Stocky and broad-shouldered, invariably chewing on a cigar, he wore white-on-white patterned shirts with “Al” embroidered on the sleeves, sported bejeweled rings on both hands and carried a pearl-handled revolver.
via Albert Seedman, Former Chief of Detectives in New York, Dies at 94 – NYTimes.com.
For eight years, Eliel Santos has been using dental floss and mousetrap glue to reel in gold, jewelry, electronics and cash trapped beneath city sidewalk grates. “If you drop it, I’m going to pick it up — so be careful,” …
via Eliel Santos fishes for cash, valuable objects trapped below NYC sidewalk grates – NYPOST.com.
Mineola, N.Y., sometime in November 1913 (about seven months before the death of Lulu Bailey).
Sanford Gwynn woke up in the drainage ditch behind the Nassau County Jail early on a November morning. In a matter of moments, he would nominally be witness to the full flowering of one of the more lurid criminal enterprises in Mineola’s history.
For his part, Mr. Gwynn was too hung over to really notice.
The parking lot to the jail was a tangle of cars and activity, and all of it was clearly visible from where Mr. Gwynn was sprawled. Women in flirty, airy dresses made too-familiar gestures to men in disheveled suits. Most of the men were leaving, some of them with half-empty bottles, all of them with half-satisfied smirks on their faces. A handful, though, were late arriving, or were returning for a second pass through the most popular brothel and gaming house in all of western Long Island: That which was operated by Warden Winfield S. Box.
Mr. Box was not merely a pimp; at least, this is what he told himself. In any event, he was a respected, churchgoing citizen, with a wife and a large, pleasant-looking family. He was well-known for his prowess at horseshoes and well-liked at the Elks lodge that met just a few blocks away. To a fault, though, he also was an eminently practical man and, for reasons which will soon be clear, although probably not to Mr. Gwynn, organizing a whorehouse and casino in the county jail seemed like the natural thing to do.
At that moment, and not unusually, Mr. Gwynn was remarking foggily to himself that there was nothing wrong with waking up in the ditch.
He had come to realize, after a long period of continual observation, that there was a great comfort to it — if you allowed first that every ounce of his being was being savaged by a ruthless and unrelenting hangover.
In the first place, it was always cool in the ditch.
Even in the hottest days of August, the grass there was long and lush, and black walnut trees lolled their branches protectively overhead. The earth, soft and forgiving, would nuzzle a prone body like a concerned parent. In the spring or the fall, the early morning would bring dew, which to Mr. Gwynn held a soothing, almost icy, dampness that would apply itself to every inch of his nervous, twitching body.
In the second place, the ditch was convenient.
Straight behind Mr. Gwynn, about 100 yards away perpendicular from the ditch, was Ali Kafeer’s luncheonette. Immediately across the ditch was the aforementioned parking lot of the county jail, where Mr. Gwynn was a regular visitor. About 200 yards farther in the same direction was Pedersen’s Ale House, where he was also a regular. North of him, where the ditch met Packwood Road, was the Bengal Club, where he was regularly turned away. And not far to the south, somewhere beyond the trees, was the back door to the morose row house where he had a room.
The ditch was secluded, too.
It wound through a tall, disorganized grove of pitch pines, spruces, walnuts and other trees like a scar on the back of an angry, dirty animal. Below this wild mesh was a riot of shrubs — juniper, holly, bayberry — and harder-to-identify plants. Lapping at the roots, blanketing the mud, were mounds and mounds of rotting leaves, twigs and trash of all kinds. Here and there in the small wilderness were discarded monuments to carelessness, like the cast-iron stove that had been improbably tossed nearby.
The ditch itself was probably the result of the construction of the jail. Though, if had been an honest man, Mr. Gwynn would confess that in all the time he spent in the ditch, he never once wondered how it got there.
It should be said that Mr. Gwynn was not a honest man.
On this particular morning, in early November, the dew might have been frost. But it wasn’t, and Mr. Gwynn laid in the grass with his eyes closed, mostly oblivious to the occasional shrieks of playful laughter at the jail, and felt the coolness of his wet clothes with a perverse satisfaction. As car doors slammed and engines revved below him, he slowly stretched his limbs out.
Without opening his eyes, he knew his face was flecked with blades of grass and drops of muddy water. He could feel that his clothes were about half-soaked, and not only with water. He sighed. He did not mind.
As a breeze passed over his face, Mr. Gwynn slowly formed a mental sketch of the night before. He had left the offices of The Mineola Press Boy and Gazeteer after the close of the afternoon edition, had a dinner of eggs and toast under the obsequious gaze of Mr. Kafeer and then tried in vain for half an hour to get inside the Bengal Club.
At length, he had procured a bottle of rye from a corner store and wandered around in the gloaming trying to look casual while drinking it. Eventually, he fell into Pedersen’s, where he was sure he had told several fascinating anecdotes to a coterie of attractive young women.
As he laid there, the sky still dark and blank and the wind gently nudging the trash around his head, he thought he could hear their joyful adulation.
“Oh, Mr. Gwynn,” they said. “Your sense of humor!”
They all laughed, not just the girls but the whole bar. A chorus of admirers tumbled into snorts and heehaws. Even the band stopped playing. Swells of cheering overwhelmed him, men slapped him on the back, and mugs of beer sloshed behind him on the bar.
And by now, Mr. Gwynn was sure he could hear that laughter, for real.
