Thinking Twice About C-Food

On the one hand, you might believe what you want to believe:

“If this is a C, then how do dirty jerk chicken joints in Flatbush get A’s? This place has a brand-new kitchen. I’ve seen it.”

Then again, it’s a little different when it comes to sushi restaurants:

At [a sushi place] in Whitestone, Queens, [the manager] said the spot’s C rating hasn’t hurt business.

But the grade was posted in a place where no customer could reasonably see it last week. [The manager] moved it to a more visible spot during an interview with a reporter, then later removed it from the window.

“The grade has not hurt us at all,” said [the manager], who said the restaurant spent $20,000 to fix problems that he claimed were unrelated to the food served.

[A passerby], 34, understood why the sushi joint was embarrassed by the grade.

July Weather Report Calls For High Heat, Humidity And Slush

Another budget, another round of dubious discretionary spending:

City Council members have lavished huge pork dollars on schools their kids attend — or where family members work.

Of course, if you don’t have this bizarre form of slush funding, er, discretionary spending in place to begin with then there’s no reason to have to clumsily explain it to your constituents.

Don’t Worry Mom, This Tattoo Is Just A Pilot Project

I just I just captioned a New Yorker cartoon. Such is the power of the Bloomberg Administration’s brand of creative thinking:

It has never been easy for a mayor to get things done in New York City, where every government proposal must navigate a thicket of community groups, policy boards, and empowered neighborhood gadflies who can blackball a project in a blink.

So the Bloomberg administration has taken a tack that could be called “do it first, answer questions later.” And the key to the strategy is to start small, and to use the word “pilot.”

Dozens of marquee administration projects, as broad as transforming the city streetscape with pedestrian plazas and bright green bike lanes or using new ways to train principals and encourage school attendance, have started as so-called pilot programs, ostensible experiments that are often exempt from the usual forms of city review.

The pilot has emerged as the mayor’s signature policy weapon. Admirers see an innovative way around red tape. Critics see a blunt tool that undermines democracy by minimizing the public’s role in scrutinizing the ideas of government.

Stupidest Holiday Ever Claims Another Victim

The bizarreness that is Brooklyn-Queens Day is causing yet more trouble:

As the sun faded following a thunderstorm, police were walking shoulder to shoulder on the boardwalk, shining flashlights into the crevices of the pieces of lumber, looking for shell casings.

. . .

The mayhem on the boardwalk unfolded after hundreds of kids enjoyed a day off from school for Brooklyn-Queens Day.

This Tree Kills Cockroaches

The problem with using “the latest scientific data” to guide public policy comes when assumptions might have been faulty to begin with. Over and over during the mayor’s big push to plant hundreds of thousands of trees across the city it was claimed that trees “reduce the pollutants that trigger asthma attacks and exacerbate other respiratory diseases” (which is actually a little more modest than how they tended to sell it in the past). Then some initial studies showed that cockroaches may be to blame. Now there’s further research with similar conclusions:

[A] new study by Columbia University’s Mailman School of Public Health [. . .] finds that higher exposure to cockroach dust may explain why some New York City children have asthma while others, who grow up just blocks away, do not.

. . .

Other studies have shown a link between cockroach exposure and asthma. But the Columbia study, published online in The Journal of Allergy and Clinical Immunology, is the first to show that children in high-asthma neighborhoods have been more exposed to cockroaches than those in adjacent low-asthma neighborhoods, Matthew Perzanowski, senior author of the study, said Tuesday.

The study may help explain, he said, why the prevalence of asthma among children entering school varies greatly by neighborhood, from 3 percent in Flushing, Queens, to almost 19 percent, in East Harlem.