Did you ever notice how white the teeth of airline security people are? It's from all the toothpaste they confiscate. Some probably even open toothpaste stores or sell it on ebay. There does not seem to be anything logical about the confiscation of toothpaste and other liquids over 4 oz. They let people through with no problem if they have 50 packages of a 2 oz liquid. A friend of mine had cleaning fluid samples, a whole bagful, all of the packages were about an ounce or two each, and they let him through no problem. I got no hassle with 4 oz of cough medicine. But the toothpaste they took away. Sealed , unopened, in the box. Into the confiscation or should I say gift pile. They make you take your shoes off, don't they know that some people's feet stink? meanwhile, you can bring a computer on board. A computer can surely be a deadly weapon in the hands of a skilled martial arts person, so can the cans of soda or juice they give you .
None of it makes sense. My solution, everyone flies naked. I guess if that plan happens, Virgin airlines will soon change their name
Monday, February 28, 2011
Friday, February 18, 2011
BLACKSMITHS
Blacksmiths forge iron into weapons, utensils and horseshoes.
Who thought of this horseshoe thing. Someone decided to take this custom made iron shoe and nail it into a horses foot (hoof). That is sick. Can you imagine going to buy a pair of shoes and when you find a pair that fits you , the salesman grabs your leg ,,then grabs a sledge hammer and big nails. Hammers the nails through the shoe into your foot.OUCH! ever hear a horse scream OUCH!! Why is finding a horseshoe a lucky thing? I think the horse was the lucky one to get it out of his foot.
Why aren't there little horse shoes for goats, sheep, hmm,... dogs.
Who thought of this horseshoe thing. Someone decided to take this custom made iron shoe and nail it into a horses foot (hoof). That is sick. Can you imagine going to buy a pair of shoes and when you find a pair that fits you , the salesman grabs your leg ,,then grabs a sledge hammer and big nails. Hammers the nails through the shoe into your foot.OUCH! ever hear a horse scream OUCH!! Why is finding a horseshoe a lucky thing? I think the horse was the lucky one to get it out of his foot.
Why aren't there little horse shoes for goats, sheep, hmm,... dogs.
Tuesday, February 15, 2011
Kids working in East New York
The way I saw it, East New York had alot of opportunities for a kid to make some extra spending money.
Of course, most of us got a few bucks a week allowance money from our parents. Obviously that wasn't enough, a kid has gotta have his candy, his ice cream and his baseball cards. The candy's of choice, that is, my choice back in 1959 were Hollywood ( kind of like a 3 musketeer with nuts), 5th ave ( a clark bar with 2 almonds on top), Clark bar ( maybe a Reese,s cup spread out into the consistency of a kit kat), mallow mars ( they came with a coupon to get prizes, it was a marshmallow cup), Lik-m-aid(koolaid but you just ate the powder), Payday (covered with peanuts no chocolate), wax lips ( they were wax lips that you chew very sick thing), fudgethingie with a spoon( tiny spoon you eat the fudge, i have no idea what the name was),
chunkie(raisins nuts whatta chunk of chocolate),chuckles ( hated the red and the black ones, loved the yellow and orange, my friend always took the green one from me), red hots ( hot hot hot),frozen milky ways bars( yep we would freeze them), bon bons ( only available at the movies, filled with ice cream chocolate coated), malted balls ( only a few of us liked these),non pareils ( white sprinkles on chocolate disk) one time i had white bugs on my non pareils grossed me out and i never bought them again, Bonomo's turkish taffee ( you smack it and crack it), junior mints ( soft chocolate coated mints, i still buy them), and thickly salted pumpkin seeds ( so salty), red pistachio nuts ( why red, our fingers got red, our mouths got red), then we didnt like the bad breath fixer stuff but bought them occasionally black jack gum ( licorice tasting), violets (gross), sen sen ( teeny weeny little flat things a mixture of soap and licorice) ,,, and oh I forgot an old favorite PEZ, gotta love pez,,amazing alot of these are still around today. Today I buy Hershey with almonds, M&M peanut, and Kit Kat mostly.
