Morgy Says, ‘I’m Too Old to Retire!’LAW
• Robert Morgenthau called a press conference in response to a “Page Six” item about him stepping down after 33 years: “I’m too old to retire.” The man is 88! [NYT]
• Big-time Mayer Brown partner Joseph Collins, who maintains offices in both New York and Chicago, has been indicted for fraud in the Refco case. [Above the Law]
• Which court is the worst “judicial hellhole” in the country? [Law Blog/WSJ]
intel
‘Happy Is the Lawyer Who Dwelleth in the House of Unroch’s Blog’You remember William Unroch. He’s the lawyer representing possible transsexual Maximilia Cordero in her lawsuits against Jeffrey Epstein and the Post; a blogger; a sometime Daily Intel correspondent; and a genuine crazy person. William read our post earlier on the Wall Street Journal’s story about the large percentage of lawyers who suffer from depression and the Websites that have sprung up to help them, and he decided to put his two cents in on the subject.
Lawyers are Sad because they do not read Unroch’s blog The Spirit World (you known the site). Guilt and misery are common byproducts of most lawyers. Vicious is as vicious does. The Spirit world will cleanse them. Happy is the lawyer who dwelleth in the house of Unroch’s blog.
Hm. Actually, lawyers are depressed because they have insane billable-hour quotas and are constantly fighting with people. That said: Unroch’s musings on “dead pig vapor,” “Devil Midgets,” and Mike Huckabee (“Sounds like a good guy. But does he accept the Space Pig?”) do make us smile. Happy holidays, lawyers!
William Unroch’s Blog [Attorneys NYC]
Earlier: Daily Intel’s coverage of William Unroch and Maximilia Cordero
neighborhood watch
Malcolm Gladwell: Big Hair, Big Feet, Big Heart?Upper East Side: Malcolm Gladwell revealed his big feet, gesticulated intensely, said people shouldn’t be allowed to say where they went to college, and stole bloggery hearts at the 92nd St. Y the other night. [UES Informer]
Bushwick: Now the hipsters are staging Punk Rock Pillow Fights. Will their crazy, ironic, lo-fi fun ever stop? [Brooklyn Rink via the vaguely anti-Semitic BushwickBK]
East Harlem: A principal at a high school here sent teachers a memo telling them to dumb down their standards for the kids. Uh-huh. [NYDN]
Harlem: Amid its massive, seventeen-acre expansion in the hood’s west side, Columbia says it won’t tear down the Cotton Club on 125th after all. That’s Christian of them. [NYP]
the sports section
WNBC Plays the DopeYesterday WNBC beat everyone to the punch by printing the much-sought-after list of doped-up baseball players in the Mitchell Report. They ran their list online at 11:23, nearly three hours before the press conference, smugly scooping everybody but the blog Deadspin.com, which published the same names just seven minutes earlier. Unfortunately for our local NBC affiliate, the list of names was fake. It included Johnny Damon, Jason Varitek, Nomar Garciaparra, and a whole bunch of other players who weren’t fingered in the Mitchell Report. And unlike Deadspin, WNBC didn’t publish them with the caveat that they weren’t sure it was real. So fifteen players who were on their list, but not in the report, had their names smeared (as yet without apology) for several hours yesterday. The Smoking Gun has the full fake report, and MLB.com has the real one. We don’t know who made the screwup of posting the WNBC list, but we’re betting they’re Yankees fans. Theirs hits the Red Sox much harder than the real one.
WNBC’s Bogus Steroids Scoop [Smoking Gun]
Earlier: MLB Steroid Report Fingers 29 New York Players
Update: WNBC has a correction on their site. “There were a number of discrepancies between our list and the Mitchell report, and we mistakenly listed several players that did not appear in the report,” they explain. “[Reporter] Jonathan Dienst and WNBC.com regret the error and sincerely apologize for providing the incorrect information.”
in other news
Macy’s Hosts Your Holiday After-partyMacy’s announced this week that they are going to keep eight of their locations, including the Herald Square flagship store, open at all hours of the day and night from December 21 to Christmas Eve. From the Staten Island Advance:
Shoppers will be greeted with the ongoing sales Macy’s has been holding since Black Friday, said spokeswoman Elina Kazan. “The most important thing about being open 24 hours is that it makes shopping convenient to people with different schedules,” she said. “This gives everyone a little extra time.” Company officials have been planning the shopping marathon for months to ensure there is enough manpower and merchandise.
Everyone is saying this is so nice of Macy’s to open the store so everyone, no matter what their time constraints, has a chance to shop. Now, once all the crowds have gone for the day, customers will be able to wade through the dunes of scattered merchandise in peace. What a great Christmas present. And just think of all the homeless people who will have a nice bed of jumbled merino V-neck sweaters!
