Northeast Storm Sets Records, Stops Traffic and Makes Life Miserable

By JAMES BARRON NY Times
A wind-driven deluge broke rainfall records across the Northeast on Tuesday, flooding roads and basements almost as quickly as it snapped umbrellas inside out, and compounding the lingering damage from a storm two weeks ago.
Officials mobilized National Guard soldiers in hard-hit areas of Connecticut, Massachusetts and Rhode Island.
In Massachusetts, Gov. Deval Patrick declared a state of emergency as rivers rose toward flood stage. On Long Island, crews rushed to shore up beaches chewed up by erosion.
Weather forecasters said the storm made this the wettest March on record in many places, including Boston, Newark and Queens. The National Weather Service said the March total had reached 10.63 inches in Central Park by Tuesday evening, beating the record set in 1983.
“Is it annoying? Yes,” said Walter Johnsen, who was walking his English mastiff in the West Village. “Would I like it to stop? Yes.”
It was a day for angry-looking colors on television weather maps, big swirls of yellows and reds that descended on an already storm-soaked region. It was a day when patients canceled their doctors’ appointments because they could not find vacant cabs, a day when tourists complained there was nothing to see from the top of 30 Rockefeller Center, when New Yorkers wondered if they had somehow woken up on the wrong coast.
“I feel like I’m in Seattle — it rains every day,” said Fabian Rios, who said he had given up on umbrellas after having two $5 ones and two $15 ones destroyed in the last couple of months.
It was a day when the weather supersized everything: the fierce surf pounding the beaches on Long Island came with Hawaii-size waves, and inland, everything that had to do with water grew as the steel-gray day went on. Puddles morphed into ponds, ponds became little lakes, lakes were transformed into rivers in the streets — and the rivers in the region spilled over their banks, just as they had earlier in the month when a punishing Northeaster barreled through.
In low-lying areas, streets seemed passable only in kayaks. But the storm even soaked areas where soggy basements are a rarity, in part because the ground was already waterlogged from earlier storms. Along New York Avenue in Huntington, on Long Island, water spurted out of manhole covers like little geysers.
The Interstate 95 corridor between Boston and New York was a particular concern, especially in Rhode Island, where some state roads were already closed.
In Manhattan, commuters high-stepped through subway stations where rain cascaded down the stairs, and a mudslide on the tracks delayed some Metro-North trains in the Bronx.
Westchester County drivers crept through hubcap-high water, and the police rescued a 77-year-old man who drove onto a stretch of the Bronx River Parkway in Yonkers that had been closed because it had flooded. A police spokesman said the man, identified as Riccardo Tedesco, “hit a wall of water” and, in seconds, his pickup truck was submerged.
In Connecticut, Gov. M. Jodi Rell said that a state of emergency from a storm earlier in the month remained in effect. This time, she said, “relentless rain has created extremely dangerous situations,” and she ordered 150 Connecticut National Guard troops to assist with flood control. She also directed all available state troopers to help with road closings.
Train service on a stretch of the Staten Island Railway was suspended when the tracks flooded, and the beach at Robert Moses State Park was underwater at high tide. Ronald F. Foley, director of the Long Island Region of New York State Parks, said that crews were concentrating on hauling sand to submerged beaches farther east, toward Fire Island.
“Our goal was to haul 20,000 cubic yards in there,” he said, “but it was a slower process than we thought it would be.” He estimated that the crews had delivered 5,000 cubic yards.
With high winds reported through the day, officials said there were delays at the airports in the New York area, and it was slow going on wind-tossed roads. The Port Authority of New York and New Jersey reduced the speed limit on three bridges between Staten Island and New Jersey to 35 miles an hour.
“This is a mess,” said Tom Kines, a meteorologist with AccuWeather in State College, Pa. “Some places are going to get almost two months’ worth of rain out of this system, but in 72 hours.”
In Manhattan, people scavenged trash cans for usable umbrellas. Patrick Ward, a dancer with the Joffrey Ballet, was checking a trash can on Seventh Avenue and describing the loss of three umbrellas to the wind this year. They were the $5 kind. He said he was hoping to find a still-usable castoff — broken, but not broken enough to be useless.
T. J. Jaye, a package deliverer, wore his rainy-day uniform: a plastic shopping bag over his Mets cap and a plastic garbage bag over his torso. He said he used to wear one like a skirt, until he saw himself in the mirror.
But tourists like Said El Bohdidi, from Spain, took the weather in stride. He and a friend, Carmen López, had booked several open-top bus tours and had to cancel them. But they went ahead with their plans to go to the Top of the Rock, the observation deck at 30 Rockefeller Center, and take pictures of the distant Empire State Building.
The Empire State Building was all there — the antenna that broadcasts radio signals, the observation deck that has been in the movies, the 6,500 windows that have to be washed — but they could not see it for the clouds. Mr. El Bohdidi said he did not mind. “If you want a nice picture,” he said, “you can take it from the Internet.”
Reporting was contributed by Angela Macropoulos, Sarah Maslin Nir, Liz Robbins and Nate Schweber.

