kidchamp dot net

01.14.08

twelve things, continued-continued-continued:

07 from the new york times's city room blog, mayor bloomberg and the cheez-its:

On Wednesday, Newsday and its sister publication amNewYork published an article noting that a photo of Mayor Michael R. Bloomberg in Wired Magazine shows the mayor evidently reaching for a bag of Cheez-Its. The snack contains trans fats, which the Bloomberg administration has prohibited city restaurants from using.

so much for that potential third-party run for the presidency! as someone who is paid to think about such things, i am amused. first, obviously, the trans fat ban had/has nothing to do with packaged foodstuffs. then there was the misguided smug backlash from people who noted that cheez-its contain "zero grams" of trans fat - but didn't know that per the fda, "zero grams" means "less than 0.5 grams of fat per serving."* last and lustiest were those who simply noted that cheez-its are delicious, and right they are! i limit myself to the little bag i'm offered at the blood bank after donating platelets - they (the crackers, not the platelets) really are nutritionally disastrous - but what a bag it is. glad to see the uptick in cheez-it-related news stories.

08 didn't hear of cheezgate? perhaps you heard of our neighborhood weekend at bernie's revival.

After [Hell's Kitchen resident] Mr. [Virgilio] Cintron recently died, Mr. [James] O'Hare, 65, and another friend, David Daloia, also 65, whose last known address was in Queens, tried, without success, to cash a Social Security check of Mr. Cintron's, the police say. They realized that they needed their dead buddy's help.

So on Tuesday afternoon, the police say, they dressed Mr. Cintron's corpse, carried him down a flight of stairs and heaved his body into a computer chair with wheels. Outside, they rolled him over the uneven sidewalk, pulling the chair toward Pay-O-Matic, a check-cashing shop on Ninth Avenue.

But as the men turned the corner, trying to steady the floppy corpse, they ran into the law. At Empanada Mama,** a restaurant next door to the Pay-O-Matic, Travis L. Rapp, a detective, had sat down to lunch.

Detective Rapp looked out the window and saw the unwieldy trio. Something about the way they struggled to balance the man in the chair caught his eye.

"At this point, when they approached closer, I saw the body and I said, 'Well, this is a dead guy,' " Detective Rapp said on Wednesday in a phone briefing.

those of you who have crashed at our place might recognize that stretch of ninth avenue, as i did when i saw the news the other day - it's two blocks away, just north of our vet and the amish market. to give you a sense of our neighborhood's identity crisis, about half of the locals i know found the whole thing quite retro-charming. that darn hell's kitchen!

*"trans fat free," on the other hand, means just that. if you suspect that i've gotten stuck at the office in late-night arguments about this very issue, you are right!

**also delicious, by the by (want good local food? follow the cops). their dessert empanadas are the awesome.