Dan's Papers - October 31, 2008 - The Hampton Subway Newsletter

Week of October 28 - November 3, 2008
Riders this week: 7,418
Rider miles this week: 66,803

There will be a delay on the F train between Southampton and Hampton Bays this Thursday, as some of our crew powerwash graffiti off the subway wall about 1.2 miles west of Southampton. They intend to do it between cars so the cars will be allowed past at 30-minute intervals instead of 10. It's really awful, so hide your eyes when you pass this spot to avoid looking at it.

Raoul Castro and Hugo Chavez were seen straphanging and chatting happily between Sag Harbor and Noyac Monday afternoon on the E train. Eavesdroppers overheard Vladimir Putin giving advice to George W. Bush about retirement on the Amagansett platform waiting for the G train. Kathleen Turner and David Letterman were seen on the Water Mill and Westhampton Beach platforms, respectively.

Chef Rachael Ray will be giving away free samples of hors d'ouvres to riders on the platform in East Hampton between 2 and 4 p.m. on Saturday.

The balloons and banners were out. The sandwiches were in the display cases and the Mayor was present with his silver shovel. However, at the appropriate time there on Main Street, Sag Harbor, a process server arrived with an envelope to give to our esteemed Commissioner Bill Aspinall, who was about to cut the ribbon to open our first Hampton Subway Sandwich Shop. The letter was an order of injunction signed by a judge preventing the opening of the shop. It had been requested jointly by the Subway Sandwich chain and by Sag Harbor Residents Violently Against the Hampton Subway Sandwich Shop, (SHRVAHSSS.) And so, the opening never took place. The Mayor said he knew nothing about it. All the food was given away free. Back to the drawing board, said the Commissioner.

EPA officials visited the underground wall at the northern end of the Sag Harbor Station that blocks access to the new tunnel under construction intended to lead to a subway stop 22 miles away in Foxwoods, Connecticut. A few oil leaks were noted. The original wall of cinderblock was reinforced after their visit with a four-foot thick, reinforced, concrete wall that includes a pressure gauge.

The tunnel construction was halted after workmen accidentally opened an underground gusher of oil, about 14 miles off the coast of Mattituck, which has so far filled the unfinished tunnel with 1.6 billion barrels of oil. The fear is that the wall gives way and the oil fills the entire subway system, but apparently, that is not going to happen.

As I announced last week, a new advertising medium is about to be created on the walls of our subway tunnels. The first one, next week, was to consist of a series of 100 posters which, when driven past by a subway train at 32 miles an hour, would seem by straphangers to be a 12-second animation of a beautiful woman firing a Remington Rifle, which is to be our first client.

Instead, vandals struck a week ahead of time with a series of 100 posters that show a man, with his back to our riders, who lowers his trousers halfway to show what some young people I know tell me is called a "moon." At the end, he pulls his trousers back up. It is disgraceful, and our security guards are, at this very moment, examining riders to see whose backside that was. We shall prosecute to the fullest extent of the law for this indiscretion.