Urban Scalp Hunting

Under the guise of a followup story about sleeper agent Wayne “Rip Van” Wiggins, the Post puts out a clear call for yet more cellphone pictures of sleeping agents:

Station agents, this is your wake-up call.

A Post reader spied yet another transit snorer dozing in his booth, and the paper has received a half-dozen similar reports yesterday from straphangers who didn’t have a camera handy.

“I can’t believe these guys are paid to sleep,” said Frank Donati, who spotted this agent taking a 7:45 a.m. nap last Friday at the Northern Boulevard station on the R line.

For historical reference, see Mountain Men of the Gila:

The most historically significant of the Gila mountain men was a contemporary of [James Ohio] Pattie’s named James Kirker (1793-1853). Kirker arrived at the Gila trapper’s headquarters, the Santa Rita copper mines, in 1826, and he stayed for a decade at least, trapping the Gila streams and acting as a guard, scout and manager of the mines. By his own account he was “highly successful” as a trapper. According to William C. McGaw, author of the Kirker biography, Savage Scene, Kirker was once gone off in the wilderness, hunting and trapping, for 18 months! As late as 1837, when beaver were of little economic consequence due to their scarcity, Kirker emerged from the Gila Wilderness with over 1,000 beaver pelts, only to lose the entirety to an Indian raid.

But Kirker would be of minor historical interest had his career ended with beaver trapping. Instead, following the Apache uprising in 1837, Kirker turned to a more lucrative pursuit: scalp hunting. Hiring out to the Mexican government at $200 per scalp, Kirker led vigilantes of 50 to 100 men, many of them Shawnee and Delaware Indians, on punitive expeditions against the Apaches. The scourge lasted a half dozen years and ranged over the wilderness, from Taos to Santa Rita to Chihuahua City. The toll of Apache dead eventually exceeded 500; the scalps hung in gruesome display in the Ciudad Chihuahua square. One of Kirker’s recruits, James Hobbs, wrote: “We would fight certain tribes . . . for the fun of the thing, and for common humanity, even if we were not rewarded for every scalp.”

Piqued Post Pans Prodigious Payback Proscribed Picket Precipitated

There’s no mistaking the Post’s take on the new transit worker contract — “TWU’s Greedy Gloating”:

The Transport Workers Union was gloating yesterday that its damaging, illegal three-day strike resulted in a better contract for 34,000 subway and bus workers.

“Was the strike worth it? Yes,” read a large headline over a letter to union members from TWU head Roger Toussaint’s office.

“It’s about respect, and it’s about results.”

The letter continued, “We came back with more than was on the table before the strike . . . The 2005 transit strike was a big success. We went out strong. We came back stronger.”

Toussaint was particularly giddy about a hefty pension rebate that will be given to more than half the 34,000 members who made alleged “overpayments” toward their retirement from 1994 to 2000.

“We said we need pension justice. We got it,” Toussaint said on a Web site statement. He added that the refund will mean $8,000 to $14,000 for some 20,000 members.

Marvin Holland, a TWU executive board member who represents station agents, crowed, “The pension refund will be 10 times more than any fines we will get from the strike.”

Tabloid Wars

One of the more amusing things you see are the daily snipes the two big tabloids take at each other — not always amusing enough to point out, but amusing nonetheless. So here’s a good New Yorker piece on the recent (Drudgetastic) kerfuffle between the Daily News and the Post:

No longer can it be said that the News, traditionally the more restrained of the city’s rival tabloids, lacks a fighting spirit. The paper, reeling (or so said the Post, many times) from a lotto-game debacle that awarded cash prizes to thousands of readers by mistake, stepped up last Monday and finally played Hatfield to the Post’s McCoy. First, the News touted its own success—“daily newsad sales hit record high”—while also noting the “sorry picture of the shrinking business prospects of the New York Post.” Then, over the next several days, it ran a series of articles exposing an apparent “dump-and-pump” scheme at the Post, a “frantic, desperate effort” to boost circulation through bulk sales. The News, of course, has the higher circulation of the two.

. . .

Meanwhile, back from vacation, Mort Zuckerman reported with pleasure that the attention seemed to be increasing Scratch n’ Match participation. He also said that the News’ dump-and-pump story, which referred to “bloody shrapnel from publisher Lachlan Murdoch’s carpet-bombing propaganda machine,” was not retaliatory. “That wasn’t a response, obviously, to this latest—what my grandfather would have called mishegoss, which is a Yiddish word for craziness,” he said. “Who was that sociologist at Columbia—Robert Merton?—who said that every group has a reference group? Our reference group is not the Post—it is our readers.”

Up at Post headquarters, Lachlan Murdoch tried to play nice. “We don’t really think about the Daily News that much,” he said. But when he learned that a reporter had spoken with Zuckerman he asked, “How were the Galápagos?” He referred repeatedly to “Scratch n’ Stiff,” without winking or smiling, and accused the News, on the issue of bulk orders, of being a “pot calling the kettle black,” since the News sells a lot of bulk copies, too.

Col Allan, the editor, arrived, complaining about the “hypocrisy of these people,” and seemed more eager for a scrap. “They’re still shoving fifty papers a day in bulk into the prisons of the mentally insane on Wards Island,” he said. “I mean, give me a break.”

“I might even read the Daily News if I were stuck in a white padded cell,” Murdoch said.

Allan laughed: “Yes, very good.”

Murdoch said that he thought the nicknames had gone too far.

“It may have been a little exuberant,” Allan said. “But you’ve got to remember that the folks at the Daily News have this curious view of the world, and it really is that they feel that they can throw shit at the fan and never get dirty.”

Allan got up to leave. “If they want to attack us,” he said, “they shouldn’t do it in the business section—because nobody reads it.”

Delivery Man Update

The Post now reports (“Elevator Moo Goo Guy Ran” — I know, not at all funny) that the delivery guy who was trapped in the elevator for three days has gone into hiding, fearful of being deported (which was probably why it took him so long to pull the alarm, now that I think about it):

The Chinese food deliveryman who was trapped for 3 1/2 days in an elevator went into hiding yesterday — fearing his newfound fame may get him in hot-and-sour soup with immigration officials.

“He left the city,” one of Ming Kuang Chen’s roommates said through an interpreter. “He’s an illegal immigrant and he’s afraid people will catch him.”

After his ordeal — which set off an intensive police manhunt — Chen’s co-workers at the Happy Dragon restaurant in The Bronx said they didn’t know if he would return to work.

“He’s recovering. We don’t know if he’s coming back. We haven’t spoken to him,” said a woman working the counter.

Might get him in “hot and sour soup?” Like “hot water,” but soup? Because it’s something you order from a Chinese restaurant? Between the silly headline and the clumsy turn-of-phrase, I’m not at all happy. Not at all!

“The ‘Sack’ King”

I’m interested in Michael Strahan’s marital troubles like not at all, but it should be noted that the Post really came through this morning with the headline “The ‘Sack’ King” after they pored through the salacious details from the defensive end’s divorce proceedings and reported on his “repeated trysts” with other women.