“Venetians themselves would like to see more money put toward retaining natives, and are critical of such projects as the new Calatrava Bridge over the Grand Canal. Building the bridge, designed by the Spanish architect Santiago Calatrava, ran well over projected costs while doing little to ease the lives of average Venetians.”

Here in New York, this sure sounds familiar!
His “Calatrava Transit Hub” at the World Trade Center site must be by now very much over budget, behind schedule, and who knows for sure if it will EVER be actually finished?
That’s why many people have said, “Why don’t they just add some improvements to the ‘temporary’ PATH station, and let it become a permanent PATH station?”

Seriously, I have clipped my fingernails in public! I’ve done it over a public trashcan, clippings go in the trashcan, very quickly, less than one minute, in an uncrowded area. The main problem is where the clippings are going to wind up. A secondary problem is that today people also seem to do these things deliberately to attack attention and to inconvenience as many people as possible, very slowly and very noisily.

I remember the city pre-Bloomberg and it wasn’t so much that people didn’t do funky things in public, it was that that they didn’t go out of their way to show their oblivious to the other people who might be sharing the public space with them. This is what goes on today and I don’t get what is causing it.

Really I’m just stirring up the pot here, but I’ve seen this done a lot (esp. on the 7 train for some reason), and my initial reaction is always, ew that’s gross, but then after a second’s reflection I don’t care.