currently 10:52pm Friday 5th September, 2008 (NYC, New York)
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June 2004 archives
The following are all the entries published for the month of June 2004. chizh and blues co at the china club, nyc
Monday 28 June, 2004 at 9:21PM (Nereus) :: permalink :: comments (2)
We met up with Altie at Bryant Park in Manhattan earlier and intended to go to a little restaurant called 'The Nook' in midtown Manhattan that we've been to a couple of times before. Seems it's become somewhat trendy and hence was full, so we headed to another one down the road apiece called, quite simply, 'E'. The food was just ok; I wouldn't rave about it. We did get to sit at a table outside (sort of on the sidewalk) which was nice since, as usual, the temperature was hitting around the 30°C mark. I went out wearing a new Nautica t-shirt and some funky cargo shorts and sandal type things as it was too hot outside for me to wear anything like 'clubbing clothes' (can't take the Kiwi outta me :P). Didn't know if they'd let me in to the China Club dressed so casual but they did, so I had fun jumping around without overheating all night. The drinks are pretty expensive though, and I know there are clubs in Manhattan a lot more expensive than this one. One heineken for me and a margarita for IceQueen cost US$20 (about NZ$30-35), so it's not so suprising when I hear stories of people spending over $20,000 on a night out in Manhattan. Worth noting though is that they don't bugger around pouring measured nips here, it's all free pour and the drinks are really potent as a result. Fun. I still haven't been drunk since I left NZ over 2½ years ago though. urban scrawl famous?
Thursday 24 June, 2004 at 6:39PM (Nereus) :: permalink :: comments (8) Happy Birthday to my sister Jo in Taupo! I trust your Brideshead Revisited party this weekend will be debaucherous if not completely out of control. Go hard, go loose, and go for coma. I just got off the phone with Jo and she had some rather interesting news to tell me. She was at a funeral the other day and was chatting to some guy (as ya do at funerals) ..the name escapes me; Adam was it? Anyway he is a Raglan surfer (maaaate, does that place pump or what?) and Jo mentioned Raglan was my local break for about 8 years before I moved to New York (Whale Bay mainly, and Indies). Adam (or whatever your name is) then asked Jo if I was the guy who wrote Urban Scrawl. When she said yes, he then told her my website was featured on some Sunday surfing/sports program on TVNZ a week or two ago and that it's really well known, famous even! Well fark, I had no idea. Sure I get a heap of visitors; sitting on nearly 88,000 hits currently, but that's neither here nor there (actually it's at the bottom of the page), so if I'm getting all these Kiwis visiting, why don't you Kiwis leave a friggin' comment?! (the current exception being James from NZ music site NoiZyland's noizyblog - cheers mate). I've still yet to meet another real Kiwi in NYC after 2½ years here, so any contact from back on the clean green shores of surf, sheep, gumboots and food without a preservative content in the double figures is most welcome, even if it's just to say gidday, kia ora, talofa or taunt me with how good the surf is at the moment there. Bring it. If you saw the program on TVNZ, please can you comment and let me know what program it was, which channel, and what date if possible. I have a cunning plan you see, and that sort of info would greatly assist me. My cunning plan relates to my currently non-existant career. Want me to elaborate? If enough people comment then maybe I will.. another innocent civilian beheaded
Tuesday 22 June, 2004 at 8:34PM (Nereus) :: permalink :: comments (10) The decapitated body of South Korean man Kim Sun-il has been recovered in Iraq, apparently booby-trapped with explosives. American Nicholas Berg was beheaded in similar circumstances a little over a month ago. In a video broadcast last Sunday, the murderers had gave the South Korean Government 24 hours to cancel their plans to send 3,000 additional troops to Iraq, threatening to behead Kim otherwise. "To the South Korean citizens, we warned you!" one of the militants said in another video broadcast Today. "This is the result of your own doings." Yeah right, asshole, like they were forced to cut off his head. I get so pissed at that kind of behavior (I mean the, "hey, I'm gonna break your toy if you don't do as I say, and it will be all your fault!" kinda bullshit). Unfortunately, blowing up a train to successfully bribe the Spanish government not to send troops to Iraq seems to have given these terrorists all the encouragement they needed to believe that this form of terrorism works. Gee thanks Spain.. South Korean officials have confirmed they are going ahead with their plans, but are obviously very angry as their 'mission' in Iraq is to focus on reconstruction efforts there only, without engaging in hostile acts. After this episode I hope they change thier plans to include hunting down and wiping out these fucking murderers. Kim, Berg and Paul Johnson (killed last week by his captors in Saudi Arabia) were all shown in videos wearing orange jumpsuits similar to those worn by prison inmates in the United States. In no way do I condone the actions of these terrorists, but there are some US soldiers in Iraq that haven't exactly been behaving either, although their actions fall far short of beheading innocent non-military non-insurgent citizens and sending videos of it to the media. Everyone has heard about the prisoner abuse, but some more telling stories I have read come from independent reports by non-military personal such as Stephanie Sinclair, an independent photojournalist. Stephanie writes earlier this month in her journal, "three weeks ago [in Baghdad] American troops shot up my car for no apparent reason. Alaa and I were approaching what looked like a US checkpoint and when we stopped to wait for a signal from the soldiers on whether we could continue to move forward, two soldiers ran toward us and shot our vehicle destroying our radiator, a/c and