RASTB5M postings?

Hmmm I think you are all deluded. Alcester is a far finer place... in fact I recommend you all visit some day. It's far better than that overrated grot hole next door (Stratford-upon-Avon).

Hey, I've been to Stratford-upon-Avon! I even have a pen that says "Shakespeare's Birthplace" to prove it!

Bureaucracy allows me to join your little elitist club .. as I am, legally, a New Yorker - since to be able to vote and the such, I need to be SOMETHING, legally, which isn't too easy a matter for a US citizen born abroad that has never lived in the States .. The last place a parent of mine lived in the US was New York, where my mother lived in the 70s - Manhattan most of the time, then briefly outside of NYC. My father was born in the Bronx, and spent the first few years of his life there.

Factually, I've been to New York myself twice AFAIK - once in 1986, though my memories of that are .. quite limited And again for three days in 2003 with annoying classmates that really spoiled the trip for me.

Planning to return as a tourist - without the stupid classmates - as soon as I have the financial means to survive it

Hmmm I think you are all deluded. Alcester is a far finer place... in fact I recommend you all visit some day. It's far better than that overrated grot hole next door (Stratford-upon-Avon).

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But! Stratford-upon-Avon still sounds cooler!

Considering that Leicester is Lester and that Worcester is Wuster .. I'd be surprised if we knew what Alcester sounds like, at all .. probably a well-guarded secret the Brits keep to keep the rest of us confused

My father was born in the Bronx, and spent the first few years of his life there.

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Well, that explains the attitude, anyway.

Bureaucracy allows me to join your little elitist club .. as I am, legally, a New Yorker

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And reality allows me to inform you that you are what actual New Yorkers call a "tourist".

Legallities mean nothing. It takes years of aborbing the place through your pores to make a New Yorker - the concrete, the smog, the smells of the subway and the East River (if you wonder why New York TV cops from the 70s almost never puked when turning over a decomposing body, it's because they smelled worse on the way in to work that morning), the lights of Broadway, Lincoln Center, Radio City Musical Hall and 30 Rock, the Library Lions, the scent of bagels and real pizza cooking, the San Gennaro festival and the pastrami at the Carnegie Deli. Same day, half-price tickets for Broadway and off-broadway shows at the TKTS booth in Duffy Square. "Yankee Stadium. October. The hot dogs have been cooking since April. Now that's a hot dog" - Dr. Heywood Floyd, 2010.

Visiting once every couple of decades and resgistering to vote don't count. Hell a goodly portion of the people who make up the city probably can't vote because they're either in the country illegally or they're felons.

Casablanca:

Strasser: Are you one of those people who can't imagine the German Army in their beloved Paris?

Rick: It isn't particularly my beloved Paris.

Strasser: How about New York?

Rick: Well, Major - there are certain sections of New York I'd advise you against trying to invade.

My father was born in the Bronx, and spent the first few years of his life there.

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Well, that explains the attitude, anyway.

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It's his standard excuse, whenever anyone complains about his attitudes or about anything he says.

"Hey, I was born in the Bronx. What do you expect?"

Bureaucracy allows me to join your little elitist club .. as I am, legally, a New Yorker

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And reality allows me to inform you that you are what actual New Yorkers call a "tourist".

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That's why I said that it's bureaucracy that allows me to be in your little club .. and why I'd need to be a tourist if I was to come to New York again

.. especially considering just how *weird* a place New York was to visit .. what's up with ..

* having steam coming out of manhole covers at all times?
* traffic lights - why do they even bother putting them up? * hearing the subway through the streets?
* having the seats on all public transport means arranged in a manner that Chilli sits down, falls asleep, and falls over on a random woman sitting beside him, drooling, as soon as the bus accelerates?

.. though unlike my classmates, I could take it. The only things about New York I really couldn't take were .. my classmates. Unlike them, I actually could cope quite well with stepping out of the bus when just having arrived and instantly hearing "Watch where you're fucking going, you fucking schmuck!" from a nearby street. Hell, I actually found the attitudes I encountered quite refreshing, after having just been in Southern California. I guess there's a spark of New Yorker in me after all

real pizza cooking

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I've been to Italy. So New York can piss off on that point.

It's his standard excuse...

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Actually, I was talking about your attitude.

* having steam coming out of manhole covers at all times?

