And There Are A Lot of Red Lights In This City!

The president of one of the two firefighters’ unions is telling his men to adhere to stricter national guidelines calling for firetrucks to come to a complete stop at red lights and stop signs, even though City regulations allow firetrucks to cautiously proceed through them. Predictably, response times have gone up. Go figure!

Boo Freakin’ Hoo, Lady!

I can’t decide if this story was worth registering at the Post for:

A Queens couple claims their daughter’s memories of elementary school have been marred by a “horrible” yearbook photo, and are demanding the school recall all 200 books and replace the picture.

Michelle Maihepat, of South Ozone Park, said her 11-year-old daughter, Asheana, is so embarrassed by the “bad picture” that she has been crying and hiding her face in shame from her sixth-grade classmates at PS 121 since the yearbooks were distributed Monday.

“For the rest of her life, she’s going to have to be ashamed of that horrible picture,” Maihepat said.

“Twenty years down the line, she’s going to look at this book with her friends, and her friends are going to say, ‘What happened to you there?'”

If the Post keeps writing Onion-worthy stories like this, I might have to check them more often! This, for example — too much:

A teary-eyed Asheana said the episode has upset her so much that she has decided to skip graduation next week.

The family says anything less than a total recall is not good enough, reasoning that the yearbook is Asheana’s legacy among all her classmates at PS 121.

“Who knows, one day she might be famous or have a lot of money and someone could blackmail her with that picture,” Maihepat said.

You Mean That’s Offensive?

Had we only sculptor Eric Fischl’s “Tumbling Woman” — dayenu! Had we only Sharon Paz’s falling silhouettes in Jamaica, Queens — dayenu! But no, it wasn’t enough! The Daily News takes up the case:

A Brooklyn artist evoked the images of people who leaped to their deaths from the World Trade Center by repeatedly jumping off a Chicago musuem – outraging the families of some 9/11 victims.

Kerry Skarbakka, who wore a safety harness under his clothes, told the Daily News that Tuesday’s stunt was his way of asking questions about what went through the minds of those who jumped from the towers and others who watched helplessly.

But some people who lost loved ones in the terror attacks told The News they were disgusted by the very idea of Skarbakka’s “art” project.

“What kind of sick individual is he?” asked Rosemarie Giallombardo of Midwood, Brooklyn, who lost her son, Paul Salvio, on 9/11. “Tell him to go jump off the Empire State Building and see how it feels. He’s an artist? Go paint a bowl of fruit or something.”

The Latest Outrage

Parks Department plans to renovate Washington Square Park involve removing the concrete mounds in the southwest portion of the park. The New Yorker profiles a neighborhood group dedicated to preserving them, confirming that people in Greenwich Village have become no less loopy over the years:

Leonie Haimson, who lives just off Washington Square Park and heads a group of Village residents informally known as Save the Mounds, has been advised that, for public-relations reasons, it might be better to refer to the three asphalt bumps in the southwest corner of the park, threatened with demolition by the Parks Department’s renovation plans, by the term “hills.” “‘The Hills’ sounds less silly,” she said the other day, sitting on a bench with some fellow mounds defenders, not far from the objects of their attachment. In truth, the mounds, each of which is about six or eight feet high, are hills to about the same degree that Washington Square Park is square. But they are, as Haimson pointed out, all that the Village offers in the way of elevation; and they are sufficiently beloved for two thousand neighbors to have signed petitions protesting their destruction.

“Generations of children have played on these mounds—my daughter took her first running step on them,” Haimson said as her son, Nathaniel, who is six years old, frolicked on the mounds’ cracked and weedy surface. Another advocate, Suzanne Dickerson, said that her daughter Erin, now a junior at Yale, had played there avidly for years. “I credit her athletic ability to those mounds,” she said. “I really think it developed her calf muscles. She was a competitive track runner all through elementary school, until she switched to swimming.”

The piece notes the history of the mounds. And the fervent self-sacrificing nature of the mounds’ supporters:

The mounds were created in 1971, when, with the construction of two new children’s playgrounds, the park—which until the mid-sixties was a turnaround point for the Fifth Avenue bus line—was rededicated as a place for leisure. Robert Nichols, who was the project’s landscape designer, says that the mounds and the play area around them were inspired by the so-called “adventure playgrounds” that he had seen in Scandinavia. Although they were built for children, the mounds have been adopted by Villagers of all ages: hundreds of people mounted them this past winter with sleds in tow; and, until about five years ago, a theatre group used their valley as a natural amphitheatre for productions of Shakespeare and Sophocles. Over the years, however, the mounds fell into disrepair—an instance, Nichols believes, of malign neglect on the part of the Parks Department, inspired by the earlier thwarting by Village activists of Robert Moses’s hopes to bisect the park with an extension of Fifth Avenue. “I can’t imagine a park without a bunch of mounds, myself,” said Nichols, who now lives in Vermont but whose daughter, Eliza, has become one of the mounds’ chief protectors. (She told activist colleagues that she was prepared to lie down in the path of bulldozers.)

“I can’t imagine a park without a bunch of mounds, myself.” Are these people nuts? Fuck the stupid mounds!

Location Scout: Washington Square Park Mounds.

Mayor Mike: Rockin’ the Mic Left and Right

The Mayor’s kitchen cabinet in full gear, someone remembered the Bears’ Super Bowl Shuffle and lo and behold, a rap penned in honor of Mayor Bloomberg emerged:

“Mayor Mike’s Rockin”
BY ALISTAIR (CHARLIE BIGGS) SEALY
and LENNY (MR. L) MOORE

Who’s running the city an’ making it airtight?

I can tell you that nobody cares like Mayor Mike

Make your own way, go against that grain

It takes an independent mind to wanna change this game …

For people who thought he was keepin’ his dough

Saved the Harlem Dance Theatre when it needed him most …

The Board of Ed failed, that remains a true thing

Some are scared to change the way we do things

Mayor Mike is gettin’ with the times

Leaders should be independently inclined

City . . . airtight . . . can’t breathe . . . help!

The forgotten final verse (with apologies to Jim McMahon):

I am the funky mayor, known as Bloomberg.
They call me hizzoner, and I’ve got to return.
My funky kitchen cabinet gets into the mix
‘Cause they know I can’t dance, but that I can take the six.
Olympic Committee, I like to tease.
Board of Ed, I make them say please.
Anything about the Jets, any foolish kerfuffle
Is quickly forgotten after the Funky Mike Shuffle.