Enough said:

He would have gotten the job — if only he hadn’t stolen the interviewer’s wallet.

And Marco Marabotto, 31, would have never gotten caught if he hadn’t listed his name and address on the job application.

Now Marabotto faces up to four years in the slammer after lifting Carly Miller’s wallet from her purse during an Aug. 15 job interview, sources said.

“This is one of the dumbest criminals alive,” said Bill Clinger, Miller’s boss at Revolution, a pedicab courier service on Ninth Avenue.

Clinger advertised for a driver on Craigslist and Marabotto, who lives in Manhattan, made an appointment for an interview.

Miller, 22, did the interview from behind a desk as Marabotto sat across from her. Her purse was on a chair next to him.

Miller got good vibes from Marabotto.

“I would have hired him, absolutely,” she said yesterday. “I had a good feeling about him. He was very friendly and warm.”

Useless train announcement of the day goes to:

Due to an incident involving trains at the Flushing-Main Street Station, there is no train service in both directions between the Flushing-Main Street Station and the Willets Point-Shea Stadium Station.

Don’t look now — the $405 Club is back:

In the wake of continuing, even worsening, layoffs in the financial industry (10,000 in New York since last August, Bloomberg recently reported, with behemoths like Citigroup cutting 10 percent of its investment bank alone); as double-digit drops in net worth have top executives wringing their hands in The Times, much of Wall Street’s young are simply throwing up theirs and saying, “Whoo-hoo!”

Tommy Kim, 27, formerly of UBS, for example, logged 37 days of snowboarding in 2008 after being fired last January. “When I got laid off, it was like, hallelujah,” he said.

After the snow melted, he came back to New York, where “I went paint-balling,” Mr. Kim said. “I went to Six Flags.” Now: “I stay up late, wake up late, go to the beach a lot. I play a lot of video games when I can’t find people to hang out with. I started reading again for pleasure, which is something I haven’t done since before college.” (Currently on the nightstand: Freakonomics).

He doesn’t have a three-bedroom in Westchester or a country club membership. He’s single and owns a one-bedroom in Queens that he bought “really cheap” in 2004.

Recently, Mr. Kim turned his attention to organizing his vast music collection and playing DJ gigs around town, including a Saturday party at the Brooklyn Museum and a few weddings (he was a well-known DJ during his undergrad days at Dartmouth). He’s also taking break-dancing classes. And he built himself a new computer, just for the hell of it. Looked up the instructions online, bought the parts, et voilà!

And his job search? “I’m kind of looking,” Mr. Kim said. “I decided last week maybe I should be more proactive.” It’s hard to get worked up, though, because “President Bush extended unemployment by another 13 weeks!” That’s $405 a week on top of the “generous” UBS severance.

Buried Lede: Unemployment Benefits Stagnate; Unaccountably Rich Hardest Hit!

So bascially Thomas Friedman is holding Peter Vallone, Sr. responsible for the United States’ alarming lack of transportation infrastructure:

As I sat in my seat at the Bird’s Nest, watching thousands of Chinese dancers, drummers, singers and acrobats on stilts perform their magic at the closing ceremony, I couldn’t help but reflect on how China and America have spent the last seven years: China has been preparing for the Olympics; we’ve been preparing for Al Qaeda. They’ve been building better stadiums, subways, airports, roads and parks. And we’ve been building better metal detectors, armored Humvees and pilotless drones.

The difference is starting to show. Just compare arriving at La Guardia’s dumpy terminal in New York City and driving through the crumbling infrastructure into Manhattan with arriving at Shanghai’s sleek airport and taking the 220-mile-per-hour magnetic levitation train, which uses electromagnetic propulsion instead of steel wheels and tracks, to get to town in a blink.

Then ask yourself: Who is living in the third world country?

Buried Lede: Authoritarian regimes can do a lot of cool shit, can’t they?

Broadway Boulevard has been “an instant hit” for thrill seekers:

As if New York wasn’t stimulating enough already, the city has provided a new kind of thrill right in the heart of Midtown: an esplanade carved into Broadway where people can sit and relax as cars and trucks whiz by.

And while the esplanade seems to have become an instant hit with office workers and tourists — the metal benches, tables and chairs (some under red umbrellas) were rarely empty on Monday morning, even though they have been out for only a few days — many eyed the traffic warily.

“I think it’s dangerous,” said Vicki Lee, who nonetheless sat with two friends eating lunch at a cafe table on the esplanade just south of 38th Street. Ms. Lee, a clothing designer at a Midtown fashion company, was careful to sit so that she could keep an eye on the traffic heading downtown.

Her concern, she said, centered on the gray plastic planters arrayed every few feet along the edge of the esplanade as a buffer for the passing traffic. The planters were filled with soil, flowers and other plants and were too heavy for one person alone to budge. Yet they did not make Ms. Lee feel safe.