OK, back to making money.The first money maker was making pitchers of lemonade and selling little paper cups of it for 5 cents a cup. That was a young kid job. When we reached 10 years old we became prostitutes ( haha nonono just kidding). We used to go behind the projects to the factories and find stuff they threw away. The glass factory had these semi-circular pieces of glass that worked as magnifying glasses. We would burn our arms with them, as the sun got really hot you could burn other people's arms too, we would sell them to people who didnt want to go look for them. Then one day we found cans of cleaning fluid. A big score. When I look back on it, they were garbage, useless rejected cans. We sold these for a dollar each. We had about 30 of them, that was a huge score. I don't know if we lived in a dumb neighborhood, so people bought them, or maybe they just felt sorry for us poor kids trying to earn a living. Some of us became newspaper delivery boys. we wore a sack with papers and dropped them off at people's doors in the projects. We didn't do the bike thing and throw it in front of houses like in the movies. We were in the projects, it was up and down the staircases. We made two cents a paper. I delivered the New York Daily Mirror. Then we went on to be delivery boys. Mind you , no girls did this stuff, It wasn't chauvinism , Girls were just smarter than us. The first delivery job was a Speedway on Stanley Ave, Henry was the owner, he gave us 10 cents per carton delivered. Can you imagine how heavy that was, a full carton of canned goods, and you had to walk about 2 blocks to deliver it, no bike , no wagon, carry it. A 60 lb 10 year old skinny kid that I was lugging these cartons for 10 cents. I did like riding down to the basement on the conveyor. I think we werent supposed to do that. Then i moved up in the world and delivered for the drug store. There were two on Stanley Ave. Alben, and Good Ray, they both paid 25cents a delivery. more than twice as much money and a little bag to carry. And the people appreciated getting their drugs, so you got a much bigger tip too. Drug store tips were a quarter to a half dollar. Supermarket tips were about a dime. When there were no deliveries, we would fill cough syrup bottles, and coke syrup bottles. Coke syrup was a big drug store item back then, it stopped nausea. Why did they stop selling that, it tasted great.
As we got older we got more industrious. Me, Richie and Red, came up with a great idea. Everyone seemed to like bagel or bialy with cream cheese and lox ( smoked salmon). Kids hated the stuff, we liked hot bagels and bialys but hated the stink of the fish. I love it now by the way. So , the idea was to go to every apartment in 2 projects.over 1000 of them. Well, we couldnt do all of them but we went to quite a few. We took orders for Sunday breakfast deliveries. The usual order was 6 bagels, 6 bialys, 1 lb of cream cheese, 1/2 lb of lox,we may have had some other fish too. like herring or smoked whitefish. We got the money in advance. Our prices were half of what it was in the stores. They were low prices because we just made the price up. We thought it was a great idea, and by the response it was HUGE.
I forget how much money we collected, and we figured on making a ton of profit. So we got close to $400 on our first run. The sad part is , there was never a second run, we didn't want to rip anyone off. We just got too busy, playing punchball, or skelly, or I dunno, we just forgot. We kept the money and enjoyed it. Noone ever came looking for us. I don't think we told our parents. My father was a cop, so he probably would have thrown us in jail. Instead it was our secret little one day business adventure, that had great potential, but turned out to be a one day HUGELY profitable day. Then , I got a steady job on Sundays. I worked at the chicken market on New Lots Ave. near Ashford St.. In the morning the chickens would be loose, running around, keeping in shape. This was a kosher chicken market. My job was to catch the chickens. There were two ways to catch a chicken. One was grab them by the wings from behind. Be careful they scream and can peck you. The other was with this long metal hook. You scooped the legs out from under them. Then I'd carry them by the legs and put them in a cage. When a customer came in, I'd have to grab them a live chicken. Take them in back, to the "kosher neck cutter" theres a name in Yiddish for it, something like Sheichel, i tried googling kosher neck cutter but nothing came up.This guy wore a cap, he would slash the chicken's neck in one svelte swoop, then stuff the birds head in this can, and the blood would drain. Then pluck the feathers in the machine. It was a very busy place with fresh chickens. The chickens didnt get the antibiotics and hormones that today's chickens get. They were tough, fresh city chickens, eating corn and worms, and who knows what. If you were lucky you got them with an unborn egg ( no shell on it) it was inside them. Great in chicken soup. That was an intersting job. Another was shoveling manure and walking horses to cool them off at the riding academy. Lots of good employment for very little pay, but lots of fun.
