What Do You Think This Is, The 1980 Olympics?

The thing about boycotts is they never work the way you want them to:

For Kim Myles, co-owner of 5 Boroughs Ice Cream and the brains behind the controversial flavor “Staten Island Landfill,” the publicity stemming from a borough-wide boycott marshaled by Borough President James P. Molinaro, not only increased her profits, but kept her striving for more.

“The boycott tripled our sales and we crossed state lines,” said Ms. Myles.

5 Boroughs Ice Cream got its start when she and her husband received an ice cream maker as a wedding present in 2001. After experimenting with a variety of ingredients, the couple began their own business and began marketing flavors focusing on the five boroughs.

Staten Island’s claim to fame?

The former Fresh Kills landfill of course.

What Molinaro described as a “derogatory attack in the name of consumerism,” Ms. Myles sees as a great ice cream that “included everything but the kitchen sink.”

Although the flavor is still widely unavailable in the borough, Staten Islanders are still managing to get their fix of the cookie crunch-, brownie chunk-, cherry- and fudge-laden vanilla ice cream.

According to Ms. Myles, Islanders are eating the ice cream despite the opposition, much like people who drank during Prohibition. She even recalls one Island customer ordering a three-gallon tub for a birthday party.

And When Did You Say The Next Homeland Security Grant Applications Are Due?

Of course it’s an issue for local law enforcement — they’re the ones best suited to tackle the threat:

Police officials said the report laid the groundwork for a public policy debate over the growing concern about homegrown terrorism and would serve as a tool for law enforcement to better understand threats in the United States compared with threats by Al Qaeda members overseas. Local law enforcement officers, corporate security officials and some politicians praised the Police Department for addressing the human factors at play in terrorist plots and for helping to synthesize trends in human behavior. But critics called the report a faulty stereotyping of entire communities of Arab people, a notion the Police Department rejected.

“The report is at odds with federal law enforcement findings, including those of the recently released National Intelligence Estimate, and uses unfortunate stereotyping of entire communities,” Kareem W. Shora, the national executive director of the American-Arab Anti-Discrimination Committee, said in a statement.

The “sweeping generalizations” of the report may serve to cast a pall of suspicion over the entire American Muslim population, the Council on American-Islamic Relations said yesterday.

“The report also claims that signs of radicalization include positive changes in personal behavior such as giving up smoking, drinking and gambling,” said Parvez Ahmed, chairman of the group’s board, adding that the report made similar claims about those who wore Islamic clothing. “Is Islamic attire or giving up bad habits, which is something recommended by leaders of all faiths, now to be regarded as suspicious behavior?”

Police officials from New York visited Washington this week to brief officials, including those from the White House and the F.B.I., said Lawrence Sanchez, an assistant police commissioner.

Mark J. Mershon, assistant director in charge of the F.B.I.’s New York office, did not attend yesterday’s briefing. Stephen Kodak, an F.B.I. spokesman in Washington, said, “We have no comment on the report.”

Note the Power Point slide in the picture — remember, it’s easy to shut down homegrown terrorists when you goad them into committing crimes. Ostentatiously pronouncing that homegrown terrorists are the most dangerous threat out there is the only obvious thing to do . . .

We Are All Gettysburg Now

Oh, please — as if you don’t understand what’s inherently cool about lucite Twin Towers trinkets:

The other day on the E train, a woman asked me how to get to “umm, Ground Zero.”

I was a little bewildered, and not because I couldn’t imagine why anyone would want to go there. What gave me pause was trying to decide how to proceed.

I always like to give detailed, friendly directions to out-of-towners, if only to counteract the stereotype that all New Yorkers are rude. But of all the things to see and places to go on your first trip on a subway — as she said this was for her — why go there?

I wanted to ask her if she’s been to the Met, the Empire State Building, Chinatown. The SoHo Apple store, perhaps?

Instead I gave her detailed, if not quite friendly, directions. I made her work for it.

“You don’t want to see that,” I said.

“Yes, I do,” she replied.

“It’s just a big hole in the ground, a construction site. Why go?”

“To pay my respects, I suppose.”

. . .

That woman, respectful in her slumped shoulders and doe eyes, was one of a projected six million people who will visit Ground Zero this year, according to the Downtown Alliance. That’s six million out of a total 40 million tourists annually. These are people who, for the most part, we can assume, knew none of the thousands of victims.

Exactly When Did Mini Storage Become Edgy?

Apparently the thinly veiled furvert campaign lost its punch and now those mini-storage pimps are experimenting with a more provocative strategy:

A Manhattan Mini Storage billboard on Manhattan’s West Side Highway is again stirring up both opprobrium and approbation.

A large sign at 44th Street and Twelfth Avenue shows a wire hanger with the words “Your closet space is shrinking as fast as her right to choose.”

What Darren Star Hath Wrought

In 2007, the fetishization of New York is a symbiotic effort. I’m sure Ms. Astor would understand:

It’s not every red-blooded college student in the Midwest — Mr. [James] Kurisunkal, 18, is a sophomore considering a major in English or sociology at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign — who knows and appreciates who Ms. [Tinsley] Mortimer, an Upper East Side socialite, is, let alone can tell that she is wearing Dior. “I recognized it instantly,” he wrote.

Mr. Kurisunkal is something of an obsessive about New York’s young socialite set and everything that a hobby like it tends to include — bone structure, bloodlines, boyfriends named Bingo.

In March, he anonymously started Park Avenue Peerage, a compendium of party pictures, society updates, and, once in a while, family histories he put together mostly by culling wedding and death announcements. The next day, he began hearing from readers — and subjects. “I think a lot of people have Google alerts sent to them every time their name pops up on the Web,” Mr. Kurisunkal said. They sent new photographs and, on occasion, something approaching news.

He guarded his identity, filing posts under the name “68thandpark,” until May, when he revealed himself to a New York magazine reporter who was sleuthing around.

“I really am a freshman at the University of Illinois updating this Web site from my dorm room,” he wrote on his blog that week. “I live next to fields of corn and soybeans and my desktop is open with party pictures from Anchor and Marquee. I know.” Not long after, he applied for, and was offered, a paid summer internship at the magazine. This is his last week.

Beyond his evening with Ms. Mortimer, however, his social calendar racked up far more blank spots than engagements and invitations. He said his overall assessment of his time in New York was that “it’s been surreal.”

Over a poulet de grain rôti at La Goulue, on Madison Avenue, he added: “I’d always loved New York and felt like I knew it, but I’d never actually been here. My main exposure to it came from ‘Sex and the City’ and ‘Friends.'”

Mr. Kurisunkal’s unmasking came as the resolution to a parlor game that had been playing out for a while — in some parlors, anyway. Park Avenue Peerage had immediately established itself as the primary competition to Socialite Rank, a catty anonymous blog that saw fit to give the city’s leading “socials,” as they’re called, quasi-mathematical evaluations. New York magazine reported that Socialite Rank was run by a Russian-born brother and stepsister, one of them a former reporter for Fashion Week Daily.

But Socialite Rank folded, and Park Avenue Peerage stands now as peer of the realm. Mr. Kurisunkal said that his site receives an average of 8,000 page views per weekday. “I don’t ever put anything salacious or mean,” he said, explaining why the socialites send in so many pictures of themselves cavorting at functions and private events (trips to the beach, parties at somebody’s parents’ house). “Why put people purposefully in a vulnerable position? What’s the point?”