OJ Simpson, Judith Regan and The Cannibal Cookbook – a killer quotation for anybody who finds great writing delicious

A few paragraphs down you'll find a quote from Carl Hiassen’s column of last November 26th in the Miami Herald.

In case you just got back from a long journey to the Planet Nictu, Hiassen is a journalist, mystery author and coiner of unforgettable phrases. He was talking about the recent flap over the OJ Simpson book, “If I Did It...” supposedly a near-confession.

The book was edited by sleaze-a-loid publisher Judith Regan and announced with some fanfare only days before her boss, Rupert Murdock, put a kibosh on the project.

“Simpson's editor," wrote Hiassen, "is a woman named Judith Regan, who in the publishing world is warmly known as the Queen of Crap. If killer-cannibal Jeffrey Dahmer were still alive, Regan would be doing his cookbook.”
http://www.miami.com/mld/miamiherald/news/columnists/carl_hiaasen/16091634.htm

In my humble opinion, that’s the best line on the Simpson affair since his trial, when some wag insisted, “They framed a guilty man.”

Pee-eugh! What’s that disgusting odor permeating Manhattan right now? And how easy would a WMD gas attack be? Or is this one?

First off, a bit of full disclosure about today’s picture.

It wasn’t taken in New York. That’s Representative Wesselhoft from the Oklahoma House of Representatives, in the process of going a bit over the top concerning some other issue.

Nevertheless, it’s a perfect fit for New York.

Manhattan this morning reeks of gas – the kind of stuff that burns in stoves and furnaces. http://news.yahoo.com/s/ap/20070108/ap_on_re_us/nyc_gas_odor

I picked up the smell just as I walked into my cranky work space a few hours ago. I thought it might have something to do with rotting internal infrastructure in the commercial slum of an office building where I rent workspace and communications hookups with other self-employed entrepreneurs. No such luck.

WHATEVER IT IS
SPREADS FAST

Within moments, all my entrepreneurial neighbors were hawing, hacking and gossiping to each other or over the phone from their own workspaces. And then the word got out via Internet news that the odor was extending all the way up the West Side from Chelsea to Rockefeller Center, a distance of about a mile and a half. Not to mention New Jersey, a mile or so across the Hudson River.

So where’s it coming from? Search anybody in charge. The Fire Department referred the matter to Con Edison, the gas company here, which doesn’t have a clue. The utility is “investigating.”

ONCE AGAIN, THE SECURITY OF A CITY
IS IN THE HANDS OF CLUELESS BUFFOONS

Is it cooking gas? Or is it WMD poison gas?

Is it in “negligible” concentrations? Or is it in concentrations that will make people sicken or die like some poisoned Russian Agent? And if it’s “not serious,” how come so many people around me are complaining of headaches?

Is “Mayor Mike” Bloomberg, the public official so security minded that he arrests bicyclists out of fear they might create traffic jams that somehow will pave the way for Al Quaida, even aware of the gas leak yet? Or is he still in his weekend home in Bermuda, with do-not-disturb messages attached to his answering machine while he cuddles up to dreams of the Presidency?

I dunno. But I can tell you, if this is the best the city, the state and the Feds can do when some mysterious gas permeates New York, we’re all doomed. Me. You. And anybody from here to San Francisco.

Stay tuned. More dispatches eventually from New York – if there still is a New York and if anybody is left alive in it.

Well, I’m wildly exaggerating.

Scratch that. I HOPE I’m wildly exaggerating.

2 PM UPDATE

"Mayor Mike" held a press conference today at 11 AM. He offered one of those razzle-dazzle 'em self-contradictory statements that I just love:

"“The smell is there, we don’t know the source of it; it does not appear to be dangerous.” http://www.nytimes.com/2007/01/08/nyregion/08cnd-odor.html?ref=nyregion

Yo, Mike, if you don't know what it is, how can you tell whether it's dangerous or not?

I'm happy to report that the stink is gone from Entrepreneur Central where I work with all kinds of self-employed types – accountants, fashion designers, online newsletter editors, wedding photographers, Internet geeks and other startup businesses.

I was outside about 25 minutes ago, and I most certainly can confirm that whatever-it-was is no longer blowing around the West 30s in concentrations strong enough to smell.

But this was not just a big joke.

TRANSIT INTERRUPTED

A subway train in the West 20s was evacuated for a while because of the strong "gas" odor.

PATH commuter trains between New Jersey and New York were stopped for a while.

THE BEST NEWS FOR TERRORISTS
SINCE OSAMA BIN LADIN GOT AWAY

Betcha wannabe terrorists are rejoicing. Just explode your poison gas bomb in New York with a timing device, while you're hightailing it out of town. You'll have all manner of public officials saying in laid-back lethargy, "Duh. Gee. I dunno. But it's probably not dangerous. Happens all the time here." And there'll be a lot of dead bodies before anybody in charge wakes up.

What does it take to get government on the offensive when odd smells permeate the whole city? (Turns out this smell covered territory from the Battery in Lower Manhattan to midtown -- a distance of about (this is only a guess-timate) five linear miles. You could bump off a whole lot of people in five linear miles of Manhattan at rush hour.

But that doesn't seem to bother anybody in government, who are practing buzzzzziness as usual. They won't know something really bad has happened until everybody's dead.

The Saddam Hussein execution– a 6-part starter kit for budding conspiracy theorists

Look, I’m not saying any of the events listed below happened. In fact, I can 100 percent guarantee (or your money back) that these things absolutely did not happen.

But any time you get anything so weird and brutal as an execution or an assassination, conspiracy theorists and truth deniers are likely to pop up like weeds in a cow plop-enriched pasture.

The truth? Feh! Truth doesn’t matter. Suspicion and an unfounded but insistent conviction that evil forces are at work behind the scenes are everything.

So let’s get right to it with Saddam Hussein, the execution, the cell phone videos, the whole ripe-for-conspiracy-theory shebang. Remember, if you can convince enough people that what you imagine is true, you get to write a book, go on well-paid speaking engagements, build a following or even become famous. So pay attention, folks. Here are some seedling conspiracy theories to hang your hat and your future on.

1. SADDAM ISN’T DEAD. THAT WAS HIS DOUBLE. Remember, before and just after we invaded Iraq, there were TV reports that public “appearances” by Saddam were actually appearances by somebody who looked like him? That’s the poor bastard who got hanged, while Saddam was being spirited out of the country so he can set up a regime/operation/insurgency (pick one or more) in exile.

The reason the room was so badly lighted and shaky cell phones were used instead of video cameras was so that we couldn’t get too clear a look at the hanging victim on the gallows or his corpse afterwards. Taunts against “Saddam” were created merely to throw us off course. Iraqui Baathists can use this theory to rally the troops. Rightist American wingnuts can also use it to convince us that the war has to go on forever because Saddam is still “out there.”

2. SADDAM ACTUALLY WAS HANGED, BUT ONLY AMERICANS WERE INVOLVED. This theory can be used to absolve any Islamist of any stripe – Shia or Sunni – from bearing the guilt. That’s the reason all the executioners wore masks – so we wouldn’t recognize the Yank hangmen. Umm, let’s expand this and call them hangmen and women. Or to be politically correct, hangpeople.

The shouted epithets in Arabic were really tape recorded days earlier on the streets of downtown Bagdad, between IED explosions. Some poor schnook of an Iraqui policeman will be arrested and falsely accused of the camera phone videos, to throw the world off the scent of America. He will end up occupying a cell in a prison – American run, of course – next to Lindy England’s cell.

