Results tagged “thenewyorkpost”

A sonic device designed to drive off troublesome youths has been installed in one Queens building known for vandalism and drug use. It's called The Mosquito, and is produced by a British company, where more than 3,500 units of the equipment are in use. As humans age, they naturally lose some of their hearing, beginning at the higher end of the audible spectrum detectable to man.

• Today on the Gothamist Newsmap: shots fired and a large crowd at 98th St. and Rockaway Blvd. in Queens, a carjacking on Ave. Y and Nostrand Ave. in Brooklyn, and an overturned auto on 28th St. and 7th Ave. in Manhattan.
• The New York Post continues to discover the brave new world of "twisted sex play," commonly known as BDSM.
• The gentrification of Harlem is colorblind, to the consternation and frustration of many newcomers and long-time residents.
• A Bronx man and his son, who were bound, robbed, and shot in the alley next to their home, may have been followed all the way from Brooklyn by their assailant.
• QueensCrap notes some less-than-professional tree pruning after the Parks Dept. improperly issued permits to a notorious company. There's a difference between pruning and just lopping off most of the tops of trees.
• Ironic Sans was included in a new book titled Ultimate Blogs; masterworks from the wild web. Congratulations!
• The persistence of gay bathhouses in what only seems like the post-AIDS era.
• TreeHugger wonders about the carbon footprint of a bloated Gmail account.

Yesterday, over a hundred people - made up of "fans, reporters and photographers" - waited outside the Frank E. Campbell funeral home, where the body of actor Heath Ledger had been kept since ME's autopsy. Ledger had been found dead in a SoHo apartment by his masseuse and housekeeper on Tuesday afternoon. The cause of death is inconclusive, but he had a number of prescription drugs in the apartment, many of them to aid sleeping (he had been described as looking tired recently and even told interviewers he had trouble sleeping after filming The Dark Knight).

New Yorkers can walk the streets--and their pets--with renewed confidence this winter. Con Ed is reporting that one's chance of electrocution via stray voltage is down more than 20%, based upon their most recent survey. Of course, being electrocuted while walking around is a very remote possibility, although it does happen, especially in winter, when salt water and slushy water become simultaneously a corrosive agent and an effective conductor of electricity. The utility recorded only 295 accounts of people being shocked last year, versus 378 the prior year. That's a 22% reduction.

Mayor Bloomberg may be finding that coy flirtation can be cute at first, but quickly becomes old and aggravating if carried on for too long. The New York Times has a story today describing a growing backlash against a Mayor who seems preoccupied with something big, but it's something big that he won't discuss, or even acknowledge.

An assistant principal at P.S. 196 in East Williamsburg was arrested yesterday for slashing her live-in boyfriend with a pair of scissors. Danielle Capuano's boyfriend Alejandro Ruiz was also arrested in the domestic violence incident in East Elmhurst, Queens. Capuano was charged with assault and criminal possession of a weapon. Ruiz was charged with assault for hitting Capuano in the head.

A nine-year-old girl remains in critical condition following surgery yesterday at Long Island Jewish Hospital after an unregistered van carrying school children was struck by a city bus. The accident occurred Friday morning allegedly after the passenger van cut off a Q46 bus in Fresh Meadows, Queens. The bus clipped the van, sending it into a spin, shattering its windows, and ejecting a bench seat into the street.

Retired football great Jim Brown is the president of a new snack food and beverage company and City Councilman Leroy Comrie is not happy about it. Brown's company is called OG Nation, which Comrie says stands for "original gangster." The company currently markets "King Pin" lager and a line of mixed drinks under the brand "Party Dogg." According to Newsday, Arizona-based OG Nation is also developing a line of potato chips, pretzels, pork rinds, and dips that will be marketed as "Thug Chips."

The Boston priest arrested for stalking "Late Night" talk-show host Conan O'Brien has been found fit for trial. A Manhattan judge declared the Reverend David Ajemian mentally fit for trial after a court-appointed psychologist examined him. Ajemian was arrested after issuing a number of threats to the host of the NBC talk show host and attempts to get into an O'Brien taping. Ajemian was relatively more unhinged than your average show biz stalker. He was...

A Columbia Law grad is suing a cabbie for grabbing her by the hair and bashing her head against his cab's partition after calling her and her friend "bitches." According to The New York Post and court papers filed by 25-year-old Mei Ying Lai, cab driver Fazal Wali picked up the young woman on West 51st St., but became impatient when asked to wait for her friend, Nancy Hon, at West 29th St. Hon reportedly wandered off from the meeting point and Wali became infuriated.

