Category: ramblings

ramblings

Landlord Sues Restaurateurs Over Ghosts

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I just had to post something funny – too much Katrina coverage can really keep you in a dark mood. This was filed by the AP yesterday:

Landlord Sues Restaurateurs Over Ghosts

ORLANDO, Fla. (AP) — The owners of a Japanese restaurant who claim their newly renovated building is haunted are being sued by their landlord for refusing to move in.

An offer to hold an exorcism was refused, according to the 2.6 million dollar lawsuit filed by the owners of the Church Street Station entertainment complex last month in Orange County Circuit Court.

The lawsuit also asks a judge to decide whether the building is haunted and, if so, whether the ghosts would interfere with the restaurant’s business.

Christopher and Yoko Chung had planned to move their Amura Japanese Restaurant into the building in October 2004, but backed out of the lease.

The Chungs’ attorney says subcontractors gave several documented reports of having seen ghosts or apparitions in the restaurant at night. The attorney also says Christopher Chung’s religious beliefs require him to ”avoid encountering or having any association with spirits or demons.”

Thanks Jessie for making me smile – something I haven’t done too much of lately

ramblings

NOLA Relief NYC

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I am still so upset about this tragedy that I can hardly speak or think about it without getting red in the face so I’ll leave my blistering criticism of the federal government’s reaction (it took 4 days!?!?) for another post.

In conjunction with my cousin Jimmy, proprietor of Jacques-imos, and the president of the NYC Tulane Alumnus Association, I have launched Nola Relief NYC, a site dedicated to information related to the New Orleans Hurricane Katrina Relief Effort that is going on in the Greater New York City Area. There are going to be many, many, fundraising events in the NYC area. This site will be listing all NYC fundraising events that are being held in conjunction with the NYC Tulane Alumnus Organization. There is already one planned at Jacques-imos for Wednesday, September 14th. It will be a night of food, drink, and live New Orleans music. We will celebrate while we mourn in the greatest of New Orleans’s traditions.

The copy below is from an email that Jimmy sent out yesterday:

Most of you have watched this weeks events in New Orleans and The Gulf Coast in horror. As many of you know, we operate a New Orleans restaurant here in NYC, Jacques-Imos, and have two restaurants New Orleans. Our sister restaurants, Jacques-Imos New Orleans and Crabby Jack’s of Jefferson Parish, employ more than 85 people.

To date, we have only heard from 5 of these employees. We have reason to believe that more than 60% of the homes of our employees have either been destroyed or looted. The personal stories we are hearing from our friends and employees down in New Orleans are horrific, often worse than what we are hearing on the news. Here in NYC, our staff has been personally effected by the events as more than 70% of our employees are from New Orleans. Due to Katrina’s wrath, Jacques-Imos NYC has become the orphanage of New Orleans’ residents and refugees in NYC.

For those of you who have been touched over the years by the majesty and charm of New Orleans, for those who simply want to help the people of The Gulf Coast, please come by Jacques-Imos NYC on Wednesday, September 14th, to show your support. 100% of the proceeds will go to relief efforts in New Orleans. For those of you in a position to donate something that can be auctioned off that evening, please email me or call me Jacques-Imos, 212 799 0150. Whether it be a weekend at a home in the Hamptons or in St. Maarten, 20 cases of Abita beer, plane tickets to Miami, a years subscription to the NY Times, we’ll take any and everything that we can auction off. Again, 100% of the proceeds from the evening are going to the American Red Cross.

Finally, there is a real need to find short term housing in NYC for our New Orleans employees and New Orleans friends. If any of you have access to apartments in the NYC area that we can rent please let us know or send an email to info@nolareliefnyc.com. Everyone from New Orleans is in the same boat. Many of the financial institutions in New Orleans are very local as opposed to what we have here in NYC. Therefore their ATM and Credit Cards are not working. We are looking for large and small affordable apartments in NYC.

Please do what you can. Open your hearts. Open your homes. Open your wallets. Let’s make a difference when obviously our government has failed to do so. After the jump, feel free to read a poem I wrote about Nawlins after I visited the the city for the first time – Jimmy took me to Jazz Fest and I just fell in love with Nawlins. It was written during my sophomore year and included in my intermediate creative writing class portfolio.

