The Times’ David Carr goes local and explains how the city’s major editorial boards slid into the tank for the mayor:

Mr. Bloomberg said that he understood the situation and did not take the people’s verdict lightly. “But as newspaper editorialists and others have pointed out,” he said, “the current law denies voters the right to choose who to vote for — at a time when our economy is in turmoil and the Council is a democratically elected representative body.”

It is no coincidence that Mr. Bloomberg cited voices from the city’s opinion leaders. With a fiscal crisis at hand, the business leaders of New York has already held a private referendum and decided who the next mayor should be. So in spite of his rather breathtaking grab for another term, there will be no opprobrium forthcoming from the editorial pages of the city’s newspapers.

Before Mr. Bloomberg took this controversial step — remember when Rudolph W. Giuliani got clobbered for seeking three more months in office after Sept. 11? — he made the rounds and locked up the support of the editorial pages of The New York Post, The New York Times and The Daily News, three city newspapers not known for moving in lock step.

. . .

To set the stage, the mayor had spent the last month making plain his interest in staying put at City Hall. He did not post a Web site or drop items in various blogs, but instead called Howard J. Rubenstein, a master of the city’s power grid. Meetings were set up with the owners of the daily newspapers, as well as with potential opponents and the city’s corporate overlords.

It was a gambit that would not have been out of place in the 1970s — or the 1870s, for that matter. This being a Bloomberg administration, there were no smoke-filled rooms, but there was definitely the sense that issues of civic moment were being handled in private environs.

“The only thing that my clients have been talking about for the past few weeks is the fiscal dilemma that this city is facing,” said Mr. Rubenstein, the public relations mogul who helped broker a deal in 1975 involving Abraham D. Beame, then mayor of the city, and Governor Hugh L. Carey back when the feds told the city to more or less drop dead.

“I did step up because I want to see the city survive and prosper,” Mr. Rubenstein said, “and I think we all agree that he is the person who we would like to see leading us through this crisis.”

In mid-September, after a year of talking on and off, Mr. Bloomberg and Rupert Murdoch, who owns The New York Post, met for dinner at an Italian restaurant on the Upper East Side and sealed a deal. Arthur Sulzberger Jr., publisher of The New York Times, had two breakfasts with the mayor, and although no specific commitments were made, an understanding was reached.

Mortimer B. Zuckerman, owner of The Daily News, said he had no trouble throwing his support behind Mr. Bloomberg. He said there had been no cabal, no conspiracy, just three newspaper publishers all arriving at the same conclusion at a critical juncture in the life of the city.

“Suggesting that the publishers can decide who the next mayor is is a little like being a 90-year-old named in a paternity suit,” Mr. Zuckerman said on the phone. “I only wish we had that kind of power. I think he has been a remarkable mayor, we face tremendous challenges as a city right now, and it’s clear that he is the person for the job.”

The City Section takes on spirituality and nail salons in one article:

As noon approached on a recent Sunday, the mostly Jamaican congregation of New Life Tabernacle gathered in its small storefront on White Plains Road in the Wakefield section of the north Bronx. Women in elaborate, wide-brimmed hats and men in dark suits filled six rows of pews and two dozen wooden chairs. The pastor’s wife, Paulette Randall, wearing a violet dress and holding a microphone, stood before the congregation.

“Is your soul right with God?” she asked the crowd of about 60, her voice exploding into the microphone. “That is the question.”

. . .

If this were not enough spiritual fervor for one block, worship at three more storefront churches was also about to begin. As the afternoon wore on, the worshipers became increasingly ardent, cries of hallelujah turned to shrieks, and White Plains Road between 239th and 240th Streets, home to seven houses of worship in all, throbbed with the ardor of believers readying their souls to meet their maker.

The abundance of churches in Wakefield is not limited to this block, which sits opposite a desolate strip of auto body shops. Amid the retail stores on the two-mile stretch of White Plains Road that runs from 240th Street south to East Gun Hill Road, there are about 30 storefront churches.

While the faithful often attribute the proliferation of churches to the will of God, a few earthly factors help explain their numbers in this particular part of the Bronx.

Starting in the 1970s, in a trend echoed throughout much of the city, Wakefield was plagued by crime that drove many of the neighborhood’s residents, among them large numbers of Italian and Irish families, to the relative safety of the suburbs. In response to their departure, many of the butcher shops, travel agencies, pharmacies and other small businesses along White Plains Road closed, leaving behind empty storefronts.

During the 1980s, immigrants from the Caribbean began replacing residents who had left. The immigrants brought with them faiths like Pentecostalism, and they established fledgling churches in the cheapest and most convenient places they could find, the White Plains Road storefronts widely available at low rents.

The houses of worship do not, however, inspire praise from all quarters.

. . .

While the churches offer their members spiritual reinforcement that helps them endure life’s trials, some neighbors view the sheer number of houses of worship with exasperation.

“There are too many churches,” Mario Ferrante, the gray-haired owner of Fairbanks Lumber and Home Center, said one recent afternoon as he stood outside his lumber yard, flanked on either side by a church. “How many gods are there?” he asked with a shrug. “How many popes?”

Donna Stewart, owner of Salon Express, a business sandwiched between two storefront churches, would agree. “Business could be better,” said Ms. Stewart, who was working near four hair dryers that sat dormant. “If we had other kinds of businesses around, we’d have more people walking by.”

According to Ingrid Gould Ellen, a director of the Furman Center for Real Estate and Urban Policy at New York University, there may be some truth to this claim. “They fail to attract the 24/7 street traffic so critical to urban retail,” she said of the churches, which are typically shuttered most days. “Retailers want to be around other retailers.”