Our friends from the Great White North are feeling flush from the strengthening of the Canadian dollar versus its US counterpart, and New York is apparently ready to relieve them of their excess cash. The Loonie, or Canadian dollar, is even with the US dollar for the first time since 1976. If you've ever wondered why the backs of paperback books usually have a second, more expensive, price printed on them them for Canadians, it's not because we don't want our northern neighbors to read inexpensively. It's because the Canadian dollar has traditionally been weaker than the US dollar and the exchange rate necessitated dual pricing in North America.

• Today on the Gothamist Newsmap: an unstable building at 37th Ave. and 31st St. in Queens, a stabbing on State St. and 3rd Ave. in Brooklyn, and an organ transport on the Cross Island Parkway in Queens.
• GrandOpening on the LES is following up its single-table storefront Ping Pong concept with another slice of Americana: the drive-in movie theater. $75 will secure all six passenger seats in a ragtop Ford Falcon. We recommend burning the two extra tickets for a less awkward double date.
• In what to us makes NJ Gov. Jon Corzine seem like a candidate for a "Ripley's, Believe it or Not!" segment, the reformed seatbelt wearer had 10 pounds of excess bone growth removed from his femur during surgery today. Ten pounds!
• The Times' Freakonomics blog notes that panhandlers may earn more than low-ranking NYPD cops.
• Four tales of people who just had to leave the city.
• The New York Post will soon start publishing a Page Six glossy magazine that will weigh in at almost 100 pages and come as an insert with the Sunday paper.
• Friends and family gathered today for the official naming of the block at 53rd St. and 8th Ave. as Jerry Orbach Way.

• Today on the Gothamist Newsmap: a child was found at 115th St. and Nicholas Ave. in Manhattan, an unusual incident at Columbus Circle in Manhattan with a man atop the globe in front of the Trump International, and a double shooting on Hegeman Ave. in Brooklyn.
• A worker fired from her job at the substance-abuse outreach organization Odyssey House said that her former supervisor would talk of his sexual exploits constantly. One of the weirder boasts: he would have sex in front of his cats, which would really turn the pets on.
• The New York Post looks at the most international pick-up spot in town: the Delegates Lounge at the U.N. The view is great, the drinks are strong, and many are looking to practice their international language skills.
• The second thresher shark in a week washed up on Rockaway Beach yesterday. A park manager and police gently pushed the three- to six-foot shark back into the water and it swam away.
• Alain Mariduena, or the graffiti artist known as Ket, pleaded guilty last Monday to painting a subway train in Brooklyn. He received probation, but his deal stipulated that he owes the city one mural to be commissioned by the DA's office, as long as it does not "condemn graffiti as an art form."
• The Gowanus Lounge helpfully points out why it's never a good idea to loan your shoes to the random guy who's already had his shoes, phone, and watch stolen, or let him crash on your couch because he has no idea where he lives. You probably won't get your shoes back.
• World leaders will be descending on midtown Manhattan this week as the 62nd U.N. General Assembly begins Tuesday, and Iranian president Mahmoud Ahmadinejad will be a featured speaker. Prepare for heightened security measures and nightmarish traffic situations.
• 21-year-old New Yorker and Mets fan Matt Murphy auctioned off the record-setting 756th home run ball, hit by Barry Bonds and that Murphy caught, for more than $750,000.

(con-ed, by huckfunn at flickr)

• Today on the Gothamist Newsmap: a police-involved shooting at 149th St. and 3rd Ave. in the Bronx, an attempted sexual assault on 55th St. in Brooklyn, and a bank robbery on West 52nd St. between 7th and 8th Aves.
• Kenneth Eng, noted earlier this year for his controversial essay "Why I Hate Blacks", was arrested again by the Feds shortly after pleading guilty to harrassing his neighbors and threatening them with a hammer.
• The New York Post reports that rumors of white people fleeing the city in a "white flight" are an urban myth, and that the latest census data supports the opposite conclusion. This is the first we've heard of any "white flight" rumors, and we probably would have correctly guessed the opposite over the last ten years.
• NYU is expanding across the East River, with the announcement of its first dorm in Brooklyn. The Brooklyn Paper reports that the school is opening a dorm for students in Brooklyn Heights, previously used as a dorm for the Watchtower Bible and Tract Society.
• Chris Noth signed on to the movie adapation of the HBO / NYC-centric series Sex and the City. He played the character Mr. Big, who flew to Paris to sweep protagonist Carrie off her feet in the series finale.
• Queens Crap has a round-up on what people are saying about the indictment of Queens Councilman Dennis Gallagher after he allegedly raped a 52-year-old woman in his Queens office.
• Martin Scorcese's Rolling Stones concert documentary has been pushed back seven months, to April, 2008. A Viacom spokesman said that the company needs more time to set up proper promotion for the movie.
• The Queens man who caught Barry Bonds' 756th homerun ball may just hang on to it, for sentimental reasons.
• A collection of spoof SubTalk transit posters.