One day, it came to us, in a dream. Let's start a business. So what better business than a Radio Repair Shop. We got a free room at the Community Center to start our shop. We would go to the junk yards on Flatlands Ave. and take car radios out of cars. That part was fun. Take the knobs off first, then juggle it around and pull it out, the speakers were usually right on top of the radio. We would take a bunch back to the shop. We would get one working so we would have music. The rest would get stripped for parts. We had lots of tubes. There were 4 partners in this business. Yep, it was big business. A couple of us would go to the drug store and test the tubes in the tube tester. We had capacitors, resisters, tubes, speakers, a soldering iron, screwdrivers, wire cutters. We were very professional. We put our sign up and business started coming. Transister radios were making an appearance on the scene, and the big Emerson's that were portables with a plug, and RCA's were fading out, as Sony came out with an 8 transistor radio, small compact and totally cool. Many years later boom boxes came about. Strange how things go in the opposite direction after a while. Business was booming, we had a big backlog of radios to fix. Our major problem was, we had no idea how to fix radios. If it had tubes we would test them all and hope we would find a burnt out one and we were successful at fixing it. Others, we would check things with this ohm meter or something, and occasionally we found a broken wire. I had my first soldering job on a nice little portable. The wires were so small, the solder was so big. I liked the way solder bubbles and melts. So I splash some on the broken wires i twisted together. I gotta say it held really strongly. But the whole radio was covered with melted solder and melted black tape. It was a mess. Good thing the radio had a cover. Who cares how messy it looked inside. Look inside a mouth with tons of fillings, disgusting, but it works. So it was the same attitude, our work wasnt pretty but at least 10% of the time we fixed your radio. Some we couldnt fix. In a month or so, the shop closed down due to lack of satisfied customers. But we learned alot about different colored wires, and how hot solder is. We learned how easily plastic melts, speakers puncture. It was definitely a learning experience.
When I hit 7th or 8th grade, I got a really important job, working in the dry cleaners. I was the bagger. I did some miscellaneous work there also, like spraying the soapy stuff on stains, or soaking badly stained clothes in the 'perc". Perc was short for a long chemical name, that i'm too lazy to look up right now. It was deadly stuff. It came out of the "cooker". It certainly took stains out of clothes. Someone had to shovel out the perc from the cooker everyday. It was like shoveling pounds of ash, like they do on the coal engine trains. The thing is, the fumes were hazardous to your health. But in 1962 nothing was hazardous to your health. So I shoveled. It made me so high , that when i was done shovelling , I'd bump into racks of clothing , knocking some on the floor. What a great job. I also got free dry cleaning as a benefit. The owner didnt know we had 6 people in our family and alot of clothes to clean. When he saw the piles of clothing I brought in to clean, I thought he was having a heart attack.
And then there was Big Bill. Bill was a big black guy with slick hair and sometimes a bandana. He was the presser. Bill got paid by the piece. Some articles of clothing worth more than others. I was the guy who counted the pieces and wrote down how many Bill pressed. if the total came to 120 I would round it up, to maybe 374. Bill loved me. The owners caught a few of my accidently on purpose mistakes and I no longer did that. It was back to bagging the clothes. I would hang some clothes on this metal stand, roll down a bag, rip the bag off the roll, shake it a few times to puff it up and get it right over the clothes, then twist tie it and staple the ticket on the plastic. Of course if it was an opposing Little League uniform, a few extra things took place. Like, stapling the legs together , spitting on the clothes, putting pins in so they'd get stuck. nice things like that. I was the fastest bagger known East of the Mississippi. I got paid $1 an hour , off the books. The job got passed down to my friend Johnny, the Richie, and a few others. I would pass the Cozy Bar ( which was next door to the cleaners) with my mother and Big Bill would say hello, my mom would say " you know people from that dirty bar?" I'd say oh mom that's Big Bill. She would just roll her eyes.