fan." Stephanie also notes that, "It is truly worse [now] than I have ever seen it in a year and a half of working in Baghdad." Americans are often accused of staging attacks that are actually carried out by Iraqi insurgents; "In Iskandariyah hundreds of people were convinced that an American plane shot a missile at people applying for jobs the police station. Then they said that the police were cowards for cooperating with the Americans and started breaking the windows of one of the new police cars." I think that one was actually a car bomb driven by Iraqi insurgents. "At another site, the locals claimed the American soldiers set off the explosion and that is why all the soldiers were behind the concrete barrier when it happened, resulting in Iraqi casualties only." ..err, they are always behind the barriers, that's what the barriers are for, but try explaining that to an angry person convinced otherwise regardless of a total absense of logic, proof or motive. Personally I think this 'operation' should've been carried out a lot quicker. The longer the US occupy Iraq, the more the Iraqi citizens seem to forget about Saddam Hussein and instead resent the US troops that occupy their country. Eight days to go until the 'hand over' to an Iraqi Governing Body (of which several of the top officials have already been assassinated). I hope there is an end in sight after this. reflection
Wednesday 9 June, 2004 at 12:06PM (Nereus) :: permalink :: comments (9) I've been considering a redesign of the site (once again) and have been waiting on the release of MovableType 3.0 (the general release, not the developer release) before going ahead. In considering new ideas for the design, I've also started to reconsider the direction of this weblog altogether. Initially this weblog was created just as a personal journal of my time since leaving the green shores of New Zealand to be with my love IceQueen here in New York, and basically to cover my day to day experiences here. Somewhat mundane reading for some I guess, but hey, it's a personal weblog, what do you expect? Recently I've found myself writing more often about news items and injustices (perceived or factual) that I've come across, and basically voicing my opinion in relation to them. Today I read part of a journal at stephaniesinclair.com, which is the website of an independant photojournalist covering the war-torn areas of Iraq and Afghanistan. Reading the journal kind of humbled me in a way and I guess re-opened my eyes a little to the plight of innocents there and made me realise that maybe I should be less concerned writing about what movie we saw in the weekend and more focused on issues of a broader spectrum. Then again, most of what I could write about in that sense would be second hand. So I'm at a crossroads I guess. Should I continue with a personal weblog with our day to day activities, interspersed with the occasional sensational news item as I have been doing recently, or should I write more on subjects that people want to discuss and hopefully learn from? Maybe I could have two separate blogs, one personal, one not. What do you think? cia director george tenet resigns
Thursday 3 June, 2004 at 10:54AM (Nereus) :: permalink :: comments (22) :: trackbacks (2) Interesting. Just a few weeks ago former CIA director Stansfield Turner said that he would resign if he were in current Director George Tenet's place because of political pressure on the intelligence agency. "I think the biggest problem of intelligence today is political direction from the White House.." Tenet and the CIA have come under criticism for flawed prewar intelligence on Iraq's weapons programs, the existence of which was a leading argument for the Iraq war. Just announced a few minutes ago from Washington was the news that CIA director George Tenet has resigned "for personal reasons" and that his deputy will temporarily lead America's premier spy agency until a successor is found. President George Bush gave no other reason for Tenet's departure, stating; "George Tenet is the kind of public servant you like to work with ...I send my blessings to George and his family and look forward to working with him until he leaves the agency." Well that certainly will raise some eyebrows. Is he leaving because of the flawed information leading to the Iraq war, or is it because he is sick of being dictated to by politicians who have their own agenda? Maybe time will tell, but I doubt it. Some more on the story I wrote yesterday about Bridget Marks, a former Playboy model, actress, and the mother of the twin girls who were ordered to be transferred to the custody of their father last Tuesday: Bridget Marks has been ordered by the judge not to cry when she gets to talk on the phone with her daughters during conference calls supervised and monitored by a social worker who will be paid $150 an hour to listen in. "If I do, they'll terminate the call," said Marks, referring to Family Court Judge Arlene Goldberg's instructions on how she must behave during any supervised contact with her children. "If I show any emotion, a supervisor will hang up; if I do anything that a supervisor thinks will upset the children, that's it; if the girls ask if they can come home, I'm not allowed to speak about it ...I don't know where they are, if they're scared, if they're hungry, if they're lonely." No schedule for phone calls or visitation has been arranged or set by the Judge Goldberg. The Judge awarded John Aylsworth (the father) and his wife custody on the grounds that Marks alienated the girls against their natural father and made false accusations that he sexually abused them (translation imho: he won the court case because there was no physical evidence, and he's rich and able to afford good lawyers). The twins were born out of Aylsworth's extramarital affair with Marks. Yeah good one, he's obviously such an upstanding citizen; he owns a casino, he's been unfaithful to his wife and he's been accused of sexually abusing the two girls. Yup, those sure sound like good reasons to award him custody. Farking unbelievable. what is wrong with the citizens of nyc?
