With the Giants getting ready for a very unusual Super Bowl tomorrow in Indianapolis, it is only fitting that it took a very unusual set of circumstances for them to get their beloved and traditional Friday after-practice Long Island pizza there. Umberto's was given a police escort to LaGuardia Airport yesterday in order to fly out to Indy to deliver 15 pies to the team. And the millionaires seemed to enjoy the fact that greenhouse gases were pumped into the atmosphere so they could enjoy lukewarm pizza, despite a lack of salsa.
Video: Giants Devour Special Delivery Of Long Island Pizza
Umberto's Pizza Gets Police Escort To LaGuardia For Giants Lunch Delivery
Since the Giants devour pizzas from Long Island's Umberto's after every Friday practice, you wouldn't think a little four hour flight would stop them while they're in Indianapolis for the Super Bowl, right? Except the Giants aren't going to be returning to New York for their weekly meal, they're having it delivered to them—never underestimate the power of superstition when it comes to the sports set. But what's really absurd is that the pizzas just got a police escort to LaGuardia Airport!
That's So Brooklyn: Park Slope Sex Shop Now Delivering Toys By Bike
The Babeland outpost in Park Slope is offering up a new service for Brooklynites who don't want to get out of bed: they'll deliver sex toys to your door, and by bike! According to the Brooklyn Paper (who just happened to find out about it?), the service costs a whopping 30 bucks, but it's free on Valentine's Day.
Delivery Tipping Map Shows Stingy Customers In Financial District
Proper tipping etiquette (20%, 90% of the time) can be enforced by the angry stares of your tablemates and the shame that gnaws at your soul when you look a competent, friendly server in the eye and tip them 15%. But who's keeping you in line when you summon chimichangas to your apartment on a rainy night? Visual.ly takes 3.5 million Seamless orders and creates a nifty chart showing the most popular foods ordered on the service and the average percentage of tips left on them. What neighborhood is the stingiest? The Financial District, with an average tip of 12.31% Way to put those company credit cards to use!
Order Takeout From The Comfort Of Your TV!
Hey, America, are you too busy watching Dancing With The Stars reruns to be bothered to pick up the phone and order a meat-lovers burrito for yourself? Great! Just hop on your remote and order away, without all the fuss of pausing the TV and actually speaking to a real human being.
Duh: New Yorkers Really Love Their Takeout Food
The 2011 Zagat Survey were released last week, and there were plenty of good reasons to be interested in what it can tell you about NYers eating habits. But there was one bit of information we weren't terribly surprised about: New Yorkers frickin' love takeout.
[UPDATE] Deliveryman For Chinese Musician Restaurant Killed In Greenpoint, Driver Reportedly Charged With DWI
[UPDATE BELOW: The driver's neighbor writes us in his defense.] A delivery worker, described by police as a 41-year-old Asian man, was killed last night in Greenpoint when a driver in a Buick struck him from behind as he waited at a stop sign. The accident occurred around 7 p.m. at the sleepy intersection of Leonard Street and Meserole Avenue, and witness Sheryl Yvette tells us the driver also hit a livery cab minivan at the intersection. In an email, she describes the horrible scene:
Ordering Pizza To Times Square Plazas Is The Way Of The Future
What better place to sit down, not smoke a cigarette and have some lunch than smack in the middle of Times Square? Other than literally anywhere else, that is. The Times Square Alliance is trying to make their pedestrian plazas an inviting place to hang, especially for the office crowd, and their latest idea is to say it with food. The TSA issued two requests for proposals today, one for a food and beverage concession stand [pdf], and the other for a food delivery service for the plaza [pdf]. And according to their FAQs, "Beer and Wine is permitted if the proper license is obtained."
72,000 Pounds Of Food Didn't Go To Waste
Need to warm up? This story should give you the warm fuzzies (sorry). City Harvest reports (via their Facebook) that "FreshDirect donated approximately 72,000 pounds of food this week after Monday’s snowstorm brought business to a halt on the East Coast." The food would have gone undelivered and to waste otherwise. This is a photo from this morning's 1,000 pound drop off at the Holy Apostles Soup Kitchen in Chelsea.
Home Depot Is One Stop Shop For Flooring, Heart Valves
Perhaps Home Depot is trying to get out of the home makeover market and into bodily makeovers. Or perhaps this courier service just got really lost. Employees at the Home Depot on Third Avenue were shocked that a box allegedly containing heart valves meant for a hospital in Chicago wound up at their store. "I think it's crazy. They should look at their packages before they deliver them," one employee told ABC 7. However, no one at Home Depot or the courier service seems to be talking, so we're just going to assume there are some weird Aztec rituals going on in the back room.
