This happened just last night.

Leaving an evening of card-playing on the fourth floor, I was waiting for the elevator down with a few other people. It arrived, and its occupants were slightly confused. As sometimes happens, they started to leave the elevator, realized it wasn't the ground floor, and then retreated to the elevator.

Then they promptly pressed the "close doors" button, oblivious to the people waiting for the elevator. I had to squeeze my way through the closing doors. I thought it bespoke an astonishing degree of self-absorption: if it wasn't the right floor for them, the elevator's job at that location was done.

It really frosts my cookies when people ask me to turn down Fox News. I mean, how stupid and worthless can you be? That and the fact that I have to change channels to get to Jerry Springer. HeLLO? A little consideration for the audience? I'm thinking a revised Patriot Act, this time with teeth, might take away a little comfort from the enemy and make people show some respect.

I am guilty of some major etiquette infractions myself, and I don't care. For example, there is a fleet of private cars driven by subcontractors from New Jersey, and they park on a strip of shrubbery next to the federal court. In doing so they have dessimated (sp?) all the flowers and a little japanese maple (which is an expensive tree.) So I left a polite note requesting them NOT to park on MY park. Needless to say, this was roundly ignored (I leave a lot of notes, many also about the detriments of driving SUVs.) The other day, the offending parkers were hanging out in front of their cars, so I asked them in person to please not park on MY flowers. They of course were surprised and uncertain of whether they were on candid camera, but having come this far, I was loath to let them leave the conversation without their assurances. THEY were reluctant to give them, and basically when they figured out what the hell I was talking about, became very rude.

I for one, am not a Christian and firmly DO NOT BELIVE in turning the other cheek. I shot right back that they are petty criminals, ripping off the government, and too proud to do the right thing, and that their thinking was fallacious and people like them are responsible for the destruction of civic-values. Also I believe I mentioned they should be very ashamed for their willful stubborness, and they actually DON"T have the right to park there just because they happen to be mixing grout nearby, and that I was taking down their number and reporting them.

They are still parking on my flowers.

This kind of thing happens about twice a month for me. My husband is worried that I"m going to get shot someday. But I can't stop. I'm too righteous to be NICE to DICKSHITS any FUCKING MORE.

But at least she doesn't yak on the cellphone in the public crapper.

Chinatown presents an interesting conundrum: yr likely to be ignored, shoved, trod upon, etc., yet the perpetrators are old, female, short, and SIMPLY ADORABLE.

Hey LBY-- maybe it's time to enlist one of those "Seven on Your Side" type news teams? See what happens when a news crew comes down there.

Better yet, get one of the Democratic Mayoral candidates to do a photo op about how Bloomberg is allowing the Trampling of Our Fair City's Florifactory Resources! That Anthony Weiner's a good shouter.

See the thing is, 311 will not face the issue (oh yes, 311 works!) because it's FEDERAL policy. Fucking US government problems. BUT ALL the courts are guilty... the baliffs think that because Franklin Place (an alley between Franklin and White) doesn't TECHNICALLY belong to the city (though there are NO PRIVATE DEEDS ON RECORD), that means it's THEIR parking space. ALSO the Family Court (NY) tends to leave the motors running for HOURS at a time, and so when I mentioned the issue to them about maybe curtailing their unncessary petrol use (they claimed the fleets of cars were warming up despite the fact that it was 70* out), they don't respond nicely.

Yeah. Maybe Air America needs a "7 on my side"/"PROBLEMSOLVERS!" type of show. Yeah. I think i'll make some calls.

Thanks Bill!

Oh and Sonic Youth STILL ROCKS!

If I can cast minds back (rudely) a few Fridays, I'd like to point out the Washington Post's ego-stroke-casting, a front page story on iPod theft and its attendant psychological scars.

http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/articles/A57629-2005Apr15.html

Front page, for Frick's sake!

Same space that a few weeks ago had a gloating story, based really on just a few interviews, indicating that granola suburb Takoma Park (ok, *my* granola suburb)is becoming carnivorous.

Not that it ever wasn't, though we certainly have our hippies and even one guy who walks around in trapper gear carrying a fox carcass in a trap to make (?) his point about animal abuse. And I even agree that the trend is probably right, since property values are headed up faster than Bob Dole's pooch at a Britney Spears concert, and the town is no longer attracting the like-minded so much as those with similar buying power. Not that this was mentioned. (And not that I want to read about hippie victims of gentrification.)

Um, what was this week's question?

Oh, I do think that going about your business noisily is probably the best way to shut down Mr. P Mobile.

One of my coworkers encountered someone in a women's restroom at a computer training center in lower Manhattan.

On speakerphone.

Between that and the waiter clipping his nails (very audibly) at the end of a bar in a restaurant during lunch (I changed my mind about eating there) today, I think I've overdosed on behavior.

People in my home town spit on the sidewalk nowadays -- not just little old Asian men whom you could maybe excuse (though they don't in Singapore), all kinds of people, all the time. I don't know which is worse, the straightforward disgustingness or being forced to reflect every ten feet on the decline of civility, the increasingly feral and hostile nature of one's fellow townspeople etc. Anyway, I hope to move eventually, so if any of you know of a city where people don't do that, please let me know.

Um...Celebration, Florida?

Actually, I saw very little sidewalk-expectoration when I lived in the environs of Washington D.C., but in the southern suburbs of that city sidewalks are deprecated. (By "deprecated" I mean "curious and unused ribbons of cement, occasionally found separating heavily fertilized lawns from roadways." ) Perhaps the walkways in the urban core itself are more frequently spat upon.

Here in Gotham, of course, you can pretty much get your spit on 24/7. Also, we got rid of our cable-cars in the Great Cable Riot of 1904. So that's two up that Toronto has on us. Plus, you know, the political thing.

Invasions, death, destruction, sanctimony, sure. Spitting on the sidewalk? Heaven forfend.