Yet there are other reasons business could be better here. Nail and hair salons, seemingly immune to laws of supply and demand, are in oversupply on White Plains Road, and shoppers seeking more options head north to malls in the nearby suburbs. And on this particular block of White Plains Road, auto body shops and a New York City Transit yard add to the desolate mood.

I guess storefront churches are to the Bronx what banks are to Manhattan . . .

Matt Elzweig explains in the New York Press how the Times Sunday Magazine’s Deborah Solomon comes off as such a pain in the ass in those preciously bratty Q-and-A features:

When I began my reporting three weeks ago, this story was slated to be a benign profile of an incisive, witty, cantankerous, high-profile-but-not-quite-famous, powerful, puzzling, playful, combative contributing writer to the New York Times Magazine. Through Deborah Solomon’s weekly column, a Q-and-A interview that has become a popular staple of the Times’ Sunday magazine since its launch in 2003, the former art critic and author of two biographies has developed a voice easily as distinctive as the ones she features.

Most of my interviews with people in Solomon’s column over the years reflected positive overall experiences. (Several of those contacted either declined to comment or didn’t respond to requests for an interview.) But after conversations with two prominent Solomon Q-and-A subjects — Ira Glass, the popular host of Public Radio International’s “This American Life,” and Amy Dickinson, the nationally-syndicated advice columnist who replaced Ann Landers in 2003 — the story became more complicated. Both Glass and Dickinson, without any prompting and in significant detail, told me that in the published versions of their interviews, Solomon had made up questions, after the fact, to match answers that, at least in one instance, she had taken out of their original context.

“[Solomon] rewrites her questions and then applies any question to any answer that a person says,” Glass told me in a tape-recorded telephone interview.

Both experienced journalists, Glass and Dickinson accused Solomon of violating basic ethical standards by making up dialogue never said during their conversations with her — conversations Solomon taped. Dickinson (in a tape-recorded telephone interview) described an exchange that she says “didn’t happen” during her interview, that she said Solomon put together using her quotes. Glass went even further; of one exchange, he said that “she never actually asked that question,” and added that Solomon “was changing context in a way that changed what I meant.” In Glass’s case, he told a fact-checker for the magazine about the distortion of the interview, in an attempt to have it corrected. “I made my case as forcefully as I knew how,” Glass said in an email to me last week, “but I guess he just disagreed with me.”

On the one hand you have “Hey Ho — You Owe!”. On the other we see “Hey! Ho! Let’s Sue!” Now care to guess which is the Post and which is the Times?

But that’s OK because that middle column was usually boring anyway:

The New York Times is moving to a smaller format starting Monday, cutting 1.5 inches from its width and moving to what is becoming a newspaper industry standard of 12 inches.

The change, which the company originally announced a year ago, will result in cost savings of about $10 million per year, spokeswoman Diane McNulty said.

Several other major newspapers have already adopted the 12-inch format, including The Wall Street Journal, published by Dow Jones & Co., which went to the new size at the beginning of the year; The Washington Post; and the Los Angeles Times, published by Tribune Co.

The change at The New York Times was originally expected to occur in mid-2008, but McNulty said the company was able to get its presses reconfigured sooner than anticipated.

The look of the paper will remain essentially the same, she said, though the headlines will become slightly smaller. The news columns will also become slightly narrower.

The change will result in the space for news being reduced by about 10 percent, but the paper will make up for about half of that decline by adding extra pages. Additional pages may also be added from time to time to accommodate major news stories, she said.

So between a 25-cent increase on weekday issues (translating to a 25-percent cost increase) and a ten percent decrease in news, that’s a 35 percent turnaround, right?

The Daily News wants you to know that we are all going to die:

The Brooklyn Bridge is one of 166 city bridges labeled “structurally deficient,” putting it in the same category as the one that collapsed into the Mississippi River.

In fact, under the the feds’ rating system, the Brooklyn Bridge scored dramatically lower than the doomed Minneapolis bridge — and the Willis Ave. Bridge, which connects East Harlem to the Bronx, was not much better.

The Brooklyn Bridge also got lousy marks from the state, which called it one of three city bridges in “poor” condition with rusting steel joints and deteriorating brick and mortar on its ramps.

The biggest problem was the roadway deck on the Manhattan and Brooklyn approaches.

The state felt the “poor” rating was enough to raise concerns but not enough to shut down traffic like it did with the nearby Williamsburg Bridge in 1988.

At the city’s iconic landmark, a reporter observed considerable rust on metal structures and areas of missing brick work on the Manhattan anchorage.

Responding to the Daily News’ findings, Charles Carrier, a spokesman for the city Department of Transportation, said, “The bottom line is, if a bridge is unsafe, we close it. Obviously the Brooklyn Bridge was not deemed to be unsafe, but there are issues we’re going to be addressing.”

. . .

City officials stood by what they termed a “state of the art” inspection system and declined to perform additional checks on any of its bridges.

In New York, the federal government has labeled 2,110 bridges “structurally deficient,” of which 166 are in New York City, records show. The feds define this as structures with “deteriorated conditions of significant bridge elements.”

All of these bridges are rated by the U.S. Department of Transportation on the same 1-to-100 scale that gave the Minneapolis bridge a “sufficiency rating” of 50.

Considering factors such as structural adequacy and safety, serviceability and functional obsolescence, the Brooklyn Bridge was given the lowest possible “sufficiency rating,” a zero.

On the other hand, Sewell Chan is not into fear mongering*:

More than 2,000 bridges in New York State meet the federal government’s definition of “structurally deficient,” from the heavily traveled on-ramps of the Brooklyn Bridge to a 28-foot span across Trout Brook near the Canadian border.

