If You Think Your PCP Is A Big Enough Nag Already . . .

. . . just wait until he or she is eligible to receive performance bonuses from the Department of Health:

And echoing the city’s cash-incentive experiments in the school system, the health department will soon start offering doctors bonuses of perhaps $100 for each patient who hits specified targets like controlling blood pressure or cholesterol, up to $20,000 for each doctor.

And then they’ll really start pimping out those statin drugs!

Maybe You Like The Idea Of Living In An Uninsulated Ferry On Newtown Creek

Me, not so much:

The residence is 6,000 square feet across four floors, with 15-foot ceilings. From a roof deck the size of a tennis court, there is an unbroken view of the Manhattan skyline. The main room is so big it even has a swing — perfect for the frequent all-night parties held there, about which there are no neighbors to complain. Best of all, one can live rent free in exchange for helping to keep the place up.

But there is no insulation and the heating is patchy, so its five residents often see their breath indoors and must sleep under piles of blankets. The power from noisy diesel generators is intermittent and there is no mail delivery. The shower does not work and the toilets flush only if someone hauls a bucket of water from over the side and throws it in.

. . .

Jonathan sleeps in the captain’s quarters, a small cabin littered with power tools and candles. Bruce Beese, who grew up with Jonathan in Montana, moved into the pilot house a few weeks ago, and sleeps next to the ship’s wheel on a bed he got free on Craigslist. “I was a little worried about the possible bedbugs situation, but I think it’s good,” said Mr. Beese, 28, who remodels homes. “It probably helps that it’s freezing in here.”

Jason Menders, 31, who works in construction and is also from Montana, has lived on the ship since the beginning. “Summer is better than winter,” he said. “But even that gets too hot. And you can smell the sewage from the sewage outflow sometimes.”

From The Broken-Windows Theory Of Policing To The Faux Western-Facade Theory Of Policing . . .

As John Wayne once said, “Talk low, talk slow and don’t say too much”:

The NYPD is making an unusual move to ensure no one notices a decline in the number of cops on the streets — decking out the vehicles used by traffic-enforcement agents, auxiliary police and school-safety agents so they look like regular cruisers.

The move will be phased in slowly with the special units — who have typically used cars painted dark blue — to be given the white cars that are taken out of use from the main fleet.

The only difference will be in the decals affixed to the sides of the vehicles that indicate which unit they are from.

“This is to make this look like there are more cops on the street,” said a law-enforcement official familiar with the decision.

In all, there are about 100 cars used by the auxiliary wing of the department and 200 used by each of the school-safety and traffic-enforcement divisions.

So Who Is Going To Give Her The Ben Affleck Treatment?

Amazing. Especially considering that voting — the simple act of filling in a bubble, poking a chad or chonk-chonking that big goofy lever — is basically the easiest thing in the world, and the one way even the laziest, most incurious of us participate in democracy.

Unless you have some bizarre philosophical aversion, not voting (and this from the daughter of one of the most revered presidents in history!) should basically rule you out of ever participating in electoral politics.

Oh wait, I forgot — there’s no election here.

I’m pretty offended.

The Scottish King! The Scottish King!

More like “Macbeth!”:

“The last 15 years have been boom years for theater — I always expected the pendulum to swing, and I simply see this as a correction,” said Nancy Coyne, chairwoman of the theater advertising agency Serino Coyne. “The good news is that so many straight plays are now coming in the spring, and I think New Yorkers will come out for them once the tourists go away. We’re horrible snobs. We hate tourists from Cleveland.”

Just keep telling yourself that.

Personally, I can’t wait to sink my teeth into “the story of a world traveling photojournalist and a New York gallery owner who discover each other and also that there might be an art to repairing broken lives” (“Impressionism”). And nothing takes my mind off of a worldwide economic crisis like a new Moises Kaufman play about “a musicologist who travels to the Beethoven archives in Germany to unravel the mystery surrounding the composer’s enigmatic ‘Diabelli Variations,’ only to discover she has a fatal illness” (“33 Variations”). Oh and hey, what better way is there for New York theatergoers to forget eight years of Bush than an uplifting Ibsen revival? “Hedda sets out on a shocking path of destruction that affects the lives of everyone around her” — I remember that one! — but it does have the hot lady from Weeds. Aw, alright — send me a postcard with some midweek discount and I’ll think about it . . .