Keeping breaking my own personal record, allow me to deliver November's highlights. Although a lot of time has passed, I'll try not to mention anything from December. If you want to hear about New Years Celebrations at Times Square, you'll have to wait for the next issue.
The above picture was taken on the subway station at West Farms Square in The Bronx. Outside Manhattan the "Sub-Way" actually rides above the ground. This station is about 20 meters above street level, and looks very different from the subway stations in Manhattan.
I came to this country, and I must say I had some problems with some of the Federal Agencies (Not the FBI, to my knowledge). It didn't end with that. After getting my Social Security Number, I marched into one of the banks in the city and wanted to open an account. This shouldn't have been too hard - You give them money, they never let you have a negative balance (No overdraft), and they might charge you for anything from writing a check to obtaining money using their ATM. They refused me, of course. I had to ask my Boss at work to guarantee that I'm a stable enough person to have a bank account.
Just for your information, I have to keep an average monthly balance of at least $3000, or they would charge me $0.50 for each transaction in my account. Actually it's not such a bad idea - it forces you to save some money, but I still don't understand why they wouldn't let me open an account for just being me.
Now, if opening an account seems like something only privileged people could do, it looks like only VIPs can get a credit card here. I applied for a credit card about four months after I came here and got a polite reply that said, "Do we know you? Why would we give you credit? Why would we risk it? Call us again when you're someone".
I did. In the middle of October. And by the beginning of the next month I got my shining new MasterCard by mail. It seems that since I've been paying all my bills on time, I've earned enough points to get a credit card (They call that here "credit history"). If they only knew that back in Israel, the electricity in my apartment with Moti was disconnected more than once for being late on payments...
Take a look at this beauty:
How soon do you think one should prepare for the holidays? Here we have Thanksgiving at the end of November, and around that time the entire city is covered with lights - wires with many small lamps. They cover shop windows, they cover trees, they cover buildings, and if you're not careful enough, and you stand too long in one place, you might get covered yourself by an over enthusiastic happy spirit. The city looks very nice with all these lights. I said earlier that it seems like New York is getting ready to hibernate as winter arrives. I was wrong. The party is just starting.
But actually, the preparations start a lot sooner. There's an old habit that every year they murder a tree and put it up in Rockefeller center, decorated as much as possible. Every year they have to get a bigger and better tree, so for the last few years they have someone whose job in life is to handle the Rockefeller Center Christmas tree. He starts searching for the tree in March. This search is done with helicopters. In the next few months he negotiates the price for the tree with whoever owns the tree, and a couple of weeks before Thanksgiving they chop the tree and then somehow bring it to a close by river, and sail with it to Manhattan, and then hang it up in the right place, decorate it, and light it up in a big ceremony. This two weeks process gets full coverage in the media, and this tree finder/chopper is considered a hero here. I went to see the tree, and it is big, it looks like they will have to start chopping Sequoias in the near future.
Now that I have an American credit card I get the respect I deserve. But that's not all I get. About a week after I got my credit card I got this mail:
Do you know what it is? It's a letter from Visa, saying I'm pre approved to have a Visa credit card. This means that now I can have more credit cards. Where were you when I was begging for a credit card and got refused? Now I understand why the symbol of this country is the corpse eating Bald Headed Eagle. Stay the hell away from me.
I've been writing this "newspaper" for quite some time now. And it's been a lot of fun. Usually I think about things to write during the month, and when I finally sit down to write an issue, it usually doesn't take me more than a couple of hours to write everything.
Adding the pictures is another story. Sometimes the pictures need some work, and this might take some time. At least for me. I'm no graphic designer. For example, a few months back I included a scanned image of an add. I'll remind you what it was:
Actually this was a two page add, and I had to work on it so that it would look solid enough. The original looks like this:
Compare the two pictures and I hope you'll see some differences. I have a reason for telling you this. It's not just for show off. I just wanted to assure you the credit card you saw at the beginning of this issue is mine, but don't try to use it, the number is really different.
Another inside story: In the August issue, I quoted a TV commercial and in that quote I wrote the following line: "The most common side effects of FloMax are a decrease of semen...". Actually I wrote the word "Seamon". How the hell would I know how to spell it? After a small argument with the spell checker, we settled on the word "Seamen", which seemed the best we could come up with. I "published" the issue, and got the following comment from one of the quicker readers - A.A. (The real name is safe with me): "Now, I'm *almost* sure they didn't mean you get less sailors after using FloMax, right?". I quickly changed the spelling, so most of you didn't get to see the "Titanic version". Oh, what a shame. Just thought you'd like this short story.
