SfanGoch

I would say that NYC public school teachers are overpaid for what the students get out of the classroom. Check out their salary schedule. The joker in the deck is that a rookie cop makes less than a first year teacher. NYC teachers' pensions aren't based on what one pays in. They're based on years on the job. Check out the pensions here. From that list, I'd say your math is definitely wrong. Maybe you associate with the wrong teachers because that list contains a whole lot of teachers who collected MILLIONS after retiring, including a good number working on their THIRD million only fifteen years after retiring. A regular patrol officer or firefighter won't even come close to those numbers. By experience, I am a vet. My knowledge of civil service comes from the fact that my brother-in-law is a retired cop, my nephew is a bus driver and my niece is a public school teacher. Additionally, I can read.

Aside from noir and old pulp crime novels, I'm not into fiction. I do like reading the works of Theodore Dressler and Stephen Crane, though. Two books you'd probably enjoy reading are "The Pale Blonde of Sands Street" by William Chapman White and "The Amboy Dukes" by Irving Shulman. "The Amboy Dukes" was considered required reading (not by H.S. English departments, though ) by every teenaged boy in NYC for years. Richard "Ramfins59" could attest to that. FYI, Ted Nugent named his band after the title of this book.

Yup. Think Cornell Woolrich written in Swedish.

We live in an amazing country. People in Europe can speak one or more languages in addition to their native tongues. Here, we can barely manage with just Engrish. "Teutonic French"........got a nice ring to it. In my neighborhood, there is Quay Street. Ask any ten people what "quay" means and you'll get ten wrong answers. A quay is a reinforced wharf, usually constructed with masonry, for the loading and unloading of ships. Those same people will pronounce it as "kway". Wrong again. It's pronounced "key". Everybody is familiar with Baron Friedrich Wilhelm August Heinrich Ferdinand von Steuben . Why, there's Steuben Glass, a Steuben County, NY and a Steuben Street in Brooklyn. Yet, nobody pronounces it correctly. Everybody and his brother pronounces it "Stoo-BENN". Everybody except Germans and German speakers who pronounce it "SHTOY-bin". Then, there is the case of Tadeusz Kosciuszko, Revolutionary War hero, designer of the fortifications at West Point and who, in addition to having a street in the Borough of Churches bearing his name, has both a mustard and bridge named in his honor. NOBODY can pronounce his name. Every traffic copter reporter says "Kos-KEE-os-ko". It's actually "Kos-Choos-ko". Don't get me started on the streets named after the original Dutch and French Huguenot settlers around here.

Bara á fimmtudögum.

Betra en í ósköpunum út úr mér. Ég tók ekki eftir nein hreim í skrifa þinna.

Wanna hear some great accents? Listen to Jackie Mason, born in Sheboygan; Lawrence Welk, born in Strasburg, N.D. and Stanley Myron Handelman, born in Brooklyn and sounded like Bernie Sanders doing a Jackie Mason imitation.

Actually, growing up in Jamaica, NY, Donald does have a perceptible "Queens" accent, as does his brother, Robert, and his father, Fred. I worked for Trump and interacted with him daily. You can hear the accent whenever he uses a word with a short "a" in it. It's nasally and a somewhat drawn out. That particular accent was found all over Queens and all the way to western Nassau County, where a lot of Queens residents moved. It's not as widespread as it was thirty to forty years ago; but, you can still hear it in some neighborhoods. Bernie's is influenced by a combination of good old Brooklynese, Yiddish and Eastern European (Polish, Russian, etc.) He grew up in the midwood section which has had a very large population of Eastern European Jews since the early 20th Century. Most of my teachers in Brooklyn Tech H.S. who were from Midwood talked and sounded like Bernie. They always dropped the "r", pronouncing words like "car" as "cah". This was in imitation of the pseudo-aristocratic "London" accent that was in vogue in the early 20th Century. It was supposed to impart a contrived, supposed sense of sophistication. You can hear it listening to FDR, certain actors and actresses from the 30s through the mid "50s. That's why Bernie pronounces "millionaires and billionaires" as "millionahs and billionahs". This accent pretty much died out almost everywhere after WWII, coinciding with the decline of the British Empire, and folks started to roll their "r" again.. Everywhah, except in Midwood.

I have a good ear for accents and dialects and can do it intentionally to annoy or confuse that particular individual if it suits me at the moment. I've mimicked accents since I was a kid. There was plenty of material to practice with growing up in Brooklyn. I mimic everything from Newyorican Spanglish to Yiddish-accented Brooklynese. I attended my son's Confirmation practice Wednesday and was imitating one of the Polish priests. The other parent I was sitting with was cracking up in the pew. So was one of the other Polish priests, who looks is a dead ringer for Kurt Jurgens, standing behind me! Yesterday afternoon after the actual Confirmation Mass, as we were waiting around to get a photo with the bishop, somebody behind me said, "So, you are de fanyi boy, eh? Mebye you can provide for me de voiceover for homily eef I have de laryngitis, yes? Kurt Jurgens ratted me out. Journalist Robert MacNeil wrote an excellent book and hosted a fantastic nine part documentary called "The Story of English" which go into great detail explaining the history and evolution of the language and how the numerous English accents heard around the world developed.

