Pakistan’s telecoms regulator has released a list of over 1000 words and phrases to be banned from usage in text messaging, most of which are pretty hilarious. Not particularly hilarious but nonetheless banned: “Deposit.”
Of course, this will just lead to a bunch of creative new slang phrases. Expect Pakistan to be at the cutting edge of euphemism within the next few years.
Well yeah, lady, it’s weird. But why are you so aggressive about it? Via Lou.
From designer Athanasia Leivaditou, via Gothamist, comes word of this new “Umbrella Coat Raincoat,” proposed as a solution to this city’s unfortunate rainy-day sidewalk umbrella traffic problem:
First of all, call it whatever you want, that’s just a hood. I mean, it’s a glorified hood for sure, but something attached to the back of a jacket that you pull over your head to protect your hair from the rain is a hood. I guess this one is special because it’s, I don’t know, bigger than a regular hood.
It really goes to underscore my main issue with rainy days in the city, which is: Why don’t more people just get rain jackets? Those dinky five-dollar umbrellas you get from the guy in the poncho on the corner aren’t going to keep your pants dry anyway, so you might as well save everyone the trouble of dodging your pointy umbrella-end thingies, invest in a $40 rain jacket, buckle down and face the storm. Plus when you’re not towing your own umbrella you’re more apt to dodge the umbrellas of others.
But the main thing is that the jackasses who carry the huge golf umbrellas will never go for the Umbrella Coat Raincoat, so this won’t solve anything. If they had even a shred of human decency within them they’d realize how obnoxious it is to command the entire width of the sidewalk with their stupid umbrella and find a more reasonable one. It’s silly to expect them to just hand over the massive pinwheels they landed at the Barclays in favor of some designer raincoat that’s going to make the world better for the rest of us. They don’t care about the rest of us; that’s the thing.
The only solution is one I’ve proposed before: License to carry laws for umbrellas in Manhattan. A written test and a practical test.
This comes from our man Catsmeat, via Gawker. Watch as this deer comes hurtling through the window of an Atlanta-area taco restaurant:
Non-banned-Ryan passes along the terrible news (that happened a few weeks ago) that Sam Ricobene, a man partly responsible for the best-rated sandwich ever reviewed at this site, has passed away at 79.
Also, worth noting: Banned Ryan is still going. Popped up here again this week, commenting from a new IP address. Seems like he’s a pretty dedicated reader — he even asked about a mobile site. His comments weren’t particularly trolly, but I had to ban him again because this site’s banhammer is absolute. Thanks for reading, though.
The World Wildlife Foundation recently had to move 19 endangered black rhinos. Here’s how they did it:
Check out the whole amazing gallery. Via Ted Burke.
Some light octopus reading suggested by Patrick Flood led me to some YouTube surfing, which led me to this:
Look at that thing.
For Halloween, I’m dressing this site up as a better version of itself, only with no concept of time. Which is to say I’m finishing up my move today (hopefully) and I don’t have access to the Internet, so I’m re-posting a bunch of old stuff that people seemed to like.
If you’re looking for a good time to tell your friends about TedQuarters, maybe do it today. Unless they’re going to expect I’ll always churn out like 8,000 words a day. In which case tell your friends to come back tomorrow when things are back to normal.
This one has to be quick. Plus I’m not even sure what’s going to suck about my new apartment yet, since I haven’t lived there. There’ll be plenty of time for complaining once I do.
Roaches: The new place is sparkling clean right now, but it seems just about inevitable that if you live in the city you’re going to see a roach in your apartment at some point or another. They come up through the pipes, I guess, or in windows or whatever. And that sucks, because roaches are awful looking. And I know they’re just stigmatized, and they’re actually clean by bug standards and don’t mean you’re going to get diseases or anything. But they’re creepy as hell, and anytime I ever saw one in my old apartment I couldn’t sleep that night.
The rent is too damn high: Seriously. I mean, we lucked into a great place that seemed downright reasonable in price compared to everything else we saw. Plus, I’m lucky to have a job in this market, and to be able to pay said rent.
But with almost every apartment search, you see a ton of places that appear only barely liveable, then just when you start bargaining with yourself and convincing yourself you could make that dirty postage-stamp of an apartment work, you find someplace way better in every way and go for it.
But someone has to live in those other apartments, right? Who’s paying so much for spaces so small? The rent is too damn high. And apparently it’s higher than ever right now, which sucks.
Brodowns: It is the Upper East Side, after all.
City living has it’s advantages.
Food: As you may have realized by now, I like eating. And though leaving the suburbs means — as mentioned earlier — I’ll have to give up grilling meat and enjoying homegrown herbs and vegetables, I should be able to make up the difference in the new location.
I know the Upper East Side isn’t exactly a hotbed of awesome culinary delights, but the whole access-to-the-subway thing makes a huge difference in the variety of food I’ll be able to eat. And while I recognize and appreciate the joy of perfecting a fried-chicken recipe through trial and error with the deep fryer, it’s better than even-money I’m never going to get it to taste better than what they serve at Hill Country Chicken.
And the variety! Near my new place there are German and Argentinean and Vietnamese places, with foods I wouldn’t even know where to start figuring out how to make myself. And somewhere near a NYC subway stop there is nearly every time of cuisine in the world available.
I expect this will mean good things for those of you who enjoy the food reviews on this site, for what it’s worth. Part of the reason it got so hard to keep up with the sandwich reviews was that I had exhausted most of the interesting sandwiches near my house in Westchester and couldn’t find time to venture out and find ones in the city. So look out for that.
Sidewalks: I love walking. When I first moved to Brooklyn I would find excuses for it: a book I wanted from a store a mile away, a cheeseburger I wanted from a White Castle even further. Then at some point I realized I needed no particular destination, and I took to wandering. Sometimes I plan it. Most times I just step outside for some reason, find the weather pleasant, realize I have nothing better to do, and set off. It’s good for thinking, plus it’s decent exercise.
In my neighborhood in the ‘burbs, though, there are very few sidewalks. That means any walking needs to be done while looking over your shoulder for oncoming cars that might hit you (like I said, there are few streetlights) or at the very least splash you with water from a nearby puddle. It’s not the type of walking conducive to thinking about much besides your own safety.
So I’m psyched to have sidewalks everywhere. I tell people it’s about a 45-minute walk from my new place to my office and they say, “yeah but you’ll never do that.” But I will. I might even do it tonight.
Time, and access to stuff with which to pass it: I used to, you know, do stuff. I’d go see my friends’ bands or check out museum exhibits I was interested in or just go meet up with people at a bar to watch a game. And while that stuff is hardly impossible to undertake while living in the suburbs, the distance — from most of my friends and from the museums and bars and everything — made it something of a pain in the ass.
The difference in commuting time means I’m going to have more than an hour and a half extra every day with which to do stuff. I’m talking a big game now and I realize I’ll probably spend most of it watching TV. But I’ll certainly write some more too — for this site and for other projects — and spend some time going out and enjoying all the awesome things the city has to offer. So that’s cool.
Tedquarters 