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Sunday, January 26, 2014
It's all in the calendar(s) and Cuomo
has never read NY Const. Art. 1, Sec. 3. We love to bet and/or work before our employer goes bankrupt like NYC OTB or files for bankruptcy like Suffolk OTB where our union president Kevin McCaffrey is now a Suffolk County Legislator who stands up for working people?
This Valentine's Day, I am calling for a revolution.
An uprising. A revolt against the annual madness.
Cupid
doesn't respond well to orders. Love and romance don't thrive on
command. And yet every year couples are told they must all go out to
celebrate their love on the same evening, and at the same time, as
everyone else.
Greg Clarke
They end up packed into overcrowded
restaurants eating from the overpriced "Valentine's Day Special Menu."
Even Romeo and Juliet might have found their ardor wilting under the
pressure.
So this year I am calling for something different.
I am not suggesting we all abandon the idea of a romantic holiday. Merely that we make one important change. The date.
This year, hold your own Valentine's Day. On a date of your choosing.
Celebrate
it a week later, on Feb. 21. Celebrate in October. Follow the Eastern
Orthodox church and celebrate the Feast of St. Valentine in July. Pick
any day you like—so long as it isn't Feb. 14.
Eric Schaefer,
a financial planner in McLean, Va., says he and his fiancée
started celebrating their own Valentine's Day several years ago. That
way, he says, they "avoid the crowds, save some money and have a more
romantic and quieter evening."
I have
been grappling with the conundrum of Valentine's Day for years—ever
since I walked into my favorite seafood restaurant in London on Feb. 14
and found that the exquisite poached Dover sole wasn't on the menu.
Instead,
my guest and I were told to order instead the "Valentine's Day Special
Menu," a monstrosity in which everything seemed to be stuffed with
something else and then drenched in cream. It also cost more than $100 a
head.
One doesn't want to be unromantic. But one doesn't want to be exploited mercilessly either.
How
much can this save you in simple dollars? This year Feb. 14 falls on a
Friday. (Making things worse, it's also Presidents Day weekend.) I
compared the cost of staying in a hotel in various romantic destinations
for that weekend and the weekend afterward, using the travel website Hotwire.
A simple change. But the difference is striking.
Delaying
by a week could save about 25% on a four-star hotel in Manhattan, and a
third in San Francisco, said the site. Delaying your stay in Las Vegas
could cut the cost in half or more.
According to Expedia,
another travel site, a weekend getaway from New York to Miami,
including flights and two nights at the Fontainebleau Miami Beach, would
cost $2,200 for two on the weekend of the 14th. The same getaway two
weeks later would cost less than $1,700.
Thinking
of Las Vegas? Flights for two from New York, plus two nights at the
Bellagio, cost about $1,600 on the Valentine's weekend—but about $500
less two weeks later.
You may also save
money on flowers and chocolates if you go shopping the week after Feb.
14. Why would you buy in a seller's market on Feb. 13 when it is a
buyer's market on the 15th?
The savings
work only for perishable items, alas.
Scott Tilghman,
a Boston-based analyst at investment advisory B. Riley & Co.,
says that if you are hoping for a jewelry sale on Feb. 15, you may be
waiting in vain. The industry doesn't tend to discount the same way a
florist would, he says.
Worried you're
missing out on the "real" St. Valentine's Day if you don't go out on
Feb. 14? You're misleading yourself. There is no "real" St. Valentine's
Day. It isn't even clear who the "real" St. Valentine was.
Alban Butler,
in his classic "Lives of the Saints," said St. Valentine was a
"holy priest" living in Rome in the third century. He allegedly helped
Christian martyrs being persecuted by the emperor Claudius II. For his
pains he was "beaten with clubs" and then beheaded on Feb. 14, around
the year 270.
Unless you are heavily into bondage, there seems to be no connection with romantic love at all.
Subsequent
historical research has found at least two St. Valentines supposedly
martyred in or around Rome. "Neither of them seems to have any clear
connection with lovers or courting couples," reports the Oxford
Dictionary of Saints.
