When You Want To Also Put A “Moratorium” On, Say, Daniel* Or Bouley**, We Can Talk

Until then, you’re basically an idiot:

Support for a fast food ban in New York is growing among city lawmakers after the Los Angeles City Council passed an unprecedented bill Tuesday that would make the addition of new fast food restaurants in certain areas of the city illegal for at least one year.

“People are literally being poisoned by their diets — LA’s idea deserves serious consideration as we look for holistic solutions to a serious problem. A moratorium may help stem the problem,” Council Member Eric Gioia, who represents Queens, said in a statement yesterday.

*I’m guessing the Pistachio Crusted Duck Foie Gras Terrine (menu) is just as “bad” for you as a Big Mac.

**Three words for you: Foie Gras Napoleon.

Admit It: Jazz Sucks!

Then it’s “goodbye, pork pie hat”:

No one outside the pub that night would loan me a cell phone to dial 911. Crying, I went inside and borrowed a phone from Melvin. Two uniformed cops responded to the call, a man and a woman, young and as unsympathetic as the patrons at the bar — who hugged me in greeting most nights — and now wouldn’t look me in the eye.

“Nobody knows you,” the cops said. “Nobody saw anything,” they said.

“It’s always like that in there. Someone gets stabbed in the backyard and nobody saw nothing, nobody knows nothing. It’s a matter of time until someone is killed here, and we can shut the place down. What’s a woman like you doing in a dive like this?”

“I love the jazz,” I said.

They looked at me like I was crazy.

Come For The Ferry . . .

. . . stay for the Joni Mitchell trivia:

When the ferry docked at Staten Island, a wave of tourists funneled down the ramp and made a U-turn to board the same boat they had just gotten off.

Few seemed to have heard of anything worth sticking around for in New York City’s southernmost borough. Only a handful ventured over to the makeshift tourist kiosk at the ferry terminal.

“Yes, can you tell me where is Alcatraz?” one woman asked.

Andrew Yuen, 22, who was on duty at the kiosk, maintained a chipper demeanor in the face of such demoralizing questions. He cheerfully handed out maps and brochures, and directed a few people to the red faux trolley outside.

“There’s a tour bus that just opened three weeks ago,” he told one couple from England.

A man in a red vest picked up on Mr. Yuen’s cue and rushed to hand out a flier that begged, “Don’t hurry back on the ferry! New! Discover Staten Island Tour.” The salesman pointed to three small photos of unrecognizable tourist destinations and promised, “You’ll see this, this and this.”

The tour, Staten Island’s newest year-round attraction, is operated by Gray Line New York Sightseeing, which also runs bus tours of Manhattan and Brooklyn. In an hour, visitors get an overview of the island’s north shore. The $15 tour stops at places like the Snug Harbor Cultural Center; the house of Alice Austen, a pioneering photographer in the 19th century; and the Staten Island Zoo. Riders have the option of getting off at any of these places and catching the next trolley an hour later, but one tour guide said that most choose to stay in the bus.

“We’ll just wait to see the Bronx Zoo,” Karim Pacheco said.

. . .

What Staten Island may lack in breathtaking skyscrapers, it makes up for in historical tidbits, most of them involving celebrities. The tour drove by the cream-colored stucco building of the Mandolin Brothers guitar shop, which has been visited by the likes of Jimmy Buffett, George Harrison and Suzanne Vega.

“Joni Mitchell wrote a song called ‘Song for Sharon’ that starts, ‘I went to Staten Island, Sharon, to buy myself a mandolin,'” Ms. McGann said into the microphone.

After passing Wagner College, where Joan Baez’s father taught, the bus merged onto the Staten Island Expressway. Later, Ms. McGann pointed out the Stapleton station of the Staten Island Railway.

“That’s where Madonna filmed her music video for ‘Papa Don’t Preach,'” she said.

. . .

