Tag Archives: Luke Kingma

Survival Stories from Zone C – A First Look at the Aftermath of Hurricane Irene

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“You’re in Zone C,” a special Hurricane Irene version of Google Maps told me. “And you’ll maybe experience major flooding if the storm somehow gets a lot worse than it already is. But probably not.” Like the rest of Manhattan’s residents, it was time to panic/blow things out of proportion. Rushing past apocalyptically long-lined Duane Reades and empty city bakeries toward Target on 116th street, I prayed the droves of people cleaning out flashlight/water bottle aisles from Battery Park to Central Park hadn’t made it up to 116th st yet. I was wrong.

The flashlights (flashlight aisle pictured above) were nowhere to be found. In fact, it seemed almost everything in the store was gone, save for those Pringles, which no one seemed to be interested in. They’re way, way overpriced, after all. Nowhere near as good as regular potato chips. Still, we managed to stock our “emergency rations bunker closet” with everything we thought we would need.

With enough water to last us years and years, Hello Panda cookies from Chinatown, a medium-sized watermelon, and extra soy sauce, just in case something happened to the soy sauce I already had in the cupboard, we were ready. We taped the windows, said one last thoughtful compliment to each other (just in case they were our last words on earth. I was told I had nice calves), and began waiting it out.

Minutes turned to hours, and after unsuccessfully trying to find an english version of True Grit again and again for what seemed like days, it was finally morning. And it was time to survey the damage. In fact, as a self-titled “Hurricane Overreaction Correspondent” in my neighborhood of East Harlem, it was my duty to.


East Harlem, though visibly bruised and battered, is eventually going to be okay. The trash cans uprooted can probably just be stood back up by people walking by who have an extra second or two, while the branches down may require two people (as per the OSHA regulations I remember from working at Target) to remove them from the sidewalk.

A rough estimate of the damages in East Harlem due to Irene run, at this point, about $14 – $16, depending on how many issues of “El Especialito” were contained in the El Especialito newspaper machine pictured above. That number could have easily reached $2014, if that branch had hit that car.

The real fallen “heroes” of East Harlem, however, are the cheap deli-bought black umbrellas. Though these $7-$10 items don’t normally make it through a regular rainstorm in New York, anyway, we found an unseasonably high number of them within a few blocks this morning. They did the best they could, and we’re proud of their sacrifices.

Perhaps the strangest and most alarming piece(s) of debris found is pictured above. Whether it was one person who lost a relatively decent looking Nike shoe, bottom jaw dentures and leather mask, or three separate people, it should be noted that these items appear to be okay. To the owner(s): if you’re out there, and if you’re looking for these things, they’re just past the 110th street 6 train stop going west. By the dumpsters. Hurry, because the looters’ll grab these up so quick if you don’t.

Though the hurricane was not nearly as bad in New York City as Bloomberg yelled to us on the television, there’s still a lot of damage elsewhere and a good amount of people who didn’t make it. My heart goes out to their families.

Photo Essay: New York, After Osama.

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Note: You can find this article (and others) on my new site, http://www.TwelveBitterPeaches.com! This site will be used primarily for photo essays, so check out both often and enjoy!

Sitting in a chilly, empty subway car racing towards Times Square last night, I was a bit nervous about what I was going to find. I’d heard that there was a “celebration” picking up speed on 7th avenue, but didn’t know any of the details beyond the general statement. And my nervousness was grounded in historical fact…

I’m from Pittsburgh,  after all, where “celebrations” are never just celebrations… Inevitably, someone always climbs a traffic light pole and somehow (with superhuman capabilities I’m imagining) manages to tear the light itself down. There’s always a car that gets flipped for no rational reason at all by groups of kids who never once even got a detention in high school. There’s typically a dude carrying around a speed limit sign with a huge mound of earth still attached to the bottom (again, superhuman capabilities). And riot police, saddled up on angry, foreboding death horses, always charge down the street to break it all up to the tune of 18 and 19 year old girls screaming for their lives. This is not what I wanted to find.

Man Raises Flag over Times Square in Celebration

And it’s not what I found. I found others exactly like myself – emotionally overcome by the scope and importance of the news… people who wanted to not just celebrate Osama’s death, but also the healing that can now take place in America. We were there to remember the (arguably) most horrific event of this nation’s young history, and those the day (and ensuing years) took from us. I have more respect than I’ve ever had for this country, and I want to thank the people of New York for being so respectful in this “celebration.” I’m going to stop talking and let the rest of the pictures speak for themselves. I think they do a pretty good job of it. Enjoy!

