Boy, an s-load of corrections in the NYT today! Not the least of which include the admission that in the frenzy of their breathless dork-out about the perfect use of a semicolon on an MTA placard, they messed up on comma usage.

The Times was sooo thrilled to find a vaguely correct use of a semicolon on a subway ad that they tracked down the copywriter (who has a degree in creative writing, natch) and wrote a whole cutesy piece about how rare it is that civilians punctuate properly. Then they asked various famous linguists and grammarians to comment:

• 30-day unlimited cards are now $81, 7-day cards $25, and the brand-new 14-day card will be $47.

Again, there's cause to wonder: does Page Six Magazine purposely refuse to edit the ramblings of heiress-model Lydia Hearst so that their magazine will be mentioned online? "It's absurd that the MTA is raising the rate of the monthly MetroCard but keeping the single rate fair [SIC!] at $2, so the tourists keep their discount. As a New Yorker, I feel like I am being penalized because I ride the subway more often than not and buy the unlimited 30-day card," begins Lydia's latest.

Now the MTA is literally stealing from us! If you're foolish enough to deliver lost property to a bus or subway worker, chances are slim that'll it end up in the "lost property storage unit," according to a probe by the MTA's inspector general's office. Investigators posing as passengers handed 26 items to MTA employees and ended up recovering three of them. And apparently the lost property unit itself is a gold mine of unsecured valuables! Wallets and "several years worth of passports" are all sitting in unlocked drawers and cabinets—and "unauthorized workers from other divisions" are running wild throughout. Free passports for everyone! [NYDN]

When Hero Governor Eliot Spitzer got the MTA to freeze subway fares at $2, he also promised that the raises in other fares would drop from the proposed 6.5% to 3.85%. So naturally the MTA is now going to raise the cost of the monthly unlimited Metrocard from $76 to $81, in the hopes that no one will bother to do the math involved in figuring out that everyone is a greedy liar. [NYT]
[Image via NYDN]

Hooray! The Daily News took on City Hall and beat the Transit Hike! All New Yorkers owe those intrepid journalists a huge debt of gratitude for personally finding the MTA an extra $220 million and forcing them to delay their fare increase for a year or two. The 7% of Subway riders who pay the $2 cash fare are sleeping easy tonight. The vast majority of us who use the multiple-ride and unlimited monthly Metrocards, prices of both of which are still expected to rise, will grin and bear it like usual. Thanks, Daily News! [NYDN]

Governor Spitzer will hold a press conference at 9 to recommend that the MTA hold off on a fare hike. NY1 may not cover the conference live, because the Governor's office is all the way up on the 34th floor.

Reactions to the MTA's proposed fare hike ($2.25/ride, unspecified increases to monthly and weekly metrocards, and higher prices for LIRR and Metro-North tix): "Hell no," "I find it ridiculous," and "Ladies and gentlemen, fuhgeddaboutit!" (that last from Brooklyn Borough President Marty Markowitz. Does he have any other purpose?). The increase will most likely happen anyway, starting early next year. Because you don't matter. [NYP]

"With weather forecasters predicting flash flooding and heavy thunderstorms in New York City, the Metropolitan Transportation Authority faces the possibility of additional service shutdowns Friday as it struggles to clear tracks of debris left from Tuesday's flood and readies the system to handle more rain." Our commute seemed fine this morning, but we get up pretty early. And guess what? It's STILL SLIGHTLY RAINING. [NYS]

We live in an era of apathy and cynicism. Government is broken; religion fails to relieve the anxiety of the age; torpor and resigned acceptance are the default responses to the inconveniences and incivilities life throws in our way on a daily basis. So when a group comes together and rouses itself against injustice, despite the arduous effort and unlikely odds of success, that group deserves to be celebrated, nay, put forth as a model for others to follow.

So a bunch of angry Irish folks have put down their pints of Powers Gold Label long enough to feel aggrieved by something, which, let's face it, is their favorite thing to do after getting plastered and blowing up cars in heavily-populated areas anyway. This time Seamus and Co. are upset about "a St. Patrick's Day liquor ban on New York's commuter railroads, calling the move a gross act of stereotyping and discrimination."

We've been playing around with the MTA's new Trip Planner, which not only provides routes when you enter starting point and destination info, but also gives estimated bus and subway arrival times, and so far . . . we hesitate to jinx this . . . it seems like it might be kind of awesome and actually useful, unlike anything else the MTA has ever done in its entire life. Unfortunately, we're far from our usual Greenpoint Avenue G proximate-haunts and are unable to test out the new system, so we were hoping you'd give it a whirl and let us know: does the subway actually come when they say it will? Or has the MTA duped us yet again? Let us know.

Those of us who commute into Manhattan from the wilds of Long Island - and Brooklyn and Queens - are all too cognizant of the fact that there's only one thing that can make a packed-to-the-gills LIRR car tolerable: the willingness of the MTA to let us get hammered on the train for all these years. Down a couple of Bud talls and the fat fuck sitting next to you will be your compadre-for-life by the time you reach Jamaica.

It's good to know that there are still people out there who are committed to causes, who aren't afraid to unite in the face of a monolithic, hegemonic power that just wants to keep them down. Iraq, you say? Er, no. Global warming, perhaps? Wrong again. Ah, the ongoing crisis in the Middle East. Surely, that's worth putting yourself on the line for. Well ... wrong again.

(More) Bugaboos on Bedford Avenue! Even longer lines at Southpaw! Less stuff for people to gripe about in those moving back to Manhattan trend pieces! This is the good (well, hey, it's good for us) news for today: the MTA announced that it will fiiiinally respond to the population growth in the Greenpoint/Williamsburg area and add 5 stops to the G train ("long considered the step-child of the MTA"), making a trek from the Slope to the 'Burg more feasible than ever before. L train service will also double up. Thank fucking God, is all we have to say. The only tiny downside that we can see is that by the time these plans actually take effect (late 2007— early 2008), we will be too old for one of the neighborhoods and still too poor for the other. Oh well.

MTA to Bookst L, G Lines Service [AMNY]

To follow-up on our transit transients who intended to break the record for most egregious waste of time fastest ride through the entire NYC subway system, covering all of 230 miles in the process.

Tomorrow at 6 AM, suspected bong collectors Matt Green and Don Badaczewski (above) will get off of their couch and attempt to break the world record for riding the entire NYC subway system in the least amount of time. The current unconfirmed record stands at 25 hours, 11 minutes, but Green and Badaczewski will attempt to subvert the laws of MTA's nature and beat the time — though, just from the looks of them, we worry that they've not contacted the proper record-keeping authorities. ("Dude, you said YOU were gonna call!") From their press release, written in the third person:

Last year, Sikh station agent employee Trilok Arora and others sued the MTA over its requirement that they wear the MTA logo on their turbans. Arora still refuses to wear the logo and only pins it to his turban when ordered by a supervisor. Unfortunately he was photographed during one of those logo-wearing instances, and he's found himself pictured in his MTA turban in a brochure outlining MTA dress codes. Arora is embarrassed to have emerged as an unwitting poster boy for a policy he's against; the MTA, however, stridently monitors the proper appropriation of their logo. But we think these two can meet each other halfway:

The MTA may not care how much shit the Jews for Jesus slap against its walls, but let them make a graven image using the transit agency's logos and the anger of the righteous finally descends. Seems the MTA has trademarked the concept of letters with a circle around them for almost the entire alphabet, and they're none to pleased by the JFJ's attempts to use their logotypes on T-shirts. The JFJ, on the other hand, had this rather curious reaction: