Paul LaRosa's Blog
December 4, 2009
So my daughter was set to go with her boyfriend to Mexico next month to celebrate her birthday. She had made reservations and plunked down some money to stay at a little hotel a friend worked at in Tulum.
Everything was all set….until she read this online review today. I think she's making other plans.
"We researched this Hotel for quite a while and chose it over our favorite hang out, Casitas Royale. We wanted a change of pace, Ocho Tulum looked like a perfect spot. We arrived on November...
December 3, 2009
CBS News is well-known for practically breeding personalities who last a long time. Walter Cronkite was 93 when he died, retired "60 Minutes" executive producer Don Hewitt was 87. Mike Wallace is 91 and Morley Safer, the baby of the bunch, is only 78.
Just this morning, I passed Andy Rooney in the hall. Andy will celebrate his 91st birthday next month. How many 90-year-olds are still coming to work every day, not to mention appearing on one of the highest-rated shows on television? It's...
December 2, 2009
Now that Tiger Woods has come clean this morning about his "transgressions" in a statement to the media asking, of course, for privacy, I have to come back to a question I've been wondering about for a while now: Does anyone live morally anymore or do we humans all act in our self-interest??
We've been confronted with any number of shocking sex scandals in the past couple few years — Gov. Eliot Spitzer, Gov. Mark Sanford, President Clinton — where men have given in to their carnal desires to p...
December 1, 2009
Last month, I detailed my battle against some dog owners owners who are incapable of making their dogs walk along the curb so as not to pee on my brownstone every single morning. It's kind of a bummer to walk out into a bright new day to a puddle of dog urine, some puddles so large it appears they were made by race horses.
Readers wrote in with suggestions of what I could do, everything from installing a video camera to yelling at said dog owners but the best idea — I thought — came from Wini ...
November 29, 2009
[Note: This is another in an occasional series of guest blog items written by a friend of mine, Alec S.]
Jury duty is an intrinsic part of the American democratic experience, and there's no place more American, or more democratic, than a jury selection room in New York City.
Civil court jury duty begins at 8:45 each Monday morning at a fine Manhattan location in Tribeca, just up the street from the restaurants Odeon and Bouley Bakery. As the pool of about a hundred jurors arrives, Bill...
November 24, 2009
Last year at this time, the NY Times was publishing an analysis of NYC's parking violations and came up with the statistic that the so-called "Black Friday" shopping holiday — the day after Thanksgiving — was a disaster for the city's drivers. More parking violations typically are given out that day than for any other day during the year.
The reason is obvious — almost everyone has off the day after Thanksgiving and everyone assumes it's a holiday so the city's drivers, normally the most...
November 21, 2009
I've had a lifelong love affair with newspapers. I worked at the NY Daily News for 16 years and those were some of the most fun years of my life. Today, I still love newspapers but the printed editions….not so much. I still get the NY Times and Daily News delivered to my home each day but more for my wife than myself.
Three things recently changed my morning reading ritual:
– The Times Reader 2.0 which is available to all subscribers. It is a desktop NY Times that I find super-easy to read. I c...
November 20, 2009
This photo says it all, really. I took it today at the Seventh Avenue station on the F/G line in Brooklyn. It was left there by someone to remember the guy who jumped to his death on the tracks during Thursday's morning commute.
The unidentified man jumped in front of a G train that was pulling into the station at approximately 7:40 a.m., just before the height of the morning rush hour. Why he did it is unknowable and who he was is better left unsaid. The motorman operating the train, who...
November 19, 2009
Yeah, I have it and everyone wants it. From the time I began driving, I've had a sixth sense about finding parking spots in NYC. I used to think it was just intuitive but I've come to believe that most people have no idea how to look for a parking spot.
For one thing, you've got to shut off the radio, crack open that window and listen. I can't tell you how many spots I've discovered by "hearing" an engine start or someone jingling their keys as they walk down the street. One morning, I was...
November 17, 2009
Nearly every morning when I leave my Park Slope brownstone, I am greeted with a puddle of dog urine right outside my front door. And almost always, that dog urine is on a small wall of my brownstone as in this lovely photo.
Now I like dogs and, until my little dog Midnight died last year, I was a dog owner. I realize you cannot always control where they pee. In fact, walking down the street sometimes seemed like a mine field of places your dog could just NOT relieve itself. No to the trees...
