Because If You’re Going To Do Time, Do It For Something Manly, Like Armed Robbery, Contributing To The Delinquency Of A Minor Or Even Wire Fraud

Things I never would wish on anyone include having to explain to your cellmate how you’re doing time because you couldn’t stop painting a four-letter handle around town that sounds suspiciously like the name of a loveable mammal featured in a children’s movie*:

A graffiti tagger who plastered his moniker, “Kiko,” all over Astoria and Long Island City was sentenced yesterday to six months in jail.

Oliver “Kiko” Siandre, 28, of Manhattan, pleaded guilty in October to several counts of criminal mischief.

Queens Supreme Court Justice Barry Kron imposed four to six months behind bars and ordered Siandre to pay $25,000 in restitution to property owners.

*cf. “Free Willy”.

See also: Fight For Your Right To Write.

Imitation Is The Best Form Of Flattery, And Flattery Is Certainly Better Than Banning It Altogether

The Times City Section figures out the best way to avoid cribbing from the community weeklies is to abstain from them entirely:

John Sutter, publisher of Community Media newspapers, has long objected to the way the Times’ Sunday “City” section draws from his papers (The Villager, Downtown Express). In 2003 he got Washington Post media critic Howard Kurtz to write an exposé on the uncredited pickups. Then in October, Sutter spotted an article he believed was too similar to a Villager piece, and e-mailed the section’s editor, Connie Rosenblum. She replied, “Our regular writers have been told they may not read any of your publications, and they all abide by that.” Sutter was “surprised and confused” by the statement. “Ban your writers from reading certain newspapers? It’s hard to believe.” Believe it. “Hoping to avoid unintentional similarities, the editor of the ‘City’ section asked her reporting staff to avoid reading Community Media publications,” a Times spokesperson said. “The editors do not tell freelancers what to read, nor encourage their staff to read any particular publication (except the Times).”

Not off limits, at least to our knowledge, are blogs that link to Villager stories . . .

Dan Rather Might Say That They Beat Him Like A Rented Mule

Unless that letter home influenced like tens of thousands of voters, not only was it expensive but totally unnecessary as well:

Sens. Jeff Klein, Ruth Hassell-Thompson and Suzi Oppenheimer will serve two more years in Albany.

Klein, 46, faced Bronx County Republican Committee Chairman Joseph “Jay” Savino in the 34th state Senate District, with both men claiming they could better represent their constituents.

Klein led Savino by a comfortable margin throughout the night. Klein said his apparent victory was a validation of his first term as a state senator.

At Least Someone In Marketing Had The Good Sense To Cancel The “Mission Accomplished” Banner Before Things Really Got Embarrassing

The Intrepid is not going anywhere:

If elaborate fanfare were all it took to propel an old aircraft carrier, the U.S.S. Intrepid would be across the Hudson River in New Jersey by now. Despite a sendoff yesterday that involved two senators, two former mayors and a few admirals, however, a team of powerful tugboats failed to pull the old ship out of the mud off Manhattan.

The Intrepid, which has housed a military museum on the West Side for almost 25 years, was to be towed to Bayonne, N.J., to begin an overhaul that would take up to two years. But after more than an hour of heaving and straining, six big tugs with a total of nearly 30,000 horsepower had moved the ship no more than 15 feet in a few lurches that left it wedged in the river bottom.

The tugboat operators scrubbed the mission at 10:30 a.m., sending the museum’s managers scrambling to draw up Plan B. Bill White, the president of the Intrepid Sea, Air and Space Museum, said he had called the Navy and the Pentagon for help and ordered a team of divers to take a close look at what was gripping the four propellers of the 920-foot ship. Jeffrey McAllister, the senior docking pilot for McAllister Towing, the tugboat operator, said: “There’s a buildup of mud underneath the vessel. We were trying to get it to wiggle.” But the ship “came to a fix,” he said, and now “it just is solidly held.”

. . .

[A]t 9:20, at the crest of the high tide that followed the full moon, the Christine McAllister, a tug with 6,140 horsepower, pulled taut a cable hooked to a chain attached to the ship’s stern and revved its mighty engines. Four other tugs stood by to help guide the Intrepid downriver.

But soon they, too, were spewing black smoke as they churned up foam in the brown water of the Hudson, trying to separate the Intrepid from the pier.

After five minutes, the retired crewmen lining the ship’s rails and the few hundred onlookers gathered on Pier 84 began to realize something was amiss. The hulking Intrepid, which survived five kamikaze attacks in World War II, looked like a mule resisting the force of several farmhands.

At 9:50, Matt Woods, the Intrepid’s vice president of operations, stood on the flight deck and reported that the ship had moved just 10 feet. “I didn’t think it was going to come out easy,” he said. Referring to the propellers, he added, “The screws are in the mud.”

Tom Cerniglia, 68, of Tappan, N.Y., who was a petty officer on the Intrepid from 1958 to 1960, was unimpressed.

“Ten feet. For a ship like this, that’s nothing,” said Mr. Cerniglia, who now performs at birthday parties as a clown named Tic-Toc.

The Double Meaning Of “Building Momentum”

New building starts are up:

Fueled largely by a housing boom, construction across the city is hitting a record level this year, with $20.8 billion worth of new apartment buildings, office towers and public projects under way, a new study has found.

The building boom’s estimated value is $2 billion more than last year’s, which was a record in itself, according to projections released yesterday by the New York Building Congress. The industry group predicts construction spending will top $21 billion next year.

“Given that World Trade Center construction activity won’t begin to peak until 2009 and that major development projects such as Atlantic Yards are slated to commence in that time frame as well, it is quite possible that the building boom could continue well into the next decade,” said Building Congress President Richard Anderson.

The industry group calculates that 30,000 units of new housing will be built annually this year through 2008, averaging $5 billion in construction costs each year.

. . . just in time for housing prices to start slumping:

Third-quarter market reports released today by the city’s top four real-estate companies show that apartment prices have dropped, while two of the surveys say prices have sunk below last year’s third-quarter numbers.

Following a record run of year-over-year double-digit price increases, the second half of 2006 appears to be a turning point moving in sympathy with the negative national housing market.

“My phone has nearly stopped ringing,” said one high-end broker who requested anonymity. “It’s a scary time in this business.”

A chilling report by Brown Harris Stevens shows the average sale price for cooperative apartments slid by 4 percent in the past 12 months to $1,003,945, while condos fell 6 percent to $1,196,930, compared to the third quarter of 2005.

Halstead Property notes that the average apartment price is $1,087,982, which is 4 percent less than a year ago, and 10 percent lower than the second quarter 2006.

Weighing particularly hard on the market is the average sales price for a Manhattan co-op, which has dropped 16.1 percent in just the last quarter, from $1.296 million to $1.088 million, according to figures by Prudential Douglas Elliman.

So is this whistling past the graveyard, as they say? Need more data:

If you have been waiting to buy a Manhattan apartment until after prices come tumbling down, you may have to wait a little longer.

Manhattan co-op and condominium prices sagged a bit last quarter, in the usually slow summer selling season, but by most measures they remained healthily above prices reported a year ago, according to a number of competing market reports released yesterday.

The conclusion of many of the brokerage firms releasing reports was that after a large advance in prices over the last few years, followed by several quarters of uncertainty, the market was essentially stable during the last quarter, despite the fact that apartments from a wave of new construction are coming on the market and there was continuing uncertainty about the direction of interest rates and the economy.

The Times then goes on to repeat the same numbers as the Post . . .