Nola by Jeff Lipson

It came from out of the bayou,
a sound of jazz and of zydeco,
a sound of the blues and of funk,
a smell of gumbo and of jambalaya,
a smell of po boys and of crawfish
a sense that I found a home.
Black child eyes the crowd,
feet blazing away on the sidewalk,
dancing hard, dancing out of love,
dancing for me,
and I smile,
throw a dollar in the hat for his effort,
and he smiles back.
Seventy year old black man,
blind but never beaten,
damns his frail body, athritic fingers,
joins his friend down at the Howlin Wolf,
gets his remedy
jamming the night like he did in ’58
except there are white folk swaying in the crowd
swaying to his mastery,
smiling with love at the negro layin down the groove.
The nights are wet, are humid,
fifteen foot shutters seal doors and windows,
wrought iron gates protect secluded gardens,
they’re everywhere in the Quarter didn’t you know,
and the street names are in french,
and the city seems ancient,
and the city is ancient
and my ticket says I have to go home,
cab speeds away toward the airport,
up 36 hours and still ready for more,
I say I will call this place home.

ramblings

Fallujah, LA (formerly known as New Orleans)

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It just keeps getting worse and worse. If I were to tell you about a city that: has no power, has no clean water, has no food, has no working infrastructure, consists mainly of rubble, has dead bodies laying about in the streets, has rampant lawlessness, is controlled by armed bands of people roving the streets and has people shooting at helicopters you might name a city in Iraq. You would never have named a U.S. city, until today that is: what I just described is happening RIGHT NOW in New Orleans. The reason why the scariest horror stories to me are books like The Stand and movies like 28 Days Later is because our society is so loosely held together – in the end it only takes so very little to rip it all to shreds. The animal side of humanity can take over so quickly and things can go from bad to worse to atrocious in no time. We are seeing this first hand by watching Nawlins become a third world country.

This is from an AP report dated today, filed at 2:02 PM:

An old man in a chaise lounge lay dead in a grassy median as hungry babies wailed around him. Around the corner, an elderly woman lay dead in her wheelchair, covered up by a blanket, and another body lay beside her wrapped in a sheet.
“I don’t treat my dog like that,” 47-year-old Daniel Edwards said as he pointed at the woman in the wheelchair. “I buried my dog.” He added: “You can do everything for other countries but you can’t do nothing for your own people. You can go overseas with the military but you can’t get them down here.”

To echo those sentiments, the NY Times published an absolutely scathing editorial lambasting our dear President’s performance over the past few days. To give you an idea of how angry the Times (and I am) is, here are the first 2 sentences:

George W. Bush gave one of the worst speeches of his life yesterday, especially given the level of national distress and the need for words of consolation and wisdom. In what seems to be a ritual in this administration, the president appeared a day later than he was needed.

Again, we’re told with a smirk that everything will be alright by someone who has less than zero credibility. Where is the LA National Guard, which could have been deployed to help prevent what has happened from happening? Oh yeah, they are fighting a losing war in Iraq. The authorities should have very quickly realized that the poorest and most desperate (not just before this storm hit mind you) part of the city’s population was not leaving. Its tough to think that your citizens will become animals but you always have to plan for the worst and hope for the best. Seems as if that wasn’t done that well down south from where I’m sitting.

ramblings

Katrina

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First of all, I feel bad for all the women who have the name “Katrina” because now that name is associated with all sorts of grief and destruction. If you haven’t heard by now, Hurricane Katrina, which would have been a category 6 storm if there was a category six, has utterly destroyed parts of the deep south. New Orleans has been washed out and I feel lucky to have experienced Nawlins twice before this disaster occurred. I’m sure that after the weeks, months or even years it’ll take to dry out the Big Easy pass that the city will be forever different – that there always will be a dividing line around this event, sort of how 9/11 has changed NYC. You were either there before, during or after Katrina. Period.

I take offense to the idea that Hurricane Katrina was “our tsunami” (many media outlets are using this as a catchy headline) because the tsunami came out of nowhere with no warning. People knew for days that this storm was coming. People knew for decades that the levees in place would not support the city if a large category five storm hit. While the destruction of property was in some ways a given, regardless of what the authorities said or did, the loss of life could have been prevented if more people left when they could have. I myself have put off buying emergency supplies in case there is another blackout or disaster in NYC because I’ve been lazy (the worst excuse of all). Well, what’s happening in New Orleans is about as swift a kick in the ass as there can be. My next freshdirect order will contain plenty of gallons of water, batteries, etc. I’m on the 24th floor in my new building – even a simple blackout will cause big problems in my life.