“You hear so many accidents of the cars going out of control and all they have here is plastic pots,” she said. But she dug into her salad and added, “We’re going to roll the dice and eat lunch here today.”

Not far away, Eric Sachinis and Grace Ong sat on two metal chairs pulled up to the edge of the esplanade closest to the traffic. They ate sandwiches and gazed at the passing cars.

“It’s a death trap,” Mr. Sachinis, a network administrator for a garment company, said with a laugh. “It’ll be up for a month and then somebody’ll get hit and they’ll take it down.”

“I like it, though,” said Ms. Ong, an administrative assistant, who observed that a pedestrian would be no safer on the sidewalk than on the esplanade if a car lost control. Besides, she said, the esplanade was a good spot for people watching. “That’s why you live in New York,” she said, “to watch everything go by.”

Creating Axioms: “New Yorkers Sit Anywhere”

Not to freak you out or anything, but:

A new analysis of 383 quakes in a 15,000-square-mile area around New York City estimates that a magnitude-5 earthquake in or around the city occurs on average once a century, and a magnitude-6 or larger quake occurs once every 670 years. An even larger magnitude-7 is estimated at once every 3,400 years.

Boy, someone is sure sensitive about that whole Tibet thing:

Days without potable water, hours of interrogation, sleep deprivation, and the theft of more than $20,000 in cash and equipment are among the hardships two New Yorkers say they endured as prisoners of the Chinese government during the Beijing Olympics.

“They threatened our lives, threatened the lives of people we know, of our family members, and they told us that they could get us, even outside of China,” a 32-year-old artist from Williamsburg, James Powderly, said yesterday.

He and Thomas Grant, a 39-year-old videographer from the East Village, arrived in New York yesterday morning, having been deported from Beijing on Sunday — the day of the closing ceremonies for the 2008 Games.

. . .

Mr. Grant said he had been in Beijing to give independent journalists and artists technical assistance in getting their work past Chinese authorities. One such artist was Mr. Powderly, who said he was at the games to highlight human rights abuses through public art installations.

The two said they and four other Americans were apprehended outside a restaurant August 19, held for questioning, and then taken to a detention facility on the outskirts of Beijing.

“We were interrogated for periods of six to 10 hours a day in holding pens,” Mr. Grant recalled. “Two days into the detention, we were shown a piece of paper written in Chinese, which none of us could read, and told that we had a sentence of 10 days given to us for a violation of Chinese law. Vague as it was, that was all we were told.”

The fish in the $750,000 tanks at the St. George Ferry Terminal are barely surviving in the stressful environment:

They’re the bright spot in the St. George Ferry Terminal, luring tourists and commuters alike to stop and admire their colorful beauty.

But brightness around the clock is exactly what’s killing off the fish in the two saltwater tanks in the terminal waiting room, as disturbed sleeping cycles stress the fish and make them more susceptible to disease.

“It’s like they’re driving with their brights on all day long,” said Wayde King, president of Acrylic Tank Manufacturing Inc., the Las Vegas-based company that installed the tanks.

Whether they were eaten by other fish or scooped out dead — or alive, removed from the tank and relocated after exhibiting aggression toward other fish — the population has dwindled to about 60 or 70 fish per tank, down from about 200 in each during the unveiling in February. The $750,000 tanks were funded through Borough President James Molinaro’s capital budget.

Curious kids and adults who bang on the tank walls also have disturbed the fish, who are unable to rest while being on display 24 hours a day in the busy transportation hub.

Furthermore, the constant light has caused a formidable algae bloom, leaving a brown film on the glass and the colorful coral inside.

. . .

Meanwhile, nearly a dozen members of SIcoLab’s Federation For Ferry Fish Freedom, a group of artists and musicians, banded together to fight for the rights of the fish with a “Fish-In” yesterday morning in the waiting room.

. . .

New railings are being considered to keep guests at a distance. And curtains are being designed to give the animals a restorative night cycle. “It darkens them up and lets them know it’s bedtime,” King said, adding the fish will be healthier if allowed a few hours of quiet.

And to tackle the algae, quarter-sized Turbo Snails will be introduced into the tank. “They’re like constant little scrubbers,” cleaning all the nooks and crannies of the tank and the coral reef inside, said Bob Kurtz, acting curator at the Staten Island Zoo, which will take over the maintenance of the tanks as planned in January.

Location Scout: St. George Ferry Terminal.

It’s that time of year again:

There’s no escaping the grime and nose-holding stench levels that city sidewalks generate in the summertime.

. . .

The city last month found that 95 percent of Brighton Beach sidewalks were clean, yet residents there say the stench of litter and rotten fruit from overflowing trash cans on Brighton Beach Avenue reaches gagging levels in the summer.

