The Mail

Fire, Water, Whiskey

Re: "Where Can We Get a Job Like That?" (The News Hole, 5/25): Better still, is there any job besides the FDNY where I can get smashed on my shift on a regular basis and my supervisor will look the other way because he's tanked as well?

We New Yorkers have gushed over the firefighters since 9/11, often with good reason. Yet it does seem that the culture of the FDNY is slightly less enlightened than that of my high-school football locker room. By the way, what is the percentage of women currently employed by New York's bravest? That stat tells us all we need to know.

Geoff King, Brooklyn

It's Too Late To Stop Them

Lately your C.H.U.D. alerts have fallen to an alarmingly low level of regularity. Perhaps that would explain your oversight of the real hands at work behind the Upper East Side subway-grate camera-the devious C.H.U.D.s.

Sure, the authorities will find some poor, leary and perverted-looking schmo to pin the blame on, but that will be a smokescreen to hide the terrifying truth. The C.H.U.D.s have mastered the powers of electricity (the L.E.S. manholes) and now computers, keeping an ever-watchful eye on us "overworlders." They continue to plot our eventual demise.

Robert Frankel, Brooklyn

And We You

First, I love New York Press. As somebody sick of seeing NYC being ceded to the yuppies, it's nice to have a voice for the rest of us. Speaking of which, please tell me that you've read this week's New Yorker essay by Paul Goldberger, in which he explains why they should build apartments at Ground Zero. He actually uses the word "exquisite" to describe Richard Meier's nightmarish vertical gashes of glass and concrete in the Far West Village, and says they are the most desired addresses in the city. For whom, exactly?

Edward M. Aycock, Manhattan

He's All Around You

What the hell happened to Jim Knipfel?ÊI feel we devoted readers deserve at least a "letter from the editor" update on your reorganization. I have to say I am stunned there has been simply "no comment." I feel it is a tremendous loss to New York Press that you no longer run his column.

Carolyn Winnick, Manhattan

The Scent of An Older Woman

Re: "Transatlantic Let-Down" (Judy McGuire, 5/18): I am a 44-year-old woman with a 26-year-old husband that is hotter then hell. Life is not bad for this "over-the-mating-curve" middle-aged, premenopausal supposed has-been.

So big yuk on all you male ass-wipes that would have women believing that their fat, portly, bald, workaholic selves are doing better than women in their middle years. How many happy couples with him being 45+ and her being 22 with babies do you really know? Yeah, keep counting. As Benjamin Franklin once said, "Tis better to make an older woman happy than a younger woman miserable."

On a nicer note, thank you so much for "Summer Guide Five-0"! I'd had a bad week and usually hate free papers, but I picked up the Press because I wanted to read on the train home. I laughed until I almost pissed my pants. People were looking at me. Thank you for a ray of sunshine on my hump-day.

Mrs. Sgt. Nick Klent, Brooklyn

Fair Enough

Re: Matt Taibbi's "Flathead" (4/20): I enjoyed your review of Tom Friedman's latest irruption. But I condemn you in the strongest terms for failing to relay what is possibly the key sentence in the entire book. On the subject of his high-school journalism teacher, he apparently writes: "I sit up straight just thinking about her!" Given the unwitting Freudian motif running through all of his works, it saddens me that I had to learn about this crucial line from a review in the Guardian.

Shame on you, Matt Taibbi.

Seth Ackerman, Manhattan

PAGING: DRINKIE CROW

I didn't have any problem with that thing about the Pope a while back, I really didn't. But last week it was that little bit in the "News Hole" about the killer mints ("How Many More Lives?!" 5/18). This week, it's the "Tsunami Survival Manual" splayed on the front cover.

You are using the misfortune of innocents to get what you think is a laugh, but what you don't realize is this just diminishes the legitimate content of your paper. Also, I agree with last week's "Mail" comment (5/25) that Jim Knipfel is one of the best reasons to pick up this paper. I especially related to his recent item about being moved from an office into a cubicle-having gone through the same move in the last year, that one really resonated with me. Lastly, I'm still waiting for a suitable replacement for "Maakies."

