Finally, Some Good News

Though I’m always upset when I see anthropomorphized food demanding that they be drenched in condiments and eaten, this is hometown talent we’re talking about:

A talented artist at P.S. 20 The Bowne School in Flushing has made it past roughly 45,000 budding Rembrandts to be one of only 36 finalists in a national design contest for food giant H.J. Heinz Company, featuring cash and other prizes for the winners and their schools.

The company had a saucy idea — the “Heinz Ketchup Creativity Contest” for school kids from first grade to high school seniors to design new artwork for single-serving packets of Heinz Ketchup.

Of the multitude of entries just from New York, Melissa Rueda, a student at the school located at 142-30 Barclay Avenue in Flushing, is one of three fifth-grade finalists.

Her proposed product art shows a smiling bottle of the name-brand ketchup, being held aloft by a crowd of happy french fries.

But Here’s What I Don’t Get: After You Get To Penn Station Do You Then Put Your Wife, Who Is In Labor, On The 4 Train?

If we’ve learned anything over the years, it’s that one should splurge for a cab when his wife is in labor:

Penn Station isn’t known for its early arrivals, but little Caesar Boothe may change all that.

The 7-pound boy came into the world Wednesday right in the middle of the bustling Amtrak concourse as commuters gathered to welcome him with cheers.

“I didn’t care who was there, who was watching me,” mom Marie Boothe, 29, said hours after she delivered her son on the floor of the waiting area at 7:18 a.m.

“I was thinking, ‘Just get the baby out!'”

. . .

The ordeal started about 4 a.m., when Boothe woke up in labor at her home in East Orange, N.J.

Joined by husband Jonathan Boothe, 26, and 1-year-old son Samson, she hopped on a train about 6:30 a.m. to get to North Central Bronx Hospital, where they planned to give birth.

But when they pulled into Penn Station, her pain was too strong, her water broke and the baby was ready to come out.

“Forget the ambulance. Forget everything else. I’ll do it right here,” Boothe said she told her husband.

Even better: Sewell Chan reports that the parents decided to use “Penn” as the baby’s middle name . . .

Location Scout: Penn Station.

Hey, Harrison Ford — How About Instead Of Fussing With That Dopey Zipline At The End Of Air Force One, You Take A Look At What Real Pros Do?

One of the more awesome Sully quotes:

“I had this expectation that my career would be one in which I didn’t crash an airplane.”

Elsewhere, how to ditch a plane into a body of water, just in case you ever find yourself in that position:

He said he knew the plane was in trouble when he heard birds hit the engines and he knew the landing had to be perfect in several ways, he said. “I needed to touch down with the wings exactly level,” he said. “I needed to touch down with the nose slightly up. I needed to touch down at a — at a descent rate that was survivable. And I needed to touch down just above our minimum flying speed, but not below it. And I needed to make all these things happen simultaneously.”

We Are All Charles G. Hogg Now

He’s biting what we’re thinking . . . free Staten Island Chuck:

Is there redemption after public disgrace? Say you didn’t pay your taxes. Or you were too tight with the lobbyists. Or maybe you bit the mayor.

Redemption? Not for Charles G. Hogg, a k a Chuck, the mayor-biting groundhog at the Staten Island Zoo.

First — on Groundhog Day, no less — Chuck botched the biggest photo opportunity of his not-quite-3-year-old life. He chomped on Mayor Michael R. Bloomberg’s index finger.

That raised a question for follow-up: Would Tuesday’s Chuck be any kinder or gentler?

So the zookeepers trotted him out for another photo op. Only one camera and two reporters showed up this time.

That word “trotted” is a problem. It suggests politeness. It suggests civility. It suggests everything that Chuck was not as he went rampaging across the stage in the zoo’s auditorium, knocking over a prop-size statue of a giraffe.

Then one of the photographers put a photograph of Mr. Bloomberg where Chuck could not miss it. Chuck rubbed his lips on the corner of the picture frame. He was not making nice — it looked as if he had bared his teeth. But the mayor should not take this personally. Chuck did the same to everything he rubbed up against before he jumped off the stage and waddled around the auditorium for a victory lap, Chuck style.

. . .

By Tuesday [. . .] John J. Caltabiano, the executive director of the zoo, had the one-liners ready. One, inevitably, was about biting the hand that feeds you. The city provides as much as half of the zoo’s budget, Mr. Caltabiano said, and the city is cutting its share by 17 percent in the coming fiscal year.

Mr. Caltabiano is well aware that the mayor has survived past Groundhog Days without injury. In his office is a framed photograph of the mayor holding a groundhog in February 2006.

But the groundhog in the picture was Chuck’s father. Eight groundhogs have played the role of Chuck in the last 27 years. Monday was the first time that Mr. Bloomberg had handled the current Chuck, who is apparently feistier than his father was.

It might have been the last time, too. Mr. Caltabiano said that he was working on breeding Chuck VIII and would retire him if there was a Chuck IX by next Groundhog Day.

One Day Ethics Will Catch Up To Technology But Until Then We’ll Have All These Cool Maps We Can Fool Around With

Wow, that’s really cool. Who knew you could do so much with a web-based mapping application? Technology is neat:

Google’s technological expertise helped turn New York City’s main visitor center from a place to collect brochures into an interactive hub for planning a day — or a week — in the city. But the related Web site — NYCGo — proved so popular that it crashed almost as soon as it was unveiled and continued to operate slowly through Wednesday afternoon.

Mayor Michael R. Bloomberg and other city officials showed off the Official NYC Information Center, at 810 Seventh Avenue and West 53rd Street in Midtown, on Wednesday morning. At a cost of $1.8 million in private financing, the center was outfitted with video tabletop touch-screens equipped with Google Maps that allow users to assemble itineraries.

Mr. Bloomberg emphasized that the center was not just for tourists. “By extending these new travel resources to our residents, we are giving New Yorkers the chance to more actively take advantage of the city’s diverse and exciting neighborhoods,” he said.

The city’s tourism-promotion arm, NYC & Company, also officially unveiled a revamped Web site, linked to Travelocity’s reservations system, so that prospective visitors can immediately purchase airline tickets or hotel rooms.

Apparently NYC & Company gets 40% of its financing — and the obvious official stamp of approval — from the city. So it seems not kind of but actually really fishy that the Maps section of the site features the “7 Karaoke Bars Worth Singing About”, for example, with detailed directions how to get to each one. If I were a competing karaoke bar owner, I’d be pissed. Or a hotelier. Or a restauranteur. Or the proprietor of an “environmentally conscious watering hole” that wasn’t picked by the site’s editors. Or anyone who could benefit from the use of taxpayer money to stir up business.