Bitches

He’s saying what we’re thinking. “Head of the Crass”:

The head of the NYPD’s School Safety Division is under fire from school security officers who charge that he called elementary school parents “bitches” who “need to be body-slammed.”

In grievance letters to their union obtained by The Post, officers claim that Chief Gerald Nelson, an NYPD official, made the shocking remarks to 850 agents at a training session last month during the mid-winter break.

To be sure, it’s not entirely clear what he said — or whether the union is just trying to screw him over — but it seems like whatever it was probably falls somewhere in between the following:

The letters vary somewhat in their description of Nelson’s alleged comments.

Some state that he said unruly parents should be manhandled into submission, while others claim Nelson made the remarks as he commended an agent for showing restraint with out-of-control parents.

“Chief Nelson was asked a question about the lack of security in the . . . schools when the chief made a statement that the parents of the students are bitches and he gives us credit for not knocking these bitches down,” one agent wrote.

Another officer wrote that Nelson said elementary-school agents had the toughest job “because they had to deal with mothers in the elementary schools that are real bitches . . . [who] need to be body-slammed down to the ground, cuffed and arrested.”

Then there’s a third explanation:

NYPD spokesman Paul Browne, speaking on behalf of Nelson, said, the two-star chief “recalls congratulating a school safety agent for dealing with an unruly adult, but not in the language described in the letters. We are looking into the matter.”

Wanted: Volunteers to Dress as Vagrants (No Law & Order Experience Necessary)

The City’s Department of Homeless Services is offering $100 to volunteers to serve as quality control decoys for their annual homeless count:

As part of a new quality-control measure from the Department of Homeless Services, some 150 “fake” homeless – graduate students clad in old clothes and blankets – will be sent out to see if the volunteers spot them.

If the volunteers approach the decoys, the fakes, who are making $100 each, will ‘fess up and hand over a sticker to make sure they are not mistakenly counted.

The idea is to test the effectiveness of the count, which has been criticized by some homeless advocates because it partly relies on estimates.

“What happens to this cadre of 150 could be a fairly faithful replica” of the count’s accuracy, said Dr. Kim Hopper, a research scientist at the Nathan Kline Institute, who is leading the decoy effort.

Some 1,500 volunteers have already signed up and will gather at 10:30 p.m. Monday for a quick training session, then hit the streets at midnight for a few hours.

Not clear if they are offering a bonus for multiple visits.

Pied à Terre to the World

New York City has filed an application to trademark the phrase “The World’s Second Home.” For real:

Lest there be any doubt, the Bloomberg administration wants to make official what generations of immigrants in New York have long known: the city is the world’s second home.

In application No. 78484751 at the United States Patent and Trademark Office, the city is seeking to trademark the phrase, “The World’s Second Home.” It wants exclusive rights to use it to promote business, tourism and economic development in the city, and hopes to slap it on everything from mouse pads and money clips to baby bibs and beanbag chairs.

If New York is successful, other cities that might fancy themselves the world’s second home could not legally apply that phrase to any of the 200-odd products and services enumerated in New York’s application. Among them are film and theatrical productions, parades, chair pads, sunglasses, temporary tattoos, postcards, beach sandals, and “electric light switch plates.”

“For all of those things, if the city got its trademark registration, nobody could come out with sunglasses and use the phrase, ‘The world’s second home,'” said William M. Borchard, an intellectual-property lawyer at Cowan, Liebowitz & Latman in New York. “To do that, they would have to obtain a license from the city.”

The Times further explains how this would work in practice:

Of course, there are plenty of things not on the city’s list. Boston could conceivably license a line of canned beans under the label, “Bean Town – the world’s second home,” without running afoul of New York’s trademark. (“Bean Town” is actually the registered trademark of an Illinois company that sells dried beans.)

New York could eventually try to enforce an American trademark internationally to prevent, say, Paris from laying claim to the same title. In fact, it is New York’s contest with Paris and three other foreign cities to play host to the 2012 Summer Olympics that is driving its quest for this silver medal of geopolitical names. (Presumably, the gold would go to “the world’s home,” but no one has sought that title, according to a search of trademark records.)

The trademark application is one of several the city has filed since September as part of an ambitious plan to secure the rights to catchphrases, abbreviations and logos that it wants to license to makers of consumer products and clothing. Among them: a line drawing of the city’s official seal, which includes a sailor, an Indian and a beaver; the phrase “Made in NY”; and a Taxi and Limousine Commission badge, intended primarily for use on toy cars.

So if New York is the World’s Second Home, are, say, the Hamptons New York’s Second Home? And would that make the Hamptons the World’s Third Home? And as the Times notes, which city is audacious enough to call itself the World’s Home?

Not On Location, Please

As someone who — in a fit of frustration after part of a sidewalk was closed — actually used the words “you guys are a pain in the ass” to some hapless movie set intern, I wholeheartedly agree with the New York Press here:

In one of his first acts of 2005, Mayor Bloomberg signed into law a five percent tax break for television and movie productions that film in New York City. This is in addition to the 10 percent tax break the governor began offering last summer, all in an effort to lure the film industry back to town.

Over the past several years, the cost of location shooting in NYC has become so prohibitive that most production companies had taken their business elsewhere—often filming in Toronto, which has acted as New York’s body double in countless movies and tv shows. That exodus also took with it millions of dollars in easy revenue.

“New York City is the greatest film set in the world,” the mayor said as he announced the offer, and we have absolutely no argument with that. We love seeing footage of old New York from different eras in films like The Naked City, Sweet Smell of Success and The Taking of Pelham One Two Three. Likewise, we understand that future generations of filmgoers will have a similar nostalgic interest in seeing what the NYC of the early 21st century actually looked and sounded like.

We also appreciate the filmmakers’ desire to capture that authentic New York vibe, which is something that can’t be reproduced anywhere else. Plus there’s no denying that over time, the film industry would bring more money into the city than those goddamned Olympics ever could.

We understand all those things, and they’re all valid reasons for making location shooting in the city much cheaper and easier.

But you know what? We still find location shoots an enormous pain in the ass, and we wish they’d stay up in Toronto.

That Special Time of Year

While it’s true that the Carnegie Deli has a line out the door stretching halfway down the block and you can’t walk down Seventh Avenue without being asked where Times Square is (“That’s it right there.” “But where’s the square!?”), the rest of the city is deserted:

For those worried about getting around town, please do not be alarmed to find an empty seat on the subway, even at rush hour. Nothing is wrong. It is not a prank.

Then again, don’t even bother trying to find a seat in a horse-drawn cab near Central Park for a romantic winter-wonderland ride. Every out-of-towner has the same idea.

It should come as no big shock, of course, that New York often takes on a different personality during certain holidays. There are more tourists and fewer natives. Businesses change their hours, their décor, even their attitudes to match the conditions.

But this year, it seems, New York has become even more a best-of-times, worst-of-times kind of place, depending on geography and other factors. Or so said dozens of New Yorkers and tourists in conversations this week, who have noticed that some places seem more jam-packed than ever, while others are deserted.

I have to say that although it’s obviously bad for business, we enjoy having a bar or restaurant to ourselves. Even the normally hard-to-get-into places are empty:

Even some famous establishments, ordinarily packed, have had surprising lulls. On Sunday night, for instance, Lisa Magnino and her boyfriend, Jon Coifman, decided to see how long the line was at Grimaldi’s pizzeria in Brooklyn. There wasn’t one.

“We were like, hmm, it must be closed,” said Ms. Magnino, who lives in Carroll Gardens. “But it wasn’t, and when we walked in, we were seated right away. There was a couple sitting at a table for four, and they said, ‘Can you believe this?'”