Deep down, we are all that 7-year-old Staten Island girl:
After the press conference, Bloomberg attempted to give a high-five to a 7-year-old girl — but was rebuffed. “She left him hanging,” laughs an eyewitness.
See also: Bloomberg For Mayor 2009.
Gains in student test scores that the Bloomberg administration trumpeted as proof mayoral control reforms are working, apparently are limited to questionable state testing:
New York students math scores stayed mostly flat on the most recent national tests, calling into question the big gains the same students have posted on state exams.
Scores on the National Assessment of Educational Progress math exams show little change for fourth- and eighth-graders in New York.
The percentage of fourth-graders scoring proficient or higher fell from 43% in 2007 to 40% this year.
The state math exams have painted a very different picture of student achievement.
The bike lane-loving DOT commissioner may have her wings clipped:
The City Council appears to be trying to stand up to Janette Sadik-Khan, the Bloomberg administration’s relatively radical and innovative transportation commissioner who has rapidly closed down car lanes and replaced them with bike lanes and open space across the city.
. . .
The secret to her magic: the transportation commissioner has broad power to do as he or she likes with the roadways without subjective outside approvals, as, traditionally, such commissioners simply treated roads as roads. But by treating the roads more like canvases of open space that happen to accommodate cars, she is able to achieve quick, tangible results that are relatively low budget, and to go forward without approval from the City Council. (By contrast, the Council must approve any major land-use changes on private or city-owned land, making it far more difficult to quickly implement any major changes.)
. . .
[Two City Council] bills would mandate the community board appearances and add new requirements for timeline (30 to 60 days of review), set up public hearings, and require DOT to provide certain information about its planned projects.
The Yankees broke attendance records last year. This year, not so much:
With decreased capacity and a small percentage of extremely high ticket prices, the Yankees totaled just seven sellouts in the first year of their new stadium and experienced a 13% drop in attendance in 2009.
Location Scout: New Yankee Stadium.
Because of course when you open a nice new $150 million park, you want people coming out in droves to enjoy the view:
Grandparent Gwen Barrett said the neighborhood has always been edgy.
“That kind of stuff here is anticipated,” she said.
Still, “I definitely wouldn’t want to bring my grandkids here,” she added.
See Also: “Two Parks” . . .
Location Scout: High Line.
Then there’s the Mets, who instead languish in fourth place. Maybe you can explain why you’d execute a hit and run down by two runs with two runners on and no outs in the ninth inning:
The sight of the Phillies’ Pedro Martinez pitching against his former team was supposed to be the most unusual aspect of the game. But that notion was quickly proved wrong before the top of the first inning was over, only to be reinforced exactly three hours later when the game ended on an unassisted triple play with the potential tying runs in motion. It was the first unassisted triple play to end a game since 1927, and only the 15th in major league history, according to the Elias Sports Bureau.
After the Wolfson campaign went after Bill Thompson’s comptrolling, the Observer’s Azi Paybarah points out that not only did Bloomberg endorse him in 2007 but there are also several of the mayor’s appointees on the pension board.
As the Daily News’ Adam Lisberg expected, video has come out showing Indian actress Shilpa Shetty “endorsing” Bloomberg. Too bad the Bloomberg campaign doesn’t realize that the Celebrity Big Brother star is actually a hack . . .
DC37 has 300,000 members, many of which (still) vote in New York City. Howard Wolfson is the go-to guy for the most egregious campaign bullshit:
In 2005, the union broke with its tradition of endorsing Democrats and backed Mr. Bloomberg, then a Republican, privately arguing that the mayor was likely to trounce a weak field of Democratic candidates.
Many expected the district council to do the same this time, especially since Mr. Bloomberg appears to be steamrolling toward re-election and granted DC 37’s workers back-to-back 4 percent raises last fall, despite the economic crisis.
. . .
In a statement, Howard Wolfson, a spokesman for Mr. Bloomberg’s campaign, said: “DC 37 opposes pension reform, mayoral control of schools, and wants the city to hire more employees, even in a time of fiscal crisis. This is their job, so we understand their position. But these are clearly not things that the mayor could agree to, and so it’s not surprising that they would endorse Mr. Thompson.”
“The real question,” he added, “is what promises Mr. Thompson made them and how much his promises will cost taxpayers.”
Wolfson, of course, is the post-modern political operative: Basically he’s telegraphing to us, “If I were being paid by Democrats, as has been the case for my entire career, I would have simply substituted ‘Bloomberg’ for ‘Thompson’ and had the same message.” It’s brilliant, in fact.