The bridge that collapsed Wednesday in Minneapolis had also been labeled structurally deficient. But the term can have a variety of implications, and does not necessarily mean that any of the bridges are in real danger of significant failure. Typically the finding means inspectors have identified some kind of deterioration, cracks or movement.

The ramps to the Brooklyn Bridge, which carries about 132,000 vehicles a day, were downgraded last year from fair to poor condition. Yesterday, city officials said $149 million in repairs to the span were under way and that the bridge was safe. Still, city inspectors were at the bridge yesterday afternoon to check on its condition.

. . .

In the last eight years, the city has spent $3 billion improving some of the 787 bridges it controls, said Lori A. Ardito, the first deputy transportation commissioner. As a result, Ms. Ardito said, the number of bridges that the city deems to be in poor condition dropped to 3 last year from 40 in 1997.

In addition to the Brooklyn Bridge, the two others were a pedestrian bridge at East 78th Street over the Franklin D. Roosevelt Drive in Manhattan and a bridge at Willow Lake at 76th Road in Flushing Meadows-Corona Park in Queens.

Ms. Ardito said “poor” did not mean a structure was at risk of collapse. At the Brooklyn Bridge, the major problem is the roadway deck on the ramps, and not structures that support the roadway. She said a more complete rehabilitation was expected to start in 2010.

“The poor rating for the Brooklyn Bridge means that there’s only components of the bridge that are in poor condition,” she said. “They’re actually the ramps leading to the bridge, not the span of the bridge.”

*Not that he didn’t try . . .

Earlier: Nothing A Little Paint Won’t Fix.

Location Scout: Brooklyn Bridge.

Any good newsman will tell you some stuff you just can’t make up:

A walk last week through the denuded ex-headquarters of the Times, on West Forty-third Street, was kind of spooky for a citizen already in an apocalyptic frame of mind. The paper’s empty offices, mid-gutting, suggested the twin desolations of war and obsolescence. But in the eyes of the “architecturologist” Kevin Browne, who searches modern ruins for loot, these wastes were full of possibility. Browne had come to the Times Building from another scavenge job (the old Queens County Courthouse — spectacular terra cotta) to look in on some of the spoils he’d been coveting since the Times decamped to Eighth Avenue, last month.

Browne, fifty, is the president of a salvage operation called Olde Good Things, which has showrooms in Chelsea, Chicago, Los Angeles, Florida, and Scranton, Pennsylvania. Olde Good Things is owned by the Church of Bible Understanding, a sect founded by a former vacuum-cleaner salesman. For a couple of decades, the church ran a cut-rate carpet-cleaning business that employed teen-age runaways. About a dozen years ago, Browne steered the church into the junk game. “It was totally Jesus leading us,” he explained. In the Lord’s name, he has salvaged artifacts from demolitions and renovation jobs all over town: the Plaza, Alice Tully Hall, the Morgan Library. The Times had already consigned most of its valuable stuff to be sold at auction. Now Browne had a shot at whatever leftovers he could find.

In the front lobby, Browne, a man with a Tommy Chong beard and a loping stride, put on a hard hat and led the way up some stairs to a vast newsroom. “You see anything you like, you can have it,” he said. There wasn’t much to like, just drifts of paper and trash: computer disks, laser printouts of war photographs, a sci-fi paperback (”Earth: Final Conflict — The Arrival”), a lei. Browne spoke into a walkie-talkie. “Junior, those glass doors to the newsroom that said ‘New York Times’ — they gone?” Junior assured him that they were not. “If it says ‘New York Times’ on it, it has value,” Browne said.

. . .

Down at the loading docks, Browne poked around in the back of his van. It was crammed with booty: a pair of oxidized bronze sconces, some antique iron nail pullers, a laser printer. He pulled out a giant black-and-white photograph, printed on poster board, of a Times reporter, in shirt and tie, sitting in front of a typewriter — a real Mohican. Browne had no idea who it was, but he was determined to find out.

Now that a little time has passed*, the Times can finally address the salient fact of that particular story:

She worked at the Red Lobster in Times Square and lived with her husband near Yankee Stadium. Yet one night, returning home from her job, Odine D. discovered that African custom, not American law, held sway over her marriage.

A strange woman was sitting in the living room, and Ms. D.’s husband, a security guard born in Ghana, introduced her as his other wife.

Devastated, Ms. D., a Guinean immigrant who insisted that her last name be withheld, said she protested: “I can’t live with the woman in my house — we have only two bedrooms.” Her husband cited Islamic precepts allowing a man to have up to four wives, and told her to get used to it. And she tried to obey.

Polygamy in America, outlawed in every state but rarely prosecuted, has long been associated with Mormon splinter groups out West, not immigrants in New York. But a fatal fire in a row house in the Bronx on March 7 revealed its presence here, in a world very different from the suburban Utah setting of “Big Love,” the HBO series about polygamists next door.

The city’s mourning for the dead — a woman and nine children in two families from Mali — has been followed by a hushed double take at the domestic arrangements described by relatives: Moussa Magassa, the Mali-born American citizen who owned the house and was the father of five children who perished, had two wives in the home, on different floors. Both survived.

. . .

But the Magassas clearly are not an isolated case. Immigration to New York and other American cities has soared from places where polygamy is lawful and widespread, especially from West African countries like Mali, where demographic surveys show that 43 percent of women are in polygamous marriages.

And the picture that emerges from dozens of interviews with African immigrants, officials and scholars of polygamy is of a clandestine practice that probably involves thousands of New Yorkers.

*It makes you wonder whether someone at early editorial meetings yelled out “Too soon!” as if it were a tastelessly ill-timed 9/11 joke.

