Smaller Guns, Plastic Keys

Rejected Post headline — “It’s Not The Size, It’s What You Do With It”:

City cops are on the alert for the SwissMiniGun — a 2.16-inch replica of a Colt Python capable of shooting bullets that are just one-third of an inch long.

The six-shot revolver — which sells for about $500 and can literally fit in the palm of a hand — is capable of causing serious damage, authorities say.

The guns cannot be imported legally, but smuggling is a concern, officials said.

Cops are also watching out for plastic handcuff keys that are approximately the size of a nickel.

The keys cannot be picked up by metal detectors and look like a pendant when worn on a chain.

The NYPD last Saturday warned the city’s 36,000 officers to “use extreme vigilance” when searching, guarding and transporting prisoners.

Hotwire My Heart

Moral of the story — you’re taking a risk when you date a tow-truck driver:

An NYPD tow-truck operator, angry at his ex-girlfriend, hooked up a legally parked car on a Brooklyn street and secretly dumped it a mile away, sources said yesterday.

David Fletcher, 46, a civilian police employee, was caught Monday when the woman’s 15-year-old daughter spotted the vehicle hooked to the truck, the sources said.

Investigators later found that Fletcher allegedly hadn’t filed the paperwork indicating the vehicle was towed, leading cops to seek his arrest.

Fletcher surrendered and was charged with petit larceny, unauthorized use of a vehicle, criminal possession of stolen property and official misconduct, according to a spokesman for the Brooklyn district attorney.

He faces up to a year in jail if convicted.

Nitwit, Now You’ve Got Us Feeling Bad For Developers!

As a renter, you know your landlord-tenant dispute is flimsy when even the Village Voice makes you seem unsympathetic:

Two years ago, his landlord, Larry Tauber — by accounts, neither a sleazy slumlord nor a chummy pushover — offered Peckham $75,000 to leave his $1,007-a-month West 21st Street one-bedroom, so that he could begin a gut renovation of the building to convert it to swanky rentals. Peckham’s refusals led Tauber to up the offer; by this summer, he’d tried to tempt the tenant with an $800-a-month lease governed by rent-stabilized guidelines on a renovated one-bedroom on West 69th Street between Columbus Avenue and Broadway, a five-minute walk away from the apartments of Steven Spielberg and Bruce Willis.

. . .

“It’s your business,” one of Peckham’s West 20th Street neighbors in a Tauber-owned building told him when they ran into each other the other day, “but if I were you, I wouldn’t be holding out for any southern exposure. If you can get an apartment at a decent rent in a decent building, take it.” Had the neighbor known of the apartment Peckham has refused to take — at a rent less than half what its previous tenant paid — he surely would have shared his shock at Peckham’s seeming greed.

Dude, for the benefit of every other renter in this city, take the fucking deal!

Only Ivy League Or Similar Need Stir Fry

Columbia sophomores may be our country’s future leaders, but they still don’t yet know their way around the kitchen:

The period after freshman year, when students’ mandatory meal plans have ended and their survival culinary skills have yet to kick in, is an awkward one. Rather than purchase the expensive, but convenient meals in John Jay-averaging between $9.20 to $11.50-many students opt out and attempt to feed themselves. How well this works depends on students’ ingenuity.

Ben Heller CC ’09 sustains himself on his own cooking and, sometimes, on cartons of cheese poofs “for days on end.” Periodically, however, he will take all of his food and make a giant stir-fry.

“My last experiment consisted of chili, pasta with meat sauce, chicken teriyaki, four eggs or so, some cheddar cheese, basil (lots of basil), and some chocolate-flavored peanut butter,” he said. Heller claims the concoction turned out well despite its haphazard origins.

For some, eating is more a question of avoiding starvation than staying healthy. “I eat a lot of cereal instead of actual food. Cereal and Ramen,” said Winston Nguyen, CC ’09. Nguyen says that if students don’t know how to cook, it’s a good idea for them to find other people who can and make a meal together. “Everyone together can figure out what they’re doing,” he said.

The Stippler

Did you know that the Wall Street Journal actually employs artists to do the unique stipple portraits of subjects who appear in the paper? Metro New York interviews WSJ stipple specialist Noli Novak:

The stipple that we use at the Journal is not a regular pointillism. The dots are larger than regular pointillism and it looks kind of grainy. It’s meant to resemble fashion engravings. It’s not something you can learn in school. It was something that we had to learn at the Journal because the Journal really wants the style to stay the same. They don’t want big differences between different artists’ styles. It takes months [to learn] because it’s a very unique style.

. . .

I got a letter from a guy once whom I noticed in the picture was cross-eyed. In the drawing sometimes, if you do a cross-eyed person, it looks like you made a mistake. This guy was really cross-eyed. He said, “All the operations I’ve had on my eyes, nothing could get rid of it but you did it perfectly!” I didn’t completely move his eye but I had to do something just to make it not look like a mistake and he was very grateful for that.