So yes, they’re watching everything we do, but they’re only seeing the tops of our heads:
In a stunning lapse of airport security, surveillance cameras at La Guardia Airport failed to capture even a single frame of the dramatic moments when would-be suicide bomber Scott McGann tried to blow himself up and two hero cops wrestled him to the ground, The Post has learned.
. . .
Investigators made the shocking discovery after they retrieved tape from Port Authority cameras, fully anticipating watching the near tragedy unfold and ultimately using it as evidence against the mentally ill terrorist wannabe.
But when they rolled the tapes, the entire episode was nowhere to be found because of a glaring lack of surveillance coverage. “There was zilch,” one flabbergasted law-enforcement source said.
“There was nothing of use,” said another.
The sources also disclosed that what little video they did recover from cameras in the general vicinity was “grainy,” of “poor quality” and basically “showed the tops of people’s heads.”
In fact, PA investigators and prosecutors at the office of Queens DA Richard Brown agreed that the tapes were of no forensic value and “unusable” against McGann.
Bloomberg gets Colin Powell — who hasn’t lived in New York since he was growing up in the Bronx — but even with that high-profile “endorsement,” Bill Thompson is now just ten points behind:
City Controller William Thompson has narrowed the gap between him and big-spending Mayor Bloomberg to 10 points in a new Quinnipiac University poll — down from a 22-point margin just a month ago.
Bloomberg would win 47% of the vote in a hypothetical matchup compared with 37% for Thompson, the poll found — versus the 54-to-32 lead he had in mid-June.
“Now there’s a little life in the mayoral race,” said Quinnipiac pollster Maurice Carroll. “Thompson is closer than Democrat Fernando Ferrer was at this point in 2005.”
Bloomberg’s campaign shrugged off the poll numbers, saying they seemed to be influenced by a wording change. Last month’s poll called the mayor an independent, but the new one noted he is running as an independent and a Republican.
And then there’s Tony:
Some colleagues question Mr. Avella’s temperament and world view. He often acts, they say, as if he is the smartest person in the room, and he has a temper. He also evinces little interest in national or international affairs.
They act like that’s a bad thing! A mayor isn’t supposed to be interested in international affairs. A mayor needs to be primarily interested in fixing potholes. Any port in a storm . . .
The problem when you cast yourself as a scold, er, worldwide environmental leader, is that you open yourself up to charges of hypocrisy:
In just the past week, the city-owned SUVS that hustle hizzoner around the city were timed idling from 10 minutes to more than an hour eight times, The Associated Press reported.
Bloomberg strengthened the city’s anti-idling law earlier this year, allowing just three minutes of idling. Environmentalists praised the law as the nation’s toughest. But the Mayor’s SUVs are exempt from the law because they are considered emergency vehicles.
“We’re doing our best,” to reduce idling, Bloomberg spokesman Stu Loeser insisted, noting the SUV’s are supposed to park in the shade so engines don’t have to run the air conditioning.
Most of the vehicles were clocked in mild temperatures last week and were parked in the shade — but the engines were still on.
Now with 50 percent less leadership! Mayoral Control apparently won’t be taken up in Albany before September:
It was another setback for the mayor’s legislative agenda in Albany, where he has been repeatedly thwarted by lawmakers who complain that he employs a my-way-or-the-highway approach.
The failed negotiations over the school control bill were a replay of similar battles the mayor has fought in Albany in the last few years — like his campaign to construct a stadium on the West Side of Manhattan and his plan to charge drivers a fee to enter the busiest parts of Manhattan.
“The mayor’s people are telling us they will not budge, they will not accept anything that isn’t their version of the bill,” said Senator Bill Perkins, a Harlem Democrat who is one of several senators from the city calling on the mayor to accept the changes. “We live in a democracy, not a dictatorship.”
He’s still campaigning about “getting the job done” or something, right?
If only for newspaper ledes like this:
As mayoral control of city schools teetered on the brink Tuesday, an angry Mayor Bloomberg said state senators should stay in Albany until they put him back in charge.
The market was not supporting face value and now it still isn’t, even for the vaunted Mets-Yankees subway series:
A year ago, it would have sounded absurd: blocks of tickets to the first Subway Series at new Yankee Stadium, available at face value on the Yankees’ Web site, a mere five days in advance.
But there they were as of Monday afternoon, and plenty of them.
