The people who live here must be cool.

Hay in the city is just dope regardless of the reason or context.

Where in the city does one buy a bale of hay? Trader Joes?

Lindsay Lohan enjoys trip to Gotham.

Lindsay Lohan was spotted in the Upper East Side yesterday trick-or-treating two days before Halloween. Seen roaming the sidewalks alone with an empty Duane Reade bag and muttering Phantom of the Opera tunes, the pop star knocked on several doors asking residents if they had any Reese’s peanut butter cups, blow, or a mom she could have.

Premature E-Jack-O-Lation is a treatable condition.

Premature E-jack-o-lation (PE) is a common and sad syndrome in the days leading up to Halloween. Like it or not, Americans have a tendency to abuse the good things in life from food to booze, and the buzz we experience from enjoyable holidays isn’t an exception. Christmas now begins before Thanksgiving. People dress up for Halloween and go out for Halloween on days that aren’t Halloween.

Premature E-jack-o-lation is clinically defined as the “irrepressible need to carve a pumpkin too early in anticipation of Halloween, knowing that doing so will result in a rotting carcass of a pumpkin before the holiday arrives.” Millions of Americans suffer from PE without even knowing there is something they can do about it. Consult your doctor if you are too embarrassed to speak with your friends or family members about your PE.

This photograph was taken on Sunday, October 25, 2009 – a full six days before the actual Halloween holiday. Estimates are that this particular jack-o-latern was carved sometime between September 17 and 22. An obvious and regrettable case of PE.

New York Yankees. World Series. Here we go.

Game on, New York City. Great baseball cities have a vested, emotional, and deeply rooted interests in the success of their teams. Being a fan isn’t a hobby, a pastime, or religion as overly dramatic – and usually drunk – idiots like to say. Being a fan is a lifestyle, a decision to define happiness not only according to winning and losing, but how the game is played. Fanatics love winning. Fans love the game. Yankees fans love winning the game. But all New Yorkers, whether Mets, Yankees, or Cyclone supporters, know the game of baseball.

Today is cold and rainy in New York City. What would otherwise be an unremarkable, blasé Wednesday, is actually opening day of the 2009 World Series – and the Yankees are still playing baseball. On the 5 train, a drenched English teacher is wearing her husband’s Yankees jacket, grading rain-speckled papers with a red pen. On Broadway an old Chinese man is sitting on a milk crate beneath a bodega awning, cigarette smoke swirling around his Yankees hat. Downtown, a coke-addled financier just left his mistress in a hotel room, and is unfurling his Yankees umbrella while trying to hail a cab with his Blackberry in hand. In Bed-Stuy, a 76-year-old woman born in Alabama is donning a pair of Yankees socks that she keeps beside an expired drivers license in her deceased husband’s dresser. It’s the end of October, and baseball is in the city. Everyone is anxious. Something bigger than us is afoot, and that has a way of making our problems seem smaller but our lives feel bigger. This is a great baseball city not because we have better baseball people, but because baseball makes us better people.

Good luck New York Yankees. Stomp some ass.

Photo by Keith Allison.

With the passing of pop legend Michael Jackson on June 25, 2009, this year’s Village Halloween Parade instantly took on an added dimension. A signature event within the parade, the Thriller song and dance routine represents everything New Yorkers love about Halloween: bringing community together and having a good time. This year, of course, will be special as the werewolf smiles and zombie moves will also serve as a tribute to the musician and dancer – regardless of one’s opinion of the man – behind the beats and choreography. So stick in your fangs and flex those fingers. It’s Thriller time in the city.

NYC Halloween Thriller Dance:

Don’t know the Thriller dance? No problem. You still have five days to learn it. Practice. Practice. Practice.

