Or at least get off the streets of New York:

Frisky clubgoers are treating a Midtown block like their own boudoir, having so much sex in the back seats of their cars that disgusted residents want the city to ban parking on weekend nights.

Neighbors around West 30th between Seventh and Eighth avenues — where stylish apartments rent for as much as $9,500 a month — say their block is littered with condoms and other paraphernalia after horny patrons of Rebel NYC and The Parlour Midtown leave the hot spots on weekend nights. They have now convinced Community Board 5 to support a rare request for a no-parking zone on those nights.

The Parlour (247 W 30th St) is in trouble already: their liquor license has apparently been suspended, though the bar remains open while the state reviews the list of violations. Yelpers give it a solid Meh.

Brian J., as is his wont, offers this suggestion to NASA, totally free of charge:

If it’s planning on a Martian mission but it’s concerned about the conditions in small enclosed spaces for long periods of time and the effect on a person, NASA should just recruit young Manhattanites who might even pay for the privilege of doubling the size of their apartments to 300 square feet.

As I believe I’ve mentioned once before, my single-car garage measures out at 290 square feet. I don’t think I’d particularly want to live there. (It does have hot and cold running water, unless it’s below zero outside, but there’s only a small space heater.)

Should we ask a New Yorker what we’re missing by not living in the Big Apple, we might be told of the abundance of cultural activities, the cornucopia behind the multitude of storefronts, the ever-present buzz of a city that not only never sleeps, it hardly takes so much as a coffee break. We would probably not expect to be told this:

I wonder how many marriages and other relationships, if taken out of New York, would fail. My unscientific guess is quite a few. The city is itself a massive safety valve; no matter how cramped your quarters, you can leave them at any time and actually go somewhere else and still return home in ten minutes. The teeming, rushing life all around buoys the spirits; aesthetic pleasures of all kinds abound. One can have myriads of secret lives there — I don’t mean affairs or other insidious secrets, but, rather, tiny, mundane ones: favorite places, favorite trees on favorite streets, favorite cups of coffee at favorite diners. It seems to me that in small towns, or in the suburbs, one has fewer means of release, fewer tiny secrets to maintain, and one is therefore much more exposed.

That “go somewhere else” means something. Where I live, ten minutes will get you out of the garage, down two or three traffic lights, and back again, and you haven’t been anywhere at all.

And one has only to look at the annual OKC voting for Best Whatever for the past few years to notice that it’s always the same seven or eight names. (More people have cast ballots for Ted’s Café Escondido, I suspect, than have ever actually eaten at Ted’s.) I can’t imagine that happening in New York.

Okay, that’s not happening. However, I do remember this aside from a 2009 thread:

I’m thinking eventually it will all be on the Tulsa grid anyway; several years ago on Route 66, just outside of Bristow, I caught a sign for South 545th West Avenue.

Tulsa, schmulsa. What if it were on the New York City grid? ExtendNY.com calculates the correct Manhattan address, or at least the correct cross streets, for any spot on the globe.

I had no problem locating the palatial estate at Surlywood on 6,915th Avenue, though I wondered how they’d count the east-west streets, since they don’t exist in Manhattan anywhere south of Houston Street. To take care of this little problem, they simply declared South 1st, 2nd, 3rd, and so on, so there are no missing spots in the grid. You’ll find me on South 16,071st Street.

Not everyone is keen on renaming a stretch of 121st Street in Morningside Heights after the late George Carlin:

“‘Carlin St.’ Resisted by His Old Church. Was It Something He Said?” is the [New York Times] headline. And the answer, of course, is, “Yes.”

We’re not sure why anyone is surprised that the Corpus Christi School (Carlin’s grade school on 121st St.) would oppose such an honor. And we’re not sure why anyone would see this opposition not as vindictive but as entirely logical and consistent.

Carlin’s 1972 album Class Clown, as the parish pastor Rev. Raymond Rafferty says, “made mockery of Corpus Christi parish and its priests.”