The Styles section attempts to write a story about “urban” “street styles” without referring to race, with varying results:

Scouring street-wear shops in downtown Manhattan on Saturday, Dimitri Viglis zeroed in on a hoodie he hoped would put some cool in his wardrobe. Mr. Viglis, a 23-year-old construction worker from Brooklyn, chose a black and purple style with a kinetic computer-graphic pattern by the label Orchard Street, a garment splashy enough, yet insulating enough, for a night on the town.

“Wear this,” he said contentedly, “and I won’t have to put on a heavy jacket while I wait on line at the clubs.”

He paid about $150 for his hoodie but would have parted with twice or even three times the price, he said. “Look at the quality,” he said, turning the cuff inside out to show its meticulous construction and stitching. Better yet, he said, he felt reasonably assured that he would not be seeing it on every Tom, Jamal and Harry.

The Observer reports that those Maureen Dowd podcasts were less popular than expected:

As The New York Times slowly works its way toward a narrower broadsheet in 2008, the paper has another new format in development: a tabloid for the younger generation.

On Dec. 15, executive editor Bill Keller mentioned a tabloid “prototype” during one of his occasional “Throw Stuff at Bill” sessions for the staff, a combination state-of-the-paper address and Q&A free-for-all.

“It’s way too early to talk about it,” Mr. Keller wrote in an e-mail Dec. 18, when asked about the tabloid. “It’s one of many projects that are still in the noodling stage.”

The subject arose during the middle of one of Mr. Keller’s three sessions on Dec. 15, in the paper’s ninth-floor auditorium, with publisher Arthur O. Sulzberger Jr. and managing editors Jill Abramson and John Geddes in attendance. A staffer asked about local coverage, and Mr. Keller mentioned new or planned electronic products, plus a “possible print product” that would be “aimed at younger readers.”

The noodling about the tabloid, according to a source familiar with the project, has been taking place in a Times committee that first convened this past April to generate ideas about marketing and boosting circulation. After a string of weekly meetings, the group — which includes members from the paper’s editorial and business side — has settled into a less rigid schedule.

So far, the concepts emerging from the group suggest that Mr. Sulzberger’s “platform-agnostic” approach to packaging content is yielding something more like platform Unitarian Universalism — taking inspiration from whatever tradition is handy. The first of the committee’s ideas to reach the public was Urbanite, a daily e-mail newsletter launched Nov. 3, listing goings-on around the city.

Because a Baltimore-based magazine named Urbanite already existed, on Dec. 15 The Times redubbed the newsletter UrbanEye. A Times spokesperson wrote via e-mail that the company “felt we should create and trademark a name that would be exclusive and distinctive to The Times.”

The tabloid idea hasn’t reached the naming stage, let alone the renaming stage. The source familiar with the project described its condition as more a collection of loose pages than a full prototype. In the question-and-answer session, Mr. Keller said that the new publication could be distributed either inside the paper or on its own.

. . .

But the proposed Times tabloid would not go head to head with amNewYork or Metro on the stairways to the No. 1 train. . . . It would be a weekly, heavy on event listings — like The Village Voice, or the New York Press, or Time Out New York or New York magazine or the front end of The New Yorker, for that matter.

The tabloid will need at least another six months to get off the drawing board, the Times source said. Meanwhile, the committee will stay busy with another outlet for the paper’s newly New York-centered ambitions: a Web site that would gather together city-related stories from various parts of the newspaper, such as the metro and culture desks, and integrate them with service features. Movie reviews, for example, could be accompanied by restaurant reviews of eateries near a particular theater.

Foreign-born New Yorkers make up 37 percent of the city’s population, according to the latest census data:

Immigrants have continued to surge into metropolitan New York since 2000, according to census figures released today, and that increase, combined with high birth rates, has elevated the foreign-born and their children in New York City itself to fully 60 percent of the population. The rate of change was even more pronounced in the 24 suburban counties around the city, where a record 20 percent of the residents are now born abroad.

The figures, while showing that the city’s gains from immigration were not nearly as marked as they were in the 1990’s, are nonetheless striking in their detail and magnitude.

In the city, the number of people who identified themselves as Mexicans, here legally or not, soared 36 percent in five years, and not merely as a consequence of improved counting. More than half the residents of Queens and the Bronx do not speak English at home. Nearly one in three black residents in New York City was born abroad.

The trends are reported in the American Community Survey, a new annual version of the federal Census Bureau’s long-form questionnaire designed to capture the nation’s demographic profile in a more timely moving picture, rather than a once-a-decade snapshot.

Meanwhile, the Times buries the Post’s lede (note the descriptive word the paper uses in the URL for this story):

Among children younger than 15, white residents who are not Hispanic have become a minority in the metropolitan area, an indication that within just a few years the New York region will become the first large metropolitan area outside the South or West where non-Hispanic whites are a minority.

The Post, on the other hand, doesn’t bury the Post’s lede:

The number of whites in New York City has been shrinking the last five years, while the Asian and Hispanic populations have been climbing, according to new figures released by the U.S. Census Bureau.

Then again, the Post’s headline is “Whites Decline In City” . . .

Other interesting or notable data:

New York ranks first in the proportion of men and women — 35.2 percent and 30.2 percent, respectively — who have never married. The median age for first marriages by women is highest in Connecticut, at 27.5, and for men in New York, at 29.3. New York State also has the lowest proportion of households composed of married couples, 45 percent. Barely half the children in the city, 53 percent, are being raised by a married couple.

As ever, within the borders of the city there were great differences. In Manhattan, where the number of black and Hispanic residents declined, married couples with children living at home made up about 10 percent of households, but the rate is 27 percent on Staten Island. In the Bronx, more than half the families with children are headed by women.

