Dan's Papers - November 7, 2008 - The Hampton Subway Newsletter

Week of November 4 - 10, 2008
Riders this week: 6,261
Rider miles this week: 66,803

There was a delay last Thursday just to the north of the Sag Harbor station, when an endangered bird, called a piping plover, was seen on the tracks in front of the train by an alert motorman as he pulled out into the tunnel heading for Noyac. The bird appeared oil covered and forlorn and environmentalists from Riverhead were called in to gently catch it in a net and take it to be cleaned up. No one knows how that bird got there. But one half hour later, the train was back on schedule.

A suitcase filled with a quarter million dollars in cash, mostly in $1,000 bills, was left on a seat on the Southampton to Water Mill run. Anyone finding it, please call Arlen Bangsten at Goldman Sachs in New York City.

John McCain and his wife, Cindy, were in Westhampton Beach for the weekend, recovering from the stresses of the long and arduous presidential campaign. He was seen going around in loops along our entire 112-mile subway system all day last Saturday, refusing to either smile or shake hands or wave to anybody.

Writers Tina Fey and E. L. Doctorow were seen laughing together about a joke on the Quogue platform on Friday.

With the graffiti on some of the subway tunnel walls removed, the revolutionary new advertising campaign created for the Hampton Subway made its debut last week. The campaign consists of a series of 100 posters, mounted side by side, on the north subway tunnel wall between Southampton and Water Mill which, when riding past in a subway train at 32 miles an hour, would appear to straphangers to be a 12 second animation of a beautiful woman dressed as a hunter, firing a Remington Rifle. The Remington Corporation is our first client.

And now we have a second client. It is a non-profit organization called Save Our Environment, and they have paid to have 100 posters on the south wall exactly opposite the Remington Posters, which, when driven past, show a woman wearing jeans and a headband, holding a sign reading "NO," and leaping in front of a moose grazing on tree bark to save it by taking the Remington rifle shot in the chest.

Only up three days, these advertisements have already become the talk of the subway. It has been pointed out that the advertisement works best when taking the westbound subway. Going eastbound, the two advertisements appear to show a huntress holstering her rifle after a bullet comes back into the breech, and a woman across from her leaping up with a "NO" sign and running off to reveal a moose eating tree bark.

In three exciting matches in our Hampton Bays cafeteria, three of our employees were crowned as champions in our light, middle and heavyweight boxing tournament.

The tournament was arranged by the 36 summer employees who were hired as "pushers," forcefully shoving straphangers rapidly onto the subway cars to keep the trains running on time. Now laid off, they wanted to find out who was the best. We obliged them by setting up a boxing ring and several rows of folding chairs for the spectators in the cafeteria.

In the lightweight category, Jody Harris knocked out Frank McCraken in the first round. The middleweight championship was won by Biff Hoosegow, who knocked out Dwayne Powder in the first round, and the heavyweight championship, which went the entire three bloody rounds, was won by Harry Bernard, who was awarded a majority decision over Beatrice Loon. The awards ceremony has been postponed until the participants get out of the hospital.

The number of straphangers using the Hampton Subway this week is off from last week by almost 20%, a fact we attribute almost entirely to the rapid decline in the price of a barrel of oil and the corresponding increase in the use of automobiles. The public just doesn't learn. If this trend continues, and economists are suggesting that the lowered oil prices might continue for years, the Hampton Subway may be forced to consider other ways to make ends meet - one thought being to sell some of the 1.6 billion barrels of oil, which our subway tunnel to FOxwoods under construction accidentally struck under Long Island Sound four months ago.

It is complicated and involves state licensing and federal approval, but it does appear that all this oil is ours to sell. It was found in international waters in Long Island Sound, by accident to be sure, gushed into our tunnels preventing the completion of our new subway spur to Foxwoods, which heretofore we have thought of as an economic disaster and it is ours to pump out - indeed we are already doing so by pumping the excess into the sea. Use the subway more. And we won't resort to selling this stuff yet.