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The Hotel Diplomat the worst hotel? See Dick's Toolbox

Mike's Pith & Wind - Running amok
I awoke on the morning of the Batman shooting to hear a (Melbourne) professor expounding his thoughts on the radio about the syndrome of mass killings by deranged individuals. He mentioned the term ‘amok’, as in ‘running amok’, and how it was derived from a Malay word describing a frenzied attack on people, animals and property, almost invariably by a young man. The inevitability of these catastrophic events was accepted with a prescribed tolerance in Malay culture.
I’d not heard that before and I was surprised to read that ‘running amok’ has been officially classified as a psychiatric condition in Western medicine since the 19th century. In any case, we tend to think of large-scale random violence perpetrated by an armed individual as a modern-day phenomenon not entirely unrelated to the American gun culture, which of course ignores other spectacular examples elsewhere in the world, like Finland for instance. Or Australia.
Whether we acknowledge these events as inevitable or not, the fact is that nearly 100% of these incidents are perpetrated by young men. What is it about being a young man that invokes such a violent response against society? There must’ve been studies done - there are studies produced everyday proving the bleeding obvious, (I notice there was one the other day backing up my beef about phones on planes), so you’d think there must be something about such a devastating social phenomenon.
Presuming the studies are in, it still leaves.. read more

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Dick's Toolbox - The worst hotel..
Over a bottle of rather good New Zealand Pinot Noir, Michael, Mary and I were discussing the worst hotels that we had stayed in. Mary and I unanimously decided on the Diplomat in New York in 1980, as my claim of survival exercises with the New Zealand army on the freezing volcanic high plains in the middle of New Zealand was dismissed on the grounds that it obviously wasn’t a hotel and I, though unwilling, was actually being paid to be there. The sergeant said that a bed of damp ferns under the starry sky was a bloody hotel, but his opinion didn’t, apparently, count.
The Diplomat is no longer, having being demolished thirteen years after we left, after a protracted battle with two tenacious holdout tenants who, for eight months or so, were the only occupants of the 13-story building. The venerable building had not started out life as a hotel, but rather the.. read more