First Comes Your Balls, Then We Inflate The Giant Rat

Brooklyn Brewery founder Steve Hindy reminisces about his first time meeting local labor representatives:

[Williamsburg] was a very different place [in 1996, when the brewery opened]. One day during construction, a bunch of union guys right out of Good Fellas showed up. One said, “We want J-O-B-S.” Their head guy — later indicted for labor bribery — said, “We put a picket up and no one’s gonna unload your trucks.” I promised them jobs on my next project. They went off to talk. I was sitting there shitting in my pants. One comes back, puts his hand on my thigh next to my balls, and says, “We’re gonna have to hurt you.” Then he says, “Just kiddin’! We’re gonna leave you alone. Next time you do something, we have to be part of it.”

Fall Back

In case you somehow missed it, Daylight Savings Time ended at 2 a.m. Sunday, but the white-gloved workers at the Torneau store were on the case long before then:

Time is the enemy of the New Yorker. There is never enough of it. So there was something euphoric about the scene yesterday inside Tourneau TimeMachine in Manhattan, where white-gloved workers were busy setting the store’s 8,000 wristwatches back an hour. For once, people got a second chance.

Officially, the end of daylight saving time struck at 2 a.m. this morning. But, as Richard E. Gellman, a Tourneau vice president, explained, the world’s largest watch store needs a head start. It will take workers three days to turn all the little knobs on the sides of all the watches to the previous hour, a significant effort undertaken each October, in accordance with the Uniform Time Act of 1966, as a courtesy to the customer.

“It’s a very big deal,” Mr. Gellman said. “We’re all about time.”

. . .

Later in the afternoon, Mr. Gellman greeted a man dressed as a floppy-eared Dalmatian. He was not shopping for a new Rolex. He was Hot Dog, the Fire Department’s fire safety mascot, visiting the store to remind people to change the batteries of their smoke detectors when they reset their clocks. Three firefighters stood with him in the bucket of a fire truck’s mechanical ladder and pretended to change the hands of the giant clock outside the store.

The clock, controlled by a computer, was not budging for anyone before its automatic resetting at 2 a.m. The tinier ones in the display cases are not as self-sufficient.

Robert Marcomeni, 42, who works at the store, said he had reset about 250 watches since Friday. He took a pragmatic approach to the task, and to the whole notion of daylight saving time. “You don’t question it,” he said. “You just do it.”

Mysterious Smell Comes, Goes And Leaves No Clues In Its Wake

Folks never quite figured out where that sweet smell came from:

The night air all over Manhattan was brisk, with a hint of winter and a dash of something sweetly out of the ordinary. Some thought it smelled like maple syrup. Some said caramel, or a freshly baked pie, or Bit-O-Honey candy bars.

From downtown Manhattan to the Upper East Side, Prospect Heights in Brooklyn and parts of Staten Island, the question was the same on Thursday night and into early yesterday: What was that smell?

The aroma not only revived memories of childhood, but in a city scared by terrorism, it raised vague worries about an attack deviously cloaked in the smell of grandma’s kitchen.

It was so seductive that many New Yorkers found themselves behaving strangely, succumbing to urges usually kept under wraps. One woman who never touches the stuff said she was inspired to eat ice cream.

The investigation — that they’re “investigating” it sounds freaky enough — was thorough, yet investigators picked up nothing . . . or so they say:

Late yesterday, nearly 24 hours after the smell had spread through the city, sparking hundreds of bewildered calls to the city’s 311 emergency hot line, officials said that they had determined that the smell had not been hazardous and that it had dissipated as quickly, and mysteriously, as it had appeared.

Even after chasing down anonymous tips and chasing up several blind alleys, however, they did not know where it had come from.

The odor was first detected around 8 p.m. on Thursday in Lower Manhattan. It seemed to spread quickly uptown and into parts of the other boroughs – so quickly that officials expressed concern. The city’s Office of Emergency Management sent out feelers to the Police and Fire Departments, state emergency response agencies in New York and New Jersey, and the United States Coast Guard, which communicated with tugboats and container ships at sea to determine whether the odor was being detected there.

Raymond W. Kelly, the New York City police commissioner, coolly told reporters yesterday that tests and air monitoring had revealed “nothing of a hazardous nature.”

“It’s believed to be some sort of food substance, but we can’t substantiate that at this time,” Mr. Kelly said. He confirmed that the source of the smell seemed to be in Lower Manhattan.

The chase led the city’s environmental bloodhounds to some interesting places. Investigators working on a tip checked the Jacques Torres Chocolate Haven in SoHo, but the owner insisted he had not been the culprit. His staff had spent the afternoon roasting almonds, he said. And anyway, chocolate, for those who really know, smells bitter, not sweet.