Well, the alternative is a massive steam explosion that would blow millions of rat, albino aligator and other sub-street lifefors all over the city. Trust me, you want that steam venting. (Like the rest of the city, the parallel city beneath the streets never sleeps.)

* traffic lights - why do they even bother putting them up? * hearing the subway through the streets?

They're mostly decorative. Why do you ask?

* having the seats on all public transport means arranged in a manner that Chilli sits down, falls asleep, and falls over on a random woman sitting beside him, drooling, as soon as the bus accelerates?

You say this like its a bad thinkg. GKE spends his life hoping to wake up drooling next to some strange woman.

I've been to Italy. So New York can piss off on that point.

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I've been to Italy, too. Which is totally irrelevant to any discussion of pizza, which is a Italian-American dish, invented in (where else?) New York in the early part of the century. It later mutated into an alien, if admittedly tasty, concoction by some guys in Chicago who screwed up and assembled a pie upsdie down. The result should never be called "pizza", but it is perfectly edible if you find youself stuck out in the middle of nowhere. It is true that Neapolitans made a sort of bread and tomato pie that was a kind of proto-pizza, but it stands in roughly the same relation to actual pizza as an australopithicus africanus does to Stephen Hawking. (Note that tomatoes themselves are an American plant.)

You actually can get quite a good pizza at one hotel in the town of Positano on the Amalfi coast. The place is run by cousins of mine who learned the trade in the U.S. before returning to the mother country.

Anybody can slop some sauce (or uncooked or cooked chopped tomatoes), wiith or without cheese on some bread dough, shove it in an oven and call the result "pizza", but for the genuine article, with the thin, just-crispy on the bottom, tender on the top, 3rd-degree-burn-producing mozzeralla cheese, foldable, one-handed slice, you've got to be in New York. (Partly it's the water. You can't make good pizza dough with the water in places like Florida.)

Regards,

Joe

Actually, I was talking about your attitude.

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How so?

Though I'm oddly comfortable with the New York manner of being a prick. "I just don't have time to give a fuck. I have more important things to do than to care." After 22 years of dealing with the Viennese way of being a prick - "I am so bloody bored with life, boo-hoo, I just can't find anything better to do than go out of my way to be an arse" - it's almost cuddly.

Well, the alternative is a massive steam explosion that would blow millions of rat, albino aligator and other sub-street lifefors all over the city. Trust me, you want that steam venting. (Like the rest of the city, the parallel city beneath the streets never sleeps.)

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I didn't quite figure out though what about New York makes it necessary there .. whereas I've never seen it anywhere else on the planet. Though I really don't know anything about the set-up of facilities in New York .. judging by the huge number of water towers and the such that I saw, I will guess that they are .. not quite your average-city facilities.

You say this like its a bad thinkg. GKE spends his life hoping to wake up drooling next to some strange woman.

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The problem was that she wasn't strange. I was strange .. and she did .. not seem to appreciate it. I never got quite such a massive "You're WEIRD!! GO AWAY!!" look in my life - before or after that.

I've been to Italy, too. Which is totally irrelevant to any discussion of pizza, which is a Italian-American dish, invented in (where else?) New York in the early part of the century.

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I had some great Pizza in Little Italy (after having had some of the worst insults to the term "pizza" in California the previous weeks).. but I've never had as good pizza, anywhere in the world, as I had in Italy (which was made the traditional Italian way, so yeah, I guess it's a different story entirely) - at a random roadside restaurant. Given, I didn't know where to go for food in New York .. but I didn't know that in Italy either .. I could just have been lucky.

I didn't expect a thread about a newsgroup to get me all hungry.

Just wondering, but looking through the source of the rastb5.mod messages, is the modbot located at deepthot.org? Because if I punch that in on my browser it loads, suggesting that there is something there that is up. But I know absolutely zero about running a moderated newsgroup, so not sure if that means anything.

Anybody can slop some sauce (or uncooked or cooked chopped tomatoes), wiith or without cheese on some bread dough, shove it in an oven and call the result "pizza", but for the genuine article, with the thin, just-crispy on the bottom, tender on the top, 3rd-degree-burn-producing mozzeralla cheese, foldable, one-handed slice, you've got to be in New York.