3. NO NO, AMERICA DIDN’T DO IT. ISRAEL DID IT. You want proof? Well, they hanged Eichmann, didn’t they? And they had a motive because Saddam once fired missiles at Israel, sometimes with deadly effect. So what more evidence do you need? This is a handy one especially for Iranian heads of state whose names begin with the letter A, but also for Palestinians and other “anti-Zionists.” Another variation of this theory is that it was the Israelis acting in concert with the Americans. Take your pick.

4. SADDAM WAS HANGED – BUT BY SECRET AL QUIAIDA OPERATIVES EAGER TO INFLAME THE ARAB STREET. Once again, the hooded hangpeople are all the evidence you need. This theory can be used to absolve the United States for turning Saddam over for execution in the first place.

5. SADDAM HANGED HIMSELF – IN HIS OWN CLEVER VARIATION OF SUICIDE BOMBING MARTYRDOM. He figured, “Why rot in a cell when I can inflame the whole Arab world, certain political segments in Europe and who-knows-who-else by appearing to be a martyr? That’ll teach Bush to monkey with me! Forever after, I will be known as Saddam the Martyr and people will attack America in my name.”

Suicide bombing was of course out of the question while Saddam was held prisoner. But he bribed the judges and the courts and the police and everybody else to find him guilty and get him to the gallows on time so he could be a martyr quicker. This is a good one for Iraqis and Americans in search of absolution for the hanging.

6. THERE WAS NO HANGING. THE WHOLE THING WAS PHOTOSHOPPED BY A REALLY BAD RETOUCHER. Conspiracy theorists can review the videos under a microscope, do pixel-by-pixel analysis, and “discover” nearly invisible insets, erasures, a blackened-over klieg light and other “evidence” that the photos and movies are fakes. Why else does his head appear at a funny angle, twisted out of shape?

Over to the rest of you, fellow Conspiracy Theory-Mongers. Write your own theory, or feel free to embellish on mine. Remember, there’s no lie like a big lie.

Unless it’s a bigger one.

Drip-drip-drip–GUSH! Bush “privatization” launches a brain drain at America’s top defense research labs.

Just when you thought there was probably no more damage the Bush administration could do to national security than it has already done, here comes more:

Thanks to a harebrained Republican-Conservative scheme, the nation’s top defense laboratories are sliding hellbent into operation under new management. The only problem is, many of the scientists who work there are now hellbent to get out. And many already have left, creating a massive national defense brain drain.

Why are the scientists and engineers so eager to jump ship?

For starters, the hush-hush research labs (Los Alamos and Lawrence Livermore Laboratories) are getting privatized. Management has been under the auspices of the University of California. But now Los Alamos is reporting to the bubbleheaded bumblers at Bechtel Corporation. And Lawrence Livermore is probably next to become a Bechtel operation after September 30th of this year. http://www.universityofcalifornia.edu/news/labcontract/faqs.html

YES, THAT BECHTEL

We’re talking about the very same, privately-held, Republican politico-connected, shadowy Bechtel screwups who took billions of your tax money for construction projects in Iraq and then fled the country before completing them.

Among the notable Bechtel disasters in Iraq was a children’s hospital. It was heralded as one of the “good things” happening in Iraq by Laura Bush and Condi Rice. But kind of like the Bush “mission accomplished” that didn’t get accomplished, the hospital never got built.

Well hey, Bechtel had an excuse. There were “difficult soil conditions” the company whined. http://www.foreignpolicy.com/story/cms.php?story_id=3628

But let’s get back to Los Alamos and Lawrence Livermore Labs. Under the University of California’s management, some of the nation’s most brilliant physicists and engineers devised ways to bolster the national defense and help make the United States a leader in nuclear technology, space and missile technology and other kinds of critical weaponry.

BUT HEY, TODAY IT’S
“JUST A BUSINESS”

The nutcake Conservative theory was that laboratories such as Los Alamos, the birthplace of the A-bomb, would benefit from privatization because, “Excellence in science is enabled by excellence in business and operations.”

That helpful thought comes from Tyler Przybylek, chairman of a federal panel charged with evaluating contractors bidding for Los Alamos' management. http://www.findarticles.com/p/articles/mi_qn4176/is_20060419/ai_n16158127

But some things, like the national defense and healthcare, are too important to be left to greedy corporations whose first obligation is to make a buck.

So what happened? It’s shocking, but not surprising.

AMERICA’S BEST BRAINS
GET ROYALLY SCREWED

Sooner than you could say “war profiteer,” Bechtel set to work screwing Los Alamos employees out of their pensions.

According to the Oakland, California Tribune of last April 19, “A labor union and four workers contended in a lawsuit Tuesday that the University of California and a UC/Bechtel National-led team were forcing more than 9,000 employees at Los Alamos National Laboratory to swap one of the nation's plushest pensions for lesser benefits and driving workers away from the nuclear-weapons lab.

“At stake is the gold-plated University of California pension that has drawn thousands of workers to design and maintain U.S. nuclear explosives at both Los Alamos and its sister lab, Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory.

“The University Professional and Technical Employees union alleges that the university is violating a commitment written into the state constitution to look after its pensioners, including weapons workers in New Mexico and California.”

The consequence was a lawsuit, with lab employees asking the courts to save their benefits.

WILL THE LAST SCIENTIST WHO LEAVES
PLEASE TURN OUT THE LIGHTS?

Now scientists – particularly employees who have built up some pension equity – are running for the exits.

A scientist at Lawrence Livermore (and no, you’re not getting his name because he hasn’t bailed out yet) told The New York Crank, “We had to make tradeoffs to get those pensions. Many of us are academics who were never allowed to publish because of national security issues.”

An academic who isn't allowed to publish is kind of like a singer who isn’t permitted to perform – except for performances in a top-secret underground bomb shelter, and then only to an audience of six tone-deaf generals and a brain-damaged cabinet officer.

Deprived of the academic acclaim they earned but never got, the only solace of the University of California defense laboratory thinkers was a university pension and university tenure that made professional near-anonymity worthwhile.

Then Bechtel came along. And guess what?

Here’s what, according to that Oakland Tribune article:

“Worker advocates say the new management at Los Alamos has taken away protections enjoyed by the university workers, making them 'at- will' employees, and is pressuring them to accept uncertain future retirement benefits in order to keep their jobs.

"An employee who can get fired on the spot for no reason is not going to speak up for scientific integrity, is not going to speak up if there's a safety problem," said Jelger Kalmijn, the systemwide president of the union.”

Even worse, it turns out, employees in this situation are quitting in droves.

RETIREMENT RATES SOAR

“Uncertainty about benefits and other employment conditions drove retirement rates at Los Alamos 50 percent higher last year than in the past, and Livermore workers predict the same for their lab as it moves into a management competition. The result could be a loss of the scientists, engineers and technicians with the most experience and knowledge of U.S. nuclear explosives.”

Well, according The New York Crank’s source, that’s already happening at Lawrence Livermore, too. And the more experienced the scientists and engineers, the more likely they are to bail, in order to protect their pensions, the Crank was told.

Brilliant! The only worse move the Conservative looneys could have made would have been to sell the labs to North Korea and Iran.

Or are the geniuses of Bush conservatism working on that, too?

GONE FISHING

Yeah, and if you believe that, I have a $20 million stash in Nigeria I'll give you for only 10% if you first tell me your Social Security and bank account numbers.

But I am outta here for a while. The theory is, when you've been cranky in New York for a long time, it's sometimes refreshing to go be cranky somewhere else for a while. So I'm off to the Left Coast for a week of eating, drinking and spending more money than I should, during which I ain't gonna post diddley-squat. There, that should fix things.

Watch for fresh posts a few days from now. Oh, figure January 3. But maybe the 2nd. And maybe the 4th. Or maybe the 5th.

Hey, if I were reliable and predictable, I wouldn't be a crank, would I?

Quick: Automobile is to fender-bender as airplane is to ?????

