You Little Shits, I Hope You Stole A 40 GB Click Wheel

Two young punks (creeping Postism, sorry) beat up a mother running with her baby in Prospect Park and robbed her iPod from her:

Two boys robbed a Park Slope woman jogging with her child in Prospect Park yesterday, police said.

Laurie Maher-Samra, 35, was jogging in the park with her 7-month-old son in a stroller when the youths, who appeared to be 12 years old, attacked her near Nellie’s Lawn at 1 p.m.

She was running along East Drive in the park, listening to music when the boys attacked.

They ran up to her from behind, hit her in the head, snatched her iPod and fled, police said.

“I just didn’t think it would happen at 12:30 in the afternoon,” said a shaken Maher-Samra. “I was just surprised that they would attack a mom with a baby.”

She and her son were not injured.

“There were people around. It was weird,” she said. “It was a bold move. As a mom of a 7-month old, I should be able to walk with him in the park.”

The 78th Precinct, which encompasses the park, has seen a 30 percent drop in robberies over the past year, but iPod thefts have been on the rise across the city.

This is what I’m talking about.

Oh But You Should Have Seen This Neighborhood Before The Condo Conversions, Or Blight, Like Obscenity, Really Turns Some People On

The big question facing proponents of the Atlantic Yards project is how to convince people that an area with million-dollar homes can be “blighted”:

Of all the real estate jargon, bureaucratic buzzwords and plain old insults exchanged over the proposed Atlantic Yards project in Brooklyn, no term has evoked quite such unruly passion as “blighted.”

During the last two years, the word has hung like a scythe over the 22-acre site, most of it on the northern edge of the Prospect Heights neighborhood, where the developer, Forest City Ratner Companies, hopes to build its $4.2 billion project.

For the developer, it is a fitting description of the abandoned auto-repair shops, collapsing brownstones and gloomy vacant lots that blemish the area, and of the eight-acre railyards that slice through the neighborhood just south of Atlantic Avenue. For many of the several hundred people who still live there, “blighted” is a term of abuse, one that ignores the sleek, recently renovated buildings on Pacific and Dean Streets, the bustling neighborhood bar, and other signs of revival. Even some supporters of the project, like Assemblyman Roger L. Green, disagree with the description.

“That neighborhood is not blighted,” Mr. Green, whose district includes the Atlantic Yards site, said at a hearing last year. “I repeat, for the record, that neighborhood is not blighted.”

The long-running blight debate took a major turn in favor of Forest City Ratner last week, when the Empire State Development Corporation, the state’s lead economic agency, formally declared the project site blighted. It was the first step in a process that could eventually allow Forest City to acquire, through eminent domain, the few remaining parcels that the company has not been able to acquire privately over the last few years.

But for all the freight the word carries around Prospect Heights these days, “blighted” is a word with no fixed definition, legal or colloquial.

It is not unlike Supreme Court Justice Potter Stewart’s famous remark about pornography — “I know it when I see it” — said Joseph M. Ryan, a land-use lawyer who has consulted for the development corporation before but has no involvement with the Atlantic Yards project. “Usually it’s a high crime rate, debilitated buildings. Often you’ll have pollution, or inadequate usage of land.”

Under past court rulings, for example, an area can be declared blighted even if particular parcels within it are not. Similarly, a given plot of land can be declared “underutilized” if what is built there is smaller or shorter than zoning laws would otherwise allow, even if the building in question is not dilapidated. Moreover, it is largely up to government officials to decide how prevalent a condition must be — how much crime, for instance — in order to label an area as blighted.

“There are no hard and fast rules regarding blight,” said Jessica Copen, a spokeswoman for the development corporation. “There’s a large area of subjectivity in evaluating the indicia of blight.”

Russian Bookstores Zhirinovskied

Some Russian bookstores around town are caught selling anti-semitic literature. How charming:

Maybe it was all the rabbis gathered out front, but Vladimir Trainin looked downright panicked yesterday morning as he ran out of his Russian bookstore on Brighton Beach Avenue and worked his way toward the trash can by the street. The crowd of people outside his store, which sells imported Russian books and movies to local immigrants, had shown up to protest the anti-Semitic Russian literature in Mr. Trainin’s history section — literature Mr. Trainin swore he did not know his store had been carrying as he demonstratively placed a copy of “The Jewish Question in Russia” by Oleg Platonov into the garbage.

Platonov’s book, which claims “Jews do everything in their power to undermine Orthodox Russia and destroy the Russian church,”according to a translation, is just one of many anti-Semitic books that Assemblyman Dov Hikind, who organized yesterday’s event in Brighton Beach, has asked Russian stores to stop selling.

“These books poison the minds of people,” Mr. Hikind said at yesterday’s gathering, which attracted a priest, a number of local rabbis, Councilman Michael Nelson, and a camerawoman from the Russian Television Network. But it was no joke — the books Mr. Hikind had on display were unambiguously anti-Semitic and readily available for only $5 or $6.