The census counted more American Indians, about 33,000, than in any other city. Chinese is spoken by more than 350,000 New Yorkers, Italian by 103,000, Yiddish by 77,000.

While the number of Puerto Ricans in the city declined slightly, they remain the largest group among Hispanics, with 787,000. Dominicans, who number 532,000 — the largest number among foreign-born — are catching up with Puerto Ricans. More city residents still identify their ancestry as Italian than any other group, but West Indians are closing.

The New York Times is being downsized to USA Today proportions:

The New York Times is planning to reduce the size of the newspaper, making it narrower by one and a half inches, and to close its printing operation in Edison, N.J., company officials said yesterday.

The changes, to go into effect in April 2008, will be accompanied by a phased-in redesign of the paper and will mean the loss of 250 production-related jobs.

Several other American broadsheets reduced their size a few years ago, and many are planning further shrinkage to cut costs as the price of newsprint climbs and newspapers lose readers and advertisers to the Internet.

The Times, which made the announcement last night on the eve of its quarterly earnings report, said it would sublet its plant in Edison and consolidate its regional printing facilities at its newer plant in College Point, in Queens.

That consolidation will mean the loss of about a third of the total production work force of 800.

The Edison plant, which opened in 1992, is to keep printing papers until the spring of 2008, by which time one new press will have been added at College Point. That plant opened in 1997.

The company said the changes would save about $42 million a year — $30 million by consolidating printing at College Point and $12 million by reducing the size of the paper. Leaving the Edison plant means the company can avoid about $50 million in capital improvements there, although it will spend about $150 million to combine the facilities in College Point and buy a new press.

The reduction in the size of The Times will mean a loss of 5 percent of the space the paper devotes to news. If the paper only reduced the size of its pages, it would lose 11 percent of that space, but Bill Keller, the paper’s executive editor, said such a loss would be too drastic, so the paper will add pages to make up for some of the loss.

“That’s a number that I think we can live with quite comfortably,” Mr. Keller said of the 5 percent reduction, adding that the smaller news space would require tighter editing and putting some news in digest form.

Several broadsheets — including USA Today, The Los Angeles Times and The Washington Post — have already reduced their size and others, like The Wall Street Journal, are planning to.

See also: New York Times Cut to 5 Percent Of Size; Keller Says Paper Better Without It (New York Observer’s Media Mob)

While it’s obviously an important issue, it’s perhaps a stretch to assume that 34 East 62nd Street would have been avoided if only New York state had no-fault divorce. But don’t let the details get in the way of a smart op-ed on the topic:

Behind the powerful gas explosion that nearly leveled a historic Manhattan town house on Monday is a nightmarish New York saga of divorce and vengeance worthy of a Lifetime channel movie. Authorities believe that the Upper East Side doctor suspected of causing the blast wanted to destroy the house so his ex-wife wouldn’t get it as the result of a nasty divorce fight that dragged on for over five years, even after the divorce was finalized.

We’re tempted to blame the State Legislature.

Obviously, even New York’s dysfunctional government is not bad enough to drive people to blow up their houses. But the story does give us an opportunity to point out once again that, thanks to Albany, the state has notoriously cumbersome divorce laws that regularly produce both hideous domestic squabbles and inflated lawyer’s fees.

And there’s your ghoulish rhetoric for the day . . .

A rent control story for the ages:

For three decades, Lisa Dittmer has been on a collision course with her landlords — one involving the peculiarities of real estate and rent control in New York City — that culminated yesterday in a lawsuit filed in State Supreme Court in Brooklyn.

For those unaccustomed to the range of comedy and heartbreak those factors can produce, it is worthwhile to begin with this: By law, Ms. Dittmer says, her monthly rent is $94.18, roughly the price of a pair of sneakers that will get you laughed off any basketball court in the city.

Ms. Dittmer moved into her apartment on the top floor of a three-story building in Bay Ridge in 1965, about a month before Sam the Sham and the Pharaohs released “Wooly Bully.”

“To date,” her lawyer wrote with lawyerly reserve, “plaintiff continues to occupy said apartment.”

The best reason, and perhaps the only reason, to occupy the same apartment for 41 years is rent control, a program established to address a housing crisis in postwar time, post-World War II time in particular. Under those rules, Ms. Dittmer’s rent for the apartment at 319 82nd Street was set at $80.72 a month in June 1970 and raised to $94.18 in March 1983, according to the lawsuit.

But since 1976, the lawsuit says, she has often been charged more than that. A lawyer for Ms. Dittmer, Colleen Buckley, said the amount she paid ranged from the maximum legal rent to as much as $570 monthly.

The suit contends that the landlords willfully ignored the fact that the apartment was rent controlled. The plaintiff is asking for $350,000:

Since 1976, the lawsuit says, Ms. Dittmer has been overcharged, in total, $84,465.80, which works out to $237.93 a month.

In the lawsuit, Ms. Dittmer, who did not return calls seeking comment, is seeking $253,397.40, or three times the total overpayment, plus lawyers’ fees and interest, for a round total of $350,000.

Despite the Times’ hoodely-doo above-it-all tone, the paper certainly has been “flooding the zone” with its extensive coverage of the Jared Paul Stern/sex-for-arms scandal. Today they print their twelfth article on the subject. But I suppose Campbell Roberts needs something to do now that there’s a death watch for Boldface Names.

You know it’s hard out there when you primp:

The social kiss is unpredictable, agreed R. Couri Hay, the society editor at Hamptons magazine.

“I never kiss on the first meeting,” he said, “but if someone offers a kiss, I feel I have to be polite and take it. Generally I really don’t want to be covered in lipstick.” The kiss “has been dumbed down,” Mr. Hay said. “It is supposed to be a sign of affection, but I’ve seen people recoil when they see someone they don’t even know coming in to lick their cheek.”