A Boy and his Father Celebrate the Historic Night Together

Elated Man Joins the Celebration with a Huge Flag

Man Shields a Remembrance Candle from the Wind in Time Square

Scores of American Flags Rise over Times Square

Young Boy Waves Flag under the Glowing Ticker Tape

FDNY Firefighter's Emotions are Gauged by the Press

A Young Girl Reports from Times Square while her Sister Watches the Historic Celebration

New Yorkers Share the Light with Each Other

Man Wrapped in American Flag Witnesses History

That’s all for now! I have hundreds of others that I’m sure I’ll share with you over the coming days/weeks, but these are the ones that had the greatest impact on me. If you’re interested, you can order prints of these photos right here. I want to close by urging everyone reading this to do everything they can to help maintain the incredible level of unity we’re all feeling and experiencing all over America right now. We really can do anything if we unite together towards a common purpose, and I hope we all take a lesson from what unfolded last night, and what will continue to unfold for days, weeks, months and hopefully years.

Notes on the Everyday Trials and Tribulations of Spending Winter in NYC

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Most of us would agree that winter isn’t much fun in most cities and towns in the cold portion of the world, ski resort towns and mountain villages excluded. If there isn’t any real form of winter entertainment in a given place, the freezing cold air and the angry people it creates aren’t much fun to deal with. If you live in New York City and you either aren’t that graceful at outdoor ice skating or don’t have anyone to do it with (check and check), there isn’t a day of winter to look forward to after Christmas. I love living here, and I can’t see myself anywhere else at this stage of my life, but I’m still allowed to complain.

You see, over the past 4 weeks (in which I’ve slept on a couch every single night… nice), I’ve noticed a few patterns of winter terribleness that are making my life a lot harder, and I want to bring them out into the light (which, unfortunately, is not bright enough or warm enough to make them go away). There are 4 altogether, and they make maneuvering a wintry New York City not only a daunting task, but an impossible one. They wipe the smiles straight off those who consider themselves smilers, and bring us right home into our beds at night instead of out with friends. I don’t have the evidence to back this up (I never really do though), but they also increase the viewership of terrible shows like “Skins” and “King of Queens” exponentially, as people who are hiding at home have nothing else to do. These 4 recurrences are a plague, and something needs to be done about them before our world is destroyed a la the black death hundreds of years ago. Let’s explore. (Pictures taken with Instagram for iPhone!)

1. Camouflaged Lakes of Slush

My daily commute to work is the same every day…. charging down the streets of NYC as fast as I can, desperately trying to get around larger, slower individuals whose walks are more crooked than the Nazca lines in Peru. Unfortunately, it’s not a consistent charge. You see, every time I get to a cross street that I have to, well, cross, I have to stop and assess one of the most difficult situations I’ve ever faced… slush lakes. Every single corner of every single street in New York has them… giant puddles of dirty, icy street water that infiltrate even the most formidable shoes and keep your feet wet for days and days and days. Most of these lakes are manageable… they’re generally easy to spot if you know what you’re looking for and, if you’re 6’4”, are very easy to leap over. Shorter people have more trouble, but I’m not concerned with them, because I’m not one.

Every day, I brave the slush lakes in courageous fashion, leaping and stretching over them more gracefully than the greatest olympic hurdlers you’ve ever watched. However, things change when I get closer to work. You see, the closer and closer I get, the less I concentrate on where I’m walking. Unfortunately, at the same time, the lakes become more and more camouflaged. A block away from work, it happens. I take a bold step into what looks like street gravel (see above), and then I sink… not just a mere few inches, but several feet down into the coldest puddle in the entire city. My lightning fast reflexes (I’m very good at a lot of things) get my foot out immediately, but it’s too late. My sock has already been soaked and my toes are already purple with hypothermia. I get to work and can’t take my shoes off, because it’s a respectable business, and end up having the worst day ever. And it never ends.

2. Trash Mountains

I don’t know how much “sanitation engineers” make in New York, but it’s apparently not even close to enough to make them do their jobs after a snow storm. Maybe they don’t want to get their hands cold, or maybe their frozen fingers can’t grip the outside of the truck as it drives down the street, causing them to fall and break parts of their bodies, leaving them physically unable and ineligible to work. Whatever it is, the consequences are severe… trash mountains. They’re on every street in New York, and they grow every day. The one you see here is a pretty modest sized one (taken in Midtown Manhattan… where they care a little more about these things, so they don’t let them get too big). It’s still impressive though – if you planned on having a picnic lunch at the top, this mountain right here would probably take a full day to hike. If you’re lucky, you’d get to the bottom by sundown, before all of the horrible trash animals come out to feed.

Others are bigger – some of the trash mountains in Brooklyn rival the ancient Appalachian mountains of Pennsylvania, and may take 3 or 4 days to climb if you’re in the required physical shape to do it. There’s really nothing we can do about it – people just tend to create giant amounts of trash. It’s in our blood. Until spring comes and the sanitation workers decide it’s time to get a paycheck again, we’re pretty much at the mercy of these mountains. If you have a day off to climb them, the views on top can be incredible. If you work, like most of us here in NYC, you have the wonderful privilege of only getting to walk past an ever-growing, ever-smelling pile of rotten waste every day. What a life.

