Villains: New Yorkers We Hate
Wrong-Way Bicyclists/Cars in Bike Lanes
We understand that for a very long time this city was a lawless, uncivilized rat race of do-anything/go-anywhere transit, and that the suicidally vulnerable cyclist had to do whatever it took to survive. But you know what? There are bike lanes now, and a D.O.T. that seems to care, so if we want to be treated as legitimate transportation, we have to act like it—and that means not going the wrong way down a bike lane on a one-way street. Ok? (And to all you cars who use the bike lane as a passing lane, you’re villainous assholes who should be set on fire.)
The Williamsburg Hotel
Boutique Idiocy
As we wrote last month, online: “There’s just something about a fancy boutique hotel (and a fancy boutique hotel bar) that represents the last frontier of mindless douchebaggery, the kind of superficial, stage-managed exclusivity that appeals to the worst kind of vanity in the worst kinds of people.” Alright, we know Williamsburg has been evolving into a condo playland over the last decade, but a boutique hotel/condo with a restaurant called “Streets” that serves high-priced Third World street food has really put things over the edge. Say it with us, “the Meatburg District.”
David Koch
Libertarian Puppet Master
Ever wondered who those people are, those people buying eight-digit uptown apartments, sitting on the board of Sloan-Kettering, and wearing black ties at events where they’re honored for dropping millions on Lincoln Center, the American Museum of Natural History and the Met? Well, as the great (heroic!) Jane Mayer recently revealed in the New Yorker, one of them is the shady Obama archnemesis Koch, co-owner of the massive Wichita-based energy conglomerate Koch Industries, who also spends his money, covertly, to fund influential market-fellating libertarian think-tanks and astroturf anti-Obama populist movements, along with fun and educational crypto-denialist climate-change exhibitions at the Smithsonian. Mayer’s article is a great illustration of Who Runs Things at the upper levels of the cultural, political and intellectual life of this city and country.
Illustrations by Anat Even-Or
Really, Jane Mayer’s piece in the New Yorker about David Koch makes her heroic? Last time I checked, an attack piece using 10 year old Wall Street Journal quotes isn’t good journalism. Maybe she should also highlight the fact that Koch’s funding has gone to condemn the war in Iraq and Afghanistan and the war on drugs.
Since this city still is “rat race of do-anything/go-anywhere” of just survival forget transit I think the DOT’s bike policy sucks. They seem to treat bicycling as equivalent to taking a Sunday drive. Real Slow. In reality I use my bike because I gotta get somewhere fast. I am working not out for a relaxing pedal. And I think this is 90 percent of the bikers, at least in Manhattan. The “protected” bike lanes are especially horrible and dangerous. They are slow, filled with pedestrians, and turning cars don’t see you as well. If it’s quicker for me to go the wrong way down a one way street I do it. And guess what? No one is hurt.