“The private garbage companies, you’ll see them squeeze the garbage and the juice comes out,” said Ned Hasanoff, whose family owns a fabric store on Brighton Beach Avenue. “I stepped in it once and my car smelled for weeks.”

and one “glorious flute”:

The challengers aiming to unseat the Assembly speaker in next month’s Democratic primary are going up against the good name Sheldon Silver’s earned in Chinatown — literally.

When Chinese-language newspapers write about Mr. Silver, they use Chinese characters that approximate the sound of his name as “siu-hwa.” In Chinese, siu-hwa can be interpreted as “glorious flute.”

For the first time in 22 years, Mr. Silver is running opposed in a primary for his district, which encompasses much of Lower Manhattan. Although leaders of large community organizations in Chinatown are pronouncing his victory a foregone conclusion, the neighborhood is becoming a political battlefield in the race.

Mr. Silver’s two opponents, Luke Henry and Paul Newell, are courting residents dissatisfied with his economic policies. Meanwhile, the speaker is reaching out to community members in unprecedented ways.

Adam “Jersey City” Sternbergh out-Sternberghs himself:

Until last May, Cloyd and Herbeck were living in Sunset Park, in Brooklyn, and they were barely making it. They ate mac ‘n’ cheese for dinner. They couldn’t afford to go out with their friends. They wanted a family, but “there was no room in our Brooklyn equation to have kids unless we put them in a closet,” Herbeck says.

Then one night, Herbeck, who’s 30, found herself browsing online listings in Buffalo. (Why Buffalo? She comes from Buffalo. And like many young Buffalonians, she got out as soon as she could.) “We were like, ‘Okay, the prices are great,’” she says. So they looked at some photos. “And we were like, ‘Okay, they’re really nice apartments. They’re really big. And right by the park.’”

And all of a sudden, they found they were staring at a very different what-could-be life: the one they’d be able to have if they were willing to leave New York.

So I guess this means those countdown clocks have become a gigantic waste of money:

In an abrupt reversal, Mayor Bloomberg yesterday left the door open to supporting a change to the term-limits law through legislation.

“My job is if the City Council comes to us with a piece of legislation, we will look at it, we will consider it, and we’ll make what I hope is an informed judgment into what is in the best interest in the city,” the mayor said.

“The City Council has the right to change term limits if they want to.”

Taken with mercury fears, it could mean the end of sushi. Will pork belly be next? Time will tell:

Many New York sushi restaurants and seafood markets are playing a game of bait and switch, say two high school students turned high-tech sleuths.

In a tale of teenagers, sushi and science, Kate Stoeckle and Louisa Strauss, who graduated this year from the Trinity School in Manhattan, took on a freelance science project in which they checked 60 samples of seafood using a simplified genetic fingerprinting technique to see whether the fish New Yorkers buy is what they think they are getting.

They found that one-fourth of the fish samples with identifiable DNA were mislabeled. A piece of sushi sold as the luxury treat white tuna turned out to be Mozambique tilapia, a much cheaper fish that is often raised by farming. Roe supposedly from flying fish was actually from smelt. Seven of nine samples that were called red snapper were mislabeled, and they turned out to be anything from Atlantic cod to Acadian redfish, an endangered species.

What may be most impressive about the experiment is the ease with which the students accomplished it. Although the testing technique is at the forefront of research, the fact that anyone can take advantage of it by sending samples off to a laboratory meant the kind of investigative tools once restricted to Ph.D.’s and crime labs can move into the hands of curious diners and amateur scientists everywhere.

The project began, appropriately, over dinner about a year ago. Ms. Stoeckle’s father, Mark, is a scientist and early proponent of the use of DNA bar coding, a technique that greatly simplifies the process of identifying species. Instead of sequencing the entire genome, bar coders — who have been developing their field only since 2003 — examine a single gene. Dr. Stoeckle’s specialty is birds, and he admits that he tends to talk shop at the dinner table.

One evening at a sushi restaurant, Ms. Stoeckle recalled asking her father, “Could you bar code sushi?”

Dr. Stoeckle replied, “Yeah, I think you could — and if you did that, I think you’d be the first ones.”

Ms. Stoeckle, who is now 19, was intrigued. She enlisted Ms. Strauss, who is now 18.

Their field technique was simple, Ms. Stoeckle said. “We ate a lot of sushi.”

Or, as Dr. Stoeckle put it, “It involved shopping and eating, in which they were already fluent.”

They hit 4 restaurants and 10 grocery stores in Manhattan. Once the samples were home, whether in doggie bags or shopping bags, they cut away a small piece and preserved it in alcohol. They sent those off to the University of Guelph in Ontario, where the Barcode of Life Database project began. A graduate student there, Eugene Wong, works on the Fish Barcode of Life (dubbed, inevitably, Fish-BOL) and agreed to do the genetic analysis. He compared the teenagers’ samples with the global library of 30,562 bar codes representing nearly 5,500 fish species. (Commercial labs will also perform the analysis for a fee.)