Back to the storm. First, the NY Times has a very good map for those that want to know exactly what parts of Nawlins have been affected. It was helpful to know that the St. Bernard Parrish is totally under water while the French Quarter is relatively okay (aside from rampant looting – more on that later). Next, I found this photo gallery of the destruction from the San Fransisco Chronicle through Google News. To me, it provides the best look at how awful this event is and I suggest you look at all of them, especially the captions. Pictures as the most potent and powerful way to convey how bad things are. That large crowd stranded on a bridge? Those would be inmates from from the Orleans Parish Prison. Scary stuff.

There are just so many different ways that this is bad. Here are just a few:

  • 80% of New Orleans is under water, some of it over 20 feet deep. I love NO and feel as if a friend, not just a city, is drowning
  • Bixoli, Mississippi, the city made famous by Neil Simon among others, has been utterly destroyed as well
  • Tulane’s fall semester, and maybe year, is probably cancelled. Who knows how many other elementary schools, high schools and colleges, teachers, staff and students are affected not just in that region but nationwide. A friend’s daughter was supposed to start her freshman year at Tulane this week. The whole family was there as part of a big “goodbye and goodluck” deal and they were lucky enough to rent a car and drive to Houston before the storm hit or else who knows what would have happened to them. Maybe they would have gone to the Superdome, which as of now has no A/C and whose toilets are overflowing. I just heard that those in the Superdome are being evacuated to the Astrodome as of tomorrow. I guess for some right now its “dome sweet dome” until who knows when.
  • 25% of US oil refining happens in this region. Many people do not realize their are two parts of the oil issue to consider – production and refinement. Blowing up pipelines in Iraq affects production. Katrina has created a problem where while we do have oil, we do not have the ability to turn that crude oil into gasoline. Our country has lost a quarter of that ability for who knows how long. You know its bad when you see deep sea oil rigs just floating around and when oil tanks look like lily pads when viewed from the sky. I’m betting that gas will hit $4.00 a gallon by the end of the week.
  • Once again, the worst of humanity has surfaced in the face of rampant looting and violence. There are wide spread stories of people getting carjacked as they tried to make their way out of the city. Looting is rampant and in many cases occurring in front of overwhelmed police officers. “These are not individuals looting,” Colonel Terry Ebbert, the city’s director of homeland security, said. “These are large groups of armed individuals.” It’s not hard to imagine that parts of Nawlins are currently under militia/criminal control. I wonder how long they will remain that way.

One thing is for sure: I’ll be donating money, hopefully through my company as they have in the past matched donations when disasters have struck, as soon as possible. I encourage you to donate as well. If you have any views, opinions, thoughts and/or if you know someone affected by this tragedy, please share. Part of having a site is being able to form an instant virtual community. I know that this event has really affected how I feel about a lot of things and I’ve shared with you how I feel. Now, if you want, its your turn. Until then, I’ve provided after the jump the lyrics to “When the Levee Breaks” by Led Zeppelin. I immediately started thinking of this song when I heard that the levees were giving way. The lyrics are pretty spot on to what a Nawlins resident must be thinking/facing right now.

“When the Levee Breaks” by Led Zeppelin from their fourth and untitled “Zoso” album:
If it keeps on rainin’, levee’s goin’ to break, [X2]
When The Levee Breaks I’ll have no place to stay.
Mean old levee taught me to weep and moan, [X2]
Got what it takes to make a mountain man leave his home,
Oh, well, oh, well, oh, well.
Don’t it make you feel bad
When you’re tryin’ to find your way home,
You don’t know which way to go?
If you’re goin’ down South
They got no work to do,
If you don’t know about Chicago.
Cryin’ won’t help you, prayin’ won’t do you no good,
Now, cryin’ won’t help you, prayin’ won’t do you no good,
When the levee breaks, mama, you got to move.
All last night sat on the levee and moaned, [X2]
Thinkin’ about me baby and my happy home.
Going, going to Chicago… Going to Chicago… Sorry but I can’t take you…
Going down… going down now… going down….

ramblings

I’ve Got A Fever And The Only Cure Is More Coq Roq News

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I just love how this story has legs, or maybe drumsticks would be the better term.

First of all, if you google “coq roq” this blog is at the bottom of the first results page, which might explain the healthy amount of comments on the first Coq Roq related post.

