FreshDirect Doesn’t Take Food Stamps?

Councilman, I’m pretty sure that Food Dynasty sells, you know, vegetables:

Forget calories and carbohydrates. The Eric Gioia diet involves only counting the cents.

The Queens Democratic councilman stocked up on Ramen noodles and cheap white bread in an effort to live like thousands of his constituents — on only $28 a week.

The stunt is his effort to find out what life’s really like on the average food stamp allotment for a single recipient.

“I usually shop at Whole Foods or online at FreshDirect,” he said, scanning a list of special offers while doing his weekly shopping at Woodside’s Food Dynasty.

“I don’t even look at the cost. I look for the brand I like, and I buy it.

“Now I can’t let myself think about what tastes good or what’s good for me. I’m thinking only about what it costs.”

That ruled out meat — save for three cans of bargain Chicken of the Sea tuna for $2.

. . .

Instead, he picked up white bread — 50% cheaper than healthier whole wheat — five boxes of pasta for $3 and a $1 jar of tomato sauce.

“I can’t even eat healthily,” said Gioia, whose bill came to $24.44. “I’ve found out that the cheapest food is also the unhealthiest.

“On a long-term diet like this, I’d be facing major health problems like diabetes or heart disease.”

For only a week, the main side effect is likely to be just a loss of appetite.

“It looks like I’ll be having toast for breakfast, tuna or peanut butter for lunch and pasta for dinner,” he said.

Gioia can blame Oregon Governor Theodore R. Kulongoski when he gets constipated . . .

March Hats Become April Baseball Bats, May Notes For End-Of-Semester Classes And June Beach Towels And Sunglasses

Metro-North recently streamlined and modernized its lost-and-found system to make it easier to recover your misplaced prosthetic limb, sailor:

Since joining Metro-North in 1994, [lost-and-found chief Mike] Nolan has applied the analytical skills he honed as a Wall Street analyst to a tracking system that once depended on pen and paper and that in many ways had not changed in decades. He has modernized it, designing a database that allows agents to gather information over the phone from customers and see if an item has been found.

To streamline the process, Metro-North a few weeks ago unveiled a page on its Web site where customers can type in information about what they have lost. Mr. Nolan said he expects the online system to eliminate one-third, or about 500, of the phone calls that his office receives about lost items each month.

. . .

By computerizing so much of the process, Mr. Nolan’s workers have more time to deal with people like 68-year-old Gary Lewis, who walked up to the window at Grand Central last week and said he had lost his wide-brimmed brown hat on the ride into the city from the Croton-Harmon station.

John Pepe, one of Mr. Nolan’s employees, retrieved a hefty box marked “March Hats” and dumped the contents on the counter. He and Mr. Lewis rummaged through the pile without success.

“I’m known for losing things,” Mr. Lewis said with a shrug.

The number of lost hats, scarves, gloves and jackets explodes as the weather gets warmer. The lost-and-found is also a window into the latest trends. Just weeks after Motorola started selling its popular Razr cellphones a few years ago, for example, they began showing up in the lost-and-found.

The number of one-of-a-kind items also says a lot about Metro-North’s 125,000 daily riders. Mr. Nolan’s team has found and returned a violin worth $100,000, a packet with four season tickets to the Knicks — and two sets of false teeth that were lost about the same time.

When three people showed up for the dentures, the railroad had difficulty confirming the proper owners. But one man was so insistent that he volunteered to try them on.

“He was that desperate, so I gave them to him,” Mr. Nolan said.

. . .

Other items have become office lore. In the day when Metro-North trains stopped near a veterans’ hospital in Montrose, more than a few sailors and soldiers returning from New York after a night of drinking left behind their prosthetic limbs.

And one woman, so the story goes, purposely abandoned her late husband’s ashes to repay him for the nights he claimed to have fallen asleep on the last train home when, in fact, he was with his mistress. The railroad learned this months later when a woman called to confess. She never did pick up the ashes, though, and Metro-North had to get rid of them and the urn they came in.

The folk singer Pete Seeger stopped by the window not too long ago with his granddaughter to retrieve a banjo he had left on a train to Poughkeepsie, Mr. Nolan said.

