a parking spot hiding in plain sight?

I may have discovered a parking spot hiding in plain sight.

First, let me describe the venue -- Hillside Avenue in Jamaica, between Midland Parkway and Edgerton Blvd. It's a commercial zone, and about a bajillion buses have stops there. Lots of people pick up or drop off passengers at the subway, since that's where the termional for the F train is -- and there are more than a few exits from the station along that stretch. Everyone knows there's nowhere to park along there, since the whole stretch is bus stops.

Or is it?

The other day I noticed something peculiar on the north side of the street, near the eastern end. See the picture below, which shows the north side of the street, facing west.

When I took the picture, I was standing in the crosswalk. West of the crosswalk is a "No Standing" sign with an arrow pointing east. That precludes parking east of that sign. Immediately west of the sign is a short stretch -- room for one car, maybe two if they're smart cars -- with no parking control indicators, except for yellow paint on the curb. Next is a bus stop sign with a single-headed arrow pointing west. That precludes parking to the west of that sign.

So what's the story with the stretch between the two signs? Normal intuition would tell me that you can't park there, but there are no signs telling me that. The curb is painted yellow, but I read enough of Gridlock Sam's columns to know that paint on the curb has no legal weight within New York City.

I'm not going to park there. If, for some reason I'm overlooking, it's not a legal parking spot then I could get a ticket which I'd have to pay. If it is legal then I could still get a ticket (because it doesn't seem like a real space, and police are people too) -- and then my best case is not paying but having aggravation. Not worth it.

But curiosity has me wondering.

I'm going to email Gridlock Sam with a link to this post and ask him if the spot is legal. If he gets back to me I'll follow up.

But, regardless of what he says, I'm not gonna park there.

subway dream fulfilled

In the last week I finally finished a quest that began more than forty years ago...I have ridden the New York subway to everywhere it goes.

There were a couple of years in elementary school that I had to take the subway to school, and that was when the interest was sparked. But I generally shared that ride with my father and sister, and it was a relatively short ride in a relatively safe part of the city. I was too young to go off on my own riding everywhere the system went. But the itch had begun.

In high shool, living in Eastern Queens and attending high school in Manhattan, I had my first taste of the freedom to ride to subway on my own, unsupervised. The optimal route had me taking the F train to 14th Street and transferring to the LL (which is now the L), but I made a point of taking other routes -- the E to the LL, the F to the GG (now the G) to the LL, the F to the 7 to the 4, 5 or 6 to the LL...there were a few others. And there was a stretch where, on Wednesdays I would take a train to Brooklyn to ride a route that I'd never been on before. But in that time, I didn't go on most of the routes in the Bronx -- This was the late 1970's and early 1980's, and there were areas that were unsafe.

Since then, there were a few more places that I have gone (e.g., Yankee Stadium), and I went on some of the new routes that have opened since my high school years.

So, going into the end-of-year season, I was missing most of the Bronx, the 2 and 3 trains north of 110th Street, and the 2nd Avenue line north of 72nd Street. And, for some reason, I decided that, while taking a few days off work, I would finally get to these places. I did it in three afternoons, one of which was with Ethan. I could have pushed myself and done it in one, but I wanted to be able to enjoy the experience -- not be thing "Geez, when will it be done?"

Railfanning isn't as much fun as it was when I was a kid. Back then, the motorman's cab only took up about a third of the width of the car. So you could stand by the front door and look through the window. On the newer trains, the cab takes up the full car width. It's much better for the motorman. But now the best you can do is look through the door into the motorman's cab and see through to the door in front of the car. You don't get the same wide angle, and you don';t feel the same closeness to the space in front of the train. For a taste of what real railfanning was like, watch this video that someone took on an A train going from 207 Street in Manhattan to Rockaway Park. It was taken on an R-32 subway car, which is significant because the R-32s had passenger-accessible front windows. Most of the route is underground, but at around 72 minutes it emerges. The remainder of the ride -- especially the parts as it approaches and goes through Jamaica Bay -- is one of the most scenic sections of the system. I watched it at 2X speed.

I won't bore you with the exact itinerary. Instead, I'll bore you with a few observations from the trips.

