Caoine

More Haunting Is Required

I definitely have a hankering for houses of the haunted variety this Halloween (and don't even get me started on my affection for alliteration), so I was pleased to see MUG's piece on Haunted House NYC. I plan to visit when it opens on the 21st, but I worry that my need for fear will not be satisified by a single attraction. So: residents of New York, what else is there? I'm thinking here not only of haunted houses, but spooky edifices or events of almost any variety. (When I was in high school, I worked one October at a Haunted Barn, and I would be lying if I said it wasn't genuinely scary, at least on one's first time through.) Send me your suggestions, and I'll post the best of them on the site.

Hop Hop Hop

Why do you love me? Because I bring you Bizarre Flash games involving Garrison Keillor and bunnies. From Honda UK, even! That's why you love me!

Hi-Technical Excellent Taste And Flavor

I have to say, I've had worse weekends. On Saturday I met up with Colin, who I hadn't seen in about two years, and some of his friends, who I had never seen before. We spent some time shopping in the Village and eating in Chinatown before heading to Lincoln Center for a midnight screening of House of Flying Daggers. And because everyone has been asking: yes, it was great, and yes, Zhang Ziyi is even hotter in person. So that was Saturday.

Although you wouldn't know it by reading the relevant archive page, Sunday made it two years that I've been with Chris (and nine months since I moved in with him). Last year we marked the occasion by going to see Eddie Izzard, but this time around we settled for Shaun of the Dead and dinner at Cafe Spice. I could go into some mushy stuff about how happy I've been over the past two years and how lucky I consider myself to have someone like Chris, but I'll save that (mostly) for him.

And today I had the day off, which I celebrated by sleeping till 11, watching Delicatessen, and then napping with the cat until 5.

Still Looking For A Gmail Invite?

I continue to get a lot of email that has to do with Gmail - both from people who want invitations and from people who have them, especially now that the original Gmail post is bringing a lot of Gmail-hungry Googlers here. Since it seems pretty dumb for a human to spend any amount of time pairing up the haves and the have-nots, I am sending all of you to the Gmail spooler: feed it your existing invites or ask for one of your own.

Help Me Give Away Money (Continued)

I realized recently that the link to my Amazon page has been missing from my sidebar for a while. I am in fact still sending my referral fees to Oxfam, so please continue to use the link generator if you'd like to contribute.

If you didn't hear about it the first time around: this page allows you to generate links to products on Amazon's site using my referral code. Whenever you buy something using one of these links, I get a chunk of its price as a referral fee. And this year, I'm sending my referral fees each quarter to Oxfam, so using that link generator for things you buy anyway is an easy way to send them a little extra cash.

It Was A Pretty Good Hotel

On my way to the bank near my office building the other day, I passed a block that looked really familiar and I couldn't figure out why (not having walked down it since I started this job). On my way back, I realized that it's because it contains the hotel I stayed at when I first came to visit NYU as a prospective student. That would have been during the spring of 1998 or the fall of 1999. It was only my second visit to the city (the first being a weekend spent here when I was knee high to a grasshopper), and I didn't realize then that the entire city doesn't look like the financial district. I couldn't have realized that five years later the financial district would still look totally bizarre to me. But I ended up moving here anyway, so it can't have been that alarming, even to a seventeen-year-old ubergoth.

Stop Right Where You Are

Just to give you an idea, the kind of weather we had today (low of 50-something, high of 60, partly cloudy and very little wind) is the only kind of weather I actually like. It needs to be cold enough that I can wear some kind of second layer but not so cold that I have to wear my huge winter coat, and it should stay like this all the time. Make it so!

Hack The Planet

In the building I work in, there is one other company on my floor. I am obliged to walk by the entrance to their office space whenever I want to go to or from the elevators. Bizarrely, I've recently started hearing the distinctive sound of someone dialing up with a modem about once or twice a day when I walk by. But this building is inhabited almost exclusively by IT and new media companies. So who's the dweeb with the 56k?

Yeah, yeah, I know you're going to email me and say they're probably having problems with their broadband and are using a backup dialup account. Nobody likes a spoilsport, you know.

Crazy Cat People

Chris and I are thinking of adopting a second cat or kitten to keep The Mighty Beast company during the day while we're both at work. He's a five year old neutered male, and we've been asking around to get an idea of what sorts of cats he's likely to get along with. The consensus seems to be that a younger female is the way to go (and I'm not going to make any of the obvious jokes about that), but we're not sure how much younger. So, cat-loving Interweb: tell me about your multi-cat households. Do you have two males that get along just fine? Do you have a kitten and a ten year old who hate each other? I want to hear all about it.

Fuck Off And Die: A Visitor's Guide To The NYC Subway System

The thing you have to remember is that the second you enter the subway system, you as a tourist become the lowest form of life imaginable. Residents, on the other hand, transform into etiquette fascists, filled with almost unbelievable quantities of both rancor and fury. Most of them will actually like you less than the rats that are scurrying around down by the tracks, because at least the rats aren't getting in anyone's way. Once you've accepted that while underground you are a vile and soulless creature hated by everyone around you, you're off to a good start.

1. Get a subway map, and study it before you even leave your hotel. (Better yet, look at the clickable map on the MTA site instead.) Figure out your route now, before you're blocking the platform or leaning over some poor commuter sitting in the seat under the map. She doesn't like your perfume, by the way. Once you know what line you need to take and what stop you need to get off at, the only signs you need to pay attention to when you're in the station itself are the ones with your line listed on them. Follow the arrows. Ignore, for the most part, the "Local" and "Express" signs, because they are misleading and almost completely useless.

2. When you are in a subway station, walk quickly or stand in one place. Don't meander, and stay well out of the way of the staircases and the train doors. Never, ever stop on the stairs themselves to talk to someone or see if your group is still together - these are all things that can wait thirty seconds until you're out of the way. Keep to the right if you walk slowly.

3. If you're visiting during the week and dislike being packed into a train such that you don't even need to hold onto a pole since you're pretty much crowdsurfing the entire time anyway, you may want to consider avoiding rush hour trains entirely.

4. If you decide to brave the crowds, you absolutely must move into the middle of the train when you board it. It doesn't matter if you're only going two stops, people will get out of your way when the time comes to get off. But if you hover by the door when fifty people are waiting to board behind you, expect to be forcibly removed.

5. If you can possibly manage it, figure out how to get where you're going from the information that's on the web or from directions provided by your destination. If you take up ten minutes of the booth person's time asking how to get to the Met, that's ten minutes during which the MetroCard line is snaking out of control behind you. Even those of us who don't need new MetroCards then have to navigate a path through the line itself, and everyone gets more pissed off (if that's possible).

Remember that when we're above ground, we don't really hate you. It's just that the subway is bad enough without people making it unnecessarily worse, and all we want to do is get to work and back without incident. I'm perfectly happy to provide detailed directions to any destination in Manhattan if you stop me on the sidewalk, but once we're past that turnstile, I am a raging beast of a commuter and it is advisable to stay out of my way.