Part II of -- Fourth of July Macy’s Style

Tuesday, July 5th was to be a powerhouse day of sightseeing involving all things commercial, our first two days in Manhattan being a Sunday and a Monday holiday, many stores were bound not to be open. We took in Wall Street and some kind of food fest going on nearby, a much easier pace of sampling foods from a variety of ethnic origins than “A Taste of Chicago” which we had visited just the Saturday before, and which was more of an exercise in pushing through a mob than sampling food. In Chicago I’d gotten some ribs and Nian some Chicago Cheesecake Factory cheesecake and exited the crush counting ourselves lucky to have only spent maybe a half hour on line each to get something to eat. Here in Manhattan the barricaded street was easy to walk and the various food stalls easy to approach.

We headed back up to 42nd street again and took in Times Square at the height of a regular workday. We didn’t really do much at Times Square however except to stop by a Toys-R-Us to get some souvenir items for Nian’s daughter. Up past 42nd we stopped by Rockefeller Center and Saks Fifth Avenue and St. Patrick’s Cathedral, this last in stark contrast to other commercial site visits. We walked past the Empire State Building at some point in our travels about the area, and probably would have made a trip to the top if not for the HUGE line of people waiting, queuing along at least two sides of the building. I had been on top once before over ten years ago, there had been no huge line. In fact there was some strange aura of sadness and lost glory when I visited – the huge visitor assembly area in no need of the dozens of crowd controls ropes, which in the distant past had been used weave people back and forth for fair and space saving line waiting, waiting in line for space on the observation deck and in the elevators. In the new sadder New York it probably isn’t the excitement of being at the highest point in Manhattan, but the melancholy of looking out at what was lost.

Darkness started to close in and weary as we where we had pretty much made a pact to visit Macy’s. Macy’s brags about the being “THE WORLD'S LARGEST STORE” and perhaps in some technical sense it is at 11 and ½ stories tall, but it really is more like taking a large mall, cutting it up into 11 or 12 pieces and stacking them vertically. In fact the building seems crowed dim and claustrophobic. Unlike Saks, this edifice to capitalism is on the other end of the spectrum and hawks its wares at everyday prices. Not exactly bargain prices I would say, but probably barging prices for people trapped in Manhattan.

We scaled the store and made our way quickly to a floor dedicated to shoes. Nian had become obsessed with finding some better footwear before returning to China. We were both tired and beginning to get on one another’s nerves a bit by this time of the day. For about ten minutes I trailed behind Nian giving my honest opinion as to what shoes I thought looked nice or not, then at about the fifteen minute mark I confessed by boredom with the exercise as Nian queried me about my lack of enthusiasm. We gave up trying to find shoes at Macy’s, which as I mentioned really didn’t seem to be all that much of a bargain to me, though they certainly had a large number of items to choose from, but somehow they all just seemed to be of some bland and of unnoticeable design -- none them caught my eye as anything special.

We went through house wares quickly, and I again while there was a huge selection, nothing especially really seemed to leap out at me. Nian was becoming exasperated by my general lack of enthusiasm for anything we looked at in Macy’s.

As we went from floor to floor, the age of the building really started to become apparent. Some of the escalators where very antique and their conveyor belts were actually made of wood. This might have appeared charming had they been well maintained and standard through out the store, but no, the escalators were a hodge-podge of types, many where broken down and had to be used as stairs. The Elevators worked in a fashion, but often ignored button presses, and even when the target floor was illuminated, the elevator would slowly pass on by without pause. This was definitely some 60’s based relay technology or older controlling the lifts, and had become creaky to say the least.

I had noticed on several floors that the furniture was broken down and dirty, the kind of thing you might expect to see discarded along the road, having been thrown away having long since outlived some useful life span, but not here at Macy’s.

All this stood in stark contrast to the Macy’s sponsored spectacle we had just witnessed the night before. While Macy’s is large, I’m sure the amount of money spent on the fireworks alone would have replaced every shoddy piece of furniture in the store with enough left over to repair the escalators and maybe upgrade the control system on the elevators a bit.

