THIS WEEKEND DOESN’T HAVE TO BE THE END OF THE LINE FOR THESE AUTUMN DELIGHTS

Thanksgiving is the last hurrah for the multitude of flavors that come together to spell “autumn” in our little lizard brains. Herbs like sage and rosemary, Brussels sprouts and squash, apples and ginger—soon we’ll say goodbye to all that and it’ll be all Christmas, all the time. Chocolate and peppermint will flavor absolutely everything—hell, they’ve already snuck their way into the Pringles can, once a bastion of salt. Orange and cinnamon will somehow find their way into the very air around you, like surplus oxygen pumped onto the casino floors in Vegas.

Some of this has to do with geographical seasonality—there’s only so much you can grow when there’s been 2 feet of snow on the ground for a month. But much more of it is due to the manufactured seasonality of holidays as consumer events. How are people supposed to go wild shopping for Christmas gifts on Black Friday if they still feel like it’s Thanksgiving, a time for being grateful for what you already have? How can you keep latte consumption running high without introducing a new limited-time-only flavor every three weeks?

Turns out seasonality means less and less these days, both from a meteorologic and a material perspective. Starbucks rolled out its holiday-branded cups weeks ago, along with all the eggnog/gingerbread/peppermint coffee-type beverages that go in them. And with a hurricane, massive snowstorm and mid-60s temperatures all within a week of each other, climate and season have only a passing acquaintance. So check out some of these autumnal flavors after Thanksgiving and assert your independence from the whole charade.

If you think you don’t like Brussels sprouts, you’re not alone. If all you’ve ever had are Aunt Gertie’s boiled-while-the-turkey’s-in rendition, there’s really not much to love. Cooked plainly, the little guys’ crucifer heritage comes out loud and clear, packing all the stench of boiled cabbage into a tiny, bite-sized parcel. But roasting opens them up to a world of caramelized sweetness, a slight bitter edge and the delightful contrast of tender interior and crisp exterior. Eat these anywhere, but especially at Mile End Sandwich (53 Bond St., mileenddeli.com), where they’re halved and tossed with shredded radicchio and a bacon vinaigrette that nestles in all the right crevices. It’s just the right thing to cut the richness of their signature Ruth Wilensky sandwich (that’s fried salami for us non- Montréalers).

Sure, there’ll be apple cider till Easter, but that over-spiced, over-sweetened hooch doesn’t do the apple justice. Over the years, New York has been home to some of the most brilliant apple breeders, who created a multitude of varieties that coax bright tartness, honeyed sweetness, floral undertones and more from the fruit. Go straight to the source at the Union Square farmers’ market, which is open all year round (apples keep for months in the right cold storage!), or try some of the seasonal sandwiches at Num Pang (21 E. 12th St. or 140 E. 41st St., numpangnyc.com), the Cambodian sandwich shop whose creations defy borders. Roasted, spiced chicken comes with slices of pickled apple, turkey breast is topped with a very Thanksgiving cranberry-apple chutney, and glazed pork belly is accompanied by Asian pear (OK, not an apple, but just as autumnal!).

For a full-on one-two punch of fall, try Crispo (240 W. 14th St., crisporestaurant.com) and their butternut squash tortelloni with chestnuts and sage. The below-the-radar Northern Italian spot (no mean feat for a restaurant that sits right on 14th Street) serves a variety of soul-warming pastas in a romantically low-lit, brick-lined room, along with plenty of their signature ingredients: prosecco, prosciutto and parmigiano. But the handmade pockets of rich, dense squash sweetened by the street vendor favorite, roasted chestnuts, and made savory with browned butter and fried sage, take the seasonal prize.

Photo Courtesy of Alissa Fleck

The NYPD’s Night Out Against Crime in Union Square last night promised a “neighborhood block party,” but a party, it failed to deliver. The annual event, celebrated by police precincts nationwide to “strengthen neighborhood spirit and heighten drug and crime prevention awareness,” was entirely overwhelmed by ordinary Union Square traffic, and no one—the NYPD least of all—seemed to mind. In fact, I might not even have found the event had it not been for the two NYPD shirts meandering in the vicinity.

Rather than connecting with the public in any real or symbolic way, two police booths were cordoned literally behind a steel barricade, out of the way of general Square merriment. At the FBI booth, a woman who gave the name Dinah, handed me a coloring book and various pamphlets geared toward children, including one on “how to spot a terrorist.”

“Do you have kids,” she asked, and when I replied that I did not, she said: “What about nieces and nephews?” as she continued to pile the cartoonish pamphlets into my hands.