There were other jobs later on, although not boring, sometimes interesting , like working in Pitkin Pawn Brokers ( i said pawn not porn ). The owner would give people money for anything they brought in. One time he gave a guy $5 for a suit with poop in the pants. GROSSSS. Another guy bought a watch that stopped every two hours. The guy refused to go get it fixed. Repair was free. He would come into the store and set his watch every two hours. The weirdest people came into that shop on Pitkin between Osborn and Thatford. Brownsville, USA.
It was fun growing up in East New York, establishing a work ethic. Ahh yes, kids today, have video games much better idea.
Of course, most of us got a few bucks a week allowance money from our parents. Obviously that wasn't enough, a kid has gotta have his candy, his ice cream and his baseball cards. The candy's of choice, that is, my choice back in 1959 were Hollywood ( kind of like a 3 musketeer with nuts), 5th ave ( a clark bar with 2 almonds on top), Clark bar ( maybe a Reese,s cup spread out into the consistency of a kit kat), mallow mars ( they came with a coupon to get prizes, it was a marshmallow cup), Lik-m-aid(koolaid but you just ate the powder), Payday (covered with peanuts no chocolate), wax lips ( they were wax lips that you chew very sick thing), fudgethingie with a spoon( tiny spoon you eat the fudge, i have no idea what the name was),
chunkie(raisins nuts whatta chunk of chocolate),chuckles ( hated the red and the black ones, loved the yellow and orange, my friend always took the green one from me), red hots ( hot hot hot),frozen milky ways bars( yep we would freeze them), bon bons ( only available at the movies, filled with ice cream chocolate coated), malted balls ( only a few of us liked these),non pareils ( white sprinkles on chocolate disk) one time i had white bugs on my non pareils grossed me out and i never bought them again, Bonomo's turkish taffee ( you smack it and crack it), junior mints ( soft chocolate coated mints, i still buy them), and thickly salted pumpkin seeds ( so salty), red pistachio nuts ( why red, our fingers got red, our mouths got red), then we didnt like the bad breath fixer stuff but bought them occasionally black jack gum ( licorice tasting), violets (gross), sen sen ( teeny weeny little flat things a mixture of soap and licorice) ,,, and oh I forgot an old favorite PEZ, gotta love pez,,amazing alot of these are still around today. Today I buy Hershey with almonds, M&M peanut, and Kit Kat mostly.
OK, back to making money.The first money maker was making pitchers of lemonade and selling little paper cups of it for 5 cents a cup. That was a young kid job. When we reached 10 years old we became prostitutes ( haha nonono just kidding). We used to go behind the projects to the factories and find stuff they threw away. The glass factory had these semi-circular pieces of glass that worked as magnifying glasses. We would burn our arms with them, as the sun got really hot you could burn other people's arms too, we would sell them to people who didnt want to go look for them. Then one day we found cans of cleaning fluid. A big score. When I look back on it, they were garbage, useless rejected cans. We sold these for a dollar each. We had about 30 of them, that was a huge score. I don't know if we lived in a dumb neighborhood, so people bought them, or maybe they just felt sorry for us poor kids trying to earn a living. Some of us became newspaper delivery boys. we wore a sack with papers and dropped them off at people's doors in the projects. We didn't do the bike thing and throw it in front of houses like in the movies. We were in the projects, it was up and down the staircases. We made two cents a paper. I delivered the New York Daily Mirror. Then we went on to be delivery boys. Mind you , no girls did this stuff, It wasn't chauvinism , Girls were just smarter than us. The first delivery job was a Speedway on Stanley Ave, Henry was the owner, he gave us 10 cents per carton delivered. Can you imagine how heavy that was, a full carton of canned goods, and you had to walk about 2 blocks to deliver it, no bike , no wagon, carry it. A 60 lb 10 year old skinny kid that I was lugging these cartons for 10 cents. I did like riding down to the basement on the conveyor. I think we werent supposed to do that. Then i moved up in the world and delivered for the drug store. There were two on Stanley Ave. Alben, and Good Ray, they both paid 25cents a delivery. more than twice as much money and a little bag to carry. And the people appreciated getting their drugs, so you got a much bigger tip too. Drug store tips were a quarter to a half dollar. Supermarket tips were about a dime. When there were no deliveries, we would fill cough syrup bottles, and coke syrup bottles. Coke syrup was a big drug store item back then, it stopped nausea. Why did they stop selling that, it tasted great.