Feel like taking nine very, very good friends to Friday night’s game against the Mets? The tickets were yours — 10 in Section 24B, Row 7 for a mere $900 apiece, plus a $23.45 “convenience charge.”
Ten in 24B also turned up at $900 per for Sunday. How about 10 in Section 28 at $525 apiece for Saturday?
Location Scout: New Yankee Stadium.
But we’ll always have Miss Brooklyn:
Citing financial concerns, the developer of the long-delayed Atlantic Yards project in Brooklyn has scrapped plans for a Frank Gehry-designed $1 billion glass-walled basketball arena for the Nets in favor of a less expensive arena. The new design, which will cost about $200 million less, comes from Ellerbe Becket, an architectural firm based in Kansas City, Mo., that specializes in convention centers, stadiums and arenas and designed Conseco Fieldhouse in Indianapolis, where the Indiana Pacers play. Officials who have seen the design say that while it resembles Conseco Fieldhouse it also bears a likeness to an “airplane hangar.”
The new design, which will cost about $200 million less, comes from Ellerbe Becket, an architectural firm based in Kansas City, Mo., that specializes in convention centers, stadiums and arenas and designed Conseco Fieldhouse in Indianapolis, where the Indiana Pacers play. Officials who have seen the design say that while it resembles Conseco Fieldhouse it also bears a likeness to an “airplane hangar.”
. . .
“The current economic climate is not right for this design,” Mr. Ratner said of the Gehry design in a statement released Thursday afternoon, “and with Frank’s understanding, the arena is undergoing a redesign that will make it more limited in scope.”
Mr. Ratner has said he is eager to get started with what he says will be a world-class project.
Mr. Gehry, the award-winning architect behind the Walt Disney Concert Hall in Los Angeles and the Guggenheim Museum in Bilbao, Spain, added that while he regretted the demise of his arena design, he remained “extremely proud of our work on the Atlantic Yards master plan and on the original arena.”
Location Scout: Atlantic Yards.
The big bold plastic bag tax (the one whose yearly windfall inexplicably jumped from $16 million in early discussions to somewhere around $100 million) seems to be blowing in the wind like something out of Alan Ball’s head*:
City Council Speaker Christine Quinn has decreed the nickel-a-bag proposal “is off the table,” according to City Council sources.
Aides to Quinn privately confirmed the development, which could add to the mayor’s woes of filling a $1 billion revenue gap in the new budget due July 1.
“We’re not going to go negotiate a budget here,” the mayor said when asked about the development.
“And Christine Quinn is certainly pro-environmental. I think that happens to be an environmental thing as well as a revenue-raising thing.”
The mayor warned the budget will have to be balanced, either through “fees and taxes, which nobody likes, or you reduce your expenses, which means less services, which nobody likes.”
*And if Bloomberg has his way, such scenes may be lost forever.
In honor of Bike Month, the police have started to crack down on bicyclists running red lights:
Police cracked down on rule-breaking bicyclists in Fort Greene and Clinton Hill last Friday, issuing tickets for running red lights and then slapping offenders with additional summonses for minor infractions, including one bicyclist who didn’t have a bell.
The dragnet snared 36 bicyclists on the popular DeKalb Avenue bike lane that links the two neighborhoods with Downtown Brooklyn.
Cops said the crackdown was long overdue.
“It was targeted towards enforcing traffic laws,” said a police source from the 88th Precinct. “Running a red light is not safe for the cyclist or anyone else in the street.”
The ticket blitz is a bitter irony for bikers who have complained since the lane’s creation last year that vehicles, including officers at the 88th Precinct stationhouse near the corner of Classon Avenue, but especially delivery trucks, regularly block the lane with parked cars along the busy corridor.
Or are bike lanes actually a backdoor way to balance the budget? Hmm . . .
I can almost make out the turnpike in the distance there:
On April 27, a plane that usually serves as the president’s plane was flying low over the New York City skyline, trailed closely by two fighter jets. It was a photo opportunity — authorized by several government officials, including Mr. Caldera — that infuriated Mr. Obama.
Hipster Grifter, meet Hipster Bounty Hunter:
She hadn’t stolen anything from me, but she wasted our time and energy with her cancer stories.
. . .