I asked Dinah if she could talk me through the purpose of the event, but as I reached for a notebook she stopped. “You’re not going to take notes, are you?” she asked.

Two girls with braces at one NYPD table (the other was abandoned) encouraged me to take more pamphlets, as they fumbled for an explanation for why they were there. A police officer ate a hot dog nearby and struggled to stay out of people’s way.

Finally I was directed to an NYPD spokesperson. “Can you tell me what this event is about?” I asked. She replied, as the woman next to her poured butter into the popcorn popper, it was a nationwide event with the intent of showing community members police departments were serious about crime prevention.

“So it’s about building relations between the NYPD and community members?” I asked.

“Yes,” she said.

“Do you feel these relations have been suffering lately?”

“I’m not going to answer that,” she said.

I asked if she would provide me her name.

“No, I will not,” she said, covering what I presume was a name badge.

The friendly faces I encountered at the renewable energy table were a welcome relief. “Please, talk to me,” I said, as I dropped my stack of pamphlets onto their table. After they recited their congenial spiel, I asked what they were doing at the NYPD Night Out Against Crime event, squeezed between a Jamba Juice booth and one hawking keychains. “We just sort of show up to events like these,” they said. “We don’t really know what this is about.” Confusion seemed to be the ambiance of the day.

At the Starbucks table—an added perk of the event was the NYPD’s stated desire to “connect with local businesses”—a man stood behind a spread of iced beverages. “Yes,” he said, seemingly exasperated, as I approached, in the voice of someone tired of being the main attraction for all the wrong reasons. “Yes, yes, yes, before you even ask.” I sheepishly grabbed a complimentary iced coffee and booked it out of Union Square.

As I left the area, a man stopped me. “Hey, are they giving away free iced coffee?” he asked, indicating the small blur of blue tents.

Fox reports six people were shot in NYC on National Night Out, putting a damper on the night’s success.

Photo courtesy of Samsung.

The Samsung Galaxy S III is just the thing to make Apple loyalists question the sanity in their devotion. Apple should do the same.

In 2007, when everyone was running around with RAZR flip phones in one hand and an iPod nano in the other, Apple gave us a sea change. Nobody who has ever bought movie tickets with Fandango, decided on dinner with Yelp, or wasted actual precious chunks of their lives playing brain-hole games like Angry Birds or Temple Run (e.g. me, sadly) can deny that the iPhone changed the way we interact with the world and with each other—by changing our understanding of how we could.

But, yo, people. That was five years ago. That thing caught everybody of guard. We were silly with it; remember? People paid $999.99 for I Am Rich, the arrow-pointing-up-I’m-With-Stupid-shirt for the new millennium. An app called iFart Mobile famously inhaled $10,000 dollars per day in 2008. iFart. iFART! Yes. We were silly, turns out it was all worth it, but we were super silly, y’all.

But now all that stuff that ooh’d and genuinely awed us is standard issue. So many people have smartphones that the New York Times actually thought it was news that a handful of contrarians choose not to join the fun. I wonder if they ran a similar article when that wacky Internet was all the rage. Remember that? I could Google it, but why bother?

What I’m trying to say is that unless the next iPhone is a G.D. spaceship, or transmogrifies the raw materials of the cosmos into Popeye’s famous popcorn shrimp, anything it brings to the table will likely be nothing new.

Will it have maps? Not Google Maps, which now runs offline on the SGS3, and all Android phones (lightning fast!). Will it have crazy good resolution? Likely. Retina? It would behoove them to do us the favor, but the SGS3 has an HD Super AMOLED (active-matrix organic light-emitting diode) screen which, at 4.8” feels a little bulky, but dang if that thing doesn’t look cleaner than Starbucks bathrooms in TriBeCa. Will it have Facebook? Instagram? Will it have…what? A camera? Will it have a phone?

It may be time to face the facts: the rest of the world may have caught up to the iPhone.

Now, I’ll say this, Samsung may have been being real smart and all, but they came super cocky with it. Not a good look, y’all. They seem to think that the coolest thing about the SGS3 is how easy it is to share pictures, music, or just any pseudo-tangible item made of up to 3GB worth of binary. Like, that is cool. Certainly. But it’s not easy. Not unless all your homies also have the SGS3, and even then it involves permissions and settings and really, nobody’s sweating that stuff when it’s already very easy to share electronic data without forcing friends to resent each other cause they had to buy the same phone (if you want to twist our skivvies, stick a USB on that doggie, dawg).

No. The coolest thing about the Samsung Galaxy S III isn’t htat it dims to save power when you look away from the screen, or that it’s got wild facial recognition capabilities, or that you can watch video on a pop-out player while multitasking. No. The coolest thing is TecTiles.