An online petition, like almost all such, is going nowhere, although this bit says it all:

Perhaps the comment from “Mark Ryan” of Long Island put it right when he said, “No, Carlin wouldn’t like the idea of a street being named for him, but it’s not for him, it’s for us.”

First thought: “Who the hell asked some schmuck from Lawn Guyland for his opinion?”

And you can imagine Carlin’s reaction to that: seven words, none of them (in 1972, anyway) at all utterable on television.

(Via Kathy Shaidle.)

Young Naturists and Nudists of America will be holding a Booze N Schmooze on Saturday night, May 14, “9:30pm-2ish,” in the Financial District.

The dress code:

Enough clothes to get yourself there! Just make sure you don’t go naked on the subway. They don’t like that.

The thought of being nude on any form of mass transit, with the possible exception of a private rail car, tends to push my squick buttons. Still, I have to wish them well, and I hope that wherever they land, the A/C isn’t cranked up to the max.

(From Refinery29 via this TravelingAnna tweet.)

In fact, they won’t even let me tell you who I am:

An Arab banquet waiter at the legendary Waldorf-Astoria hotel says he was forced to wear different name tags at work to prevent guests from being frightened by being served by someone named Mohamed.

Mohamed Kotbi, born in Morocco, has worked for the Waldorf for twenty-six years, and this apparently wasn’t a problem until shortly after 9/11. After complaining to the EEOC, he was given a tag with his last name: “Kotbi.” And then:

This past November, however, he was given a name tag that said, “Edgar.” Kotbi said he complained and was told by a manager, “It’s better to be Edgar than Mohamed today.”

You’d almost think the Waldorf was outsourcing their banquet work to Bangalore, home of Steve and Debbie and a whole lot of other people who don’t sound like they’d be named Steve or Debbie.

Kotbi is now suing, charging that the hotel’s finagling has created a “hostile work environment” in which co-workers are regularly mocking him.

(Via Fark.)

In the preceding post, I pointed out one advantage of the mostly-horizontal layout of towns like mine, though clearly it would never work in Manhattan: the island is home to 1.6 million people in a mere 23 square miles, about the size of Midwest City, Oklahoma (population 57,000). I’m sure I’d go claustrophobic in a hurry. Others, perhaps better adjusted, maybe not so much:

Two things I noticed:

• My bathroom is very nearly as small as hers. I have a full-sized tub, but it takes up almost half the available space, and the area reserved for the toilet is, shall we say, not expansive.
• The clock-radio up in the sleeping zone appears to be from Cambridge Soundworks, a sign of good judgment. (I have two of their radios.)

Obviously I have no idea what living in this space might be like. The smallest flat I’ve ever had was about 500 square feet. (We will not consider things like, um, Army barracks.) For that matter, I have no idea what living in New York might be like. (I dropped in at a walk-up just on the other side of the Hudson several road trips ago.) But I do understand, to a certain extent, the law of supply and demand, and I understand that if I want a thousand square feet on the Upper West Side, it’s going to cost me several times what I’m paying here on the prairie. For that matter, a house like mine a mere six miles south of me would likely bring half what mine would. Location, location, location, as the agents say.

(Via Fark.)

Back when they handed out area codes in the late 1940s, it made perfect sense for the city of New York to get 212: dialing required the actual turning of a dial to generate pulses, and the thinking was that the largest city ought to require the least effort to reach. (The next two, Chicago and Los Angeles, were dealt 312 and 213 respectively; faraway Oklahoma was assigned 405, and you’ll remember that 0 was on the far side of 9 back then.)

Nowadays, the Big Apple has half a dozen area codes, but the original’s apparently still the greatest:

An eager eBay seller hopes to capitalize on the cachet of a 212 phone number by hawking his digits for a cool $1 million.

