Category: Life in the Big City

My neighborhood

~ susie

Rite Aid - Philadelphia, PA (Northeast)

“What happened to you, you look awful!”

The young woman was speaking to a guy who probably wasn’t more than 50, but he had some real hard miles on him. He was thin and stooped over, and walked in obvious pain with a cane.

“I dunno, the doctor put some kinda shots in my back. Thirteen of them! And now I’m in a lotta pain and can’t hardly walk,” he said. “This is my first day out of bed in a week.”

“Geeze, I seen you last week and you were fine,” she said. “What was in the shots?”

“I dunno, he said it would help. And now, look at me. Hon, could you get me two packs of Marlboros, please?” he said to the drugstore cashier.

And they want to raise the retirement age? Bastards.

Out of gas

~ susie ~ 1 Comment

pgw

The plan to sell off our public utility is dead:

PHILADELPHIA (AP) — Philadelphia City Council members are effectively killing the proposed sale of the city’s gas utility to a Connecticut firm.

The deal required City Council approval. But Council President Darrell Clarke says there was “no appetite” for the proposed $1.86 billion sale of Philadelphia Gas Works to UIL Holdings Corp.

Mayor Michael Nutter’s administration had no immediate comment.

Nutter said in March that the sale would inject $424 million into the city’s distressed pension fund, freezing rates for three years and maintaining low-income and senior discount programs while safeguarding pensions.

Union leaders and several environmental organizations opposed the idea.

Yeah, I’m not keen on the idea of selling off our public assets to pay our bills. Call me old-fashioned!

Dear Prudence

~ susie ~ 4 Comments

Halloween with Peninsula Hotel

I have some neighbors like this. There are a couple of churches who bus kids into our neighborhood BECAUSE THEIR NEIGHBORHOOD ISN’T SAFE. They can’t even play outside, let alone trick or treat. So I love Prudie’s response:

Dear Prudence,
I live in one of the wealthiest neighborhoods in the country, but on one of the more “modest” streets—mostly doctors and lawyers and family business owners. (A few blocks away are billionaires, families with famous last names, media moguls, etc.) I have noticed that on Halloween, what seems like 75 percent of the trick-or-treaters are clearly not from this neighborhood. Kids arrive in overflowing cars from less fortunate areas. I feel this is inappropriate. Halloween isn’t a social service or a charity in which I have to buy candy for less fortunate children. Obviously this makes me feel like a terrible person, because what’s the big deal about making less fortunate kids happy on a holiday? But it just bugs me, because we already pay more than enough taxes toward actual social services. Should Halloween be a neighborhood activity, or is it legitimately a free-for-all in which people hunt down the best candy grounds for their kids?

—Halloween for the 99 Percent

Dear 99,
In the urban neighborhood where I used to live, families who were not from the immediate area would come in fairly large groups to trick-or-treat on our streets, which were safe, well-lit, and full of people overstocked with candy. It was delightful to see the little mermaids, spider-men, ghosts, and the occasional axe murderer excitedly run up and down our front steps, having the time of their lives. So we’d spend an extra $20 to make sure we had enough candy for kids who weren’t as fortunate as ours. There you are, 99, on the impoverished side of Greenwich or Beverly Hills, with the other struggling lawyers, doctors, and business owners. Your whine makes me kind of wish that people from the actual poor side of town come this year not with scary costumes but with real pitchforks. Stop being callous and miserly and go to Costco, you cheapskate, and get enough candy to fill the bags of the kids who come one day a year to marvel at how the 1 percent live.

—Prudie

Transit cop arrests NYC busker

~ susie ~ 6 Comments

God, transit cops are even worse than the regular ones. Why the hell did he feel it was incumbent on him to go after this guy?

Musicians have rallied around a fellow subway performer who was arrested for playing at a Brooklyn subway stop – after the cop recited the law saying he WAS allowed to be there.

Andrew Kalleen, 30, was ejected from the G subway platform at the Lorimer Street-Metropolitan Avenue stop on Friday after calmly explaining to the officer that he was doing nothing illegal.

A video of the incident captured by straphangers waiting for a train shows a police officer approaching Kalleen and telling him he needed a permit to play there – which the musician disputes.

‘I’m not going to argue with you,’ the officer says calmly in response.

Kalleen, also speaking evenly, refuses to leave and tells the officer he has a right to be there performing, then directs him to the section in the Metropolitan Transportation Authority’s rules of conduct that says artistic performances and solicitations of donations are allowed.

The flustered officer reads the section aloud and discovers that the musician is indeed right – but still decides to eject him anyway.
Continue reading “Transit cop arrests NYC busker” →

Working class neighborhoods are disappearing

~ susie ~ 2 Comments

I see this in my own part of the city. Where are all those people going when they’re making less money than ever?Fishtown

As America has transitioned from a manufacturing economy to a knowledge- and service-based economy, entire neighborhoods and cities have been restructured, according to a recent study by the Martin Prosperity Institute.