Second, it turns out that some fellow rocker are offended. The KISS/Gwar combo rockers (who cannot spell) SliPKnot are suing BK because “SliPKnoT fans have expressed confusion and criticism over what they think is SliPKnoT endorsing Burger King.” Get the full legal complaint at, where else, the Smoking Gun’s site.

Thanks once again goes to Todd.

ramblings

I Have Good News

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If by just reading that headline you were thinking “I just saved a bundle on my car insurance by switching to Geico,” then you’ll probably agree with the statement that Geico has the most memorable commercials on television right now. Period. I challenge you to present me with an ad campaign that is better. I love how there is no master concept holding them all together yet how that in itself is the master concept of the campaign. I love the randomness and that half of the time you have no clue you are seeing a Geico ad until you hear the tag line. They are short, irreverent and somehow, partly through immense repetition, they stick with you. More importantly, they have become part of every day life. Some examples:

* After my accountant plugged all my info into his PC program to prepare my 2005 tax return, he turned to me and said, “Good news.” I started to guess how much he was going to tell me I was getting back when he said, “I just saved a bundle by switching to Geico.” He is so dry I never saw it coming.

* When I first moved into my new apartment building, I described how I felt about the new place by asking, “Have you ever seen the Geico Tiny House commercial? Its like that.” To see Tiny House, my all time favorite Geico commercial — “I’m just trying to make an omelette!” — click here, then click “What We’ve Done” and “Geico.”).

* When I provided tech support to my friend Greg a few weeks ago, I said that something was so easy “a caveman could do it” and then we both made sure there were no caveman’s around who would be insulted by that statement.

One day, and that day may never come, I’ll call upon Geico to do a favor for me by saving me up to $500 in 15 minutes on car insurance. Until then, I will just get a nice laugh by watching their ads.

ramblings

I Am Still Being Stalked

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Update on a past post: The NY Times real estate section which has in the past stalked me is once again stalking me by writing an article titled “Settling for the Upper East Side.” Since I wrote that previous post, Jessie and I wound up buying an apartment after all in the, what else, UES and yeah, I felt like we “settled” at first. However, in the end we both couldn’t be happier. Central Park & the Met are only 2 blocks away, affordable restaurants abound, many of our friends are nearby and there is a store for everything we could ever want right at our fingertips, which is something we definitely lacked downtown at 50 Murray. As cool as that building was, it was an island in a sea of nothing and we barely took advantage of half that the island offered. While I do miss being downtown, the great architecture and the grandeur of living closer to the pulse of the city, I am going to enjoy watching my dog Bingham pee on the Temple of Dendur’s window (if he can reach that high) as we play in the park. To every season, turn, turn, turn…

Anyway, if this continues and I still receive no credit or acknowledgement as the inspiration for a years worth of NY Times stories, I will be forced to take the appropriate action.

ramblings

Old Enough To Know Better

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From the “I Don’t Know What To Say” Department:

Emergency workers helped a New Hampshire man out of a difficult situation over the weekend after a friend apparently locked a padlock around his testicles.

According to the Portsmouth Herald, police reported that the 39-year-old man was intoxicated when they arrived at the scene on July 30 at about 3:40 a.m. The man, who was not identified, told them that he had the padlock around his testicles for two weeks.

The man said that a friend put the lock on while he was drunk and passed out. When he woke up, the friend was gone.

“Never in my 13 years have I seen anything like this,” Cpl. H.D. Wood told the Herald. The man told police that he tried to remove the lock with a hacksaw because the key had broken off in the lock.

He was taken to Exeter Hospital, where a locksmith removed the padlock. He was treated and released, and the hospital said he had no lasting injury. Police said that they did not know the motive for the incident.

I would surmise the motive was to goon it up. This crime reeks of goonage to me. I bet his friends can’t wait for his 40th birthday party. Hopefully that’ll make the papers as well.

Via Todd

ramblings

I’m Gonna Get Medieval On Yo Ass

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It seems that Michigan resident Robert McClain thought that his four-foot sword, chainmail armored vest, leather gauntlets and giant wooden mallet would be able to best the local police department.

“I’m gonna crush your fucking skulls,” Michigan resident Robert McClain warned police officers when they trailed him to his home after an auto accident. “I have a thousand years of power.”

It seems that a non-enchanted taser is more powerful than all of those put together, millennium worth of power be damned.

Thanks Phyl