Summer Is Murder Around Here

No, literally! And there is data:

Still, the prime time for murder is clear: summertime. Indeed, it is close to a constant, one hammered home painfully from June to September across the decades. And the breakdown of deadly brutality can get even more specific. September Saturdays around 10 p.m. were the most likely moments for a murder in the city.

The summer spike in killings is just one of several findings unearthed in an analysis by The New York Times of multiyear homicide trends. The information — detailing homicides during the years 2003 to 2008 — was compiled mainly from open-records requests with the New York Police Department, and a searchable database of details on homicides in the city during those years is available online for readers to explore at nytimes.com/nyregion.

. . .

Summer is when people get together. More specifically, casual drinkers and drug users are more likely to go to bars or parties on weekends and evenings, as opposed to a Tuesday morning. These people in the social mix, flooding the city’s streets and neighborhood bars, feed the peak times for murder, experts say.

And the trend occurs in other cities, in places like Chicago, Boston and Newark, according to criminologists.

Some of the same trends are on display around Christmastime and are believed to be behind the slight increases in murder that occur then, criminologists say.

Hipsters Note: “PBR” Means Something Entirely Different Outside Williamsburg Bars

Message to New Yorkers, how about this year you don’t try tackling the rodeo clown when he runs into the stands? As the Daily News explains, it’s part of the show:

Flint Rasmussen is more than a rodeo clown.

As the barrelsman for the Professional Bull Riders, Rasmussen, 40, fills gaps in the competition by singing, cracking jokes, heckling the audience, running, jumping, tumbling, hurling T-shirts and souvenirs into the crowd, and dancing to “Thriller” and “Sexyback.”

“You’re in Madison Square Garden and you’re expecting all these cowboys,” says Rasmussen, “and I’m out here doing Michael Jackson and Justin Timberlake.”

The riders are wrangling bulls at the Garden through today, so I donned one of Rasmussen’s spare cowboy hats to learn his act. He spared me the bulls, not the workout.

On the packed dirt trucked onto the arena floor, I fumbled my way through a series of jumps and a kickin’ cowboy dance that Rasmussen seamlessly segued into a moonwalk.

“Anybody can do moonwalk in slick shoes on a stage,” he told me, “but not in soccer shoes on the dirt.”

In Rasmussen’s act, the arena becomes an obstacle course. The obstacles are the bulls, barrels, the riding area’s 7-foot fences and even audience members. Rasmussen has even been known to leap the fence and sprint up through the Garden’s stands – a trip that left me winded by the second tier.

Last year, he says, a wayward fan tried to tackle him, but most of the danger is bovine. “I’m having fun in a place where everything else that’s going on is very dangerous and very serious,” says Rasmussen.

You Know What Helps?

Putting your utility lines underground:

Community Board 11 district manager John Fratta explained the call for action saying, “We’ve been getting complaints about the shoes on the telephone wires.”

More than a street-beautification effort, Fratta said area residents are deeply concerned with the connotations, false as they may be, the hanging footwear represents.

While no one really knows the reason behind the telephone line-sneaker trick, numerous theories have come to pass.

Most widely believed to be the sign of gang activity or site of street drug sales, folklore also denotes the sneaker sling as a celebration for men who lost their virginity.

Though more than a dozen explanations continue to claim the reasoning behind the obscure act, all continue to remain inconclusive.

. . .

Not knowing where else to turn, he said he looked to Councilman Jimmy Vacca for some needed assistance.

Though eager to get involved, Nivardo Lopez, constituent liaison in Vacca’s office, said their immediate response for involvement quickly turned into a drawn out investigation.

With Cable Vision, Verizon and FDNY wires, among others, creating a web of unmarked territory over the neighborhood, Lopez said determining which company owned the wire that coordinated with the hanging footwear was an increasingly difficult task.

Then, to his great luck and appreciation, Cable Vision stepped in.

“They took care of theirs right away,” Lopez explained about their cooperative efforts to remove the sneakers.

Lopez further explained the company took initiative to compile a master list that clearly identified which line was which company’s responsibility.

From then on, they soared.

“We’ve gotten a good response from the different utilities about removing the sneakers,” Lopez commented, pleased with results of the unique initiative.