Michael Slate, Manhattan

in living color

Re: "A Ridge Too Far" (5/18): I'm surprised that Martha Stewart wasn't consulted on this color chart.

Elizabeth Doxtator-Morenberg, via email

don't blow your stack

Re: "Again with the Frog in the Pan" (5/4): Regarding the smoking ban in NYC, no coroner or medical examiner has ever ruled a person died of second-hand smoke. So where are the anti-smokers getting their numbers from when there are no bodies to count? I want proof, not numbers and statistics, which can easily be doctored.

Funny how one reader wrote he has the right to get drunk without cigarette smoke. Maybe we should take away his right to drink and see how he feels. Non-drinkers should be able to go to a bar without being exposed to a drunkard who reeks of alcohol. Where are non-drinkers' rights? Oh wait, bars are places where people go to smoke and drink-whoops!

Bars are not public establishments, as propaganda will tell you. They are private establishments open to the public. This is a big difference. Don't go if you are offended by activity such as smoking and drinking.

All these people who complain of smelling of cigarette smoke, well, nobody put a gun to your head to visit these establishments. You did so of your own free will.

They claim they want to breathe clean air indoors but why are they not complaining about the right to breathe clean air outdoors? Clean air that is free from smog and pollution from cars, buses and trucks they drive. Free from corporate industry smoke stacks, free from coal-fired power plants. What a bunch of hypocrites.

It should be up to business owners to decide if they want smoking or not. If a business owner wants no smoking then so be it. Smokers don't have to go there. Conversely, a business that does allow smoking, non-smokers don't have to go there. That's true freedom of choice and how a free market system works. Any other system is tyranny.

Al Martinovic, Cliffside Park, NJ

HANOI JANE SMILEY

Armond White's review of "Blandarella" (5/11) is splendidly trenchant, and I applaud your serious deconstrunction of what, alas, seems to plop onto the cinematic audience as if it were a Kool Aid version of authentic granita. What you omitted, and what is critical to so many "entertainments" today, is the paltry quality of the writing and the poor casting-J Lo has nothing in her persona to indicate she is an ethnic, any more than Geraldo Rivera can authentically be called a Puerto Rican, despite his parental semi-provenance. The lack of nuance in the script is a feature, as you do indicate, of most of what passes for film today in the TV-clobbered culture. But far more evident, and unstated in your otherwise wise review, is the inexcusable ageism of the film: Lopez is supposedly unquestionably the agreed-upon ideal, vanilla-boring and unquantifiable as she is, versus the evolved and developed complexity of a Fonda. It is uncalled for and inexplicable to have the basically callow Charlie figure toss off ageist insults at Fonda as if she were a rump pastiche of cliched elderliness. She is not.

This Clintonist take of Hollywood's devolves all emotional truth and growth into the near-pedophilic fantasylands of directors who are themselves highly removed from the nubile and yet transparently Woody Allen-esquely permitted to bramble-patch any female not 27 and toned. It avoids even the possibility of layering and meaning beyond the imbecile one-line "joke" that makes the thought of second viewing an impossibility. When I lived in Asia, for the past several years, I would buy DVDs of U.S. films because I was homesick, and because, as a professor of communications who taught a course in film, I needed material to illustrate genre concepts. Such films as this one, however, embarrassed me, as it starkly contrasted with the more subtle generational conflicts featured in local Chinese, Japanese, Vietnamese, Hong Kongese, and Korean film output.

Marion Dreyfus, via email

Not What We Mean At All

Re: "Flathead" (4/20): "This would be a small thing were it not for the overall pattern. Thomas Friedman does not get these things right even by accident. It's not that he occasionally screws up and fails to make his metaphors and images agree. It's that he always screws it up. He has an anti-ear, and it's absolutely infallible; he is a Joyce or a Flaubert in reverse, incapable of rendering even the smallest details without genius. The difference between Friedman and an ordinary bad writer is that an ordinary bad writer will, say, call some businessman a shark and have him say some tired, uninspired piece of dialogue: Friedman will have him spout it. And that's guaranteed, every single time. He never misses."