Pervert-protecting Congressional Sex Nazis to Senior Citizens: “No sex for YOU, you doddering old geezeer!”

It’s as though it happened in the dead of night – and for all I know, maybe it did. Aside from an article in the St. Louis Post-Dispatch (no longer on the web) and an online publication called Senior Journal...
http://www.seniorjournal.com/NEWS/MedicareDrugCards/6-10-18-ErectileDysfunctionDrugs.htm
…the press was largely silent about it. Maybe all those young journalists thought nobody would care.

At any rate, the Crank first heard about it when I got my hands on the letter above – identifying information redacted to protect the impotent – in which AARP/United Healthcare declared that Cialis was no longer on their formulary because “Congress has determined that…” [drugs that treat erectile disfunction] “will be excluded from coverage under Medicare Part D in 2007” So that includes Levitra and Viagra, too.

WAIT A SECOND, WAIT A SECOND!
WHICH CONGRESS IS THIS?
MAYBE IT SHOULD BE CALLED
“THE SEX NAZI CONGRESS”

“No sex for you,” says this Sex Nazi Congress to erectile disfunction sufferers over 65.

Hey gang, this is the same Sex Nazi Congress that covered up for Congressman Mark Foley, who was making buggery attempts at his teen-aged male interns.
http://www.salon.com/opinion/blumenthal/2006/10/05/foley/index_np.html

MURERED MISTRESSES AND
“JUST SAY NO” HYPOCRITES

It’s the same wife-cheating (Remember Congressman Gary Condit and his much younger murdered mistress Chandra Levy?) sometimes wife-beating, frequently divorced Sex Nazi Congress full of self-righteous Republicans who are willing to encourage the spread of AIDS in Africa by ineffectively telling people who’d like to enjoy sex, “Just say no.”
http://www.voanews.com/english/archive/2005-04/2005-04-13-voa78.cfm?CFID=88090774&CFTOKEN=69742925

It's the same Sex Nazi Congress that kowtows to the lunatic fringe of the “Christian Right.” You know, the same Sex Nazi Congress that wants to let the FCC fine television stations $325,000 per incident for profanity that gets uttered on the air in the heat of live events – from wars, to 9/11, to sporting events.
http://www.ucop.edu/irc/services/documents/guidelines.pdf
See, they don't want you to know that soldiers who are under fire or rescue worker who were watching the World Trade Center collapse and snuff out thousands of lives would actually cuss. They want to do all the cussing themselves, whenever they get caught -- almost literally -- with their pants down.

Yes, it's the Republican Sex Nazi Congress that turned a Democrat budget surplus into an eight and a half trillion-and-still-counting-national debt...
http://www.brillig.com/debt_clock/
...that also has authorized, almost without a peep of protest, half a trillion dollars poured down the toilet of two wars that we’re losing simultaneously, one in Iraq and the other in Afghanistan. (We belong in Afghanistan, but thanks to the drained resources getting flushed away Iraq, Afghanistan is rapidly drifting back to the Taliban.)

So these big spending Sex Nazis, who gave themselves eight pay raises in the last nine years...
http://www.congressproject.org/releases/paracoalletrel2001.html
...now want to block senior citizens from getting a $10 or $20 pill maybe once a week so they can have a a few happy moments of sex with their spouses in their retirement years.

These are the very same Sex Nazis who banned negotiating with drug companies for medication – something that could have lowered the cost of Vigara, Cialis and Levitra – and all medications – and made them more affordable to consumers, taxpayers and the Government. Now they say we have to "control" health care costs. How? By denying people health care.

These are the Sex Nazis who promised they’d get government off our backs. Now we’ve got it in our bedrooms.

You no longer have to be gay. You no longer have to be promiscuous. You no longer have to be foreign. Now all you have to be is over 65 – something nearly all of us will experience.

WRITE A LETTER OF PROTEST
TO YOUR CONGRESSIONAL SEX NAZI

You’ll find his, her or it’s address here:
http://www.webcom.com/~leavitt/cong.html

Demand to know where he, she, or it stands on banning erectile disfunction drugs from medical benefit formularies. Remind him or her or it that nearly everybody gets to be 65 unless they drown in New Orleans floods while the Sex Nazis in Congress fiddle, die in Congress-supported wars – or unless the Sex Nazi Congress finally outlaws longevity.

Tell your Congressional Sex Nazis you wanted Medicare to negotiate, negotiate, negotiate damnit – for better drug prices for everyone in America. Tell them that you want ALL legitimately prescribed drugs to be covered by the so-called, confusing, donut-holed “Drug Benefit.”

And if they give you any crap about not wanting the U.S. Government to pay for quality of life medications – remind them about all the raises they gave themselves to improve their own quality of life.

WHO OR WHAT WILL FALL
VICTIM TO THEM NEXT?

What quality of life or care benefit will the Sex Nazi Congress cut for the rest of America next?

Will they eliminate wheelchairs because that improves the quality of life of paraplegics?

Will they cut oxygen for people who want their quality of life improved by being able to breathe better?

SHORT ON TIME? JUST SEND YOUR
CONGRESSIONAL SEX NAZI THIS
BLOG ARTICLE

You don’t have to compose your own letter if you don’t have time. Just copy this blog article into an e-mail addressed to your Sex Nazi Congressman. Or give your Sex Nazi the URL

And let the Sex Nazis in Congress know that if they won’t act, they can all go to Heil.

New York and San Francisco swap weather. Astrophysicist says it’s because the universe has turned inside out.

New York (Dec. 18) - New York and San Francisco have exchanged weather patterns in what an obscure astrophysicist, working in a Greenwich Village basement laboratory, calls “a balloon or bellybutton inversion.”

The weather in New York today was 65 degrees and cloudy, typical of San Francisco this time of year. Meanwhile, in San Francisco, the weather for a while dipped down to a New-York-In-December 36 degrees and windy, with bright New York sunshine.

Simultaneously, New Yorkers began acting increasingly laid-back. A man on a bus stood up for a pregnant woman. On the same bus, an out-of-towner dropped two dollars in nickels and dimes into the fare box and the driver said, “Thank you, man, that’s very cool.”

A few hours later, during rush hour in San Francisco, a native tired of waiting for the Van Ness bus loudly loudly muttered several unprintable epithets and stomped off downtown on foot.

While investigating this phenomenon, The New York Crank stopped for coffee at Reggio, one of the last authentic Greenwich Village Italian cafés that hasn’t been put out of business by Starbucks. In the café, located on MacDougal Street, he struck up a chat with Herschel Harshbarger, PhD., who described himself as a freelance astrophysicist. Harshbarger, it turned out, has a theory about what’s going on. The universe, he declared, has turned inside out.

BALLOONS, INSIDE-OUTEDNESS
AND A LOT OF BROW-FURROWING MATH

The New York Crank replied, “I don’t get it,” whereupon Harshbarger whipped a small yellow balloon out of his pocket. He lay the balloon on the marble table next to his cappuccino, with the mouth of the balloon pointed left.

“It’s a matter of topology,” he said. Harshbarger explained that topology is a study of the geometry of the surface of changing shapes, which didn’t seem to help explain anything, but he kept on explaining.

“Watch this,” Harshbarger said. With a long pair of pincers he reached into the balloon and turned it inside-out, laying it back on the table. “Now, as you see, the mouth of the balloon, which had been pointing left is pointing right. All bodies and spheres in the skin of the balloon which had been oriented right-left are now oriented left-right.

“If we can assume that Earth is part of the topological skin of the balloon, then everything on earth has been reversed. This explains why New York and San Francisco have exchanged climates,” he said.

CAUSE FOR ALARM

Ever-alert, The New York Crank asked whether this “topological inversion” as Harshbarger called it justified the Lunatic Conservative movement’s insistence that pollution and the loss of rain forests are not causing climatic change.

