At the end of last week the Financial Times ran an amusing "Dear Economist..." column. The premise of the feature is that it's a tongue-in-cheek advice piece from an economic perspective. Anyway, a gentlemen wrote that, as an immigrant in London, he always carries an umbrella with him, though the natives do not. When he offers to share space under the cover, "Foreigners always accept. Indeed, one New Yorker actually links her arm with mine as we walk. But those whose families have lived here for generations prefer getting soaked." Why, he wondered, is that the case?

Here's the tally from yesterday's big bang: One dead, thirty injured (two severely). We're not sure what it says about where we're at when a statement from the mayor like this one is viewed as comforting ("There is no reason to believe this is anything other than a failure of our infrastructure") but there you have it. Oh, also, it may have rained asbestos all over midtown. Happy Thursday!

Say you want to have one of those low-stress, non-Bridezilla weddings. You know: Your high school pal serves as the rabbi, your fave gay whips up a nice chuppah, and everybody just shows up and has a ball. If you're Times deputy editor for online journalism Ariel Kaminer, you even hire a pal to do the catering—his very first wedding job! Except your caterer, one Montgomery Knott, the hipster-genius behind MonkeyTown in Williamsburg and member of Stars Like Fleas, went and got arrested on Friday, the day before the wedding. It was for a "bench warrant that shouldn't have been a bench warrant" said Mr. Knott this afternoon by phone, somewhat cryptically. "Apparently Brooklyn arrests more people than any other bureau." (Um, GOOD.) So he did his 20 hours—which plunged the wedding into the sort of chaos that forced Times restaurant critic Frank Bruni to bartend, with Times chief art critic Michael Kimmelman as his bar back. Still the "candied bacon balls" were sorta tasty, guests said. They were like gobstoppers... made of bacon?

Oh, downtown, we love your little kielbasa storefronts and fly-by-night mailbox huts and your crazy houses of coffee. We've worried about the new giant Walgreen's moving into Astor Place where the wine store was—as if the K-Mart wasn't enough, right by the two Starbucks! The chain stores will destroy all our independent businesses. And guess what? Maybe the small businesses deserve it!

Like the Great Barrier Reef, New York City has its own critters that come and vacuum up our waste. Meet the freegans! They have fun dinner parties, where they eat things from the trash and talk about the errors of capitalism, and they scurry out of their caves at night to take away that Ikea crap that surrounds the N.Y.U. dorms. Gosh, it'd be so easy to make fun of them for being so totally gross, except they're gonna be the ones to survive the apocalypse. And who'll be laughing then? And unlike the "no impact" green fools, at least they probably scavenge for toilet paper. See you in the dumpsters!

"If you went back in time 15 years and told New Yorkers that you would be able to stroll along the Hudson River at night through parks of Singaporean quality in complete safety and security, I don't think they would believe you." [We, Like Sheep]

Run don't walk (click don't paste?) to City Room where Mike Wallace (not that one), author of the definitive history of New York City, is answering questions. Ask him when the hell we're going to get the second volume already. [City Room]

This weekend Madison Park was taken over by legions of barbecue lovers. They tend to be a lot like you or me but of slightly larger proportions and more catholic taste. It was the annual Big Apple BBQ—and a careful observer had ample chance to note, first hand, the slow descent along the Glasgow Coma Scale and the yearning distended beauty of a tie dye shirt stretched to the limits of its fiber by an ample gut. The park was ringed with people madly stuffing their mouths with meat. There was a lost dead head freaking out and an old cougar without a blouse. We sent Josh, because he is poor on the inside, and Laurel Ptak, the photographer behind the extremely edifying Connecticut Ivy Cup travelogue, to make you feel good about being a vegetarian.

"The short, troubled life of a drug-dealing Harlem midget came to a violent end yesterday when he was gunned down while guzzling beer and shooting dice outside a housing project." [NYP]

Visitors to the Brooklyn Museum beware! Teen girl bandits are roaming Prospect Heights, sneaking up on folks and boppin' 'em on the head. Too bad the wee gangsters are too lazy to hop around the corner to Park Slope... so far.

