What's that bridge, and which way are those trains going?

On Saturday, I was at my friend Dan's house in Astoria (Queens, for non-New Yorkers), acting in a short film he was shooting. He wanted the main characters of shot against the New York skyline for the opening credits, so we walked down to Astoria Park. I'd never been there before...it was quite pretty. The park runs along the East River, across from Randall's Island (or was that Ward's Island?), in the shadows of the Triboro Bridge and another bridge, one that Dan said was used by Amtrak trains. Standing there under the bridge, those assembled had several questions.

1. What was this bridge called?
2. How could it carry Amtrak trains? There's no Amtrak service on Long Island.
3. Is that Randall's Island we're looking at, or Ward's Island?

There was a plaque under the bridge, which said it was called the New York Connecting Railroad Bridge, a delightfully creative sobriquet for a bridge that was built in the early 1900s to connect the Pennsylvania Railroad to the New Haven Railroad, linking New York and points South with New England.

Once I got back to a computer, I found out that the bridge is now called Hell Gate Bridge, named after Hell Gate, the passage it spans. According to Wikipedia, "Hell Gate" is a corruption of its original Dutch name, Hellegat (or "bright passage"). The entire East River was so named by the Dutch explorer Adriaen Block in 1614. The hellish Anglicization turned out to be appropriate: hundreds of ships had sunk in Hell Gate by 1876, when the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers used 50,000 lbs. of explosives to blow up the most treacherous rocks in the strait.

As for Randall's Island and Ward's Island, they are now connected by landfill. The body of water that used to separate them? Little Hell Gate.

Still no explanation, though, of what Amtrak trains were doing on Long Island. I finally had to look at maps and aerial photographs to figure out what was going on. (Pardon me if this obvious to you...I've never taken a train from New York to Boston. Only cars and Chinatown buses.) It turns out that when an Amtrak train leaves Penn Station, it goes under the East River through the East River Tunnels, just like Long Island Rail Road trains. Why? In 1901, the Pennsylvania Railroad, which then terminated in Jersey City, bought the Long Island Rail Road, which then also did not reach Manhattan. The Pennsylvania Railroad dug tunnels under the Hudson and East Rivers, built the then spectacular Pennsylvania Station, and their access to Manhattan was only rivalled by that of the New York, New Haven and Hartford Railroad, which terminated at Grand Central. (Portions of the latter are now Metro North and the Amtrak Northeast Corridor.)

The portion of the Amtrak route in Queens runs along the New York Connecting Railroad. According to Wikipedia:

Amtrak owns the line north of Sunnyside Junction, which forms part of the Northeast Corridor. South of this point, CSX is the owner.

The line begins at the Hell Gate Bridge over the East River. This is a massive span, a main span of 1,017 feet (310 m) and a total length of over 17,000 feet (5.2 km). Continuing south the line is on a high-level elevated viaduct, over Astoria and Interstate 278 (Grand Central Parkway). The line then is on an embankment and Sunnyside Junction, where Amtrak's Northeast Corridor line branches off, is here. The line heads south and parallels Interstate 278 (Brooklyn Queens Expressway) for a distance. This portion of the line was completely rebuilt in 2002. Now in the section of Elmhurst, the NYCR passes under several streets in a cut. An arched concrete viaduct over Queens Boulevard is followed by street overpasses under cut and overpasses over streets as well in Maspeth. After crossing under the Long Island Expressway (Interstate 495) and passing a few cemeteries, the line reach Fresh Pond Yard. This is the main facility for shipping freight by rail in and out of New York City and Long Island.

So, if you see a train heading northwest, away from Queens, it's actually bound for the Northeast, across the viaducts of Randall's/Ward's Island and into the Bronx. As far as I can tell, it seems that that line meets up with the Metro North New Haven line, which goes up through Harlem and stays farther from the water than the Hell Gate Amtrak section, at around New Rochelle. I'm not sure whether Amtrak uses both sections or not, though apparently, Metro North trains may use the Hell Gate Bridge some time in the near future.