Three hundred dollars’ worth of meals later, the young researchers had their data back from Guelph: 2 of the 4 restaurants and 6 of the 10 grocery stores had sold mislabeled fish.

Take care of these animals now before they become mass murderers:

Their colony in the Bronx already is devastated by so many ills: homelessness, hunger and rampant disease. Their young are often left to fend for themselves in the streets or in abandoned houses, where many will die a lonesome death.

And now they’re being beaten, burned and mutilated, residents say.

With so much already against them, it seems even harder out there than usual for the feral cats of Woodlawn.

The first report surfaced late last month. Karen Borsotti said she was walking along Vireo Avenue near East 233rd Street when she noticed a gray cat skulking by the road. It had a large gash across its back and seemed a bit haggard, she said. Ms. Borsotti stepped closer to get a better look, but the cat darted off. Later, she said, she saw signs posted on utility poles offering a $500 reward for anyone with information on the person or people responsible for what some say is serial cat abuse.

A couple days later, Animal Nation, a nonprofit rescue group, reported receiving a frantic call from a teenage girl pleading for help. She had found a 6-month-old brown tabby she knew from the neighborhood. It had been badly beaten and its tail was burned to the bone. A veterinarian later said that most of the cat’s teeth had been broken or knocked out, that it had suffered major head trauma and burns to its gums, likely sustained when it tried to bite out the flames on its tail. The young tabby was euthanized.

On Atlantic Avenue outside of the AutoZone, of course:

They can be seen all along Atlantic Avenue — urban foragers of a sort, often bedraggled and always in search of a dollar. Many of them pump gas, but that is not the only hustle along the strip.

As one regular walks on sections of Atlantic, a traffic-clogged 10-mile road that runs from the Brooklyn waterfront to the Van Wyck Expressway in western Queens, he holds a bottle of glass cleaner and offers to wash car windows. Outside an auto parts store, street mechanics replace brake pads and tune transmissions, using tools hauled around in shopping carts.

. . .

Street etiquette dictates that once a hustler claims a car, he has exclusive rights to approach it. But sometimes this arrangement breaks down, as it did recently.

“Yo, why you step in front of me like that?” a gas pumper yelled to another as passengers in a sedan that had pulled up to a pump looked out the windows with stunned expressions.

Amid such competition, the gas pumpers sometimes turn to intimidation.

“I’m going to get every car that gets in here,” DMX announced loudly at one point. “I got to eat.

“If they get in my way, I’m going to cut somebody.”

. . .

Outside an AutoZone store near Washington Avenue in Clinton Hill, several street mechanics work under cars parked on the side of the road, installing parts purchased by the store’s customers.

On a hot spring day, a 36-year-old street mechanic named Matthew Joseph lay precariously on the baking asphalt of Atlantic Avenue, near three lanes of westbound traffic that whizzed by as he jacked up the left front side of a Hyundai sedan. Mr. Joseph wore a black do-rag and a white tank top that exposed his muscular arms. After a few years of working on the side of the road, he is used to the traffic being only a few feet away.

. . .

Later that day, Mr. Joseph sat in the passenger seat of a blue Jeep, the brakes of which he had just replaced. The driver sped up and down Atlantic Avenue, testing the work.

“The front brakes is good,” Mr. Joseph announced. “Beautiful. Beautiful delay. Hard and sturdy.”

Mr. Joseph offered his cellphone number to the car owner in case there were any problems. “You could call me, too, all right,” he said. “You’d be driving, even at nighttime, call me. I’m official.”

I don’t know — check the flood plain. Yes, that’s right — flood plain:

Why does the city want to elevate a new riverfront park by five feet?

That was the question this month at a public meeting on replacing parkland lost to the new Yankee Stadium. By raising this parcel, the city replied, people would be able to see over an elevated freight track.

. . .

The land had always been the most peculiar piece of the city’s park replacement scheme. Located next to the Deegan Expressway, it was a mile away from the parkland it’s replacing.

Anger greeted last month’s news that cleaning up this site would cost taxpayers $56 million, three times the previous estimate. When questioned, the city claimed it had no idea the land was so polluted, though contamination had been found there in a stadium project review two years ago.

Capping polluted sites is so prevalent the practice has been derided as “pave and wave.” But why raise the land by five feet exactly?

The parcel was originally part of the Gateway Mall project being built by powerhouse developer the Related Cos. A slice later got pawned off on the city in former Deputy Mayor Dan Doctoroff’s failed bid for the Olympics. A 2005 City Planning document for the mall noted the site would have to be “elevated approximately five feet due to the flood plain requirements in this area.”

All we need is three examples for a trend piece:

Once, it was clear, black and white: One token got you one ride. Now, while MetroCards have created a more elastic, fluid system for riders, they have also created an ethical gray area:

Do I swipe in a stranger? Is that legal? Can I share my monthly card with my spouse or a friend? What if someone offers to sell me a swipe at a discount? And what if a machine accidentally gives me a free ride — something token booth clerks were not known for. Do I take it?