Wednesday 2 June, 2004 at 12:19AM (Nereus) :: permalink :: comments (25) :: trackbacks (2) This title is sure to raise a few eyebrows, and yes it's a gross generalization, but let me tell you just a few of the things that happened in NYC in the last 24hours, and you'll start to see why I've titled this entry in such a way.
Now if that's not bad enough, what happened next is what really pissed me off and made me wonder what the hell is wrong with people in this city. The train is still moving, this freak just shot this woman and obviously can't make an escape while the train is moving between stations, and everyone in the carriage just sits there and watches. When the train stops at the Times Square station (one of the busier stations in Manhattan), the gunman just casually walks off the train and disappears into the crowd, nobody tries to stop him, nobody yells for police, and get this - nobody helps this woman who's just been shot! Meadows gets off the train and makes her way to a token booth and collapses, blood everywhere. She finally receives help from (presumably) a MTA staff member working at the token booth. TV crews are there pretty quick and interview people who were on the train or at the station when Meadows got out. These witnesses are very quick to get themselves on TV saying they saw her get out of the train with blood all over her (she was shot in the shoulder it turns out) and describe how she stumbled across the platform and then slumped against a token booth, but did a single one of them lift a finger to help? Nope. And yet here they are on TV proudly telling their story as if to say "yeah I'm important, I saw it!", totally oblivious to how utterly devoid of compassion they appear, or that there is anything wrong with them whatsoever. I almost hope they become a victim one day and nobody helps them out. Meadows in the meantime is in hospital in stable condition. Ok next story, same day, later in the afternoon. A local TV crew are doing some filming outside a bank as background for an unrelated story when a robbery happens right in front of them. At the front of the bank is an area with ATM cash machines for people to come in and get money outside of business hours. The bank has only just closed and all the staff are still in the bank beyond where the ATM machines are. All of this is in open view of the street through big glass windows where the camera crew happen to be. A young man (looked to be mid to late 20's) is getting some cash from the machine and has just entered his PIN number when some big fat-assed bitch just walks up and bowls him out of the way and starts taking cash out of his various accounts. She is wearing a summer kind of dress and looks to be a relatively normal person and makes no attempt at disguising herself in any way. The guy repeatedly tries to stop her but she just keeps pushing him away with her big fat arms that are probably about the size of his upper thighs, meanwhile pressing buttons presumably to get cash out of his other accounts too. Meanwhile the film crew are just standing there filming the whole thing from a few feet away outside (they played it all on TV). There are other customers using the other ATM's but they don't help; in fact one guy says something to the guy but when he realizes that the guy is actually the victim and not the perpetrator, he just walks off without helping. The guy is yelling for the bank staff to help, but they just stand in the bank and watch while this ho takes all his money and then just shoves him out of the way once again and walks out of the bank and off down the road, not seeming to care that the TV crew get a clear shot of her face which has now been screened on the news along with the entire incident. Again what pisses me off is that once again nobody helps this guy out. The TV crew film her walking to the end of the block (not running, just wobbling her fat ass at a brisk pace), but don't follow her. They did manage to gather up the courage to interview the victim though a little later, and he is pissed. I mean who wouldn't be? All these people, including the bank staff, and in typical NYC style nobody lifts a finger to help. I bet if he offered them $100 they would have. To his credit, the victim stood by his own moral standards in refusing to hit a woman, but he is really pissed at the bank staff not helping. I guess he doesn't realize that the film crew who are interviewing him are the same ones who were there earlier doing jack shit when it all went down. A picture has yet to be published on their news station's website. Next story on the news tonight was about a Manhattan woman with two 4-year-old twin girls. A judge ordered custody to be given to the father of the girls, and of course news film crews were on hand to get everything on tape as the two girls were pulled screaming from their distraught mother outside their expensive Manhattan apartment building and put in the back of a big limo with their father, a smirking multi-millionaire Californian casino owner. The father apparently had been in court some time previously accused of sexually assaulting the girls, but the case was dropped due to lack of evidence. Also it was alleged that the father had expressed no desire to take custody of the girls until just recently when the mother decided to break off her affair with him. It would appear a NYC Judge has awarded custody of these two children to a man who has been in court accused of sexually molesting them and who appears to have started the custody battle just out of spite for his mistress breaking off their