Greatest Third Term Ever!

I don’t think even the mayor’s biggest detractors assumed you’d read this just one year into a third term:

“It’s a pretty simple formula,” said a source close to the situation. “You have the governor with an 80% approval rating and a mayor with a 40% approval rating. The governor can do what he wants.”

The Soft, Smooth, Gentrifying Sound Of Indie Rock Calms Any Neighborhood

Or, how NPR and The Decemberists slowly sucked all the life out of your borough. Which is also to say, indie rock is officially dead:

A group of persnickety Park Slopers don’t want a hip-hop haven in their hipster hood.

A petition circulating in the Brooklyn enclave begs the owner of Prime 6, a club slated to open not far from the new basketball arena, to adopt an “indie rock” theme.

You Can’t Stop A Captain Ahab Reference, You Can Only Hope To Contain It

In this case, in the 22nd paragraph, and parenthetically, at that, because Moby Dick is like catnip to journalists:

(Bloomberg View employees will not want for amenities: the town house was recently decorated with a giant whale sculpture, called Mocha Dick, and manuscripts by Herman Melville.)

I Know There’s An Obesity Problem In This Country, But You Can’t Find At Least A Couple Of People That Could Do The Same Job?

The mayor clarifies his position on immigration reform:

Hizzoner boasted on his radio show Friday that the leaders of 11 major fashion houses have pledged their support to his efforts to fix the nation’s immigration policy.

Without that change, the hottest models might start strutting their stuff on catwalks far from New York, Bloomberg warned.

“What’s happened is that some fashion people can’t get their models over here,” Bloomberg said. “So they start to cancel some of their photo shoots, because they can’t get models in or the cameras.”

The Daily News goes on to note that this is the same issue that Anthony Weiner brought up two years ago — and was ridiculed about by the mayor’s reelection team.

The Cultural McNugget

It’s like Danger Mouse’s The Grey Album set to fried chicken. Or like Shepard Fairey’s preemptive suit against the Associated Press — set to fried chicken. Mash it up, derive the derivative and claim ownership over something that no one really owned in the first place:

Abdul Haye, the self-styled Colonel Sanders of New York’s Afghan community, has declared a fried chicken war.

He has armed himself with an unwritten secret recipe that he claims allows him to fry the best bird in town. His main weapon, he says, is ownership of the trademark for the Kennedy Fried Chicken brand, which has spawned hundreds of imitators as far south as Georgia, and has become to oily drumsticks what the ubiquitous Ray’s name once was to New York pizza.

That Kennedy, named after the former president, was itself a deliberate imitation of Kentucky Fried Chicken, down to those familiar initials — and that it had its own trademark battle a generation ago — seems to make little difference to Mr. Haye, 38. A wired and wiry resident of Whitestone, Queens, he began working as a chicken fryer when he was 17, soon after he immigrated in 1989, and describes his rivals with ire similar to that he reserves for the Taliban.

“I’m declaring war against all the Afghans in New York who have stolen my name and my idea,” Mr. Haye said the other day at one of his five chicken outlets, showing off the trademark certificate that the United States Patent and Trademark Office in Washington had awarded him in 2005. He waved a thick stack of some of the 300 registered letters he began to mail last week to Kennedy outlets across the country, insisting that they pay him a monthly franchise fee, or face legal action. “Their poor-quality chicken is going to kill my reputation,” Mr. Haye complained. “I am the only real Kennedy!”