Every year Macy’s promises a better 4th of July and a grander Thanksgiving’s Day Parade. Every year this must cost more and more. With competition from the internet and other specialty merchants hawking everything from shoes to electronics and lower prices that Macy’s can match, I would have to think Macy’s profits are diminishing, and perhaps have been diminishing (adjusting for inflation) since the late 80’s. But rather than spruce the old girl up Macy’s must continue its hallmark traditions at the expense of putting what profits there are back into Macy’s itself. Macy’s I think has become a victim of her own success, a success that probably zenithed somewhere in the 40s 50s and 60s, and can scarcely now afford to admit to New York and the world she is spending beyond her means in order to keep up appearances.

Of course my analysis might be way off the mark, perhaps the store routinely is allowed to lapse into disrepair during the summer months only to be made over just in time for the Holiday season. Perhaps some native New Yorker out there could provide the answer.

Nian and I exited Macy’s with Nian still a little irritated with my impatient store behavior, an irritation that spilled over into dinner at a fine Chinese restaurant where she found all my manners boorish and unacceptable, from sitting first without waiting for her (I was bone weary) to holding my chopsticks wrong (I was trying my best) to not keeping both hands on the table (Huh??? I’d never heard that one before).

Still we made it through dinner, and back to the hotel to pack for the trip home early the next morning. I hope I haven’t overstated our minor irritation with one another in the closing hours of our New York vacation. In fact, the vacation proved to be some kind of watershed moment for us, as our relationship which had some rough spots before New York seemed to smooth out of its own accord the next day on the way home. Maybe the balance of memorable and enjoyable moments, which far out weighed the few irritable ones, had become more apparent in the more leisurely pace we were returning to.

I've often wondered if I made the right decision hosting my blog on jaytv.com instead of blogspot.com. Today after having not been blog surfing for about 3 months, most of my previous idle time devoted to Nain, and with Nian in California visiting her brother, I decided to do some random surfing to see how my humble efforts compare to others out there. The random surfing showed one overwhelming reason to host on jaytv.com however, which is not a blog site, but a commercial site I do a little web work for -- Comment Spam. Dozens of sites I visited have had their comments sections spammed by unscrupulous web site promoters. I don't see an easy cure for this blight if you are hosted on a highly visible web server like blogspot.com.

I doubt I should rest easy, my site is listed with several ranking and listing services. I suspect this new form of spam is powered mostly by Google.com searches with key words like blogspot. Once the low hanging fruit is plucked they'll seek out more devious means to find blog sites to spam. While I wouldn't count myself among the really popular blogs on the web, I've noticed they tend to have their own domain names. I did a quick check just now of http://www.wilwheaton.net, a really popular and well known blog by Wil Wheaton of Star Trek NG fame, no spam there (or Wil weeds it out quickly). Still I expect it's just a matter of time.

After a long dry spell this makes two posts in one day, three if you include this: Top Ten Signs Harry Potter Is Getting Older a post I made to my Larry's Top Tens blog. Tomorrow I should try and get part II of today's earlier post up, of course I have to write it first.

I had meant to write a lot more about my and Nian's trip to New York in early July, now that we’ve been back for a month (and Nian now off to LA and soon China) many of the events are coming unglued in my head and will be hard to chronicle with great accuracy (at least chronologically).

One event stands out that is easy to tell about and that was our viewing of the Macy’s Fourth of July Fireworks display and how that relates to the visit to Macy’s next day.

So as Mr. Peebody would say: Sherman set the wayback machine to July 4, 2005

Nian and I and I where still furiously exploring New York by foot and subway trying to cram as much site seeing in as our 4 day stay would allow. At this point late in the day July 4th we were in walking distance of the U.N. building having just comeback from exploring Central Park and the Metropolitan Museum of Art.