In addition to “The Jewish Question,” titles included “What We Don’t Like About Them,” “Why America is Dying,” “The Myths and Truths of Jewish Pogroms,” and “Jewish Society Coup.” “Why America Is Dying,” according to a statement from Mr. Hikind’s office, “declares that at the very base of American psychology lies the Talmudic principles of greed, with the right to rob and kill all others to acquire land and possessions.”

In an interview, Mr. Hikind said he sent letters to a number of bookstores in Brooklyn and Queens asking owners to remove the books from their shelves. Although none of them has responded, at least two — Mr. Trainin’s store, Mosvideofilm, and the nearby RBC — have already gotten rid of the offending material.

“Everything is put into garbage,” Mr. Trainin said.”I am a Jew! I am upset by these books.”

Mr. Trainin said all his books are shipped to him by a Russian distributor, and he had no idea they were anti-Semitic until the group of critics arrived at his door yesterday morning (he said he had not received Mr. Hikind’s letter). Mr. Trainin said he would throw away all the anti-Semitic books he could find in his store — Mr. Hikind said there were more than 20 — starting with Platonov’s. After initially throwing the book into the trash himself, Mr.Trainin noticed a photographer and decided to let a nearby elderly Russian woman do the honors.

Then again, the purge generated a slight problem — now there is no more Russian history:

Mr. Hikind went into Mosvideofilm after Mr. Trainin made his announcement to make sure the books were gone. “There is nothing left!” he confirmed, pointing towards a large gap in the history section.

(Now that’s ironic . . .)

Hey, Suit! Your Ferry Is Waiting!

New York Water Taxi proudly kicks off service to Wall Street from Williamsburg’s Schaefer Landing:

Williamsburg’s tenure as “the new East Village” may have ended yesterday morning when the new ferry port at Schaefer Landing sent its first bright yellow Water Taxi on its way to Wall Street.

Not so long ago, Williamsburg was considered a hip new frontier for Brooklyn’s artists, writers, and musicians. The arrival of the Water Taxi — with its grandmotherly onboard offerings of cookies and hot chocolate — suggests that the wealthy financiers, consultants, and entrepreneurs who have recently made their nests along the waterfront are there to stay.

. . .

“It’s going to provide a quick transportation into Manhattan, and it’ll therefore make the area more desirable,” said Helene Luchnick, the executive vice president at Prudential Douglas Elliman who proudly claims to have kicked off Williamsburg’s development boom four and a half years ago. “In the two towers at Schaefer Landing, the monitor in the elevator will show the taxi schedule.”

Ms. Luchnick said she sees Williamsburg heading in the same direction as Dumbo and Soho, both neighborhoods which started seedy, turned artsy, and developed eventually into prime real estate for wealthy professionals. “There are still artsy types living in Williamsburg, but they’re not the ones buying into the new condominiums,” Ms. Luchnick said. “Every site up through Greenpoint has been sold for towers.”

Remind Us Again Why We Care?

The Brooklyn Paper’s Gersh Kuntzman explains that the controversy behind Takeru Kobayashi’s record-setting hot dog scarfing is much ado about nothing — and, as Kobayashi’s official judge, he knows of what he speaks (warning: do not read within four hours of eating):

For the past six years, I have served as Kobayashi’s judge and, as such, have had a spittle-and-bun-covered front-row seat to history. Over those six years, I’ve had a chance to watch the greatest athlete in modern history crush all comers. For five of those years, Kobayashi’s closest competitor didn’t even come within a dozen hot dogs and buns (HDBs in competitive eating circles).

I may think Kobayashi is the greatest competitor since Secretariat, but I’m no pushover. In 2001, when this calf-brain-eating champion from Japan burst onto the American scene with his amazing 50 HDB victory, I made him stuff a quarter hot-dog back into his mouth when it fell onto the table. In 2003, I noticed he was dunking his buns into his cup of water more than usual, so I made him slurp up the water-logged carbs. And last year, when a sneeze late in the competition sent a stream of chewed-up hot-dog out his nose, I made him snort it back in.

That he did it without flinching, without questioning, showed what a true champion he is.

Controversy is as inseparable from the competition to be greatest eater in the world as hot dog is from bun. But with 10,000 spectators packing the corner of Surf and Stillwell avenues — and with almost as many camera crews from New York, San Jose and Japan on hand — I knew I had to be at the top of my game.

I watched Kobayashi like a mother cow watching her calf’s brain. He ate his game — not worrying, even when Chestnut jumped out to a two-dog lead. He passed Chestnut for good around the nine-minute mark, but I watched with even greater intensity, knowing that this was the only time Kobayashi had ever been pushed.

And then, the belch.

Yes, Kobayashi burped and, yes, the force of the belch propelled parts of four chewed-up hot dogs from his mouth. But, ever the champion, Kobayashi caught it all in his hand — and some in his water cup — and pushed it all back in.

. . .

As the late Johnny Cochran might have said: Kobayashi caught his regurgitate and didn’t hesitate. Yes, bits of hot dog did remain in his cup at the end of the competition — so I docked him a quarter-dog, making the new world record 53-3/4 instead of 54.

From where I sat, there was no controversy: Kobayashi had stared defeat in the face and pushed it right back into his own jaws of victory.

Backstory: Trying To Convince Your Body To Dance It All Down.