Ugh, gross, did you call 311?

What's 311?

311 is New York City's phone number for... everything, basically. You can call to complain about stuff, like noise, trash, call if you need information.

What is 311?

well, it's intermittent. and unless someone's dying, calling an official # in NYC accomplishes squat.

get up, uh get get down, 311 is a joke in your town...

(besides, New York simply isn't New York without alarms, sirens, car horns and subway trains for background noise.)

Inneresting.

Damn horseless carriages and their steam sirens.

I could be wrong - I probably am - but I think that the whole '311' concept originated in Baltimore.

yep

This would be a perfect opportunity to steal the car. First of all, the owner is obviously not around. Also, nobody is likely to intervene, because they will be so glad to have the alarm shut up. They may even help you if you ask nicely.

Hehe, I think car alarms should always be a sign that the car wants to be stolen. "Help me, get me out of here, I'm bored just sitting around!"

Well, it seems to have temporarily abated. But now it's rainy and windy as fuck. Pips is sick poor girl, but I've got a nice DVD biopic of Ed Roth going and I just downed a quart of Raspberry malt liquor and I've moved on to the Bud.

I left a note on a guy's car when the alarm didn't stop until the battery ran out (we're talking three or four hours straight). It said, approximately "If you ever park your car here again, I will personally spend all night beating the shit out of it with a baseball bat or sledgehammer."

I never saw the car near my house again.

And I did end up denting up his fender in a stupid attempt to reset the damned thing.

They had that at Makor last night--I missed it when it came to the Village East-- and one of the people who worked on it was there. I asked how he and George Barris got along and the guy said horribly--there was a lot of his life left out of the movie. The Barris shop was still in Toluca Lake the last time I was in LA.

I was at a desert rave-type party once where the sound or generator kept dying.

This guy started running around slapping cars setting off any alarms he could find. And then raving to them. He'd get like 10 of 'em going at once. It was pretty funny.

It was even funnier when the mass of angry desert techno nerd hippies he roused started popping open hoods and disconnecting the batteries.

Ahh, functional anarchy in action.

2 car alarm stories:
1. The tough Catholic kids from the scary tough Catholic school up the street from me in East Baltimore used to set them all off every day after school. They'd get out of school and the girls would immediately start hiking up their skirts and putting on dark lipstick and the boys would pull off their ties and then run down the street, jumping on every single bumper until every single car alarm was going.
2. Once on 11th Street in NYC I watched while these three totally messed up homeless guys attempted to break into a car with a tire iron. The guys from the Chinese laundry came out to watch them too; it was like street theatre. They finally jimmied the trunk open but then the alarm went off and they all did this sort of slow motion cartoon of shock, then slowly ran off down the street while the car's trunk stood gaping open and the Chinese guys and I laughed.

We have a similar Catholic school here in Astoria. Every morning they come off the train in a pack and pass right by my apartment. It's difficult to look thuggish in a Catholic school uniform, but they manage.

Raspberry malt liquor

Self-parody becomes you ;)