Despite the awkwardness, the cheek, or social, kiss is displacing the handshake, once the customary greeting in American social and business circles. It may be a growing Latin influence, an aping of European manners, the influx of women in the workplace or just a breakdown of formality: no one seems to know. It’s not just celebrities smacking the air or diplomats puckering up with the European style double kiss or Soprano family wannabees mimicking a sign of forced fealty.

. . .

The awkwardness — and inevitability — of the social kiss has led to strategies to deal with it. “I position my face just slightly to the side,” said Jeff Elsass, a Pilates instructor at the BioFitness Center in Manhattan, who is frequently greeted with kisses during his workday, “then I wait and see what the other person is going to do. That slight turn of the head can take you past the lip and the cheek.”

New York Times reporters covering the Mayor’s inauguration demand to know where the gravlax is:

The thousands who crammed the space squished and pushed, and chased after floating plates of miniburgers, which, like elusive white stags on the horizon, seemed impossible to lasso. Those in the know simply stood on Chambers Street and waited for the tiny sandwiches and bite-size brownies to make their way out.

While on the topic, it is fair to say that Mayor Bloomberg has finally driven home his point about the joys of comfort food. He serves his dinner party guests meatloaf. He favors hot dogs. Everyone understands. At his next big event, perhaps he could offer some gravlax?

Another Thanksgiving, another super-cloying Times article about how new immigrants celebrate that ur-immigrant holiday:

Every November, Thanksgiving - a celebration of the original immigrant feast - plays out in this city of immigrants as the Pilgrims and the Wampanoag Indians could have hardly fathomed in 1621: a cross-cultural hodgepodge holiday improvised by new American families often inspired and instructed by some of their youngest members. The children of immigrants act as pint-size ambassadors of all things Thanksgiving, urging parents throughout the world to prepare all-American turkey meals that they learned about in school and sharing their incomplete yet innocently sweet knowledge of the holiday’s origins.

. . .

Sometimes, the children are not so much teachers as they are cheerleaders. Occasionally, they are simply culinary advisers. Maha Attieh, 47, a Jordanian-born Palestinian, takes her children to the market when she goes shopping for Thanksgiving, which she usually celebrates at her home in Midwood, Brooklyn, with a turkey stuffed with rice, chicken cutlets, nuts and raisins.

“They make their own menu,” said Mrs. Attieh, who works at the Arab-American Family Support Center in Brooklyn. “What they hear in school, what they hear from friends, they want the same thing. I say, ‘As long as it’s halal meat, I’ll do it.’”

Page One Sunday Times, albeit below the fold — They’re Soft and Cuddly, So Why Lash Them to the Front of a Truck? Tsk, tsk . . . if you have to ask:

A bear with a prominent grease spot on his little beige nose spends his days wedged behind the bumper guard of an ironworker’s pickup in the Gowanus section of Brooklyn. A fuzzy rabbit and a clown, garroted by a bungee cord, slump from the front of a Dodge van in Park Slope. Stewie, the evil baby from “Family Guy,” scowls from the grille of a Pepperidge Farm delivery truck in Brooklyn Heights, mold occasionally sprouting from his forehead.

All are soldiers in the tattered, scattered army of the stuffed: mostly discarded toys plucked from the trash and given new if punishing lives on the prows of large motor vehicles, their fluffy white guts flapping from burst seams and going gray in the soot-stream of a thousand exhaust pipes.

Grille-mounted stuffed animals form a compelling yet little-studied aspect of the urban streetscape, a traveling gallery of baldly transgressive public art. The time has come not just to praise them but to ask the big question. Why?

That is, why do a small percentage of trucks and vans have filthy plush toys lashed to their fronts, like prisoners at the mast? Are they someone’s idea of a joke? Parking aids? Talismans against summonses?

Don’t expect an easy answer.

Which is to say, expect one of those half-serious, unself-aware answers the Times loves to dredge up:

At the same time, [New York City Department of Sanitation artist in residence Mierle Laderman] Ukeles said, the trucker, perhaps uncomfortable with his soft side, may feel compelled to punish it.

“Binding a soft thing to a very powerful truck - there’s a kind of macho thing about that,” she said.

That double identification with both victim and agent of violence may reflect the driver’s frustrating position in society. Stuffed animals are found mostly on the trucks of men who perform hard, messy labor, which, despite the strength and bravery it demands, places them on the lower rungs of the ladder of occupational prestige.

The motley animal, then, can function as a badge of outsider status, a thumbed nose to the squares and suits. In that case, the cuter the mascot, the more meaningful its disintegration.

Thus, while Mr. [Dan] DiVittorio, of the Queens carting company, is quite fond of the red plastic skull that adorns his garbage truck, he will never forget its predecessor, a three-foot-high stuffed Scooby-Doo.

And it gets worse:

Scooby’s story lends credence to the theory of [School of Visual Arts art history lecturer Monroe] Denton . . . that the grille-mounted stuffed animal draws from the same well as the “abject art” movement that flourished in the 1990’s and trafficked heavily in images of filth and of distressed bodies.

“That is part of the abject,” he said, “this toy that is loved to death quite literally.”

The externalization of an indoor object is another abject trope, Mr. Denton said. “An important aspect of the abject is the informe, the lack of boundaries,” he said, using the French critical theory term, “the insides oozing out.”

Charlie Maixner, a steamfitter for Deacon Corp. in Jericho on Long Island, has taken the informe to its logical extreme.

On the dashboard of his Econoline van is an adorable and pristine white bear, a gift from his 5-year-old daughter. But the bear is not for the outside world. On the grille is Mr. Hankey, salvaged from a chef’s office during a kitchen renovation job.