• In an interview with the Guardian, Conrad Black calls his fraud trial "bullshit" and announces that he's at war with the U.S. government. The paper also has an excerpt from Black's forthcoming biography of Richard Nixon, which praises the former president's "surpassing dignity." Read into that what you will. [Guardian]
  

Were your Metrocard machines working today? A tipster notes that "all over NYC the subway machines aren't taking credit/debit cards...so cash is the only option. Can be a real inconvenience when the closest ATM is 10 minutes away." First of all, we're not sure how different this is than any other goddamned day on the MTA. When we ever find a machine that a) accepts cards and b) actually works, we shut the hell up about it lest someone from Transit find out and disable it. More importantly, how fucking hard is it to keep an emergency twenty in your wallet or purse or sock? This is New York City. Not long ago, if you lived, say, in the East Village, you'd have to walk to the Chemical Bank at Broadway and 9th for money; it closed at 2 p.m., and there was nowhere to get money on weekends. Nowadays we know the prevalence of ATMs makes everyone feel like there's always going to be a place to get cash around you, but for fuck's sake, show a little goddamned sense. Hasn't anyone seen After Hours?

• Yesterday it was old-school Nickelodeon shows; today it's important films like Mallrats, Reality Bites and Empire Records. [this girl called automatic win]
  

Tucked between the second (lust) and third (greed) circles of hell lies 21st Street, which the Post is calling the new clubland. And it's true the massive hornet's nest of clubs in the area belches out Axe-wearing alpha males and glitter-bodied sad girls like an old factory chimney. What with Prey Bar and Lounge, Snitch's, Duvet and Aspen, the FlatIron has become the lowest point in the dirty bathroom floor of New York club life. The Post notes the District's clubs now have a capacity of 10,000. To put that in perspective that's about twice the entire freshman class of NYU crammed into the space of a few blocks. (Eww!) And what, Prey tell, do you imagine might be the outcome of such a glut of revelers? Bonhomie? Fraternit ? Esprit De Corps? Nope. Murder, Mayhem, Marauding.

Good news for fans of hops and gentrification: Zum Schneider, the pioneering German bar/restaurant in the East Village, has had its lease extended to 2021 after a protracted court battle. Owner Sylvester Schneider, magnanimous in victory, touched on some of the reasons his landlords might have wanted him out: "You should know that this whole thing was not just a money thing; it was also a racial thing. We are white; they are Puerto Ricans." The affable Deutschlander continued:

You know what they say about Second Avenue, don't you? Lose a deli gain a subway. (Not too elegant but it beats that ol' Avenue A axiom: Lose a cyber-cafe, gain a diaper-changing station). Like the 2nd coming, the 2nd Avenue subway brings the shimmer of eternal underground salvation to millions and, also like the 2nd coming, the 2nd Avenue subway is so rarely delivered. But there's a new sheriff in town by the name of Eliot Spitzer and dude supposedly means business about the subway that doesn't really get you from anywhere good to anywhere else good.

The Long Island couple who are raising a half-black baby as a result of a Park Ave. fertility clinic's mistake got a judge's go-ahead yesterday to sue the clinic for malpractice. They're also trying hard not to come off as racist assholes, but it's tricky. The line between 'we love our daughter' and 'we would like to return this defective product' is a fine one, it seems! "While we love Baby Jessica as our own, we are reminded of this terrible mistake each and every time we look at her," legal documents quote the couple as saying. Also, "We fear that our daughter will be the object of scorn and ridicule by other children, both in school and as she grows up." Well, of course she will now.

What A Mess, Baby [NYDN]

We were talking the other day [Note: This is Balk, btw, and officious diktats be damned, I'm still using "we." I came onto the Internet using "we," and that's the way I'm going out. But I digress: In this case, the "we" actually does refer to all of us, who, when not trying to undermine each other, do occasionally have group conversations] about how nothing is going on in New York these days. As people whose paychecks depend on spinning newsworthy events into nugget-sized bursts of meaningless information with predictable jokes appended, this presents a bit of a problem and causes no end of frustration and anger (hence Doree's vicious outburst against the loveable Cary Tennis yesterday). [Ed. Note: Actually that was Balk. Quit it.] But it's not just us; surely you've noticed it too? Where are the Suris of yesteryear? This morning we came across something that helped us understand whither all this nothingness.

Naomi Campbell reported for her first day of community service at the Lower East Side Sanitation depot yesterday, and she wore some clothes! As the 90s supermodel expiated her phone-throwing sins, the Post reports that she maintained a luxe look: "Campbell wore green yoga pants, stiletto boots, a black empire-waist coat, diamond-studded earrings, a newsboy cap and large, black sunglasses on her first day of real work." Someone who knows things about fashion would probably be able to find a bunch of errors and omissions in that sentence—even our untutored eye can discern a Chanel logo on that newsboy cap and Louboutin-red soles on those boots, and that's no empire waist. But more importantly, anyone who has ever seen an episode of any modeling-themed reality show knows that the "first day of real work" thing is bullshit. You've gotta work. Everyone knows that.