I Know There’s An Obesity Problem In This Country, But You Can’t Find At Least A Couple Of People That Could Do The Same Job?

The mayor clarifies his position on immigration reform:

Hizzoner boasted on his radio show Friday that the leaders of 11 major fashion houses have pledged their support to his efforts to fix the nation’s immigration policy.

Without that change, the hottest models might start strutting their stuff on catwalks far from New York, Bloomberg warned.

“What’s happened is that some fashion people can’t get their models over here,” Bloomberg said. “So they start to cancel some of their photo shoots, because they can’t get models in or the cameras.”

The Daily News goes on to note that this is the same issue that Anthony Weiner brought up two years ago — and was ridiculed about by the mayor’s reelection team.

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!”

More Evidence Of Quotas On Staten Island

With an overtime angle, to boot:

Two Staten Island cops are accused of writing motorists more than 40 bogus tickets while assigned to overtime duty, authorities said.

. . .

The accused officers submitted paperwork to their bosses to make it look like they were doing their jobs, but never gave the summonses to the unsuspecting motorists, sources said.

Kurt Andersen Comes Down Against Basketball, Wants To Take “Recreation” Out Of “Parks & Recreation”

Not to mention that there’s also something really pretentious sounding about “piazza”:

He told [the Brooklyn Paper] that his notion is to annex the “underused” western portion of [Carroll Park] near Court Street for the piazza, setting up tables, chairs and awnings — a cosmopolitan space where area cafés could serve drinks and food.

. . .

Andersen, the former architecture and design critic for Time magazine and a co-founder of Spy magazine, conceded that basketball players could be displaced by his plan, but ballers would have a readily available option nearby, as PS 58 at Smith and First Place has outdoor courts.

. . .

“Certainly, this connects to the ethnic heritage of the neighborhood of the last century,” he said. “But to me, this is for everyone in the neighborhood,” he said.

Location Scout: Carroll Park.

Third-Term Malaise Alert: The Thin Line Between Faux Folksiness And Lousy Grammar

It’s not so much a “you have to” scenario but rather a “you got to” sort of thing — kind of like when Kenny Rogers sings “you got to know when to hold ’em, know when to fold ’em” in “The Gambler,” or when The Beatles sang “got to be a joker he just do what he please” in “Come Together” or even when Randy Newman snarked that when it comes to short people, “you got to pick ’em up just to say hello”:

At his news conference Wednesday, the mayor appeared to have no patience for any employee who somehow missed his unannounced media appearances. “You got to listen,” he demanded.

Earlier: “At Least They Didn’t Call Them ‘Non-Essential'”.