How About Best Two Out Of Three, Or Even An Average?

I’m sure they would say that worked out exactly as planned:

A drunken driver and his plastered passenger tried to avoid getting arrested after a Staten Island fender-bender by switching places — but both were busted when cops determined the passenger was more stewed than the driver, authorities said yesterday.

The two dimwitted drunks, Jose Solar-Avila, 37, and Jose Garcia Gomez, 32, were nabbed in a 1992 Mercury at the corner of Bay Street and Vanderbilt Avenue at 3:22 p.m. on Monday, law-enforcement sources said.

According to authorities, Gomez was behind the wheel of the Mercury when it collided with another car and they switched seats because they mistakenly believed Avila was more sober.

Disable Comments! Disable Comments!

Somebody started a TWU Local 100 Blog, and enabled comments! Unbridled public outrage at the striking union ensues:

You guys really have a lot of balls. All you do is drive around in circles. Your job isn’t hard at all. You get paid as much as cops and firemen, while much more as teachers. Something is wrong.

. . .

Everybody will know in a few hours what you actually make. And what you make is a lot comparing to majority of New Yorkers. Your strike is hurting financially the people with daily wages, people who usually have no medical insurance, no pension plans, who usually have to take mass transit because they don’t make enough money to afford anything else (and who definitely make less then TWU workers). Luckily, some of them are making your sandwiches. So, I am hoping the TWU strikers will find some spit in theirs and some piss in the beer they drink between picketing duty.

. . .

FUCK THE TWU, MAY YOU SUFFER ON CHRISTMAS!

. . .

I hope that Roger and his friends go to jail for a year and rack up so many penalties that the union itself is thrown into bankruptcy and the members are personally responsible for their penalties essentially cutting their pay by up to 35% per paycheck that gets paid back to the city. Plus, the pension fund will dry up and all those retireies who thought they had the good life go on welfare. I hope that’s what happens.

To be fair, there are some that say something along the lines of, “I’m proud of all of you that you are standing up for yourselves, your families and the rights of all workers to achieve a secure, middle class standard of living,” but those tend to be outnumbered by comments such as, “I hope Mayor bloomberg has you all arrested and you get AIDS in prison from being gang raped.” Who knows if the comments will stay up, but there they are.

[Link via.]

Update: the 733 comments were indeed deleted, but preserved elsewhere! [Link also via.]

From Bridge And Tunnel To Meta-Bridge And Tunnel In Less Than One Night

Pacha, New York’s newest bridge-and-tunnel hotspot is even better than expected, attracting both bridge-and-tunnel trash and fictional representations thereof:

“Sopranos” daughter Jamie-Lynn Sigler shot a disapproving eye at her on-screen brother, Robert Iler, Wednesday night as the bratty underage actor was caught swigging vodka straight from the bottle while partying on opening night of the hot Manhattan club Pacha.

Sigler . . . looked flabbergasted at the boozy antics of 20-year-old Iler, who sweated profusely as he clutched a fifth of the pricey Russian vodka Imperia in one hand and a cigarette in the other. Looks like the punk who plays mob boss Tony Soprano’s son A.J. on the smash HBO show — Sigler plays his sis, Meadow — hasn’t learned his lesson. Three years ago, he pleaded guilty to participating in a mugging on the Upper East Side, and got three years’ probation.

A Pasha spokesman insisted underage drinkers are not tolerated, but could not explain why Iler had the booze bottle.

On Any Given Night A Most Exclusive Crowd Of 2,700 Will Dance Here, Or From Zero To Bridge And Tunnel In Less Than One Night

The Post reports a new record in a nightspot’s transition from exclusive hot spot to bridge and tunnel lameness — before it even opens:

Dancers in bikinis gyrate in two glass-enclosed showers overlooking the dance floor. The bartender juggles four bottles of liquor at once, and pours a dozen shots in glasses he cradles in his arm. Waitresses serve drinks wearing nothing more than body paint.

Welcome to New York’s wildest new nightclub: Pacha.