Graceful, Generous, Kindly & Wrong!

Murder-suicide possible cause of deaths of former state Sen. Schaefer and husband

By Mashaun D. Simon and Aaron Gould Sheinin
The Atlanta Journal-Constitution
Conservative political activist and former state Sen. Nancy Schaefer and her husband Bruce have died of an apparent murder-suicide.
Few details were available Saturday, the day after the couple's bodies were found. It could be weeks before autopsy results are available, Habersham county Coroner Kasey McEntire told the AJC Saturday.
Meanwhile, tributes and condolences continued to pour in from lawmakers and others.
"I had the privilege of serving with Nancy for several years in the State Senate and appreciated her kind heart and desire to serve the people of Georgia well. Nita and I will be praying for the entire Schaefer family and ask that the Lord will provide them with peace that passes all understanding during this difficult time,” Lt. Governor Casey Cagle said in a statement.
GBI spokesman John Bankhead told the AJC there will be a thorough investigation into what happened. He could not say who might have been the shooter. Six GBI agents and two crime scene technicians were at the scene of the Schaefer home in Habersham County Friday night.
An announcement was made around 7:30 p.m. Friday on the floor of the Georgia General Assembly.
Sen. Don Thomas, a physician and who said he knew the couple well, said he believed Bruce Schaefer, 74, had cancer.
“In those moments, you are not at your complete sanity," said Thomas, of Dalton. "Some people figure the best way is to end it for both of you. They were married for so long. Loved each other so much. When you see somebody that you love so much, every now and then, you think the best way out of it is to go and be with the Lord. ”
Schaefer, a former Atlanta mayoral candidate and two-term senator, was beaten by Habersham County Commission Chairman Jim Butterworth in a north Georgia Republican runoff in 2008.
“This news hits the hearts of many in our community and I want to be among the first to express my deepest condolences to the family of Nancy and Bruce Schaefer. The Schaefer’s were a blessing to many who were privileged to know them," Butterworth said in a statement.
Rep. Rick Austin made the announcement from the house floor of the couple's death before the chamber observed a moment of silence. Austin represents Habersham and White counties, near Schaefer's home.
“Nancy Schaefer was a great lady, and she served Georgia and her constituents with honor and grace,” Austin said.
Neill Herring, a veteran environmental lobbyist, said Schaefer came to symbolize "a period in Georgia history where the Christian right was really in the ascendancy. I almost feel like her defeat in the last election was a sign that that power had began to wane."
Schaefer and her husband were the parents of five children and moved to Habersham County in North Georgia after living in Atlanta for 35 years. The daughter of a North Georgia Superior Court Judge and granddaughter of a state legislator, Schaefer, 73, entered the public eye in 1985 when she organized a Constitutional Liberties Rally in Atlanta.
The following year, she founded Schaefer Family Concerns, Inc., a nonprofit foundation dedicated to issues such as display of the Ten Commandments in public buildings and opposition to abortion.
She was the Republican nominee for Lt. Governor in 1994. In 1998, she sought the GOP nomination for governor.
According to her state senate biography, she was an eight year Trustee of the National Ethics and Religions Liberty Commission of the Southern Baptist Convention (SBC). She represented Family Concerns and the SBC at the United Nations Fourth World Conference on Women in Beijing in 1995, the U.N. Conference on Human Settlements in Istanbul, the U.N. Conference on Food in Rome, Italy and the U.N. follow up Conference to Beijing in New York.
She is a former First Vice President of the Georgia Baptist Convention, a frequent speaker to churches of all denominations, a speaker to civic and political organizations, and a frequent guest on radio and local and national television programs across the nation. She was also a Sunday School Teacher.
Nancy Schaefer was chosen as a Gracious Lady of Georgia, served on numerous advisory boards and directorships and in 2001 became the first woman Trustee for Toccoa Falls College in Toccoa, Georgia.
As a state senator, Schaefer represented the 50th district, including Banks, Franklin, Habersham, Hart, Rabun, Stephens, and Towns Counties, as well as part of White County.
- Staff writers Ernie Suggs, Nancy Badertscher and Alexis Stevens contributed to this report