Some historians
argue the annual festival is really a continuation of Roman and Greek
fertility rites that took place in early or mid-February. Many
historians now believe that the idea of St. Valentine's Day as a
festival for lovers dates back only to the 14th-century English poet
Geoffrey Chaucer, who linked it to the springtime mating ritual of
birds.
The only problem—as anyone who
has lived in England can testify—is that Feb. 14 there isn't the
springtime. Some argue Chaucer's festival was supposed to be in March,
or April, or even May.
Not to be
technical about it, but even if your other half insists that Feb. 14 is
"traditional," you have the problem that the Feb. 14 of the original St.
Valentine—whoever he might be—isn't our Feb. 14 anyway.
The
world began changing calendars in 1582.
Denis Feeney,
a professor of classics at Princeton University, says that Feb.
14 under the old Julian calendar corresponds to Feb. 27 under the
Gregorian calendar we use today.
So if
you really want to mark the beheading of a Roman saint in A.D. 270 by
going out to dinner on the anniversary, you actually need to make a
booking about two weeks later.
Stop scratching on holidays
Published: June 1, 2012
Off Track Betting in New
York State has been racing into a crisis called shrinking
revenue. Some people have spitballed a solution: Don’t close
on holidays. New York State Racing Law
bars racing on Christmas, Easter and Palm Sunday, and the
state has ruled OTBs can’t handle action on those days, even
though they could easily broadcast races from out of state. “You should be able to bet whenever
you want,” said Jackson Leeds, a Nassau OTB employee who
makes an occasional bet. He added some irrefutable logic:
“How is the business going to make money if you’re not open
to take people’s bets?” Elias Tsekerides, president of the
Federation of
Hellenic Societies of Greater New York, said OTB is
open on Greek Orthodox Easter and Palm Sunday. “I don’t want discrimination,”
Tsekerides said. “They close for the Catholics, but open for
the Greek Orthodox? It’s either open for all or not open.” OTB officials have said they lose
millions by closing on Palm Sunday alone, with tracks such
as Gulfstream, Santa Anita, Turf Paradise and Hawthorne
running. One option: OTBs could just stay
open and face the consequences. New York City OTB did just
that back in 2003. The handle was about $1.5 million – and
OTB was fined $5,000. Easy money.
GREEK ORTHODOX FAIL TO PREVENT CARDINAL ANDREW CUOMO FROM DISCRIMINATING AGAINST GREEK ORTHODOX BELIEVERS AND/OR FOR ASSERTING ANDREW CUOMO'S RELIGIOU PREFERENCE ABOVE ALL OTHERS.
Dosed
up on Tylenol and Advil after three days in bed with the flu, Valerie
Markou paced the terrazzo floor of a catering hall in Queens. She
carried a gold paper shopping bag, selling the raffle tickets it
contained and tucking away the $20 bills she received in return.
All
around Ms. Markou on a recent Monday afternoon, 300 guests mingled,
sending up a pleasant thrum of chatter. Some admired the banquet hall’s
chandeliers. Some lingered over the display of raffle prizes. Some
sipped delicately from the wine at the round tables.
For
all the conviviality, the underlying task was grave. On Martin Luther
King’s Birthday, a holiday that has become synonymous with service,
these guests from a single outpost of the Greek diaspora had gathered in
the guise of celebration to raise relief money for their homeland,
impoverished and destabilized by an economic crisis entering its sixth
year.
“Our
mother country needs us,” said Ms. Markou, a travel agent in Brooklyn.
“And who else should help but America? This is the country that educated
me. This is the country that put food on my table. We’d help any
country in need. And Greece is the country of my ancestors.”
It
was no accident that her efforts were taking place under the aegis of
the Greek Orthodox Church, one of the primary institutions linking
Greece to more than a million Greek-Americans. Long before anyone talked
about globalization in its high-tech context, the denomination served
as a superhighway for the Greek diaspora, with immigrants traveling
outward and, in times of dire need, humanitarian assistance flowing
inward.
