Contribute Or Leave

I’m thinking Owen Wilson and Kate Hudson:

Like his laidoff owner, Louie the 5-pound wonder dog is waiting for work.

Deborah Chusid, 46, lost her advertising job on Sept. 26, another New York casualty of the economic downturn.

If that wasn’t bad enough, when she phoned her ex to ask him to put their 14-year-old son, Jonah, on his health plan, there was another blow. He had lost his job the same day.

Now what?

. . .

Why not put the dog to work? Surely everyone would think Louie — a friendly black-and-white Mi-Ki named after Louis Armstrong — is as adorable as she and Jonah do.

. . .

Like people showbiz, it’s a dog-eat-dog world for animals trying to break in. [Linda Hanrahan, the president of Advertising for Animals and owner of the now departed Toonces the Cat of “Saturday Night Live” fame] advised that Louie not get his hind legs up too high, as the reality is often disappointing.

“I’ll try to get that poor little dog a week’s worth of dog food,” added Hanrahan, noting that most pet owners should not plan on their pooch becoming a meal ticket. Then in a whispered tone, she confided, “If she had a Jack Russell, it’s so much easier.”

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!

How Long Before This Storyline Gets On Law & Order?

I’m guessing it is already in the works:

The Manhattan district attorney, Robert M. Morgenthau, had a problem. The murder convictions of two men in one of his office’s big cases — the 1990 shooting of a bouncer outside the Palladium nightclub — had been called into question by a stream of new evidence.

So the office decided on a re-examination, led by a 21-year veteran assistant, Daniel L. Bibb.

Mr. Bibb spent nearly two years reinvestigating the killing and reported back: He believed that the two imprisoned men were not guilty, and that their convictions should be dropped. Yet top officials told him, he said, to go into a court hearing and defend the case anyway. He did, and in 2005 he lost.

But in a recent interview, Mr. Bibb made a startling admission: He threw the case. Unwilling to do what his bosses ordered, he said, he deliberately helped the other side win.

He tracked down hard-to-find or reluctant witnesses who pointed to other suspects and prepared them to testify for the defense. He talked strategy with defense lawyers. And when they veered from his coaching, he cornered them in the hallway and corrected them.

“I did the best I could,” he said. “To lose.”

Annotation: The baseline is 101 days.

We Have Our Whale

If there’s a more ominous symbol of summer, I can’t think of it:

Coast Guard officials spent yesterday searching for a dead whale spotted floating in a busy shipping lane south of New York Harbor.

Officials said that a passing boat had called in the sighting south of the Verrazano-Narrows Bridge, and though helicopter sweeps were done of the area, no whale was found.

“It may have drifted, it may have sank, we don’t know,” a Coast Guard official said.

A spokeswoman for the National Marine Fisheries Service, Connie Barclay, said the animal was likely to be a humpback whale, sei whale, or fin whale, as those species commonly feed in New York waters during the summer.

It’s rare to find a whale so close to the city’s harbor, an assistant stranding coordinator at the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, Ulrika Mamone, said.

“We do get one or two a year in the shipping lanes heading in,” she said. “This one was quite close.”

Boys Of Bummer

But with congestion pricing . . .:

A shooting suspect blew his brains out after the Con Ed truck he had stolen to flee cops got caught in traffic outside Yankee Stadium just as last night’s game ended, sources said.

The unidentified man — who earlier had shot his girlfriend in the shoulder after a violent argument — killed himself as pursuing officers closed in on him.

The suspect had gotten into a fight with the woman near East 151st Street and Courtlandt Avenue, about 20 blocks from the Stadium, at about 10 p.m.

He suddenly drew a gun and shot her in the shoulder, a police source said.

. . .

The gunman then hopped into a Con Ed truck that was left with its engine running at a work site.

When a utility worker confronted him, the suspect pointed a gun at his head and sped off.

Shortly after, he smashed into a police car, but got away.

As he approached the Stadium, at East 161st Street near the Macombs Dam Bridge, he got stuck in traffic. When cops approached the truck, they heard a gunshot and found the driver dead with a bullet wound to the head, authorities said.