Low Hanging Fruit

Anyone who wants to get a rise out of people only needs to ask subway riders what upsets them most:

They chew like cows, clip their nails and charge open seats like linebackers.

Meet the rudest of the rude subway riders.

The Daily News asked readers last week for their subway bad manners pet peeves — and our e-mail boxes filled up faster than the No. 7 train at rush hour.

There were daily horror stories about door blockers who refuse to move, and sprawlers who spread their legs far too wide, taking up more than one seat.

. . .

One reader snapped at “GUM SNAPPERS. These people try to make as much noise as possible. They sound like cows and act like pigs.” Others took aim at “pole huggers” who wrap themselves around the floor-to-ceiling poles designed to be used by many standing riders.

I prefer the term “subway pole dancer,” but that’s just me.

The Chutzpah Is Endemic

Are state hospitals mimicking the Yankees by retaining public relations firms to lobby the public? It looks that way:

Panic is setting in among New York’s money-hemorrhaging hospitals as Governor Pataki’s health care commission nears completion of a first draft of proposals for revamping the state’s troubled health industry.

Late next week, commission members are set to receive confidential advisory reports that will likely include lists of hospitals and nursing homes marked for downsizing or closure. Although the reports are nonbinding, they represent the first time the commission is formally considering recommendations and are the object of intense speculation and fear in the industry.

. . .

In preparation for worst-case scenarios, hospitals are quietly retaining lobbying and public relations firms and reaching out to local lawmakers for support, according to advisers to the commission.

The behind-the-scenes maneuvering by the hospitals is expected to give way to a full-scale campaign, entailing television advertising, protests, and lawsuits, that could be coordinated with the expected return of lawmakers to Albany after the November elections for a special session.

. . .

“They are not coming out and holding press conferences,” a member of a regional advisory committee said. “They are preparing themselves to attack the commission, to take legal action, and to lobby, lobby, lobby.” One struggling downtown hospital has hired the lobbying firm of a former senator, Alfonse D’Amato, according to the committee member, who did not wish to be identified because of the confidential nature of the commission’s work.

Us Dithering About Fucking Conspiracy Theories Means That The Terrorists Really Have Won, And Good For Them Because They’ve Obviously Got Scoreboard On This Count

Hey, Idiot — I can’t believe our tax dollars are going to rebut your asinine conspiracy theories:

Faced with an angry minority of people who believe the Sept. 11 attacks were part of a shadowy and sprawling plot run by Americans, separate reports were published this week by the State Department and a federal science agency insisting that the catastrophes were caused by hijackers who used commercial airliners as weapons.

The official narrative of the attacks has been attacked as little more than a cover story by an assortment of radio hosts, academics, amateur filmmakers and others who have spread their arguments on the Internet and cable television in America and abroad. As a motive, they suggest that the Bush administration wanted to use the attacks to justify military action in the Middle East.

Most elaborately, they propose that the collapse of the World Trade Center was actually caused by explosive charges secretly planted in the buildings, rather than by the destructive force of the airliners that thundered into the towers and set them ablaze.

The government reports and officials say the demolition argument is utterly implausible on a number of grounds. Indeed, few proponents of the explosives theory are willing to venture explanations of how daunting logistical problems would be overcome, such as planting thousands of pounds of explosives in busy office towers.

Nevertheless, federal officials say they moved to affirm the conventional history of the day because of the persistence of what they call “alternative theories.” On Wednesday, the National Institute of Standards and Technology issued a seven-page study based on its earlier 10,000-page report on how and why the trade center collapsed. The full report, released a year ago, and the new study, in a question and answer format, are available online at http://wtc.nist.gov.

See also: Conspiracy Theory Underground And Nico, Pod Theory, Controlled Demolition And The Flash Is Not A Sunday Matinee Hardcore Bill At CBGB, Ed Begley, Jr.?.

I Don’t Know, I Just Started Here

After learning that in effect, taxpayers are paying the Yankees to lobby the city, more details emerge about how that happened. In short, basically everyone was new:

Henry Stern, who as Giuliani’s parks commissioner was the one to actually sign the Yanks and Mets lease extensions, says he “never heard any conversation relating to legal and lobbying costs,” though he quickly adds, “I didn’t handle negotiations.” But he’s not exactly surprised that things turned out as they did.

“I have found that very often, just in the course of business, when the city signs an agreement with another party, and city officials change and the private party remains the same, things don’t come out the way they were intended by the city,” says Stern, who has served on and off in city government since 1973 and now runs his own think tank. “Particularly in economic development matters, the reality on the ground often ends up different from what the parties intended when they signed the lease.” This was particularly true, he says, at the end of 2001, as Giuliani’s staffers cleared out their desks to make way for Bloomberg’s team: “The city was not rich in institutional memory.”

And if that wasn’t enough:

Those having a portion of their salaries charged to taxpayers included George Steinbrenner’s sons Hal and Hank, plus his son-in-law (and now designated successor) Steve Swindal.

In addition to lobbyists, the Yankees charged the city $56,967.46 for the services of Sive, Paget & Riesel, the outside law firm that drew up the new lease in the first place.

The New York Times On Your Side

The good news is that they finally found your car underneath tons of rubble. The bad news is that you have to pay to have it towed away:

Denise Jack got a good news-bad news phone call from an insurance company yesterday regarding her blue 1993 Nissan Pathfinder, which was buried by an avalanche in Upper Manhattan last year and has been sitting beneath the mountain of dirt on Riverside Drive ever since.

The good news was that after more than a year of waiting and frustration, her sport utility vehicle would soon be dug out.

The bad news was that she would have pay to have the S.U.V. — or the presumably flattened hunk of metal, glass and rubber that was once her car — towed away.

“They said they were about to dig out the cars and needed my documents to see if they could settle it,” Ms. Jack said. “That made me hopeful, but then they said it was my responsibility to have the car towed away once it was dug out.”

On the morning of May 12, 2005, Ms. Jack parked the Pathfinder on Riverside Drive next to a 75-foot-high retaining wall beneath the Castle Village apartment complex near 183rd Street.

When the wall gave way that afternoon and collapsed onto the Henry Hudson Parkway, it buried the stretch of Riverside Drive where Ms. Jack’s vehicle and several others were parked. There the S.U.V. sat as the seasons rolled by, beneath a two-story mountain of dirt, debris and uprooted trees.

Since her car insurance policy did not cover landslides, Ms. Jack filed a claim with the Greater New York Mutual Insurance Company, which insures Castle Village. Yesterday, she said, that company contacted her to say that the cars would be dug out soon, and asked her to fax some ownership and registration documents to them. And, they said, she should be ready to pay for towing costs.

“I definitely don’t think I should be accountable for removing the car,” Ms. Jack said. “I didn’t know the wall was going to fall when I parked there. It wasn’t even that great of a parking spot.”

Backstory: Retaining Wall to Henry Hudson Parkway: Drop Dead, Rvr Vus.