A Queens bus driver got into a brawl on his bus with a 22-year-old passenger after the younger man refused to surrender his seat at the front of the bus to an elderly woman with a cane. The New York Post reports that Larry Woods, who is 44, smashed passenger Christian Custis over the head with the bus's onboard phone after the man half his age wouldn't get out of a seat marked reserved for the handicapped when an elderly woman with a cane boarded the bus at 164th St. and Hillside Ave. in Jamaica, Queens yesterday Friday morning.

Last August, Viola Goodman found her son Robert dead on the bathroom floor of his apartment, which was stiflingly hot. Despite the August heat, the heating system in the building was blasting. Robert Goodman had called his mother earlier to report the blasting radiators and flooding. As his mother waited downstairs in the building's basement waiting for the fire department to arrive and find a steam shut-off valve, her son was upstairs frantically trying to mop up a quarter inch of water on the apartment's floor as plumbing was springing leaks. When the steam was finally shut off, Viola Goodman returned upstairs and found her dead son. A city medical examiner determined that his body temperature was 112 degrees after he died.

The New York Post has a story today on the seizure of an old checkered cab from its owner, who uses it to give free rides to people around the city. 80-year-old Ray Kottner had his hack seized when Taxi and Limousine Commission investigators spotted him accepting a $10 gratuity from a grateful rider. Kottner's been driving a cab for 64 years but decided to quit "working for the man" a few years ago. A CBS News profile of him in 2006 described his unique business model. He offers people free rides in his old checker cab. In addition to the ride, he offers an irascible personality and doesn't suffer fools gladly. People love it, and the money he makes in tips from grateful riders far outstrips anything he made as a cab for hire.

A budding Manhattan pot dealer named Peter Dagostino was arrested last year and police found a refrigerator in his apartment stuffed with 88 pounds of marijuana. They also found a list of specific "dos and don'ts" on how to succeed in the drug business. Apparently, a "don't" he forgot to add to his list was "Don't leave a written outline of your criminal enterprise for police to find." Dagostino also had some helpful advice from a fellow dealer. The New York Post explains:

Authorities also found a two-page letter from a fellow criminal acquaintance - full of juicy tips on how to not get arrested while dealing dope.

Continue reading "To Do: Get Arrested with Fridge Full of Weed"

A barking pit bull named Bleu (or Blue) was a hero yesterday, as his barking alerted a neighbor to the cries of a young girl who was being molested between two houses on 171st St. in Flushing, Queens. The Daily News writes that a young man had been sitting on the steps of a house, across the street from where the attack would take place, watching a seven-year-old girl and her friend ride their scooters. Around 7:45 p.m., he approached the young girl and asked her if she wanted to see some worms in a backyard. NY1 reports that the man just pulled the girl off her scooter and carried her to a backyard. Once between two neighboring garages, the man pulled down the girl's pants and attempted to molest her as she started screaming for her parents.

The New York Post is loving the NJ beauty pageant story, which includes allegations that a fellow contestant may have been behind the blackmail plot to get Miss New Jersey to relinquish her crown. Someone sent pageant winner Amy Polumbo a package of photos that were lifted from Polumbo's Facebook account and doctored to include sexually suggestive captions. The Daily News says that there is no breast-baring or drug-taking in any of the photos, but Polumbo will still have to appear before the NJ board of the Miss America competition to determine whether she can keep her crown or not.

WCBS is offing Jack FM, the station format it abrubtly switched to two years ago, and turning back the clock to its former oldies format. The 2005 switch upset a lot of listeners, who were outraged both at the loss of a long-beloved source of classics and the abruptness of the change, which occurred with only an hour's notice. It also led to the immediate dismissal of well-liked on air personalities like Cousin Brucie, Don Ingram, Bob Shannon, and Harry Harrison, who were replaced with a pre-recorded voiceover that nattered slogans and one-liners.

The head of a firemens' union is pledging to end any hope of Giuliani's campaign for President. Rudolph Giuliani has emphasized his leadership in crisis as the centerpiece of his campaign for the Presidency. His primary set piece in this narrative are FDNY firefighters, who accumulated an enormous reservoir of goodwill during and after the 9/11 attacks, during which 343 firemen and parademics were killed. Perhaps it's a good strategy heading into a Republican nomination race, which usually favors people who are considered strong on national defense, but Giuliani's tack so far appears to have left him sitting on a one-legged stool. If he loses 9/11 as an issue to rely on, he's pretty much finished.