On its own and through related charities and local churches, the Greek Orthodox Archdiocese of America
has sent $4 million in aid to Greece since 2009. Archbishop Demetrios,
its primate, has personally delivered $700,000 of that amount on three
visits to Greece since 2012.
“The current response does not in any way represent only the present,” said Alexandros Kyrou,
a historian at Salem State University in Massachusetts. “There’s a very
strong relationship between Greece and Greek-Americans, who are the
most dynamic part of the diaspora. This relationship even predates the
establishment of the Greek state.”
Like
her friends Eleni Psaras and Stella Panagakos, Ms. Markou has been an
active member of the National Philoptochos Society, a philanthropic
organization of Greek Orthodox women. The luncheon, which aimed to raise
$30,000 for children’s shelters in Greece, was sponsored by five
Philoptochos chapters in Brooklyn and Staten Island.
As
members of the Philoptochos unit at their church, Holy Cross in the Bay
Ridge section of Brooklyn, Ms. Markou and the others have made four
relief trips to Greece since late 2008, delivering thousands of dollars
and tons of clothing, and witnessing a societal calamity none of them
had expected in this century.
Having
spent itself into a budget deficit of about 15 percent and then been
pressured into an austerity regimen by the European Union, Greece has
seen disposable income plummet by 40 percent since 2008. Unemployment
has reached almost 30 percent. Among children, the level of “food
insecurity,” meaning hunger or the imminent risk of it, tops 50 percent
in the poorest sections of the nation.
“People
went back to raising chickens, pigs,” said Ms. Psaras, who immigrated
to America as a teenager in 1969 and is now a real estate broker. “I
called my friend the other day, she told me, ‘I got a goat.’ No one uses
oil to heat their house. My sister-in-law told me she has wood. People
go to farms to chop wood.”
An
embodiment of the protracted crisis sat at the Holy Cross luncheon
table in the form of Markella Antoniou, 29, the girlfriend of Ms.
Psaras’s son. After earning a master’s degree in molecular medicine from
a British university, Ms. Antoniou came to New York looking for work.
“Most
of my friends are living in Germany or England,” she said. “They have
master’s degrees, but if they go back to Greece, they end up working in
video clubs, in tourism. If you’re in business or medicine, there are no
jobs.”
The
slow-motion cataclysm of Greece presents a challenge to the tradition
of diasporic aid, Dr. Kyrou said. During both world wars, the suffering
of Greeks was abrupt and apparent. No rational person could blame the
victims for what they endured at the hands of Ottoman opponents and Axis
occupiers.
Over
the course of the wartime periods, both religious and secular
organizations provided humanitarian assistance as part of umbrella
coalitions such as the Relief Committee for Greeks of Asia Minor and the
Greek War Relief Association. In addition to the Greek Orthodox Church,
Greek-Americans involved in import-export businesses were also
particularly well suited to help funnel relief.
The
current economic crisis, however, has unfolded and persisted over a
period of years. It has been accompanied by a public narrative that
blames the Greek people for being spendthrifts and tax dodgers and
characterizes the harsh results of austerity as some kind of moral
tonic.
“The
crisis isn’t as immediate as an invasion,” Dr. Kyrou said. “It has been
slow in gaining its momentum, but it’s now reached a crushing level.
But it is no less of a humanitarian crisis than the ones in the past,
and it needs the kind of humanitarian response Greek-Americans have
provided in the past.”
The
women of Holy Cross have struggled to get across precisely that point.
In previous years, the Philoptochos luncheon raised money for people
with AIDS, children with autism, breast cancer research and library
construction. The decision to commit this year’s intake to Greece, even
specifically to needy children, faced some internal opposition.
Ms.
Psaras has found herself frequently assuring donors that the aid will
be hand-delivered to shelters and families rather than being passed
through government channels. And, she invariably adds, she and the other
volunteers are paying their own way.
“By us going there,” she said in a recent conversation, “we give them ... ”
Ms. Markou, standing nearby, finished the sentence: “... a little hope and comfort.”
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