“On the contrary,” Harshbarger insisted, “it is entirely possible that heat rising from formerly forested areas, plus the growing emission of greenhouse gasses have distorted the balloon, thus causing the inversion.”

“It’s as if you were made so sick by pollution that you turned inside-out from the locus of your bellybutton,” Harshbarger said.

BUT THERE’S REASON
FOR OPTIMISM, TOO

According to Harshbarger, there is currently so much temperature fluctuation on earth that the topological surface of the universe is in flux, rather like a balloon that expands, contracts and changes shape as the air inside it is heated and expands, then cools and causes deflation.

“Things look very hot in New York today,” Harshbarger said, “but they could cool down tomorrow, just as San Francisco chills out by heating up.”

Harshbarger did some elaborate computations on the back of a napkin (adjacent to text) that he said, “confirm the fluxness of the situation in a topological sense.”

Bystanders, some of whom seemed to have stopped by from the nearby Institute of Mathematics at New York University, seemed impressed.

“That’s the most extraordinary napkin I’ve seen in years,” one of them said.

Get off that bread line, Stupid. You’re NOT starving. You’re merely experiencing “very low food security.”

Among the many sick and dirty tricks dreamed up by the Bush administration, the sickest have been their attempts to make problems go away by re-naming them or changing the meaning of everyday language.

That’s how losing in Iraq came to be known as “winning.”

That’s how having no quantifiable goal whatsoever in that country got recast first as “mission accomplished” and then as the promise that, “we’ll stay until we complete the mission.”

That’s how torturing people by nearly drowning them over and over again got redefined by Vice-President Chaney as “a dunk in the water.” http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2006/10/27/AR2006102700560.html

ADMINISTRATION BRAINSTORM: IF WE
RENAME “STARVATION” MAYBE PEOPLE
WON’T KNOW THEY’RE STARVING

Now the Bushnik political hacks at the U.S. Department of Agriculture are about to completely “eliminate” starvation in America. They’ll do it simply by renaming what ails the hungry.

I’m going to let Liz Krueger, a member of the New York State Senate, put it her own way. The following are excerpts from a recent letter to her constituents:

“A glaring change in this year's USDA report is that they have decided to stop using the term ‘hunger’ to describe hungry people. From now on, the most desperately poor Americans—11 million people! — who show ‘multiple indications of disrupted eating patterns and reduced food intake’ will instead be defined as facing ‘very low food security.’ In other words, they are hungry.

“Note to the Feds: You cannot define away the very real problems of poverty and hunger facing millions of Americans by changing the terminology.”

YES, THIS REALLY IS
HAPPENING IN AMERICA!

Krueger, who has worked in emergency food pantries, soup kitchens and food banks, has harrowing memories of what she saw:

“… panicked mothers telling me about having to put their children to bed without dinner; of parents admitting they skipped meals so their children could eat. There were endless conversations with people who were forced to use their food money to pay rent and utilities to avoid eviction and homelessness. There were poor seniors who told me of the humiliation of digging through garbage bins behind supermarkets…

“Too many conversations ended with people breaking down in tears because they were wrongly rejected for Food Stamps or because they realized that even with Food Stamps, their benefits would not last a full month. There is nothing hypothetical about families facing the reality that the need to pay for an emergency prescription is going to result in many missed meals for weeks to come.”

YOUR HEAD ACHES, YOUR
STOMACH HURTS, YOUR CHILDREN WEEP?
OH, JUST SNAP OUT OF IT.

Krueger continues, “All of these people were facing or experiencing ‘hunger’ -- the kind that brings headaches, causes your stomach to hurt, leaves children and seniors much more likely to get sick, unable to concentrate, angry and/or depressed—real physical and emotional consequences of ‘hunger.’ They were not feeling "insecure" about food -- makes it sound like a Dr. Phil topic of the week. ‘I'm feeling a bit insecure about food today...can we talk?’

“The U.S. is the most affluent country in the world and yet, our federal government spends time and money altering our vocabulary, instead of fixing our problems. Let's stop playing with words and decrease the shame of hunger in America. A few easy ways to start:

“1) Strengthen the Food Stamp Program in the upcoming Federal Farm Bill -- make the application process easier, increase benefit levels, provide flexibility to expand outreach and enrollment incentives to states.

“2) Connect more children to child nutrition programs, such as school breakfast, summer meals, child care food and after-school snacks and meals.

“3) Boost family incomes through strategies like an increased minimum wage and refundable tax credits for low-income workers.

“4) Expand funding for meal programs for low-income Seniors, particularly deliveries to homebound elderly and disabled.”

But Liz, Liz – do you actually think programs like this will come from those wonderful Bush administration folks who brought you “very low food security?”

Don’t hold your breath.

Wunderman, once a distinguished direct marketing advertising agency, hits a new low in taste

“We are in the business of using language persuasively,” says Lester Wunderman, founder of the advertising agency that bears his name.

“We constantly search for those appropriate and explicit words and phrases that will arouse interest and trigger action.

“When we do that, we are not just another part of our industry but of a special and unique group of imaginative and sensitive individuals who constantly strive to create effective, persuasive and even, on occasion, beautiful prose and poetry.” http://lesterchroniclesblog.wunderman.com/

That's mighty hifalutin’ talk for a guy whose company made its bones churning out junk mail and those 800-number TV commercials. But at least the thought seemed to have some validity when Lester was actually minding the store. In better times the Wunderman agency had a reputation for being a class act – or at least as much of a class act as you can have in the direct marketing business.

LADIES AND GENTLEMEN,
LESTER HAS LEFT THE BUILDING

These days Lester, now “way up there” in years, is no longer running the place. Oh sure, he still helps front for the agency and even writes a blog for it, from which I’ve taken his comments on sensitive individuals and beautiful poetry. But one glance at the advertising associated with the shop tells you that somebody less august than Lester is running the place today.

Take the ad shown above, for KnowledgeBase Marketing®, which proudly bills itself as “a Wunderman company.” Was this vulgar piece of poop-in-your-face communication written at some far-away subsidiary office (say in Dallas) or at the Wunderman nerve center at 285 Madison Avenue in New York?

It doesn’t matter. Either way somebody in top management was snoozing at the switch when the ad got approved – and remains asleep at the switch even today. After all, the ad has run over and over again in direct marketing trade magazines. Presumably, agency management reads the trades about their own industry. Or can they read?

They certainly can’t read well enough to recognize bad writing when it smacks them in the chops. The author of this ad has a wee bit of trouble with his syntax. He means to say you should talk to KnowledgeBase Marketing if you’re having trouble increasing the percentage of readers and viewers who respond to your advertising. Instead, tangled in a web of ain’t-I-clever puns and mangled metaphors, he writes, “If upping your response rate is keeping you awake at night, talk to us. Rest assured, you’ll see your prospects in a whole new light.”

Well, at least you can figure out without gnashing your teeth what he means to say.

SORRY, YOU’LL HAVE GRIT YOUR TEETH
TO PLOW THROUGH THIS NEXT BIT

It’s a bit more of a brow-wrinkling exercise to plow through the Wunderman ad agency website. Getting through the prose there is like paddling against a current of molten tar. You’ll discover juicy tidbits such as:

“Customer data yield the insights and knowledge we need to help clients create meaningful customer dialogues in every media and at every customer opportunity. And we do it with a creative flair. Wunderman conceives, builds and runs the infrastructures around the communications we develop -research, databases, campaign management tools, all of it. We immerse ourselves in our clients' infrastructures as well, to become a total marketing partner.” http://www.wunderman.com/working/53.asp

THE DADA OF ADVERTISING
AT WUNDERMAN

Nevermind that the Wunderman website’s techno-jargon brutally obfuscates whatever the hell it is they’re trying to say. (Yeah, yeah, you’ve probably decoded it if you read it carefully enough, but did you want to?)