The ethical quandaries of the free ride were spotlighted this week by the disclosure of a computer glitch that allowed hundreds of people to get free tickets and MetroCards — most of them unwittingly — from vending machines in Long Island Rail Road and Metro-North Railroad stations.

Selling a swipe on a MetroCard is illegal and can get you arrested. Bending a MetroCard’s magnetic strip to fool the turnstile into letting you through is also a form of theft.

But letting a friend or a relative use your unlimited-ride MetroCard when you are not using it is perfectly legal, as long as you don’t charge for it, said Paul J. Fleuranges, an authority spokesman. (The card allows only one entry every 18 minutes.)

Mr. Fleuranges said it is also legal to help out a stranger who asks you, as a favor, to swipe him through a turnstile free as you are leaving a subway station — although it certainly deprives New York City Transit of a fare.

. . . and tenants who have their windows open during the winter . . . and on and on and on:

Business owners who leave their doors open while an air-conditioner is running are about to face a fine for the offense.

The City Council is poised to approve new legislation on Thursday that would bar stores from keeping their doors open when air-conditioners or central cooling systems are in use. Any store or restaurant in violation of the new rule will first be issued a written warning and charged fines for subsequent violations.

The second time within an 18-month period that a business is found to be violating the law, a fine of $200 would be charged by the city for every open door.

That fine would increase to $400 a door for any subsequent violations during the same period.

Council Member Gale Brewer, who represents the Upper West Side, said she introduced the bill after receiving a steady stream of complaints from constituents who were frustrated with stores that kept their doors propped open in the summer, allowing cold air to flow out of the building onto the sidewalk.

. . . “Ground Zero” is almost an anagram of “Green Zone”:

According to a 36-page presentation given by top-ranking police officials in recent months, the entire area would be placed within a security zone, in which only specially screened taxis, limousines and cars would be allowed through “sally ports,” or barriers staffed by police officers, constructed at each of five entry points.

Roughly a dozen guard booths would be established at street corners where pedestrians or vehicles are most likely to enter the area, while the western lanes of Church Street would be reserved for emergency vehicles.

All service and delivery trucks for the trade center site would be directed to an underground bomb screening center at the south side of the complex. Tour buses would drop off and pick up passengers at Liberty and Greenwich Streets. But no bus would be summoned from the underground security center and garage until all the passengers are present, a requirement that could leave large clots of tourists waiting for stragglers.

The plan is designed to prevent a third terrorist attack on the site, said Paul J. Browne, deputy police commissioner for public information, and, he said, would have little effect on either traffic or pedestrians. It is among the more striking features of the Police Department’s overall plan for Manhattan security, which also includes measures to photograph every vehicle entering Manhattan, and scan its license plate, and then keep the information on file for at least a month. The department hopes to have the plan in place by 2010, by the time Mayor Michael R. Bloomberg leaves office.

Landlords, company executives, public officials and some urban planners acknowledged the need for security at ground zero, but worried that the procedures would undermine the effort to reweave the trade center site into the city’s fabric. They fear that the proposed traffic restrictions could create tie-ups in a congested neighborhood and discourage corporate tenants from renting space, or shoppers from visiting the stores in the area.

. . .

The security zone would extend west from Church Street, between Vesey and Liberty Streets, and include portions of several adjacent blocks.

Mr. Browne, addressing criticism that the security plan would undermine a normal commercial and cultural life in the neighborhood, said, “I think this will reassure people that this is probably the safest business environment anywhere.”

Oh, he’s that guy:

Popcorn, pistachios, Tic Tacs, and Skittles are the latest threat to local children that the City Council is moving to neutralize.

Council Member Domenic Recchia, who represents parts of Brooklyn, has introduced a bill that would require store owners across the city to put up signs or labels warning that certain bite-size foods could endanger the lives of children under the age of 5.

While the city’s Department of Health and Mental Hygiene would determine the list of foods requiring labels, Mr. Recchia said the bill would likely include grapes, peanuts, chewing gum, small hard candies, and candy necklaces, among other products. The American Academy of Pediatrics also lists hot dogs, apple chunks, raw vegetables, and cheese as choking hazards for children under 4.

If the bill passes, vendors who fail to alert customers to food that has been designated as a choking hazard will be fined up to $250 a violation.

. . .

Mr. Recchia said yesterday that he was moved to take up choking prevention after a 2-year-old boy in his district, Brandon Martinez, died in 2007 from suffocating on a grape, a fruit that health experts consider dangerous for children under 4 years old if it is not skinned and cut in pieces.

According to Mr. Recchia, the bill could help prevent similar tragedies by raising awareness of dangerous foods among parents.

Raising chickens in your backyard is a fine thing. A fine thing. It’s part of our heritage:

Investigators who raided a Brooklyn apartment building Wednesday found a cockfighting factory, a breeding ground for brutality.

