I Can’t Believe This Is New York City!

New York should really have its own county fair, with an agricultural competition:

A Queens woman has taken homegrown fruits and vegetables to a whole new level by cultivating a 6-foot-long zucchini in her backyard.

Green-fingered Apollonia Castitlione grew the giant Long Italian zucchini during the warm summer months using nothing more than fertilizer, water and a little TLC.

“I’ve had my vegetable garden for 26 years, but I never saw anything so spectacular,” said Castitlione, who’s 5 feet tall. “I didn’t put Miracle Grow on it, nothing, just a little bit of 5-10-5 fertilizer, water and my time.”

Castitlione, 48, said she noticed the giant fruit was growing longer than usual last month when it suddenly shot up a couple of inches in as many days.

She then went on vacation to Boston for the weekend and returned to find it had shot up another 1.5 inches.

At last count, the zucchini was just over 6 feet . . .

China Could Extend The N Train To LaGuardia!

So bascially Thomas Friedman is holding Peter Vallone, Sr. responsible for the United States’ alarming lack of transportation infrastructure:

As I sat in my seat at the Bird’s Nest, watching thousands of Chinese dancers, drummers, singers and acrobats on stilts perform their magic at the closing ceremony, I couldn’t help but reflect on how China and America have spent the last seven years: China has been preparing for the Olympics; we’ve been preparing for Al Qaeda. They’ve been building better stadiums, subways, airports, roads and parks. And we’ve been building better metal detectors, armored Humvees and pilotless drones.

The difference is starting to show. Just compare arriving at La Guardia’s dumpy terminal in New York City and driving through the crumbling infrastructure into Manhattan with arriving at Shanghai’s sleek airport and taking the 220-mile-per-hour magnetic levitation train, which uses electromagnetic propulsion instead of steel wheels and tracks, to get to town in a blink.

Then ask yourself: Who is living in the third world country?

Buried Lede: Authoritarian regimes can do a lot of cool shit, can’t they?

The Urban Equivalent Of The False-Front Western Town: The Fake Store

The film set fakeout catches Queens foodies off guard, resulting in culinary blue balls:

The opening of a new Indian restaurant in Jackson Heights may not raise eyebrows — that is, unless it does not actually serve food and its owner is “Daily Show” correspondent and actor Aasif Mandvi.

For several weeks, the Tandoori Palace has been open (and closed) for business along a busy strip of 37th Avenue in Jackson Heights as Mandvi and director David Kaplan (who shot the 2007 Sundance Film Festival entry “Year of the Fish”) filmed “7 to the Palace,” an independent Tandoori comedy in which the diverse neighborhood acts as a character.

. . .

Producer Lillian LaSalle said the film’s crew set up shop at neighborhood eatery Ashoka, at 74-14 37th Ave., one month ago, designing a sign for the film’s fictional restaurant and using local businesses as office space.

“If you’d drive by, you would see our awning,” she said. “The locals kept wanting to go into the restaurant and check it out, so we had to put a sign on the door that said, ‘This is not a restaurant, it’s a [movie] set.’ But we’ve been honored to shoot here. The business owners have been very enthusiastic and incredibly accommodating. On one day, I used a hair salon as my office and, in days prior, we set up in an Afghan kebab house.”

LaSalle, also Mandvi’s manager, said the film completed shooting the Jackson Heights scenes last weekend and would next film sequences at Bayside’s Fort Totten before wrapping in early August.

Is Arthur Miller Still Alive?

Sounds like the premise to a modern urban tragedy. And fortunately Al Sharpton is nowhere near this horrible story:

A grand jury has decided not to indict a Queens man who fatally stabbed a 15-year-old girl who he said was part of a mob of teenagers attacking him after an argument on a bus.

It was the final stage of a rolling confrontation that began when the man, Winston Alladin, exchanged words with a woman who he said had cut in line to board the Q85 bus the night of June 25. Several miles later, the argument, now involving some young passengers, spilled onto a street in Springfield Gardens, where more teenagers joined in and Mr. Alladin stabbed Keyanna Jones in the chest.

“He broke down in tears because I told him he is going home,” Kevin P. O’Donnell, Mr. Alladin’s lawyer, said on Thursday.

But Mr. Alladin, who is from Trinidad, may not be able to return to his home in Queens. He was still in jail Thursday and was expected to be turned over to federal custody at the request of the Immigration and Customs Enforcement agency, said a Rikers Island spokesman, Stephen J. Morello.

The agency did not say why it wanted Mr. Alladin detained, though it typically does so when a person’s immigration status is in question. Mr. O’Donnell said he believed Mr. Alladin, who has been in the United States for at least about 10 years and was engaged to be married, was in the country legally.

But he wants to return to Trinidad anyway, Mr. O’Donnell said.

“It is awful; he has never been arrested before,” he said. “He is a hard-working guy. One of the things he kept saying was, in his Trinidadian accent, ‘Why did these people want to hurt me? I did nothing.'”

. . .

“He had a very, very legitimate self-defense argument,” said Mr. O’Donnell. “He had been chased by 10 or 12 kids for no reason for an argument that happened half an hour earlier that did not involve any of them. It was like a pack of wolves.

“He was running up and down the street screaming for people to call the police,” he said. “He was being hit by rocks, punched.

“He goes into the street and these kids surround him,” Mr. O’Donnell said. “One at a time they are stepping in and punching him.”

His back against a wall, Mr. Alladin pulled out the knife, he said.

“He had a knife in his bag, he was hoping they would see the knife and back off,” Mr. O’Donnell said. “It just so happened that the next person that stepped up to hit him happened to be this young girl. He did not know if it was a girl, he did not know if it was a boy, he just stuck the blade out to protect himself and she happened to get cut. Unfortunately it was a lethal stabbing.”

“‘Why did these people want to hurt me?” It’s a much, much better last line than Eric Bogosian’s final lines in subUrbia: “What is wrong with you . . . You throw it all away!” People, this is A Raisin in the Sun meets subUrbia! Pitch now!

For All That You Apparently Do, This Bud’s For You

If they let people in more often, maybe they’d see they’d get better press than the occasional Anheuser-Busch local reax story:

Local lore has it that Budweiser is, or at one point famously was, the drink of choice in Breezy Point, a flyspeck of a beach community that sits at the western tip of the Rockaways. The talk is that Breezy Point’s ZIP code — 11697 — once had the highest per capita consumption of Budweiser in the world.

And so it was with bitterness, and resignation, that many Breezy Point locals met the news on Monday that Anheuser-Busch, the St. Louis-based maker of Budweiser, was to be sold to a Belgian company for $52 billion.

“I don’t like it, I don’t like it a bit,” Mr. Dooley said. Then he raised his empty glass, which the bartender, Tom Coady, promptly refilled.

Breezy Point is overwhelmingly Irish-American, with an official year-round population of 4,226, a figure that is estimated to more than double in the summer. It is also fiercely insular, a private community that is run as a cooperative with its own security force.

A reporter and a photographer, setting out to gauge local reaction to Anheuser-Busch’s sale on Monday, were intercepted by a security guard at the community’s tiny shopping plaza, escorted back to the bungalow that houses Breezy Point’s security headquarters (along with several boxes of Budweiser cans confiscated from local teenagers), and tersely told to leave town. Officials later relented, and gave the reporter and photographer the go-ahead, so long as they promised to leave within the hour.

One hour, as it turned out, proved to be enough time to capture at least a fleeting sense of the devoutness instilled in the people of Breezy Point: They are as committed to their favorite beer as they are to their privacy. They would continue drinking Bud, they said, so long as its price and taste stayed the same.