Sciento(xico)logy

Perhaps even more depressing than the idea that those September 11 honor roll walls are quickly going to be out of date is the notion that 9/11 responders are desperately resorting to Scientology to rid their bodies of cancerous toxins:

Hubbard’s detoxification program, which Scientologists refer to as the “purification rundown,” requires an individual to ingest a vitamin cocktail and cooking oil, run on a treadmill and sweat heavily in a sauna with temperatures ranging from 140 to 180 degrees Fahrenheit for about a month. If Downtown Medical is to be believed, that combination is a miracle cure for many ailments. “Patients have had black paste coming out of their pores in the sauna,” states Woodworth on the site. “Their sweat has stained towels purple, blue, orange, yellow and black. They have reported bowel movements that are blue, or green, or that have smelled like smoke — despite the fact that they had not been at a fire scene for months.” A picture of a program participant holding a purple stained towel in his hands appears in a slideshow on their website, and program administrators say they have other similar photos available. Shards of glass have leaked from the pores of detox participants, according to the website. And accounts of the program’s benefits, written by rescue workers who served at Ground Zero, cover the site.

(Don’t Step) On It!

When they’re not electrocuting your pets, they’re swallowing your employees on their way to work:

A young woman walking to work was swallowed up by a Manhattan sidewalk yesterday when a metal grate gave way, sending her plunging into an electrified power vault.

If she had fallen a few inches in another direction, Jessica Hinksmon, 26, could have been electrocuted or severely burned by the Con Ed transformer that pumps out 13,000 volts of electricity, authorities said.

. . .

Grainy footage from a nearby surveillance camera captured her terrifying fall. The video shows her walking along the sidewalk between Sixth and Seventh Aves. She then vanishes suddenly, dropping into the ground.

Another pedestrian cleared the same heavy metal grate only seconds earlier. That same pedestrian is seen on the video hurrying back to try to help.

. . .

Con Ed was probing whether the hinges of the metal grate ripped off, causing it to fall.

“It was an accident, we apologize to [the victim], but why it happened we don’t know,” said Con Ed spokesman Chris Olert.

“You would have to hit a certain spot on [the transformer] to be shocked or burnt,” he noted. “It’s not as if the whole thing is dangerous.”

The Road To Staten Island Is Paved With The Unthinkable

Families of 9/11 victims worry that roads in Staten Island may be paved with human remains:

Families members of Sept. 11, 2001, victims filed court papers last week charging hundreds of thousands of tons of debris at the Fresh Kills landfill were not sifted for human remains — and have even been used to pave roads and fill potholes on Staten Island.

The claims were part of a lawsuit submitted in Manhattan Federal Court, and include affidavits by the city’s chief medical examiner, a former landfill director and Eric Beck, a city contractor who oversaw the separation of the pulverized debris or “fines.”

“I observed the New York City Department of Sanitation taking these fines from the conveyor belts of our machines, loading it into tractors and using it to pave roads and fill in potholes, dips and ruts,” Beck said.

Beck was a senior supervisor for Taylor Recycling Facility, hired to sift through debris brought to Fresh Kills after the World Trade Center attacks, between October 2001 and July 2002.

The 9/11 family members are suing the city to force them to continue the separation, and to create a worthy burial place for them. Some groups estimate there are about 223,000 tons of debris that were not properly sifted. The city filed to dismiss the lawsuit, and the families filed to counter that motion Friday.

Those documents contained a 2003 letter by chief city medical examiner Dr. Charles S. Hirsch, who wrote it was “virtually certain” that at least some human tissue has been mixed in the dirt at the landfill.

Send Unstable, Paranoid And Imbalanced “Aspiring Filmmakers” Back To LA Where They Belong

Choose your bias: anti-military (“An Ex-Marine Was Shooter of Two Officers”) or anti-filmmaker (“Gunman Was Aspiring Filmmaker With Pent-Up Hostility and a Résumé of Failures”). Let’s go with . . . filmmaker! Because it’s clear that the Mayor’s Office of Film, Theatre & Broadcasting is at least partly to blame:

David R. Garvin’s first brush with New York City came at a time when his life was already drenched in personal and professional failure. It ended in May 2005 with a collapsed career in the production department of The Wall Street Journal.