relationship. The fact that he has shitloads of money has nothing to do with it ...yeah right. This just stinks. Did anyone (especially the Judge) consider how the children are suffering because of this? Just to rub salt into the wound, the Judge also ordered that the mother can only visit the children if supervised by a court appointed representative, and that the cost of this would be over $1,000 a day to the mother. Wow, they really know how to screw a person here don't they. What the hell did she do wrong, other than stand up for herself and her children? addon.. I've posted some further details about this particular story here. These are just three examples of the crap that goes on here in NYC every friggin' day, and believe me, there are a number of other stories just from today alone with the same underlaying vein: total absence of morality and/or justice. Now do you understand the reason for the harsh title of this entry? jose padilla and other news
Tuesday 1 June, 2004 at 5:04PM (Nereus) :: permalink :: comments (2) :: trackbacks (1) Announced on NY1 news a couple of minutes ago was that Jose Padilla has now admitted he was part of an al-Qaeda terror cell after all. There has been a lot of public outcry since his incarceration as an 'enemy combatant' in May 2002, which resulted in his being held incommunicado in military prison under the controversial Patriot Act, forbidden from contacting family or legal counsel ever since. This of course is in direct contradiction of the US Constitution. Although he has had legal counsel more recently, the fact remains that he was still being held illegally.. until now I guess. His lawyers are trying to get him released because he has never been formally charged of anything, despite this alleged admission. Ahh ok, guess the TV newsreaders took the statements out of context (hardly surprising); the story NY1 just published online is a little different: Federal law enforcement officials on Tuesday said a Brooklyn-born terror suspect already in government custody was apparently planning an attack on Manhattan. Hmm. Ok, in other news, the price of milk here has gone nuts, now hitting a price of nearly US$4.50 a gallon, almost double what it was a year ago. Analysts say dairy prices could go even higher during the coming summer. Apparently this is because of a low demand for milk some time ago which meant many farmers switched to higher meat production, and now we are getting the repercussions of that. I can see this turning into a nasty little spiral actually. Damn, I'll have to start putting gasoline into my coffee instead of milk; it would be a lot cheaper! ..actually, 1 US gallon is equal to about 3¾ litres (which is what I'm familiar with from living in NZ most of my life), so that roughly works out to about NZ$1.80 per litre, which is almost exactly what the price is in NZ at the moment according to this recent article in the NZ Herald.. *shrug* Ok another change of topic. It seems Urban Scrawl was nominated 'Blog of the Month' on joeant.com for April/May 2004 (thanks Cheri for the heads up). I have no idea how I got noticed there, but thanks! In their words; "JoeAnt.com is about providing a directory of quality sites for Internet users. Our goal is to list the best sites for a wide variety of topics giving our users the most relevant results for their searches." Groovy. Ok another change of topic; the other Weasel and I went a saw the newly-released 'The Day After Tomorrow' movie in the weekend, at my urging. I think the other Weasel wasn't expecting much, but found it to be quite a good movie fortunately. I certainly thought it was good. Definitely a movie to see on the big screen to appreciate the visual effects, so don't wait for the video to come out. The story is based on a theory that the [last] ice age was induced by weather pattern changes related to changes in major ocean currents (which in this case are initiated by global warming). The way the series of events plays out in the movie and how the US reacts (particularly the Vice President) certainly lends realism and credibility to the movie. Although there's a few attempts in the movie to personalize it with a few semi-sappy scenes, what made it for me is the fact that this isn't some wild fantasy movie, this is actually the way things are heading. I have lived enough years under an ozone hole in a country that has the highest skin cancer rate in the world to appreciate the relevance of global warming with the events portrayed in this movie, so for me it was particularly interesting. I would like to hope the educational side of this movie would not be lost on the majority of people who see it, but I think I'd be optimistic to hold up that hope. Perhaps linking more events in the movie to real events in recent world history would have made people think a bit more, rather than just viewing it as another "kewl movie with wicked special effects". Anyway, go see it, the massive wave hitting NYC is worth checking out if nothing piques your interest. |
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We (IceQueen, Altie & myself) went to the famous 
Tuesday afternoon, Manhattan, northbound W train between 34th and 42nd Street stations. A mid afternoon on a week day in the middle of Manhattan of course means there are plenty of people riding the train. Safety in numbers, right? Wrong. Model and aspiring actress Monica Meadows, 22, (pictured) was one of the many passengers riding on this subway train when a complete stranger sitting accross from her stood up and shot her. No reason, no provocation, a total stranger.