Cell Phones, Daily News Columnists Equally Annoying
Just as cops block bike lanes every morning and man still refuses to ask for directions, so too will people yakking loudly on cell phones forever annoy us. And so too will obligatory articles about how cell phones annoy us annoy us. It might not stop us from demanding we get reception on the subway, but we always find new ways to study and criticize other people's cell phone etiquette.
Wife Of Man Killed By Bicycle Rider Gets DOT Apology
Yesterday the NYC DOT commissioner met with the wife of a man killed last year in a collision with a cyclist riding the wrong way on a Midtown street. Not long after the tragic accident, Nancy Gruskin, widow of Stuart Gruskin, wrote the mayor about safety issues and asked for a meeting with someone at the DOT. Her response was a form letter from Commissioner Janette Sadik-Khan, addressed to her dead husband.
New App Brings Delivery To Central Park
Earlier today, the Times tried to kick off a new Manhattan-Brooklyn battle, this time over whether Central or Prospect Park is the superior park. Really, there's nothing better than spending a lazy summer day in either park. Having said that...iPhone offers a pretty compelling argument as to why Central Park is superior: you can now order delivery there!
New Delivery Service Uses All Of NYC As Inventory
Just as we're being launched into the long, hot, humid days of summer, a new delivery service has beta-launched so lazy New Yorkers can stay in the air conditioning while someone else peddles to get Frappuccinos, or whatever.
NY Pizza Blue: Delivering Pies With Red Lights Flashing
If all this talk of Pizzacones is creating a craving emergency in your belly, help is just a phone call away—at least for parts of Brooklyn. Bushwick resident William Meyer just sent us this dark yet humorous photo of an NYPD Parking Enforcement Vehicle retrofitted as a pizza delivery car. Meyer tells us he saw it "stopped in the middle of rush hour traffic on Bushwick Ave on Friday; its red emergency strobes were on and rotating, and the driver was standing at the back, taking a pizza out of the trunk for delivery."
Are Museums Using Enough Protection?
In light of the recent Picasso accident at the Met, it's sort of nerve-racking to see a masterpiece like this out in the open, no? One blogger recently spotted this painting being unloaded at the Guggenheim during lunchtime, noting how it "is only clad in plastic wrapping and the 2 handlers look about as professional as the college stoners I used to hire to move my Ikea furniture in a minivan." And what artist gets this kind of handling? Joan Miró, who is certainly worthy of some bubble wrap, at least.
How Early Is Too Early to Steal the Sunday Times? Reporters Weigh In
This whole business of charging readers for access to the New York Times website got us thinking about a slight ethical dilemma we ignore every Sunday afternoon while liberating a fat, neglected copy of the Times from some out-of-towner's stoop. How early is too early to steal someone's Sunday Times? For guidance, we asked a couple NY Times reporters. (They don't get free subscriptions!) One veteran staff reporter, who agreed to speak anonymously, is surprisingly brazen:
Video: Chinese Food Delivery with a Song
Heads up, delivery men and women: It's not enough anymore to just dash up the stairs to our apartments (being careful not to get mugged or killed on the way) and deliver our food in a timely manner. These days, people expect a little more show biz, a little more razzle dazzle. (In the musical theater world, it's called "eyes, tits and teeth.") Well, whatever you call it, this kid's got it. China Fun singing deliveryman Yang Yu Bao may be serenading Upper West Siders now, but it's only a matter of time before he's delivering dinner to the biggest theaters on Broadway.
UES Eateries Accused Of Racism For Not Delivering To Harlem
Two Upper East Side restaurants refuse to deliver uptown to East Harlem, but they willingly schlep longer distances downtown to service a more affluent and more white neighborhood. An investigation by the Post reveals that both Chinese Mirch on Second Avenue between 94th and 95th streets and One Fish Two Fish on Madison Avenue and 97th Street declined to deliver to addresses located 15 blocks to the north, but readily fulfilled orders 20 blocks to the south — a delivery discrepancy that "smacks of racism," according to state Sen. Bill Perkins (D-Harlem). "The difference between north and south is black and white," he said.
Police Release Sketch of Bogus UPS Deliveryman
The front steps of brownstones throughout the West Village are now decorated with police sketches of a man suspected in a string of home invasions during the past few weeks. The man has sometimes posed a UPS worker to gain access to five apartments since his first job on October 16th, when he entered the home of an 84-year-old woman on Bank Street after asking her for a glass of water. While she retrieved the refreshment, he fled with a cell phone and a watch.
Hide Your Wives: The Milkman Returns
The milkman cometh! The nostalgic middle-of-the-night milk delivery service, complete with glass bottles, has returned to New York. The Daily News tagged along with the two milkmen, Matt Marone and Frank Acosta, who started their business a couple of years ago, and now deliver to around 50 households in Manhattan. They're also expanding to Brownstone Brooklyn next month—where surely the two good looking gents will quickly become a hot topic amongst Park Slope mom gossip circles.
