This excerpt from the New York Times:

Intel,
the world’s largest chip maker, has overhauled the basic building block
of the information age, paving the way for a new generation of faster
and more energy-efficient processors

Mark Bohr, an Intel physicist who led the research, holds a
45-nanometer wafer using new metal alloys that led the insulation
advance.

Company researchers said the
advance represented the most significant change in the materials used
to manufacture silicon chips since Intel pioneered the modern
integrated-circuit transistor more than four decades ago.
 

The
microprocessor chips, which Intel plans to begin making in the second
half of this year, are designed for computers but they could also have
applications in consumer devices. Their combination of processing power
and energy efficiency could make it possible, for example, for
cellphones to play video at length — a demanding digital task — with
less battery drain…

I remember the headline very well. During the fiscal crisis in the mid-1970’s, it was one of the great Daily News headlines. Ford to City: Drop Dead.

Back then we knew Ford didn’t actually say, "Drop Dead." But the art of the headline is such that liberties can be taken. The headline did, however, express the essence of what Ford was saying.

And it really resonated with New Yorkers at that time.

The Times’ reports today that many think that Ford actually said those infamous lines and it cost him the election in New York (Jimmy Carter carried New York State by a slim margin).

Here are the facts: On Oct. 29, 1975, Ford gave a speech denying federal assistance to spare New York from bankruptcy. The front page of The Daily News the next day read: “FORD TO CITY: DROP DEAD.”

Those were tough financial times for New York City. The city was broke and Ford’s reaction seem to epitomize a general feeling that nobody cared about New York City anymore.

Ford apparently resented the way that the headline became a stand-in for what he’d actually said. “It more than annoyed me because it wasn’t accurate,” he recalled years later. “It was very unfair.”

According to the Times’ "Ford’s treasury secretary, William Simon, warned that bailing out NYC would amount to nationalizing municipal debt and rewarding local officials who lacked the will to stanch the inevitable hemorrhaging inflicted by bankrupt liberalism. (The investment banker Felix G. Rohatyn, recruited by Mr. Carey to rescue the city, would liken default to “someone stepping into a tepid bath and slashing his wrists — you might not feel yourself dying, but that’s what would happen”)."

The following demands were made to city officials: raise transit fares, abolish rent control, scrap free tuition at the City University. "This prompted Victor Gotbaum, the municipal labor leader, to complain that Mr. Simon barely believed in government at all, except for police and fire protection, “and he’s not sure about fire.”  writes the Times.

The newly elected officials: from left, Eric Adams, 46; Hakeem
Jeffries, 36; Darlene Mealy, 42; Yvette D. Clarke, 42; and Karim
Camara, 35. Photo by Chester Higgins Jr./The New York Times.

Brooklyn Record thoughtfully ran this picture and link to the story in the New York Times about the new generation of black politicians in Brooklyn.

In case holiday festivities kept you away from the Sunday Times,
we wanted to share this story about the new, post-civil rights
generation of black politicians in Brooklyn…

Continue reading "Politics in Central Brooklyn"

This from the New York Times:

One of those New York City bar guides prints helpful little symbols
to describe each spot, and beside the entry for O’Connor’s in Park
Slope, there is a silhouette of a man diving into the water.

A
dive bar. Patrick O’Connor, the owner, hated that label. He didn’t
stand here all day, every day, running a cheap dump. And by the way,
when his was the only place around for blocks and blocks, when the drug
dealers outside outnumbered the old men on the stools, he didn’t hear
anybody complaining.

“We don’t do much here,” said Mr. O’Connor’s
son Joseph, 42, sitting at the bar’s dark wood. “What you do, you do
well. Here, you get a good drink in a clean glass at a reasonable
price. He hated the word ‘dive.’ ”

A good drink: Patrick kept the
liquor lined neatly behind the bar. On the way out the door after
closing time, he would dump fresh ice on the bottles of beer. Nothing
colder on a hot day. He always used a shot glass to make drinks, so the
customer knew just what he was getting. And on Sunday, it is worth the
trip just to watch the 78-year-old bartender, Charlie Campbell of
Ireland, make a bloody mary. His back ramrod-straight, he pumps the
tumbler out and down, out and down, looking like Jack La Lanne with one
of his health juices.