Of course, the draw here is not just the 212, but the fact that it’s an even thousand: 212-5xx[digits redacted]-9000. But still: can he do that?

Verizon said it’s unclear, but points out that New York State Public Service Commission rules say subscribers have “no proprietary right in any number that is assigned by the Telephone Company.”

That said, I can show you people in Tulsa who wouldn’t give a plugged nickel for a 539 number.

Joni Mitchell once wailed about a big yellow taxi taking away her old man, a cry which evidently moved Mike Bloomberg, who, in his capacity as Lead Nanny Mayor of New York, sought to require taxis to be Less Big.

And the Supremes shot him down:

Mayor Bloomberg’s master plan to make every yellow taxi go green has come to a screeching halt.

The US Supreme Court ended a four-year legal battle [Monday] by refusing to hear the city’s appeal of two lower-court decisions that struck down the mayor’s mandate forcing cab operators to buy fuel-efficient hybrids.

The courts had sided with the Metropolitan Taxicab Board of Trade, which represents hundreds of taxi-fleet owners, by ruling that it’s up to federal agencies — not local officials — to regulate fuel-economy and emissions standards.

Which is not to say that every hack with a New York taxi medallion drives a Crown Victoria: hybrids make up about a third of the fleet, and can be seen at various spots in the Apple.

(Via Autoblog.)

After my mild rant about a guy on a bike in Oklahoma City, Felix Salmon has a slightly-less-mild rant about bikers in New York, based on the premise that J. Random Cyclist tends to think of himself as a faster pedestrian:

Bikes can and should behave much more like cars than pedestrians. They should ride on the road, not the sidewalk. They should stop at lights, and pedestrians should be able to trust them to do so. They should use lights at night. And — of course, duh — they should ride in the right direction on one-way streets. None of this is a question of being polite; it’s the law. But in stark contrast to motorists, nearly all of whom follow nearly all the rules, most cyclists seem to treat the rules of the road as strictly optional. They’re still in the human-powered mindset of pedestrians, who feel pretty much completely unconstrained by rules.

The result is decidedly suboptimal for all concerned, but mostly for the bicyclists themselves. New York needs to make a collective quantum leap, from treating bicyclists like pedestrians to treating bicyclists like motorists. And unless and until it does, bike relations will continue to be marked by hostility and mistrust.

If it seems like less of an issue here in the flyover zone, it’s because we’re still well short of a critical mass of bicycles, except in places like Austin, and Austin cyclists seem to be comparatively well-behaved, perhaps because it’s gotten up to a hundred and three outside and they no longer have the strength to do anything stupid. Then again, I admittedly usually arrive in summer; in other seasons, your mileage may vary.

(Via kottke.org.)

Actual family-size families are moving into Manhattan:

Sales of three- and four-bedroom apartments swelled last year, even as sales of smaller places declined, and the trend has since persisted. The increased sales are another sign that New York City has become a more appealing place for families. In addition, prices for these apartments have decreased more significantly than those for smaller units, and so are now more affordable for more people.

For those of us who tend to think of the Big Apple as being suitable only for singles and DINKs, this might serve as our wakeup call. On the other hand, if you’re looking to buy, here’s yours:

Last summer Irene and Oleg Davie moved into a five-bedroom apartment at 225 East 74th Street with their son, now 11; their infant daughter; two Havanese dogs; a live-in nanny; and a live-in housekeeper. “It’s an amazing thing to have an apartment big enough for all of that,” Ms. Davie said. They paid just under $7 million.

Still, it’s not like they’re being squeezed, at least in the physical sense:

Their apartment’s most appealing feature is its 1,000-square-foot kitchen. “Not even many houses have kitchens that big,” Ms. Davie said.

My whole house is barely that big. And if you don’t need that much space, you can live at the same address for a whole lot less than $7 million.

(Via this Michael Bates tweet.)

