Another Mystery Solved!

Apparently they don’t just use the hot dog water as someone might have told you one time or another:

Health inspectors, cracking down on unattended vendor carts across the city, revoked his permit last week when a bathroom emergency forced him to leave his stand in lower Manhattan.

“Everybody has to go sometimes,” [Nuts 4 Nuts vendor Shiraj] Islam, 42, who had been a fixture near J&R Music World, told The Post.

“Now, I am losing a lot of money. I have a wife and four children, and I have been sick.”

Leaving a food cart unattended — even for a minute — is a violation of revised city health codes that went into effect Jan. 1, sparking the crackdown.

. . .

Under the law, street-sold hot dogs, pretzels and nuts become “imminent health hazards” the moment the carts are abandoned because the food could be contaminated.

Normally, Islam would have a friend watch the cart during the one or two bathroom breaks he took each day, but since he was diagnosed with a tumor on his colon, the frequency of his trips to the toilet have increased.

Islam’s cart is dropped off each day two blocks away from the electronics and music store on Park Row, but the veteran vendor said that on that day, as he went to haul it to its usual spot in front of the shop, he knew after walking 10 feet that he wasn’t going to make it without a pit stop.

“My stomach was feeling very bad,” he said. “I went into a pizza place on Fulton Street where they know me, but there was a line.”

Islam said he waited and used the restroom, but “when I returned [to the cart] 15 minutes later, the decal [permit] was gone.”

See also: Food Carts, Nuts 4 Nuts.

The Best Defense Against A Carjacking . . .

. . . is a standard transmission:

“We stopped at the light, and he came right over,” Peter recalled. “He was 6-foot, thin.”

“Get out of the car!” the crook barked at Anne, who stands 5-foot-3 on her tiptoes.

The creep then forced down the window on the driver’s side — and stuck his long arm in the car.

“He used a knife to cut my hand” and then swiped Anne’s iPhone, she said.

Things went from ugly to ridiculous by the time the light changed, the couple recalled — and the would-be carjacker’s luck ran out.

. . .

“I’m small — he cannot fit in my car,” she said.

“And I don’t think he could drive the stick shift!”

So, stolen iPhone in hand and his tail between his legs, the driving-challenged car thief took off on foot.

About That Cord That You Should Never Ever Pull . . .

In case you ever wondered exactly when you should pull the cord, since it’s unclear from the sign when you should ever be pulling the cord:

A rider on a Bronx-bound D train pulled the emergency cord Saturday after Gerardo Sanchez allegedly stabbed Dwight Johnson to death in an argument as the train traveled to the Seventh Avenue station.

But passengers should never pull the cord when the subway train is between stations, said NYC Transit spokesman Charles Seaton.

. . .

If a passenger witnesses a crime or a passenger becomes ill, the cord can be pulled if the train is still at the station but not when it’s already departing.

NYC Transit says the cord is mainly to stop a train from leaving a station if someone gets caught between closing car doors and is being dragged.

Gate Time Travelers

It’s like the customary several-minute delay for the curtain to rise at theaters, only more helpful:

Every commuter train that departs from New York City — about 900 a day — leaves a minute later than scheduled. If the timetable says 8:14, the train will actually leave at 8:15. The 12:48 is really the 12:49.

In other words, if you think you have only a minute to get that train — well, relax. You have two.

The phantom minute, in place for decades and published only in private timetables for employees, is meant as a grace period for stragglers who need the extra time to scramble off the platform and onto the train.

“If everyone knows they get an extra minute, they’re going to lollygag,” explained Marjorie Anders, a spokeswoman for the Metro-North Railroad. Told of this article, Ms. Anders laughed. “Don’t blow our cover!” she said.

Entirely hidden from the riding public, the secret minute is an odd departure from the railroad culture of down-to-the-second accuracy.

. . .

The minute was originally known as “gate time,” dating to the days when gates were used to block off the ramps that lead down to the platforms. (The gates are still occasionally used at Grand Central.)

At the publicly posted departure time, the gates would be closed; those who had already made it through would have a minute to climb onto the train.

The practice gradually extended to trains to Long Island and New Jersey that start in Pennsylvania Station and the Long Island Rail Road’s Brooklyn terminal.

Don’t Worry, “Blue Highways” Was Kind Of Disappointing Anyway

What ends up at the LIRR lost and found:

For instance, [Casey Arasa, Penn Station’s terminal manager] suggested, judging by the number of lost karate gis, interest in the martial arts and being properly uniformed for them is booming in the suburbs. Yoga, too — at least according to all the dropped mats — remains quite popular. But trend spotting gets more difficult when the items are bizarre ones, and there are certainly plenty of those.

. . .

All told, the lost and found collects more than 10,000 items a year (with a 50 percent return rate) and stores them for as long as 40 months on numerous cluttered shelves in a dingy warehouse space that is just around the corner from the men’s room. Lost cellphones are kept in plastic bins, according to their model (and with their ringers blissfully off). Cash, of course, is stored separately, and the fact that $19,892 has been returned so far this year suggests that people probably aren’t as grasping as you thought.

The biggest lessons of the lost and found appear to be: a) suburban women have a hard time keeping hold of their purses, and b) Long Islanders are waterproof, since why else would they leave behind so many nice umbrellas? Sub-lessons might include the fact that many commuters are technophobes (there are currently more than 60 laptops in the lost and found) and that, judging by how many Touristers are missing, a good piece of luggage just isn’t as valuable as it used to be.

Another thing you may not know is that the framed print of, say, the East River bridges that you accidentally left behind last year on the morning train to Babylon now hangs on the wall of the lost and found, which is furnished by commuters’ dropped objects. There is even a modest lending library of lost books that indicate the Long Island mindset: “Be a Real Estate Millionaire,” “Gross Anatomy,” “Blue Highways,” by William Least Heat Moon and Joe Torre’s inside-the-clubhouse tell-all.

See also, for comparison’s sake, the MTA lost and found (from 2006); prosthetic limbs there, too.