Posts Tagged “subway”

It happened again, some punk stole $2 from me in the subway.

Well, not exactly.  What happened was, somebody squeezed through the fare gate behind me without paying.  I hate it when that happens because it makes me feel somehow complicit in the fare-beating, or even that the fare beater has somehow stolen the fare directly from me.

This is generally silly, as there have been fare-beaters – such as turnstile jumpers and token suckers – for as long as there’s been public transportation.  In fact, token suckers were punished by a fine of four shekels in ancient Mesopotamia per the Code of Hammurabi.  But recent changes in the T’s system have made it feel more like a personal robbery because fare beaters can’t just jump the gate, they have to wait for you to pay and then scoot in behind you.  Either that or hack the Charlie card system with some help from MIT.

Any economist will tell you that the cost of fare evasion ultimately falls to the commuters, so I’m going to have to be more alert going through the gate, and I hope you will be too.

PS you might want to take the T to the grand opening of the Hudson Street Gallery this Saturday.

I write a lot for work and some for pleasure, and I enjoy a good game of Scrabble (more on the death of scrabulous another time) so I’m sure it comes as no surprise that I like a good anagram. One of my favorite sites is the Internet Anagram Server at Wordsmith.org, although I don’t always like the output.

Anyway, imagine my delight when J brought back to my attention, the Anagram Subway Map, an odd mashup genre where people take transit maps and anagram the stops. I can now add to my two favorite Boston subway map variants, a third, anagrammed, version, apparently from this site, where you can buy CafePress items featuring it.

Maybe its just luck, or a cosmic joke, or something, but it seems that the quality and in some cases the appropriateness of the anagramming is very very high on this map. There are links to several others on BoingBoing and elsewhere, I’m sure.

Gotta wonder about taking a daily commute between Carnal Request and Divas and back. I hope the good folks at Strange Maps take note of this phenomenon.

Finally, I’ll reproduce a droll bit wherein a wag anagrams the stops on New York City’s 1 train, starting, oddly enough, at my home stop of 72nd street and heading North:

27
97
68
69
130
101
611
521
371
451
751
861
811
911
Damn Tyck Trees