On Sunday, May 3, she finally agreed to take a bus to Philly. At 9:15 p.m. she said she was sitting on the bus in Manhattan. I immediately called the 6th District police headquarters and told them that a wanted felon with orders for extradition was taking a bus to Chinatown, and that I could help them pick her up. I gave them her case numbers. Then I called the SLCPD and gave them the phone number for the 6th District. When I called the 6th District back, they told me to come down to headquarters to help ID her, so I did.
Officers DeLuca and Green drove me to Chinatown in an unmarked black Explorer. They watched from across the street. When the bus arrived, I waved to Kari to get their attention. I want to say I hugged her, but I was anxious and I don’t remember. I picked her bag out of the luggage storage and started walking behind her. The officers crossed the street and stopped her. I dropped her bag and walked away. They took her aside and questioned her for a moment. She didn’t struggle. I didn’t stay close to hear what they were saying because I wasn’t sure if I wanted her to know it was me who turned her in. Not so much because I cared about her (I didn’t) but because I felt a little cold for betraying someone’s trust.
The curse on the Yankees, previously thought to have been reversed, is apparently still active:
It has been more than a year since the team extricated a Red Sox jersey maliciously entombed in the new stadium’s concrete by a Boston-loving hardhat — yet the hole remains unfilled, and officials have no clue what to do with it, The Post has learned.
The Yankees were quick to shell out $50,000 to remove the David Ortiz shirt when word of its burial surfaced in April 2008 — yet all they have done since then is surround the now-empty 2-by-4-foot gap with railing and a piece of Plexiglas.
The team refused to discuss plans for the hole — which was dug into a service tunnel behind home plate and is not accessible to the public — but sources said a decision has still not been made.
A cop patrolling the corridor Friday said the team may turn the spot into some sort of exhibit.
Location Scout: New Yankee Stadium.
Or perhaps it’s just 50 percent less greatness:
Twelve days after opening their new stadium, the Yankees on Tuesday bowed to the sour economy and the specter of empty seats by slashing in half some of their top-end, $2,500-a-game prices.
. . .
Over all, the new policy represents a dramatic retreat from the team’s initial luxury-sales strategy for the new stadium, which was underlined in advertisements that crowed “Own the Greatness” and “Select the Greatest Seats in the World.”
Last week, team officials said they would no longer discuss ticket prices or the many empty seats behind home plate and the two dugouts that were painfully visible at Yankee Stadium and on television during the team’s first homestand from April 16-22.
Location Scout: New Yankee Stadium.
Writers and historians will use this anecdote in the introductions of the many books yet to be written detailing the Fall of New York City:
After spending $2.3 billion on new stadiums packed with suites, restaurants and the latest technology, the Mets and the Yankees expected fans to embrace their new homes and pay top dollar for the privilege. Almost every team that has built a new stadium in the recent past has seen an immediate surge in attendance.
Instead, the Mets and the Yankees face a public relations nightmare and possibly millions of dollars in lost revenue after failing to sell about 5,000 tickets — including some of the priciest seats — to each of their first few games after last week’s openers.
The empty seats are a fresh sign that the teams might have miscalculated how much fans and corporations were willing to spend, particularly during a deep recession. Whatever the reason, the teams are scrambling to comb over their $295- to $2,625-a-seat bald spots.
. . .
But the slow start in New York is striking considering how much the teams here spent to build and promote their parks. Like airlines that break even on economy tickets and rely on first-class travelers to turn a profit, the teams need to sell their most exclusive seats to help repay the hundreds of millions of dollars of tax-free bonds they issued to finance their new parks.
The unfilled seats in New York are even more glaring compared with how robust sales have been for previous stadium openings. The Baltimore Orioles sold out 67 of their 80 home dates in 1992, when Camden Yards opened. The Cleveland Indians sold out 36 games in the strike-shortened season in 1994, and were filled to capacity 455 consecutive games from 1995 to 2001.
After moving to their new park in 2001, the Houston Astros drew 3.1 million fans, 300,000 more than they ever attracted at the far larger Astrodome. The Pittsburgh Pirates, a perennial second-division team, sold 2.4 million tickets in 2001 when PNC Park opened, 700,000 more than they ever sold at Three Rivers Stadium.
Location Scout: New Yankee Stadium, Citi Field.
In the realm of entertainment — whether it be sports or music or whatever — there is difference between a “game” and a “performance.” With the former, time was, you’d go to the ballpark, pay some nominal admission fee to get into a “game” and watch two teams slug it out. With the latter, you go to Broadway to pay for your Cynthia Nixons or Judd Hirsches and have some reasonable expectation that you’re seeing a performer at the top of his or her game giving you a “performance.” It’s the same in Vegas; you get the Celine Dion “performance” or the Dean Martin “performance” and Celine makes you cry during “My Heart Will Go On” or Deano brings you to years with his routines and bits. That’s entertainment!