Gray Line declined to say how many people had taken the tour so far, saying it often takes up to five years before a new tour catches on. But the company is optimistic that the numbers will grow as Staten Island — once reputed for its enormous Fresh Kills landfill, which has closed — earns some credibility in the tour books.

“It’s a huge market,” said Eva Lee, Gray Line’s tour guide manager. “And they should be educated that Staten Island is important.”

Gowanus The Healer

How’s this for a silvery lining on the white film:

The murky waters of Brooklyn’s Gowanus Canal have caused the demise of a baby whale dubbed Sludgie, stunk up an entire neighborhood and even once caught on fire.

Someday, they may also save your life.

At least that’s what a pair of New York biology professors believe after doing research on the waterway considered by many to be the most polluted, putrid and repugnant place in the city.

New York City College of Technology Profs. Nasreen and Niloufar Haque say the key to combating heart disease, Alzheimer’s and even the AIDS virus may exist in a white film full of bacteria in the canal.

“One of the things we found is that it has a very potential effect as an antibiotic,” Nasreen Haque said Wednesday.

The Haque sisters began researching the Gowanus three years ago equipped with a team of elite divers willing to plumb the depths of the canal — and a hypothesis.

“If organisms can survive in such an area, they must be producing something that protects them,” Nasreen Haque said.

The divers pulled samples of the white gunk, which is a combination of bacteria, microbes and other chemicals, from under the canal bed. The Haques took the samples to a lab.

“What we suspected turned out to be true,” Nasreen Haque said. “Extracts from the microbes in the water proved to be potential sources of antibiotics or inhibitors.”

. . .

Haque said she and her sister found secretions from microorganisms — “some of which operate like antiobiotics” — in the white gunk.

The Haques are testing some of the agents to see if they are able to fight the type of bacteria that leads to staph infections.

Nasreen Haque hopes the substances could be used in anti-inflammatory drugs capable of battling heart disease, among other serious disorders.

Location Scout: Gowanus Canal.

Just A Pinch Between My Cheek And Gum

Maybe it’s not Obama’s year after all — people in New York have started chewing tobacco:

On a recent Friday evening, two New York City gentlemen in their 20s were sitting at Vol de Nuit, a Belgian beer bar in the West Village. After some conversation, they removed a couple of small, tea-bag-like packets stuffed with tobacco out of a circular black plastic container the size of a hockey puck and, between sips of Pilsner, placed them inside their respective upper lips.

First came the burning sensation, followed by a slightly unpleasant taste, and then, the nicotine buzz.

“It combines the cleanliness of not smoking with the pleasure of tobacco,” said one of the men, who wished only to be identified by his first name, Lucas, of the substance, a product imported from Sweden called “snus” (rhymes with “loose”). “It’s like a secret. Nobody really has to know you’re doing it.”

In a city where the act of lighting up in a bar or restaurant increasingly seems a part of ancient history, where smokers now huddle in angry little knots under scaffolding, shunned by polite society, could snus be the up-and-coming vice of choice?

“We sell out of them like candy — it’s very popular,” said Mario Chebly, manager of the smoke shop Shisha International on West Fourth Street, of packages of snus, which retail for a recession-friendly $5 apiece (some stores are now pricing cigarettes at $10 per pack). It was a little after 2 p.m. on a Sunday afternoon, and Mr. Chebly was standing beside a refrigerated display case of General brand snus, flanked by shelves of Marlboros and Dunhills. He’d sold 14 containers of the moist oral tobacco to “nice, good-looking, professional people” since opening at around 11 that morning.

. . .

The use of snus brings a certain class, if that’s possible, to this consumer category. It’s quite discreet, and unlike the chewing tobacco or dip favored by baseball players, doesn’t require spitting. And while snus tins do come with the requisite warnings of mouth cancer, gum disease and — yikes! — tooth loss, for some nicotine addicts, it seems like a slightly healthier alternative to hacking up a lung each morning, or smelling like they just bathed in an ashtray.