See also: Hanging Sneakers.

This Is How We Roll

All aboard the vomit comet:

They are off into the night as another group of revelers — mostly young ladies — comes off the 10:32 from Mineola. They don’t want to give their names, but one is glad to share the recipe for the cocktail she is sipping from a plastic Starbucks cup on the sly: Smirnoff Blue (100 proof), a little 7 Up and cranberry juice.

These must be the “beauties” that a Long Island Rail Road engineer speaks of a little later at Tracks Bar & Grill, where he is convening with two other co-workers at the end of a shift. They would only talk if their names weren’t used.

“It’s beauty coming in and the beast coming home,” the train engineer says of the transformation partying commuters make when they come in fresh and leave haggard.

The engineer and his conductor buddies know too well the iniquities of the weekend ride, a shift usually reserved for rookies.

“At the 12 o’clock hour, there are a lot of fights. At the one o’clock hour, it’s the ‘vomit comet,'” one of the conductor says.

“And by 2 or 3, they’re zombies; the leftovers that couldn’t make the ‘vomit comet.'”

Fabio Bari and Phillip Prado, both 23, are familiar with the weekend routine. It’s barely 1 a.m. and they are making sure to hit the 1:19 a.m. to Manhasset, which if they miss leaves them only with the 3:19. Not an option. “It’s full of drunken animals,” Bari says.

There are worse possibilities, however, than missing the 1:19: “God forbid you miss the 3:19. You’ll be contemplating all the wrong directions you took throughout the night and your life,” Bari says.

Location Scout: Penn Station.

Hey Self-Absorbed Asshole, Could You Possibly Have One Lousy Minute To Spare For The Children?

After a summer of being spurned daily by people who, frankly, don’t have the time to consider the environment, “dialoguers” try a different tactic — negging:

They spot you as you’re walking near Union Square on your lunch hour. Two impossibly fresh-faced, college-age canvassers with clipboards station themselves at either end of the block. They’re facing each other, so that no pedestrian heading in either direction can escape the trap they’ve set on this sunny summer afternoon.

As you approach them, you do what you can to pretend not to notice. You adjust the headphones of your MP3 player as a way of advertising that you can’t hear anything lower than the sound of an airplane engine. Or you pull the celebrity trick — holding a cell phone up to one ear, even though you’re not really on a call. And whatever you do, you don’t make eye contact.

But there’s no way you’re escaping the pitch.

“Got a minute for the environment?”

Or . . .

“Got a minute for gay rights?”

Or . . .

“Got a minute for the ACLU?”

And despite your evasions, you just can’t keep going, because the canvasser — who is younger and lither than you — has pounced into your path with the quickness of a jungle cat and is staring at you with an expectant, disarming smile.

. . .

It’s noon, it’s over 90 degrees, and Garth Mramor, late of Buffalo and Colorado University, overtakes a woman before she has time to run away. With sweat dripping down his ruddy face, he stares into her eyes and delivers his pitch at breakneck speed, knowing that he has only seconds to get it all out.

“Hi-my-name-is-Garth-and-I’m-from-Children-International-and-we’re-trying-to-help-children-in-poverty. Children-in-abject-poverty. There-are-kids-dying-every-day- because-they-don’t-have-something-as-silly-as-food-and-water. I-mean-even-a-bum-in-New-York-can-have-two-meals-a-day!”

Despite the fact that his breathless spiel is all monologue, Garth’s job title is “dialoguer.” It’s a term coined by an Austrian company known as the Dialogue Group, which helped to develop this brand of street confrontation and brought it to U.S. cities a few years ago with a subsidiary called Dialogue Direct.

Garth pauses to catch his breath and then whips out a laminated picture of his own sponsored child, an innocent-looking boy sitting in a hut thatched with palm fronds. The location, he says, is the Dominican Republic. He checks to see whether he still has the attention of the woman in front of him. He does, but then realizes he’s talking to a reporter.

“Children are dying and you’re wasting my time!” he says, scowling. Mramor drops the laminated photograph back into his duffel bag. He doesn’t apologize for seeming rude. “Being nice doesn’t work,” says the irritated college student. “I signed up two people today by being an asshole, and I’ll continue to do that. Have a nice day.”