Reports of Baby Born on L Train, Delaying Service
[UPDATE BELOW] For crying out loud, some lady had to go into labor on the subway during rush hour this morning, tying up service on the L line. This better be one cute baby. We've gotten multiple reports that the L is held up because of the delivery. One tipster tells us the woman actually delivered at the First Avenue L station, and a Twitter user reports that she gave birth between Brooklyn and Manhattan.
Man Offers Costco Deliveries To UWS, UES
Have you dreamed of buying 3-liter bottles of olive oil from Costco, but you can't because you're not a member and don't have a car? Well, City Room found a service run by Michael Eberstadt, who owns the Rack and Soul bbq restaruant, called BigBoxDeliveries which will bring bulk items to folks on the Upper East and Upper West Sides: "The customer and Mr. Eberstadt split the savings from shopping at a Costco. To make it worth his time, his share has to be a minimum of $40." He explains he doesn't have much overhead since he has a truck and points out, "There are certain things you need in bulk. That is what I am hoping to provide: cases of Gatorade, Tide." But he admits his wife, a white-collar defense attorney, "thought it was the stupidest thing she ever heard of."
Seltzer Man Injury Leads to Soda Club Dread
If Brooklyn's seemed a little less bubbly than usual lately, we may have tracked down the culprit—Ronny the Seltzer Man is down! Ronny Beberman, the last seltzer man driving a "real seltzer truck," has been out of commission since last Tuesday after falling from his truck, suffering a bloody head gash and breaking several bones. The Times quotes a legendary seltzer man who once said, "I can’t stop these dreams — I keep seeing all the people I missed on the route."
Our Future: Overcrowding and Sewage Delivery?
The opening line in this Wired article is sort of terrifying: "It's 2020, and cities are so overcrowded that it’s impossible to deliver packages." The megalopolis of the future sounds claustrophobic to say the least, but just how will we get our much needed crap delivered to our doors and desks? Before it breeds post-consumer waste, it'll travel through the sewer systems!
Strangers With Synthetic Crack Candy
It's not quite '80s Manhattan, but the Club Animals troupe are tapping in to the vibe of old, drug-laden New York by bringing a crack rock delivery service to your front door. Okay, so maybe furry animals delivering candy is aiming more towards the Disneyfication of the city. Here's what they have to say for themselves: "we are personally delivering a 100% sugar crack rock (multi-colored and multi-flavored with snow cone syrup) to your Brooklyn house on demand. Expect a 7-foot tall man in a plush, blue mascot head, white gloves and a tuxedo to come knocking soon after you call or text for delivery. You can purchase a few candy crack rocks for $1 a pop in a 1" x 1" crack bag." Seems innocent, if not a bit creepy (this is the same man who gives bouncy rides in the subway). But wait! The closing sentence declares: "Can't say too much here because y'know it's drugs." Follow the link if you wanna take your chances. See you on Dateline!
Technology Allows Deployed Soldier to See Son's Birth
The staff at North Shore University Hospital set up a webcam so Air Force Captain Mike Schaefer, currently in Southwest Asia, could be by his wife Gannon's side when she gave birth to their child last Sunday. The couple lives in Chicago, but Newsday reports that "Gannon Schaefer came to Merrick, where her family lives, so she could deliver and have the support of her parents and siblings." The webcam was set up in the delivery room and Captain Scahefer said, "Oh honey, congratulations, he's beautiful. I can see him, I can see my little man." Little Jackson Jeffrey Schaefer, 7 pounds and 4 ounces, will meet his dad on New Year's Eve at MacArthur Airport.
Papa John's Employee Delivers Vandalism with Pie
Uh oh, another graffiti-happy citizen has been busted! Following the kid on the N train who was caught on a camera phone scratching into the subway window, a pizza delivery man was busted above-ground in Brooklyn Heights. Allegedly the "saucy Papa John’s deliveryman" was seen doing the deed in a Livingston Street elevator, The Brooklyn Paper reports. "And now the owner of the building is biting back, suing the franchise for $3,200 — the cost, he says, of removing the 'Dizzy CFM' tag that the ditzy doughboy scratched into the car’s wood paneling." The tagger worked at the Downtown Brooklyn establishment and has since been fired. One lawyer told the paper that “It’s a tough case unless Papa John’s knew [the deliveryman] had a history of vandalism."
Talk of the Town: Late New Yorker Delivery
Has anyone else out there found their New Yorker subscription arriving later and later in the week? We're pitifully elated if it's in our mailbox before Thursday, and on more than one occasion it hasn’t even been delivered until the following week. Sure, there's content online, but you can't bring that on the subway!

