A couple of observations which should otherwise be relegated to twitter.

I- there used to be a section in the "metropolitan" section of the Sunday Times called FYI. People would send in random questions about New York City like "what are those funny wall-paintings in the subway tunnel as you go into the city over the Manhattan Bridge" and some expert would answer. The thing is that the section just disappeared, which I find strange because it was a great little read and just could not have cost the Times that much money. By bigger issue is the irony of the only place I could think to ask what happened to the FYI section would have been in the FYI section.

2- staying on the NY Times beat, I remember an editorial a few months ago where the Times wrote about a proposed tax on those flimsy plastic bags you get at Bodegas because they were so environmentally damaging (petroleum needed to make them, getting stuck in landfills where they could never disintegrate, potential suffocating wildlife). I agreed with the premise but then realized that the only plastic bag I ever get and cannot make use of is the blue one that my NY Times gets delivered in.

3- whenever I walk outside and don't see my NY Times delivered on my stoop, I am forced to call their 800 number to report it which is already a pain in my ass but what really gets me is that they credit $1.22 to my account which I'm sure is the prorated amount per paper. The problem is that I then pay $2 at the Bodega for a copy of the same paper which wasn't delivered. So I'm inconvenienced by having to call, inconvenienced for having to go elsewhere to buy your paper and then I'm also losing $0.78. It's the principle here, you screwed up and I have to suffer.

4- It is a near daily occurrence that you will find a tag line under another columnist's work that reads that Thomas Friedman or Maureen Dowd " is off today". No explanation and always kept vague. So basically the people who write about hard working Americans are only working 1 day per week themselves!!!

They actually might be on some kind of work furlough which would at least show them to suffer the same difficulties as the rest of the country.

What the hell do you expect from a publication which proudly states that it published "all the news that's fit to print"

Sent from my Verizon Wireless BlackBerry