Mr. Hankey, to the pop-culturally illiterate, appears to be a brown worm in a Santa hat. He is not. He is the carol-crooning excrement from “South Park,” where he is formally known as Mr. Hankey the Christmas Poo.

A Manhattan judge overturns David Lemus’ conviction in the murder case of a Palladium bouncer killed in 1990 and the Times marvels about the specimen as he is released from captivity — “Free After 14 Years, and Learning to Use a Cell”:

In some ways, Mr. Lemus seemed like Rip Van Winkle. It was as if Mr. Lemus had been asleep for 14 years while the world moved on.

As he and his lawyers walked away from the courthouse, the lawyers handed him cellphones to talk to friends, and Mr. Lemus seemed to not know how to use them.

The Times finally runs a human interest piece about this crazy rain (after all, Times readers are interested in the weather, too!), and somehow manages not to Tom Wolfe it up too much. Or perhaps not — let’s run the special New York Times Tom Wolfinating Check:

• Tourists from California? Check.
• Stockbroker? Check.
• Woman in Queens hair salon? Check.
• The guard at Downtown Brooklyn’s Fulton Mall? Check.
• Administrative Assistant living in Bed-Stuy? Check.
• Woman in calf-high suede boots (idiot!)? Check.
• Mother? Check. (Does she live in Brownsville? Yes!)
• Poodle? Check, check, check!

The Tom Wolfinator Machine gives this Times story high marks for vapid “cross-section” of the city (”high marks” but not “highest marks” — need more homeless).

I basically fell out of my seat on the subway this morning reading the worst op-ed ever:

I try to go to the gym just about every morning. Because I work out with my scarf on, people stare - just as they do on the streets of Cambridge.

The other day, though, I felt more self-conscious than usual. Every television in the gym highlighted some aspect of America’s conflict with the Muslim world: the war in Iraq, allegations that American soldiers had desecrated the Koran, prisoner abuse at Guantánamo Bay, President Bush urging support of the Patriot Act. The stares just intensified my alienation as an Arab Muslim in what is supposed to be my country. I was not sure if the blood rushing to my head was caused by the elliptical trainer or by the news coverage.

Frustrated and angry, I moved to another part of the gym. I got on a treadmill and started running as hard as I could. As sweat dripped down my face, I reached for my towel, accidentally dropping my keys in the process. It was a small thing, I know, but as they slid down the rolling belt and fell to the carpet, my faith in the United States seemed to fall with them. I did not care to pick them up. I wanted to keep running.

Suddenly a man, out of breath, but still smiling and friendly, tapped me on my shoulder and said, “Ma’am, here are your keys.” It was Al Gore, former vice president of the United States. Mr. Gore had gotten off his machine behind me, picked up my keys, handed them to me and then resumed his workout.

It was nothing more than a kind gesture, but at that moment Mr. Gore’s act represented all that I yearned for - acceptance and acknowledgment.

She’s kidding, right? Actually, scratch that — the Times is kidding. They have to be!

Did I ever tell you about the time I left behind my umbrella at Fairway? Along with that umbrella slipped away my faith and enthusiasm for the Upper West Side. As I lugged my many bags thoughtlessly stuffed with olives and sumptuous cheeses down Broadway, the rain came down steadily. Drenched, I cursed the gods, only to have Regis Philbin — no shit! — tap me on the shoulder. Just before ducking into his hired car, he handed me a black umbrella — the ubiquitous five-dollar black umbrella — a lumpy, overwrought symbol of my restored sense of good will towards men.

It was nothing more than a kind gesture, but at that moment Mr. Philbin’s act represented all that I yearned for — acceptance and acknowledgment.

For the Times, the story behind the Billy Graham Crusade is not the man’s message, the devotion of the flock or even namby-pamby generalized anthropological discourse on the role of religion in culture but rather the logistics, “where even the ineffable must be quantified”, which is actually probably how the Times views religion when you think about it. At least they didn’t use their special red state correspondent:

Since Labor Day, the crusade’s 30 paid staff members have run their campaign from a 12th-floor office in the Fashion District overlooking a nine-story billboard of an underwear model pulling down his briefs to reveal a tattoo of a panther. ([New York Crusade Director Art] Bailey said he found the image inspiring. “This picture is an illustration of what the world sees,” he said. “The world focuses on the outward body. Our job is to put the focus on the inner man, the part that is eternal.”)

It was here that organizers booked the Christian pop bands that will play before Mr. Graham preaches and where they secured the services of Bibleman, a caped crusader in Spandex and silver body armor who will lead the children’s rally on Saturday morning at Flushing Meadows.

Bibleman . . . intriguing . . .

P.S. A little birdie points me to the Bibleman website and an apparent connection to Eight is Enough/Charles in Charge Hunk Willie Aames.

The biggest tragedy of this Times article about unairconditioned city schools is that this glorious bit of Times-ese appears in the 13th paragraph. It’s as if the reporter was scared to bring it up front! Is that dripping sweat or condescension? You make the call:

But in New York, with its sometimes majestic but aging schools, the heat’s effect seemed especially pronounced. Classrooms were like ovens by the end of the day, the students inside feeling like they were being slowly sautéed in their own perspiration. There were no reports of serious injuries, but there was misery aplenty.

See, I have qualms aplenty with the mixed metaphor here — shouldn’t it be “Classrooms were like ovens by the end of the day, the students inside feeling like they were being slowly basted in their own perspiration”? Or “Classrooms were like sauté pans by the end of the day, the students inside feeling like they were being slowly braised in their own perspiration”? Get Frank Bruni on the case — he can advise!

