For nearly four days New York City has been gripped in the wet melancholic embrace of cold autumn rain. Not the wistfully tragic kind of precipitation you might experience next month, which is usually accompanied by virtuoso guitar solos and shoulder-length hair, but a biting reminder that the elements can be cruel and relentless, an icy shock on your ankle with one wrong step at the curb.
There are of course meteorological reasons for this (welcome) precipitation, which is expected to leave us by Thursday. But surely there are psychic reasons too: Eric Adams has lost Fran Lebowitz, though it's not clear if he ever really had her.
"It would be good if we had a good mayor but we don’t," the personality told Page Six the other night.
"I hated de Blasio but Eric Adams I saw coming," Lebowitz noted. "I said to my friends, 'He’s going to make you long for de Blasio, [and] he was terrible.'" She also claimed to be one of the few people in her friend group to still take the subway: "I’m alone out of all of my friends. They say, 'Aren’t you afraid?""
To be fair to Mayors de Blasio and Adams, Lebowitz is famous for literally hating everything. Her ranked-choice ballot in the 2021 mayoral primary was probably
- Secondhand smoke
- Deafening but authentic gridlock on Delancey
- Guy in tweed cap reading newspaper and shaking his head
- Paying with a personal check
- John Lindsay
But at least Lebowitz is still taking mass transit, and the city hasn't warped her into a public thinker who imputes "revenge" as a motive to the mentally ill, and whose only answer to complicated problems is "the police must arrest more people."
Here's what else the rain is falling on:
- Flooding has forced Mayor Adams to move his encampment from Orchard Beach in the Bronx to...Randalls Island, another low-lying piece of land prone to flooding.
- Florida politician sends asylum-seekers to New York City to make a political point. Florida contractors try and bus them back to Florida to help with the Hurricane Ian clean up. Make sense?
- It took all goddamned day but the Brooklyn Democratic Party reelected Rodneyse Bichotte Hermelyn as chair. Queens Democrats giggled and were home in under two hours.
- Amazon workers in one of the warehouses on Staten Island reportedly staged a work stoppage on Monday night after a piece of equipment caught fire.
- The Onion submitted an amicus brief to the Supreme Court in a case involving shitty Facebook satire and it is pretty good reading.
- Bus cameras are here. Bus-lane-blocking drivers beware.
- Hundreds of kids won't have pre-K or 3K because the DOE says they don't have the money. Sorry!
- NYC wants to collect and store trash the 21st century way, so of course we have to cut McKinsey in for millions of dollars because lord knows city government can't just implement a common-sense policy all by itself.
- Microchip manufacture is coming to the greater Syracuse area, bringing with it a promised 50,000 jobs, and all government had to do to make it happen was promise $5.5 billion in incentives.