But the thing is that when you inflate ticket prices of sporting events to absurd heights, people then start expecting something more than “a day at the ballpark.” In short, they want a performance. And then it becomes a case of Dance, Monkey, Dance:
The new Yankee Stadium was spotless and the weather stunning, but the Bombers stunk it up in The Bronx yesterday, subjecting their fuming fans to a putrid performance against the Indians, who scored an eye-popping 22 runs.
The loss — one of the worst in team history — was the Yankees’ second in three games in their new $1.5 billion ballpark.
But this one stung the Pinstripe faithful, who forked over as much as $2,625 to see the pitiful play, like few ever before.
“It’s a tragedy. This is the worst game I’ve ever seen,” said a seething Erich Wald, 28, of Toms River, NJ.
“You can’t afford to buy anything at this Stadium,” he added, “and the players are going to go out and have $50 steaks when it’s over.”
Jon Brawn, 26, of White Plains, couldn’t agree more.
“I woke up this morning expecting to see something great in this brand-new Stadium,” Brawn said, “and what I got was a calamity.”
. . .
“I paid $10 a beer to see this chop-shop team? They suck!” cried Shawn McCarthy, 28, of Hoboken, as he fled during the seventh-inning stretch.
“George Steinbrenner,” he added, “should take down ticket prices if we’re just gonna see a home-run derby by the Indians.”
A couple that had trekked all the way from West Palm Beach, Fla., to check out their favorite team’s spanking-new digs said they, too, were leaving with a sour taste in their mouths.
“I’ve been a fan since 1958,” said Fred Bingiano, 57. “We used to come back in the ’90s, and it was $36 a ticket. Today, we paid $350 each.”
His wife Deborah, 45, was just as disgusted.
“Families can’t come together anymore,” she noted before speaking for a lot of disaffected fans by tossing out the quintessential New York judgment: “Fuhgeddaboutit.”
Location Scout: New Yankee Stadium.
For a night, Queens was the hot spot in town and New York glowed orange and blue. The Mets, not the Yankees, opened their gleaming new ballpark first, and Citi Field was primped and primed for the occasion, as if it were preparing for a date. Monday was Citi Field’s night to shine, and the Mets, after two rehearsals and a week on the road, were eager to show it off.
Reality soon intruded, however, and the Mets bumbled their way to a 6-5 loss to San Diego, the game turning for the second straight day on an outfield mishap. Long after Mike Pelfrey got his cleat stuck in the dirt, falling off the mound, and Jose Reyes slid past second base, Ryan Church misplayed Luis Rodriguez’s sixth-inning fly ball into a three-base error.
Almost fittingly, Pedro Feliciano balked in the eventual winning run, and the Mets’ final 10 hitters went down in order. In a somewhat comical twist, two of their bullpen castoffs — Duaner Sanchez and Heath Bell — closed out San Diego’s win.
. . .
After throwing out the final pitch at Shea on Sept. 28, Tom Seaver and Mike Piazza left through the center-field gate. They entered Citi Field with their arms locked, chatting and waving on the long, slow walk toward the mound.
Nervous he would bounce the pitch, Seaver threw a strike. A few minutes later, at 7:11 p.m., Pelfrey threw a first-pitch strike to Jody Gerut. The next strike he threw landed in the right-field stands, Gerut hooking a 1-1 pitch inside the foul pole for the first regular-season homer at Citi Field.
According to the Elias Sports Bureau, Gerut is the first player to lead off a game with a homer in the first game at a new stadium.
Location Scout: Citi Field.
That’s it. Just “scoreboard.” We don’t even want to buy something in this stupid city; we just want you to admit that you were wrong all along:
For years, Halstead Property’s Richard Grossman has run a boot camp, teaching agents how to get buyers approved by co-op boards. In it, he presents four hypothetical applicant profiles. The first is a professional — a teacher, perhaps — with an average income but an outsize down payment. The second is a bonus-dependent candidate like a banker, who makes $80,000 and is putting down the minimum, but has a bonus three times his salary. The third, a non–Wall Streeter, earns somewhere in the low six figures and has a small bonus and a standard down payment, and the fourth, a first-time buyer with a good job, relies on relatives to cobble together a decent down payment.
