50 Most Loathsome New Yorkers

The New York Press‘ 50 Most Loathsome New Yorkers list is out. At number 12, the New Yorker‘s Adam Gopnik easily makes the cut. Inclusions go from the obvious (Bill O’Reilly, 29; Mayor Bloomberg, 1; Alex Rodriguez, 50) to the refreshingly counterintiutive (Eliot Spitzer, 35). And which STD-spreading Interpol bassist checks in at number 15? Click the link to find out!

Don’t Let The . . .

The New Yorker notes a disturbing trend in pest activity — bedbugs:

Life is, like, so unfair sometimes. Case in point: Alexis Swerdloff and her friends Laura Perciasepe, Avni Bhatia, and Anna Arkin-Gallagher, a quartet of eye-on-the-main-chance nouvelles Yale graduates who late last summer set up housekeeping in the East Village, in a four-bedroom apartment that they really, really liked, but then realized that they liked a lot less when, not long after they moved in, all were viciously assaulted by bedbugs. According to Andy Linares, the proprietor of the Bug Off Pest Control Center, in Washington Heights, which he describes as the largest supplier of pest-control products in the city, New York is witnessing “without a doubt, a dramatic increase in bedbug activity. We hadn’t seen bedbugs in New York in sixty years. Then, all of a sudden, bingo. Who’da thunk it?” Whatever satisfaction Alexis and her roommates might have derived from having caught the wave of an interesting new trend was offset by the heart-of-darkness horror of it. That’s how they felt, anyway, after the fourth or fifth visit from the exterminator, a redundancy necessitated by the fact that, as Alexis explained the other day, “the bedbugs kept not going away.”

Because of where they like to hang out, the case can be made that bedbugs might actually be worse than mice or cockroaches; you feel sorry for writer Mark Singer’s prissy protagonists:

When the first symptoms appeared, last September—small, itchy pink welts, mostly on the arms and legs—the four women thought they had a mosquito problem. A bit of online research established that the welts matched bedbug bites. The good news—other than the illusory good news that the landlord was dispatching an exterminator—was that bedbugs are not a disease vector and therefore not a public-health risk. The bad news, which quickly revealed itself, was that if you’re twenty-two years old and you’re paying (O.K., so maybe you’re getting some help from Mom and Dad) Manhattan rent, bedbugs can easily drive you insane. Cockroach-colored, and when full grown about the size of an apple seed, a bedbug sucks blood through a mosquito-like proboscis after injecting an anesthetic that keeps the sleeping victim from reacting before the meal gets under way. Bedbugs are not, strictly speaking, parasites, because unlike, God forbid, lice or crabs, they can survive away from their host. Basically, they eat and then crawl into a tuft in the mattress or upholstery, or under the rug or the molding, or maybe into your clothes or your furniture, and sleep it off until the next time they’re hungry. When they’re not feeding or dozing, adult bedbugs evidently enjoy having sex.

. . .

As it happened, all four roommates had parents who lived in the city. “So, on days when the exterminator had visited and we couldn’t sleep in the apartment, we could all go home to our parents,” Alexis said. “But then our parents didn’t want to let us in the door. My mother was afraid I would bring them into her apartment and she’d have problems with her co-op board. I’d have to come in the back door and take off all my clothing and put it in a plastic bag in the kitchen. She’d leave a change of clothes for me there, but first she’d make me take a shower.”

And the long-term trends are not favorable:

So, what’s the reality and what’s the prognosis?

“It’s an emerging crisis,” [Mr. Linares] said. “So you have to have a plan of attack to reverse the trend. I have the sense that this year—2005—is going to be a determining year. This summer, we’re going to hit a plateau. You look at the number of complaints, the number of professionals reaching out to me for the training. I think after this year it will probably stabilize. What we’ll end up with is a continuing battle in certain enclaves. Bedbug eradication is not for every pest-control professional, because it does require a great deal of skill, patience, and attention to detail. And it requires that you charge an above-average fee. It’s still not up there with roaches and rodents—in New York, that’ll always be the bread and butter—but bedbugs is a nice niche.”

How Fortunate We Are

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.

What Kind of School Was It?

God help me if I ever let news of my botched penile enlargement surgery make it into the Post:

Bigger isn’t better for Eric Neuberger, who says his New York doctor botched his penile enhancement to the point that he’s now nearly impotent.

Before the January 2001 surgery, Neuberger “could engage in intercourse approximately 30 to 50 times a month, and after the surgery, he was only able to engage in intercourse once a month,” his malpractice suit charges.

Neuberger said his new limitations forced him to drop out of school — and even hurt his musical ability. His suit did not elaborate.

But the doctor, Robert Barron, suggests that Neuberger simply “injured himself during sex.”

Hurt his musical ability? Who is this guy, R. Kelly?

The Post is burying the lede here, though — we finally might have found someone enrolled in a co-ed naked basket weaving course! And here I just assumed those T-shirts were a joke.

Years From Now

Years from now, anthropologists and social historians will find this all a little odd:

It would be hard to conceive of a better criminal target than the iPod. Those white cords snaking down from listeners’ ears into the recesses of their jackets signify an instant status symbol, hundreds of dollars worth of merchandise and a mark who may be blissfully unaware of his or her surroundings.

. . .

But a recent spike in subway felonies, reported in The Daily News yesterday, has been driven by an increase in iPod thefts, the police said. As of Sunday, there had been 304 robberies in the transit system citywide this year, up 24 percent from the same period last year, the police said. Grand larcenies are up 10 percent, with 462 so far this year. Over all, transit crimes are up 16 percent.

It is impossible to say how many of those robberies were iPod thefts, but they were a major factor, the police said.

“IPods are definitely part of the newest items to be stolen and appear to be driving the recent spike in subway robberies,” said Paul J. Browne, the Police Department’s deputy commissioner for public information.

Rarely have the iPod thefts involved physical assault, he said, adding that the thieves and their victims tended to be teenagers. Late last year, Stuyvesant High School students were targets in a series of iPod muggings, one of which took place in the Chambers Street subway station near the school in Lower Manhattan.

Mr. Browne said the police have been sending teams consisting of a sergeant and eight officers into the subway this month, both in response to the increase in felonies and out of caution near the anniversary of the Madrid train bombing, on March 11.

The current rash of iPod thefts resembles that of 8 Ball Jackets a few years ago. They were singled out because they were an expensive status symbol. But the difference is that iPods are easier to conceal once they are stolen, and can be sold online easily and anonymously.

Despite the thefts, though, few subway riders seem to be changing their habits, and may be feeling even safer since the little white wires seem to be everywhere.

“It was a concern when I first got it,” said Adriana Arcia, 29, a publicist for Major League Baseball, whose iPod contains around 3,700 songs. “But I live in Williamsburg, and on the L train everybody has one.”