“Perhaps if it was a chocolate smell, people would be running here today,” Mr. Torres said from his shop, which he said was no busier than normal for a Friday in autumn. His chef, Susana Garcia, 31, who was on duty Thursday, said the mysterious odor was definitely more like maple syrup than like chocolate. It was, Mr. Torres said, a kind of warm-your-heart holiday smell appropriate for this time of year.

See also: “Smell hath no fury: Breakfast odor in city called nontoxic” (Daily News, October 29, 2005); “Sweet Smell of Mystery Wafting Along” (New York Post, October 29, 2005), which posits the passing ship and Canadian assault theories (“The theory that it came from a ship passing through New York Harbor makes sense, given the prevailing north-by-northwest breeze that night, but others abound — from antifreeze to ‘rebel’ trees to a Canadian assault. . . . The Canadian Foreign Ministry did not return a call seeking comment.”); “That Smell” (New Yorker, October 31, 2005), which suggests a real estate-related scheme (“It’s a well-known fact, among real-estate agents, that prospective buyers respond enthusiastically to the smells of cinnamon and baking dough. Brokers often instruct sellers to put an apple pie in the oven just before showing an apartment. This ploy came to mind last Thursday evening, when the smell of maple syrup unaccountably permeated the entire metropolitan area.”).

The Sweet Smell Of Maple Doughnuts, Or Perhaps Eggos

Perhaps you caught wind of the sweet smell permeating the air last night that officials assure us was in no way harmful and hopefully was not connected in some way to preparations for some sort of terror attack, albeit a not altogether unpleasant one:

An unseen, sweet-smelling cloud drifted through parts of Manhattan last night. Arturo Padilla walked through it and declared that it was awesome.

“It’s like maple syrup. With Eggos. Or pancakes,” he said. “It’s pleasant.”

The odor had followed Mr. Padilla and his friend along their walk in Lower Manhattan, from a dormitory on Fulton Street, to Pace University on Spruce Street, and back down again, to where they stood now, near a Dunkin’ Donuts. Maybe it was from there, he said. But it wasn’t.

Mr. Padilla was not alone. Reports of the syrupy cloud poured in from across Manhattan after 9 p.m. Some feared that it was something sinister.

There were so many calls that the city’s Office of Emergency Management coordinated efforts with the Police and Fire Departments, the Coast Guard and the City Department of Environmental Protection to look into it.

By 11 p. m., the search had turned up nothing harmful, according to tests of the air. Reports continued to come in from as far north as 112th Street shortly before midnight. In Lower Manhattan, where the smell had begun to fade, it was back, stronger than before, by 1 a.m.

“We are continuing to sample the air throughout the affected area to make sure there’s nothing hazardous,” said Jarrod Bernstein, an emergency management spokesman. “What the actual cause of the smell is, we really don’t know.”

Having smelled the smell firsthand, I can report that it was a very familiar (yet the exact name eludes me) smell. I want to say it was like a doughnut. Others came up with similar observations:

There were conflicting accounts as to its nature. A police officer who had thrown out her French vanilla coffee earlier compared it to that. Two diplomats from the Netherlands disagreed, politely. Rieneke Buisman said it smelled like roasted peanuts. Her friend Joris Geeven said it reminded him of a Dutch cake called peperkoek, though he could not describe that smell.

French Vanilla sounds about right, actually . . .

Bad To Worse

For mayoral candidate Fernando Ferrer yesterday, things went from bad (“Even Among Democratic Voters, Poll Finds Ferrer Is Well Behind”) to worse:

Here’s the picture that’s going to send Fernando Ferrer reaching for the Tums.

One week after endorsing the Democratic mayoral candidate, former President Bill Clinton encountered Mayor Bloomberg at a Waldorf-Astoria luncheon yesterday and — from the looks of it — both had a mighty swell time chewing the fat for five minutes. The politically powerful picture was snapped by the mayor’s photographer and quickly released by City Hall.

“The mayor was happy to see President Clinton,” said mayoral spokesman Ed Skyler, without providing details of the chat. “They’ve known each other for a long time and he enjoyed their conversation.”

One Clinton aide wasn’t too happy, though.

When four City Hall reporters rushed to a foyer off the Waldorf’s Grand Ballroom, where Clinton and Bloomberg were spotted in conversation, the Clinton aide angrily demanded they leave.

“No! No!” the aide shouted.

When he started getting physical with the reporters, Skyler intervened. “Don’t push around my press corps,” he told the Clinton staffer, who then backed off.

Clinton left moments later for the United Nations, with the mayor heard saying, “All the best.”

The political damage to Ferrer had been done.

The photo of a smiling Republican mayor joined by one of the most recognizable Democratic leaders in the world is a boost for Bloomberg in a city where Clinton is enormously popular.

Of course this was all a chance encounter — an accident — just like last time.