At Macy’s, A Shopping Marathon [SI Advance]
intel
Trying to Save Part of Edward Hopper’s New YorkWhen much of Greenwich Village was landmarked in 1969, the low-rise sprawl of humble Italian-immigrant groceries and tenements southeast of the neighborhood, along Sullivan and Thompson streets and even Seventh Avenue South, didn’t make it inside the designated historic safety zone. The area, while not full of great monuments, has its own quiet claims on history. The artist Edward Hopper lived there most of his life, and his paintings like Early Sunday Morning were set there. On December 10, the Greenwich Village Society for Historic Preservation and the local community board convened more than 100 people inside Our Lady of Pompeii Church to figure out how to get the city to landmark the area to keep its Hopperness intact. GVSHP’s Andrew Berman points out that it’s filled with gems like Macdougal Street’s Provincetown Playhouse, which launched Eugene O’Neill, and a nearby rowhouse where Louisa May Alcott may have worked on Little Women. Parts of the façade are all that remains of Edgar Allan Poe’s house on West 3rd, which NYU subsumed into a big new building, raising alarms.
office-party patrol
‘CosmoGIRL!’ Parties Like It’s Freshman Year All Over AgainLast night saw loads of magazine parties: The blazered GQ staff boogied down at Passerby, Wenner Media rocked out at Madison in the meatpacking district, and W celebrated its continued existence at Death & Co. We didn’t go to any of those, because we were at New York’s own fiesta at the Cub Room. Unfortunately, we can’t tell you much about that, partly because we’re not allowed to but mostly because we can’t remember much — except that we were pleased to learn that our co-workers like to party. And that Jessica Coen will do the splits if you ask her nicely. But we can offer you a report from inside the CosmoGirl soirée, held at the decidedly un-girlie Rumours, a tinsel-decked, wood-paneled sports bar on Eighth Avenue in midtown.
photo op
Staten Island’s Spring Awakening
Punxsutawney Phil saw his shadow this morning, and so did Holtsville Hal on Long Island. But the only weather marmot residing in New York City — Staten Island Chuck — woke up, saw no shadow, and thus allows us to confidently predict spring will come early for our fair (if, granted, soon to be inundated) city. The good people at Gothamist provide the picture we’ve been looking for, and it reminds us — in case we’ve forgotten — that Brooklyn Chuck will never miss a chance for a photo op.
Early Spring, Says Staten Island Chuck [Gothamist]
party town
Brian Lehrer, Will Shortz to Rage at CiprianiTonight’s boldfaced parties:
• WNYC gala. Cipriani 42nd Street, 110 E. 42nd St., nr. Vanderbilt Ave., 6 p.m. Scheduled attendees include Brian Lehrer, Ira Glass, Liz Smith, Rosanne Cash, and Will Shortz. This is the first time crossword guru Shortz has shown up in our boldfaced column; while he used to be a regular on the circuit, there’s hardly a New York party promoter left who’s willing to deal with the coke dealers, prostitutes, and figures from the cockfighting underworld that he insists on bringing along with him.
cultural capital
Jay-Z to Post Lowest Stats Ever, Miss PlayoffsJay-Z’s comeback album, Kingdom Come, found its way onto the Internet this weekend, and after hearing it, we’re thinking it would be smart for Jay to stop calling himself the Michael Jordan of hip-hop. The best producers money can buy — Dre, Just Blaze, the Neptunes, Kanye West (though not, oddly, Timbaland) — turn in competent but overfamiliar work, while Jay-Z sounds altogether too comfy as he raps about how mature he is these days (there’s even a song called “30-Something”). There might be a 50-point game in here somewhere — like the title track, with its deconstructed “Superfreak” beat — but, mostly, this is the laid-back sound of a middle-aged superstar nursing his balky knee through a long, grueling season, only to just miss the playoffs. (Meantime, Lil’ Wayne, the Lebron James of hip-hop, sounds lean, mean, and hungry over Jay-Z’s beats.) Jay-Z might keep in mind what happened after MJ’s final comeback: He got fired from the executive suite.
Young H.O.- “30’s the New 20, N-gga!” [Notes From a Different Kitchen]
The King Has Returned [Discobelle.net]
Leak of the Week: Jay-Z Does Not Have Time for MySpace [Idolator]
in other news
‘Times’ Agrees With Microsoft: Zune Is Cool
The Times runs a long Bizday piece today on Microsoft’s fancy new MP3 player called Zune. The breathless article tells us not only how super! duper! amazing! the device is but also just how gritty, dedicated, and, well, real the Microsoft operation to build it was. There are many pieces of evidence offered for this thesis — an executive who uses merely “J” as his first name; the “creatively fervid overcrowded office space” in which the team worked, where on “hot summer days” the engineers “had to decide between lights and air-conditioning” — but one is by far the most convincing. It’s the accompanying photos, apparently shot by MSFT itself and credited to it. With engineers and marketing execs who seem quite so, well, punk rock, there’s no way these guys didn’t make the coolest MP3 player around. And wasn’t it nice of the Times to gamely run the company-provided photos that prove the point?
Microsoft Counting on a Twist to Make Zune Shine in Shadow of iPod [NYT]
neighborhood watch
Columbia B-School Explores Northern FrontierDumbo: In our version of The Straight Story, the old man on the tractor is a Jehovah’s Witness. [Brooklyn Papers]
Lower East Side: Queens of the Stone Age will break in a new, giant restaurant-theater, the Box, tonight. [Brooklyn Vegan]
Morningside Heights: Columbia Business School will move to Manhattanville campus and take 25 to 30 years to complete. [Curbed]
Park Slope: New FAO Schwartz may be within Bugaboo-pushing distance. [Crain’s New York via NY1]
Times Square: Photographic proof why New York is a city of singles. [Bagel in Harlem]