There were chicks a few months old and battle-scarred veterans — 59 in all, destined for the lucrative betting rings that pop up across the city.

“There is no ring here, but they were breeding and housing them for the fights,” said Al Lombardo, deputy chief of Brooklyn District Attorney Charles Hynes’ investigators.

“I love my birds,” Corchado, 40, protested as he was led away in handcuffs.

Cages of the raging roosters were stacked three deep in the Arlington Ave. backyard. Shipping labels showed some were brought in from Puerto Rico.

Most had their combs cut off, making it harder for opposing birds to grab them. Other were shaved.

“I shave them because the weather is hot,” Corchado said.

Prosecutors scoffed at the excuse.

“They are placing razor blades on the birds’ legs to cut humidity? No, these animals were trained to kill everything around them,” said Deputy District Attorney Carol Moran.

This is how it happens:

But since the store opened, something unexpected has happened. Ikea has won grudging acceptance from some of its detractors, who admit, somewhat sheepishly, that the feared blue box has brought perks enjoyed even by those who have no interest in stepping into the store.

There is the daily water taxi and shuttle bus service provided free by Ikea, technically for its customers. But for residents, the boats and buses have made the hard-to-reach neighborhood without a subway stop a little less remote; the ferries in particular have given them a picturesque way to travel between Manhattan and Red Hook.

The grassy waterfront esplanade that Ikea built, featuring benches with a view of the Lower Manhattan skyline, framed by remnants of Red Hook’s maritime past, is also catching on as a neighborhood attraction.

And the onslaught of Ikea-generated traffic that so many predicted has yet to materialize. Indeed, traffic is so light on some days that a rumor started among locals that Ikea was actually turning out to be a customer-starved failure (Ikea said its store was meeting its financial expectations).

Just before sunset one recent evening, Kerri-Ann Jennings, a graduate student at Columbia University who said she had opposed the store’s opening, sat in a chair on the esplanade with a view of the water, sketching plans for a new bedroom that she was considering filling with Ikea furniture. She offered the kind of reluctant approval heard over and over in interviews, a declaration somewhere between an armistice and a retreat.

“It isn’t awful,” she said.

Interesting defense:

A young woman woke up in her Central Park West sublet in July 2007 to find her fire-escape window open and two 15-year-old boys standing over her bed. One of them was pointing a handgun at her head.

Over the next few hours, the boys took turns raping the bound, gagged and terrified woman. They left, taking her laptop, cellphone, iPod, digital cameras and credit cards.

Now the boy with the gun — Steven Vasquez, according to DNA and his own police confession – is hoping for a break.

Vasquez’s lawyer says his client is mentally retarded due to childhood lead exposure, and she wants him tried in Family Court as a juvenile.

Lead paint in the West 129th Street home he grew up in left Vasquez so brain damaged he is unable to read.

“He’s basically the mental age of a kindergartner,” says his lawyer, Elsie Chandler, senior trial attorney with the Neighborhood Defender Service of Harlem.

See also: “Lead exposure in children linked to violent crime,” LA Times, May 28, 2008.

Otherwise even more soul food restaurants would probably close:

A recitation of the names of the vanished Harlem soul food restaurants — where the waitress/owner called everyone “Baby,” and the temperature in the room was determined by the amount of lard in the skillet — would be longer than the menu at most of the places.

Among those now out of business are: 22 West, where Malcolm X used the pay phone in back to do radio broadcasts; Adel’s, popular for its fried chicken; Pan Pan, which burned down in 2004; Wilson’s, known for its breakfasts; Wimps, revered for its smothered chicken and red velvet cake; Singleton’s, which was among the last restaurants to regularly serve pig tail stew, hog maws, and pig ears; and Wells Supper Club, best known as the restaurant credited with putting chicken and waffles on the same plate.

Onetime staples like butter beans, country fried steak, hog maws, oxtails, chicken livers, ham hocks, neck bones, and chitterlings have become uncommon, and in some cases, unavailable, in this former soul food capital.

. . .

Restaurants, including soul food places, are also operating under increased pressure from the city to offer more nutritious meals. This summer, the city banned restaurants from using artificial trans fat to prepare foods, and also required chain restaurants to post calorie counts of their menu items.

Even before the new laws took effect, some traditional soul food restaurants began to offer more healthful choices, including sometimes using skim milk in macaroni and cheese, and offering the option of oven fried, instead of deep fried, chicken.

The calorie count for a traditionally prepared dish of macaroni and cheese, for instance, is about 650 calories, and a single piece of deep fried chicken can have more than 400 calories, said Lindsey Williams, author of Neo Soul cookbook.

Those numbers are in line with a typical fast food meal: At McDonald’s, a Big Mac has about 540 calories, while a McDonald’s premium crispy chicken club sandwich contains 630 calories, according to the restaurant.

