Humberto Humberto, It’s Not The Rooster’s Fault It Has A Thing For Pigeons

Moral of the story — never trust anyone with a pet rooster:

A Manhattan man was arrested yesterday after he killed his pet rooster by biting its head off because he was angry at the bird, authorities said.

Humberto Rodriguez, 52, was charged with animal cruelty after agents from the ASPCA found his pet’s headless body on the fire escape of his apartment at 506 W. 213th St. in Inwood.

When the agents got there, they noticed a large crowd around the fire escape — pointing up to the headless bird, authorities said.

Rodriguez confessed to having champed down on the 6-pound rooster because it had attacked one of his pet baby pigeons.

He said he became enraged and sought to discipline the foul bird.

Responders found the body of the rooster on his fire escape, ASPCA spokesman Joe Pentangelo said.

The rooster’s head has not been located.

Authorities also discovered that the rooster had been a victim of previous domestic abuse:

An examination also found that the rooster, which Rodriguez owned for six months, suffered from two broken wings, Pentangelo said.

You Little Shits, I Hope You Stole A 40 GB Click Wheel

Two young punks (creeping Postism, sorry) beat up a mother running with her baby in Prospect Park and robbed her iPod from her:

Two boys robbed a Park Slope woman jogging with her child in Prospect Park yesterday, police said.

Laurie Maher-Samra, 35, was jogging in the park with her 7-month-old son in a stroller when the youths, who appeared to be 12 years old, attacked her near Nellie’s Lawn at 1 p.m.

She was running along East Drive in the park, listening to music when the boys attacked.

They ran up to her from behind, hit her in the head, snatched her iPod and fled, police said.

“I just didn’t think it would happen at 12:30 in the afternoon,” said a shaken Maher-Samra. “I was just surprised that they would attack a mom with a baby.”

She and her son were not injured.

“There were people around. It was weird,” she said. “It was a bold move. As a mom of a 7-month old, I should be able to walk with him in the park.”

The 78th Precinct, which encompasses the park, has seen a 30 percent drop in robberies over the past year, but iPod thefts have been on the rise across the city.

This is what I’m talking about.

A Loose Coalition Of Antibar Activists Seeks To Halt The Assault On The Senses

The Villager’s Lincoln Anderson is on the verge of popularizing a new phrase — “antibar activists”* — in the course of profiling a woman who is raising children next to an East Village bar:

Last month, a few neighbors held a protest rally outside that bar, Boxcar, between 10th and 11th Sts. Their ranks were swelled by antibar activists who don’t live in the neighborhood, including individuals who had coalesced to push for the closing of The Falls, the Soho bar where Imette St. Guillen was last seen in February before her murder, allegedly by a bouncer.

Wearing a nightgown and robe, Liz Glass, who lives around the corner on E. 11th St. and whose first-floor apartment’s backyard abuts Boxcar’s backyard garden, organized the rally. With her were her three young children, ages 2 through 7, whom she says are kept awake by the bar’s noise, the older two of whom toted protest signs.

“We can’t sleep anyway. It’s a pajama protest,” Glass said, with a forlorn expression.

More than a year ago, Boxcar agreed to a curfew for its backyard of 11 p.m. on weeknights and midnight on weekends.

However, shortly after the bar agreed to the backyard curfew, Community Board 3 passed a resolution calling for the State Liquor Authority to close the bar’s backyard entirely. Glass, the bar’s primary critic, is asking the S.L.A. to follow through on the resolution.

Although Glass is the neighbor most affected by the noise, others say they are too.

“I moved to here to be by the beautiful park, and then I got this,” said Eden Fromberg, an OB/GYN doctor who lives on 10th St. whose rear windows face into the block’s interior. “Somehow, with the A/C on and a tape of a babbling brook playing, I can still hear them,” she said of her unsuccessful efforts to block out the bar’s noise at night.

A woman from Huntington House, a shelter for female parolees and their families on the other side of Avenue B, saw the protest and came over to briefly lend support and add her name to their petition.

“Let me sign it!” Haydee Figueroa said, a cigarette dangling from the corner of her mouth as she grabbed the clipboard. She said she was angry “because of the bullshit in the morning — 2 a.m., 3 a.m. they come out to talk and to fight. This one is worse,” she said, gesturing at Lakeside Lounge a few doors down from Boxcar. “A lot of women can’t sleep,” she said.

Although it’s unclear how much noise is too much noise, one’s threshold seems to lower when you involve a two-year-old:

Boxcar also built a sound-barrier wall between its backyard and Glass’s backyard — Glass called in a complaint to the Department of Buildings as the bar was building it because they didn’t have a permit. Spingola says they didn’t know they needed a permit.

