Segacs's World I Know

Posts Tagged ‘new york’

In the meantime, here’s a random New York City photo:

Times Square at Night

Back soon!

Just in from my long weekend vacation to NYC. Had an amazing time.

Got my fix of cheesy American chains – both restaurants and stores – I have no idea why I love them so much but it’s probably just the fact that we don’t have them at home. I bet I’d be bored with the chains if we did have them here.

Also got a culture fix. The Met was awesome. So was randomly running smack into the middle of the Salute to Israel Parade on Fifth Avenue when we exited the museum after several hours of getting cultured. I knew I would be missing the March to Jerusalem here in Montreal yesterday in order to go on this trip… but I had no idea such a huge event was taking place in New York. Needless to say, when I saw the thousands of people wearing t-shirts and waving flags, the parade floats blasting Israeli music, the Israeli flags hanging from the lampposts… I caught on pretty quick.

Got my Broadway fix too. Avenue Q was the most genius thing since, well, Sesame Street itself. Words cannot describe the brilliance of this show.

What I love about New York is the contrast between areas only a few blocks away. Times Square, with all its commercialized glitz and glitter… the high style of the Upper East Side (with the awesome bakery/deli selling M&M-covered pretzels)… the green oasis of Central Park, complete with sunbathers missing only the beach… the laid-back edginess of the Village, Washington Square and the NYU area… and no, we did not go to Ground Zero, mainly because it was too far out of the way, but we did see a touching memorial set up at a Fire Station.

Weather much nicer there than apparently was here. Waits at the border long and frustrating, of course… made worse by the union strike tactics… though I wish I’d have known this. Driving otherwise uneventful. Have come to the conclusion that cheesy 80s compilation CDs make for the best driving music.

Road trips rule. Back to reality tomorrow. Oh well, there’s always next time.

. . . was nice.

I headed down there over the weekend, and I managed to squeeze some city exploring in between the business I had to do. It’s been a number of years since my last visit, and I can’t get over how much the city has changed. Not just the conspicuous absence of a couple of towers. But also how much more patriotic everyone seems. And how clean the city is in general, compared to what I remember from my last time there. Still expensive though. That hasn’t changed.

At any rate, I missed a bunch of news over the weekend, and rather than play catch-up, I’ll post a few links:

Allison, Lynn, and Harry commemorate Yom HaZikaron. Barry has been all over the North Korean train crash story. David weighs in on the abortion debate. And Meryl tries to take back the F-word from the nutbags. (In case you’re wondering, the F-word in question is feminism.)

In other news, seems like the only Habs fan cheering these days is none other than Vinny Lecavalier. *Sigh*.

Today’s weather was miserable – high winds, power outages, heavy rain . . . but in New York it was much worse, where 10 people died and dozens more were injured when the Staten Island ferry crashed:

A New York ferry slammed into a pier while docking in high winds on Wednesday, killing at least 10 people and injuring dozens more as passengers’ limbs were severed and others leaped into the choppy water to escape being crushed in the wreckage.

At least 34 people were hospitalized after the Andrew J. Barberi ferry crashed at the end of its 25-minute, 5.2-mile run to Staten Island from Manhattan and tore a huge gash down the side of the bright orange boat, Mayor Michael Bloomberg said.

The boat which can hold up to 6,000 passengers was carrying commuters heading home from Manhattan to the city’s more residential Staten Island borough. It was unclear how many people were on board.

What an awful tragedy. Reports are also that the ferry’s assistant captain attempted suicide after the crash. And the rescue operations are still going on at the scene.

I hope they at least wait until the families have had a chance to mourn a bit before the inevitable finger-pointing and blame-shifting begins.

It is beyond me why Israelis were surprised at what went on at the Pro-Palestinian UN conference Anti-Israel propaganda fest held in New York yesterday:

Postcards of a Palestinian child dwarfed by the Israeli fence, slide shows of Palestinian humanitarian crises allegedly caused by the fence’s construction, informational leaflets printed by the anti-Zionist, ultra-Orthodox group Neturei Karta, and maps of “Palestine” from the river to the sea from 1920, minus the caveat that Palestine was never a state, were all on display yesterday at UN headquarters in New York, where delegates from across the globe gathered for the International Conference of Civil Society in Support of the Palestinian People.

The theme of the two-day conference was “End the Occupation!”

Ridiculous allegations were also levelled against the security fence, delegates were urged to overlook and excuse Palestinian terrorism, and Rachel Corrie’s mother was called up to speak. ADL chairman Abraham Foxman wrote a letter to Kofi Annan urging him not to support this conference, which – surprise, surprise – was ignored.

And people wonder why Israel doesn’t trust the UN . . .

The power outage that has shut down New York, Toronto, Ottawa, Detroit, Cleveland, and virtually everywhere in between somehow managed to escape us in Quebec, for once. Maybe the gods of power figured we paid our dues with Ice Storm 98?

Like a lot of people I’m sure, my initial reaction was to ask whether it was terrorism. But now it seems pretty clear that it wasn’t. CTV News is reporting that the cause was a fire at a nuclear power plant in Pennsylvania, although they still seem to be trying to sort that out.

The impact is absolutely staggering. To me, it says a lot about how dependant we are on electricity. Literally nothing works without it – the lights are the least of the problem. Transportation, business, the stock market, ventilation, even drinking water . . . it’s like mankind existed happily for thousands of years without electricity, but as soon as it was discovered, we moved ahead in a lit-up world so quickly that we can’t survive without it anymore. I remember having these conversations during the Ice Storm, and hearing the panic again in 1999 as we approached the millennium with trepidation that everything would simply shut down. That didn’t happen, of course, but the fear that it would just underscores this point.

I hope everyone in the affected areas makes it home safely and gets their power back soon.

There’s more conflict between the Hasidic Jewish community and a group of bigoted xenophobes in Outremont. First, they opposed the Eruv on the grounds that the wire is visible and it bothers them or something similar. Then, they lobbied against a zoning change that would have allowed a synagogue to expand. Now, they’re opposing a bus service between Montreal and New York that is geared towards the Hasidic community, many of whom have friends and relatives in New York and make the trip regularly:

Even more important than convenience – the bus made three stops in Outremont, picking up people almost from their doorsteps – is that the bus service offers kosher food, separate seating for men and women, and prayer time, Werzberger said.

The bus service has existed for about 30 years, he said, and nobody had complained about it until a small group of residents started lobbying council.

“There is a small group of people in Outremont who have made it their raison d’être to make life difficult for the Hasidic community. They come and bang in at the councillors and sometimes you just cave in to this kind of pressure.”

The credibility of the residents who keep complaining about the Hasidic community is long gone. The only question is, will the borough council cave into their pressure?