transit cuts gain final approval. So will free transit rides for students.

The NY Times says the cuts are necessary after the MTA found a nearly $400 million revenue shortfall.

The cuts would eliminate two subway lines, create more crowding on subways and buses, and reduce frequency at off-peak hours. Service on dozens of bus lines would be reduced or ended, and disabled riders would find it more difficult to get around.

The plan would, in short, strip back some of the advances to New York City’s transit system in the past decade, and the formal announcement on Monday stirred a chorus of complaints from the city’s politicians and transit advocates, who pointed fingers at Albany, City Hall and the authority’s management.

The earliest the cuts would come would be June.

And file this one under Who Knew? Cranky White Male Clyde Haberman does some digging (Thanks, Wikipedia!) and finds out that Jay-Z got his nom de rap from a pair of subway lines.