Continue reading BELOVED PARK SLOPE BARTENDER DIES →

PATTI SMITH was one of the first musicians to play at CBGB in the 1970’s.

Last night, she performed there for the last time. It was the club’s final concert before it moves to Las Vegas for its after life as a Las Vegas attraction.

“I’m sentimental,” she told the New York Times and she stood on Bowery and pointed an antique Polaroid toward the club. More story at the New York Times.

A team of American and Iraqi public health researchers has estimated that 600,000 civilians have died in violence across Iraq since the 2003 American invasion, the highest estimate ever for the toll of the war. This from the New York Times:

This is the second study by researchers from the Johns Hopkins
Bloomberg School of Public Health. It uses samples of casualties from
Iraqi households to extrapolate an overall figure of 601,027 Iraqis
dead from violence between March 2003 and July 2006.

The
findings of the previous study, published in The Lancet, a British
medical journal, in 2004, had been criticized as high, in part because
of its relatively narrow sampling of about 1,000 families, and because
it carried a large margin of error.

The new study is more
representative, its researchers said, and the sampling is broader: it
surveyed 1,849 Iraqi families in 47 different neighborhoods across
Iraq. The selection of geographical areas in 18 regions across Iraq was
based on population size, not on the level of violence, they said.

Plans were announced yesterday by NYC education officials to
standardize admissions to programs for gifted students by requiring
applicants to take a reasoning test and to be assessed by teachers
using a scale of classroom performance. This from the New York Times:

The plan is the
latest step in an effort to bring order to a hodgepodge of some 137
programs citywide with varying admissions practices that critics have
said allowed for favoritism and discrimination.

The test, the
Otis-Lennon School Ability Test, is published by Harcourt Assessment of
San Antonio. The assessment of classroom performance is called the
Gifted Rating Scales, a measurement system also published by Harcourt.

The new admissions standards apply to programs for gifted children in
prekindergarten through second grade. The application process for the
2007-8 year will begin next month. In elementary schools citywide,
there about 22,000 children in gifted programs.

The test, known
as theOlsat, is widely used by school districts nationally. It has four
components — verbal comprehension; verbal reasoning; figural reasoning,
which measures nonverbal skills using pictograms; and quantitative
reasoning. Students receive a total score and subscores.

The
Gifted Rating Scales, or G.R.S., measures ability in six areas:
intellectual, academic, motivational, creative, leadership and artistic
talent. City education officials said that Harcourt had proposed that
schools give two-thirds weight to the test and one-third to the ratings
in admissions decisions, but that the details remained to be worked
out.

Dona Matthews, the director of the Center for Gifted Studies and Education at Hunter College, called the Olsat “a good, tried and true test.”

“It has been around for a long time and has solid reliability and validity,” she said, “and it is tied to school success.”

But
while she praised the city’s Education Department for using multiple
criteria for admissions, Ms. Matthews said she had some reservations
about the G.R.S. because of the possibility of inconsistency.

“Teachers
vary tremendously in how good they are in making this sort of
assessment,” she said. “A lot of highly gifted kids are not teacher
pleasers. Teachers don’t like them, and they don’t necessarily give
them good ratings on scales like that.”

Ms. Matthews said she
was especially troubled by Harcourt’s proposal to assign a set
percentage weight to the ratings. Instead, she urged the city to use a
sort of sliding scale. A student scoring, say, above the 98th
percentile on the test might gain admission to a program while those
between the 90th and 98th percentiles would be judged further on their
ratings.

City education officials said the new admissions process
would have controls built in so that any large discrepancy between the
test score and the classroom rating would generate additional
examination.

The officials also said that Harcourt, as part of a five-year $5.3 million contract, would provide training for educators.

Officials
also said that city translators would make the test available in
Spanish, Urdu, Haitian Creole, Russian, Chinese, Arabic, Bengali and
Korean.

Williamsburg coffee joints: Cafe Grumpy, Gimmel, the Oslo Coffee Company deemed best by New York Times’ article. Comments?

Drinks at these shops are in a style that took root in the 1990’s in
Seattle cafes like Espresso Vivace Roasteria and Hine’s Public Market.
While the cafes thrived in the Northwest, New York was seen as a
backwater among coffee geeks, a label proudly adopted by the scene’s
premier Web site, www.coffeegeek.com.