. . . just look what we will have lost:

Some people look at Coney Island and see a paradise of carefree entertainment. Others see a cesspool of gritty squalor. Few are those who gaze upon its shrieking kids, grizzled wanderers and fast-talking flimflam artists and see an opportunity for engaged political discourse.

But it was just that improbable impulse that drove the artist Steve Powers to open the new “Waterboard Thrill Ride” on West 12th Street, just off Surf Avenue, in the shadow of the Cyclone and a mere corn dog’s throw from Nathan’s.

It looks at first like any other shuttered storefront near the boardwalk: some garish lettering and a cartoonish invitation to a delight or a scam — in this case there’s SpongeBob SquarePants saying, “It don’t Gitmo better!”

If you climb up a few cinderblock steps to the small window, you can look through the bars at a scene meant to invoke a Guantánamo Bay interrogation. A lifesize figure in a dark sweatshirt, the hood drawn low over his face, leans over another figure in an orange jumpsuit, his face covered by a towel and his body strapped down on a tilted surface.

Feed a dollar into a slot, the lights go on, and Black Hood pours water up Orange Jumpsuit’s nose and mouth while Orange Jumpsuit convulses against his restraints for 15 seconds. O.K., kids, who wants more cotton candy!

. . .

Mr. Powers, who has undertaken many creative projects in Coney Island, said he started thinking about interrogation when he first saw the cramped, concrete room. “I thought, ‘This looks like a torture chamber,’” he said brightly.

But his initial idea was for real people to undergo real waterboarding, right there in real time. He’d be the first volunteer, then he’d perform it on the next guy, who’d turn the hose on the next one, and so on.

He said his wife was among the first to point out that that might be a tad over the line. (It’s fun to picture that conversation.) “In the meantime,” he said, “robot waterboarding became a way of exploring the issue without doing any harm. It’s the perfect Coney Island distraction — it’s not quite delivering what it offers, but it’s putting a unique experience on the table. And it doesn’t take a great leap of the imagination to look in there and say: ‘That’s really what’s going on? That’s crazy.’”

How about a Take Back The Tap campaign for city schools? Maybe they know something we don’t . . . or not:

Parents who sent their toddlers to the well-regarded Mandell preschool on the Upper West Side used to count on getting into the private school of their choice.

But with the recent boom in the city’s under-5 set, the competition for kindergarten places can rival that of Ivy League admission. This spring, for the first time, several of the 43 Mandell preschool graduates found themselves without anywhere to go. So Mandell, which has been around for generations, decided to do its part to ease the kindergarten crunch by opening its own $2 million elementary school, in a 17,000-square-foot storefront on Columbus Avenue at 96th Street.

“I think we’ve reached a crisis level in terms of capacity,” said Gabriella Rowe, Mandell’s head of school. “Although the majority of our families are still going to be able to send their children to their first-choice school, it’s clear that it’s going to become more difficult every year if these numbers continue to increase.”

The new school, financed through bank loans, will start with 50 kindergarten students in two classes. Ms. Rowe plans to expand to 450 students through 8th grade by 2017. Tuition is $28,000 for the 2008-9 school year, rising to $30,000 the next year.

Despite mounting layoffs on Wall Street and the broader economic downturn, private schools in New York City continue to thrive, with administrators and consultants saying this year has been the most competitive yet for admission to kindergarten. Some estimate that several hundred children were rejected from every place they applied.

About 150,000 students are enrolled in private and parochial schools in New York City; about 1.1 million attend the city’s public schools.

And in other news, punx not dead, it just evolved into convoluted arguments against people who rehab buildings:

“I am not scum!” exclaims Michael Rosen, a onetime developer and member of the East Village/Lower East Side rezoning task force, who is also the owner of a penthouse at the luxurious Christadora House. It’s a hot July evening, and Rosen is holding a one-man counterprotest outside the home of one of his main detractors, a crusty squatters’-rights activist named Jerry “the Peddler” Wade. “I am not scum, and my children are not scum!” he tells Wade in an outburst provoked by a month of name-calling.

Wade and his fellow neighborhood agitators have been leading boisterous anti-gentrification marches all summer. But no matter what they’re screaming about on any given day — and they do like to scream — all roads eventually lead to Rosen. The marches regularly conclude in front of the Christadora, where they sing their anthem, “Die Yuppie Scum!”, and they’ve taken to calling out Rosen by name, raising questions about his influence in neighborhood politics.

“I really don’t think real estate developers need to be on rezoning plans for communities,” says John Penley, a self-described “slacktivist” who has organized several of the marches. Penley and pals argue that Rosen’s role in creating the rezoning plan — which is meant to protect the neighborhood from aggressive developers — is hypocritical because Rosen lives at the Christadora, one of the first symbols of gentrification here in the late 1980s, and is the developer of Red Square, another luxury-condo building and commercial space built in 1989.

