Who Still Walks Around With Slingshots?

Latter-day Dennis The Menace terrorizes co-workers at Brooklyn high school:

A Brooklyn high-school teacher was sent home after he showed up for work drunk and got into an argument with a co-worker yesterday — then returned to the school with a slingshot to confront the colleague, police and education sources said.

Judson Kilpatrick, a 42-year-old teacher at Paul Robeson HS in Crown Heights, landed in hot water after he started fighting with another teacher and officials discovered that he had been drinking, the sources said.

Kilpatrick was promptly sent home.

But he continued to harass the co-worker by repeatedly calling him on the phone, authorities said.

Kilpatrick then returned to the school after classes let out, armed with the slingshot and empty gun holsters, sources said.

Sure, It’s Good To Be King . . . But It’s Even Better To Be The Deciding Vote On The Public Authorities Control Board

Mmm . . . courtside seats:

Sheldon Silver could always just say no.

That is the nightmare facing Forest City Ratner, the real estate developer whose $4 billion Atlantic Yards project must now be approved by an obscure state oversight board on which Mr. Silver, the state Assembly speaker, controls one of three votes.

Over three years, Forest City has assembled an astonishingly wide and deep political coalition behind the Brooklyn project, ranging from outgoing Gov. George E. Pataki to Acorn, the liberal advocacy group for low-income people. The developer has endured thousands of pages of studies and reviews, staged hundreds of meetings and hearings, beat back lawsuits and persisted in the face of a growing and energetic coalition of opponents and critics.

But now — once again — the fate of a multibillion-dollar project comes down to Mr. Silver, a politician who has not hesitated to delay or halt grand development plans when he deems it appropriate.

It was Mr. Silver, along with Joseph L. Bruno, the Senate majority leader, who effectively killed the West Side Stadium last year by withholding his vote on the Public Authorities Control Board. And in October, Mr. Silver delayed another major project, the $900 million Moynihan Station, questioning the financing behind it.

It remains unclear whether Atlantic Yards, which is to include an arena for the Nets, will meet a similar fate. Mr. Silver has said he generally supports the project, along with Mr. Bruno and Mr. Pataki. Each controls one vote on the board, and the three must vote together to approve a project. They have already set aside $100 million in state funds for Atlantic Yards, and at a news conference on Thursday, Mr. Silver called the Brooklyn project “worthy of the area.”

Speak For Yourself, Haggard Perv Who Thinks OK To Hit On The Help

Among New York Magazine’s Reasons to Love New York (in 2006, at least), the hot waitstaff:

If New York is the flame to which scores of the world’s most beautiful, multiracial, multiethnic youth are drawn, then the city’s waiter and waitress ranks are its red-hot center. Where else in the world can you look up from your fatty-toro sashimi or cheeseburger and find yourself staring into the eyes of a ruby-lipped Botticelli Venus? Or a porcelain-skinned John Currin? Or a Mapplethorpe subject? Brunch and a gallery crawl? Why bother. It’s redundant.

And one reason we can’t stand dining out is because of the totally incompetent waitstaff who, although sometimes “hot,” are dumb as shit . . .

Who Do You Think You Are, The Pope?

This year’s conspicuous consumption, now with added Mickey Rourke:

OK, so you had a pretty good year, if not a Goldman Sachs $100 million–bonus good year. You can afford to gorge yourself like the overpaid, all-conquering hunter-gatherer you are. A number of pricier-than-thou steakhouses are stocking up on Wagyu “Kobe” beef flown in from Japan, not the knockoff American hybrids raised on ranches in Texas or Colorado. At Nello, on Madison Avenue, fourteen-ounce Wagyu sirloins have been selling for $750 a pop. That’s hardly an exorbitant markup, owner Nello Balan says, considering that after his chefs finally strip away the meat’s blubbery blanket of fat he is paying about $400 per pound. He also offers Wagyu dusted with white truffles. That goes for $1,050 (which would get you about three years’ worth of Lipitor).

“It’s really fucking good,” says Mickey Rourke, the actor and proud carnivore. He ordered one sirloin at Nello, and the buttery, foie gras–like beef was so exquisite he came back the next day, this time with a Romanian model in tow, for more. (“It didn’t even taste like steak,” he says.) Levent Piskiner, who owns the Fifth Avenue jewelry store Gilan, didn’t mind that his bill came to over $800. “It’s a miracle,” he says of the Wagyu, named after a noble strain of cattle from the Kobe region of Japan.

Sometimes It Seems That Everyone’s A Broker (No, Seriously)

Real estate agencies and rental brokers should think about ways to take advantage of the existing black market in rentals:

Seven days a week, a mustachioed, 47-year-old Dominican named Pedro Reyes sells fruits and vegetables in front of Bonhita’s Barber Shop, on a block of West 137th Street that slopes gently toward Riverside Park. Starting at 8 a.m., Mr. Reyes positions milk crates and cardboard boxes full of waxen limes, bright tomatoes and bulbous calabaza, or squash, on the sidewalk. When a favorite song plays on the radio sitting nearby, he breaks into salsa moves with an invisible partner.

Mr. Reyes, who is widely known as Piri, calls his business the Valle Encantado Fruteria — the Enchanted Valley Fruit Shop. But food is not all that he peddles. For $60, he will drive you to the airport in his battered white van. For negotiable rates, he does deliveries and moving. And for a $25 commission, he will find you a bare-bones room to rent in Harlem or neighboring Hamilton Heights.

That last sideline may be Mr. Reyes’s biggest. Over the last decade, he says, he has placed hundreds of $100-a-week boarders in the apartments of mostly older single women from Puerto Rico or the Dominican Republic. In a town full of heart-stopping rents and behemoth real estate firms, Mr. Reyes is a little broker for the little guy.

“People used to say, ‘Hey, if you know someone who has a room, let me know,'” he said the other day, recalling the early days of his sidewalk real estate venture as he sliced into a watermelon in front of his produce stand. In the beginning, his only clients were other Spanish speakers seeking rooms. But as gentrification crept farther north and Manhattan’s apartment vacancy rate sank to less than 1 percent, Mr. Reyes’s services, known only by word of mouth, have been sought by all sorts of people.

“Everyone comes to me,” he said. “Boxers. Dancers. Students. People who have some education, because they definitely have to have a job to pay for the room every week. But it’s less expensive than getting a whole apartment.”