Continental rubbed my belly
Mar 17, 2009 Around NYC
I saw these ads for continental.com yesterday at Grand Central Station. I don’t take the subway often from Grand Central, so for all I know they’ve been there for years, but this was the first time I had noticed ads on a subway turnstile.
I’m all for being creative and using new ideas for the MTA to make money, as long as the turnstiles don’t ever start looking like a NASCAR race car, covered with dozens of ads – if they ever covered the whole thing, I think I’d prefer one ad that wrapped around the whole turnstile. But I digress. I was on the F train yesterday and roughly half of the ads were out of date. Not just a little out of date, but months old. There were several ads for movies that aren’t in theaters any more, and at least half a dozen for the NYC Waterfalls (a complete mess of a tourist attraction that was scheduled to close last October, but I think might have closed even earlier than that due to complaints about saltwater blowing back and killing trees).
So before the MTA decides to put ads in new and exciting places, they should focus on selling the space they’ve already got ads on. With so many people on the subway listening to music but not reading anything, it really is good ad space. I’m annoyed that the MTA is once again talking about raising subway fares when they’re obviously not doing all they can to make money in other ways.
Tags: Continental, Grand Central Station, MTA, NYC Waterfalls, subway
Pasta Boy’s Perfect Day
Aug 20, 2008 What's Going On
[OK, I wrote this last Wednesday, and totally forgot to post it. Oops.]
Yesterday just may have been my 7-year-old son’s perfect day. It started out very early – we all had to be out of the house by 7:30 – but was worth it. We went to a sneak preview of two new video games. I’m not sure if I’m even allowed to say what they are yet – I have to check the confidentiality agreement and I don’t have it on me (and I can’t go looking because my house is filled with people shooting a TV show – I just posted about that craziness here and here). So I won’t name them yet – I’ll be talking a lot more about one of them in the near future – but suffice it to say that we had a very cool morning playing some very cool games. In fact, my son was the first kid in the entire country to try out these two games. He was the only kid there playing the games (there was a baby doing baby things, and my daughter, who was very bored until I gave her a TV to watch). Every time I peeked my head into the room where he was (he liked playing one game better, I liked the other), he was trying to talk the video game people into taking him back to California with them to be a video game designer and tester. He was so excited, he’s been starting conversations with strangers about it.
Then, as we were leaving the midtown hotel where the video game preview was, we walked into a crazy scene, with about three dozen emergency vehicles, including a bunch of huge fire trucks. My son was in heaven. Pasta Boy: “OH MY GOD!” Me: “How about ‘Oh My Gosh?’” Pasta Boy: “No, this is too cool for gosh!” (Turned out to be a small subway fire, nothing to get excited about. But the small boys and tourists thought different.)
So we finally got our subway train (they were all running slowly because of the fire) and my son wanted to go in the very front of the front car. He likes to watch out of the front window. And of course this terrifies me, because once, about ten years ago, a kid fell out and got run over. This is a one in a zillion thing, but I still think about it every time I get on the subway with my kids.
So while he was in the front, an MTA guy got on the train to talk to the driver. So as MTA guy was standing in the doorway of the little booth talking, Pasta Boy was trying to sneak under the guy’s arm and look inside! And he was being none too subtle about it. So finally, after a few minutes of this, the MTA guy couldn’t ignore Pasta Boy any longer and opened the door wide. He showed my son what all the different levers did, how they slowed the train down and sped it up, and what the different signals meant. My son was glowing. (My daughter couldn’t have cared less.)
After we got off the subway, we stopped at Subway for lunch (an occurrence that sends Pasta Boy into a laughing fit every time: “We took the subway to Subway! Bwah-hahahahahaha!”) and then went home to meet the sitter. I needed to be somewhere, something that I couldn’t postpone or change, and the sitter didn’t show up! I called my next door neighbor in a panic, and he graciously agreed to take them (I owe him BIG). But he mentioned that he was about to take his kids to McDonald’s for lunch! So off my kids went to McDonald’s, about 90 minutes after Subway.
So, to recap, my son got to play two video games before anybody else, got to see a few dozen fire trucks, ambulances and police cars, got to see inside of the little booth where the subway driver sits and learned how things work, and got to have two fast food lunches. All before 1pm. His perfect day.
Originally posted on Selfish Mom
Tags: fire trucks, MTA, subway, video game
