Aren’t They Just Income Tax Deductions Anyway? (No, I Mean The Kids Themselves)

Another year, another crop of Type A parents struggles with getting ahead in this competitive city:

Among some New York parent circles, it’s considered normal to spend $6,000 on a consultant to help toddlers get into private school.

The spending is spreading to public schools on the Upper West Side, where parents jostling for the seats in a few “it” schools are increasingly willing to drop hundreds or even thousands of dollars to get an advantage.

Maggie Ganias said she used to scoff at frantic pregnant New York City women applying to competitive private nursery schools before reaching their sixth month. She decided she would be sending her child to public school so she wouldn’t have to go through all that. When her son, Alexander, turned 4, she realized her mistake.

“I had always laughed at that cliché of parents in New York. But here I was just a public school mom and all these choices were in front of me,” she said. “It’s overwhelming.”

Faced with a staggering array of decisions and deadlines as her son prepared for his first day of kindergarten a year away, she did what a growing number of parents are doing each year: She turned to Robin Aronow.

Ms. Aronow is an elementary school admissions consultant who has created a niche by charging parents to help them apply for choice public schools. She is based on the Upper West Side, where public elementary school admissions are arguably the most competitive and complicated in the city. Autumn is Ms. Aronow’s peak season: Applications become available, and school tours and testing begin.

. . .

“I couldn’t have done this without her,” a mother of a 4-year-old, Brett Hill, who lives on the Upper West Side, said. “Friends call me crying, saying, ‘I don’t know what to do.’ They go to Robin’s seminar and they come back better and calmer.”

. . .

Ms. Aronow charges $50 a season to join the e-mail listserv, nearly $200 an hour for phone calls, or $2,000 for an annual all-inclusive package. She says she charges less than some of her competitors, who focus more on private schools. This year, she is also doing a pro-bono presentation at a nonprofit center for immigrants.

“Whatever it was, it was worth it,” Ms. Hill said of the costs of Ms. Aronow’s services. “It alleviated so much stress.”

See also: Manhattan Preschool Admissions More Competitive Than Harvard.

I’m A Patsy! They Just Picked Me Up Because I’m A Pasta Dish!

You can’t tell the Patsy’s without a scorecard:

Patsy’s Italian Restaurant on West 56th Street — Frank Sinatra’s favorite — asked a federal judge yesterday to stop a restaurant from opening in Syosset, Long Island. The reason for the request, according to a legal complaint filed in U.S. District Court in Brooklyn, is the “Patsy’s” sign above the new storefront.

If the dispute sounds familiar, it is because Patsy’s on 56th Street, which opened in 1944, guards its name as jealously as it would any family recipe. Earlier this year, it went to court to force a Staten Island restaurant doing business under the name Patsy’s to shut its doors.

Another Patsy’s, a pizzeria on 118th Street, which opened more than a decade before the 56th Street restaurant, feels the same way about its name. The pizzeria filed suit against a Patsy’s in Brooklyn, obliging the Brooklyn Patsy’s to change its name. The restaurant now does business as Grimaldi’s Pizzeria.

The 56th Street Patsy’s is known for its pasta; the 118th Street Patsy’s for its pizza. But the culinary interests of the two have overlapped at times, leading to a lawsuit over which establishment had the right to market marinara sauce under the name.

In light of the past cases, the suit over the Syosset restaurant hardly seems a surprise, though it does suggest that the 56th Street restaurant will guard its name against alleged impostors even beyond the five boroughs.

Buried Lede: Pedophiles Prefer Early Bill Murray And Earlier Tom Cruise

I guess someone has to perform the unenviable chore of screening sex offenders’ Netflix queues:

As part of the state Division of Parole “Operation Halloween: Zero Tolerance,” 1,983 paroled sex offenders across New York also will have their DVDs and CDs searched for pornographic or other banned materials as part of conditions of their release. Using portable players, investigators will make unannounced visits to view parolees’ collections to ensure they are in compliance.

“This is a new tool we’ve provided parole officers with,” said Scott Steinhardt, a NYS Division of Parole spokesman. “They may see DVD cases that say ‘Caddyshack’ or ‘Top Gun,’ but they’ll be checked to make sure there’s not really pornography or other contraband on them. This is part of our proactive measure and has been successful already.”

Big Brother And The Unintended Consequences

Do you load the homeless with transfats or nothing? It’s a sticky issue:

The Health Department’s war on trans fats may have an unintended victim — the city’s food pantries and soup kitchens that feed hungry New Yorkers every day.

Canned meats and beans, jars of peanut butter and other pantry staples donated from around the country include the artery-clogging trans fats.

“We support the ban, but people need to understand this will mean less food in the food pantry,” said Joel Berg, executive director of the New York City Coalition Against Hunger.

During yesterday’s lengthy public hearing, Berg told the Board of Health that any plan to ban food with trans fats should provide extra money for pantries and soup kitchens to buy trans fat-free foods.

“It’s a painful dilemma,” Berg said. “Our folks get less quality or they get less food?”

The debate then turned philosophical:

Health Commissioner Thomas Frieden has asked the board to change the Health Code so that trans fats can no longer be used in city eateries. Another proposal would force some restaurants to post caloric contents of its food on menus.

“Trans fats increase the level of bad cholesterol and reduce the level of good cholesterol and by doing so they increase your risk of heart attack and stroke and early death,” Frieden told reporters during a break in the hearing. “Keeping toxic items out of our food — this is a core role of government.”

Hm. At least one constituency disagreed with that definition of the proper role of government:

Outside the hearing, Luis Nunez, president of the Latino Restaurant Association, with 4,000 member restaurants in the city, said that health officials had not prepared them for the proposed ban on trans fat cooking, and were now threatening them with fines or other penalties.

“This big brother policy does not work,” Mr. Nunez said.

And Soon We’ll Start Calling Them “Freeways”

Bad news for those who worry that New York is becoming more and more like LA everyday:

City and state transportation officials are planning to give highway drivers real-time travel information, calculated in part with E-ZPass technology and displayed on a network of roadside message boards in the five boroughs.

Motorists on major thoroughfares like the Belt Parkway and the FDR Drive will get forecasts of how long it will take to go between various points in the city based on the average times of other drivers.

Currently, such level of detail is being displayed only to drivers on the New Jersey approaches to the George Washington Bridge and at two Metropolitan Transportation Authority bridges. The plan is to have real-time travel information displayed along highways in all five boroughs within about three years, a spokeswoman for the city Transportation Department said.

It will begin with a pilot program along the Staten Island Expressway by the end of the year.

We’re desperate, get used to it.