I’ve never lived in New York City, and if word gets around that I purloined this theory from Sonic Charmer, they’ll probably set up barriers along the West Side Highway on the off-chance that I might show up:

The one saving grace … is a healthy network of easy services that all the businesspeople spending too much money to live too densely end up supporting: food delivery from any restaurant, relatively cheap taxis, dry cleaning, etc. Indeed these things are often cited by visiting/newcomer businesspeople as reasons why New York is so great (as compared with, say, London). Yes, you can get a relatively cheap taxi… on the other hand, the unseen part of the equation is that you pay some of the highest city+state taxes anywhere to support social services for the giant fraction of the city (the cab driver and his family, e.g.) that is on food stamps, housing assistance and other forms of welfare. In other words part of the friendly business climate in New York is that the city has set up, essentially, a citywide subsidy for the servant population. This is “convenient” for all the bigshot businessmen, but the result is yet more need for inflation and escalation of profits that must pay for it all. Hence, another factor driving hard work.

The long-term equilibrium seems to be a super-bifurcated society of extremely rich guys and extremely poor guys living side by side in equally-squalid, cramped conditions, the poor guy begrudgingly delivering a $50 box of General’s chicken to the rich guy’s office every day, and the rich guy telling himself how good he has it.

Which General, we may never know: General Tso is probably out, General Grant is busy answering the phone — “Grant’s Tomb, Grant speaking” — and General Zod would demand way more than $50 a box.

And I figure while “cramped” is a given, “squalid” is a variable.

By now, everyone in the 918 knows that they’re about to get an overlay code.

Traditionally, overlay codes have been hated because they mean everyone has to dial ten digits, even to someone across the street. But who dials anymore? You call up the name on the cell and push a key.

And some places have more than one overlay, as Gothamist notes:

According to a press release, “929″ will join “718″ and the much-maligned “347″ in the Bronx, Brooklyn, Queens and Staten Island. That’s because all the existing phone numbers will be tapped out by 2012, reports Neustar.

After Costa Tsiokos linked to this, I had to ask:

Was [347] really maligned? For that matter, does anyone malign 646?

His answer:

347 is generally shunned. In fact, I personally shunned it: My first NY number was a 347, and I couldn’t wait to dump it in favor of 646. 646 is deemed worthy, and an acceptable alternative to 212 (which is fairly impossible to snag).

Is this a preference for palindromes over non-palindromes? Or just a distrust of the new kid on the block? (New Yorkers have had over a decade to get used to 646.)

I think it’s a safe bet, though, that the first time someone says he has a 539 number, the person being told this will say something like “Where the hell do you live?”

And we here in the 405 should not be smug; we’ll be facing something like this ourselves in a couple of years. (572?)

Banning smoking in public parks and on beaches? How ordinary. Now here’s a proposal Nanny Bloomberg can really get behind:

Not only smoking should be banned. Pictures of smoking should be excised from every old book, censored from every old movie, cut from every TV programme. People who smoke should be howled at, mocked, have anti-smoking pamphlets glued to the bottoms of their shoes. Their clothes should be confiscated once a month and shredded and they should be the ones to have to bear the cost of buying new garments. Giant posters showing smokers as pariahs should fill the public squares. Sounds of smoking should be broadcast, followed by the noise of violent retching. Up and down the land, the great and the famous should be shown vomiting at the sight of a cigarette. People should weep over such folly, hide in corners, moan in their beds. They should cover their eyes, block their ears, invoke the names of Purity, Virtue, Light.

And, while we’re at it, curse Sir Walter Raleigh: he was such a stupid get.

(Via still muttering.)

Dan Rather, in a moment of shining lucidity, once noted that “Americans will put up with anything provided it doesn’t block traffic.” Residents of the City of New York, I have long believed, were quintessentially American in this regard. As I noted during World Tour ’02:

I executed a fair number of what I would normally consider to be startling moves in traffic, operating under the assumption that New Yorkers wouldn’t care what kind of crap I pulled so long as I didn’t inconvenience them in so doing. From the absence of horns sounded in anger rather than sorrow (and with WQXR on the radio, I’d have heard them had they been sounded), I must conclude I was right.

