In-Flight TV And The Perils Thereof

The best thing about Jet Blue is its in-flight live television . . . until your flight becomes the next big Fox News Alert. Then it seems like probably not such a good idea:

A New York- bound airliner with a crippled landing gear made a fiery emergency landing at Los Angeles International Airport last night, as millions of TV viewers across the country held their breath. For three hours, as JetBlue Flight 292 circled the skies over Southern California to burn off fuel, frightened passengers also watched the drama unfold, on inflight TV screens — listening to commentators speculate on the outcome.

“It was surreal,” said Christiana Lund, 25, of Manhattan. “We were like, ‘That’s us. That’s crazy'”

Zachary Mastoon, 27, a Brooklyn musician, said, “I got a little scared when I saw the plane on TV.”

Some passengers, he said, were so terrified, they turned their screens off.

. . .

Passenger Diane Hamilton, 32, of Clifton, N.J., said, “Grown men were crying. Emotions were running high.”

She added that as the drama neared its climax, “it was the worst, because you didn’t know if it was going to work, if we would catch fire. It was very scary.”

But most passengers appeared calm and continued to watch the bizarre events until their screens went dark 10 minutes before the plane finally landed.

The plane eventually landed safely after skidding to a sparky halt. No serious injuries were reported.

It’s Getting Hot In Here . . .

. . . so take off all your clothes:

The possibility of rain today may ease the pain of the oppressive spell of hot, muggy, sticky weather that saw yesterday’s temperatures hit 90 but made it feel like it was over 100 degrees.

Then again, it may not.

“You want to take all your clothes off,” said Hesham Gamal of Queens, a hot dog vendor working a nine-hour shift yesterday outside Madison Square Garden.

Then there’s this:

Vicky Jeudy, a 24-year-old aspiring actress from Queens, said, “I feel like I’m in Arizona this week.”

Doesn’t she understand that’s a dry heat?!

Meanwhile, the Times — in its own inimitable style — develops a literary angle, of sorts:

Women trudged by wearing see-through shirts, some men no shirts at all. The basketball courts were left to the ghosts, and the sunlit sidewalks were wet as the sea.

Yesterday morning defied science, at least the kind learned in nursery rhymes. Out came the sun and dried up nothing. The itsy-bitsy spiders were denied a second chance at the waterspouts. It was humid, that was all, but people found other ways to say it.

“The first word that comes to mind is brutal,” said Greg Oire Ganter, 33, a photographer from the Lower East Side. “It’s disgusting. It’s sluggish. It’s gross.”

Then comes the grand unifying theory . . . oh, the grand unifying theory:

A common theory holds that hot weather is more tolerable than cold. This fails to account for something meteorologists never refer to.

Call it the Grumpy Factor, a phenomenon tied to humidity. In a nursery-rhyme-science sort of a way, the Grumpy Factor explains how unpleasantness can shuffle across the city, lighting tempers and darkening moods.

“Especially if you have heavy coats,” said Linda Sadiker, 44, petting one of the five dogs she was walking in Park Slope, Brooklyn. Ms. Sadiker allowed that she was a little jealous of her charges, who were massed around her on a stoop, not straining at their leashes but just standing and panting.

“Most of these go to refrigerators they call apartments, while I’m out here,” Ms. Sadiker said. “Nice to be a dog in Park Slope.”

Not to mention a healthy dose of Class War! No time now, though, it’s too hot. Must. Make. More. Literary:

The streets were alive with carting and pouring and lifting, all the things that go undone when no one does them. On Fifth Avenue a worker climbed a ladder above a storefront; half a block away Con Ed workers climbed a ladder the other direction. Life went on, angrily.

Can’t make much more literary . . . too hot . . . must find whale!

Jailbait, But Really Hot Upper East Side Jailbait

In New York Magazine David Amsden writes one of those pieces you want to believe — hope against hope — is some Stephen Glass-esque fabrication:

Inside a vaguely South African–themed nightclub called Cain, a pale-skinned, blonde-haired girl named Sophie is on the dance floor. She sports a yellow blouse with a plunging neckline, white jeans that look grafted to her skin, and shimmery ice-pick heels. Yesterday, Sophie graduated from a certain all-girls private school uptown, and she is still three years shy of being legal in such an establishment, though right now that’s irrelevant. Right now, Sophie is a woman in her twenties, just like her I.D. says, and just like she told the guy in the preppie blazer with the gelled-back hair on the dance floor. He’s sort of annoying. But sort of cute too. And very likely graduated from high school right around the time Sophie was born.

“Him? Yeah, I think he’s like 35, or even 40,” observes Sophie’s friend Audrey. “She hooked up with him last week at Lotus.”

Audrey is also 18, also pale and blonde. When she imagines herself in ten years she sees a successful woman working as “a representative of some corporation. Like if I’m doing press for JPMorgan, that’s fine.” She is slouched in the banquette running alongside the dance floor, sipping her second Grey Goose and cranberry. Next to her is Lana, 17, all long brown hair and big, drowsy brown eyes. The three girls (whose names have been changed “because otherwise our parents will freak”) are jaunty, sweet-natured, sophisticated, and acutely self-aware. They know which is the dessert fork. The last time any of them looked their age, they were in elementary school. Like so many privileged New York kids, they have been taught, since they were small children, never to act like children.

“Apparently I hooked up with him last week at Lotus, but I don’t remember” is how Sophie had described the incident to her friends earlier that day over lunch at Nello, on Madison Avenue. “That was totally uncharacteristic, and you know it. I don’t just randomly hook up with people. I can count the number of guys I’ve kissed on”—Sophie did some math with her manicured fingers—”two hands. But I’d only had a sushi roll for dinner, and we drank way too much.”

For their part, the older men seem to view this arrangement as some sort of mini Thai holiday:

The girls decide that Hiro isn’t happening tonight, and head over to Gypsy Tea, a club on 24th Street that feels a lot like Hiro. They sit at the owner’s table and dance on the dark couches. Around them, like a halo, stands a ring of older men staring, hoping, debating first lines in their minds. “My feeling is that if they’re in here, they’re 21,” says a ruddy-faced man in his forties with a crew cut. “And that’s where I stop asking questions. So you can tell me they’re 18 and I’m basically just like, ‘Shut the fuck up.'”

A thirtyish guy with slicked-back hair in a pink polo shirt approaches Lana, sticks out his fleshy hand, and says, “Dance with me.” A moment later she is sandwiched between him and his friend, who’s wearing a blue polo shirt. Eventually, Sophie and Audrey pull Lana away. The polo pals high-five each other.

Pink shirt: “I’m just here to get laid.”

Blue shirt: “But it never happens with little girls like that.”

Overhearing this, a 31-year-old wearing a black suit and baseball cap shakes his head. “It kind of disturbs me to see all my friends hitting on girls twenty years younger than them,” he says. “I guess the girls just don’t care. Maybe they just care about the money, I don’t know. It all comes down to that because, come on, it’s not like they’re going to fall in love in a place like this. They can’t possibly think they will. I’ll tell you, I feel really terrible for women my age, in their thirties and forties. There’s no market for them anymore. Everything is about girls like these.” He takes a sip of his Heineken and suddenly changes his tone. “But, God, they’re the hottest people in here, aren’t they?”

Oh, my aching head. Please someone reveal this is just the latest “Hack Heaven”.

Ghoulish!

“The Donald” answers the question of whether he can be even a bigger media whore than he already is: Yes!

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!