As we approached the building it became evident that something was going on, which at first we assumed had something to do with the UN building as there were barriers on the street by the UN and police interacting with a small group of people walking by them. The time was about 7pm, and by the time we walked the two or three block to the corner of the UN building the small trickle of people was fast becoming a crowd. We asked what was going on to which we were informed the elevated road along the river here had been closed to traffic so that it could be used for pedestrians to view the Macy’s 4th of July fireworks display, promised to be the biggest best fireworks show n the world, or at least as described by the excited pedestrian we asked in the throng of people we had joined more by accident than by plan.

I was skeptical about waiting for the 2 hours plus before the show started, but Nian was uncharacteristically excited by the event and opined that we should investigate. We went through the security check which consisted of Nian opening her purse for a police officer to shine a flashlight in, all the while debating whether it would be worth the two hour wait. After walking for about five or ten minutes up the roadway it became apparent we had crossed the point of no return and the crush of people behind us was enormous. Had we planned on being at the dead center of the roadway would couldn’t have planned our arrival anymore accurately and somehow had been at the head of a huge wave of people that was now converging on the location like some biblical plague of locus.

We trudged along for about another 10 minutes or so, our pace slowing as the crowd around us thickened. We stopped for a short time, but then some policemen came along the barricaded free zone in front of us extolling people to keep moving and make room as there where still thousands of people arriving wishing to find a viewing spot. By about 7:30 we finally settled to a complete permanent stop, not exactly crushed by the crowd, but definitely hemmed in.

A few more questions to others nearby informed us that the show would start at 9:30 sharp, some kind of synchronized start having to do with a televised rock concert at Battery Park starting at 9pm, and lasting exactly 30 minutes.

We then hunkered in for the long wait, amusing ourselves mostly with taking cell phone photos of one another. I wasn’t able to email to Nina’s gmail.com account due to some configuration problem that I would have to sort out with Sprint later, but we did change my cell phone entry screen to a picture of Nian and I side by side.

After about an hour we began to see a small trickle of people back along the barricade zone, so evidently we weren’t as trapped as I thought, and could have opted out of viewing the fireworks. I had been wondering what would happen if someone suddenly needed to go to the bathroom as there were no port-a-potties on the roadway. Still after what was already an hour and a half wait it would have been foolish to not wait one more hour.

I doubt I would have been able to stand the wait without Nian, but while the wait was long, the conversation was pleasant, an I experimented with laying back on the bare concrete, though I had to thread myself into position between other event waiters who where in a spectrum of poses from standing to sitting to laying down.

Darkness closed in shortly after nine, and I returned to standing. Colored lights could be seen swinging back and forth along Battery Park, the rock concert underway.

9:30 arrived and no fireworks started, the man who had informed that the start would be at 9:30 sharp quickly speculated the Battery Park concert must have run over. I stated in a loud voice for all those around to hear “sorry folks, the fireworks have been cancelled, no one can find a match.” My comedic timing must have been pretty good with peals of laughter ensuing, I even heard someone say in a jovial tone somewhere a little was away “hey, did you hear what that guy just said, he said they can't find a match.” There wasn’t a long wait however and at about 9:35 the fireworks started full bore.

There were a lot of fireworks, but I won’t go into detail. Everyone around us seemed enthralled, but I felt pensive and I thought Nian looked pensive also. I find fireworks to be like popcorn. I like popcorn, but a small handful is all I need to feel satiated, while others can never get enough of the stuff.

The show ended abruptly at close to its promised 30 minute duration time. With hardly a pause the crowd turned to leave, but the slow walk soon slowed to a zombie like crawl, and then stopped all together. It then resumed fitfully, at a pace everyone clearly was unhappy with. There was a sea of people ahead of us 200 thousand perhaps; the price to pay for being first in line is being last to leave. We crawled along for close to an hour before getting to 2nd avenue and the bottleneck the police had erected to keep the flow of people from disrupting all traffic in the city. We watched some irate man with gray hair harangue police on duty for the huge delay in letting people exit the area. Whether the crowd control plan was reasonable or not (I thought it probably was) I couldn’t help thinking about what an ass the man was making of himself, and how the NYPD men in blue probably had to put of this kind of unwarranted abuse often. On the other hand their stoic faces showed no sign that he was getting to them at all.