This: little squares about 1” x 1” or so that can be programed to activate whatever stuff on your phone. The example I keep seeing is that you can put one nightstand to activate your alarm just by placing your phone on the thing. But there’re tons of potential uses for these TecTile deals:

• Put one: on the door and tap to open your subway app;
• near the table and tap to open your morning news;
• on your amp and set your phone down to open your guitar tuner;
• bands should have one on the merch table so that fans can FB Like them
• businesses might have one on the counter for a quick 4^2 check in;
• put one on your wallet and tap your pocket to open your camera (HOT!)
• etc. etc.

So, whatever, is the Samsung Galaxy S III going to be an ‘iPhone Killer’? Maybe not, but not for lack of guns. This little buddy is about as good as they get. If you’re looking to buy a phone this summer, it’s a good time to go Samsung. The Galaxy S III has everything you need, and a whole lot of stuff you probably won’t even know what to do with.

Photo Courtesy of Dave Winer

Two cops were injured Saturday night after a clash between the NYPD and a group of pipe wielding anarchists amidst an hours-long clash with officers. According to police, a group of approximately 25 individuals tried to smash the windows of the Starbucks on Astor Place using 8-foot metal pipes at 8:45 p.m.

The protestors had recently left the fifth annual Anarchist Book Fair at Judson Church on Washington Square South. There, a separate larger group of around 150 people had vandalized commercial property and overturned garbage cans in the area. Responding officers were pelted with pipes and bottles while chanting “f*** the NYPD,” and “all pigs must die.”

Clashes between anarchists and the police are nothing new in New York City. While recent scuffles with Occupy Wall Street protestors come to mind, this conflict has been steadily churning under the city for more than a century. The first commissioner of the NYPD, Michael C. Murphy, commanded all precincts to secretly find and record the names of anarchists and their meeting places.

“I don’t propose, if I can help it, to have any Anarchists living in this city,” Murphy stated in the Sept. 11 1901 issue of The New York Times.

During the spring of 1919, Galleanist anarchists mailed bombs to prominent politicians and appointees who they viewed as enemies of the working class. Included among the would-be victims were then-mayor John Hylan and his police commissioner Richard Enright. More recently, there were clashes between NYPD and self purported anarchists in the East Village. In 1988, nine protestors were arrested after throwing bottles and ramming a police barricade into a new luxury condo on Ave. B side of Tompkins Square after the NYPD tried to impose a 1 a.m. curfew. Scores were injured in the melee, with dozens of complaints of police brutality being reported.  Several years later, after anarchists were pushed out of Tompkins Square, another group clashed with residents and police at La Plaza Cultural on E 9th St.and Ave. C. Anarchists came out to party during a hot Sept. evening and the drunken revelers trashed the gardens and demolished fences.

I was 26, freshly single and lonely, when a girlfriend suggested I try an online dating site called Plenty of Fish. Without much hope, I logged on and created a profile. The questions were simple, but the last one me stumped me: What is your idea of a great first date?

Had I ever been on a great first date? Not recently. I shrugged and started to type that my perfect first date would be the beach, sunset, champagne, roses and serenading, invisible violins. Then I caught myself. What the heck was I thinking? I lived in Manhattan.

Goodbye, champagne and roses. In their place I wrote: My idea of a great first date would be to meet up in Union Square and walk around the greenmarket. We could get some nice bread and cheese and fruit, and have a little picnic. I held my breath and pressed send.

My phone woke me the next morning. Sixty-six unread messages. All from Plenty of Fish.

I spent the day reading posts from wannabe suitors. They had only two things in common: They were male and they loved my idea for a first date.

“When I saw you like the Union Square Farmers Market, I knew we were soul mates,” wrote Blade33blue. DRKUTS said, “Thank you for being the only woman on this site who doesn’t think a first date should be on a beach. Want to go to the market this weekend?” And Yankeeman02 paid me the highest compliment he could when he wrote, “You are the only pretty girl who doesn’t sound like a total nutjob. Meet me at the Farmers Market tomorrow? I’ll be the one in blaze orange.”

Two days into my search, I came across one promising guy. He was from Israel. Exotic past? Check. He coached water polo at Queens College. Steady job? Check! He was hot. Check. Not long afterward, he called me up and asked me out. I asked him where he wanted to go and he replied, “How about the Union Square Farmers Market? When I read your profile that’s what first caught my eye.”

There was just one glitch: It was December, not ideal picnic weather. “Let’s start with coffee,” I suggested. “Meet me at the Union Square Starbucks.”

