Rest In Piece; For A While There At Least, We Used To Scoop Shit In This Country . . . Now We Just Let Our Dogs Crap On The Piles Of Snow Left To Evaporate On The Sidewalk

As the snow piles from the recent storm melt away and the dog shit that inconsiderate canine owners allowed to drop on top of them remains, let’s pay homage to Fran Lee, who died last weekend at the age of 99:

At the behest of a New York doctor, Ms. Lee took up the cause of dog waste. In the early ’70s she founded Children Before Dogs, a group whose aim was the elimination of all such waste from city streets. As she explained often in interviews, Toxocara canis, a tiny roundworm found in dog feces, poses health risks, especially to children. At its most severe, it can cause blindness.

In staunch contrarian fashion, Ms. Lee initially fought the city’s plan to enact a pooper-scooper law. By her lights, such laws were far too lenient. In the world of which she dreamed, no dog would be allowed to besmirch the city’s streets for even a moment: instead, it would attend to its affairs at home, on newspaper, before padding outside. She envisioned, as she told The Times in 1972, a battalion of city “poodle maids,” who would prowl New York issuing summonses to the masters of dog offenders.

Ms. Lee’s stand put her at the forefront of the pitched battle over dog excrement that raged in the city for much of the ’70s. When she appeared in public, outraged dog owners hurled invective; occasionally they hurled the subject matter of the debate itself. Ms. Lee had no qualms about responding in kind.

Who Created The Would-Be Puppy Killer?

We sit back like they taught us. We keep quiet like they taught us. But we are all there. And we are all guilty:

Dog lovers across the borough remain on high alert after a creepy Craigslist post threatened to poison pooches with deadly dog treats.

“Too many dogs!” read the post, which has since been taken down by the Web site. “Too many pissing and s–ting everywhere. Kill them! Cull the herd! I am leaving poison in bits of meat and gravy dog food. Poison the dogs!!”

Somebody Obviously Huffed A Ton Of White Out In Grade School . . .

When you put it this way, the contamination in Newtown Creek seems almost pleasant:

Investigators probing a toxic underground chemical plume in Greenpoint have discovered groundwater with levels of a cancer-causing cleaning solvent more than 14 million times the state standard.

“We got hit in the face with it before we got our gear on,” said state Department of Environmental Conservation project manager David Harrington, adding that water contaminated with PCE splashed out while his crew was doing repair work.

“It smelled like White-Out times a thousand with a lot of sugar thrown in for a couple seconds until my nasal lining burned out,” he said. “That’s pure product.”

Location Scout: Newtown Creek.

Greatest Joyride Ever!

Who would want to steal a Greyhound bus? More like Who wouldn’t want to steal a Greyhound bus:

Cops recovered an abandoned Greyhound in Queens Wednesday that had been swiped from one of the bus line’s lots on Sunday.

“Who would want to steal a Greyhound?” asked Jose Martinez, 42, a worker at an East Elmhurst deli where the $75,000 bus was found. “It’s not like you can sell it or hide easily.”

Fresh Off Its Victorious Effort To Stop The Closing Of Guantanamo Bay, REBNY Now Aims To Save The Flagging Municipal Bond Market

The problem is that it’s a lot easier to get the Obama Administration to twist in the wind than it is to get a thousand-ton tunnel boring machine to poke a couple more holes in the bedrock:

Fresh off a victorious effort to persuade the federal government to move the Khalid Shaikh Mohammed trial from New York City, the Real Estate Board of New York, the powerful lobbying arm of the industry, has turned its attention to the missing link in the No. 7 line. This week it started a Web site (BuildTheStation.com), a petition drive and a lobbying campaign to press the Obama administration to come up with hundreds of millions of dollars to pay for the station.

“We think it should have two stops,” said Steven Spinola, president of the Real Estate Board. “There is substantial growth already taking place near 10th and 41st. For them to quietly let the station evaporate, without anyone telling anybody, is a mistake.”

(Innocent question: Since when did REBNY get the government to switch the KSM trial location?)