Resolved: Immediate Moratorium On Adjectival Overuse Of The Word “Urban”

New York Magazine’s locally applicable etiquette guidelines (since calling it “The Urban Etiquette Handbook” is lame).

Saturday Night Live castmember Amy Poehler’s contributions:

1. Be nice to everyone, especially people wearing hospital bracelets.

2. Don’t ask white girls if they “left their ass at home.”

3. If you have to bring your baby to a movie, make sure he laughs at appropriate times.

4. Don’t eat Cheetos and then sit down at a fancy hotel piano.

5. If you are in Central Park and think you are getting mugged, first check to see if maybe you’re just part of a student film.

6. If you see Oprah at a fancy function, don’t grab her wrist and ask for money. Quietly sneak up behind her and whisper, “You give me that money, Oprah. You hear me?”

7. When walking on a New York street, try not to spit, litter, bleed, or take a crap.

8. If you need to do any of these things, try to do it between two parked cars.

Navigate The Dark Areas Of The Internet The Old Fashioned Way — Via The New York Public Library Telephone Reference Service

Most things you can Google. For everything else, there’s the New York Public Library Telephone Reference Service:

. . . [T]he persistence of this service raises its own questions. Like why, in the age of search engines, would anyone bedevil a human being with such questions? And what human being would choose to be so bedeviled?

Harriet Shalat, 62, of Forest Hills, Queens, for one. She is the chief of the service, known as telref. “We are detectives,” she said. “We know more than people think we know. We’re not little old ladies stamping books and telling you to be quiet.”

Paul Duguid, an adjunct professor at the School of Information at the University of California at Berkeley, said there would always be a place for such human search engines.

There are “dark areas” on the Internet, Mr. Duguid said, vast databases that are not scanned by search engines like Google. Mr. Duguid (pronounced do-good) is a co-author of “The Social Life of Information” (Harvard Business School Press, 2002), about data that computers cannot process.

“If you have a good search question, Google is great for answering it,” Mr. Duguid said. “If you don’t have a good question, you will get 17 million responses and you will wish you hadn’t asked.”

Some caller questions are verboten. The telref staff won’t answer crossword or contest questions, do children’s homework, or answer philosophical speculations or guilty-spouse questions (what is my wife’s birthday?).

. . .

When a challenging question comes in, the staff quivers, like human parallel processors, checking reference books and pooling information. They can also consult with as many as 50 other researchers in the library system.

Under library rules, each inquiry must be answered in under five minutes, meaning the caller gets an answer or somewhere to go for an answer — like a specialty library, trade group or Web site. Researchers cannot call back questioners.

The deadline is meant, in part, to focus the staffer’s attention. “Otherwise,” Ms. Shalat said, “once we get going, we would never stop.”

Almost all telephone calls are in English, although researchers can get by in Chinese, Spanish, German and some Yiddish. Specialty libraries, like the Slavic and Baltic division, can lend a hand with, say, Albanian.

The haughty and the impatient tend to be men, Ms. Shalat said. Physicians are the worst. “It’s not a man thing, it’s a conceit thing,” Ms. Shalat said. “This is Doctor So-and-So calling and I need blah blah blah. Run and get it, honey.”

A person might ask, “Tell me about Africa,” Ms. Shalat said. A few quick questions will elicit her real interest in animals, then in elephants, and finally the reproductive cycles of elephants. “Now that’s a question we can answer,” Ms. Shalat said.

Breaking: Suicide-Proof Verrazano Fails To Kill Man

Attention potential suicides — the Verrazano is not the bridge for you:

A male jumped from the Verrazano-Narrows Bridge early this morning — and survived. He jumped just before 6 a.m. from the upper level of the Brooklyn-bound side of the span. The man was brought to Lutheran Medical Center in Brooklyn in critical condition, a police spokesman said.

This comes after a jump back in November failed to kill a 19-year-old Brooklyn man.

Later — the Advance reports that the man actually only fell off a seawall:

A man reported to have jumped from the Verrazano-Narrows Bridge yesterday morning actually fell into the water from a seawall in Brooklyn, police have determined.

Police Commissioner Ray Kelly said yesterday that the man who was pulled alive from the harbor shortly before 6 a.m. was a bicyclist in Bay Ridge who fell after climbing onto rocks at the water’s edge.

What’s more — this bridge definitely should not be fucked with:

On Wednesday, police recovered the body of a New Dorp man from New York Harbor. He had been missing since the car he was driving was found abandoned on the bridge on May 9.

Verrazano skeptics stand corrected!

A Public Payroll Larger Than The GDP Of Guatemala

New York City has 267,000 public employees who are paid $29 billion a year. See their hourly wages online:

New York City’s public payroll has more people than the combined populations of Albany, Hollywood and Liechtenstein. At $29 billion, it is larger than the gross domestic product of Guatemala.

Among the names on the payroll are 50 Bushes, 28 Clintons, 44 Nixons, 12 Gandhis and two Churchills. A Brando works at the housing authority, a Trump at transit and a Kissinger at design and construction.

And who knew there was a Municipal Water Finance Authority, let alone that half of the 19 people who work there are paid more than $90,000 a year?

. . .

These and other random insights emerge from a close reading of the civil list, a 6,685-page census of 267,000 public employees that is quietly filed away each year in the city’s Records Department.

. . .

An anachronism by modern standards of electronic recordkeeping, the list has been published by the city annually since the enactment of the civil service law in 1883, when it originally included employees’ home addresses. Since the 1960’s, the list has been filed on microfiche, and two years ago the Records Department began putting scanned images of it online.

. . .

The civil list is so big — it dwarfs that of New York’s largest private employer, Citigroup, which has about 27,000 employees in the city — and has such a lengthy pedigree that it can fairly be said to reflect the evolution of the city itself.

“There is a racial and ethnic mosaic within the civil service that reflects the politics of the city at various points in time,” said John H. Mollenkopf, executive director of the Center for Urban Research at the City University of New York Graduate Center.

“It’s amazing that specializations that were established 100 years ago survive today — the Irish cops, the Italians in the parks department, the Jewish names in social services,” he said. “That reflects, to some degree, the mayors who were in office at the time and what groups formed their electoral base.”

Scanning the Police and Fire Department rosters from 2005, for example, finds echoes of the Tammany era, when those agencies were well-known entry points for Irish immigrants. There are 52 McCarthys and 54 O’Connors at the Police Department, far more than at any other agency; the Fire Department has the second greatest number, with 28 and 30, respectively.

Losing The First Prosthetic Leg Posed A Problem, But Misplacing The Second One Was Devastating

The MTA’s lost and found unit is guarded by a Muppet:

The lost and found — staffed by three workers — is tucked away under the A, C, E lines at Penn Station. The office’s entrance is guarded by an unclaimed stuffed Muppet character.

A large storage room to the back houses row after row of shelves holding backpacks, briefcases, shopping bags and toys. The room has a low ceiling, and trains can be heard rumbling overhead every few minutes.

Last year, the unit received 8,600 articles of which 1,500 were claimed. New York City Transit wants to improve the return rate.

To that end, the agency has launched an awareness campaign whose centerpiece is a poster — featuring a lost prosthetic leg — which has been splashed all over the subways.

The office staff keeps a collection of oddities found over the years, among which are two prosthetic legs and a set of fake teeth.

. . .

The No. 1 lost item is the cell phone. In order to protect against fraudulent claims, the office enforces strict rules before handing over a phone. A person must be able to call the phone or at least name people from the address book. If the phone is dead, they’ll send you home to get your charger.