Thank God For Pizza Slices And Chinese Takeout

The ironic thing about the Amazing Technology That Is The Internet is that the basis for it is remarkably low-tech:

Daniel Rayas moved to New York in January from El Paso, Texas, to care for his newborn granddaughter, Eva Lucia. But he needed a job to pay his room and board, one flexible enough to allow for daily diaper-changing duty.

The unlikely solution: collecting take-out menus.

Allmenus.com, an online yellow pages for restaurants, sent him on a quest to reel in menus from eateries across the New York metropolitan area. Four months and one worn out pair of boots later, Rayas has snapped up 10,000 take-out menus.

“My motto is ‘No menu left behind,'” said Rayas, 55, who gets paid $2 for each menu.

It all began one March morning when baby Eva was taking a nap. Rayas — an accountant by trade who worked demolition in El Paso before his move east — was crunching numbers part time for a law firm to pay his rent. But it wasn’t enough. He answered a Craigslist ad: “Earn Money by Collecting Menus.” He sent an e-mail and thought it would go unanswered.

“But the same day I got a response that said, ‘Get started.'”

So Rayas set out from his Washington Heights home in his brand new rust-colored High Sierra boots.

He walked down Broadway. Then he walked up and down Amsterdam Avenue, St. Nicholas Avenue, Audubon Avenue and Fort Washington Avenue. “All the numbered streets, too,” Rayas said.

By the end of the day, blisters covered his toes and he limped into a Rite Aid on 125th Street to buy a box of Band-Aids. “I leaned against the wall, took off my socks, popped the blisters and taped up my toes,” Rayas said. “Man, it felt good.”

Months later, he knows to tape up his feet, tighten his shoelaces and check Google Maps before setting out on his evening and weekend menu hunts, which at his current pace would net him about $60,000 a year. His subway and bus maps are covered with yellow and pink highlighter markings, his legs no longer get sore, and he’s lost 20 pounds. Meanwhile, his boss started calling him “the vacuum” for his astounding proficiency in bringing in menus.

. . .

“Chinese people believe in menus,” he said. “Jamaicans don’t. I ask, ‘Do you have a menu?’ They point to the wall.”

Rayas is grateful he’s no longer knocking down walls and hauling bricks. And he’s grateful to the pizza parlors and Chinese restaurants that have given him menus. “Whenever you don’t think there’s a restaurant around the corner, there’s always a pizza parlor and always a Chinese restaurant,” he said.

Sure, Pick On Sunset Park

The Health Department reveals the fattest, skinniest and drinkiest neighborhooods in a new study:

If you live in Sunset Park, it might be time to get off the couch.

A new city report found people who live in the Brooklyn neighborhood are least likely to exercise of all New Yorkers. In fact, 57% admitted they are sedentary, while residents of Greenwich Village and SoHo hit the gym on a regular basis.

Meanwhile, Staten Island is still the smoking capital of the city, especially the South Shore and Mid Island sections, where 33% of residents smoke,

The updated Community Health Profiles released by the Department of Health use yearly phone surveys and other data to measure health indicators such as depression, asthma, diabetes and smoking in 42 neighborhoods.

Some conclusions:

East Harlem residents may exercise a bit more than those in Sunset Park, but they should lay off the fried foods — 31% say they are obese.

Binge drinking — defined as having five or more drinks in a night — is highest in Chelsea.

Hell House, New York City Style

This year features borough-specific haunted houses:

Last Halloween, [Timothy] Haskell, a theatre director, staged a public haunted house on the Lower East Side, and so many people showed up that hundreds never made it inside. “We realized that we had to turn away a lot of local people,” Haskell said. So this year he put up haunted houses in all five boroughs, tailored to prey on the fears peculiar to each one.

