While attempting to rescue a cat stuck in a tree, an NYPD officer got stuck in the tree and had to be rescued by the FDNY. Reread that to make sure you get the full effect of it.
Then Natto’s colleague put out a call for assistance from the FDNY.
Sources said dispatchers asked him to repeat what was going on — since they couldn’t believe what they were hearing.
When firefighters arrived, “they didn’t go straight to helping him,” Giuong said. “They all gathered around and laughed at him. They took their time just crowding around. It seemed the officer was enjoying himself.”
Stories like this make the Post, and me, very giddy.
The New Yorker has an interactive graph that plots the median income of each stop on each line of the NYC subway.
It’s amazing how much the change is from one stop to the next. Take the A train for example…look at the jump between Fulton and Chambers.
The Times’ Pete Wells reviews Guy’s American Kitchen & Bar in Times Square:
GUY FIERI, have you eaten at your new restaurant in Times Square? Have you pulled up one of the 500 seats at Guy’s American Kitchen & Bar and ordered a meal? Did you eat the food? Did it live up to your expectations?
[...]
When you hung that sign by the entrance that says, WELCOME TO FLAVOR TOWN!, were you just messing with our heads?
EVERYTHING about this review is just so so awesome.
Eater has posted the harshest lines of the review with pictures of cats.
UPDATE: The Times Public Editor weighed in on whether such overwhelmingly negative reviews should be written, saying:
Is it ever really acceptable for criticism to be so over the top, considering that there are human beings behind every venture? I think it is. That kind of brutal honesty is sometimes necessary. If it is entertaining, all the better. The exuberant pan should be an arrow in the critic’s quiver, but reached for only rarely.
NOLA to New York is a tumblr that has Katrina survivors in New Orleans talk to New Yorkers about how to deal with the aftermath of a big storm.
I am a freelance journalist and New York is my home. But New Orleans was once. I am in NOLA now, waiting to get home in the wake of Sandy. So while I am pacing, worried about my husband, friends and my city, I thought up this project. Who better than the people of New Orleans to talk to the people of NYC right now. They know, they lived through Katrina. They are still living with it seven years later.
Patience, compassion, and being nice to each other seem to be the keys. Too bad that a) it takes a big storm to bring those qualities out in people, and b) New Yorkers don’t have much of any of those three. New Jerseyans are even worse.
The Atlantic’s In Focus has 54 pictures of Hurricane Sandy’s aftermath.
Last night, Hurricane Sandy — the largest Atlantic tropical system on record — made landfall just south of Atlantic City, New Jersey, bringing winds up to 90 mph (150 kph), and pushing a massive storm surge onto beaches and shorelines.
Update: They’ve posted another set of pictures.
NYC’s MTA has posted some photos of their system wide shutdown in preparation of hurricane Sandy. It’s really weird and erie to see some stations completely empty when they are normally bustling even at 3am and 4am. I really hope that guy made that train.
My office is closed and I’m up because I forgot to turn off my alarm clock. I’m an idiot.
The Wall Street Journal recently spent the day in Central Park counting the number of sports played. 29.
It is hard to even think of 29 distinct sports. Beyond the obvious (softball, basketball, cycling, running), there were ones we couldn’t identify without asking the participants.
I don’t know that I would classify toy airplanes and kites as a “sport”.
Photographer Navid Baraty takes photos of midtown NYC intersections from a rarely seen angle: above.
So many taxis.
According to Guinness World Records, the most expensive hamburger can be found at Serendipity 3 in NYC:
The hamburger is made from white truffle butter-infused Japanese Wagyu beef and topped with James Montgomery cheddar cheese, black truffles and a fried quail egg. It is served on a gold-dusted campagna roll spread with white truffle butter. The roll is topped with a blini, creme fraiche and caviar.
According to the press release, profits of the burger will be donated to the The Bowery Mission.
I love food made with gold; makes your poop all glittery.
Rumors are flying that the Yankees might be for sale.
“Hal’s a smart businessman,” the source said. “And I’m just not sure that he considers baseball to be a smart business. I think he looks at some of these other owners, throwing $200 million at players and thinks they’re idiots — idiots that unfortunately can affect the way he does business. [...]“
This makes total sense to me. The Steinbrenner kids were never fans like their father, and with the amount that the Dodgers sold for, they’d be stupid not to listen to offers. The potential problem is that some large corporation or group of investors will buy it, will have no passion for the game (like the Steinbrenner kids), and will just run the team as an investment. How did that work out for CBS? I might like to see some sort of public ownership, à la The Green Bay Packers.
Update: Unsurprisingly, Hal Steinbrenner denies the rumor.
The Atlantic’s John Metcalfe asks, “Why aren’t cities littered with dead pigeons?”
The favorite rumpus room of the pigeon, New York City, is thought to contain anywhere between 1 and 7 million of the flapping rats of the sky.
So where are all the dead ones?
The dog I had when I was young would chase after pigeons for her first year. Never did catch one. That was probably a good thing after seeing some of the videos accompanying this article.
Manhattan will soon have its first $1 million parking spot.
The private garage at 66 E. 11th St. costs six times more than the national-average price of a single-family home.
Buying it would be the same as paying a $115 ticket for illegal parking every day — for 24 years.
For moguls or celebrities, however, the rare commodity of a Manhattan parking space inside their building, with a curb cut at the street, is a huge status symbol and selling point.
It’ll sell. No problem.
A disaster analysis firm has put the damage caused in “The Avengers” at $160 billion.
Watson said he was surprised by a lower-than-expected total. “Compared to the aliens in Independence Day, for example, these guys were amateurs,” he told THR. “Of course, the Chitauri/Loki alliance were more interested in conquest and ruling, whereas the ID aliens were just looking for lunch or something.”
While that’s what it would cost in normal universe money, they failed to take into account that in the Marvel Universe (in which “The Avengers” takes place), there are many extremely wealthy philanthropists, amazing technology, and a construction company dedicated to cleaning up the messes caused by super villains and superheroes, so I doubt the costs would actually be that high. You know, a movie about Damage Control has some potential.
The NYC Department of Records has recently introduced the municipal archive gallery online, with access to over 800,000 photos, maps, audio recordings, and more. It’s so popular that the site is offline as they work on it.
Both The Daily Mail and The Atlantic’s ‘In Focus’ have republished highlights from the archive. It’s amazing to see how much has changed and how some things don’t. The Daily took three photos and posted then-and-now versions.
Note, there are some photos of dead or dying people in the group above. They’re not very graphic, but if you’re very squeamish, you might want to avoid.