Coulrophobics Beware

Good thing it’s a city that never sleeps, or clowns might eat you:

More than 200 international clowns will take the city by storm — whoopee cushions optional — for this week’s World Clown Association’s annual convention.

The five-day clown throwdown kicks off today in Queens with face-painting competitions, balloon-sculpture workshops and a session on how to make your own honker at the LaGuardia Plaza Hotel in East Elmhurst.

Trains May Suck In A Lot Of Ways But At Least They Don’t Flip Over On The Thruway

As long as the Acela remains absurdly expensive, this will continue to be one of my worst fears:

More than a dozen people were killed in a horrific crash early Saturday when a discount bus flipped on a Bronx highway and careened into a metal traffic pole, officials said.

Star Trek 2.0: Path Of Khan

How the worldwide push toward progressive transportation goals died for Bloomberg’s sins:

Connect the dots, and this becomes a much more significant story than the future of one bike lane in Brooklyn, or even the career of one official. New York City justly sees itself as the world’s greatest city: here, in some sense, people live the way everyone would live if they had the chance. How New York — the city that still has a uniquely low level of car ownership and use — manages its transport planning in the 21st century matters for the whole world: it is the template. If cycling is pushed back into the margins of that future, rather than promoted, along with efficient mass public transit and safe, pleasant pedestrianism, as a key part of that future, the consequences will be grave and grim.

[Via.]

Play Idea: Last Con Man In Manhattan

Alternate title: Con Err. Opening this summer at a fringe festival near you.

Times Readers Never Seem To Get A Satisfying Answer To That Eternal Gay Or Lavish? Question

There’s innuendo:

Graft Charges Depict Kruger’s Lavish Lifestyle

And then there’s the schoolyard version thereof:

Gay pol’s $1 mil ‘bribe’ out-rage