Showing posts with label Merchant of Venice. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Merchant of Venice. Show all posts

03 October 2017

Coming To A Neighborhood Near...Me

We all waited with bated breath.

No, I didn't mis-spell "bated."  If a cat swallows cheese and stands in anticipation of a mouse, he/she can be said to be waiting with "baited" breath.  But "bated" is just a truncated form of "abated":

Shall I bend low, and in a bondsman's key
Wait with 'bated breath, and whispering humbleness

In Shakespeare's Merchant of Venice, Shylock utters those two lines as part of a soliloquy in which he asks Antonio (the merchant) how he can ask for a loan after Antonio and his associates called him a "cur", spit on him and kicked him around.  Antonio's rationale for their behavior is the "usurious" interest on the loans Shylock gave them.  



Now, of course, I was exaggerating just a bit when I said "we all waited with bated breath."  Nobody does that in New York--except, maybe, for a bank (oh, irony of ironies!)--specifically, Citibank.  But we weren't waiting for a loan so we could open up a pet-boarding house.  Instead, we were eagerly anticipating something else that comes from S-itty--I mean, Citi--bank:  Citibike.



Well, all right, I wasn't waiting for it as much as some other folks were.  After all, I have my own bikes.  But I must say that I am glad that Citibike has come to my neighborhood.  In fact, as of the other day, it was on my corner:



Is the arrival of Citibikes a sign that a neighborhood is "hip"--or that it's merely infested with hipsters?  Whatever the case, I'm glad to see the bikes--even though they're in the ugliest shade of blue--just because I'm happy to see anything that encourages people to ride bikes.



A few days ago I wrote about the thefts that have plagued bike share programs.  Citibike has not been immune to such problems.  Baltimore may have come up with a solution--at least for a while.  There are other interesting ideas out there, including one I found in a 99 cent store just down the street from the new Citibike port: