A Good Schools Chancellor Sets A Tone, And This One Intends To Excite A Child’s Literary Senses, And Reach Out To Parents With Tenuous Analogies

It’s not the birth control comment that was so funny:

Following the 35-minute listening session, Black’s one-minute response was tempered with warnings of “tough sledding ahead” in anticipation of an austere state budget due Feb. 1 and a reminder that she has had similar “conversations” with parents all around the city.

“I don’t mean this in any flip way. It is many Sophie’s choices,” she said, in a reference to the book and film in which a mother in Auschwitz must decide which of her two children will die.

Her Name Was Written On Her Coat, Her Life Was A Miserable Anecdote

Why it’s a growler from the chainstore:

One corner of the Duane Reade store on Bedford Avenue in the Williamsburg neighborhood has Fire Island Lighthouse Ale and eight other beers on tap, with growlers — refillable glass bottles — lining the walls. Uniformed clerks-cum-beer-experts fill the growlers and conduct tastings only — sorry, no pints served. Behind a bar, a large walk-in refrigerator stocks common national brands as well as local, craft and imported beers. “We knew we would have a little bit of a battle to try to bring Duane Reade into this community, because they really don’t like a chain store,” said Paul Tiberio, senior vice president for merchandising and marketing at the company.

The Williamsburg beer bar is part of a larger effort by Duane Reade to recognize — and capitalize — on the fierce identity and local needs of many New York City neighborhoods.

One More Innocuous Pastime Brooklyn Will Eventually Make Annoying

Quizzo:

“There are a lot of young professionals in Brooklyn, and those are the main people you see at a trivia night — people with a lot of education who still like to go out and have drinks,” [a participant] said, laughing.

To Paraphrase Chris Rock: What Do You Want, A Cookie? You’re Supposed To Clear The Snow!

Perhaps yesterday you noticed all the plow-fitted garbage trucks moping around your neighborhood sullenly scraping at the pavement every half hour or so — this long after the snow stopped and the skies turned bright blue. That harsh plastic-on-frozen-asphalt sound you heard from blocks away was actually a sneer: “You want this plowed? I’ll plow until you can feel it in your teeth!”

Let’s try another tortured baseball analogy:

City crews “did what they were supposed to do,” Mayor Bloomberg declared Wednesday as he briefed reporters on snow cleanup at the city’s emergency management headquarters in Brooklyn.

“They learned each time from what they did the previous time. And sometimes you get a curve ball that you weren’t ready for and next time, you try to get ready for . . . that kind of pitch as well.”

And I hope this was a joke, though it was hard to tell by the tone of the evening news anchors when they first reported it:

Mayor Bloomberg was so pleased [by the Sanitation Department’s concerted snow removal efforts], he opened a snow briefing by commenting that the city had volunteered to help dig out Long Island.

If they need something to do maybe they might want to consider returning to regular tasks like clearing all the garbage piled on the sidewalks . . . I’m sure the folks who put on those expensive management seminars at Harvard each summer would agree.

Yes, Pile On

If you find that you’re exhausted from another obsequious New York Observer editorial, you can always rely on Clyde Haberman to perk you up again:

Only a month ago, before the storm, representatives of Mayor Michael R. Bloomberg insisted somewhat superciliously that everything was fine in this regard. The issue then was whether the mayor’s desire to be a national figure on matters like gun control, immigration and economic policy might distract him from the less romantic, but essential, duties of running the city. His chief spokesman, Stu Loeser, was asked about this on Dec. 8 in an interview with NY1.

Mr. Loeser’s response was that Mr. Bloomberg and those around him can do it all. “If there’s one thing that the mayor has shown over the last eight years,” he said, “is that both he and we as a government really have the collective ability to walk and chew gum at the same time.”

A CityTime scandal and a disastrous snowstorm later — you may also throw in the earlier inelegant management of the appointment of a new schools chancellor — the walk-chew ratio turns out to need reconfiguration.

See also: December 2010 Blizzard.