Dan's Papers - June 6, 2008 - The Hampton Subway Newsletter

Delays: Next Friday, between noon and 10 p.m., there will be detours on all routes as our service department performs its quarterly track-maintenance procedures.

Vice President Dick Cheney was seen leaving the Bridgehampton Station, apparently on his way to a hunting expedition at the Spring Farm hunting preserve on the Bridgehampton-Sag Harbor Turnpike, considering the shotgun under his arm. There's a law against carrying weapons on the Subway, but, hey, he's the Vice President. Also spotted were Paul Simon of Montauk and Suzanne Vega of Sag Harbor, standing on the platform in Amagansett, eating ice cream cones.

Crowds gathered at the Hampton Subway Headquarters in Hampton Bays as the nozzle of a huge vacuum cleaner, usually used for cleaning up sand, snaked down into the basement of the headquarters and into the vault underneath, where 1.2 billion stored subway tokens are being extracted. Onlookers noted that during the extraction process, the sound of the tokens coming up made a noise not unlike that of change jingling in your pocket.

The tokens are being poured out of vacuum cleaner bags and into potato trucks that take them to fishing draggers at the docks in Shinnecock, which then take them to large tankers offshore. The tankers cannot tie up at the docks in Shinnecock because Southampton Town refused permission. The tokens will cross the Atlantic - the tankers are only half full because of the weight - and be unloaded in the new African country of Basinoba, to be used as the country's currency and replacing the dollar they use now. The extraction process should take about a month, and though the jingling noise is keeping neighbors up, it needs to proceed for the Hampton Subway to stay in business.

A wealthy anonymous donor who was killed in an auto accident last Thursday in East Hampton has willed $1 million to the Hampton Subway, provided the money is used to speed up service. We intend to use the money to purchase special equipment being built by a new company headed up by my brother, Biff Aspinall, that can magnetize the tracks and train wheels so speed can be increased from a maximum of 35 miles an hour to 75 miles an hour, around the turns, between stops.

Many readers have written in asking how we will use the subway if all the subway tokens are being sold to Basinoba. The answer is that a new card "swipe" system will be installed stationwide next month, replacing the old turnstiles. Meanwhile, we have a one-month supply of tokens set aside until then. On the other hand, we regret the inconvenience of having everyone use two tokens to get through the turnstiles instead of the usual one. President Juan Carlos Sinatra Alexander of Basinoba has already devalued the dollar 50% in his country, and since the subway system, for paperwork reasons, is part of the Kingdom of Basinoba, until this transaction is completed (as we explained last week), the cost of a subway ride is now doubled.

One good sidelight right now is that as the tokens are hauled to the Shinnecock docks by potato trucks, when the trucks go over bumps, some of the tokens get knocked off onto the road and into bushes. These tokens, as I said, will be worth twice what they were before last Friday, when the devaluation took place, and so you can use them, both in the Kingdom of Basinoba, if you choose to go there, or underground, at Hampton Subway. Teenagers are already picking them up along the route, so if you want to do this, you better hurry.