However, Rosen is far from your stereotypical developer. He is a curious study in contradictions that reflect the cliquey politics of the neighborhood. He’s a wealthy man who lives in a luxury building and spent a couple of years buying up East Village properties, but he is also a respected community activist, a former professor of radical sociology, the father of seven adopted children, and a friend to local radicals like Reverend Billy of the Church of Stop Shopping. Although Rosen has gained supporters through his work to save the old P.S. 64 building from demolition, critics have pointed out that part of his passion stemmed from a desire to protect the view from his penthouse apartment next door. Rosen is known as a big promoter of local business; his four-year-old nonprofit organization, the East Village Community Coalition, recently launched a campaign to discourage national chain stores from moving into the area. But he also profits from Red Square’s chain-store tenants.

Some locals are annoyed by these contradictory messages. “Michael Rosen needs to decide if he is a benevolent community person or a real-estate developer,” says Penley.

I don’t know if this makes Red Sox fans seem like huge wusses or Yankees fans seem more fearsome than they actually are:

A Boston Red Sox fan is suing the New York Yankees, saying the team failed to protect him while he attended a game between the two rivals.

Charles Hillios, 40, of Chicopee, Mass., filed a suit yesterday in Manhattan Federal Court, claiming that two Yankee fans assaulted him during a baseball game at Yankee Stadium in 2007.

According to the complaint, Mr. Hillios was cheering for the Red Sox on August 29, when two New York residents began to verbally harass and insult him. An employee of the contracted security unit of Yankee Stadium, Burns International Services Corporation, allegedly noticed the men and warned them to stop or risk being ejected from the stadium.

But when Mr. Hillios left his seat to visit a refreshment stand, he says in the suit, the men “viciously” attacked him, leaving him with serious injuries for which he later required restorative surgeries.

Mr. Hillios faults the Yankees, Burns Security, and the two Yankees fans in the suit, and is asking for more than $75,000 in damages.

Maybe keep that in mind during the next voir dire:

A former member of what is believed to be New York City’s only commune was found not guilty on Monday in the shooting of a co-founder of the commune.

The former member, Rebekah Johnson, 45, was acquitted by a jury in State Supreme Court on Staten Island of second-degree attempted murder in the shooting of the co-founder, Jeffrey Gross, 53. He had identified Ms. Johnson as the person who aimed a handgun at him as he returned from a movie on May 29, 2006, and shot him repeatedly. He also said she stepped over him after he fell to the ground.

The jury took less than five hours to clear Ms. Johnson, who had also been charged with assault and attempted grand larceny.

. . .

The Staten Island district attorney, Daniel M. Donovan Jr., issued a one-sentence statement that said, “While we respect the verdict of the jury, it is my belief that we presented a clear and compelling case which satisfied each element of the crimes for which Rebekah Johnson was indicted.”

Mr. Gross summarized his reaction in three words: “Stunned. Disbelief. Shock.”

“The evidence is overwhelming,” he said. “I was the eyewitness. She was 10 feet from me.”

He was shot on the stairway leading to his home, one of 10 buildings owned by the Ganas commune, a group that sanctions wife-swapping among its 100 members but moved to evict Ms. Johnson in 1996. He said she ambushed him.

“I said to the court, ‘I said to the jury, I immediately recognized it was Rebekah Johnson,’” he said in a telephone interview on Monday, after the verdict. “She had a gun pointed at me, I said, ‘Please don’t shoot,’” and he watched her pull the trigger. “I knew exactly who it was and I knew who it was as she climbed over me.”

Earlier: You Win Some, You Lose Some; Rebekah, Stop The Madness!; From Deranged Hippie Fugitive To Deranged Hippie Reject.

And then you realize that you know very little about the maritime industry. It’s like that abandoned car in the vacant lot down the street except no one seems to notice — until now:

On Monday, two City Council members and a state assemblyman announced their disgust with what they called a growing problem: abandoned construction barges and other vessels left to rust, buckle, leak and eventually sink to the bottom of remote corners of rivers and tributaries feeding Jamaica Bay.

In January, the National Parks Service estimated that about 190 abandoned vessels — many of them small boats, apparently privately owned — had been left to rot in the 25,000 acres that make up Jamaica Bay. Since then, about 40 vessels have been removed, said Brian Feeney, a Parks Service spokesman.

In a news conference held by the East River in Manhattan on Monday, City Councilmen David Yassky and Eric Gioia said that abandoned industrial barges had become a threat to the health of city estuaries.

“For too long, it’s been the Wild West in New York Harbor,” Mr. Yassky said.

Since 2006, the officials said, one company in particular has repeatedly tugged barges into Newtown Creek, in Brooklyn, and other New York rivers and bays, to let them rot. Mr. Yassky said the company, Pile Foundation Construction Co., of Hicksville, N.Y., was pursuing what he called an intentional “abandon-and-sink strategy” within the city, and must be stopped.

Earlier: How Dare You Barge Right In Here!