Thursday, December 24, 2009

Merry Christmas!

Wishing a Merry Christmas and a Happy Feast of the Seven Fishes to all the Italians out there!

- Posted using BlogPress from my iPhone

Ode to the G Train

Pretty funny post over at Scallywag & Vagabond entitled "Observations on the G Train". The relevant parts for Carroll Gardens are:

"The platform sign in front of me says Carroll Gardens and by the sight of the slightly vexed yuppies (vexed because they are yuppies supposedly forced to live in this part of town…) I can tell that everyone manages to take showers before they set out in the mornings and even dare to color coordinate the occasional dress or shirt. They stand there before me, lawyers, yoga aficionados and the usual cafe latte drinkers that they all purport to be. Everyone is apparently well behaved, dressed and mindful to never look one another in the eye (an unsaid law in the NY subway system). As soon as the train pulls in they are respectful, obliging and even mindful of not taking up too much space."

Scrooge Visits Brooklyn

For a good laugh, head on over to the Daily News for a really funny Denis Hamill envisioning of Scrooge in Modern Brooklyn. The relevant parts are:

"Scrooge marries Mrs. Dilber because she's with his child. When the baby's born, Ebenezer names him after his old partner, Jacob. 

Then Jake Scrooge 1st has a son, Jake 2nd, who starts working in the old man's shop. Jake Scrooge 2nd does a 20th century inventory and realizes that his father and grandfather are literally giving away the store to the Tiny Tim cripples and Oliver Twist orphans of London. He has a son, Jake 3rd. 

Jake 3rd places Ebenezer and Jacob in a conservatorship, takes over the shop, downsizes, then emigrates to Park Slope, where he buys up most of the rent-stabilized apartment buildings and fathers an in-vitro son, Jacob Scrooge 4th, who opens Le Parc Scrooge Realty on Seventh Ave. during the 1990s real estate boom. 

Scrooge 4th starts gentrifying out all the "old hardcore Brooklynites," converting the working-family-friendly properties to million-dollar condos for Wall Street yuppies, Manhattan movie stars and literati who have declared Brooklyn the new Greenwich Village, a great place to displace working people, for nannies to raise your kids and to rant against Atlantic Yards."