But that was then, and this is now:

New York has unseated Miami as the least courteous city, according to the fourth annual In the Driver’s Seat Road Rage Survey, commissioned by AutoVantage, a leading national auto club. The Big Apple moved up from its No. 3 ranking last year to claim the distinction. Rounding out the five worst cities for road rage are Dallas/Fort Worth, Detroit, Atlanta and Minneapolis/St. Paul.

The survey also named a new city as the most courteous. Portland, Ore., took the top spot, moving up from No. 2 last year. It was followed by Cleveland, Baltimore, Sacramento and Pittsburgh.

I’ve never driven in Portland, but I’ll vouch for Cleveland: despite a nonexistent road-repair budget, a baffling grid — 18th and Euclid to 81st and Euclid (which I actually drove one evening) is less than 2.5 miles — and the presence of money-grubbing enclaves like Linndale, driving through northeast Ohio was always a breeze for me.

The City of New York will be needing a sixth area code shortly, although Cindy Adams doesn’t think so:

We’ve finally memorized 212 and 718 and 646 and now anyone just across the street will have yet a different three-digit prefix?

Whoever concocted this plan to section off New York City like a pizza is brain-dead. Probably buys his hats at Forest Lawn. Question: What do you call a phone-company executive with half a brain? Answer: Gifted. Which brings me to this phone-company executive who bought 100 bottles of aspirin. And why did he do that? Because he needed the cotton.

Another area code for what? So more 5-year-olds can put their own personal cellphones in their own pencil boxes to bring to Mommy-and-Me class? So more 25-year-olds can Twitter during a sit-down, black-tie dinner party? So more 35-year-olds can discuss their sex life aloud while walking on the street? So more 45-year-olds can annoy a whole theater when they don’t turn off their brain cells and cellphones? So more 55-year-olds can text wives in Connecticut while fondling mistresses on an airplane bound for the Bahamas? So more 65-year-olds in a restaurant can ring their doctors to discuss intimate symptoms of burping, belching and whatevering while the waiter’s serving your veal cutlet? So more 75-year-olds can actually pull out these toys and ask their grandchildren how does this newfangled f—ing gadget work?

Incidentally, she forgot (or never knew) 347 and 917, and 917 has been around since 1992.

If you’re wondering about TEmpleton 8, it was in this general area.

(Via Fark.)

Back in 2004, I kicked out a Vent called “NYC vs. OKC,” which highlighted some of the differences between the two towns. A further difference presents itself at the moment of typing: Firefox’s ostensible spell-checker recognizes “NYC” but doesn’t recognize “OKC.” Okay, fine, they’ve been around longer, and if you ask J. Random Ukrainian for the name of a city in the United States, he’s far more likely to mention New York than Oklahoma City.

But that’s not what I was going to tell you. There is, evidently, one further difference between the two cities that I hadn’t come close to imagining, let alone proclaiming to the world:

• New York: Chewing gum accumulates horizontally.
• Oklahoma City: Chewing gum accumulates vertically.

Perhaps I need a “Who knew?” category.

What can you get for $400 a month rent in the City of New York? Someone’s bathroom, maybe:

I am a female in my mid 60′s and I am looking for a room mate. Times are tight and I need some extra money. I am willing to rent out my bathroom in my 1 bedroom east village home.

My bathroom is large. You can easily put a twin air mattress in there. I only ask that when I need to use the bathroom, you or your air mattress are not in it.

I do ask that when you are in the apartment, you confine yourself to the bathroom. I do not feel comfortable with a stranger walking around my living room. This might change as I get to know you better.

You may have guest over as long as they are confined to the bathroom as well. This might seem a bit odd but please remember the rent is $400 and the bathroom is large.

(Via U Street Girl.)