But he came back, months later, this time to make movies.

Traveling in the dim light of obscurity that New York bestows on most of its citizens, he had a sensibility that was unremittingly dark. He gravitated toward the paranormal, to projects where the bizarre and abstruse — in one of his scripts, a metallic object inhabits a philosophy professor — converged into the far-fetched.

. . .

Brent Jaimes, an independent filmmaker in St. Louis, said Mr. Garvin had approached him about helping with the project. He said Mr. Garvin had begun auditioning actors and had permission from the owner of an old barn in nearby Nashville, Ill., to burn it down for the movie.

“What he was doing in this project that I thought was unique was that he was going to take two cameras and set them parallel to each other,” Mr. Jaimes said. “Each image would be parallel and overlapping.”

In the fall of 2005, before the project was fully under way, Mr. Jaimes said, Mr. Garvin abruptly notified everyone involved that he was scrapping the film because he had to move to New York immediately. “We were about two weeks out from shooting and he said that he had an offer from a buddy with HBO,” Mr. Jaimes said. “He e-mailed me on a Thursday or Friday and said he had to be in New York City on Monday.”

Those massive tax credits have reached diminishing returns.

Bones, The Pied “Pipe”-r, Leads Rats To Mounds*

The rats in the Village continue to rattle Villagers:

Rats remain a citywide concern and, in the Village at least, the rat population continues to grow. Washington Square Park has seen an increase in infestation this year, which the Parks Department has been working to keep under control.

. . .

As a Villager photographer was attempting to document the rat infestation on Saturday night, a park regular — a marijuana dealer who goes by the name Bones — filled her in about the situation. Bones said he had noticed the new trashcans on Saturday and that they seem better, since the rats can’t climb into them, either from below or above, to get at the garbage. Bones reported that while he did see some rats on Saturday night, it was much less than what he had seen earlier in the week. He showed the photographer a dead rat and also a slow-moving rat that he had noticed earlier.

Since the KFC was closed because of health violations relating to the rat infestation there, the next-best option to baiting the rats for a photo shoot proved to be a cheeseburger. As soon as the burger was placed on the ground, one rat made a beeline for it, going for the meat right away.

And sometimes you feel like a nut, sometimes you don’t:

Some say that, not the KFC-Taco Bell or Demo Square, but the mounds — the three, small, currently cordoned-off climbing hills in Washington Square Park — are, in fact, the nexus of the Village’s rat population. Indeed, Parks has long wanted to raze the mounds, which have been frequently criticized as being virtual “rat condos.”

Eliza Nichols, a mounds advocate, strongly disputes this claim, calling it a “very good excuse” to destroy the three asphalt-covered humps. Nichols said this rumor was a scare tactic.

“The Parks Department has always hated the mounds,” Nichols said, explaining that she feels Parks just wants to flatten the whole park and make it more unified looking. Nichols has been fighting for more than 10 years to renovate the mounds, with little tangible success. The mounds, Nichols said, are great for children.

“They’re fun for children, they are great for exercise and an efficient use of space,” she said. In the winter, she said, “kids can sit on top and see the whole park” and go sledding on them.

Nichols explained that she has had multiple petitions signed showing support for the mounds. Nichols said Parks said they would renovate the mounds if the mounds supporters would fund it. Nichols has started many petitions and even raised money to renovate the diminutive hillocks. Despite assurance from Parks both in person and in writing, the mounds remain closed off.

When The Villager photographer and Bones were scouting out the area on Saturday night, they noticed many rats around the mounds.

Or, “Dammit, Jim, I’m A Drug Dealer, Not An Exterminator!”