The size of a parking garage, Pacha New York — which opens to a select audience of celebrities and models tonight — took eight months and more than $3 million to construct. The club, across the West Side Highway from the In trepid, has four levels, including a top-floor VVIP (very, very important people) area where stars such as Diddy and Mischa Barton will survey the rabble below.

Although this is the first Pacha club to open in North America, the franchise is famous worldwide. Owner Ricardo Urgell founded the first Pacha in Spain in 1967 and his empire now includes 25 nightclubs, including one on a private island off Brazil. He also owns a hotel, a record label and a magazine.

Pacha’s most infamous dance floor is on Ibiza, an island it transformed into a tourist hotspot. That club also fueled the careers of DJs like Fatboy Slim and Erick Morillo, who, after 14 summers spinning at Pacha Ibiza, is the co-owner of the New York franchise.

Morillo says the local version will inherit the chain’s hedonism, and that its size — it has a 2,700-person capacity — will make it stand out in New York.

Meaning, it will take a crowd the size of a Rangers game to get a nice Studio 54-style velvet rope going. But investors fear not, for this has bikinis! And Doublemint Twins:

Also standing out are dancers like Jennifer Libran and Jay Gallegos, who are paid to writhe under showers while clubgoers watch from a nearby seating area. Visitors can join in if they pass the hot-or-not test with the floor staff, and are lent Pacha-branded bikinis for the occasion.

Libran and Gallegos were part of the “talent” auditioned at the club weeks ago, in which 1,500 people tried out to be waitresses alone — and 75 were chosen.

The winners include 22-year old waitresses Takinya and Cipriani Quann — formerly Doublemint twins. Now, they’re thrilled to double their customers’ pleasure with $300-plus liquor bottles.

Then of course there’s always the possibility that this will just become New York City’s biggest fresh-of-the-boat (FOB) bar:

General manager Steven Hernandez said Pacha is more a series of lounges than a traditional megaclub.

“Clubs like Sound Factory had a cold, industrial feel. That era’s gone,” he said, likening Pacha’s four floors to “festive restaurants you only see abroad.” [Emphasis added]

Boutiques Are No Match For San Gennaro’s Long Shaft

The Boutiquification of the neighborhood north of Little Italy (snappy abbreviation: “Nolita” — rhymes with “Lolita”!) once threatened that neighborhood’s diversity — if you’ll permit me some chest-thumping wonkery, I believe Jane Jacobs called it the “Self-Destruction of Diversity” (The Death and Life of Great American Cities, Chapter 13). But it seems the neighborhood has, for now at least, withstood what once seemed inevitable:

The first of Manhattan’s microneighborhoods to emerge in the mid-nineties, Nolita saw retail rents double by 1998, from $50 to $100 a square foot, as Italian butchers and hardware gave way almost overnight to tiny, precious boutiques. The place is such shorthand for cool that the eatery on Fox’s Kitchen Confidential is called Nolita.

Then why do more than two dozen storefronts now stand empty in its nine blocks? It’s pretty much always been the case: Nolita turnover is unusually brutal.

Somehow the Williamsburg-ish crowd hanging out in front of Café Habana doesn’t translate into sales of the sort of arty luxury goods the shops are peddling. Theresa Ma, whose skin-care line, SCO, had a storefront on Mulberry Street before decamping to Broadway last year, notes, “People who live in Soho will happily pay $4 for a cup of coffee or buy an expensive face cream like mine.” Not in tenement-filled Nolita. “Most buildings are falling apart, with regular water and toilet leaks from the apartments above,” [onetime boutiquist Hugh] Duthie notes.

And then there’s the nabe’s previous claim to fame: September’s spumoni-and-beer-fueled San Gennaro Festival. “It’s crushing,” says Lindsay Cain of Femmegems, a do-it-yourself jewelry lab on Mulberry. “Those two weekends in September are really important — everyone is back from the Hamptons and women are excited to get shopping again. We tried to stay open during the festival our first year, in 2002, and there were horrid sausages and rats outside our door every morning, so now we just close.”