Mayor Bloomberg held a press conference at Rockefeller Center today in which he announced that despite the fact that we have terrible waiters, urine-drenched subways, crap weather, and, let’s face it, basically the same stores as your average mall, tourists still want to come to New York: In fact, a whopping 47 million people visited this year. So yay! As if to prove his point, tourists crowded around him as he was saying this, according to the Times, snapping pictures as if he were an exotic animal. So he obliged them by doing that cute thing where he barfed up his lunch and ate it again. No, kidding, he obliged them by saying something quasi-rude, just like a real New Yorker: “We love you; go spend some money,” he concluded. Ha! Memories to share with the grandkids. [City Room/NYT]
