9 Oct 06

Time:

?

Money:

$16, really, really good roast pork with yellow rice and black beans, plus a bottle of water, Chelsea Havana.
$3, Tres Leches soft-serve (in keeping with the Cuban theme) from Tasti D'Lite (or however they spell that ridiculous name.)

More interesting things:

Took the C to Chelsea to meet Anne and Co., and spied the "yellow-green" subway traffic light combination I'd read about yesterday. It's going to be a loss when there are no more cars with windows at the front; I do like to watch what's coming, and Ben's absolutely right when he describes the gradual and somewhat mysterious appearance of a station in the distance as similar to that of a lighted outpost on a dark river.

Waited on aforementioned C at... 51st? because of "the E train crossing ahead of us." I appreciate the engineer's specificity, even if I don't know what its purpose is.

Noticed what looked almost like big tags made of yellow metal sticking out from the wall as the train pulled into one of the stations. Each tag had a number on it - from ten back one at a time to six is as far as I saw, although I bet they went all the way down to one. I think - and this is just an educated guess based on the rest of that article mentioning the yellow-green, but I think it's a good one - that each tag tells the engineer how many of his (or her) cars has, in MTA parlance, "made the platform." As in the famous LIRR comment, "Passengers for Laurelton will need to be in one of the first four cars; only the first four cars will make the platform at Laurelton. First four cars for Laurelton." Express trains generally have ten cars, but if they're 70-foot cars (?) rather than 60-foot (again, ?), obviously they don't need as many, so it's not like the engineer can just, like, line the front of the train up with the end of the platform or something.

Listened to the table-moving sound. Once upon a time, I lived the whole year 'round in Florida, where there's a big wooden table in our tiled dining room. When you move the table slowly - perhaps in an effort to keep the Thanksgiving decorations in place - you hear a soft "kerthunk" as the table legs dip into the grout lines, followed by a quiet scraping sound as they slide across the tiles themselves. If you do it at the right speed, you can note for the benefit of those around you that it sounds just like a train dropping speed as it approaches a station, particularly if you happen to be on, for instance, the Long Island Rail Road, whose cars sometimes momentarily lose contact with the power line and cause everything to get real quiet for a second or two. This time, however, a train was the physical environment, leaving my brain to occupy for a minute a room that smells like turkey.