It Happened Last Week

Taking It Easy

By Mark Adams
Published May 7, 2007

There was something inspiring in New Jersey governor Jon Corzine’s insouciance last week: rising from his deathbed, paying a photo-op $46 fine for violating the seat-belt law, and then speeding off toward home at 70 miles per hour. His predecessor, Jim McGreevey, nonchalantly announced that he planned to study for the Episcopalian priesthood (in laid-back Chelsea, no less). New York governor Eliot Spitzer raised reelection funds in California; fellow Dems back in Albany grumbled about his sudden devil-may-care attitude toward campaign-finance reform. Mayor Bloomberg pushed to redevelop grimy Willets Point. Don Imus’s lawyers coolly noted that his contract had a “dog has one bite” clause, meaning that he’d been owed one warning from CBS before his firing. A 16-year-old whacked the naked intruder who attacked her in a Macy’s dressing room with the door. (“What happened was really freaky,” she said.) Jurors at the Peter Braunstein trial heard his victim’s chilling and really freaky 911 call. peta planned to soft-sell Manhattanites with a statue of a sobbing circus elephant in Union Square. A Venezuelan artist plotted a peaceful coup of Wall Street behind an army of mini-robots. Rupert Murdoch offered to peacefully take over the Wall Street Journal’s parent company for $5 billion. The Bronx D.A. dropped charges against a pot-smoking granny; the always-helpful Daily News I.D.’d the substance as a “green, leafy drug.” The driver of a heisted truck stopped on the Tappan Zee Bridge and swan-dived 90 feet into the Hudson. (Police fished him out.) A Chinatown restaurant paid a $1,000 fine for charging non-Chinese speakers inhospitable prices. And the increasingly Zen-like George Steinbrenner maintained clubhouse calm by granting Joe Torre and Brian Cashman lukewarm votes of confidence, then canning the man obviously to blame for the Yanks’ recent woes: strength coach Marty Miller.