In the past, says Grossman, agents invariably picked the financier as the most board-worthy, thanks to his bonus. At last month’s seminar, however, the answers were unanimous: “Go with the teacher.” And that is a big change. “If you were bidding against someone from Wall Street who had this kind of bonus history, you couldn’t compete. First of all, they were willing to outbid you, and second of all, the sellers were willing to take them over somebody else,” says Gumley Haft Kleier president Michele Kleier. “Bonus used to be the favorite word in everybody’s vocabulary. Now salary is a much more attractive word.” Admits one Upper West Side board member: “We’re definitely cautious across the board now, especially when someone’s touting their bonus.”
One more tantalizing Alex Rodriguez detail to take with you into Spring Training:
The Manhattan madam linked to former Gov. Eliot Spitzer claims she had a “connection” and “flirtation” with scandal-scarred Yankees slugger Alex Rodriguez.
Kristin Davis, who says she met the third-baseman at a Philadelphia gym in 2005, told the Post that: “our paths have crossed both personally and professionally,” and that “there was a flirtation there.”
. . .
When asked if the Yankee patronized her escort agency, Davis, who said she likes Latin men, would only say that they had a “professional” relationship.
With the Yankees set to dominate baseball this year, we needed something to level the playing field:
The legend of “A-Fraud” grows.
Joe Torre took a lot of heat last week over excerpts from his new book. Among the myriad of skeletons he exorcised from the Yankees closet, he said the idea that Alex Rodriguez may not be the most genuine soul in the world had always been a running joke inside the Yankees locker room.
Well, it looks now like A-Rod’s words and actions are going to have to be good for more than just his teammates. With Saturday’s bombshell CNN/SI report that Rodriguez tested positive for steroids back in 2003, he now finds himself in the unenviable position of having to choose his words carefully because if indeed failed that test what he says next will go a long way toward determining if the rest of baseball — and the sports world for that matter — will be as forgiving with him as they were with players like Jason Giambi and Andy Pettitte.
If Rodriguez doesn’t play this thing perfectly, he’ll be the East Coast version of Barry Bonds and the Yankees’ 2009 traveling zoo will be inhabited by far more than its usual cast of 800-pound gorillas.
Whether or not you buy the apologies from Giambi and Pettitte, those guys are generally very likeable, players you rally behind because they appear to be good people and good teammates. New Yorkers are a forgiving bunch. They want to see their heroes fight back from adversity, even if the hole they have put themselves in is because of their own doing.
New Yorkers are the polar opposite of fans in a city like San Francisco, where despite every single piece of evidence suggesting Bonds is as guilty as O.J. Simpson, the people who buy the tickets continue to turn the other cheek and actually support the guy, almost to the point where they have convinced themselves that Bonds is the victim and that this is all one big witch hunt.
Oh wait, yes it is:
A guerrilla “artist” known as “Poster Boy,” who cuts up and rearranges subway advertisements into designs of his own, was busted after an undercover officer overheard him bragging to a girl about his exploits at a party, sources said.
Henry Matyjewicz, 27, of Bushwick, Brooklyn, was arrested Friday at an art show at a SoHo loft that featured his work and was hosted by a group called Sly Art vs. Robot City.
Transit police had gotten a tip that Matyjewicz would be at the party, advertised as “The Friends We Love Festival,” and sent the undercover officer, the sources said.
Poster Boy’s work has caused tens of thousands of dollars in damage to ad campaigns, and he has long been a thorn in New York City Transit’s side.
But not knowing what he looked like, the officer was able to nab him only after he overheard the artist/vandal bragging to the girl, the sources said.
He was charged with counts of criminal mischief, graffiti and possessing a tool to make graffiti. He was also held on a warrant for shoplifting in Manhattan last August, court records show.
Moral: no third term, no pandering (er, “campaigning”); no campaigning, no getting your hand bitten off by a rodent:
If Mayor Bloomberg’s pride was wounded — along with his hand — in his encounter with Staten Island Chuck, hizzoner wasn’t letting on this afternoon.
Hours after the borough’s prognosticating groundhog snapped at Bloomberg’s hand during today’s Groundhog Day festivities at the Staten Island Zoo, West Brighton, the mayor laughed off the run-in.
Bloomberg joked at another event later that city residents should rest assured that their mayor is “willing to put himself and his physical well-being in harm’s way to protect them” against what might have been “a terrorist rodent.”
In other news: It will be an early spring.