American cities today experience distinct class divisions. The “creative class” (tech, law, arts, healthcare, professional jobs) occupies the most economically functional and desirable locations, many of which used to be working-class neighborhoods. The “service class” (lower wage, lower skill jobs like food preparation and retail) live in areas surrounding the creative class. The “blue-collar working class” (factory, manufacturing jobs) has been decimated, and what remains has been relegated to the least desirable places in cities.

The Martin Prosperity Institute study theorizes that creative classes have clustered around four major attractions: urban centers, transit hubs, universities, and natural amenities like coastlines and waterfronts.

Here’s Philly:

philly-8

Thanks to Shawn Sukumar.

The FIOS borg

~ susie ~ 1 Comment

Verizon Fios Bus On the scene

So they’re all over the neighborhood, signing people up for FIOS. One nice young lady banged on my door yesterday and said, “My manager sent me out here yesterday to find out why you don’t want to sign up.”

“You want to know? Fine, I’ll tell you,” I said. “Because Verizon handed over everyone’s personal data to the federal government without a warrant.”

She looked at me. “Yeah, that’s a good reason.”

“Damn straight, it’s a good reason.”

She kept trying. I told her contract employees with no benefits were another reason.

“The people who do the installations are all union employees with benefits,” she said.

“Yeah? How about the people who will be answering service calls?”

“I’m pretty sure they are, too.”

I looked at her. “Now, you know I’m going to call and check on that, right? Because they’re not.”

Then she started telling me about the $300 gift card I would get with a two-year contract. “Uh huh. And by then, you’re the new monopoly and you’re free to jack up the rates,” I said.

“Oh no, we’re regulated. Not like Comcast.”

“Yes, and your company is lobbying even as we speak to try to change that.”

She said she didn’t understand why I didn’t “want to save money.” I told her when I had Verizon DSL, the service from their contract workers was the worst I’d ever had. (I didn’t tell her that one of them told me, “We don’t care because we don’t have to. That’s the company motto.”) I remember at one point, I went three weeks without service, and they couldn’t figure out why.

Plus, you know how it is. You have to change all the mailing list stuff under your old address, and it’s a pain in the ass. As much as I hate Comcast, and as much as I suspect Comcast is also BFF with the NSA, I don’t know for sure. Yet.

I imagine the salespeople get some kind of bonus for signing up the entire block, but oh well.

Heh

~ susie ~ 2 Comments

Was talking to our own Brendancalling at last night’s 10-year anniversary party for Drinking Liberally. His latest musical project? A band that does all Eagles covers, only in a Philadelphia accent.

Yiz can check out any time you like
But youse can never leave…

I can’t wait.

We know who the real savage is, Pammy

~ susie ~ 6 Comments

pammy

*Here’s what the headline refers to.

This is Pam Geller’s hate group putting up these disgusting ads. Geller is the wingnut blogger who, through her batshit crazy blog “Atlas Shrugged”, devotes her life (and makes nice bit of cash doing so) attacking the usually-imaginary “Islamic threat.” Everything is a jihad, she attacks at fever pitch, and the louder she gets, the more money rolls into her group. (Not that she needs it, after her $4 million divorce settlement and then a $5 million insurance policy when her ex died.) She is, truly, a dreadful person. I hope passengers can exercise their own First Amendment rights by defacing these signs:

pam_Geller

When an anti-Islamic group decided to advertise on city buses and billboards this fall with photos of a terrorist poised to behead an American and a Muslim leader smiling at Adolf Hitler, transit officials in New York and Washington, D.C., huffed their disapproval – but allowed the ads to run.

They had no choice, they said, because the ads were protected under the First Amendment.

SEPTA’s officials disagreed and rejected the ads.

But the group behind the ads – the American Freedom Defense Initiative – won’t surrender quietly. The New Hampshire-based group sued SEPTA in federal court last week, complaining that the transit agency violated AFDI’s free-speech rights.

One local First Amendment expert says SEPTA picked an unwinnable fight.

“The most fundamental principle of the First Amendment is that you may never bar any message based upon the content of the message,” said Burton Caine, a law professor at Temple University and past president of the Philadelphia chapter of the American Civil Liberties Union. “This is absolutely prohibited, what SEPTA is doing.

“Everybody has this same idea that they like the First Amendment,” Caine said, “but when the speech is offensive, people will make all kinds of excuses why it’s not protected. The whole point of the First Amendment is to protect speech that offends. No exceptions.”

A federal judge said as much in 2012, ruling that the AFDI could post ads in New York City and Washington, D.C., that compared Muslim jihadists to “savages.”

Here’s Pam in classic wingnut attack mode, explaining to Ron Reagan Jr. that she knows his father better than he does: