In The End, Sucking Up That Way To Ken Livingstone Was All For Naught

In case you were wondering why the State Department concerns itself with the ins and outs of a domestic transportation bill, now you know:

Mayor Bloomberg promised that diplomats would pay up, just like everyone else, under his congestion-pricing plan — but it looks like he won’t be able to keep that promise.

According to the fine print inside the deal that gives $354 million in federal transportation funds to support the anti-traffic scheme in the city, the State Department will be able to waive fees on foreign bigwigs whenever it wants.

The State Department has already taken a stand against congestion pricing. U.S. officials are arguing in London, which now has congestion pricing in place, that assessing such fees against foreign governments violates international law.

Aides to Bloomberg told The Post in April that the mayor will only waive fees for emergency vehicles, taxis, livery cabs and handicapped drivers.

. . .

The Committee to Keep NYC Congestion Tax Free, which opposes Mayor Bloomberg’s plan, said the last-minute clause was “infuriating.”

“It is galling that an Iranian diplomat could pay nothing while a senior citizen from Bayside would be charged to go for cancer treatment at a Manhattan hospital,” said spokesman Josh Bienstock.

The DOT said the potential loophole for foreign government workers was added at the request of the State Department.

The clause says the State Department can force the city to waive fees for “vehicles owned or operated by any foreign government or international organization.”

The State Department — currently locked in a bitter battle with the city of London over $3 million in unpaid congestion fees and fines American diplomats have racked up there — has argued that congestion pricing amounts to a tax. And under the Geneva Conventions, the agency maintains, foreign governments don’t pay taxes.

Backstory: Hizzoner The Cab Crusher.

Why Do You Cut Off Your Sleeves?

No sense in wasting a good detail:

All across the city, the watchers take up their posts, pillow or towel spread across windowsill, Bible or remote close at hand. The white-haired woman leaning on a golden cushion above Nostrand Avenue in Crown Heights, Brooklyn. The retired pizza maker on the Upper East Side of Manhattan in his undershirt and khakis. The tragic-looking woman with pulled-back hair over the Drama Cafe in Park Slope, Brooklyn, and the long-sideburned deaf man two windows down.

And they sit there. And they look out at nothing; and at everything.

From the city sidewalk, there are few summer sights more archetypically urban than the face glimpsed in an open window, gazing silently out at the street. In a world where entertainment is delivered via modem and iPod, the very idea of someone drinking deep from the well of unmediated, nonvirtual reality exerts a strange pull. It also taps into our own voyeurism: to see someone inside a home, after all, is to witness a private moment.

The view from the other side of the window frame turns out to be no less engrossing. For the committed window gazer, there is no better place than the exact juncture of the public and private realms.

“Instead of going outside,” said Willie Taylor, 69, who holds court over his block in Harlem, “you sit at the window and you are outside. It’s better than being outside.”

The sociologist and window-gazer extraordinaire Jane Jacobs, in her 1961 polemical valentine “The Death and Life of Great American Cities,” championed “the ballet of the good city sidewalk,” an intricate dance which, she wrote, “never repeats itself from place to place, and in any one place is always replete with new improvisations.”

. . .

On East 107th Street in East Harlem, a square-jawed woman in a sleeveless T-shirt answered a request for an interview with a cigarette butt flicked from the third floor.

To Fill A Pothole Deferred

Mister Softee operators breathed a sigh of relief when plans for the Jingle Enforcement Mechanism were abandoned in favor of something more useful:

The city’s newest team of inspectors won’t write tickets or issue fines. They won’t harass landlords over leaky pipes or ensure that builders follow safety codes. The target of this team will be the city itself.

Yesterday, Mayor Michael R. Bloomberg unveiled the Street Conditions Observation Unit, Scout for short, at a news conference in Bushwick, Brooklyn.

The sole mission of the 15-member team is to patrol the streets in small three-wheeled vehicles looking for maddening little problems like potholes, clogged catch basins, damaged bus shelters and unsightly graffiti. The inspectors will also be on the lookout for more substantial problems, like homeless people in need of aid, the mayor said.

The program is the latest evolution of 311, the city’s popular customer service line, which gives residents access to all city services and allows them to record complaints by dialing one phone number.

Each inspector will be armed with a BlackBerry with global-positioning software to allow him to record observations and locations automatically in the 311 system, which will then notify the appropriate city agency.

“We’ve taken the first step, where it’s easy for you to report problems,” Mr. Bloomberg said. “But you shouldn’t have to do that. We love to have you do it, but it’s government’s responsibility to find the problems and fix them, not to sit there and say, ‘Duh, we didn’t know.’

“That’s not what good government is all about.”

The Subway’s Not-So-Fresh Feeling

The MTA tries to shake the funk off of what has previously stunk:

It smelled like death warmed over to some straphangers. To others, it was rancid excrement.

That stank crept from an elevator at Herald Square. The summer heat acted as an odor adhesive, keeping the foulness lingering well after people were out of the stink zone.

The dirty elevator solicited complaints throughout the week, and it has won worst-smelling elevator from a disabled riders group two years in a row. Luckily for straphangers, a Transit employee with high-powered disinfectant mopped out most of the smell Thursday, but the war on odorous subway stations is not over.

. . .

Cleanliness is a serious subject for New York City Transit, and as part of a new customer service initiative, about 350 more cleaners will be on the roster by fall to keep stations fresher, trains cleaner and platforms and tracks clearer and safer. They’ll also be able to respond to specific stenches faster.

Still, why the big stink at Herald Square and at stations throughout the system? Stations get funky for several reasons, said Bill Henderson who hears rider complaints as head of the MTA’s Permanent Citizens Advisory Council.

“Sometimes the cause is a broken sewer line,” he said. “It could also be something on the surface.”

And unfortunately, it takes a little more than a few spritzes of air freshener, sometimes a lot more. A sewer stank is sometimes caused by construction accidents, and the stink may slowly dissipate even after a cracked line is patched.

From Books To Balls, The Borough Of Barganza Does It All

In a week of pace setting, Queens continues to outdo itself:

Jamaica resident Ashrita Furman, 52, takes the old saying ‘records are meant to be broken’ to the next level.

Furman, who has set more than 150 official Guinness world records and currently holds the most records by an individual with 65, added to his total on Sunday, August 12 when he broke three more.

Furman set new records, which Guinness representatives have to verify, by doing 36 deep-knee-bends on a Swiss ball in one minute, throwing and catching a water balloon with a partner 74 feet, which shattered the previous record of 60 and his personal favorite, running a mile while bounce-juggling three balls — with zero drops. Furman utilized the track at Queens College for his final record finishing in a time of 9 minutes and 9 seconds.

“Nobody has ever done that before; it’s a new category that Guinness approved,” Furman told The Queens Courier. “Of all three I am most happy about this because I really think it’s going to catch on. I feel like I have established a new sport.”

While his interest in the Guinness book started when he was growing up in Kew Gardens, Furman said he was not an athletic kid and never imagined he would ever break a record — until he met his spiritual teacher Sri Chinmoy.

After participating in meditations conducted by Chinmoy, Furman experienced an epiphany in 1978 while participating in a 24-hour bicycle race in Central Park and decided he wanted pursue a quest to break records.

Less than a year later, Furman began his record-breaking by setting a Guinness world record for most consecutive jumping jacks — 27,000, which was previously set at 20,000.