3. Never-ending Construction Projects

I don’t want to go into a huge rant on this, because I could go for days, but 90% of New York City (and every other city I’ve ever been to) is constantly under construction. And there’s never anyone actually working. The stick man on the orange sign does more work than the construction workers who put him up. I understand it’s snowy and it’s winter, but you chose the profession. Please, fix this road. It’s making taxi drivers angry, which makes the whole world dangerous for the rest of us. Not a healthy situation.

4. Irony

Now, I don’t really know how to describe this to you in words, so I’m going to let the pictures explain this one, because the kind of ironies you experience every day in New York city are confounding, and, a lot of times, very sad. Here:

Imagine this scenario: you’ve just picked up April, a cute, free-spirited girl you met through a friend who set you two up on a first date… which is starting right now. You’re sitting in the back of a taxi getting to know each other as the taxi driver sings along to that LeAnn Rimes song everyone would never admit they used to like. All of the sudden, the collision occurs. The taxi driver had taken his hands off the wheel for a few seconds to air drum, and now the car is on fire in the middle of a snow bank. You don’t panic yet, though. After all, you’re surrounded by the very substance that stops fires! All you have to do is wait for it to melt…. fire melts ice, right?

Not in New York City. You wait and wait, but the ice holds strong as the fire gets bigger. When the soles of your feet begin to melt, you decide it’s time to get out. You all burst out of the car and run screaming down the street. After a night in the ER, you decide  to walk back to the location, only to find that the car is now completely burned out, and the snow has never melted. The irony is palpable… and very, very sad. Fred (the taxi man) probably lost his job. What’ll he do now? Better question, what do we do?

The answer is, unfortunately, to wait. Spring is coming friends. Spring is coming.

A Sea Lion from Chicago and the State of our World in 2011

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In most ways, the human race has progressed greatly over the past 50-100 years. The pace at which we are inventing new ways of doing things, new ways of treating the sick, and new ways to communicate with others is nearly unparalleled to any other time in history (including the industrial revolution). It’s good to know we’re getting better and better all the time. Of course there are problems in our world, more than I can count. But we’re on our way.

That is, until just recently, when ABC News decided to post a story that sets the entire human race back farther than we can possibly comprehend. You all remember Paul from the World Cup: Paul was a visionary, psychic Octopus who correctly guessed the results of every single world cup soccer match in 2006.

Paul made us believe again… not in ourselves, because we were all too stupid to guess the results perfectly, but in the animal kingdom. Paul changed the world, and we as a media-ingesting society got as much of him as we could in his too-short 4-years on this earth. He died before the world cup this year, and no one was there to take his place. And it ended there… a perfect story, frozen in the history books (or history web pages I guess). The world was good.

And then, the 2011 NFL playoffs came. And some schmuck in Chicago decided to try to get the kind of attention Paul the Octopus got. Enter Ty the Sea Lion. Now, I’m sure you see the problem right from the get go here: Octopi are considered one of the smartest animals on earth. They can learn to open a jar or unlock at a door at a very early age, an age in which we humans are still drooling helplessly all over ourselves in a high chair we’re not remotely capable of escaping from.

Sea Lions, on the other hand, are generally considered one of the slower animals in “the kingdom.” Their intellectual limits seem to be their ability to hit a ball with their noses and smile sometimes… if you’re lucky, they’ll stick out their tongue; things any living thing on earth could do, plants and fungi included. And they’re like that their whole lives. No progression. Anyway, some dude in Chicago decided to try to steal Paul’s thunder and have his stupid sea lion pick the winner of the Chicago/Green Bay game. Note one more time that this sea lion is from Chicago. And so is its trainer.

Surprisingly, the sea lion stuck out its tongue at the Packers and smiled at the Bears, clearly indicating a Bears victory. Obvious bias from the trainer aside, this is unbelievable. Forget the picks of well-educated, knowledgeable football analysts who are picking the Packers to win almost resoundingly. We place our trust in a sea lion, and ABC News puts it on their front page. Paul’s different. Paul would have picked every single outcome of every single game in the regular season and playoffs, nearly impossible odds. Ty the sea lion gets to pick one game, 50/50 odds, after being well trained to hate the Packers with every ounce of his being. Yup… sounds unbiased to me.