By the way, if you enjoy the Hell Gate Bridge (and its dark red color, from its paint job in 1996), you will be happy to know that it may be around for a while. According to the February 2005 issue of Discover magazine, if humans disappeared, Hell Gate would be the last New York bridge to collapse: they estimate it would stand for 1,000 years.

Further reading
The History of Amtrak, or, Can you believe America actually has a nationalized industry of any kind?
A map of Queens neighborhoods

In which I fail to discover the name of a bodily function, and try to name it myself

So there we were—my girlfriend, her roommate and I—having just finished a meal of slow-cooked pork, egg noodles and root vegetables, when the roommate did that thing. You know... kind of like a single hiccup? An involuntary inhalation of air that happens after you've eaten a big meal, and usually sounds like you gasping the word "HUP"? And for some reason you feel compelled to excuse yourself, as you would after belching?

"What makes us do that?" I said to them. "And what is it called?"

Well, after spending hours searching the Internet, not only did I fail to find either an explanation or a name for the phenomenon, but, as far as I can tell, no one has even written about it. IN THE HISTORY OF MAN. How is that possible? You know what I'm talking about, right?

When Googling something like this, all roads lead to hiccups. So let's talk about them first. A hiccup, according to Uncle Wikipedia, is a spasm of the diaphragm that causes you to sharply inhale, until your glottis flaps shut. It's scientific name is singultus. (In case you enjoy bodily functions but hate crass language, you should also know the words sternutation [sneezing] and eructation [burping]. You can find the scientific names of all the effluvia here.)

Also? According to Wikipedia the Guinness World Record for the longest bout of hiccups gies to Charles Osborne, an Iowan who hiccuped constantly from 1922 to 1990. Sixty. Eight. Years. Of. Hiccups. I can't believe he didn't shoot himself in the face.

I spent much of the time googling various combinations of the words involuntarily, inhalation, gasp, after eating, ate too much, etc. One of the weirder things I came across was a detailed refutation of the aquatic ape theory (or hypothesis, which he abbreviates as the AAH/T). Since the sixties, apparently, there's been a hypothesis among certain, uh, thinkers that the only thing that explains the divergence of human anatomy from that of the other primates is a more aquatic past. I don't quite understand what that more aquatic past would consist of. Like Waterworld, but with cavemen?

Not that I have that many readers at this point, but readers? I need your help. Do you know anything about this phenomenon? Is there a name for it even, say, among your group of friends? While you work on that, I'll try to ask people in that world outside the Internet. My girlfriend says there are people called "doctors" who might be answer this question.

Until I hear a better name, I hereby dub it hupping. As in, "I was so full I hupped, like, four times."

In which my hunger for knowledge trumps my distaste for discussing poo.

WARNING: Don't read this post during dinner, in church or as a bedtime story to your children. In fact, you may just want to take your laptop into the bathroom with you.

My friend Andy told us recently about a mystery co-worker who's been leaving cups of water next to the toilet in the men's room. Here's how he put it (he's a stand-up comedian):

Everyday this guys feels a shit coming on and he's like, "lemme bring a cup of water in with me to quench my thirst while I'm pinching off this mad loaf. Gotta stay hydrated. Ok. Let me just set this down next to my left foot while I,"

*clench, growl, push, gasp, feeeeeyart, turdblast, sigh*
*wipe, wipe, wipe*
*zip*

"Oh hey, my water. Yeah, like I'm going to drink THAT now. Duh."

Quite a conundrum. But it rang a bell. What was that thing called in Kuala Lumpur? Why do I want to say mandi or mandee?

You see, I taught English in Tokyo for a while. Japan is a world-leader in toilet technology now, with toilets that stop just short of taking care of the intestinal peristalsis for you, but it's still possible in some places to see the old-fashioned squat toilets that have long been the standard in much of Asia. For Westerners, and people with bad knees, these toilets can take some getting used to. What are you supposed to do with your pants? What if you (*shudder*) lose your balance?

Still, even Japanese squat toilets offer toilet paper.