As we got older we got more industrious. Me, Richie and Red, came up with a great idea. Everyone seemed to like bagel or bialy with cream cheese and lox ( smoked salmon). Kids hated the stuff, we liked hot bagels and bialys but hated the stink of the fish. I love it now by the way. So , the idea was to go to every apartment in 2 projects.over 1000 of them. Well, we couldnt do all of them but we went to quite a few. We took orders for Sunday breakfast deliveries. The usual order was 6 bagels, 6 bialys, 1 lb of cream cheese, 1/2 lb of lox,we may have had some other fish too. like herring or smoked whitefish. We got the money in advance. Our prices were half of what it was in the stores. They were low prices because we just made the price up. We thought it was a great idea, and by the response it was HUGE.
I forget how much money we collected, and we figured on making a ton of profit. So we got close to $400 on our first run. The sad part is , there was never a second run, we didn't want to rip anyone off. We just got too busy, playing punchball, or skelly, or I dunno, we just forgot. We kept the money and enjoyed it. Noone ever came looking for us. I don't think we told our parents. My father was a cop, so he probably would have thrown us in jail. Instead it was our secret little one day business adventure, that had great potential, but turned out to be a one day HUGELY profitable day. Then , I got a steady job on Sundays. I worked at the chicken market on New Lots Ave. near Ashford St.. In the morning the chickens would be loose, running around, keeping in shape. This was a kosher chicken market. My job was to catch the chickens. There were two ways to catch a chicken. One was grab them by the wings from behind. Be careful they scream and can peck you. The other was with this long metal hook. You scooped the legs out from under them. Then I'd carry them by the legs and put them in a cage. When a customer came in, I'd have to grab them a live chicken. Take them in back, to the "kosher neck cutter" theres a name in Yiddish for it, something like Sheichel, i tried googling kosher neck cutter but nothing came up.This guy wore a cap, he would slash the chicken's neck in one svelte swoop, then stuff the birds head in this can, and the blood would drain. Then pluck the feathers in the machine. It was a very busy place with fresh chickens. The chickens didnt get the antibiotics and hormones that today's chickens get. They were tough, fresh city chickens, eating corn and worms, and who knows what. If you were lucky you got them with an unborn egg ( no shell on it) it was inside them. Great in chicken soup. That was an intersting job. Another was shoveling manure and walking horses to cool them off at the riding academy. Lots of good employment for very little pay, but lots of fun.
One day, it came to us, in a dream. Let's start a business. So what better business than a Radio Repair Shop. We got a free room at the Community Center to start our shop. We would go to the junk yards on Flatlands Ave. and take car radios out of cars. That part was fun. Take the knobs off first, then juggle it around and pull it out, the speakers were usually right on top of the radio. We would take a bunch back to the shop. We would get one working so we would have music. The rest would get stripped for parts. We had lots of tubes. There were 4 partners in this business. Yep, it was big business. A couple of us would go to the drug store and test the tubes in the tube tester. We had capacitors, resisters, tubes, speakers, a soldering iron, screwdrivers, wire cutters. We were very professional. We put our sign up and business started coming. Transister radios were making an appearance on the scene, and the big Emerson's that were portables with a plug, and RCA's were fading out, as Sony came out with an 8 transistor radio, small compact and totally cool. Many years later boom boxes came about. Strange how things go in the opposite direction after a while. Business was booming, we had a big backlog of radios to fix. Our major problem was, we had no idea how to fix radios. If it had tubes we would test them all and hope we would find a burnt out one and we were successful at fixing it. Others, we would check things with this ohm meter or something, and occasionally we found a broken wire. I had my first soldering job on a nice little portable. The wires were so small, the solder was so big. I liked the way solder bubbles and melts. So I splash some on the broken wires i twisted together. I gotta say it held really strongly. But the whole radio was covered with melted solder and melted black tape. It was a mess. Good thing the radio had a cover. Who cares how messy it looked inside. Look inside a mouth with tons of fillings, disgusting, but it works. So it was the same attitude, our work wasnt pretty but at least 10% of the time we fixed your radio. Some we couldnt fix. In a month or so, the shop closed down due to lack of satisfied customers. But we learned alot about different colored wires, and how hot solder is. We learned how easily plastic melts, speakers puncture. It was definitely a learning experience.
