You Get What You Pay For

I’m not sure whether Wi-Fi would have helped or just exacerbated the situation:

A Brooklyn man was busted on a Philly-Chinatown bus yesterday for pleasuring himself in front of disgusted fellow riders, police said.

. . .

“He’s a jerk-off,” [a disgusted fellow rider] said. “He deserves that name.”

What Was Wrong With “Liberty Plaza”?

The problem with renaming places for people who are still alive is that anything off-message that happens there could mean one’s “legacy is forever intertwined, if not over-shadowed” by said events:

John Zuccotti, 74, is co-chair of global real estate giant Brookfield Properties, the owner of the half-acre slice of pink granite and honey locust trees the Occupy Wall Street movement took over.

And even though the NYPD removed the tent city that crammed the park, friends say Zuccotti worries his legacy is forever intertwined, if not over-shadowed by the showdown.

“He was very worried about it,[“] former Mayor Ed Koch told the Daily News after speaking with Zuccotti recently. “He said, ‘Everybody knows my name, Zuccotti, not because of what I’ve done as an individual, but because of the park.'”

“It’s been a difficult time for him,[“] Koch said.

Still, in the eyes of the populist OWS protest, he’s now considered part of the problem — a member of the countrys wealthiest 1%.

Better to stick to old tried-and-true names — George Washington, for example.

Have We Really Gotten To The Point Where A Second-Tier Mayoral Candidate Can’t Make An Inappropriate Tiananmen Square Comparison Without Folks Getting All Worked Up About It?

I can’t believe I’m writing this, but I’m kind of enjoying Howard Wolfson taking mayoral hopefuls to task on their OWS grandstanding:

Stringer said “any time a police force comes into a park in the middle of the night and arrests 200 civilians is definitely a cause of concern,” adding that he was troubled by allegations of violence against protesters and the treatment of reporters, who were forcibly penned blocks from the park and subject to arrest.

“Zuccotti Park is not Tiananmen Square,” had said.

But Wolfson said that comparisons to Tiananmen and Iraq were uncalled for.

“That is an insult to the men and women of the NYPD who carried this out professionally,” he said.

“That kind of rhetoric is so overblown and so outrageous and so indicative of people who are not squaring up with the facts,” said Wolfson, claiming that these officials had failed to address the central question — whether tents at tarps should be allowed.

“The central issue before this mayor, at this time, was whether or not tenting and tarping and camping can continue at Zuccotti Park.

“And not a single statement by any of the mayoral aspirants addressed that issue,” he said. “They all ducked the central issue before this mayor and this city yesterday.”

Wolfson called on all of the mayoral candidates to come forward with their positions on whether the Occupy Wall Street encampment should have been allowed to remain.

“Anyone running for mayor ought to have a position on this issue,” he said, adding that those who supported the tents, “should have been willing to say that. That’s what it means to step up and run for mayor.”

Stringer shot back on Twitter Wednesday evening, tweeting Wolfson, “kudos on ur #OWS work, but ur not in a position 2 tell reporters what 2 ask after keeping them away from Zuccotti & arresting them.”

My hope is that in some magical alternate reality, all borough presidents will be forced to communicate only in short bursts of no more than 140 characters. And it will feel so good to finally unfollow.

Gilding A Pothole With A Noirish Pedestrian Plaza

There’s a great mixed message that the Mayor’s aides float out there in Michael Powell’s “Third Term Blues” piece in which Casey At The Bat baseball analogies are invoked. On the one hand, all the citizenry really cares about are getting potholes fixed while on the other, a third term is a big, beautiful, only slightly warped canvas for one’s legacy:

Reporters, he notes, fixate on trials and contracting scandals far more than voters do. If you look at the mayor’s poll numbers after Tropical Storm Irene, they have taken on helium, he noted.

“How do New Yorkers live their lives? They care about crime, about schools, about garbage pickup,” Mr. Wolfson said, “all of the things that are vital to the lifeblood of the city, and they run pretty well.”

. . .

More grandly, the mayor and his aides now gallop hard in pursuit of a technology corridor on Roosevelt Island, to be built with Stanford or Cornell and the City University of New York. If successful, and the mayor’s team appears to have skillfully laid the groundwork, this could turn Silicon Alley into a broad avenue of innovation and jobs.

But the emphasis, for now, remains on the conditional tense.

“They need a masterstroke that shifts all your attention off the last year and a half,” a former official who has worked in several administrations said. “They need the home run in the bottom of the ninth inning.”

Of course, as this official noted, the problem with waiting until the ninth inning is that, as with the Yankees’ Alex Rodriguez, you can step up to the plate and strike out.

As Long As It’s In Brooklyn, There Is Hardly Anything Marty Markowitz Won’t Support

If only Borough Presidents were about shaking up the system . . . but then there’d be no Borough Presidents:

A shadowy group calling itself Occupy Brooklyn is set to rally in Grand Army Plaza on Saturday — the first big protest in Brooklyn — and unlike many mainstream Democrats and Mayor Bloomberg, Borough President Markowitz is offering some support.

“It was only a matter of time before the . . . rallies made their way to Brooklyn,” Markowitz told us. “There is no doubt that Americans — those in the ‘99 percent’ — are hurting, and we can all agree that some of the issues being raised by these protests . . . are concerns we can all rally around.”