In many other parts of the world, though, toilet paper is not the norm. I first heard about this, I think, when I read Salman Rushdie's The Satanic Verses. One of the characters, who I believe was Indian (it's been a while), was horrified to discover that Westerners, after a BM, do not wash their recently befouled backsides with water, instead preferring to use dry pieces of paper. Just as horrified, perhaps, as a Westerner is to discover that in much of India, Africa and the Arab World, defecators use... their hand.

After I left Tokyo, I backpacked around Southeast Asia for a while, and usually thought to have a roll of toilet paper with me, just in case. But it's not second nature for an American to bring toilet paper with him to the bathroom, and I was unpleasantly surprised, in a hostel in Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia, to find next to the toilet not a roll of paper but a basin of water. Yikes!

Anyway, when Andy told me about the mystery cup of water, I thought, maybe that cup was supposed to stand in for that basin I wrestled with back in Malaysia. What was it called? After way too much searching, I finally figured it out. I was mostly right: it's called a bak mandi (lit., wash basin) or just mandi. I finally found it on this post on a site about getting jobs in Indonesia, and this hilarious self-portrait an Aussie photographer took of himself in an Indonesian bathroom, or kamar mandi.

The average Indonesian home doesn't have a shower or bath, but rather a bak mandi, a water basin built into the wall of the bathroom. In the bak mandi floats a plastic scoop which is used to pour water over the body while standing on the floor of the bathroom (not in the bak mandi). This is very refreshing when the temperature is sizzling. It is not uncommon to take these three or four times daily to cool off. Indonesian toilets are of the squat variety, and though toilet paper is sometimes available, it's important that it be disposed of in the trash, not the toilet (their plumbing systems can't handle it).

Apparently, the bak mandi can be a big basin built into the wall of the bathroom, or it can be, as I saw, a small plastic tub. It's interesting that the post above suggests that the scoop (or gayung) would be floating in the bak mandi, because I stumbled upon one website where there was a raging debate as to where the scoop should be placed after you finish it. The consensus from the Malaysian Miss Mannerses was next to the bak mandi, upside down. (If it's floating around in the water, you would have to fish it out and foul the water with your dirty hand.)

You may have some questions at this point. One might be, "Wait? Are you talking about Indonesia or Malaysia?" Well, Malay (Bahasa Melayu or Bahasa Malaysia) and Indonesian (Bahasa Indonesia) are very similar languages. Malay is spoken in Malaysia, Singapore and Brunei, and the local version was made the official language of Indonesia in 1945. (The majority of Indonesians are of Malay descent.) Both languages serve as a sort of lingua franca in these ethnically diverse countries — including hundreds of regional ethnicities and populations of Chinese, Indians and Arabs — though English is dominant in Malaysia and Singapore.

And this whole business about using your hand to wipe yourself? In most places where this practice is still common, it is customary to use your left hand. Your right hand is used for greeting, eating and passing things to people. This fits with the historical connotations of the left as bad (from which we get the words sinister and gauche) and the right as good (adroit, dexterity, the rights of man, etc.) Islamic code seems to take this idea to extremes.

All this from my trying to remember what that thing in the Malaysian bathroom was called. Actually, that isn't the half of it. Here are some of the interesting facts I stumbled upon along the way.

• The first recorded instance of manufactured toilet paper is from 14th-century China. It was made for the Emperor.
• It wasn't until the mid-19th century that Americans started manufacturing toilet paper. Before that, they used such items as corn cobs, leaves and pages from the Farmer's Almanac (which was sold with a hole punched in the corner so you could hang pages on a nail in the outhouse).
• Englishman Thomas Crapper did not, in fact, invent the flush toilet, but he helped popularize it. The word "crap" already existed, dating back to the 15th century.

Incidentally, Andy says that, as far as he knows, there are no Muslims at his office. Another co-worker has anonymously posted a note in the stall that reads, "Take your water with you."

FURTHER READING
Wikipedia articles on Toilets, Toilet Paper and Islamic Toilet Etiquette
Why Some Toilet Seats Are U-Shaped, How Crapper Didn't Invent the Flush Toilet and more
How to Use a Squat Toilet
The Great Toilet Paper Shortage
A Malaysian Man Lectures His Countrymen on How to Properly Use Western Toilets