A new noise code will go into effect tonight/tomorrow morning when the clock strikes midnight, and that clock better have muffled bells. It's the first comprehensive overhaul of noise ordinances in about 30 years and was proposed by Mayor Bloomberg three and a half years ago. It's mostly oriented towards bars and clubs, where a growing nightlife presence in neighborhoods like the Lower East Side has left many residents sleepless. The New York Times notes that noisy cars and motorcycles will be completely banned from the city, there will be a limit on how long dogs can bark continuously, garbage trucks will be required to stay at least 50 feet from residential buildings between 11 p.m. and 7 a.m., construction noise must be mitigated (Adrienne Shelley was killed for complaining about construction noise), and ice cream trucks will have to go quiet when parked curbside. We wonder if this will have any effect on the creative siren-DJ stylings emanating from police cars. Either way, enforcement of the new code may be spotty because the Dept. of Environmental Protection only has 26 noise meters. The police have 80.

• Today on the Gothamist Newsmap: a partial collapse at Fleet Court and Woodhaven Blvd. in Queens, two pedestrians were struck on the westbound Grand Central Parkway at Queens Boulevard in Queens, and a stabbing on West 21st St. in Manhattan.
• All three area airports: Newark, JFK, and Laguardia, were thrown into chaos yesterday after a computer malfunction in the air traffic control system resulted in multi-hour delays, missed connections, and many unhappy passengers.
• Gov. Spitzer wants to crack down on the misclassification of employees as independent contractors, which is said to deny the state $175 million in payroll taxes annually.
• The New York Post looks at the phenomena of cats falling or jumping out of windows, for which the ASPCA treats feline patients about five times a week in New York.
• Are NYC sidewalk bike racks secure? This picture at Streetsblog seems to indicate that they are not.
• The 62nd St. replacement for an UES townhouse that a doctor blew up in a suicide attempt last year will be eco-friendly and is priced at $30 million.
• New York will be a testing ground for the Special Olympics organization's new Urban Strategy, which is an effort to attract more city kids to its programs.
• Hunts Points residents protested against the smells coming from a DEP wastewater treatment plant and the adverse health effects they claim it is causing. They say both are making life in their neighborhood unbearable.

There's a fantastic look at a cross-section of Queens residents in the Times today. There's a feature about a Wednesday night class at the James A. Bland Houses in Flushing, where a group of curious and determined residents are learning Mandarin. There's an Italian-American woman who explains, "Kind of like, ‘If you can’t beat ’em, join ’em,'" a few people who simply want to communicate with their neighbors, and an 85-year-old Holocaust survivor who knows seven other languages. The latter student, Frank Sygal, totally inspires us:

Mr. Sygal grew up outside Krakow and lost his parents on an August day in 1942 when German soldiers rounded up Jews, stripped off their jewelry and machine-gunned them. His facility with languages helped him survive: He spoke Russian with the Russian soldiers, Ukrainian with the Ukrainians and German with the Germans, reserving Hebrew for private spaces. Once he arrived in New York in 1949, there were two more languages to learn — English and Spanish.

Continue reading "Chinese As a 2nd, 3rd or 8th Language"

The New York Post tells a slice-of-life story of Queens homeowners who neighbor a golf course today, employing the maximum number of golf puns possible. In its story, it tells the un-"fore"-tunate tale of neighbors who live next to the Douglaston Golf Course. The residents were "teed-off" and "taking a swing" at the city for owning a golf course that subjected them to a barrage of incoming balls and broken windows. They said that the net that was supposed to protect their homes was not "up to par" and described being virtual prisoners in their own homes. The picture caption showing one unhappy man displaying all the golf balls he found in his back yard reads "Mulligan Stew."

A look at some noteworthy television this week:

Rupert Murdoch did not become a media tycoon by turning tail at the first sign of resistance in his business dealings. New York Times media columnist David Carr examines Rupert Murdoch's past successes in wooing reluctant sellers into folding their companies into the News Corp. family with promises of benign oversight and marginal interference at best, only to run roughshod over the company and imprint it with Murdoch's style before the ink is dry on the corporate bill of sale.

The parents of Destiny Mesa claim they only decided to sue the city after the teacher who lost track of their kingergartener daughter in a crowded Manhattan museum wasn't disciplined. The suit alleges that the school did not have enough chaperones for a field trip from Staten Island to the American Museum of Natural History on the Upper West Side. The New York Post reports, however, that the teacher assigned to look after Destiny Mesa only had two other children to monitor. We have to wonder how many chaperones is standard or would be considered enough to keep track of a group of six-year-olds.