SR#4. Sidestepping Unwanted gifts On The Sidewalk
A little while back the Mayor of New York, known to all his wild-eyed haters as “The Commie Bastard From Hell”, dutifully warned all New Yorkers to “prepare for a storm worse than we have seen before.”
Come the night of the predicted apocalypse I stayed up late to check out the storm and expected to see heavy lorries being overturned, mighty trees bending and snapping, and even find an array of uprooted fire engines being carried past my window by a glut of beastly tornadoes… My fears were all for nothing. There was some mild snow fall. The odd, suitably ghostly howl that rattled my windows and nerves but nothing to even remotely justify the Mayor’s bombastic warnings. (With that said, Jersey City appears to be a little pocket universe of its own: home to randomly erratic weather spells that are entirely independent of the rest of the New York State. Jersey City is packed with different churches and religious groups and I presume the weather is the result of thousands of different prayers confusing the Almighty’s head.)
The next day, with the schools unnecessarily closed, I could only wonder as to who had been advising the Mayor and what technology this secret group of august advisors had been relying on. In American politics the appearance of decisive leadership, even if one makes mistakes, seems far more important than any hint of indecision or passivity. The Mayor appears to have set out his stall to habitually err on the side of saying too much rather than too little.
That said the current post-End-of-Days-Apocalypse-that-never-was has fully highlighted another criss that needs to be dealt with by the Mayor: The war against common decency by lazy, selfish pet owners…
The recent snowfall has ended. Hard snow turns to soft mush. Within the remaining melting glaze hundreds of dogs turds present themselves for horrified viewing to the causal pedestrian. I am now aware I am living within a massive open toilet. I constantly pass plenty of street signs warning insensitive dog owners of serious, wallet-splitting fines if they do not clean up after their beloved companions - clearly, these fines need to be tripled and even quadrupled.