When Mayoral Candidates Deliver

Artful governing pays off in the end with tremendous results:

Early this year, Christine C. Quinn, the speaker of the New York City Council, held a news conference at City Hall to announce that she had resolved one of the most contentious issues to face the Council during her six-year tenure — a proposed law that would raise the wages of workers in developments subsidized by the city.

. . .

This week, three months after her initial announcement, Ms. Quinn, a likely candidate for mayor next year, said that she had at last completed revising the measure, and that it would be “the most impactful living-wage law in the United States.”

But it now exempts even more employers, and by her office’s estimate, just 400 to 500 low-wage workers a year will benefit.

We Have To Put The Focus Back On The Kids . . . As Backdrops!

This day in irony:

Ms. Black appears to have been among the last to find out. At about 8 a.m. Thursday, an aide to Mr. Walcott called Laura Scott, the principal of Public School 10 in Park Slope, Brooklyn, and asked her to arrange for a group of fifth graders to attend a press conference at City Hall, where they would serve as the backdrop for an announcement. The aide did not tell Ms. Scott the topic of the event — Ms. Black’s resignation.

About an hour later, the mayor met with Ms. Black at City Hall. In his private office, on the first floor, Mr. Bloomberg told her that her position was no longer tenable. She had become the story, not the schools, he said, distracting her staff and the public. “We have to put the focus back on the kids,” he said.

The Cultural McNugget

It’s like Danger Mouse’s The Grey Album set to fried chicken. Or like Shepard Fairey’s preemptive suit against the Associated Press — set to fried chicken. Mash it up, derive the derivative and claim ownership over something that no one really owned in the first place:

Abdul Haye, the self-styled Colonel Sanders of New York’s Afghan community, has declared a fried chicken war.

He has armed himself with an unwritten secret recipe that he claims allows him to fry the best bird in town. His main weapon, he says, is ownership of the trademark for the Kennedy Fried Chicken brand, which has spawned hundreds of imitators as far south as Georgia, and has become to oily drumsticks what the ubiquitous Ray’s name once was to New York pizza.

That Kennedy, named after the former president, was itself a deliberate imitation of Kentucky Fried Chicken, down to those familiar initials — and that it had its own trademark battle a generation ago — seems to make little difference to Mr. Haye, 38. A wired and wiry resident of Whitestone, Queens, he began working as a chicken fryer when he was 17, soon after he immigrated in 1989, and describes his rivals with ire similar to that he reserves for the Taliban.

“I’m declaring war against all the Afghans in New York who have stolen my name and my idea,” Mr. Haye said the other day at one of his five chicken outlets, showing off the trademark certificate that the United States Patent and Trademark Office in Washington had awarded him in 2005. He waved a thick stack of some of the 300 registered letters he began to mail last week to Kennedy outlets across the country, insisting that they pay him a monthly franchise fee, or face legal action. “Their poor-quality chicken is going to kill my reputation,” Mr. Haye complained. “I am the only real Kennedy!”

Textbook Irony, Right?

The consultants who set up the City’s flawed and astonishingly overbudget CityTime timekeeping system — by now allegedly ten times overbudget — are now federally fucked:

“In an ironic twist, a project intended to prevent payroll waste, fraud and abuse was itself allegedly bilked in part by fraudulent time-keeping,” said Manhattan US Attorney Preet Bharara.

I Would Ask If This Is An Example Of Irony But I Can’t See Around The Giant Inflatable Rat In My Face

First off, Happy Birthday, Giant Inflatable Union Rat — it turned 20 this year. The Daily News marks the occasion and notes that even though the thing has been used to great effect by the city’s unions to inform the public about non-union work sites (or whatever they’re using them for), there is actually no giant inflatable rat-maker union:

The vinyl vermin quietly marked their 20th birthday this year. The folks at Illinois-based Big Sky Balloons and Searchlights, creators of the inflatables, made their first rat for a Chicago bricklayers union in 1990.

Business was soon blowing up — the rats became an instant, unlikely symbol of corporate greed and anti-union work sites.

The company — a nonunion shop, by the way — says the majority of its business is done on the East Coast. The rats range in height from a relatively small 6-footer to the super-sized 25-footer.

The costs can run upward of $8,000.

See also: Union Rat.