The morning of our date dawned bitter and rainy. I tied a black-and-white checked scarf around my neck and arrived early. We were supposed to meet at noon, but at a quarter past there was no one answering his description. What if he didn’t show up? Worse, what if he’d shown up, looked through the window and bolted for the nearest subway?

Two minutes later my phone buzzed. “Where r u?” I glanced around, but it was the same crowd of stroller pushers, hipsters and writers crafting intense sci-fi novels in the corner. I frantically texted back: “Here! I’m the one in the black-and-white scarf.”

Torturous silence, then a new message. “I’m at the wrong Starbucks.”

Five minutes later he arrived, soaking wet, after a jog through the rain from the Starbucks across the Square. We warmed up over hot chocolate. The rain stopped and we strolled around the Union Square Christmas stalls before heading north. We passed the skating rink at Rockefeller Center and glimpsed a hundred tubas gathered on the ice playing “Silent Night.” His arm slipped around my waist and I rested my head on his shoulder. Who needed violins?

We made plans to go ice-skating the following Tuesday, his birthday. He kissed me goodnight on my doorstep while I did a little tap dance of joy.

On Tuesday, I headed back to the Union Square Christmas stalls. I was searching for the perfect belated birthday gift. Finally I found it: a wooden Christmas ornament shaped like three little fish dangling from a hook with a hand-painted message: Catch of the Day.

We’re still together. Thinking of this during the snowstorm, I decided to pull on my boots and brave the weather. When I got to the market, I paused to say a little prayer of thanks to the gods of Union Square for helping me hook a live one.

Hooray for Mayor Bloomberg, who urges our president to start enforcing gun laws. I contribute money to the Brady campaign to end gun violence. Google it.

You put guns in people’s hands, they use them. Is this somehow our Wild West fixation? Europeans know we’re crazy when it comes to guns. Why aren’t Second Amendment gun crazies strict constitutionalists when it comes to amendments guaranteeing rights for women and minorities?

I can’t imagine why people need guns, but frustration, anger and feelings of impotence and powerlessness must be part of the mix. I’m confident that owning a gun and bullets won’t stop this country from adopting Socialist principles, nor will it stop bankers from stealing from the working classes.

Starbucks stinks in more ways than one. Before guns became the issue, my beef with Starbucks had to do with the standardization of coffee houses, which used to be eccentric, fuzzy havens for people who read and played guitars or just listened to music. Now, Starbucks is one more piece of the giant corporate mall.

We’ve all heard by now that 38 states have open-carry laws for guns, and that frustrated people are now swaggering into Starbucks in at least two of those states, openly sporting guns. Some cafes and coffee houses in northern California, such as Peet’s Coffee and Tea and California Pizza Kitchen, have responded to customer complaints and petitions. These sensible and courageous establishments refuse admission to the gun-toting folks.

Not Starbucks.

Permit me an aside: The only stinky smells I’ve come across in Manhattan are occasional wafts from the open back door of Starbucks at West 60th Street, just west of Broadway. The odor is soured milk and old garbage. The only other time I smelled anything this bad was in the waste-strewn alleys between Cairo’s open sewers.

Back to guns.

I say boycott Starbucks until they pass this rule of decorum: “no unconcealed or concealed weapons allowed.” I bet crazy people can’t walk into Starbucks flaunting genitals or even bare feet. The buck (as it were) should stop with guns.

I’m betting it’s scary to confront an “open-carry” zealot. Does Starbucks even ask these misguided folks to show gun permits?

God help us to nullify the Second Amendment. Will gun-owners openly start carrying guns into Chase banks and subways and Whole Foods markets? Please, please support the Brady campaign and prevent gun violence. They’ve delivered thousands of petitions to Starbucks in Seattle. The life you save may be that of someone you love.

My mother’s sister had a huge farm with cornfields, woodlands and cows outside Philadelphia. My uncle and male cousins laughed at my visceral shivers when they loaded shotguns to kill deer. One of my cousins died in his early 20s in a shotgun accident. It was totally unnecessary. Afterward, nobody removed the prickly deerskin that covered the back of the living room sofa, but I never sat there anyway.

Until two years ago, I had a lovely jerrybuilt 18th-
century farmhouse in the middle of 2,000 acres of someone’s farm in Sullivan County. I began thinking of selling my house when the farmer’s sister told me proudly that she’d shot a huge buck in my backyard. “He put up a big fight,” she said, “but I nailed him.” I didn’t ask her if she planned to eat the deer meat. My uncle and aunt never did. 

–
Susan Braudy is the author and journalist whose last book, Family Circle: The Boudins and the Aristocracy of the Left, was nominated for a Pulitzer by publisher Alfred Knopf.