Ninth
Street Espresso in the East Village earned the first ripple of
recognition for New York’s coffee scene when it opened in 2000. Since
then a handful of other top-flight shops have opened, including three
in northwestern Brooklyn: Gimme!; the Oslo Coffee Company, also in
Williamsburg; and, most recently, Café Grumpy. Oslo opened a second
Williamsburg branch last month; Café Grumpy is building a second
location in Manhattan, in Chelsea. Baristas like Dan Griffin, who
recently left the celebrated coffee spot Albino Press in Portland,
Ore., will be setting up shop soon in the West Village.

This sad story from Crown Heights. A sanitation worker who caught a 4-year-old girl last year as she was thrown to safety from a burning building was shot in the head and killed early yesterday on a Brooklyn street, the police said. This is from the NY Times. ( John Marshall Mantel took the picture of Allen’s shoes for the New York Times).

Damon Allen, 33, was once again trying to help others, the police and witnesses said, urging them to take cover from the crossfire of a gun battle that erupted around 2 a.m. in Crown Heights.

In homes and on streets across the neighborhood, thousands of revelers, some in costume, some playing steel drums, were celebrating J’ouvert, a celebration held every year on the eve of the West Indian American Day Carnival Parade.

“Nearly one year ago, Damon Allen was the city’s hero for saving the life of a little girl,” Mayor Michael R. Bloomberg said to reporters at the parade yesterday. “Today he lies dead, the victim of an apparent random shooting.”

Maybe yoga isn’t so great after all. This from the New York Times:

GREG E. COHEN, a podiatrist at Long Island College Hospital, hears
the same story a lot: women complaining about a flaky red bump or a
persistent itchy patch on a foot. By the time he sees them, they’re
embarrassed and horrified. A few years ago, Dr. Cohen, who also has a
private practice in Brooklyn Heights, didn’t know what to make of it,
but these days he doesn’t blink an eye.

“The first thing I ask is, ‘Do you do yoga?’ ” he said. As often as not, the answer is a resounding “yes.”

In
the last two years, Dr. Cohen said, he has seen a 50 percent spike in
patients with athlete’s foot and plantar warts. The likely culprit?
Unclean exercise mats, he said.

Gyms have long been hothouses
for unwanted viruses, fungi and bacteria, a result of shared equipment,
excessive sweat and moisture in locker rooms. Many facilities provide
disinfectant so clients can wipe down machinery, but they are often
less diligent when it comes to exercise mats. It’s common to see staff
members clean a stationary bike. It’s rare to see them disinfect a mat.

This is starting to worry many yoga practitioners who go
barefoot on high-traffic mats. Half a dozen kinds of yoga-mat wipes are
now sold nationwide, and new products like hand and foot mitts, to
protect serial mat borrowers, have hit the market.

City parents are not taking the newly enacted cell phone ban sitting down. A citywide organization of parent association leaders plans to sue
the city’s Department of Education to overturn a ban on students
carrying cellphones in public schools. They are planning to file a lawsuit today in Manhattan, which will argue that the ban is unsafe because it makes it tough for parents to stay in touch with their children before and after school. Parents are angry that the schools are subjecting students to random x-ray scans and are confiscating cell phones.

An article in Tuesday’s New York Times asserts that the Atlantic Yards will be a major political issue in borough elections. This from the New York Times:

It will be months, if not years, before a single brick of the
Atlantic Yards project is laid near Downtown Brooklyn. But as the fall
election season draws near, the unbuilt, unapproved,
multibillion-dollar development is shaping up as a major political
issue in this corner of the borough.

"This is a litmus
test for brownstone Brooklyn," said City Councilwoman Letitia James,
whose district includes most of the Atlantic Yards site and who is
perhaps the elected official most outspokenly opposed to the project.
"But the issue is nonetheless important for all Brooklynites, whether
or not you’re a brownstoner, someone who lives in public housing, or
you live in a condo."

Over the last two and a half years, the
project’s gravity has warped the political space nearby, as if a black
hole had settled at the corner of Atlantic and Flatbush Avenues. It has
bolstered some candidacies and bedeviled others here, where mostly
white, affluent neighborhoods like Park Slope shade into the more
diverse yet rapidly gentrifying confines of Fort Greene and Prospect
Heights.