I've had a few people mail me and say, "Tony, you've always been picky about your kitchen, I'm sure you're exaggerating the state that Hell's Kitchen's in." So, before the super has his folks clean it on Wednesday, hopefully with tactical nuclear weapons, I figured I'd show you what a lair of minions to Beelzebub the place really is.

First, there's the refrigerators. Note that the box of eggs that you can see in one of these pictures expired in June. (We threw away the ones from February and March, but these might in theory have belonged to somebody.) And there's the impressive collection of moldy gunk on the surfaces...

Stuff from this fridge is gradually dripping on the floors...

Now, near as I can tell what happened here is someone spilled soy sauce on a bag of sugar, and it dissolved the bottom of the bag. This looks like a petri dish, and the image doesn't do it justice--there's little things of black mold growing in the goop that you can't see here.

The counter. In fairness to the cleaning staff, twice a week they do clean the surfaces, though not around anything that's left on them. This includes the pan of one of my floormates. Near as we can tell, he cooks with it each evening but never cleans it, a practice which means that when it's heated, it stinks to high heaven.

And finally, the crowning glory. The two big butcher's knives, complete with whetstone, hidden in one drawer for no readily discernable purpose.

Again, in fairness, I've been told this will be taken care of by Wednesday, which would be nice, because then I might be able to use my frying pan and lovely new set of dishes.

OK, off to bed. First day of classes is tomorrow, so I ought to be asleep by midnight.