• The D train in the Bronx is very boring.
• The 5 train, out to Eastchester/Dyre Avenue, is a relatively interesting ride, as a good part of it runs on an embankment. So you see lots of varied scenery, including people's backyards.
• I wasn't aware that the northern terminal of the 3 train in Harlem is above-ground. The 1 train has elevated stretches in Norther Manhattan, but I thought that was it for elevated subways in Manhattan.* It was fun to see that station, though it could definitely use some maintenance.
• When the 2 and 3 trains split from each each other, north of the 135th Street station, the downtown 2 track crosses the uptown 3 track. Most other places where routes split one or more tracks are graded downward or upward so that they go under and over each other. Building tracks and tunnels the way they did for the 2 and 3 trains is cheaper, but it makes the signalling more complicated and crashes more likely. That said, I am not aware of there having ever been any train crashes at that spot. The only other place I can think of where tracks cross each other like that (and I'm limiting this to tracks that are used in customer service in the New York subway) is just west of the Myrtle Avenue station on the J and M trains.
• On the 2 train in the Bronx, I kept my eyes out around the Gun Hill Road station to see if any remnants of the old 3rd Avenue el (AKA the 8 train) were visible. That train was discontinued in 1973, so I wouldn't really expect to see anything anymore. On the other hand, the old MJ train was discontinued earlier (I think in 1969), and its trestle is still clearly visible over the aforementioned Myrtle Avenue station that services the J and M. Anyway, I couldn;t make out any infrastructure that I could say for sure was part of the old el. North of the Gun Hill Road station, it looked like the trestle had room for what had at one time been extra tracks. But I don't know if that was related. Did the old el  merge with the White Plains Road line at Gun Hill Road? Or did it kind of hit it at a perpendicular?
• Most of the routes that I polished off were old IRT lines. They are, in parts, deliciously twisty.
• The Second Avenue line (or at least what's been built and opened of it) is beautiful, clean and roomy. And boring. WHy did they build it as a two-track line, instead of a four track line that allows for express service. A bajillion years from now, when it's finally extended southward, they'll regret building it as a local only. Maybe -- just maybe -- they actually dug a four track tunnel, and the express tracks are on an as-yet-unopened lower level? It sounds crazy, but when the Lexington Avenue/63rd Street station opened on the F train, there was one track on each level, and the platforms were half-width. There were no visible clues that there was room for another half platform and track on the other side of the wall.

Having said all that, I note that some stretches of subway route have been shut down during my lifetime, and I will never get to ride those. These include (but are not necessarily limited to):

• The Culver Shuttle (which connected the old Sea Beach line (now part of the D) to the Culver line (now part of the F) in Brooklyn.
• The old end of the QJ** (now the J) in Queens. When I was a kid, the QJ, went to 168th Street and Jamaica Avenue. It was shortened to 121st Street. Since then it was extended on a route similar to the old one. It ends underground at Parsons Blvd ("Jamaica Center," whatever the fuck that is). The old line was elevated the whole way.
• The aforementioned 8 train in the Bronx, which was the last remnant of the Third Avenue el.
• The aforementioned MJ in Brooklyn, which was part of the BMT's Myrtle Avenue line.

Mission Accomplished
.
*I am not counting the short stretches where trains come above-ground for the Manhattan and Williamsburg bridges.
**Trivia: QJ stands for Brighton to Jamaica.

cinema history class: plan 9 from outer space

Session: Ed Wood Month, Week 3
Movie 2: PLan 9 from Outer Space (1959)
Directed by Ed Wood

As always, there may be spoilers here. And the trailer may be NSFW and/or NSFL

Plot:
Space aliens are reviving the dead in order to save humanity from itself. Hilarity ensues.

Reaction:
As far as I'm concerned, Plan 9 didn't live up (down?) to its reputation as the worst movie ever. Having said that, I should note that Dave gave it a 9 quoting the common refrain that it's "so bad it's good," and Sean explained his rating of 4 out of 4 as recognition that it's the quintessential bad movie. But Glen or Glenda, which we saw two weeks earlier was much worse. I guess it was more fun to see GorG in the class, but that was because of the bizarre way it was put together. Plan 9 is a better movie in the sense that it does a better job of satisfying the implicit contract a movie makes with the viewer. If I'm a 1950's moviegoer sitting down in the theater to have a story told to me, Plan 9 is less likely to disappoint.

But that's not to to say that Plan 9 is a good film. There's just too much wrong with it:

• The acting is horrendous.
• The dialog is almost as bad. I love the part where the the alien commander starts repeating the word "stupid" to tell the humans how, well, stupid humanity is.
• Don't get me started on the continuity errors -- police cars change, and scenes are constantly changing between night and day.
• Most famously, there's the Bela Lugosi issue. Lugosi dies during production, and the stand-in they got to film the rest of the scenes was much taller.
• Budgetary constraints forced Wood to use sparse sets, which kind of reminded me of the acting I did in small black box theaters. We had minimal set pieces, and the audience had to use their imaginations. Here, the scenes on airplanes space ships didn't really look like they were on such vehicles, and on;y worked as well s they did because the audience member wants to b e drawn into the story.

But the movie also had enough going for it that I really wanted to like it more than I did.

First, I have to give Ed Wood credit for the story itself. The basic premise that I liked is that space aliens want to get humanity to abandon its pursuit of weapons because, if we don't, we will eventually destroy the universe. There's some technobabble to explain it, and that sounds as reasonable as the worst of Star Trek. But this movie was made in the 1950s, when the US and USSR were stuck in a nuclear arms race. With the two superpowers developing more and more powerful weapons, the message about destroying the universe must have resonated. Say what you want about Wood as a filmmaker, but he had his finger on the pulse of the zeitgeist.

One simple fact about Plan 9 is that it was probably too ambitious. This had space aliens and zombies, and it tied them together in a coherent plot. And this was a "message" movie (see previous paragraph). I think it was Keith who noted that this should have been Ed Wood's epic -- if he had had the funds for an epic. Instead, he had to make do with what he could manage on a small budget. Given the constraints, he did as good a job as anyone could have expected.

