New Haven Updates

1. The dirt on the roads is gone... not sure why, I saw no road crews. Maybe dirt evaporates in Connecticut to be made into Acid Mud.

2. The garbage people did a nice thing - they fell for my little ploy. I have two entrances to the house: the front (shared with the first floor neighbor; two doors needing two separate keys; internal door to our house badly made so glass rumbles inside antique doorframe such that guests are afraid the 20 pound pane will wrench loose and bounce off their skulls), or the side (accessible only to us, has outside screen door with no discernible value and a lock with no key). The side door's stairway goes straight up to our kitchen area - where we produce most of our garbage. Basically, I'd like to leave the garbage outside the side door rather than shlep our bags half-a-block to the front entrance. I called the sanitation department, which is populated by the cranky receptionists - who should wake up every day realizing they are in the glamour end of the trash business - and they were confused by my request to change my garbage pick up location. After a few futile conversations, they directed me to the superintendent of Waste (how would you like that on your resume?) who was on vacation... three weeks ago... still no call back. Taking matters into my own perfumed hands like the sanitation vigilante society has forced me to be, I left one bag of experimental garbage on the alternate curb... and they picked it up! We'll see if I can keep this up.

3. Red Light Alert. I forget if I mentioned the stunning fact that in Connecticut you can make a right on red! Unless they don't want you to, which can be a random occurrence. But it beats the NY law which allowed rights on red only if you had a gun.

4. Starbucks vs. Dunkin Donuts. I don't know when it happened, but it appears that Dunkin Donuts won a war and kicked out Starbucks from New Haven. There is one lone 'Buck, I'm told, near campus, that stays alive solely on the padded pocketbooks of dewy freshmen. The rest of this, the newest of Havens, is donutland. And I think it's a good thing. Here's a comparison:

Nickname:

• DD: The Big Double D, Dunkizzle Donizzle, Dunkin' Ho-nuts
• SB: Sloshbucks, Star-too-many-bucks, The Green Diuretic

Decor:

• DD: rows and rows of glorious donuts; all items in store dedicated to food, pure white color scheme offset by rainbow-sprinkle colors; food titles are down-to-earth (e.g. Donut, Big Donut; Chocolate Donut)
• SB: green faux-grunge aesthetic, frou-frou sentimentalities with food hermetically wrapped and given bourgeois titles (e.g. Dillweed Camembert on bagette with honey-pork marinade)

Coffee Names:

• DD: small, medium, large, x-large (24 oz!)
• SB: tall, grande, venti (whoever invented these asinine titles should be whacked)

Prices:

• DD: largest coffee is $2.50
• SB: smallest coffee is just under $2.00

Store Name:

• DD: startlingly functional - the donuts are made to be dunked in coffee
• SB: named after strange fictional character in horrible book

As you can see, I'm glad the Donizzle won the war.