Man Dates

Jennifer 8. Lee investigates the notion that men going out to dinner with each other are secretly homosexual:

The delicate posturing began with the phone call.

The proposal was that two buddies back in New York City for a holiday break in December meet to visit the Museum of Modern Art after its major renovation.

“He explicitly said, ‘I know this is kind of weird, but we should probably go,'” said Matthew Speiser, 25, recalling his conversation with John Putman, 28, a former classmate from Williams College.

The weirdness was apparent once they reached the museum, where they semi-avoided each other as they made their way through the galleries and eschewed any public displays of connoisseurship. “We definitely went out of our way to look at things separately,” recalled Mr. Speiser, who has had art-history classes in his time.

“We shuffled. We probably both pretended to know less about the art than we did.”

Eager to cut the tension following what they perceived to be a slightly unmanly excursion – two guys looking at art together – they headed directly to a bar. “We couldn’t stop talking about the fact that it was ridiculous we had spent the whole day together one on one,” said Mr. Speiser, who is straight, as is Mr. Putman. “We were purging ourselves of insecurity.”

Anyone who finds a date with a potential romantic partner to be a minefield of unspoken rules should consider the man date, a rendezvous between two straight men that is even more socially perilous.

. . .

Although “man date” is a coinage invented for this article, appearing nowhere in the literature of male bonding (or of homosexual panic), the 30 to 40 straight men interviewed, from their 20’s to their 50’s, living in cities across the country, instantly recognized the peculiar ritual even if they had not consciously examined its dos and don’ts. Depending on the activity and on the two men involved, an undercurrent of homoeroticism that may be present determines what feels comfortable or not on a man date, as Mr. Speiser and Mr. Putman discovered in their squeamishness at the Modern.

Both Sex and the City and Seinfeld are long gone but it’s not too late to coin glib terms for New York City culturo-athropological phenomena:

Simply defined a man date is two heterosexual men socializing without the crutch of business or sports. It is two guys meeting for the kind of outing a straight man might reasonably arrange with a woman. Dining together across a table without the aid of a television is a man date; eating at a bar is not. Taking a walk in the park together is a man date; going for a jog is not. Attending the movie “Friday Night Lights” is a man date, but going to see the Jets play is definitely not.

“Sideways,” the Oscar-winning film about two buddies touring the central California wine country on the eve of the wedding of one of them, is one long and boozy man date.

She of course conveniently forgets that the technical term for two or more men being out “on the eve of one’s wedding” is “bachelor party.” Nothing to see here, move on: Gentlemen, rest assured, your manhood is intact.

The Making of an Urban Legend

A Drudgetastic story that will be repeated around the watercooler all across the country — the delivery guy who was stuck in the elevator for three days:

Ming Kuang Chen, a deliveryman for a Bronx restaurant called Happy Dragon, walked out Friday night at about 8:30 p.m. with a large order of curried shrimp with onion and a small shrimp fried rice, and never came back.

Worried co-workers found his bicycle chained up in front of the 38-story apartment building of Tracey Towers, at 40 West Mosholu Parkway near Jerome Avenue, and feared the worst: At least three deliverymen for Chinese restaurants have been killed in New York City in the last five years, for money or for food.

For three days, the police searched in and around the buildings for Mr. Chen, going door to door to the 871 apartments, sending bloodhounds and cadaver-detecting dogs into nearby Van Cortlandt Park and Woodlawn Cemetery, dropping with scuba gear into the cold waters of the Jerome Park Reservoir.

And all that time, it seems he was right in the middle of them – trapped in an express elevator, where he spent more than three days in a 4-foot by 6-and-a-half-foot cab without food or water before being rescued shortly after dawn yesterday. He had made his last delivery before becoming trapped.

“I kept yelling,” a weary Mr. Chen said through an interpreter after his rescue, briefly describing his roughly 81 hours of captivity.

The offending building:

The Post headline: “Deliverance.” The Daily News headline: “Sat in hell-evator for days.” I liked the Daily News headline more until I considered the implicit snobbiness of “Deliverance.” So the tabloid-to-tabloid headline battle ends in . . . a draw! On to the next bizarre story!

J-E-T-S, Jets! Jets! Jets!

Speaking of the apparent inability of some New Yorkers to understand sports metaphors, the Times reports on yesterday’s decision by the MTA’s board to accept the Jets’ offer to buy the airspace above the West Side railyards for a multi-zillion dollar stadium, using the smart headline “Jets Win Stadium Battle by 2 Touchdowns.” Too bad they had to add the redundant explainer: “(the Vote Is 14-0).”

