Week of June 11-17, 2011

Riders this week: 10,812

Rider miles this week: 111,645

DOWN IN THE TUBE

Gwyneth Paltrow was spotted riding from Sag Harbor to East Hampton last Saturday morning. Some people thought she was on her way to the Grand Opening of the Restoration Hardware Store on Main Street in East Hampton. Others said she was off to Cyril’s in Napeague, but in the crowds that day nobody was able to keep track of where she got off.

SARAH PALIN VISITS

Sarah Palin, who has been traveling around the country with her entourage visiting bowling alleys, motorcycle gang conventions, shrimp boat docks and Walmarts to be with her “people,” also came out to the Hamptons last week to visit the little fishing shack she owns in Hampton Bays and sit in her rowboat to be photographed “fishing.” She also visited the Hampton Subway building on Ponquogue Avenue and ate a hoagie in the cafeteria with some of the workers, then walked down to the Hampton Bays subway platform across the street to be photographed next to a subway train. [expand]

ANNUAL AUCTION

The Hamptons Subway maintenance crew, which has been collecting debris and other junk from the subway tunnels for the past year, will hold it’s annual auction next Thursday at 4 p.m. in the lobby of Hampton Bays HQ. Items include an unused Kleenex box, magazines, baby bottles both full of milk and not, car keys and wedding rings. This is the third year this auction has been taking place and it’s hoped that there is a bigger turnout than in the past and that more of this stuff is sold than before. Recycling is a big part of saving our planet, after all.

RIDE FREE FOR A MONTH

Straphangers can now have a microchip embedded in their heads that will allow them to go through the turnstiles without having to swipe a subway card. The procedure can be performed by any doctor in the community licensed by Hampton Subway to do the job. The cost of each trip using the chip, during the first year, is $1 instead of $2 deducted from a pre-arranged credit card. (The secretaries in your physician’s office are also trained to do this.) The volunteers who tested these chips in a three-month pre-approval test (required by the Metropolitan Transit Authority) say that the chips also work on the turnstiles of the Atlanta subway system, and, surprisingly, also open certain hotel room doors and locked cars.

PIPING PLOVER PROBLEM SOLVED

As reported last week, flocks of endangered piping plover birds were repeatedly seen fluttering around in a tunnel between East Hampton and Wainscott. If they nested on the tracks, the subway would have had to shut down. Due to the creative thinking of Bobby Benton, a messenger trainee at our Hampton Bays headquarters, it was decided to temporarily remove all the vent gratings above the tunnels that sit flush in the ground throughout the Hamptons. We did and the piping plovers, bless them, flew away.

COMMISSIONER ASPINALL’S MESSAGE

I was privileged to have an invitation to meet with Sarah Palin when she was at her fishing shack in Hampton Bays last Thursday. It came at the last minute and so unfortunately, I had to leave in the middle of one of our monthly meetings with disgruntled subway passengers. When you get an invitation like this from a great woman, you do what you have to do. But when I got to her fishing shack, her rowboat was there along with all her household help, but Sarah was nowhere to be found. She’d gone off in her tour bus to meet with some unemployed blue-collar workers in a bar in Mastic Beach. She’s an impulsive woman, that Sarah. She gets my vote. [/expand]