The Mob Exists Outside The Confines Of David Chase’s Office!

The bad old days are still hanging on:

Manhattan prosecutors on Thursday accused the Luchese crime family of infiltrating the Buildings Department, saying that three of the family’s associates found jobs as building inspectors and that others in the family, including top bosses, committed a wide range of crimes.

In all, six building inspectors were accused of taking bribes to grant building permits, expedite inspections and overlook building violations. The three inspectors said to be Luchese associates were also accused of more traditional mob-related offenses, including bribery, gambling, drug trafficking, extortion and loan sharking.

While The Well-Heeled L Train Customers Cool Their Heels, Soon Time Will Heal All Other Riders, Too

In other news, the 6 train alone carries more riders than the entire Chicago train system:

More than 150 stations on the numbered subway lines, including the heavily trafficked Nos. 1, 4 and 6, will be providing the information by December 2010; in some stations the clocks will be running even earlier, according to a recently released Metropolitan Transportation Authority document.

In the timeless realm of the underground, where anguish can mount with each passing trainless second, this amounts to something of a revolution.

. . .

Although New Yorkers became familiar with the technology after its debut on the L line in 2007, that train, which snakes through Williamsburg out to Canarsie, carries only a fraction of the city’s overall ridership (though it does carry a high proportion of its well-heeled hipster set). The No. 6 train, on the other hand, handles 700,000 rides a day, more than the entire Chicago rail system.

A Company Founded On Blood, Sweat And Tears

New York has the entrepreneurial spirit:

After spraying disinfectant, Sosa poured a sandy material akin to kitty litter to soak up the scabbed-over puddles of blood. After scraping up and disposing of the material, he breaks out a mop, then a high pressure steamer to clean the smaller splashes of blood around the kitchen.

Gospodarski, who has been a paramedic for nearly three decades, said he started his career working the Queens District Attorney’s Office, founded Bio-Recovery when he noticed that there were no companies in New York City that provided cleanup services after nasty incidents and instead, made the victim’s family, or landowners, pick up the pieces. Bio-Recovery is one of only a few companies based in NYC that specializes in cleaning up the aftermath of crime scenes and death.

Gospodarski said the city takes the official position that they can’t refer anybody to a private company due to conflict of interest. “The city can hire a tow truck, but they can’t hire somebody to clean up your husband or your child and make you deal with it.”

Don’t miss the charming video at the link . . .

News You Can Use!

Researchers at NYU devise system to count gumballs. Good for state fairs and third grade science class but, sadly, computer not included:

“It’s a mathematical problem, it’s a geometric problem, and it’s a real physical problem as well,” said Professor Jasna Brujic, a physicist who led the team that solved the query.

Johannes Kepler, the 17th-century scientist, had originally come up with a conjecture to solve the problem based on the gumballs being perfectly round, of equal size, and packed as tightly as physically possible.

Only in the last decade had scientists shown Kepler’s 400-year-old conjecture was probably right — using calculations that required high-speed computers.

Now, Brujic’s team, in a paper just published in the science journal Nature, takes things a step further — by giving a way to calculate the number of gumballs in a jar if they are of varying sizes.

The complicated formula boils down to this: It’s easiest to figure the answer if you start from the perspective of one gumball and check how many other gumballs touch it.

The team concluded that if you know the proportion of gumballs of each different size, you can figure out statistically how many are in the jar.

Political Lessons Of The Day

One, unless you’re comparing Nazis to actual Nazis, refrain from using Nazi comparisons, because that’s just, as they say in Gaelic, “meshuganah.”

And two, never, ever, ever allow anyone to be able to use a headline like “REP. CAROLYN MALONEY APOLOGIZES FOR USING ‘N WORD’,” even if you are just repeating what someone else told you.