Of course, there are limits to lost-and-found searches, something Mr. Nolan’s staff had to tell a man who called in 2003 looking for a duffel bag he lost in 1957.

Maybe If You Don’t Mind Picking Up Some Bubba Gump Merchandise For Me On Your Way To The Subway . . .

If you felt like being cruel by sending someone on an errand in Manhattan, we suggest doing it on what might be the single most crowded hour of the year:

Tim Tompkins, president of the Times Square Alliance business improvement district, has a convincing answer. He puts the most crowded time at 5 to 6 p.m. on the Wednesday after Christmas, which will be Dec. 26 this year.

“You have, on the one hand, all the tourists who are here,” he said in an e-mail message. “Then you have people who have left the matinee and people who are coming to evening shows and eating dinner before or after the shows.” Add the commuters who are still pouring out of offices, along with people returning gifts or using their gift cards.

Finally, Times Square attracts onlookers curious to see where the New Year’s Eve ball will be dropped — if not the heartiest of revelers intent on camping out there for five days.

Rarer Than A Swiss Cabbie

A new folksy-sounding quip is born:

New York City taxi drivers hail from more than 130 countries, and America is one of the five most common countries of origin, according to records for 2006 obtained from the Taxi & Limousine Commission.

Just two drivers indicated on their applications that they were originally from Switzerland, making them as rare a breed on the city streets as the new hybrid Lexus taxis. More than 5,200 drivers were originally from Bangladesh, making the South Asian country the most common country of origin among cabbies, followed by Pakistan, India, and Haiti.

America was fifth, with about 2,300 drivers, and New York natives made up more than half of the American-born drivers, according to the Taxi & Limousine Commission documents.

. . .

Many New Yorkers interviewed about their perceptions of cab drivers harbor stereotypes that do not necessarily reflect the diversity of taxi drivers. Tasheem Jones, who lives in Midtown and estimates that she rides in a taxi at least three times a week, describes her typical cab driver as a “rude Arab guy.” Kheeny Khan, a Pakistani who lives in Queens, said he has the impression that most cabbies hail from the same Punjabi districts of Pakistan he still calls home.

After Vivi, Everything Changed

The first Westminster Dog Show in the post-Vivi era takes place this week:

It has been nearly a year since a prize-winning whippet named Vivi broke out of her cage on the tarmac of John F. Kennedy airport and bounded away. The 131st Annual Westminster Kennel Club Benched Dog Show starts today, and she hasn’t been found despite the efforts of a dozen searchers.

Among dog owners in the show, the memory of Vivi is anything but faded.

“I was just talking about her. I tell you — it’s scary,” an owner from Michigan, Bobby Bidwell, said in the lobby of the Hotel Pennsylvania. After leaving her 96-pound Otterhound, Marilyn Monroe, in the car for a minute, she realized the risk she had taken.

“I was so scared that someone was going to steal her,” Ms. Bidwell said. “I just kept thinking of the whippet.”

Meanwhile, Vivi’s owner vows never to return to New York:

While the fate of Vivi the whippet remains unknown after she bolted from her travel cage last Feb. 15, Karin Goin believes retracing the dog’s steps at this year’s show would simply be too painful. “I’m not coming to New York . . . it hurts too much,” Goin, 40, said from her California home. “I don’t want to have to be at that airport again.”

. . .

While Goin has not gone back to the world of show dog competitions, she did adopt a puppy a few months ago to fill the void in her life that Vivi once occupied. “Her name is Lucy Brown and she’s a Jack Russell [terrier] mix,” she said. “And, when we travel, she fits in my carry-on bag and I never . . . let her out of my sight.

These people sure have control issues. Back to the Sun article:

There are 2,628 dogs in this week’s show at Madison Square Garden, many of which were brought to New York in airplanes from cities across the country. Owners say this is the riskiest part of the trip, because it is the one time when the dogs are completely out of their control.

An owner from Port Jervis, N.Y., Kimberle Schiff, said she has adopted a new set of security measures for flying.

“I now drill holes in the sides of all my crates and we use cable straps” that have to be cut off, she said.

See also: Vivi the Whippet.