Gowanus The Healer

How’s this for a silvery lining on the white film:

The murky waters of Brooklyn’s Gowanus Canal have caused the demise of a baby whale dubbed Sludgie, stunk up an entire neighborhood and even once caught on fire.

Someday, they may also save your life.

At least that’s what a pair of New York biology professors believe after doing research on the waterway considered by many to be the most polluted, putrid and repugnant place in the city.

New York City College of Technology Profs. Nasreen and Niloufar Haque say the key to combating heart disease, Alzheimer’s and even the AIDS virus may exist in a white film full of bacteria in the canal.

“One of the things we found is that it has a very potential effect as an antibiotic,” Nasreen Haque said Wednesday.

The Haque sisters began researching the Gowanus three years ago equipped with a team of elite divers willing to plumb the depths of the canal — and a hypothesis.

“If organisms can survive in such an area, they must be producing something that protects them,” Nasreen Haque said.

The divers pulled samples of the white gunk, which is a combination of bacteria, microbes and other chemicals, from under the canal bed. The Haques took the samples to a lab.

“What we suspected turned out to be true,” Nasreen Haque said. “Extracts from the microbes in the water proved to be potential sources of antibiotics or inhibitors.”

. . .

Haque said she and her sister found secretions from microorganisms — “some of which operate like antiobiotics” — in the white gunk.

The Haques are testing some of the agents to see if they are able to fight the type of bacteria that leads to staph infections.

Nasreen Haque hopes the substances could be used in anti-inflammatory drugs capable of battling heart disease, among other serious disorders.

Location Scout: Gowanus Canal.

New York Aquarium Staff Must Come To Grips With Sudden Death Of Masturbating Walrus

Ayveq the masturbating walrus has died suddenly at age 14:

Ayveq, the walrus whose bizarre, though oddly compelling, masturbation rituals made him an international sensation at the New York Aquarium, has died. He was 14.

Though well-liked long before he discovered the habit that would make him a star, Ayveq’s frequent public self-gratification made him the Coney Island institution’s singular attraction.

“We are all still in shock about it,” Aquarium Director Jon Forrest Dohlin said. “He was an absolute delight. He had a magnetism and a charm that was totally his own. He loved people and he knew how to work a crowd and entertain guests.

“And himself,” Dohlin added. “He did have a raffish charm, no doubt about it.”

Ayveq The Masturbating Walrus, New York Aquarium, Coney Island, Brooklyn, October 20, 2007:

Location Scout: New York Aquarium.

Dog Eat Dog World

The unregulated Five Points-like atmosphere of the city dog run starts to resemble rush hour at the entrance to the Lincoln Tunnel:

Two men rumbled at a Brooklyn dog run in a fight over their beloved pooches — ending when one whipped a water bottle into the other’s face, breaking his nose, cops said yesterday.

The heated canine clash erupted on June 13 at 10 a.m. at the Manhattan Beach dog run.

Ira Levine’s bull mastiff, Max, tried to take some water that Sergey Uzilov was squirting from a bottle so his boxer, Lola, could drink.

Levine, 66, of Sheepshead Bay, and Uzilov, 55, of Midwood, had almost come to blows once before when their dogs fought, so the exchange escalated quickly.

“He has a water bottle, and he’s giving his dog some water and some of the other dogs,” Levine said.

“My dog is thinking, ‘Where’s my water?’ and [Uzilov] yelled, ‘Get away! Get away!’ ” said Levine, who was also walking his other dog, a French mastiff named Jake.

“I grabbed a hold of my dog, and I said to him, ‘You’re a real a- -hole. He’s just a dog. He doesn’t know,’ ” Levine said.

Levine, a retired police officer, said Uzilov shot back, “Get your dogs out of here! You don’t belong in here!”

“We’re yelling back and forth at each other. I lean over — I have my gun on me at all times — I don’t want to do something and get really pissed off,” Levine said.

“The bottle of water that he is giving to his dogs, he throws at me from 10 feet away. I couldn’t react fast enough.”

As the bottle bounced off the ridge of Levine’s left eye, others quickly intervened, and cops were called.

The Swedish Box Store*

Not to put too fine a point on it:

Whether or not the excitement of opening day lingers, remains to be seen.

“I think they just have really good PR people,” said Sam Ahmad, who owns Home Court furniture store in nearby Cobble Hill. “And if it doesn’t work out, they will have ruined an entire section of Brooklyn.”

*Sort of like “the Scottish king”.

Piece Of Crap Kids . . .

. . . those little shits:

Teachers were thrilled when students at a Brooklyn high school sweetly offered them slices of homemade cake last week.

But the innocent-looking treat contained a nasty surprise — it was laced with laxatives that sent two educators to the hospital and sickened three other staffers.

Now, three seniors at the Brooklyn School for Global Studies in Cobble Hill have been suspended for the prank and barred from graduation — and were under arrest last night.

“It was just cruel and hurtful,” one of the victims, Tom Mancuso, 36, told the Daily News Tuesday.

. . .

The students behind Thursday’s stunt weren’t seen as troublemakers — one was a straight-A cheerleader. So no one was suspicious when they doled out the chocolate-iced Bundt cake.

People who were offered the cake assumed the red chunks inside the yellow filling were candy, but school officials say they were actually Dulcolax tablets.

“One of the kids said it was baked by his mom. ‘Go ahead, it’s free,'” said Danilo Dungca, 54, who left a job at the Federal Reserve three years ago to teach in the public schools.

“I’m very close with the kids, so I didn’t think anything of it.”

As soon as he and Mancuso took a bite, they knew something was wrong.

“It tasted like someone sprayed hairspray in my mouth. I spit it out,” Mancuso said. “That’s when my lips and my tongue went numb.”

“It had red chunks that looked like cherries, but they were bitter,” Dungca added, “I spit it out. . . . My mouth was numb. I got sick. I went to the bathroom.”

. . .

Some students at the school were blasé about the cake caper.

“Nobody’s died from a laxative,” said Shanell James, 17, a senior and friend of Ramirez. “He thought it was funny. I thought it was funny, too.”