Suburban Southeastern Queens is hot hot hot!

I have a hard time thinking of a neighborhood less fashionable than Locust Manor, Queens — even the name is terrible — but these days, even Locust Manor merits sexy new condos worthy of being advertised alongside all the Hudson-adjacent Jersey megaplexes in today’s Metro Wednesday real-estate section. Things I especially like about Locust Manor Estates:

1. The gutsy phone number, 888-FOR-LOCUST
2. The logo, which seems designed to convey the message, “We’re talking about the tree, not the horrifying swarming insect”
3. The existence of a “Senior Living” page on its website, which you can bet fellow Metro Wednesday advertiser Trump Tower Jersey City’s site wouldn’t offer, despite its video of a pretty abysmal-looking Donald on the homepage
4. The spelling of “Comming Soon” on the aforementioned page

Most of all, though, I like LME’s page on “The Community,” which looks unappealing enough that maybe they just should’ve discreetly left it out. Particularly great is the “Entertainment” section — and yes, those are sarcastic quotes — which lists seven attractions, including a batting range conveniently located right behind my old high school and nowhere near Locust Manor.

Next up to get luxury condos will be — oh, wait. I don’t think there’s anywhere left.

Top of the what?

A couple of years ago, I remember hearing a few scattered panicky reports about the impending sale of naming rights to subway stations. Everything is for sale these days, so instead of getting off at, say, Astor Place, you’d be at Starbucks Junction. The 79th Street station on the 1, 2 and 3 lines could be FreshDirect Central Terminal. (Eat it, Zabar’s!) 71st/Continental Avenue-Forest Hills might become, oh, I don’t know, Stolichnaya Station.

People around these parts talked about it for a few days, like people are wont to do — I’m sure there was no shortage of hysterical phone calls to boring NY1 phone-in shows — and then, like many things, it died out. But a few months ago, I started noticing something, something kind of subtle that I haven’t heard anybody mention. When my morning F train rolls into 47/50 Street-Rockefeller Center, the conductors no longer stop at the name of the station. Inevitably, they announce:

“47/50, Top of the Rock.”

It happens every time. I pass this station every single weekday and many weekends, and I can’t think of a single time since I started paying attention that the conductors have failed to announce Top of the Rock. Sometimes they go into explicit, tongue-tying detail: “This is 47/50 Street, Rockefeller Center, Top of the Rock. Change here for the B, D and V trains.” Sometimes they make do with a near-unintelligible “Mumblemumble Top of the Rock mumblemumblemumble.” Sometimes — I dare say often — it’s just, “Top of the Rock,” as if that says it all. Why, it’s almost like somebody instructed them to always say “Top of the Rock,” or else.

And what is Top of the Rock? An observation deck on the 70th floor of GE’s famed 30 Rock building, it’s a major tourist attraction. But there are much bigger tourist attractions in the tourist attraction capital of the world, and they generally only get mentioned at subway stops by completist conductors like the one I caught announcing incorrect directions to a Long Island Rail Road station last month. The Empire State Building and Macy’s rarely get mentions at 34th Street-Herald Square. Heck, Top of the Rock isn’t even the biggest tourist attraction at its station — Radio City Music Hall is a much bigger deal, as are the famous ice-skating rink and Christmas tree in the winter.

But what makes this a really obvious shill to me is the fact that Top of the Rock just reopened a year and a half ago after — get this — a 20-year hiatus. Its revival was much celebrated — in advertisements. The kind of people who run the subway and make the subway run couldn’t have cared less.

So even if nobody’s noticed, it certainly appears that subway sponsorship is here and most likely here to stay. And considering that Top of the Rock isn’t exactly a brand to rival Coke or Microsoft, my guess is it’s coming cheap. If it were going to be much of a financial drain, why would NBC throw away its money promoting New York’s second-highest observation deck when it could promote NBC?

This is only going to get worse, of course. It always does. What’s next? ESPN Zone? Mars 2112? I’m hoping standards continue to drop — maybe then we can get ourselves a Nuts 4 Nuts stop. It’ll smell better than the others, at least.

Wyoming fact!

There is only one four-year university in the entire state of Wyoming. The whole state!

Me: not an original thinker

Evidently, I’m a New Mysterian. I came up with this philosophy completely independently, honest — I had no idea anybody else had ever professed it or even thought of it. I guess everything has already been done, huh? It wasn’t until I stumbled across its Wikipedia article five minutes ago that I realized it was an actual, existing theory with an actual, existing name.

The situation is pretty dire. For one thing, “New Mysterianism” is a surpassingly dumb name that makes me think, above all, of ? & the Mysterians. And it only gets worse. One of the most prominent proponents of New Mysterianism is notorious jerk and admitted homophobe and racist John Derbyshire. And look at this guy, the world’s leading New Mysterian. Does he look like someone you can trust?