Well, since we’ve got all our ears to the ground, hanging on every word a sea lion is saying, I’m going to let my dirty H&M work pants pick the outcome, and see what they think (we’re just moments away from kickoff). They’re about on the same intellectual level as this sea lion, so why not? I’ll throw them on the floor, let them settle and see what I get. Here we go:

A “G,” without a doubt. Luke’s pants pick Green Bay to win. Bring it on, Ty. The game’s just starting now, and if my and Ty’s predictions are any indication, I think it’ll be a good one. Just hope I don’t eat my words and lose to a sea lion of all creatures. You’ll never hear from me again if I do.

UPDATE: Ty’s career ended before it even started (a lot like the Eagles’ Kevin Kolb), failing to predict the outcome of the Bears/Packers game, an outcome my work pants could predict. My pants will try to predict the outcome of the Superbowl in one week’s time. Be there to see history made! Any news reporters interested in running the story can give me a shout. Young, aspiring journalists: this could launch your career.

iPhone App Review: The “I’m Being Assaulted” Application

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I don’t know how I even stumbled across the “I’m Being Assaulted Application” in the first place (I have no idea what my search parameters even were… or why they were. but whatever they were, I shouldn’t be judged on them), but what I found startled me so much that I decided to start an entirely new segment to address it.

Smart phones are incredibly dynamic, game-changing, and, every once in a while, even life-saving machines. We’ve all read stories about iPhone apps saving people’s lives… whether the story of a woman pinned inside her Toyota Camry on the side of the road (thanks to the Toyota Camry’s wonderful “auto-pilot” feature that takes over driving and crashes into things) who used an app to contact loved ones to broadcast her location, or perhaps a story of a traveler trapped in the deep, dark jungles of the Congo who’s not sure which plants are safe to eat, but learns all about it with that tropical plant app. The possibilities seem endless.

Technology is literally saving our lives (though in many other ways ruining them and making them sad and lonely… but that’s not for today). There is an app, however, whose intentions to save lives are marred by an unbelievably extensive process that will more often than not do the opposite. The app is called the “I’m Being Assaulted App.” Here it is now:

I’ll address the whole “no ratings” thing later, as it’s very important. Anyway, I hate for you to imagine this type of scenario, and God forbid it ever happens to anyone, but think for a second about a man or woman being physically assaulted in an alley by some evil, terrible person, perhaps robbing you and demanding your cash and that brand new Chase Freedom card (which is maxed out anyways… stickin’ it to the assailant).

This is one of the most horrifying situations anyone could ever be in, and it’s great that people are trying to create ways to help save you in these situations, and I’m sure these were the intentions of Adam Eisenman… Unfortunately, Adam apparently didn’t employ a single ounce of common sense when writing this app. Here’s why.

So the man in the long black coat has his gun trained on you and is waiting for you to take your wallet out.  You’re obviously jarred and emotionally distraught, but you quickly remember that you bought the “I’m Being Assaulted” app earlier in the day.

You open it for the first time only to find…. that you need to write a detailed letter to your friends in order to be saved:

It definitely seems like a brief letter (though, at the same time, ridiculously and unnecessarily repetitive and vague), and it probably would be… if you didn’t have a gun to your head. Without even addressing the extremely likely scenario in which the offender will simply take your brand new iPhone (he is robbing you after all) while you’re furiously trying to open up the app, you already have huge problems on your hands, not the least of which are… what are you going to write and who are you going to write to?

Bigger questions loom. Is the assailant going to give you the minute and a half necessary to navigate the on-screen keyboard that gives you a greater typing error rate than your great grandmother had on her first day in the 21st century? Is he also going to let you check your Facebook or e-mail (if he lets you bring this app up, chances are he’ll let you check your social networks, after all)?

Things aren’t looking good for you at this point, but we’ll give you (and the assailant) the benefit of the doubt. Let’s say you get this letter written. All you have to do is click send, right? Surely Adam made it so you could send this letter quickly to your loved ones so they can contact authorities and save your life in a reasonable amount of time. Not so fast.

You’d better confirm that! Because of course you have the extra few seconds to spare when you’re being stood up at 3 am in the alley behind that night club your significant other doesn’t know you spent the night at. There literally couldn’t be a worse time in the world to have to digitally confirm an action (and there are thousands, if not millions of terrible, annoying instances in which you have to confirm actions on computers). Adam decided this was pretty important, though. And we have no idea why.

Bottom line? We highly recommend that you don’t even show the robber your phone at all, let alone take it out, open up this app, write a letter, confirm the letter, and send it to a loved one. There is somewhere around a 0% chance that you’ll have time to do this. If you are going to take out your phone, just throw it at your assailant’s face. You stand a much higher chance.

Adam, I give your app a 0.5/10. And that 0.5 isn’t even for you. It’s for all of the folks who were smart enough not to buy it, because, if anyone did, they would have been so angry with it that they surely would have reviewed it, but there aren’t any. There is some hope for the world yet… as long as we don’t put our trust in this application.