We need more old-school-frumpy condescending arts reviewers like Gia Kourlas:

When the Barnard College department of dance puts on a show, the results aren’t always pretty because the dancers aren’t always, to put it kindly, in the best shape. Aspiring performers need only audition, and when the pickings are slim, everybody seems to get in. But at Barnard Dances at Miller, seen Friday night, the standard deer-in-the-headlights incidents were blessedly few.

That’s what I’m talking about!

Who would have thought that there would be so many foreign-language newspapers in a city in which 40 percent of its residents are foreign born? The New York Times! No, really:

Near the back of a garment district bookstore and gallery, the paintings on exhibit are blocked in part by newspaper pages taped to an overhang. The pages are not on exhibit, but they will soon be seen by many as part of the redesigned Nowy Dziennik, the Polish-language daily newspaper whose offices occupy several floors in the same modest building.

“We are trying to make it more appealing to young people,” said Ewa Kern-Jedrychowska, a reporter at the paper. “We have competition here, surprisingly. There are three Polish daily papers in New York.”

Many New Yorkers had no idea there was even one, much less three. For that matter, who would have imagined that there are 26 ethnic daily newspapers in New York that keep immigrants in touch with their homelands while educating them on how to survive in their adopted one?

Speaking of the apparent inability of some New Yorkers to understand sports metaphors, the Times reports on yesterday’s decision by the MTA’s board to accept the Jets’ offer to buy the airspace above the West Side railyards for a multi-zillion dollar stadium, using the smart headline “Jets Win Stadium Battle by 2 Touchdowns.” Too bad they had to add the redundant explainer: “(the Vote Is 14-0).”

R.W. Apple, Jr. eating lunch with the Barnum & Bailey Circus. Only in New York, Kids, Only in New York:

Shortly after I talked with Mr. [chief animal trainer Sacha] Houcke, I came across a copy of “Center Ring Circus Cuisine,” a cookbook published in 1979, which shows that European circus traditions were alive in the Ringling show of that era. It contains a Wiener schnitzel recipe from a Czech aerialist, one for sauerbraten from a German wardrobe mistress, one for toad-in-the-hole from an English chimpanzee trainer and one for moussaka from a Bulgarian teeterboard specialist.

Ever the feinschmecker, Mr. Houcke buys Starbucks beans from Colombia and grinds them himself in his quarters. He drinks one big cup each morning.

When he came to America five years ago, he recalled, he gorged on steaks the size of which he had never seen before. “I was a fiend,” he said, for places like Blade’s Prime Chophouse in Fort Worth - “you don’t even have to press hard on your knife to cut the beef there” - and Sonny Williams’ Steak Room in Little Rock, Ark., and the Golden Ox in Kansas City, Mo. - “a place that you’ve absolutely got to get to.”

Now Mr. Houcke looks for cozy, quiet places with good food, searching on the Internet or following friends’ tips. “Noise spoils my dinner,” he said. Often he eats with musicians from the circus band, and when he comes across a good place, he goes back. One great favorite is the Park Bistro, where he ordered snails followed by skate in a port wine sauce the day we ate together, then sampled my hanger steak.

We’ve noted the Post’s proclivity to print pat points about the weather. Now it’s time for the Times to wax poetic about that same topic: “The Calendar Says Spring and You Expect Sunshine and Flowers?”. Someone on West 43rd Street is satisfying his literary leanings. Relevant excerpts to follow.

Exhibit A) The Surreal Hook, taking the form of a man dressed in a carrot suit:

Of all the possible signs that spring had, in fact, arrived in New York yesterday, a 5-foot-2-inch carrot strolling down Broadway at midday was a pretty hopeful one.

But not even the carrot could convince itself that yesterday, the official first day of spring, even remotely resembled springtime.

“It’s not spring yet,” the carrot declared indignantly. The carrot was inhabited by Venancio Meza, 45, of Sunset Park, Brooklyn, who was distributing fliers for a health food restaurant. A chilly drizzle fell, and the temperature hovered around 40 degrees.

Exhibit B) The Grand Observation on All of Human Existence:

Somewhere in the human body, there is a mechanism that runs on a blend of hope and self-delusion and makes people believe that on the morning of the vernal equinox, the world around them will suddenly bloom. Even if the forecasters predict rain and cold - as they did in advance of yesterday - that little mechanism continues to crank away.

In other words, spring hopes: eternal.

So yesterday, New York residents and tourists alike were once again reminded of the century-old observation by the clergyman and author Henry Van Dyke: “The first day of spring is one thing, and the first spring day is another.”

And finally, Dashed Hopes in a Gritty Milieu:

At Coney Island, where Astroland reopened yesterday, the sky and water were a solid sheet of gray, and the Boardwalk was all but abandoned.

Those who showed up at the park were obviously driven by a deep commitment to the pursuit of thrills.

Britney McCollough, 18, and Kyle Huneycutt, 21, two college students from Orlando, Fla., were determined to wring whatever fun they could out of a soggy Astroland, and rode several of the rides, including the Cyclone roller coaster.

“On the Cyclone, we froze our faces off,” Ms. McCollough said in an enthusiastic way that suggested that freezing one’s face off is a good and exciting thing.

Bill Hoffmann, come home, all is forgiven!

You know a place is frou-frou when the Sunday Times refers to it like this:

Indeed, the feminized décor [of Cafe Lalo, the dessert place on West 83rd Street featured on You've Got Mail] may serve a purpose beyond aesthetics. After a man spends an hour surrounded by fluffy desserts and the lulling sound of Norah Jones on the stereo, his more carnal tendencies will probably be all but cowed on the walk home. If he musters the testosterone required for hand holding, he should consider it a victory.

Gentlemen, they’re calling you out! What are you gonna do about it?