Thriller Dance Instructions:

Street Sign Scarecrow

NYC’s culture is a collective patchwork of holidays – each celebrating some particular culture, accomplishment, or spiritual perspective, but the best holidays are the ones that we all share either as Americans or New Yorkers. Thanksgiving is a calm, relaxing, and family-oriented holiday, which pulls many residents to their hometowns outside of the city, where they clutch a Heineken beside their crazy ass, pill-popping sister-in-law and watch the Macy’s Thanksgiving Day Parade with a sense of yearning. Thankfully, before Thanksgiving and all of its Americana overtones, there is Halloween – and Halloween in New York City is unlike Halloween anywhere else. New Yorkers can bring the freak, and although we don outrageous costumes, the real insanity comes from within us. NYC gives us the street, and New Yorkers take care of the rest.

Hnyc is dedicating this week of posts to Halloween in New York City. For those who love hilarity and NYC sidewalks, this is our Super Bowl.

On what street does this animal live?

Ok, readers, let’s see how well you know your neighborhoods. Where is this patriotic bull is located in New York City?

Check out the answer provided by avid reader Jack to our last installment of Identify This NYC Space.

Intellectual Meals on Wheels

What’s more relaxing than an aquarium full of fish? How about an aquarium on four wheels full of New Yorkers. That’s exactly what the Parts and Labor Gallery is, in addition to being a “mobile arts truck and events space housed in an eighteen-foot box truck” recently spotted near Union Square. At hnyc, we’re not sure if the Parts and Labor Gallery is subject to seatbelt and cell phone laws, but it’s safe to presume this mobile arts space is parked when events are underway. Like the blood mobile. But for artists.

The ghost of water powers many NYC establishments.

In a city with luminescent Times Square, sleek Apple stores, and cutting-edge technology in the pockets of its 8 million residents, it is hilarious how dependent our lives remain on steam technology. That’s right: steam. The stuff Russians sit around in, wrapped in towels. The stuff that rises from your coffee. The stuff that feels good on your face when you open the dishwasher. Without steam, many New York City buildings would be freezing in the winter, stifling in the summer, and completely without power. Gotham never outgrew or outpaced the steam age, which, for past New Yorkers, began in lower Manhattan in 1882. Steam is still here, beneath our feet, like a disturbed subconscious being funneled into productive activities.

Steam rises from our streets, billowing up through grates, construction tubes (or, Dr. Seuss Hats, as we at hnyc call them), and any opening or aperture that leads to the city’s underbelly where time stops and dank walls of bedrock collide with steel beams and the twisted wreckage of defunct technologies. But steam persists and is an essential source of power for almost 2,000 Con Edison customers and more 100,000 commercial and residential structures from 96th Street in Uptown Manhattan to the Battery on the southern tip. Though we at hnyc have no idea what a pound of steam looks like (a shot glass of water, maybe?), about 30 billion pounds of steam course beneath and through NYC every year.

Since 1987, twelve steam pipe explosions have occurred in New York City, many tragically resulting in severe injuries and fatalities. The most recent happened on July 18, 2007, in Midtown, caused by a failed 24-inch steam pipe installed in 1924. Calvin Coolidge was president of the United States.

Photo by striatic.

Miracle in a trash can.

Miracles of every shape and size occur in New York City all of the time. Captain C.B. “Sully” Sullenberger safely lands a crippled US Airways jet in the Hudson River. Every day a stranger finds someone else’s wallet in the back of a cab and tracks down the owner. A brooding man from the Bronx sticks out his foot and blocks a closing subway door for you. An Irish bartender gives you a buyback beer, after only two. The mice in your apartment disappear for no reason. Ann Curry drops an F-bomb as you walk past a T.J. Maxx. This city is full of miracles. We call them Street Jesus moments.

This NYC trash can could very well represent a Street Jesus moment. It requires little imagination to picture an old man shuffling along the sidewalk with the aid of his cane. He stops at a crosswalk and waits for the light to change. When it turns green, the man’s ailing left knee joint loosens, and the intense pain vanishes. He bends his leg in disbelief, and as the green silhouette blinks that the moment is passing, the old man shoves his cane into the garbage can and scuttles across the street. Never asking how or why. Quietly accepting his Street Jesus moment. Miraculous plane landings. The kindness of strangers. The absence of rodents. Ann fucking Curry.