At Thirty-fourth Street, when the conductor announced that the train was going to go express, people filed off, muttering, grumbling. On the platform, this guy kicked at the car’s metal sides, yelling: “I hate you, R train! I hate you!”

I don’t usually have occasion to be on the yellow subway line, but today’s excursion to SoHo found me heading downtown on the R. It’s not like I have so many complaints about the F train crowd: tucked in among the bony-wristed Chinese uncles with their Mandarin newspapers and bulging plastic bags, the massive-haired Russian women, the teenage mothers, and the large Jewish men bent silently over their Torahs, you will find your young, thrift-store-outfitted eye-candy. But hel-lo yellow line, with your Eurotourist boys in blond and brunet, and dude looking sharp in a dark, double-vented suit (two vents are always better than one, people).