Conveyances

So there's this super-great article in the New Yorker about elevators. Such a take-for-granted slice of modern-day life, that you barely notice. Yet, without them the skyscraper as we know it would not exist. It's really worth reading.

Anyhoo this topic was pretty useful in shifting the conversation to a more exposed (and I want to say "elegant" but I understand this might be a subjective statement) conveyance - the escalator.
You might remember (tho probly not) I had done a little research into a hit-man character, who killed people by staging elevator and escalator accidents. Anyways, a couple more things have come down the pipe in the last coupla' days, which are sort-of relevant. Like there's this bit from the NYT about their new subway escalators. (I'm not sure how long their links last, so I'll just paste this juicy bit...

"On the morning of August 28, Lisa Chiou, 33, got off a subway train at the Bowling Green station in Lower Manhattan and got on an escalator that would carry her up and out of the station to Broadway. She placed her right foot (she was wearing flip-flops) on the lowest step, and as the escalator rose, she put her left foot on the step below it.

Except all of a sudden, there was no next step. There was a crash, and Ms. Chiou looked down to see that the escalator step that had been under her left foot had fallen out of the machine. It sheared off three more steps below it, and Ms. Chiou found herself slipping backward into the void.

“It was literally a split second,” Ms. Chiou recalled. “My left foot was still on that step when it fell in. My foot sank in with it, and I just kind of pulled my leg back out. So I got scraped by the metal and stuff.”

Ms. Chiou managed to stumble up the still-moving escalator and make her way to the top. She had a small cut on her leg that required two stitches. “If one foot wasn’t on a sure step,” she said, “I would have fallen in, and I would have been eaten up by the escalator.” "

Yep - That's pretty much what I envisioned my hitman doing. Who would suspect an escalator step of just vanishing into a void and eating up a person? "A horrible accident..." the authorities would say, while the assassin twirls his moustache in the shadows, laughing.

Well, shortly after (or before...internet time gets confjusing) there was a nice article over at Pruned on the worlds longest escalator system. So, that about wraps it from this end.

***EXCEPT***

This does remind me I dooo have to make a note of the dangers of wearing "flip-flops" I disprove of those things...for a variety of reasons.