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Selfish travelers

I was on a plane and as is the case often, a couple asked if I would exchange seats so they could sit together. I told them NO.

I think this is the first time I said no, as it’s happened to me more than once and I always accommodate people. But I think I’ve had it with that and I told them, “NO, I don’t want to move.” And for the rest of the flight, I felt uncomfortable and guilty. I avoided the guy who was sitting next to me the whole time, we didn’t speak, I didn’t eat or drink because I didn’t want the flight crew reaching over him and I didn’t want any interactions with him. I felt he was being a schmuck by asking me to move so his wife, who was sitting in front of him could sit next to him.

I know, I know, it sounds selfish on my part. But it’s not.

It was a husband and wife who wanted me to switch seats and they ended up sitting one behind the other for the trip. They also asked the lady sitting next to the wife, if she would exchange seats with the husband, who was sitting next to me, and she said no, too. She said she needed to sit next to the window because she feels “wonky” if she doesn’t. They literally wanted to take the window seat away from the lady or me.

I didn’t give a reason for not wanting to move, I just declined to move. And this moronic husband who wanted us to change seats says to his wife, “Oh well, you like to sit next to the window.”

I think people are getting tired of this seat swap, it’s become a regular thing. People just book flights and then deal with the seating situation later, I guess.

But I carefully booked my flight months in advance and I planned my seat months in advance – not over the wing so I have a view, and on this particular side of the plane so I could see the skyline as we lifted off, etc.

I’ve given up my seat many times over the years – one time to the large Bush family so they could all sit together, Jeb’s, not George’s. But this time I was not doing it. And through the whole trip, I ignored the guy next to me, so there were no pleasantries and it was an uncomfortable flight because of this. I felt guilty the whole time and I should not have been made to feel that.

And you know what? The lady in front of me who refused to give up her seat felt guilty the whole time, too. Know how I know? Because she didn’t talk the whole time to the wife who was seated next to her, but when they were departing the flight, she said, and I quote, “Goodbye, and I’m sorry.” So she felt the need to say she was sorry because she must have been feeling guilt about it the whole time, ruining her flight, too.

Selfish travelers plan ahead or just deal with the seats you’re dealt!

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Free water and the rich guy

A couple of us were walking around Madison Square Park on Sunday and we stopped to get something to drink from a food truck. There was a girl on the corner handing out Hint flavored water, but she said it was warm, so we passed that up and bought cold drinks from a store nearby.

We sat on a bench and drank and talked.

We were sitting across from Chelsea Clinton’s condo building. It’s a ritzy area, Jeff Bezos lives catty corner to Chelsea on the cross street.

And out came a guy from Chelsea’s building, I guess one of her neighbors. He saw the Hint water truck parked sort of out front and he said something to the doorman, who walked over to the truck. That’s it above.

We assumed he was going to complain about them being there and ask them to move along. But no, the doorman came back with two cases of free water. Not bottles – cases. The free samples.

The rich are different. Cheap, the rich are cheap.,

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Matisse’s – The Red Studio

I checked out the Matisse exhibit at MOMA yesterday. Henri Matisse’s The Red Studio (1911), depicts the artist’s work space in the Parisian suburb of Issy-les-Moulineaux.

Of course I had to add Starry Night here. Since I was at MOMA, I had to visit my favorite painting.

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Why the NYC OMNY MTA system is a scam

I’m unhappy with the OMNY MTA system, remember how I wrote about what a great idea it is? Well it sucks.

I’ve been using the unlimited weekly card for years – right now the cost is $33.00 for a week’s worth of unlimited rides which is 12 rides at $2.75 each, which is 6 round trip rides.

Well, if you use the OMNY system for the same purpose, it only works from Monday through Sunday. So if you start using it on Saturday, which I did last week, it is useless for that Saturday and Sunday. It literally starts on Monday and goes through Sunday. Read that again. If you start using the OMNY payment method any day of the week other than Monday, then you are screwed out of days.

I lost 7 or 8 rides from last Saturday or Sunday, a waste of $22.00, where if I used the MetroCard as I have for all these years, that would not be the case.

I called OMNY to complain and was told by some guy, “Too bad, that’s how the system works.”

So my suggestion is, DO NOT USE THE OMNY MTA SYSTEM. It’s a ripoff. I don’t consider myself a stupid person, so I consider their ad campaign stupid and the whole system is stupid. It screws over visitors especially.

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Wegmans

I finally visited Wegmans. It’s a super market, but it’s a super super market.

