With all this talk about alerts, there's one thing that remains a perennial New York (okay, andNew Jersey) thing: traffic. Oh, I know, LA has its insane freeway traffic. But the other day, Denis Hamill in the New York Daily News had me roaring with laughter. Here's an excerpt from his piece,"The Easy Way Out is Closed for Summer":

The torture rides home on the Garden State and Southern State parkways were so long, I think the CIA should consider them as ways of making Al Qaeda suspects talk. Handcuff a terrorist suspect in the backseat of a Toyota next to a 3-year-old in a kid's seat on the glacial creep home from the Jersey Shore with the windows open to the stink of the Garden State's cancer alley and the clam-broth humidity of August, and he will tell you where to find Abu Musab Zarqawi - in king's English - before you reach the Outerbridge Crossing. Make him sit for 109 minutes on the Staten Island Expressway as the 3-year-old insists on playing"I spy with my little eye" while listening to an endless taped loop of Thomas the Tank Engine songs, and he'll give up Osama Bin Laden - and his prospective kidney donor - before you get to the Verrazano. Until I can afford a seaplane, with a pilot who knows how to take off and land, I'm staying put.

Read the rest of Hamill's essay, here.