Are you allowed to use "straight" here?

After you pay your taxes, you have pocket change left over, right? Sounds fair to them what robs you in the name of the law. Don't forget the Dept. of Taxation & Finance's official motto: "What's mine is mine, what's yours is mine." The lion's share of municipal budgets go toward pension funds.The actual operating budgets are just a small percentage. Heck, NYC's FY2016 Executive Budget is $78.3 BILLION! That's more than the annual budgets of 90% of the nations on this planet. A giant chunk is for pension funds. I have no problem with cops and firefighters getting paid well or receiving nice pensions. They put their lives on the line every single day and deserve to be compensated for what are, short of combat duty, the most hazardous occupations to work in. Every other civil servant.......keep walking.

It pisses me off to no end when POS skels use their kids as props in order to play on people's sympathies and shame them into coughing up money out of some misguided guilt. I was riding the subway earlier today. Two stops into the trip, a guy and a little girl get on. The guy starts his prepared spiel about their being homeless, hungry, etc. Then, he walks through the car shaking a ski cap under passengers' noses for "donations". The suckers tossing in bills didn't seem to notice that the guy was wearing brand spanking new Air Jordan 4 Pinnacle sneakers, which cost around $650, holding an iPhone worth at least another couple hundred and the little girl was also dressed in expensive clothes. Years ago, there was a guy who used to pull a similar scam on the F train to Queens. He would walk through the car wearing a cardboard sign reading, "Please help my family" with a "photo" of two smiling little girls and Mom taped in the middle. I thought there was something very familiar about that picture. I knew I've seen it someplace before. It was one of those generic inserts you find when you buy a picture frame. I got a hold of one of those inserts and carried it with me, hoping I'd see the guy again. I got my chance a few weeks later. He got on the subway and went into his routine. When he reached my seat, I said, "Man, it's hard to believe that your girls are in such a bad situation." "What do you mean?" "Well, you must be doing pretty well with your daughters being famous models." "Huh?" "C'mon dude, don't be so modest. I see their faces all the time." "I don't know what you're talking about." So, I pulled out the insert and asked him if I could have his autograph. Everybody in the car started yelling at him and proceeded to pelt him with coffee cups, soda cans, food and newspapers. I never saw him on the F train again.

Somebody's gotta pay for all those "free" social programs in the Great White North. Here in NYC, one goes to state licensed service stations/repair shops for inspections and emission tests. In the past, it was never a problem passing even if your car blows smoke like a steel mill. There was always a properly tuned vehicle in the shop that the mechanic, after getting his already greased palm regreased , would use.

I built a Tamiya 4x4 Bruiser R/C truck in 1986. I tested it out on the pier down the block from me. After about five minutes, it stopped responding to the transmitter, drove straight off the pier and is still somewhere at the bottom of the East River. All 650 bucks of it.....

My first guess was Ed Norton.

Didn't he co-star with Jack Klugman in "Quincy, M.E."?

I taught him all he knows about Turbo Tax.

Yup, that's me, the human bullseye. Just the way I like it.

Personally, I'm a big fan of confrontational microaggressive post modifiers and suffixes, know what I'm sayin'?

And it landed upright. Elon Musk needs to hire these guys.

Not one, but two R/C gas turbine powered B-52 Stratofortresses!

Rémy Julienne was driving. This is how he pulls out of parking garages.

Alan Freed and Morris Levy were pros at adding their names to writing credits and leaving artists and writers broke. An old friend of mine, the late Raoul Cita, didn't play along with them. He was the writer, accompanist, pianist, arranger and founding member of the classic R&B vocal group The Harptones. Raoul made sure he got what was coming to him. Every piece of work created by him had his name on it. Raoul is the fellow in the lower right corner of the photo: Yeah, I dig them Doo Wops too.

"Friends" on Facebook is somewhat a stretch. You may personally know about 25% of those people who are in your "Friends" list. Every other "friend" is picked up along the way during postings on different FB pages. Just because you might have 567 "Friends" doesn't mean that they really are. If your family is on Facebook, time to tell them to put the dammed phone/tablet down and engage in some real face time, especially if you're all in the same house. This reminds me of that stupid Time Warner Cable commercial where there's a family of four sitting in front of a flat screen TV and each one has his/her face buried in one device or another.

Go through their discography and you'll see how often that was the case. I was never a fan of Zep, even though I saw them in concert numerous times. I thought they were pretentious and really in awe of themselves. I always thought Deep Purple was better.