He lifted his head, gingerly, and stared down past his feet at the jail. At first, all he noticed was that he was wearing only one shoe. A moment later, his red, swollen eyes focused in surprise on the denouement of another night of the warden’s debauch.
And the instant that Mr. Gwynn began to question why so much was going on in the parking lot of the county jail at 5 in the morning, his excesses from the previous evening welled up like an orchestra and gripped his head and his stomach in a simultaneous convulsion of pain, nausea and temporary blindness.
Had he been in a contemplative mood, he might have mentally added to his list of reasons why the ditch made a perfect early morning haven: No one cares if you throw up. In fact, reasonable, respectable people would tell him, Yes, yes, by all means. Go to the ditch over there and throw up.
But he wasn’t thinking about any of that. He just turned his head and vomited. His view of the parking lot shifted to dark green grass and then faded away altogether to white and then red.
He let his head slap mercifully back into the cool November mud.
He eventually became a certified EMT in New York and then completed a tactical medicine training program in Southern California. Not famous enough to headline Madison Square Garden, plenty famous enough to stand out in a tactical medicine training program. “The altitude drop is when somebody realizes who you are and they take you to task. Now youre the guy who gets to do garbage five days in a row instead of one, and doing ambulance-garage garbage is different from I-just-finished-dinner-and-now-I-have-to-dump-the-garbage-darling garbage. That will test you. But I was old enough and smart enough to know what Id signed up for. These tactics are of value, theyre a contribution.” For years he went on ambulance calls all over New York City, and found that a life in the music business was good preparation for rushing to the aid of grievously injured people in the less picturesque corners of the city. “My skills were serious,” he says. “Verbal judo, staying calm in the face of hyper-accelerated emotion. Same bizarre hours. Same keening velocity.”
via David Lee Roth Will Not Go Quietly.
Spring will march into Brooklyns Grand Army Plaza early Wednesday morning with a puff of sage smoke, the beating of drums, and a group of people balancing more than 300 eggs on end. “Urban shaman” Mama Donna Henes will lead the egg-centric balancing ritual to mark the equinox, the twice yearly moment when the day and night are exactly the same length and a new season is born.
via Brooklyn Shaman to Welcome Spring with Egg Balancing – DNAinfo.com New York.
The flying beetle can kill a healthy, decades-old ash tree in a mere three to five years. It lays its eggs on their bark, which the larvae, once hatched, bore into and consume, eventually starving the tree of water and nutrients. Adult borers can fly only relatively short distances between trees, but people spread them widely when transporting firewood.
via Endangered trees: Making a hash of the ash | The Economist.
Dinner. Dinner is the “oh-f” moment of the day. Unless you have an assistant who has expertly troubleshot your social life, or you are an out-of-towner who has diligently reserved the most ecstatically reviewed spots a year in advance, or you have an in, youre totally screwed for any day-of plan.
via Michael Wolff on securing top tables at New Yorks finest restaurants – GQ.COM UK.
The police did not open them to check. No, thank you. They put the bricks, undisturbed, back in the box, and they left. Officers in New York City confront all manner of hazardous material and paraphernalia every day, but this was something else. Fruitcake. Homemade fruitcake.
via Thief Steals 2 Packages – One Contained Glasses, the Other Didn’t – NYTimes.com.
Drones have become the subject of urgent policy debates… But they are also a part of the popular culture — toys sold by Amazon; central plot points in “Homeland” and a dozen other television shows and movies; the subject of endless macabre humor, notably by The Onion; and even the subject of poetry.
via Visions of Drones in U.S. Skies Touch Bipartisan Nerve – NYTimes.com.
Divorce filings shot up here and in other big cities across China this past week after rumors spread that one way to avoid the new 20 percent tax on profits from housing sales was to separate from a spouse, at least on paper.
via Some Chinese Seek a Divorce to Avoid Real Estate Tax – NYTimes.com.
Of the 16 men who went down with the Monitor on Dec. 31, 1862, researchers have narrowed the identities of the two sailors to six possibilities. While there are no conclusive DNA matches with their descendants, forensic researchers are convinced that they will eventually find these men’s stories in their bones.
via After Over a Century at Sea, 2 Sailors Are Laid to Rest – NYTimes.com.
Lent toured his wife throughout Europe, where some newspapers and books described her appearance unsparingly: “gorillalike” or “revolting in the extreme.”
via Julia Pastrana, Who Died in 1860, to Be Buried in Mexico – NYTimes.com.
“Watching violence makes kids feel they can use violence to solve a problem. It brings increased feelings of hostility. It increases desensitization.”
via The ‘Die Hard’ Quandary – NYTimes.com.
And John McCain could channel his spooky fury into a fragrance for the grudge holder who has never suffered a slight that he didn’t avenge. Its name would be Payback, and it would smell of sour grapes and scorched earth.
via A Spritz of Power – NYTimes.com.
Ludwig Wittgenstein #3 (Photo credit: Christiaan Tonnis)
Stop me if you’ve heard this one:
An Iranian in New York asks his readers why no one is taking Middle Eastern philosophers seriously.
I mean, that is not what he is asking. But, really, it is.
The question is rather something else: What about other thinkers who operate outside this European philosophical pedigree…
via Can non-Europeans think? – Opinion – Al Jazeera English.
A few clicks away was his answer.
I mean, it is not really the answer he wants or is even looking for. But, really, it is.
Philosopher Bertrand Russel described Ludwig Josef Johann Wittgenstein as “the most perfect example I have ever known of genius as traditionally conceived, passionate, profound, intense, and dominating.”
via Reality is shaped by the words we use.