Pretentiously fuzzy communication was on the verge of becoming the dominant discipline at Wunderman some years ago, when some fool briefly changed their honorable company name to “Impiric.” Eventually, wiser heads changed the name back and saved the agency from its neo-Dadaist approach to self-branding.

A brief aside: once upon a time there was a direct marketing advertisement for the mail order Sherwin Cody School of English. Written by the late John Caples, an advertising copywriter who truly knew how to write clearly and compellingly, the ad’s headline asked its readers, “Do you make these common mistakes in English?”

Maybe that ad ought to be required reading for every Wunderman employee.

AND ONE MORE THING:
A POST SCRIPT ON PLAGIARISM

P.S. The Wunderman “up yours” headline can’t even claim the virtue of originality. Back in the 1950s, a New York subway car poster featured a clean-cut guy wearing a skinny tie and a snap brim hat, holding up three fingers. The headline, for an interest-bearing bank account, read, “I upped my income 3% last year. Up yours!”

An old advertising pro, now deceased, once confided in me that he was part of the mischievous team at the Ted Bates advertising agency that created that first Up Yours ad. And yes, they absolutely understood that they had written a double entendre. They wanted to see if they could get away with it, he told me. The joke was meant to be on the client. But with the passage of years, he at least had the good sense to feel slightly ashamed of himself.

These days, the joke is on the agency that panders to the mentality of an 11-years-old juvenile delinquent who has just learned a vulgar new phrase.

Radioactive poison? Hey, it’s good for the restaurant business.

So Colonel Alexander Litvinenko, the whistle blowing Russian spy, died of Polonium poisoning after dining with his buddies in a London restaurant, and now some of his dinner companions are also poisoned.

Investigators found the poisoning came from radioactive Polonium, which somehow made it into either Litvinenko's sushi, or his cocktail, or his cigarette. Since then, Geiger counters have been going off all over London. Creepy, right?

Nah, not in Sheffield, England, where a restaurant called Polonium is doing a pack-‘em’in business since the poisoning scandal. http://www.breitbart.com/news/2006/12/04/061205005849.uzua3100.html

An otherwise undistinguished restaurant hasn’t done this well on horrifying publicity since the mob rubout of Crazy Joe Gallo at Umberto’s Clam House here in New York’s Little Italy. The restaurant lived on its bad reputation for years.

There’s nothing like a slight frisson of deathly fear to enhance a meal, whether it’s fear of Polonium poisoning or of a stray mafia bullet. And the French think wine is the appetite-enhancing aperitif? Lillet is lovely, but it's no match for a dead customer.

Somehow all this brings to mind the ancient limmerick:

A diner while dining in Crewe
Found quite a large mouse in his stew;
Said the waiter, “Don’t shout and wave it about
Or the rest will be wanting one, too.”

Never mind privatizing Air Force planes. How about a plan to privatize military ranks?

Somebody sent me this photograph about a year ago. What a great idea to help pay for the Iraq war!

You see, this is a greedy America we now occupy. In exchange for a wad of bucks shoved into some team owner’s pocket, baseball parks and football stadiums will shun stirring up any civic pride that comes from naming ball fields after their teams and cities. Instead, we’re now naming these places after voracious banks and corrupt companies.

Fortunately, the sponsored name lasts only as long as the money flows. Remember Astros Field in Houston, named after the team that actually played there? Greed and corporate egotism changed the name to Enron Field, which in turn changed, ahem, to Minute Maid Park. Want to cheer for a glass of orange juice?

One of the blessings of a nation ruled by greedy egotism (or is it egotistical greed?) is that loyalty has the approximate longevity of a container of yogurt left out in the sun. I know a university that will name a building after you in exchange for a king’s ransom. But dare to die and in two shakes of King Midas’ wand they’ll take your name off the building and replace it with the name of the next deep-pocketed donor.

So as long as America is up for sale, how about selling military ranks to corporate sponsors? Think of the tax cuts some hack politician could take credit for if, say, McDonalds starts paying for military uniforms instead of the Department of Defense.

It will take some getting used to, but army privates will hereafter be known as McNuggets. Generals, on the other hand, will be known as Big Macs. Despite protests of sexism, Army nurses will get stuck with the rank of Egg McMuffin.

In the spirit of inter-service competition, the Navy will have a different sponsor. Its former admirals will hereafter be known as Whoppers. Former ensigns will have the rank of Chicken Tenders. Chief Petty Officers will become Big Fish.

Oh, bad news for all you guys wounded in action. You can forget about a purple heart. Instead, they’re going to give you a Pepperidge Farm Puff Pastry pin.

What, you’re complaining? Whaddaya want from the government? You want fries with that?

Seven Dwarfs or are they U.S. Supreme Court Justices? You decide.

I only raise this issue because a recent poll by Zogby, the public opinion firm, “found 77 percent of U.S. residents could name two of Snow White's dwarfs, whereas only 24 percent could name two Supreme Court justices.” http://www.sciencedaily.com/upi/?feed=Quirks&article=UPI-1-20060814-19023200-bc-us-popculture.xml

Wait a second, just wait a second! Maybe this country isn’t so dumb after all.

Last night, perhaps as an act of depraved masochism, I was listening to a C-span broadcast of the U.S. Supreme Court proceedings concerning Parents v. Seattle and Meredith v. Jefferson. Both cases have to do with school integration and racial discrimination.

My friends, there were distinct parallels between some of the justices and some of the dwarfs.

Take justice Clarence Thomas. During the spirited Q&A back-and-forth between the justices and the various lawyers representing parents, school districts, and George Bush’s administration (You’d think George would have better things to worry about, like Iraq, but no!) I heard not a peep out of Mr. Justice Thomas.


Now admittedly, I didn’t sit through the whole thing. I didn’t even come in at the very beginning. So it is possible that Clarence cleared his throat at some time during the proceedings. But not to my knowledge.

So why was there not a word from Thomas, who during his confirmation hearing raised the issue of “lynching” to describe descriptions of alleged sexual misbehavior on his part? Surely, you’d think he’s interested in race-related matters.

Unless…

Unless he was SLEEPY and nodded off. Or DOPEY and didn’t want to sound dumb by asking a dumb question. Or maybe he was just too BASHFUL, a sad state of affairs for a U.S. Supreme Court Justice.

I was surprised how remarkably nasal Justice Ruth Bader Ginsberg sounded. Perhaps she was a bit SNEEZY and keeping it in with a handkerchief and nasal spray. Because the court proceedings are recorded for broadast, but not recorded on camera, we may never know.

To my surprise, Justice David Souter sounded rather GRUMPY in some verbal dueling with some of the lawyers. Too bad, since I happen to like the way he has come down on most decisions.

I have two nominations for HAPPY, Justices Samuel Alito and John Roberts. Why shouldn’t they be? They fudged, hedged, and stealthed their way into their seats, although one suspects they could have achieved even these feats only in a Republican Congress. Since we no longer have one, they got into office just in time.

Oh listen, I’m not going any further with this. Offer your own nominations. If they’re printable, I’ll post ‘em.

Meanwhile, be of good cheer. Whistle while you work.

Holy Guacamole! Is somebody in the Bloomberg administration or NYPD actually paying attention to the furor?

Just below, you’ll find a rant about cops under the current Mayor Bloomberg and former Mayor Giuliani administrations blaming the victim or failing to arrest the driver when a bicyclist gets killed by a motor vehicle. This has applied even when the cyclist here in New York City was on a protected greenway path where motor vehicles don’t belong.

