Results tagged “randycohen”

Move over Crazy Cat Ladies of New York, a West End Avenue tenant may just have you beat. The Post reports that court papers have been filed by a building owner against 71-year-old tenant Jacqueline Bartone, calling her apartment a "zoo" and listing the pets that reside with her -- including three dogs, several reptiles and cats, "and as many as a dozen birds, including an African Grey parrot and a macaw parrot."

Radio shock jock Don Imus was suspended for two weeks by CBS, which owns WFAN and Westwood One (the radio outlets his show is broadcast and syndicated on) and MSNBC, which broadcasts a televised simulcast of the radio show, over remarks he made towards the Rutgers women's basketball team. MSNBC announced that Imus would be suspended first, then CBS announced a similar suspension.

It's so funny, we were watching WNBC 4 yesterday and there was a segment about engagement rings. If a woman receives an engagement ring on a holiday (Christmas, birthday, etc.) and then later breaks off the engagement, she can keep the ring because it was be considered a gift. So experts suggest that women request their engagement rings on holidays and that men not give them on holidays.

Once in a while, there are Ethicist columns in the NY Times Magazine that are immediate classics. Like yesterday's column, in particular the second item about an item found on the subway:

I found a video camera on the subway. I could not get to lost and found that day, and the manufacturer had no record of the owner. When my mother lost a camera, the finder located her by viewing the pictures. Trying to do the same, I saw that this camera was used to look up women’s skirts on the subway. I was shocked! The police said that they couldn’t do anything. I don’t want to return it to the owner. Should I erase the footage and donate it to a school? M.H., New York

Randy Cohen has what we think is some sage advice.

It would be another matter had the camera been used to shoot something erotic and shocking and consensual: you may not thwart what is voluntary and benign. But this up-skirt epic intrudes on the unwary. If the authorities decline to act, as they did, you may seek alternatives. Here’s one approach: Announce your discovery on Craigslist or similar lost-and-found sites: “Found: One video camera used to shoot up women’s skirts. Will return to owner, whom I will photograph, posting his picture on this site and on lampposts throughout the city.” Then, when the camera’s owner fails to step forward (and he won’t show up, of course, out of embarrassment), give it to a school.

And we're not surprised the police couldn't do anything, because they sometimes don't like to get involved, but wouldn't it have been interesting if someone called up the police or MTA Lost & Found to say they lost a camera on the subway? We wonder if the police would have been able to press charges - video voyeurism is a felony!

An off duty police officer stopped a man from carjacking him by shooting him in the face. Officer Kenneth O'Connor had been sitting in his Ford Explorer SUV when Daniel Arroyo apparently threatened him with a gun early Sunday. O'Connor used his off-duty - and licensed - revolver and shot him in the head, but didn't realize that Arroyo had been wounded until he saw blood on the ground. The cop called the police and Arroyo was found trying to run away.

NY Times Ethicist Randy Cohen announces to readers (Gothamist assumes he means all NY Times readers, though he just mentions "Book Review" readers) that he wants their suggestions to make a literary map of Manhattan, places where literary characters walked, brooded, or traipsed. Email suggestions to bookmap@nytimes.com (there are more rules and regs, like having page numbers and quotes, here), credit will be given to the first person who sends in a submission for a particular book. And, friends, Lyle, Lyle Crocodile has already been submitted:

Bernard Waber places Lyle, Lyle Crocodile for us: "This is the house. The house on East 88th Street." But where on East 88th Street? The clue comes in an illustration: the amiable reptile stands on his front stoop looking at a house to his left marked No. 234. That puts Lyle's own house at No. 236. Alas, a visit to the block shows not the charming brownstone where Lyle lolled but an ordinary tenement. Lyle's house, like Lyle, is a fiction. As it happens, Harriet the Spy lives in the same neighborhood, in a house on East 87th. You'd think someone as clever as she would have noticed a crocodile around the block.

The map will be published in June. Gothamist loves this idea, but while Cohen hopes for maps of Chicago and London next, we wonder about a map of the outer boroughs (think Jonathan Lethem, Walt Whitman).

Randy Cohen, The Ethicist

This week's Ethicist column contains, in Ask Gothamist's opinion, one glaring mistake. Vicki Pope from Tennessee writes in with this question:

Thanks for sending us great questions this week! We got quite a few over the weekend and we'll try to answer them all. Meanwhile, if you've got a burning question, take a look at what we've tackled in the last week to see if we've already answered it. Otherwise, ask away!

Gothamist absolutely loves the Ethicist. Randy Cohen's weekly column in the Sunday New York Times magazine is the first thing we read when the paper is delivered Saturday morning and many an argument ensues as a result of Cohen's topic du jour. Case in point is this weekend's first question. E.L. of New York asks:

What the blurb fails to mention is that the man, "Sean from the Midwest," feels uncomfortable because it seems his friend, the blogger, has a crush on him - feelings that would be unrequited. Cohen of course says that the Internet is fair game and that Sean should not feel bad for reading his friend's blog, plus postulates that the blog was a low-risk way for the girl to get her feelings out there, in hopes Sean would read it, and act on it if interested and be tactful if not. That's exactly what blogs were made for: Developing, fostering, documenting and destroying crushes.