When I hit 7th or 8th grade, I got a really important job, working in the dry cleaners. I was the bagger. I did some miscellaneous work there also, like spraying the soapy stuff on stains, or soaking badly stained clothes in the 'perc". Perc was short for a long chemical name, that i'm too lazy to look up right now. It was deadly stuff. It came out of the "cooker". It certainly took stains out of clothes. Someone had to shovel out the perc from the cooker everyday. It was like shoveling pounds of ash, like they do on the coal engine trains. The thing is, the fumes were hazardous to your health. But in 1962 nothing was hazardous to your health. So I shoveled. It made me so high , that when i was done shovelling , I'd bump into racks of clothing , knocking some on the floor. What a great job. I also got free dry cleaning as a benefit. The owner didnt know we had 6 people in our family and alot of clothes to clean. When he saw the piles of clothing I brought in to clean, I thought he was having a heart attack.
And then there was Big Bill. Bill was a big black guy with slick hair and sometimes a bandana. He was the presser. Bill got paid by the piece. Some articles of clothing worth more than others. I was the guy who counted the pieces and wrote down how many Bill pressed. if the total came to 120 I would round it up, to maybe 374. Bill loved me. The owners caught a few of my accidently on purpose mistakes and I no longer did that. It was back to bagging the clothes. I would hang some clothes on this metal stand, roll down a bag, rip the bag off the roll, shake it a few times to puff it up and get it right over the clothes, then twist tie it and staple the ticket on the plastic. Of course if it was an opposing Little League uniform, a few extra things took place. Like, stapling the legs together , spitting on the clothes, putting pins in so they'd get stuck. nice things like that. I was the fastest bagger known East of the Mississippi. I got paid $1 an hour , off the books. The job got passed down to my friend Johnny, the Richie, and a few others. I would pass the Cozy Bar ( which was next door to the cleaners) with my mother and Big Bill would say hello, my mom would say " you know people from that dirty bar?" I'd say oh mom that's Big Bill. She would just roll her eyes.
There were other jobs later on, although not boring, sometimes interesting , like working in Pitkin Pawn Brokers ( i said pawn not porn ). The owner would give people money for anything they brought in. One time he gave a guy $5 for a suit with poop in the pants. GROSSSS. Another guy bought a watch that stopped every two hours. The guy refused to go get it fixed. Repair was free. He would come into the store and set his watch every two hours. The weirdest people came into that shop on Pitkin between Osborn and Thatford. Brownsville, USA.
It was fun growing up in East New York, establishing a work ethic. Ahh yes, kids today, have video games much better idea.
Monday, February 14, 2011
Chew Your Food
Thinking back a few years, i was at a business meeting in Jacksonville, Florida. I was talking up a storm to everyone trying to get more business. A lot of talking was done at the bar and between the bar and buffet.
The buffet was pretty good, as far as buffets go. I'm not a big fan but these were dishes served by people, so no dirty hands, or feet for that matter were going into the food. They had steak shish-kebabs, spaghetti, shrimp, chicken on skewers, etc etc. There I was talking and talking eating my kebabs, suckin' down my spaghetti. As i'm talking my voice changes and it's harder to push out the words. It gets even more difficult but I keep on giving my sales pitch to a couple of guys. My big eating problem has always been , I don't chew. Not a good thing. I look at the plate and do not notice the 5 inch stick from the shish-kebab on my plate. I think "holy shish-kebab sticks!" I sucked the damn stick down with the spaghetti. One of the guys I was talking to said , you better get to a hospital. So, i'm waiting in the lobby,and trying to talk to this young woman there, who it turn out was the granddaughter of the best Lemon Ices in East New York. What a small world. She was Willy's granddaughter from Willy's Ices on Atlantic Avenue, right near the White Castle. I was amazed. She was even more amazed, 1) that I knew of Willy's Ices 2) that i swallowed a 5 inch shish-kebab stick and am still talking
So I get to an Emergency Medical Trailer, they take an x ray, and they tell me, They can't believe I actually swallowed that. I told them it slid down like stiff spaghetti. They told me if i'm in severe pain to come back right away. As it turned out, I wasn't in severe pain, and about 3 days later, I called my whole family in to see the sight of a big ol' shish-kebab stick floating in my toilet bowl.
