Holiday Haiku

Enemy of the day: The pudgy businessman in the next seat of the train. He took out a raggedy Kleenex, blew/picked his nose, then rolled it under the seat in front of him.

I’ve been working Rockefeller Center Holiday Tourist Haiku recently. Damn, these people are annoying. Here's a sampling:

Radio City?
You’re standing right under it.
You dumb-ass tourist.

"Please hold the subway!"
Yes it goes to Thirty-Fourth Street
Now get on or off.

Escalator’s dead
Four hundred ninety steps up
I hate Herald Square

I love a parade!
Millions of volunteers out
Your red jackets suck

Tall escalator
You just made it to the top!
Now just stand around

Counterfeit watches
Bought from a fake wheelchair guy
Worst Christmas EVER

Because of the storm
All PM trains are cancelled
Thanks for riding us!

A.M. New York

Okay, I’m getting yelled at for not keeping this updated….

They introduced a new newspaper a few weeks ago – A.M. New York. It’s free, it’s completely devoid of content, and it’s hawked by a bevy of no-doubt well-recompensed annoyances outside Penn Station. There’s really no reason whatsoever to read this thing, but it doesn’t stop them from trying.

The great thing, though, is that they’re obviously not allowed to leave until they give away all of their papers. In the beginning, they were “selling” it with calls like “Top news story! Top news story!” That wasn’t working when you could buy Newsday for a quarter next to them. So they cleverly switched tactics to “Free news! Don’t cost you nothing! Free news!” Of course, this begged the question of what value it had. So today, there’s a driving rainstorm. Combining the value proposition of freeness with the tactile honesty of print, several A.M. New York vendors have adopted a new pitch: “A.M. New York! You can use it to keep dry! You don’t got an umbrella!”