Our miserable little ice chip of a mayor: "the department of buildings didn't crash, the crane crashed."

He started out his press conference defending the construction company, saying that construction fatalities happened all over the world---he came thisclose to saying construction fatalities are just the cost of doing business, and was clearly annoyed at being challenged about how many we have had.

The New York we know, aside from the big tourist attractions, is disappearing--all the nicer old buildings are being torn down for the crime of being too short, so blue glass condos, like the "Azure", the building with the crane, can be built--each one with a red plastic bank branch on the ground floor. All at breakneck speed. I can see three such cranes from my window.

Wonderful Town is dying, to be replaced by dangerous but dull CondoMallopolis. And our flinty little billionaire mayor is at the helm.

EXCELLENT JOB, BLOOMIE!

Muttonchop City Part One: Election Season Home Opener

THIS JUST IN: Newly arrived under our door, the first evil snowflake. Board election season is opening, as if one ugly election weren't enough. Soon we'll have the same blizzard of hatemail, accusations and verbal projectile vomiting. Mr. P and I are, guess what, the opposition.

Here's where I try to hide from my neighbors' search engines: we live in an apartment complex, *Muttonchop City,* that's part of the *Fernando Lamas* Program. Anyone searching Fernando Lamas for real, you can stay, but you won't find him here. More important, the neighbors who've threatened Mr. P and me won't find us here.

If you live in New York, you might know that a program sounding like the *Fernando Lamas* Program created buildings throughout the city for the non-wealthy. It allows middle class people to live in either rentals or kooperatives for very little. Kooperatives: non-googleable misspelling. Fairly large, elevators, laundry rooms and landscaping--nice. More than the residents would ever be able to hope for otherwise. Your tax dollars at work.

These complexes were often built in what were remote areas that have since become hot neighborhoods. If your income qualifies, you enter a lottery for a space on a waiting list, and should you win the lottery, you wait for years, and finally you're notified that you're in. Or you can cheat; Fernando Lamas buildings are full of professional, highly competant cheaters. And people who got here honestly, like Mr. P and me.

The proviso is that you can only sell the place for what you paid. Mr. Fernando and Mr. Lamas didn't foresee the kooperatives growing intensely valuable. A loophole in their law allows kooperatives to vote on whether to stay in the program, or leave it. By leave it, I mean gather all the profit on the now valuable kooperative you helped them buy with your taxes. Take the place private. Which also screws everybody on the waiting list. It's like the immigration debate, in a way: We got in, now you stay out.

When Mr. P and I first moved in, we thought *Muttonchop City* would be full of residents skipping through the plaza singing "Tralala! We live for nothing in the heart of Gotham! Whee!"

They don't do that. The corner pizzeria owner says these are the sourest beings he has ever encountered. "They've forgotten where they came from," he told us. "I grew up like they did--in a tenement, walk-up apartment: bathtub in the kitchen, the toilet in the hall--no elevator. No nice tiled shower. No laundry room. Now they got used to their good fortune and it's not enough for them. They come in and chew over how everybody's screwing them, while I'm paying thousands of dollars more a month than they do and I don't have a balcony! I'd give my left one to live here! They're the unhappiest SOBs, I'm telling you, I've never seen anything like it. "





*Names, key words and search terms changed to protect Mr. and Mrs. Polly

Governor Paterson's Medicine Woman

First of all, I have to disclose that I like our latest scandal-plagued governor. I want to keep him. His scandals are underwhelming, frankly. The Albany reporters are clinging to their diminishing spotlight, their moment in the sun-- just one more scandal, no wait, don't cut away to the sports just yet, did you hear the one about the funding for the defrocked doctor? Lo and behold, the defrocked doctor is Serafina Corsello---I know her! My father went (or was dragooned by my mother into going) to Dr. Corsello in the '80's, for chelation therapy. What? What's chelation therapy?

Chelation is actually a treatment for lead poisoning. A chemical, EDTA, is dripped into the bloodstream, binds with toxic metals, and hustles them the heck out of the body. Probably every New Yorker could use a little chelation, but Dr. Corsello used to have a program touting chelation for heart disease on WOR radio.

WOR, once called Women Only Radio for friendly, chatty local programming of the Breakfast with the Fitzgeralds variety, played constantly in our house. My mother, the advertiser's dream, snapped up every vitamin, eye cream and nostrum pushed by WOR. So when Serafina Corsello bought a weekly hour infomercial for her services as a chelationist, Mom ate up every one of the then-Doctor's words, which came wrapped in an Italian accent richer than the fattiest prosciutto.

Mom made it her mission to get my cardiac patient father chelated. His protests were as useless as they usually are with my mother, and eventually he was closeted with the Doctor and a tape recorder, the better to capture the wisdom as it flowed. Dr. Corsello looked like Gina Lollobrigida, and sounded like an imperious Sophia Loren. The audience was brief, and my father was ushered from the presence.

Then he was hooked up to a pouchful of EDTA and left to cool his heels for several hours with several other people also reclining on chemotherapy lounges. They were exchanging stories of agonizing yet nebulous disorders; toxin-ridden, phlegmy, headachey, neuralgic disorders, all improving with the miracle of chelation yet always with more symptoms revealing themselves.

They asked my father what was wrong with him. "I feel fine," he said. "My wife thought I should come." The other patients paused, regrouped, and resumed talking to each other. He went back to reading the Times.



