15th
NYT article on parking is kind of like listening to your dad tell bad jokes at a dinner party.
I don’t know if this article appeared on the front page of anyone else’s New York Times, but it sure graced the cover of mine this morning, right below the fold. Granted, I do live in Park Slope. But I’m pretty sure they don’t print special editions of the Times for various yuppified Brooklyn ‘hoods (although I wouldn’t be surprised).
Anyways, yes, the suspension of alternate side of the street parking is a HUGE deal for anyone that actually has a car in New York City (which, by the way means either you’re rich, masochistic, have been living in the city since the 80’s when parking was cheaper or just moved here from Ohio and will probably sell that damn thing soon). But really Michael Wilson? When you’re talking about how much time New Yorkers have to spend looking for parking, did you really have to say:
“And nowhere is this truer than in Park Slope, Brooklyn, named not for the ability to do just that — park — but for the kind with grass and trees, useless to drivers. Even on a good day, parking is scarce: No-Park Slope.”
Ugggh. You just *know* that at some point in the last year or so, he was at a dinner party. Someone had driven there, canme late, and used finding parking as an excuse. Everyone started agreeing how much parking in Park Slope sucks. Someone told the old “sixth day god created man seventh day Man had to move his car” joke that starts the article, and everyone laughed. And then Michael says “parking in this neighborhood is so bad this neighborhood should be called No-Park Slope!”
So if Michael Wilson is anything like my father, no one laughed when he told that joke. My dad’s strategy in that situation is to just keep telling the joke over and over, in the hopes that repeated subjection will somehow make it funnier. Michael Wilson’s strategy? Put it in the New York Times. Because with a readership of just over a million, goddamn it someone out there has to think that joke is funny.
Side note — notice that Calvin Trillian is the only person quoted in the article without specifying his location (and, um, one of the few that wasn’t quoted while in a “dark bar” ?!?!). His quip? “Is it like a very, very long Jewish holiday?” My guess? He was soooo at that dinner party too.