Standing in Glass’s backyard around 10:30 p.m. the night of the protest, a steady mumble of voices could be heard from Gnocco, a restaurant on 10th St. with a backyard dining area. Less audible was the sound from Boxcar’s backyard. Inside Glass’s apartment, with the windows closed, it was hard to hear anything from either place.

“We have no violations — no noise violations, since she started her thing,” said Spingola. “The Department of Environmental Protection was here last Thursday night and we did not get a violation. And D.E.P. doesn’t mess around.”

*The first recorded (or at least Googlable) reference seems to be Anderson’s After ‘Falls murder,’ a flood of concerns about bar safety from March 2006.

She Died From Our Expectations

Again, it’s never the wrong time or place to ghoulishly call attention to a social problem*:

The suicide of a 25-year-old Upper West Side woman, who jumped to her death a day after breaking up with a boyfriend, has brought to light the pressure put on young Orthodox Jews to marry.

Sarah Adelman, a Brandeis University graduate who managed a dental office in Midtown, on Monday afternoon leapt from an eighth-floor window of 35 W. 96th St., where she resided. Ms. Adelman left no note, police said, but was suffering from depression and had called another former boyfriend to say goodbye, the New York Post reported.

It’s difficult to know what role societal preoccupation with marriage played in Adelman’s suicide, but her death has initiated a conversation about the Orthodox community’s premium on coupledom, a singles columnist who is an observant Jew, Esther Kustanowitz, said. “I think it’s really sad that it took an incident like this to mobilize the community,” she said.

Anecdotal evidence of Orthodox Jews staying single longer in recent years has prompted religious leaders to trumpet a shidduch, or matchmaking, crisis, according to Ms. Kustanowitz, 35, whose Web log, JDaters Anonymous, provides a forum for Jewish singles to discuss online dating. “Traditional Judaism, as a whole, doesn’t know what to do with singles in their 20s and 30s,” she said.”There’s a temptation to try to marry everybody off. On one hand, that’s admirable, but on another it places pressure on people that they might not be ready for.”

In certain Orthodox circles, unmarried women of a certain age are stigmatized, according to a 27-year-old rabbi and teacher, Chananya Weissman, who started End the Madness, a movement devoted to changing the culture of dating in the Orthodox community. The effort, Rabbi Weissman explains on the End the Madness Web site, is dedicated to a relative “who at the age of twenty was considered ‘over the hill’ by her society,” and died without having married. “‘Over the hill’ is pretty young, especially for women,” he said yesterday. “It can be 22 or 25 or 30.”

*See also: The Point Of Which Should Hit You Like A Ton Of Bricks . . .

What Would Jesus Do? Jesus Would Issue A Press Release And Make Sure Not To Wear A Striped Shirt

The demolition of St. Brigid’s Church on Avenue B in the East Village began yesterday, surprising everyone:

In panicked phone calls and anguished e-mail messages, word spread quickly yesterday morning in the East Village: “They are demolishing St. Brigid’s.”

By 8 a.m., concerned residents, former parishioners and preservationists, many of whom had been working to save the historic church for about five years, began gathering at Avenue B and Eighth Street in Manhattan. They took in the gaping eight-foot-tall hole in the back of the church, a shattered stained-glass window in front, and the scaffolding surrounding the base like a hangman’s noose.

“It floored me,” said Edwin Torres, a former parishioner and member of the Committee to Save St. Brigid’s.

The sound of electric saws and hammers from inside confirmed that what they had been fighting to prevent for so many years had begun, with no warning to them.

The Roman Catholic Archdiocese of New York issued a statement to reporters: “Work began today to take down the former Saint Brigid’s Church, which had become unsafe as a result of the rear wall of the building pulling away from the rest of the structure.”

It is, many would argue, an ignominious end for a church more than 150 years old, one of the oldest houses of worship in Manhattan, built to care for Roman Catholic immigrants fleeing the Irish potato famine.

Work continued despite the best efforts of elected officials who, powerless to stop it, nevertheless delivered grand speeches:

A host of politicians and community leaders, including Councilwoman Rosie Mendez, who was a parishioner of St. Brigid’s; Scott Stringer, the Manhattan borough president; State Senator Martin Connor; and Assemblywoman Sylvia Friedman, delivered impassioned statements yesterday afternoon in front of television cameras in the shade next to the church.

They accused archdiocesan officials of giving in to their greed and the overheated real estate market. They denounced the demolition as the erasing of heritage and history. They asked what Jesus would do.

Joseph Zwilling, a spokesman for the archdiocese, said the decision to demolish the church had nothing to do with money, pointing out that Roman Catholic officials were not planning to sell the property, but instead wanted to convert it to some other use that fits their mission, although that has not yet been decided.

So, as the politicians dispersed yesterday afternoon, the buzz saws continued to buzz.