Another interesting thing about the movie is the ending. The space aliens get killed, which would be a standard happy ending, except for the fact that these aliens were actually benevolent. They were only trying to get humans to change from a course that would inevitably lead to the destruction of the universe. But we made their ship explode, so maybe our fate is sealed.

Oh well, pass the potato salad.

Ratings:
Me: 7
Dave: 9
Ethan: 6
Joe: 9.3
Sean: 4 out of 4

a question about president's names

In a Facebook conversation, a friend* posed the following question:

How many Presidential names can form a relatively prime group? That is, no letters in a President's name occur in any of the Presidents' names in the group. I've come up with several groups of three, but no groups of four so far.

Now, that's the kind of pointless thing that really appeals to me, so I had to work it out. Spoiler alert: Three is the maximum.

For reference, I have listed the presidential last names below. There are only 39 of them (despite there having been 45 presidents) because six last names -- Adams, Harrison, Johnson, Cleveland, Roosevelt and Bush) have been repeated.

Here's how I worked it out:

First, for simplicity, I am going to use the initialism, "RPG" to mean "relatively prime group," meaning (as described above) a group of names, no two of which have any letters in common.

I didn't want brute force this, so I started by considering vowels.** There are five vowels, not counting Y, and each presidential name has at least one. That means that, before going on, we know that the maximum size of an RPG is five or less. Assuming there is an RPG of five, it has to consist of the following:

1. A name with one or more A, but no other vowels
2. A name with one or more E, but no other vowels
3. A name with one or more I, but no other vowels
4. A name with one or more O, but no other vowels
5. A name with one or more U, but no other vowels

Before going on, let me note that that is a necessary condition, but not sufficient. If, for example, you put together such a group, but two of the names have Ns in them, then that group is still not an RPG.

But examination of the presidential last names (listed below) reveals that there are no presidential last names that have I's but no other vowels. Which means there is no RPG of size five. So now the question is, are there any RPGs of size four?

Repeating the same line of reasoning above, we know that every president's last name has an A, an E, an O or a U. If there is an RPG of size four, it must consist of the following:

1. A name with one or more A, but no E, O or U
2. A name with one or more E, but no A, O or U
3. A name with one or more O, but no A, E or U
4. A name with one or more U, but no A, E or O

From this point on, I brute forced it. Let's see what there is:

Let's call the names that satisfy condition 1, "set A." Set A consists of Adams, Grant, Taft and Harding

Let's call the names that satisfy condition 2, "set E." Set E consists of Tyler, Pierce, McKinley and Kennedy

Let's call the names that satisfy condition 3, "set O." Set O consists of Polk, Lincoln, Johnson, Wilson, Nixon, Ford and Clinton.

Let's call the names that satisfy condition 4, "set U." Set U consists of Bush and Trump.

Simple examination shows us that Adams is not relatively prime with either element of Set U. Neither Grant nor Harding is relatively prime with any element of Set E. So if there is an RPG of size four, it must contain Taft.

The only element of Set U that Taft is relatively prime with is Bush. So if there is an RPG  of size four, it must contain Taft and Bush.

Turning to the elements of Set E, we can confirm that an RPG of size four can't contain Tyler (since Tyler is not relatively prime with Taft, which must be in the RPG of size four. So an RPG of size four must consist of:

• Bush
• Taft
• either Pierce, McKinley or Kennedy
• an element of Set O.

Now, which element of Set O could be that fourth item?

• It can't be Polk because Polk is not relatively prime with Pierce, Kennedy or McKinley
• It can't be Lincoln because Lincoln is not relatively prime with Pierce, Kennedy or McKinley
• It can't be Johnson because Johnson is not relatively prime with Bush
• It can't be Wilson because Wilson is not relatively prime with Bush
• It can't be Nixon because Nixon is not relatively prime with Pierce, Kennedy or McKinley
• It can't be Ford because Ford is not relatively prime with Taft
• It can't be Clinton because Clinton is not relatively prime with Pierce, Kennedy or McKinley

Therefore no element of Set O can be in the RPG of size four, so there does not exist an RPG of size four.

There are, however, several RPG's of size three, including (Bush, Taft, Pierce).

So the maximum size of an RPG is three.

QED.

As an aside, I note that Washington is not relatively prime with any other president's name. FWIW.

Presidential last names (in alphabetical order)

1. Adams
2. Arthur
3. Buchanan
4. Bush
5. Carter
6. Cleveland
7. Clinton
8. Coolidge
9. Eisenhower
10. Fillmore
11. Ford
12. Garfield
13. Grant
14. Harding
15. Harrison
16. Hayes
17. Hoover
18. Jackson
19. Jefferson
20. Johnson
21. Kennedy
22. Lincoln
23. Madison
24. McKinley
25. Monroe
26. Nixon
27. Obama
28. Pierce
29. Polk
30. Reagan
31. Roosevelt
32. Taft
33. Taylor
34. Truman
35. Trump
36. Tyler
37. Van Buren
38. Washington
39. Wilson

*I won't share his name, but it has letters in it
**Credit where due: Blair suggested I look at vowels

it's zmedsday!! (ix)