April Fools

As I’m hearing Brian Lehrer on WNYC try to convince listeners that in order to counter steroid use, Bud Selig is instituting a new rule lowering strikes batters are allowed to two — not plausible, Brian! We actually watch baseball! Although at least one listener has called up believing him . . . clueless New Yorkers! — I see that the Times has written about April Fools’ hoaxes:

Shortly before noon today, the 20th annual April Fools’ Day parade will start its zany prance down Fifth Avenue, complete with whimsical floats, cacophonous music and this year’s grand marshals, SpongeBob SquarePants and impersonators standing in for former Gov. James E. McGreevey of New Jersey and the filmmaker Michael Moore, who will goad spectators to spar him on his own “wrestling float.”

Sounds like a real crowd pleaser.

As in year’s past, news cameras from around the globe will be on the sidelines hoping to capture the perfect wacky shot of what organizers bill as “a commemoration of the perennial folly of mankind.”

And as in year’s past, those reporters who do show up will end up playing the fool. That is because New York’s April Fools’ Day parade is a great big hoax, the brainchild of Joey Skaggs, the éminence grise of pransksterdom who has been duping the news media with his outlandish stunts for decades.

There’s a sucker born every minute, P. T. Barnum reportedly said, and the phantom parade, advertised through official-looking press releases, has drawn a wide range of news media outlets in the past, including CNN, USA Today and, without fail, a camera crew or two from Japan. (As of last night, Fox’s “A Current Affair” and the morning show on WB-11 news had confirmed their plans for coverage, Mr. Skaggs said.)

“Sometimes a reporter will call me from Fifth Avenue in a panic, saying he can’t find the parade, and I’ll say: ‘Oh, they’re probably already down at Washington Square. You’d better run,’ ” he said. “It’s an important opportunity for all of us to review our inherent foolishness.”

Brian just raised the bar, saying that a foul ball after the first pitch will be considered a strikeout.

This Craig’s List-related prank isn’t bad, however:

Anecdotal evidence reveals that workplace pranks are far more elaborate and mortifying than those unleashed at home. Just ask Steve Wyatt, an associate creative director at Kenneth Cole who received scores of odd calls last April 1 – some from prospective semen donors looking to collect $500 for a deposit, others from people seeking free Thai massages or cheap luxury rentals.

After a few dozen such calls, Mr. Wyatt and the company’s other victims discovered their phone numbers on a series of fake ads on Craig’s List, courtesy of some conspiring underlings. “I found it very amusing, but it did get a bit tiresome when I kept getting calls three weeks later,” Mr. Wyatt said.

Now Brian is saying that Mayor Bloomberg likes the rule change so much that he wants to build three new baseball stadiums — and lure the Giants back to New York. Representative Anthony Weiner just called in to object. I sure hope the other guy was a plant, too!

Years From Now

Years from now, anthropologists and social historians will find this all a little odd:

It would be hard to conceive of a better criminal target than the iPod. Those white cords snaking down from listeners’ ears into the recesses of their jackets signify an instant status symbol, hundreds of dollars worth of merchandise and a mark who may be blissfully unaware of his or her surroundings.

. . .

But a recent spike in subway felonies, reported in The Daily News yesterday, has been driven by an increase in iPod thefts, the police said. As of Sunday, there had been 304 robberies in the transit system citywide this year, up 24 percent from the same period last year, the police said. Grand larcenies are up 10 percent, with 462 so far this year. Over all, transit crimes are up 16 percent.

It is impossible to say how many of those robberies were iPod thefts, but they were a major factor, the police said.

“IPods are definitely part of the newest items to be stolen and appear to be driving the recent spike in subway robberies,” said Paul J. Browne, the Police Department’s deputy commissioner for public information.

Rarely have the iPod thefts involved physical assault, he said, adding that the thieves and their victims tended to be teenagers. Late last year, Stuyvesant High School students were targets in a series of iPod muggings, one of which took place in the Chambers Street subway station near the school in Lower Manhattan.

Mr. Browne said the police have been sending teams consisting of a sergeant and eight officers into the subway this month, both in response to the increase in felonies and out of caution near the anniversary of the Madrid train bombing, on March 11.

The current rash of iPod thefts resembles that of 8 Ball Jackets a few years ago. They were singled out because they were an expensive status symbol. But the difference is that iPods are easier to conceal once they are stolen, and can be sold online easily and anonymously.

Despite the thefts, though, few subway riders seem to be changing their habits, and may be feeling even safer since the little white wires seem to be everywhere.

“It was a concern when I first got it,” said Adriana Arcia, 29, a publicist for Major League Baseball, whose iPod contains around 3,700 songs. “But I live in Williamsburg, and on the L train everybody has one.”