We hadn’t eaten diner so I was fairly famished as we walked down 42nd street, I thought perhaps we wouldn’t be able to find an eatery that wasn’t filled with people, but not so. We ducked into a KFC for a quick fast food meal of chicken, though Nian definitely holds fast food in disdain, this fair could be stomached though I suppose because it wasn’t a sandwich.

We took our time eating and by the time we finished the streets were near vacant, a pleasant surprise as we made for the subway and back to our hotel a Holliday-Inn in SoHo. Before the night was over however Nian told me she was vaguely disappointed with the show. Being from China, and more specifically the Canton region, she informs me fireworks there are more spectacular than the ones we had witnessed that night. Despite the fireworks not being all one could have hoped for (though to most they were all that and more) I was still happy for the experience and to know what it is like to be in the middle of a real New York Crowd.

Stay Tuned For Part II: This is Macy’s?

Wow the day is getting late and I promised I Nian I would update my blog. I had meant for the last two days to go back and recount a sore throat I had shortly after returning from New York and an idea it gave me, but before getting to that however, a quick comment that I have made three posts to Larry’s Top Tens this week, so if you are more in the mood for humor, check out:
Top Ten Reasons Your Clone Hates You
Top Ten Worst Ways To Inform Someone A Loved One Has Died
Top Ten Cool Things About Being a Supreme Court Justice
The first two are original categories, the last from a David Letterman Top Ten Contest.

On with my sick day story:

I developed a mild sore throat late one night about two weeks ago. When I awoke for work it was worse. I complained about it to Nian even suggesting that perhaps I should go to the doctor. I can’t remember if she talked me out of this, but she was fairly convinced it was just a cold. I thought about seeing my doctor throughout the day, but it just stayed a very annoying but not critical level, then after 5pm shortly before finishing work it worsened and I went home a little earlier than I would have otherwise figuring I had missed the opportunity to see Dr. Basler, my home physician.

Nian thought I was being a bit of a baby, but by 11pm my throat had reached a stage I could only swallow with great difficulty and I feared it might soon make breathing hard. I told Nian I was going to the hospital and she insisted on accompanying me, all the while insisting I probably only had a cold, while I felt pretty certain it must be something like strep-throat having never had a cold settle in my uvula, causing it to swell into an ugly red mass with sacs of clear fluid clearly widening it to look more like a triangle than small punching page. My throat in general had an unhealthy look, and my tongue had a thick white coat, I had also spiked a small 99-100 degree temperature.

At the hospital emergency room we were informed it would be awhile before a treatment room and doctor would be available. I suggested perhaps they should take a throat swab in the mean time. I was only concerned with getting the lab work started to save time, but I’m sure Nian and the nurse thought this was out of some unfounded panic or concern on my part.

While I’m sure I get no credit in Nian’s eyes for saving us some time, the lab work arrived shortly after the room and doctor became available. Result… no strep-throat, none the less I did appear to have something more serious than the common cold going on and the doctor prescribed 4 medications to deal with my inflammation, pain, and possible nasal cavity infection. I wish I hadn’t mentioned I thought I had strep to Nian, but I’m glad for the treatment, rather than lay in bed in total agony not know whether the symptoms would worsen still.

I have just finished off the Penicillin that was prescribed, and I couldn’t help but notice the strong odor the pills omit. It turns out this same smell greats me when I urinate, and probably has given me a slightly offensive odor in some areas or possible bad breath (sorry Nian). It then occurred to me that the majority of modern antibiotics may be flushing through the body unaltered chemically. An observation supported by concern by some that antibiotics eliminated from the body and flushed down the toilet might contribute to microbes acquiring antibiotic resistance in the wild.

This is when I had an Ah-Ha moment. Could antibiotics and other powerful drugs be recycled for use in third world countries? Should urine from patients either first world or third world be collected to try and retrieve this precious resource? I’m sure the drug companies would say no, but from a resource utilization standpoint I can see no reason not to do so. Some people even drink urine straight for supposed medicinal reasons, and supposedly urine can be recycled five times through the body before becoming concentrated enough to be toxic. This would solve or at least amileorate two problems at once, powerful drugs leaching into the ecosystem, and a possible cheap source of cutting edge drugs for those that need them.