Well, every rule has an exception – or maybe somebody down at City Hall or police headquarters has been reading this blog and decided to reform. Sad that another life got wasted before this new turn toward some semblance of justice.

At any rate, the exception occurred Friday after a cyclist, Eric Ng, was struck and killed by a reportedly drunk driver who had somehow begun using the bicycle path as a private highway.

The alleged driver was arrested and charged with vehicular manslaughter, reckless endangerment and driving while intoxicated. The details here: http://www.nytimes.com/2006/12/03/nyregion/03bike.html?_r=1&oref=slogin

Ironically, Mr. Ng was a member of Time’s Up, the bicycle organization that has been an irritating burr in the side of the city's administration.

When cyclists get hurt or killed, Mayor Bloomberg’s NYPD blames the victims – and turns its attention to crazy definitions of “parade”.

One evening last June, a New York City physician named Carl Nacht and his wife went out for a bicycle ride. Cautious about braving traffic, they chose a path along the Hudson River Greenway, a strip of asphalt reserved for bicycle riding, skating and people moving about on foot.

Suddenly a police tow truck from an adjacent highway turned onto the path, colliding with Dr. Nacht. His wife told a reporter from the New York Times that the truck did not yield to him, as required by law. Nacht died of his injuries. (Some of the details here):
http://www.gothamist.com/archives/2006/06/27/west_side_bicyc_1.php

BITTER, BITTER IRONY

The Nacht case was one of six collisions between motor vehicles and bicycles that were listed in a written statement submitted to a hearing panel by Richard Rosenthal, a seasoned New York City writer who specializes in cycling sports and bicycle industry-related matters. The panel was meeting to consider new regulations concerning how pedestrians and cyclists could be arrested for “parading.” Rosenthal’s statement was deliciously redolent of sarcasm and irony. He wrote:

“The history of the police department's proposed amendment …of the Rules of the City of New York—a parade consists of two people!—betrays the real reason for it and belies any claim it is simply to better control and enforce obstruction of traffic and going through red lights ...The department shows itself to be blatantly and transparently hypocritical in floating the canard that the purpose for this is anything other than to create a nuisance and to harass, intimidate, and impede a section of the New York cycling community.”

RIDE IN GROUPS AND YOU’RE BUSTED.
RIDE ALONE AND YOU’RE DEAD.

Rosenthal’s statement enumerated some of the ways Michael Bloomberg’s cops (and Rudy Giuliani’s cops before Bloomberg) routinely failed to seek punishment for drivers who kill bicyclists when they’re pedaling along alone or nearly alone, even as the police attempt to punish bicyclists who have the nerve to ride together in groups.

Of the Nacht death – a case of negligent homicide the way I see it – Rosenthal wrote with considerable cynicism, citing newspaper headlines and the traffic rule a driver had violated:

“A New York Times story about the incident was headlined, ‘Bicyclist Hurt in Collision With Tow Truck’. The article spoke of his injuries (Dr. Nacht died a day later) ‘when he collided with a Police Department tow truck, the police said yesterday.’ The driver was not ticketed [despite] The New York State Traffic & Vehicle Law, §1143: The driver of a vehicle about to...cross a roadway...shall yield the right of way to all vehicles approaching on the roadway to be crossed.

“Note the police report: the bike collided with the truck. It's pretty much always this way in police reports: bikes collide with cars, cabs, buses, and trucks. Cars, cabs, buses, and trucks never collide with bikes. This is because cyclists habitually ram their 23 lb. vehicles into multi-ton speeding pieces of steel.”

THE FULL CHAMBER OF HORRORS

It’s worth reading Rosenthal’s full litany of violent bicycle “accidents” and violated rules that went unpunished, because police under the last two Republican mayor administrations have done nothing more than shrug at them.

Remember, this is the same police department that pumps 50 bullets into a van full of unarmed people, but then spends its time worrying about bicyclists and pedestrians who have the temerity to walk or ride together in groups.

SPEED AND KILL A DISTINGUISHED SCIENTIST?
NOT A PROBLEM TO NEW YORK COPS.

• “July 12, 1997, Dr. Rachel Fruchter, 57, a graduate of Oxford and Rockefeller Univ. Ph.D., a biochemist, a professor of obstetrics, and a researcher into gynecological cancer and the epidemiology of cancer, was cycling in Prospect Park in Brooklyn when she was struck from behind and killed by a van driver driving well over the speed limit, as police reconstructed the scene. He was not permitted to be on the park road as he was. He was ticketed, but not for that. He was ticketed only for equipment failure.”

CARELESSLY DRIVEN LIMO
KILLS RIDER? TOUGH LUCK!

• “A few years ago, a cyclist was riding south on South Street. A limousine driver was driving north. The limousine driver made a left hand turn into the cyclist killing him. The driver was not ticketed. The police could not bestir themselves to cite him for violating the New York State Vehicle & Traffic law, § 1141: The driver of a vehicle intending to turn to the left...shall yield the right of way to any vehicle...so close as to constitute an immediate hazard. “

BANK EXAMINER KILLED.
RIDICULOUS EXCUSE ACCEPTED.

• “April 30, 2005, Jerome Allen, a 58 year old New York State senior bank examiner, and very experienced cyclist, was on a solo, evening ride in Staten Island. If the reported story told by the 23 year old driver who killed him, Anthony Tasso, Jr., is to be believed, Allen would seem to have been riding his bike as fast as Lance Armstrong. That, or it would seem Anthony was content to drive his uncle's, Joseph Tasso's, Lexus SUV (with an out-of-state license plate) on an otherwise empty, well-paved, six-lane road… [at]. 18 MPH, which more than strains credulity. In either case, according to a report, young Tasso claimed Allen saw fit to suddenly swerve in front of him as they were riding side-by-side. That doesn't pass the laugh test. Tasso, who was driving on a suspended license that he neglected to have re-instated, was not even ticketed. The failure of the police to conduct a serious investigation has seriously hindered and prejudiced claims arising from this.

STRUCK FROM BEHIND?
MAYBE HIS BUTT WAS TOO BIG.

• “September 24, 2005, 14 year old Andre Anderson was cycling near his home in Far Rockaway, Queens when he was hit from behind by another 23 year old, Jose Vicens, driving another luxury SUV, this one a Lincoln Navigator. (See: http://rightofway.org/) Vicens was not ticketed. The police could not bestir themselves to cite him for violating NY State Vehicle & Traffic Law §1122, which enjoins drivers from aggressive passing.”

RIDER’S LEG CRUSHED.
BLOOMBERG’s COPS YAWN.

• “June 20, 2006, a man was riding his bike on Tenth Ave. at 44th Street. A cab driver opened his door into him. He swerved to avoid hitting it-or after hitting it-and had his leg crushed by a bus. The cab driver was not ticketed. The police could not bestir themselves to enforce the New York State Traffic and Vehicle Law, §1214: No person shall open the door of a motor vehicle on the side available to moving traffic unless and until it is reasonably safe to do so, and can be done without interfering with the movement of other traffic.”

WHY ALL THIS MATTERS
OUTSIDE OF NEW YORK CITY

I hope America is watching as closely as some of us New Yorkers are watching. Both Michael Bloomberg and Rudolph Giuliani’s names have been mentioned in connection with the next Republican nomination for President. They’ve spent considerable effort polishing their images – but neither politician, when you get into it, seems to give a hang about their constituents’ lives and limbs.

Instead, the current Mayor Bloombereg makes inroads into normal citizens’ civil rights under the First Amendment under the name of “traffic control” – except he has no interest in controlling traffic that kills people.

And the former mayor? Well speaking of the First Amendment, Giuliani once threatened to cut off city funding to a Brooklyn museum because he didn’t approve of one of the pictures hanging in it.