My mother spoke about it for years. Whenever she went upstate NY to visit my nephew in college, she returned with reports about Wegmans. It was never about the trip itself or of my nephew, it was about Wegmans.

A few years ago, they opened a Wegmans at the Brooklyn Navy Yard in Brooklyn, NY and I’ve been meaning to visit, but I would forget about it. But yesterday, I remembered, so I took the F train from the city and visited.

It’s right next to the King’s County Distillery and there among a lot of the old navy yard.

They are opening a Wegmans in the city, at Astor Place, in about a year, so NYC will have two now.

It’s hard to describe Wegmans, it’s a supermarket, but huge. It has restaurants inside and a coffee shop, a pizza place and loads and loads of groceries. It’s almost like a Costco but with just food, no clothing or books or anything like that.

It’s an experience, sort of like the Statue of Liberty or the Empire State Building.

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Green paint and the city

So I’m in NY for a bit.

My flight left Miami on time, actually a half hour late, which is incredible since it seems that thousands of flights have been delayed or canceled all over the U.S. this summer. The whole flight was uneventful, which is the best kind of flight.

I finally remembered to try out my new technique to getting to Manhattan from LaGuardia Airport. I always think of it when we’re on the way stuck in traffic.

What I did was, I got the Uber at the airport, but instead of the driver taking me all the way to the city, I had him drop me off at the Vernon-Jackson subway station in Long Island City. I’m very familiar with this site as it’s where my cousins usually pick me up when I’m going to their houses in Queens or we are heading out to the Hamptons or even if I am just going to Long Island City for anything.

The Vernon Jackson station is one stop from Grand Central Terminal in Manhattan.

This saves a lot of time and money as it shortens the trip by a lot. The driver was even appreciative. He was glad not to have to go all the way into the city and sit in tunnel traffic for a long time. Even on a Saturday, getting into the Midtown Tunnel and getting to the city is a project.

So I hopped on and off the train in no time and was in the city in no time flat. I even used the new OMNY system that I wrote about recently, it worked like a charm.

Some first world problems I had – my first Mr. Softee ice cream of the summer, actually of the year melted all over my hand so I threw it out. The prices keep going up, but they still give you one thin napkin to maneuver the melt.

I also managed to get green paint on me in the subway somewhere. Later on I had gone to Union Square, which is my usual thing and as I came up from down under, I must have touched the paint on the railing or something and for the rest of the day I looked like a slob as I walked around the city and also Hoboken, NJ.

The paint was fresh from the signs they were painting for the SCOTUS protest at Union Square.

All in all, it’s been an interesting start to summer. But it’s been hot and humid, very hot and humid.

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Is it real or is it Maxell?

Yesterday’s cartoon is an homage to an old Maxell ad. I came up with the idea of the guy sitting in his chair at home being bored due to economic issues of the day and the ad came to mind as I started drawing the cartoon.

One thing though – to get a photo as a reference, I googled “Memorex” and the photo came up – but the crazy part is that it’s an ad for Maxell! And I noticed people who commented on the cartoon mentioned Memorex, which is interesting because this iconic “Blown Away” ad is not serving its purpose – directing people to the correct product, it’s literally sending people to its competitor. But of course it’s one of the best photographs ever. It’s by photographer Steve Steigman.

Even the google search sends the Memorex reference to the Maxell ad. It’s sort of like those ads that we love but we don’t remember what the product is for.

*This is the original advertisement*, photo by Steve Steigman

Speaking of Memorex, I remember something from high school. We had a class called Rock Poetry and it was all based on current rock music. We studied the lyrics as poetry, which is what they were. We all had to bring in a record or cassette tape (yes, it was back then) and the teacher would pull out a random record or cassette and we would listen to a song and discuss it.

One time she reached into the box and pulled out a cassette and said, “Ok, the next one is Memorex.” And of course we all cracked up. We had to explain to her that Memorex was the cassette tape company, not the name of the recording or band.

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Wellness check

Today’s comic almost reminds me of something that happened some years back, maybe about 10 years ago.

I had taken a friend to the doctor’s office, which is at the hospital next door. I live next to a hospital. My friend had a cancer scare. Luckily everything worked out and he was totally fine, but this was a check up for something and we went to a cancer doctor, an oncologist.

I sat waiting in the waiting room and in walks the UPS guy and after him the FedEx guy with deliveries. Both of them knew me since they were my delivery guys, too.

Both of them separately had such a worried look on their faces. They asked me if I was ok, and I don’t think they believed me that I was there “for a friend.” But it was so nice to see their genuine concerns.

