JMS announced as guest at NYCC Feb. 2007

[AmyG]

Seriously, if you want good Italian, we go downtown (to the rapidly-shrinking Little Italy).

[SLerman]

Only trouble is that it's COLD up there in February!

Silly Southerners. New York would be a tropical vacation for us northern New England people.

My girlfriend's family is Italian, so I'm sure she'd be up for dinner in an Italian restaurant. A great place that I went to when I was in New York with a group in high school is Dougie's (Google says they're on W 47th). Probably the best chicken wings I've ever had.

[Jan]

Silly Southerners. New York would be a tropical vacation for us northern New England people.

Oh, I understand cold...I grew up in Chicago. These days I just don't have the clothes or boots for winter anymore.

Jan

[AmyG]

Yeah, that's weird. I never thought about that. What do people from tropical climes do when they come north in the winter? I wouldn't want to own a winter coat if I only got to use it once every couple of years! Jan, what's the coldest it's gotten in all the years you've lived in Florida?

[Jan]

Oh, it's been known to get cold, even into the 20's as I recall. But only for one day usually and it matters less here since you *walk* anywhere. It's only from the house to the car and from the car to work usually.

Jan

[Dr Maturin]

I plan on one day living in Scottsdale, AZ. That'll be nice. My knees hurt in the Winter.

[Spoo Junky]

But driving in snow and ice is such fun!

[Dr Maturin]

I grew up where it never, ever snows and the temperature at 03:00 in December doesn't get lower than 30░, and I can drive fine in snow and ice. These idiots who have lived here for their entire lives are getting their vehicles stuck in ditches and wrecking them and all sorts of terrible things.

It just takes common sense and care.

[Radhil]

Up here (NY actual, just not in the city) we have at least 5 soccer moms a weeks skidding right off the road when it snows. This is in an area where at least one major accident a week occurs in one big highway corridor. Stupid bullshit SUVs make everyone think they're invincible, right up until they roll it.

I drove rear wheel drive for three years and fishtailed once, and that was only because the road hadn't been plowed in eight hours of blizzard.

I may actually try to make it to the city for this show. Never been to a con. Ought to be interesting.

[frulad]

Seriously, if you want good Italian, we go downtown (to the rapidly-shrinking Little Italy).

Yes! I haven't had dinner on Mulberry St. in three weeks and I already miss it...

[AmyG]

Ah, Mulberry Street... I assume you know enough to get your cannoli at La Bella Ferrara, and not Ferrara's (around the block)? That's how you tell a real New Yorker.

Back to the weather discussion, when I lived in Brooklyn, if I wasn't a half mile from the subway I could have completely eschewed a winter coat. Once I got on the subway (elevated in Brooklyn), the rest of my entire trip was underground, coming out at my last stop in the basement of my building (the Top of the Sixes building, home of DC Comics, just to bring this back on topic, sort of). And the subway cars are invariably overheated in NYC, so you certainly don't need the coat once you're inside them.

[Joseph DeMartino]

Jan, what's the coldest it's gotten in all the years you've lived in Florida?

In my neck of the woods, it got down into the 30s in 1989, right at Christmas. There was actually talk of snow flurries, which hadn't been seen in the county in twenty years. (The local paper carried a warning that drivers unaccustomed to snow should not attempt to drive in it.) We never got the flurries, but the temp did dip below freezing. There were also sporadic rolling blackouts and brown-outs. It turns out that with all the snow-birds down for the season, the holiday cooking, light displays, and the fact that almost 100% of heating down here is electric, demand is generally higher between Thanksgiving and Christmas than in August and September, the hottest months of the year.

That year the added cold pushed the system beyond what it could handle. Among other things the power interruptions played havoc with clocks all over the place - including in places you never think about. As I was leaving midnight Mass at my local church, the sprinkler system, which should have run hours earlier, came on. It was about 1:30 Christmas morning, I could see my own breath and it was definitely below freezing. The pastor, who used to live in Boston, was horrified. "This is going to freeze solid. The whole parking lot. And where am I going to find rock salt at two o'clock in the morning? On Christmas day? In Florida?"

Later that afternoon my sister was pulling her hair out, trying to cook her first Christmas dinner in Florida with an oven that kept turning off for 20 minutes at a stretch every couple of hours. Try timing a cooking turkey under those conditions. I think we ended up assembling the gas grill on the patio and finishing the cooking out there.

On the other hand it rarely gets above 90 here, and has never approached the hottest days we saw in New York. (The day my sister got married, in August of 1975, the mercury hit 104 in Westchester County and I remember a number of days when it hit 100 or 102 when I was growing up.)

Regards,

Joe

[OmahaStar]

(The day my sister got married, in August of 1975 ...

Not to say anything about your age or anything, but ... I was born in August of 1975.

[Donald]

I absolutely have to go to this! I live about 40 minutes from NYC so this is fantastic!

[Joseph DeMartino]

Not to say anything about your age or anything, but ... I was born in August of 1975.

Whippersnapper!

And since this is a convention thread, I thought it would be a good place to post this headline from FARK.com:

Documentary claims that suicide bombers are motivated by sexual repression, fails to explain lack of suicide bombings at Dragon Con

Regards,

Joe