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Foldable and crispy don't really go together. The only foldable pizza I've ever encountered has been the thin, limp, soggy crap that some people have the nerve to call pizza. "Foldable pizza" is a bad thing in my book. Here, in southwestern PA, the best pizza I've ever had has been one of two kinds:

1. The Pizza House, Ambridge, PA - ~3/4" thick crust, bottom 1/8" crispy and the rest tender, square cuts, but not foldable because of the thickness. Everybody raves about their crust. I also like their sauce (a little lumpy, spiced just right). However they slice their pepperoni too thin. I've been a loyal customer of theirs for 40 years.

and

2. Pasquale's, Wilmerding, PA - ~3/8" thick crust, bottom 1/16" crispy and the rest tender, round pie, but not very foldable because of the edge crust. This is the best thin crust pizza I've ever had.


:beer:

Foldable and crispy don't really go together.

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But that's just it - they do when somebody gets the crust and the toppings just right, bakes it all in the right kind of oven at the right temperature (anything under 500 degrees farenheit cannot produce anything worthy of the name pizza and it has to cook by dry, indirect heat, either brick or charcoal) and serves it fresh. The bottom crust has a thin crsipy layer that cracks when you fold it, while the flexible layer at the crust/sauce interface hold the thing together without leaks. if you have no idea what I'm talking about (and your use of the word "soggy" suggests you don''t) you've never had the kind of pizza I'm talking about.

Regards,

Joe

You forgot about the mutants, Joe. The mutants who live under the street. They vent the steam for them, too. And, the San Gennaro festival is the one thing that truly makes me regret giving up red meat. I can still taste those sausage and pepper heroes they cook right on the street!

Interestingly, pretty much all of your memories are mine. Duffy Square, check. Lions at the library, check. Although, you left out the Metropolitan Museum. One of my favorite childhood books was "From the Mixed-Up Files of Mrs. Basil E. Frankweiler," because the kids in the book secretly lived at the museum for awhile, getting money for food from out of the fountain. Finally, the other thing that makes you a New Yorker rather than a tourist is the intrinsic knowledge of the right place to get cannoli in Little Italy.

You forgot about the mutants, Joe. The mutants who live under the street.

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Amy! You know we're not supposed to talk about the mutants.

Although, you left out the Metropolitan Museum.

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Ah, yes. And the Museum of Natural History (my parents took me there as a surprise for my - fifth? - birthday. I still remember my first look at the T-Rex, 5027. Wrong number of bones in the tail, wrong pose by today's standards, black preservative paint. But man was that something incredible for a little kid to see! Also the old Hayden Planetarium. I loved that place.

Regards,

Joe

And the blue whale. I'm still afraid to walk under the blue whale, because once when we were there, there was a stain on the carpet -- probably some kid had spilled a drink they weren't supposed to have in there -- and my father put on a creepy voice and said that it was a stain from some kid who'd been standing RIGHT THERE when the whale...came crashing down! Hey, I was very young and gullible!

Your dad sounds like my kind of guy! I love messing with little kid's heads. (Like the Dad in Calvin and Hobbes telling Calvin that film has always been color, but the until the early 60s the world itself was black and white. So all those old movies and snap shots are actually full color images of a black and white reality. )

Anyway, you''re right, some of those "really, really, heavy object suspended above your head by very thin looking wire" displays can be a little unnerving. Like half the stuff at the National Air and Sapce Museum in D.C. or the (I assume) replica of the Spirit of St. Louis inside the terminal at Lambert-St. Louis Airport. (The original is in D.C., right?) That was a little disconcerting the first time I saw it because you simply don't expect that kind of display inside a freakin' airpoirt.

Meanwhile the newsgroup still seems to be down.

In case anyone's interessted.

We now return to Amy and Joe in "Old Home Week", already in progress...



Joe

I wonder if JMS has tried to update us.

Three new messages came through overnight so there may be hope yet.

Jan

Hypatia, I don't think we've missed anything from JMS. He has other ways of getting the word out when the newsgroup isn't available. I don't think that any of his usual sources heard anything from him over the course of this newsgroup blackout.

And Joe, yeah, my dad is that kind of dad. My fondest childhood memories are of the four of us (mom, dad, sister and I) all sitting on their bed on Saturdays to watch "Creature Features" together -- because, being the 60s, the master bedroom tv was the only color tv in the house. I think by 1970 we kids got color in the basement...

wow...amy's old!