You mean "incapable of rendering even the smallest details without incompetence"? This review got so much play that I'm surprised nobody pointed this error out.

Michael Jackman, copy editor, Metro Times, Detroit

gold, silver or bronze?

Re: "Flathead" (4/20): Matt Taibbi deserves a medal for slogging through the Friedman book?or at the very least a raise!

NAME WITHHELD, Manhattan

CAPTURING THE FRIEDMAN

Re: "Flathead" (4/20): Just wanted to congratulate your journal, and Mr. Taibbi, on this piece. It said things that need to be said and in a wonderfully cogent manner. Cheers! And, please, keep it up.

Lennie Erickson, Providence, RI

Re: "Flathead" (4/20): Thank you so much for this article. After this review I would now say that the book was worth being published!

Daniela Keil, Menlo Park, CA

STARR WITNESS

RE: "We, Anonymous" (5/25): Matt Taibbi is wrong. Questioning the government is perfectly okay-as long as Democrats are in power. Marty Peretz and Al Neuhart sure weren't complaining about reporters using anonymous sources from Ken Starr's office.

Seth Chandler, Sigtuna, Sweden

Cocaine?! At SNL?!?!

Re: Paul Krassner's "Al Franken for President" (5/25): If I may, I would like to respond with a couple of comments about your article:

On Abe Fortas:

1.ÊUnlike the partisan attack on the Bush nominees, 19 Democrats joined the Republicans in "filibustering Fortas."

2. Fortas was already a Supreme Court Justice.

3. Fortas was forced to reign amid ethics charges that he accepted tainted money from the Wolfen Foundation.

On Franken's skeletons:

Did you read, Live from New York: The Uncensored History of SNL? Franken admits to cocaine use while a writer.

Alan Skorski, via email

THE COLOR OF BULLSHIT

Re: "A Ridge Too Far" (5/18): Taibbi's article almost goes far enough in revealing the inner truth that the whole terror alert, surveillance society, paranoia-writ-large paradigm is far more about teaching the sheeple to bend over and drop trou for any Pecksniff with a badge, at any time, for any reason or no reason at all, than it ever was about "homeland security."

Warfare strategy is basic; when you've got your foe on his keister you drop the hammer. And on Sept 12, 2001 we were on our collective keister. So we're to believe that our legions of super secret snoops and anti-Islamist warriors have side tracked nascent attack upon attack? Nonsense. Sure there are bad guys here, and everywhere in the world, but, no follow on attacks simply mean that the bad actors do not have the manpower and resources to whack us here, in our backyards. They may have intent, delusions and maniacal purpose, but they can't pull it off.

Of course DHS will simply announce, "We can't tell you what we've done, what we're doing, or what we plan to do, but by gosh, send us even more tax dough 'cause we're the only fence 'tween y'all and the monsters of Allah. Now shut up an smile into our total information camera at the bank, gas station, gun store, library, your doctor's office, the supermarket, toll booth, etc." And I've got a couple of bridges for sale, cheap.

L.Lane, Humble, TX

Re: "A Ridge Too Far" (5/18): I really liked this article. Unfortunately, there aren't many reporters around today with the spine to write the truth.ÊI remember in, I believe, about January 2003 the color code went from yellow to orange. So a reporter from the L.A. Times phoned the local FBI office and asked what they were doing different now that the alert was raised. The FBI didn't have the slightest idea what the reporter was talking about!

What does Homeland Security do with the $40 billion a year it gets? How could the White House choose a crook such as Kerik? No one knows that Muskie's 1972 primary run was sabotaged by Republican dirty tricks. The media is afraid to mention the obvious smoking gun of the illegal Iraq war-"the Downing Street memo." They are also afraid to touch the theft of the 2000, 2002, and 2004 elections. The evidence says Kerry won the popular vote by 3%! We are supposed to trust the hidden "evidence" of the Republican voting machine corporations? They wouldn't stoop so low-just because theyÊwould not allowÊa single African-AmericanÊto register in some parts of the country a few years ago!

Keith Gordon, Arroyo Grande, CA