Granted no one wants to drink pee directly, there is certainly a yuck factor, but I’m sure a modest reprocessing would eliminate most of the squeamish factor, and if not, we’re still talking about a possibly life saving process. Even with no chemical reprocessing the raw urine could probably be distilled to a powder for ingestion in pill form without much effect to the antibiotics and other drugs therein contained. Only a reasonable typing protocol would be needed and followed in setting the urine aside and concentrating it for cheap shipment.

Ironically in the early days of penicillin this is exactly what was done as a little Google.com research shows. Has this method of drug reuse been completely forgotten? Certainly in the first world it has.

Time to get into the habit of updating my blog. For those that haven’t visited BNL before I should explain that for the last two weeks of Nian’s stay here in Champaign, Illinois we pretty much spent every last remaining moment together, an emotionally trying time for both of us, especially the Wednesday departure for LA from Chicago Midway. Nian isn’t back in China yet, but will be after a two-week visit with her brother and his wife in Los Angeles.

Before I met Nian I had to struggle to find things to write about, and now so much has happened in the last month, I find myself overwhelmed in trying to chronicle it. Our marriage plans are still on track, if somewhat undefined in execution.

Last night was a first for me -- I downloaded MSN Messenger, hooked up my camera and had my first video messaging session with Nian last night. I had seen Nian video message with her mother and daughter several times from China and last night I was doing it with Nian from Champaign to LA. It struck me as a little odd that having grown up in the 60s and 70s that videophones had arrived far later than the World Expos of the 60s had promised, but now that they have arrived they have arrived worldwide virtually all at the same time thanks to the internet. Not only has the internet made them possible, but shows the power of building innovations on top of an improving infrastructure powered by Moore’s law. I could have had a jerky postage stamp sized video of Nian to teleconference with 10 years ago, but today it is a full screen, full resolution experience. Granted there is a half second delay, and the frame rate is still only 5 to 10 frames per second, but I expect this too will improve in the near future. In fact assuming broadband continues to improve I would be very much surprised if full frame-rate HDTV resolution video phoning and teleconferencing didn’t become common in ten years time. Assuming some kind of Wi-Fi infrastructure could handle 10 megabit per second connections, it might be normal for people to HDTV share their vacations and travels in real-time with family, friends, and associates.

G oogle Maps continues improve at a rapid pace, I could see some very near future enhancement to tie the grid of security cameras deployed throughout large cities into some kind of real-time virtual tour of any city, warping, painting, projecting real views onto the Google 3D map representation of the cityscapes. Some areas frozen in time where no active camera covers, others bustling with live activity, still others some faux reality overlain for purposes of advertisement and promotion (expect lawsuits over this last one, about how, when, and where to preempt the presentation of reality in a virtualized presentation). If there is enough storage, virtual cityscapes could be saved in time as well allowing you virtual time-travel back to significant events. Likely this would be done to varying degrees of fidelity depending on the importance of events, and would have areas of interest with more time slices to sample. Already I imagine that the 3D layout of the city itself is quickly being extrapolating backwards through time as we speak, though the software to index and playback these time isolated representations is fragmented, non-uniform, and unavailable as of yet to the general public, but I would be very surprised if Google Maps didn’t evolve to encompass them.

A century ago, we would have had to wait weeks to communicate by letter between China and America, a decade ago Nian and I would only have had an analog representation of voice carried through copper wire to connect us in real time, today a VHS resolution equivalent videoconference, a decade from now perhaps, when physically separated, we will be able to wander side by side through distant cities in HDTV resolution, glancing over to one another and pointing out the sights and wonders to one another as we explore. Of course this future vision still doesn’t include touch, and for all its promise of keeping people in contact with more immediacy and impact, it still falls far short of real life. I’ll still be missing my Nian.