It’s enough to make me want to dump the idea, but sadly, I can’t — it just seems so obvious to me. I like to talk about it in terms of cats and calculus. My cat is one of the smartest animals I’ve ever encountered. She’s affectionate. She often exhibits behavior that seems strikingly human. But try as I might, I could never teach my cat differential calculus. At her evolutionary stage, she just doesn’t have the brain power to come close to comprehending it. That doesn’t mean that differential calculus doesn’t make sense, or that it isn’t real. Everybody who has a brain advanced enough to understand it knows that it’s perfectly logical and it works, and that it can explain countless puzzling mathematical problems. But my cat, a member of one of the most intelligent of the millions of species in the world, will never even come close to being able to fathom any of it.

Likewise, it’s arrogant and scientifically specious for us humans to assume that we exist at the highest possible plane of evolution. We can understand calculus, yes, but there must be truths about the universe that we still lack the brainpower to comprehend and will continue to do so for another million years or so. If there were things we couldn’t understand back when we thought at a cat level, what evidence is there to suggest there’s nothing we can’t figure out today?

There is one major problem in the world that nobody has ever been able to solve, and I seriously doubt that anyone — anyone that we would rightfully call a human being — will ever be able to solve. It’s perhaps the only fundamental problem shared by adherents of religious and atheistic philosophies: What happened in the beginning? I once saw a great episode of Kirk Cameron’s The Way of the Master in which one of the atheists being harassed on the street asked his inquisitors that very question. The fair-minded editors took it as an opportunity to cut him off and display Genesis 1:1: “In the beginning God created the heavens and the earth.” But that’s not good enough, which is what the atheist was undoubtedly trying to convey. Let’s say God created the heavens and the earth. Well, who or what created God? And who or what created that entity — and so on and so forth? Now, this is hardly an original question, and it’s been answered many times by many religious people over thousands of years: Nothing created God. He has always been and always will be. But if God has always been, why couldn’t a godless universe be eternal, too?

But we have to ask what came first, what happened at the beginning. We have to ask it because our brains can’t comprehend another scenario. We can talk about infinity, but we can’t really understand it. Maybe something did come first, and maybe that thing just happened, just came out of nothing, but that’s an impossible concept to us, too. Either way, we’re left with something beyond the reaches of our mind.

The concept that there are simply things we’re not advanced enough to understand, questions we can’t answer and never will, is the only logical conclusion.

I find it interesting that in the rudimentary research I’ve done on New Mysterianism, it seems to be principally an atheistic philosophy. Why can’t anybody, hardcore evangelical or militant god-hater, be a New Mysterian? Science and religion both leave important questions unanswered. Genesis 1:1 aside, neither one can really answer the fundamental “in the beginning” question. I would think the philosophy would be just as compatible with religion as with science — if not more so, because science by design seeks answers to all natural phenomena, whereas religion tends to be more comfortable with the unknown. Maybe that’s my original contribution to this whole line of thought. If I can’t invent it, at least I can contribute something good.

So I guess I’m a New Mysterian. Ugh. That’s going to take some getting used to. I guess I’ll go out now to buy some crystals and flowing sky-blue robes.

Can’t say I don’t have hobbies

Should I be a little embarrassed that I’m obsessed with German propaganda?

I like the Communist stuff as much as the Nazi stuff, if not more. As nefarious propaganda goes, it’s very accessible. It’s in the Latin alphabet in a language closely related to English, so you can kind of tell what’s going on, and it goes all the way up to 1989, making it so much less distant. As an American, it’s a lot easier to imagine yourself living in the GDR than in the Soviet Union. And I love their Orwellian attempts to seem warm and fuzzy and peace-loving.

Plus there’s the excellent site at Calvin College — I haven’t found a suitable equivalent for any other country’s propaganda (unless you count whitehouse.gov — hardy har har). The Calvin guy needs to update more, though. C’mon, I presume he’s getting paid for it!

My (least) favorite subway lie

“There’s another train right behind us.”

That’s right, MTA — I’m on to you. I am completely convinced that this line, which subway conductors use every single time the train is packed and people are trying desperately to squeeze on, is utter bullshit. The few times I’ve ever taken their advice, I’ve had to wait at least another five minutes for the next train, sometimes longer. I strongly suspect MTA higher-ups teach conductors to use the line to avert a Tokyo-style crush whether or not there’s another train immediately following.

Any incidence of an actual train arriving following the use of this line is purely coincidental. Trust me. If you’ve got somewhere you need to be, just keep on squeezing. Don’t worry — other people will be gullible enough to fall for it.

It took me more than two years to realize …

… that the tile place a few blocks away from my apartment is owned by the same people as the video-production place next door to it. It even has the same name, though I guess it was understated enough that it slipped my notice every time I passed by. The video place came first. Opening up a tile business seems like an odd attempt at diversification.

Also strange: They have another video location in Astoria, which I’ve run across before despite the fact that I’m rarely in Astoria and it’s not really located anywhere you’d likely run across it, even if you lived in the area.

Melissa on dumb commercials

COMMERCIAL: What’s worse than roots?
MELISSA: Oh, I don’t know, getting raped in a park?

Observation by Melissa on our cat

“Kitty would be a bad drug mule.”

Am I supposed to be impressed?

Having been on several of them, I find it hard to believe that a seven-day cruise can make do with only 150 bottles of rum.