It’s weird that I would have the same delivery guys as the hospital which is a huge complex. Even though I am next door, I am in a neighborhood full of houses, you can’t see the hospital from the street, it’s on a lot of property and is sort of a campus, so you would think they had their own delivery thing going on.

But then again, I would see the delivery guys in the center of the village, about a mile away in the other direction, so I guess they covered the whole zip code or something. Many times I would be walking by in the downtown area and they would give me my packages as I walked by, saving them a trip to my house later in the day. It was more of a convenience – they would do this early in the day and their schedule would have them coming to me later in the day, sometimes 6 or 7 pm. So it was nice of them to give me the packages at 10 am as I walked by, rather than have me wait till the end of the day.

Anyway, this cartoon reminded me of that. I didn’t get the idea for the cartoon from those situations, but after I drew it, it reminded me of those situations.

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Land crabs and tourists

*Land crabs looked like this after it rained a few decades ago.*

I’ve noticed something – but maybe it’s nothing.

When I was a kid, come winter, every other car on the road was a foreign plate – you know, from a different state. It seemed that everyone drove down to Florida.

Over the years, that disappeared, I didn’t notice it until the last couple of years when the foreign plates showed up again. In droves (no pun intended).

I am guessing that maybe it had to do with the pandemic, and maybe people felt safer driving their own cars than being crammed up together in an airplane and I noticed it even more during the period when flights were being delayed or canceled by the thousands, I guess people felt they could depend on their own cars rather than the airlines. Also, I know it was very hard finding a rental, I tried, so I guess bringing your own car along was the thing to do.

Now I notice the cars with the out of state plates are gone. But the airlines are starting to cancel flights again, so who knows. But then again, it’s summer, so there really aren’t tourists here in summer.

Another thing I noticed when I was driving today was a large sign that warned people about land crabs. I don’t know if it was warning them not to drive over them or not to pick them up.

When I was a kid, that was an issue. After it rained, the streets were full of land crabs who were flooded out of their holes/homes. You had to be careful not to drive over them or they might puncture a tire. These crabs were all over – by the hundreds – they even appeared in back yard pools. They would break the screening around the pool areas and just end up in the water.

I have not seen that for years because of all the over-development. I thought the crabs disappeared due to that, so it was interesting seeing the sign today, warning people of the crabs. The sign might be left over from the big rains/tropical storm thing we had a couple of weeks ago. But again, I didn’t even know there were any land crabs to be warned about, I haven’t seen any in decades.

So far, as of today, I haven’t seen any tourists or land crabs. Things a good thing.

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Unheralded

So I unsubscribed to the paper again – the Miami Herald. I did it for a couple of reasons – they keep raising the price and I don’t like the delivery person.

I’ve supported newspapers my whole life, I often wished I lived in the days when newspapers ruled the media, but then I’d probably be old or dead by now, so maybe not.

I went to pick up a copy the other day at a store and the daily newspaper was $3.00 plus tax. $3.00 for the daily paper, what’s the Sunday paper cost?

The newspapers are struggling to survive. What if they gave each issue away for free, like most weekly papers do, and they can maybe raise the ad rates to compensate for the extra readers that would bring them?

I remember when I was a newspaper delivery boy so many moons ago – the daily newspaper was 5 cents and the Sunday, I don’t remember, but probably 35 cents. I remember one time the price went up a nickel a week for subscribers and one guy complained that he didn’t know and was upset about the extra nickel.

Anyway, I don’t really read the daily paper these days. I only subscribed to support them and I think the only thing I read was the tv listings. The Sunday paper used to take half a day to read, now it takes 10 minutes.

I read the comics and news online and therein lies the rub with the news and featured stories – they are all put online way before the paper is printed. And I don’t go to their website to read these stories – they are all over social media, they just come up in my feeds. I think it should be the other way around. I think they should print the stories first and then put them online, so if people want fresh news, they have to get the daily newspaper, rather than the other way around.

So many times my father would say to me, “Did you see such and such article in the paper today?” And I would say, “I read that a few days ago online.”

So basically, people are buying the daily newspaper to read days old news.

As for the delivery girl, she is obnoxious and incompetent. When I complained one time she sent me a long letter saying I was lucky she was delivering the paper at all and I should be thankful. Then she went on to complain about how hard her job is.

I remember being 12 years old and delivering the papers in all sorts of weather, by foot or on my bike and dragging them on a sled when it snowed. This 35 year old woman delivering my paper by car has it hard I guess. So I was glad to unsubscribe to lighten her load a bit – one less paper to lug in her back seat.

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