DAN'S PAPERS, April 2, 2010 Page 18 www.danshamptons.com
North Fork Wins
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match for either a car or bus trip on the Long Island Expressway. That method will bring you out to the Hamptons in at least half an hour less time. Indeed, few people do use the 4:30 pm out of Manhattan to the Hamptons and Montauk during the week. But during the Friday migration to the South Fork, the 4:30 p.m. acts as a kind of crowded backup to a historic, once-aweek LIRR train on Fridays that leaves 29 minutes earlier. This train, the 4:01 p.m., is known as the Cannonball, and it gets out to Bridgehampton in two hours and seven minutes and to Montauk in two hours and 38 minutes. The Friday evening Cannonball has been bringing passengers out east for 70 years. It leaves Manhattan at 4:01 p.m., (4:06 p.m. at Hunters Point), skips all stops until it gets to Westhampton, and then arrives in Bridgehampton at 6:08. If you miss the Cannonball at 4:01 p.m., you are relegated to the 4:30 and the penalty is that you will be on it for a half an hour longer than the Cannonball in order for the 4:30 p.m. to make all those stops. It is your punishment. Beginning in September, if you miss the Cannonball on Friday evening, you will now have to wait until the 5:41 p.m. train heads out to the South Fork. The 5:41 is even slower than the 4:30, because it is rush hour. It will take you 15 minutes longer to get to Bridgehampton on the 5:41 than the 4:30 and, in addition, you will have had a whole extra hour sitting in Penn Station before you leave,
brooding about the fact that you missed the Cannonball. Then there is another thing. Just a month before it announced the intended demise of service to the North Fork, the MTA announced an outrageous new tax on the businesses of both Forks. This tax, called a commuter tax, will be levied on the businesses within a big circle drawn around Manhattan, which was supposed to consist of the New York Metropolitan Area. Within this circle, people make heavy use of the subways and trains to commute to their jobs in the city. Out past Ronkonkoma, the North and South Forks stick out well beyond reasonable commuter range from New York City. Furthermore, the subway system, another branch of the MTA, is not out here at all. Nevertheless, the State decided what the hell, we will impose this tax, a 34 cent tax on every $100 of business payroll, on the North and South Forks, too. Then a month after that, they decided to drop the last vestige of service by the MTA to the North Fork, but still charge them the new tax anyway. It was untenable. At the present time, efforts are underway to relieve the North and South Forks from the burden of this extra tax. The decision to restore the train to the North Fork might be a first step in rectifying this situation. And now the South Fork has been wronged, though they might get over it. Next has to be the lifting of the burden of the outrageous MTA tax on the two forks.
China
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belong to it either. It’s Vietnam, Laos and Cambodia. In the north, it appears that Mongolia has been scooped out of it. And in the west, there are a bunch of these small mountainous places with names like Nepal and Bhutan. All are independent and simply from a geographical perspective look like something a big country like China should have taken care of. I drew what I saw. But I felt kind of bad for China. The fact is that, in spite of its size, China has taken a beating for about 200 years where things the size of Maine, Florida and the bump of New Orleans got absorbed by the United States in a patriotic push of Manifest Destiny without further ado, while the same sort of outfits in China just got to sit there festering and annoying looking. The other thing about China is that it doesn’t have much coastline, in proportion to everything else anyway. It has a pretty generous arrangement with the Pacific Ocean on its eastern side. But you’ll not find many glorious western sunsets along the ocean as you would in the United States, Japan, Ireland, England and, I guess, Google. When you’re a country of more than a billion, that’s a tough thing. Anyway, the article ran and the drawing was well received. I might have put the national flags inside each of the outlines. But I didn’t. That’s another matter. Hopefully the matter will get resolved. But I don’t see any answers soon for the outline of China.