He came home laden with intriguing packets, bottles, and tubes, all with the Serafina Corsello label. They were expensive, and the needle on my quackometer swung into the red. When a doctor sells supplements or energy bars under his/her own imprint, to be purchased at the "clinic," beware. If the "clinic" is a rabbit warren of examining rooms and the doctor doesn't deign to enter them but grants you a one-minute audience where you do none of the talking, beware. If the staff hustles around speaking of the doctor in hushed voices suitable to a place of worship, get out.



My father went to Dr. Corsello every week for two months or so, dutifully took his milk-thistle and pycnogenol, and didn't get worse. Now here is where the story clouds, because he was also being treated with conventional drugs, so we don't know where to lay the credit.


It's instructive to remember, though, that conventional medicine killed him. Dr. Corsello's regimen did him no harm.

After Corsello, he was alive. After Crestor, dead.


Corsello alive, Crestor, dead.


But Corsello was defrocked, and Crestor is still on the market.

Salome in a Pantsuit

It's reported by Jonathan Alter that very, very senior Democrats want to offer Hillary the New York Governorship if she will just please, please, go away, assuming that Governor Paterson is forced to step down.

Hillary isn't going to go for it, I don't think. There's the unattractive image of timid Dems attempting to sacrifice a substitute black politican for her, and the substitute hasn't indicated he's ready to go, even after his no good, very bad opening two weeks. Then, Bill in Albany? Bill not in Albany? Which is worse?

There's talk of her running against Giuliani, either in the special election that hasn't been called for or in 2010. Alter is a national reporter and I don't think he's fully aware that the New York legislature wants Paterson to remain Governor. He's one of them, he's easy to work with, he hasn't done anything that most of them haven't done. They aren't eager to get him out of office, what, for either superambitious Donkey Destroyer or superambitious scolding Prosecutor Part Deux?

DRAWN IN HASTE Repented at Leisure: Diane Dixon, Covergirl

Q: What does an axe murderer do?
A: Sells newspapers.


One day. Just one damn day. Couldn't we have had just one day to honeymoon with our cuddly new governor?

Of course not.


Note the New York Post's GIRLS! GIRLS! GIRLS! PATERSON GAL'S TAPE SHOCKER--"Olympics babe bares recording & job 'he got me'" turns out to be nothing but baloney: an evidently attention-hungry former track and field medalist e-mailed the Post that she'd secretly taped Paterson on the phone--tapes she now says she's going to destroy. Has the post heard any tapes? No. What are they of? "Conversations," she e-mailed back with a smiley face. Has she claimed the Gov slept with her? No. She says she's a single mother who's grateful to him for helping her get a job as a Family Advocate with the Board of Ed--a job she's yet to start, if it exists. The Board of Ed has no record of her. Even smut peddler Larry Flynt peddles genuine smut.



Perhaps Rupert Murdoch sees an easy path to another Republican-led era if he can get Bruno in. But Bruno has so many troubles that he'd likely soon follow Paterson. The governorship would start resembling Billy Rose's Aquacade: diving in formation.

Journalists, or, rather, the news media, like to say that among their faults is "pack journalism."

They flatter themselves. "Herd journalism" is more accurate, and "Coop journalism" more accurate still, for cud-chewers are gentler and less damaging then the old hens in Albany.

Ruminants don't write good front-page material.

Had enough of the shallow smugness with which TV reporters face into the camera and recite their 90 seconds of unimaginably intimate and surreal gossip? You're one of the few, then. Peoplemeters say the audience is eating it up. TV reporters are our modern, unthinking, brainless Furies. Pursuing sexual wrongdoers is incidental, impersonal. It's good for ratings. It gets circulation up, you could say.

Will Eliot Spitzer's resignation destroy David Paterson? I hope not. I think not. Paterson's a different number entirely: he's never been a hypocrite, he has support in Albany, and the legislators all know there's plenty of dirt to go around.

We need our governor to govern. Time for him to tell the press the subject of his sex life is closed.

A Bite Out of Crime

Mired in the Spitzer media mudflow was this little item: CNN apologised for using as one of its analysts a former Attorney General, Mr. Kendall Coffey, who had once bitten a stripper. He bit her on the arm. Then he resigned. I haven't Googled the story to see if his wife stood beside him, but I assume she did. For the children. And because the first 24 hours of shock are the best time to manipulate the stupefied spouse into self-humiliation.

CNN obviously doesn't know an asset when it has one. Who better to comment on Spitzer than former Attorney General Mr. Been-There-Done-That? It might give Eliot Spitzer reason to hope that someday he too can be a CNN analyst, perhaps to analyse the sudden downfall of, say, Joe Bruno's grandson.

Is everybody braced for the inevitable march of the Spitzer hookers? An interview with the Daily News, a segment giving a whole new meaning to Dateline, a Judith Regan book deal, including skincare tips and lifestyle hints, with recipes for low fat aphrodisiacs.

Meanwhile, champagne corks are popping all over Wall Street. This really frosts me; the enemies of Eliot Spitzer, apart from his own hormones, were and are in the main genuinely rotten, greedy bastards who robbed shareholders and employees and ruined some of them. They deserved to be taken down, and we in New York LOVED that particular strength of Mr. Spitzer's.

They still did what they did. Mr. Bruno also did what HE did, which was to misuse state funds to helicopter all over the place, and no amount of distraction, or the miscreance of others, can alter that.