Back in Brooklyn – which happens to be where I grew up – they had a word for this:

Dictator.

Suppose the radioactive Polonium that poisoned Litvinenko was actually a smuggled nuclear bomb? Boom!

I came back from Europe last August complaining bitterly that wary airport security officials in Frankfurt made me squirt my own prescription nasal spray up my nose. They wanted to, uh, “confirm” that it wasn't explosive.
http://thenewyorkcrank.blogspot.com/
2006_08_01_thenewyorkcrank_archive.html

Then it turned out that Colonel Alexander Litvinenko, the former Russian spy who most probably was poisoned by henchmen of Russian head honcho Vladimir Putin, was done in by radioactive Polonium – not by Thalium, as originally suspected and as I reported. See “the lunatic who came in from the soup” here:
http://thenewyorkcrank.blogspot.com/2006/11/curious-cases-of-poisoned-russian-spy.html

Most recently, traces of radioactive Polonium 210 have been found on at least two British Airways jets.

The Times reports today that it’s “not clear” how the radioactively hot stuff got onto the airplanes in the first place. http://www.nytimes.com/2006/11/30/world/europe/01spycnd.html?hp&ex=1164949200&en=210f59188877aad4&ei=5094&partner=homepage

Well dudes, that’s the life-or-death question. While airport security folks are busy sniffing shoes for plastique and examining 1 ounce nasal spray bottles for teensy-weensy explosives, some diabolical genius could walk aboard an airplane with a nuclear device, detonate it over London or New York, and turn all of us into radioactive cinders.

I don’t want to belittle the damage that an ounce of nasal spray could do in the right hands. I mean, it could paralyze sinuses from here to Kirkuk.

But for goodness sakes, do you mean to tell me that after all this time since 9/11, they still don’t have Geiger counters passively screening passengers as they walk through airport security – not to mention Geiger counters screening checked luggage?

Oh, sorry, I forgot. We only screen for whatever happened last week.

Well, folks, that’s how the bad guys are gonna get us. Not by smuggling in things we’re looking for. They’re going to get us with what we don’t bother looking for because it’s too much trouble or too expensive. Or because our security people are too lazy to think of it.

Speaking of which, there's a program in the works to give business travelers who pay $100 an “easy pass” to avoid airport security. Nice idea – on the surface.
http://www.usnews.com/usnews/news/articles/061119/27traveler.htm

But what’s to stop an Alchaida bellhop in London from slipping a small nuclear something-or-other into the traveling patsy’s bag, which will then speed through security unexamined, it's telephone-activated trigger cocked?

Thanks to the Polonium flub-a-dub, we now all know there's evidently nothing to stop nuclear luggage. The privileged passenger turns into an A-bomb bomb delivery system. Or at least a dirty bomb delivery system that could poison half the citizens of any good sized city. Are we going to wait until it happens before we install airport geiger counters and repeal these stupid "easy passes." My guess is...

Boom!

Heil Bloomberg! New York City police state swings into high gear.

As I write this, a public “hearing” into a new Police Department regulation defining a “parade” is going on in New York’s City Hall.

But don’t expect the police high brass or the city’s Mayor Michael Bloomberg (shown at right with a deserved Hitler mustasche) to be listening.

They’ve got their hands full with a police riot that led to a gang of rampaging cops firing 50 shots – most of them into a van full of unarmed passengers, a few into nearby objects. One passenger is dead, killed the night before his wedding.
http://news.yahoo.com/s/ap/20061127/ap_on_re_us/police_shooting

No no, I’m not claiming Mayor Bloomberg, or his police commissioner Raymond Kelly, actually ordered the shootings. On the contrary, instead of keeping a watchful gaze on the anti-crime operations of a police force noted for shooting first and asking “What the hell are we doing?” second, (remember Amadou Dialo, who committed the fatal crime of waving his wallet?)
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Amadou_Diallo
they’ve been busy redefining what a parade means.

TIME'S UP DEMONSTRATES,
EVERYBODY GETS PUNISHED

Apparently, the cops are so bugged by a ragtag group called Time’s Up that holds unruly street demonstrations on bicycles, they’ve decided to outlaw the peaceful congregation of any group of 30 or more people for any reason at all unless the cops give them a permit to "parade." (If the connective logic of this eludes you, you're not alone, but that's the Bloomberg Administration for you.) You say that meanwhile other cops are gunning down unarmed citizens? Never mind that. Let’s fix the unauthorized parade problem.

This is remarkable, because it makes New York City one of the few places in the world where the cops, not a legislative body, write the rules and then enforce them. Well, actually Nazi Germany did that, too.

So the new regulations, theoretically “under consideration” essentially appear to be a done deal. They “would allow the police to arrest any group of 30 or more cyclists or pedestrians for ‘parading without a permit’, even if they are obeying all traffic laws. Groups of as few as 10 cyclists or pedestrianscould also be arrested, if a police officer decides that the cyclists or pedestrians have violated a traffic rule for ‘more than two city blocks’.

Now, there’s not even language in the so called regulation defining what these people have to be doing, aside from walking or riding in a group.

TOURISTS TAKE NOTE:
NY COPS CAN BUST YOU
AND THROW YOUR BUTT
IN JAIL

If your kid, for example, is part of a class trip to New York, and there are 31 people in the group, they can be arrested just for being together without a permit. (A good reason why the class might want to visit, say, Montreal instead.)

Angry recreational bicycle riders, who have nothing to do with Time’s Up but who often ride in groups of more than 30 on their way out of the city, could also be arrested just for riding together without a permit.

If ten of you come to New York and you’re crossing the street, and one lags a bit and the light turns red, you all can be arrested under the proposed police regulations.

In other words, the new regulations of Mayor Bloomberg’s NYPD will punish everybody who happens to live in, visit or do business in New York in order to get even with a small band of unruly political demonstrators.

This reminds calls to mind what the Nazis did during WWII. If a Nazi officer was killed by a sniper in a village, they’d grab 50 villagers – involved in the sniping or not – line them up against the wall, and shoot them.

YOU CAN FIGHT IT IN COURT AND WIN
IF YOU'RE BUSTED, BUT IT'LL COST YOU

Fortunately, the New York Courts have been shooting down these insane Bloomberg Administration police regulations as fast as the cops can write them and then arrest somebody for violating them.

And the under-the-breath whisper one hears in defense of these Nazi-like edicts is that the law will be enforced selectively. In other words, “we’re only going to arrest people we don’t like.” Which of course, is the very soul of the fascist idea.

Besides, mistakes get made. Do you want to be the one who gets arrested and fingerprinted and spends the night in a crowded prison cell reeking of urine before your case comes up for judicial review? Want to spend the many, many thousands of dollars involved in appealing your case?

There’s no point complaining to Michael Bloomberg. As I said, he’s not listening. He isn’t the slightest bit interested in listening. And he’s too busy right now – trying to wipe up the stuff that hit the fan when his cops went on another rampage – to listen even if he wanted to.

But do us New Yorkers a favor, because we have to live here full time with these police state rules. When you cancel your hotel stay, restaurant reservations or theater tickets in New York, send in a printout or e-mail to the vendor or a cut-and-paste of this article along with your cancellation.

The one thing short of mass minority outrage over a police homicide that seems to get the Mayor’s attention is the possibility that the city is losing business.

Let New York businesses know what this mayor is really costing them.

Oh, stop it already with that frantic Latin American alarm stuff. Stop it, willyuh? Just STOP IT!

This morning’s headlines shout with alarm that Hugo Chavez is leading in Venezuela’s presidential elections.