For months, Haskell and his crew polled residents of the five boroughs to find out their worst nightmares. . . . People from the Bronx and Queens, they said, tend to fear things that might actually happen, like being mugged (harpaxophobia), while Manhattanites are frightened of fantastical and unlikely occurrences (flying sharks, riding in an elevator that rockets through the roof of a building). “In Manhattan and Brooklyn, we heard ‘fear of the homeless,'” [chief designer Paul] Smithyman said. “Then, in the Bronx, we heard ‘fear of becoming homeless.'” Staten Island residents apparently dread chemical spills and gas leaks.

. . .

The challenge of creating a tableau representing acrophobia, the fear of heights (and the seventh most common fear of Manhattan residents), almost stumped the designers. “One idea was that we’d have people walk up a staircase and onto a Plexiglas floor and see teeny-tiny furniture beneath them,” Haskell said. “But there were liability issues.” Instead, they paired a video of someone falling off a ledge with an evocative sound effect: vroooooom, splat. For illyngophobia (fear of dizziness, No. 11 among Manhattanites), the team installed a giant spinning tunnel; for entomophobia (insects, No. 3), they glued a thousand dead cockroaches onto a wall; and for musophobia (mice, No. 6), they ordered an essence of dead rat from an outfit in Chicago called Sinister Scents.

Everybody Loves Lists!

The New York Press’ Best of Manhattan for 2006 is out (it seems like every year they have to make some sort of half-assed apology for why it’s still called “Best of Manhattan”). This year includes “Best Worst Smelling Subway Station” (in City Life):

If you need a good reason to vomit, transfer from the V or the E train to an uptown 6 train at 53rd Street. The underground passageway between these two tracks either hosts a nightly pissing competition that gives bonus points for projectile sharting, or it captures the scent of a nearby chef who boils soiled toilet water. In any case, when you reach the top of the escalator off the E/V line, begin breathing deeply in preparation. Nevermind the salty taste of group body odor trailing from your fellow commuters; it pales in comparison to the soggy air trapped between the semen-coated walls that awaits you. At the top of the steps, hold your breath and run. Don’t walk. Don’t even walk fast. Run. And don’t be afraid to take out any hobbling meanderers up ahead. The smell is ruthless and so must you be.

Concur.

Most stations have a particular terroir — personally, I find the Lexington Avenue Express tracks at 59th Street a lovely musty odor evocative of an ice skating rink — but the stank-ass mop water miasma of the passage between the downtown and uptown 6 lines (If I’m understanding them, I think that’s what they’re referring to — meaning the passage commuters move through between downtown 6 trains and the E/V — of course, you probably only know this if you’re heading out to or coming from Queens . . . ha!) is one of the worst.

Authorities Declare “War” On Bedbugs

From cutesy literary allusion to full-scale war in just one day:

An explosion of bedbugs, the apple seed-size insects that hide in mattresses and furniture during the day and feast on unsuspecting sleepers at night, have terrorized visitors, outraged residents and are now stirring political action.

“It was horrible. I never wanted to go to sleep,” said Caitlin Heller, 27, a Queens College student whose Jackson Heights apartment was overrun by the bloodthirsty bugs. “They were painful, itchy, and all I thought about.”

“Even now, after they’ve been exterminated, I think I feel phantom bugs,” said Heller, who has started a blog about the topic. “Even a piece of lint scares me.”

. . .

City Councilwoman Gale Brewer (D-Manhattan) supported a measure this week to ban the sale of used mattresses — perhaps the No.1 carrier of bedbugs. But at a hearing Monday, a city official testified against the bill, saying the ban might do little to control infestations and would adversely impact poor people.

Brewer said that even if the bill fails, the sale of secondhand mattresses should be regulated.

“We need to educate residents and city officials about this growing problem,” said Brewer. “Right now, the city’s doing nothing, and we need to declare war.”

Go ahead, freak yourself out: Beasts Feast On Blood While Authorities Dither; NYPD Bedbug; Don’t Let The . . .; It’s Endemic, Pandemic, This Epidemic; Bedbugs Don’t Wait For Midterms Now, Do They?; Don’t Let The Gasoline-Soaked Bedbugs Burst Into Flames In The Middle Of The Night, Setting Your Living Quarters On Fire.