From then on I chewed my food. And it is a good thing I did, because a week later, I was playing golf, and went to eat at the restaurant at the golf course. I ordered a triple decker sandwich that is held together by toothpicks. Wouldnt ya know it? I'm eating and chewing , and i bite into something hard. It's a toothpick. Apparently when the chef stuck the toothpick in( the ones with the colored frizzly stuff on the end) it broke off so you couldn't see it. So what does he do, he doesn't remove the broken one and just sticks another one in. So it's a good thing I started chewing. Scarey stuff.
The buffet was pretty good, as far as buffets go. I'm not a big fan but these were dishes served by people, so no dirty hands, or feet for that matter were going into the food. They had steak shish-kebabs, spaghetti, shrimp, chicken on skewers, etc etc. There I was talking and talking eating my kebabs, suckin' down my spaghetti. As i'm talking my voice changes and it's harder to push out the words. It gets even more difficult but I keep on giving my sales pitch to a couple of guys. My big eating problem has always been , I don't chew. Not a good thing. I look at the plate and do not notice the 5 inch stick from the shish-kebab on my plate. I think "holy shish-kebab sticks!" I sucked the damn stick down with the spaghetti. One of the guys I was talking to said , you better get to a hospital. So, i'm waiting in the lobby,and trying to talk to this young woman there, who it turn out was the granddaughter of the best Lemon Ices in East New York. What a small world. She was Willy's granddaughter from Willy's Ices on Atlantic Avenue, right near the White Castle. I was amazed. She was even more amazed, 1) that I knew of Willy's Ices 2) that i swallowed a 5 inch shish-kebab stick and am still talking
So I get to an Emergency Medical Trailer, they take an x ray, and they tell me, They can't believe I actually swallowed that. I told them it slid down like stiff spaghetti. They told me if i'm in severe pain to come back right away. As it turned out, I wasn't in severe pain, and about 3 days later, I called my whole family in to see the sight of a big ol' shish-kebab stick floating in my toilet bowl.
From then on I chewed my food. And it is a good thing I did, because a week later, I was playing golf, and went to eat at the restaurant at the golf course. I ordered a triple decker sandwich that is held together by toothpicks. Wouldnt ya know it? I'm eating and chewing , and i bite into something hard. It's a toothpick. Apparently when the chef stuck the toothpick in( the ones with the colored frizzly stuff on the end) it broke off so you couldn't see it. So what does he do, he doesn't remove the broken one and just sticks another one in. So it's a good thing I started chewing. Scarey stuff.
Thursday, February 10, 2011
Reserved Seating
Reserve Seating, that's what we need. I was on the subway in NYC , it was so crowded and not a possibility of sitting down. The city is looking for revenue, so how about reserve seating on the subway. You walk right in through the masses to your comfortable reserved seat. Now we move to a nice sunny weekend in June, in Central Park. After walking all day, I'm ready to sit down. Every bench is taken. Homeless people sleeping on them, dogs sitting next to their masters on the bench, every part of the wall by the lake people are seated, even the good spots on the lawn is taken. Reserved seats in Central Park, a place to sit when you need to sit. Walking and walking through the city, and not a bench to be found. More seats, more reserved seats. Wait for the bus, have a seat, wait for a cab , have a seat. Anywhere, maybe just have them pop out of the ground when you insert your RSC(reserved seat card). Then there are the private seats. I went to Bloomingdales today (haha), walking and shopping , my feat were killing me. THe only place to go was to the floor that sells shoes. That's the only place with seats. Of course they were all taken, private reserve seats in Department stores, or any stores. Maybe your feet are tired,OK so you pass a furniture store and go in for awhile to lay down on the sofas they have. But you cant do that everyday. We need seats in Supermarkets. In the summer when the stores are air-conditioned , it will be a pleasure to sit in the produce section. It would be like being in the country or on the farm. So that's the idea,
have seats everywhere. Here's my slogan " Rest your feet and have a seat"
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)