Hot and Humid

The week’s unseasonable warmth made the air heavy with scents and odors that seemed to call forth primal emotions across the city. Mayor Bloomberg, usually a model of repressed sentiment, was said to be furious with Sheldon Silver for thwarting his stadium dreams, reportedly to the point of wishing to do the Assembly Speaker some sort of unspecified bodily harm. Joseph Bruno, also a likely object of Bloomberg’s ire, declared that his own heart was full of “love” for the mayor. (Note to Silver and Bruno: Beware the fury of a patient man.) Horror was the emotion that seized a woman living near Kennedy Airport when a severed human leg, shod in an Adidas sneaker, fell from the sky and landed with a “thunk” on her house. (The limb belonged to a stowaway in the wheel well of a passing South African Airways jetliner who came to grief when the landing gear was lowered.) A crushing sense of guilt reportedly oppressed the “coward cop” who had been caught on a surveillance video running away while his partner was being shot three times in a Brooklyn gun battle. An impressive range of emotions was displayed by Russell Crowe: One day he was wrathfully hurling a telephone at the concierge of the Mercer Hotel; the next he was seraphically plucking the strings of a harp in the lounge of the Ritz-Carlton. The Yankees may be having their difficulties, but Alex Rodriguez was over the moon after hitting his 400th career home run, becoming the youngest player in major-league history to pass that milestone. But the greatest joy of the week broke out when the “Potty Parity” act, which mandates two ladies’ toilets for every men’s toilet in public places, was finally signed into law. One woman said she was so happy she felt like jumping up and down on Oprah’s couch, which is happy indeed.

Hot and Humid