Yeah, yeah, I know. He’s not only a populist and a nationalist but maybe even a Marxist. Even worse – horror of horrors – he branded President Bush with the mark of Satan, declaring Bush to be “the devil” and telling the UN back in September, “I smell sulfur.”
http://www.boston.com/news/world/latinamerica/articles/2006/09/22/
venezuelan_chavez_wants_to_be_worlds_anti_us_voice/

What’s the best way to deal with the Chavez anti-United States stance?

Nobody in the present regime in Washington is going to listen to this, but the best ploy is to reach down and give Chavez a great big bear hug. Love him to ruination.

As we finally learned in Viet Nam after a war that wasted thousands of American lives… as we finally learned in China, to which we now go to finance President Bush’s regime of financial mismanagement…nations busy gobbling up wealth at the groaning board of commerce have no time to plunge full time into Marxist dialectic and major league repression.

And they’re certainly not going to bite the hand that feeds them.

The quickest way to undo Fidel Castro’s form of Marxism would have been to trade with him and readdict Cuba to U.S. price supports for sugar. Similarly, Chavez's economy ought to get force fed by us like a Strassbourg goose. Ditto a roomful of Latin American nations whose poverty and inequities of wealth feed their anti-Uncle-Sam-ism.

Of course, just as it has elsewhere, the Bush administration will go in exactly the wrong direction on Chavez. I wouldn’t be completely taken by surprise if some White House directed agency attempts the overthrow or assassination of Chavez, once again aping James Bond and the Russian secret police.

No no, guys. Believe me. You don’t want to off Chavez. You want to seduce him.

But what to I know compared to that genius, Boy George?

Addendum:

Our last post had Russian Colonel Alexander Litvinenko lying ill in a London hospital after having been poisoned – presumably by Russian agents – with thallium.

Litvinenko died yesterday. And the poison, whatever it was, turned out not to be thallium after all. Nobody seems to know what it was. Livinenko’s final words: “The bastards got me, but they won’t get everybody.”
http://www.bloomberg.com/apps/news?pid=20601087&sid=aFmK1K3mzIV8&refer=home

The curious cases of the poisoned Russian spy and the lunatic who came in from the soup

So perhaps you’ve been reading about former Russian spy and critic of the current Moscow regime, Colonel Alexander Litvinenko (picture at right), who was poisoned with a deadly chemical called thallium in London.

As I write this, Litvinenko is in an intensive care unit with a 50-50 chance of survival. If you’re not up on the story, go here: http://news.yahoo.com/s/ap/20061120/ap_on_re_eu/britain_russian_spy

The news reports bring to mind a woman I met outside the United Nations building years ago – while the late premier of the USSR, Nikita Khrushchev, was inside scandalizing the planet by taking off one of his shoes and disruptively banging it on a desk in front of the world’s diplomats.

A GREAT YEAR FOR CRAZY STUFF

This was in October of 1960. It was a very good year for nutty things to happen – from shoe banging to Fidel Castro slaughtering his own chickens in a Harlem hotel – and I was on top of the nutcase situation when I met Sylvia Krause.

I was a reporter at the time for one of New York’s daily newspapers. Sylvia Krause was an antiques dealer. The first time I saw her she was walking around in one of the pens made of saw horses, erected across the street from the UN by cops trying to control the insanity. The various pens were spaces reserved for legitimate protestors and for severe nut cases. You name it and they had it penned up:

There was a man dressed in a bear costume, goose-stepping. There were angry survivors of the Soviet-induced famine in the Ukraine back in 1932-33. There were enraged Hungarians. There were anti-Castro Cubans. And then there was Sylvia Krause.

Sylvia was carrying a sign that said something like “Russian Spies Poisoned Roosevelt. Who’s next?”

Huh?

“Are you talking about Franklin Delano Roosevelt?” I asked her.

THE SOVIET HIT LIST

“Oh yes,” she said, “and they didn’t stop with Roosevelt.” She ticked off a list of more than a dozen celebrities from the world of politics and the movies whom the Kremlin had bumped off with poison.

“Why movie people?” I asked.

“Because they were anti-Communist,” Sylvia replied.

What immediately struck me was that, like Roosevelt, all of the “victims” had been reported dead of natural causes when their obituaries appeared in the newspapers.

“How do you know they were poisoned?” I asked.

THE SECRET AGENTS IN YOUR SOUP

“The Russians have secret agents working as waiters all over the world,” Krause explained, “and when someone they want to kill comes in for lunch, they put poison in their soup. That’s how they got…” and she listed the names of half a dozen more deceased celebrities.

“But how do you know this for a fact?” I asked.

Because they tried to poison ME!” she said.

“Then how come you’re not dead?”

“Because I realized they had poisoned my soup, and right there in the restaurant, I stuck my finger down my throat and threw up.”

I loved the imagery, so I wrote a short feature story about her. In those days, stories were typed on actual paper rather than into a computer. Next they were carried by a “copy boy” to the desk of a city editor, who edited them with a fat lead pencil. Unwanted stories ended up “spiked” – literally impaled on a brass spike that sat atop the city editor’s desk.

I watched forlornly as, across the city room, my Sylvia Krause story got spiked faster than a secret agent can say “thallium bromium arsenic chromium.”

Sylvia Kruase operated her antiques business, The Carriage Antique Shop, in a townhouse on East 70th Street near Lexington Avenue. In the course of poking around for information, I learned that she had been leafleting students at nearby Hunter College concerning those poisonous secret Soviet agents. Evidently, many of the students had encountered her and were fond of coming into her shop between classes just to torment her.

THE LIST OF VICTIMS GROWS

A few years later, I wandered past her shop again. There were no longer any antiques in her shop window. The window contained only a spotlight shining down on a photograph of the late President John F. Kennedy. Seems that Sylvia learned the Soviets had poisoned JFK's soup, too. The grassy knoll, Texas Book Depository and Lee Harvey Oswald? Those were just fabrications to throw you off the track, Sylvia explained.

Her new list of secret Soviet poisoning victims included Marilyn Monroe and John Foster Dulles.

As you might expect, an antiques dealer who spends her time tracking down Russian poisonings rather than displaying, buying and selling antiques is doomed to financial failure. She went out of business soon after. Way out of business.

OUR TALE ENDS NOT ONLY SADLY—
BUT ALSO WITH A SHUDDER

In 1970 I came across her again, grimy and a bit ragged looking, at the base of a flight of steps at the Seventh Avenue entrance of Pennsylvania Station in New York. She was begging for coins, shaking a bent and filthy Styrofoam cup, but still displaying a sign – this one written in crayon on a piece of corrugated coardboard – denouncing Soviet poisonings. By then, she appeared to be about 50.

I never saw her after that. I doubt that she is still alive. Even if her life had remained comfortable, she’d most probably be in her late 90s by now. I assume that she died somewhere on the street and was buried at the potter’s field on Hart’s Island, where the city rids itself of the remains of its homeless.

But now there’s the case of Col. Alexander Litvinenko, evidently poisoned in a London restaurant. And the hair stands up on the back of my neck.

I mean, you just have to wonder: did Sylvia Krause really know something after all?

A geography lesson too good to ignore

The blog Overheard In New York publishes some hits and some misses, but this one is a super-triple-extra bonus home run. With their encouragement, I just had to run it here

As Long as We Maintain a Sense of Smug Superiority, We'll Make It

Blonde #1: You know her parents are letting her study abroad next semester?
Blonde #2: Really? Where?
Blonde #1: Ummm, this place that's near, like... Russia. Like, in China?
Blonde #2: Japan?
Blonde #1: No. Well, yeah, Japan's in China, but that's not the one she's going to.
Blonde #2: India!
Blonde #1: No, but oh my god I totally just remembered! It's New Zealand!
Blonde #2: New Zealand's not in Russia, it's in Australia, stupid.

--Astor Place

Overheard by: MistressSilver

via Overheard in New York, Nov 18, 2006