Milita's Target Democrats

by John Avlon
Daily Beast
Around 10 House Democrats have reported being threatened with violence and even death upon return to their districts because of their support for health-care reform, according to House Majority Leader Steny Hoyer. The FBI, Capitol Police, and sergeant at arms gave the imperiled lawmakers a briefing Wednesday, reportedly offering extra security detail after some Democratic campaign offices were vandalized.
In another disturbing pattern, windows are shattering in Democratic field offices. Wingnuts author John Avlon talks exclusively to the militia leader who called for the attacks.
Late Saturday night, on the eve of the health care vote, a brick was thrown through the window of the Monroe County Democratic Party headquarters in Rochester, N.Y. A note quoting Barry Goldwater was attached to the brick, reading “extremism in defense of liberty is no vice.”
This came on the heels of shattered windows at Congresswoman Louise Slaughter’s district office in Niagara Falls and a Democratic Party headquarters in Kansas, and just before a similar attack on Congresswoman Gabrielle Giffords’ office in Arizona.
All this follows the online exhortations of militia leader Mike Vanderboegh of Pinson, Alabama – who wrote on his blog “Sipsy Street Irregulars” this past Friday: “if we break the windows of hundreds, thousands, of Democrat party headquarters across this country, we might just wake up enough of them to make defending ourselves at the muzzle of a rifle unnecessary.” The parallels, intentional or not, to the Nazis' heinous 1938 kristallnacht, or “Night of Broken Glass,” so-named for the 7,000 storefront windows that were smashed, are hard to ignore.
“Need I remind you that this side is the one with most of the firearms?”
Like most of his ilk, Mike Vanderboegh sees his calls to violence as patriotic and defensive, designed to stop civil war—“if we are to avoid civil war, we must get their attention BEFORE the IRS thug parties descend upon us each in turn—when we will be forced into dozens of defensive slaughters and then, to end it, forced yet again to call Pelosi and the other architects of this war upon their own people to final account.”
I interviewed Vanderboegh at length late last year for my book Wingnuts. He is a self-described “former leftist” and SDS member who had a political epiphany after reading Nobel economist Friedrich von Hayek’s The Road to Serfdom in the mid-1970s. He became a Second Amendment activist and became involved in the militia movement during the 1990s. The homebound father of three now believes that escalation is all but inevitable.
Wingnuts: How the Lunatic Fringe is Hijacking America. By John Avlon. 304 Pages. Beast Books. $15.95. Over the past year, he has detailed his unhinged opposition to the Obama administration while bracing for revolution: “You should understand that we are rapidly coming to a point in this country when half of the people are going to become convinced of the illegitimacy of this administration and its designs upon our liberty. Need I remind you that this side is the one with most of the firearms?”
Vanderboegh is the co-founder of the Three Percenters, one of the threefold increase in militia groups—I call them “Hatriot” groups—that has sprung up in the first 15 months of the Obama administration, as detailed by the Southern Poverty Law Center. They take their name from the questionable statistic that only three percent of the American colonists actively fought for independence. Therefore, the Three Percenters position themselves both as an elite group and also a direct link to the Founding Fathers, making their extremist alienation from mainstream America a badge of honor and secret knowledge. They describe themselves as “promoting the ideals of liberty, freedom and a constitutional government restrained by law.”
But beneath the benign bumper sticker, the loosely-affiliated group also professes that they “embrace the American Resistance Movement philosophy”—a survivalist militia-incubating network that teaches its followers how to train for the coming fight against tyranny. Their online forums offer a glimpse into a lunatic fringe that is itching to get the fight on: “This government has failed,” writes one registered user known as JV67. “At what point do we follow the example of the Founding Fathers and take up arms against these tyrants?”
In our conversation, Vanderbeough also raised the specter of a “race war” that he believes could erupt under Obama. “Now we have a gangster culture in the middle of the cities,” he told me. “We've imported into this country over the last 20 years a significant subculture that comes from south of the border that also has not bought in and identified with the larger culture. Our fear is that any breakdown in this country of law and order will turn into a three-sided race war and I can't think of anything that's more calculated to bring long-term tyranny and chaos than something like that.”
Vanderbeough has warned his supporters to prepare for what he calls “The Big Die Off”: “When a computer crashes, you simply discard it and obtain another. When political systems, nations or civilizations fail, they collapse in a welter of blood and carnage, usually ending in mountains of bodies, slavery and a long dark night of tyranny. This is referred to by people today who recognize the existential danger by the short-hand acronym of ‘TBDO’—‘The Big Die Off.’ This is not a video game. There are no do-overs. This is as real as it gets. Your system has experienced one or more fatal errors and must shut down at this time. Whether you survive The Big Die Off with anything left that is worth preserving is up to you.”
This revolutionary rhetoric is standard operating procedure on Hatriot websites in this burgeoning subculture. It is the extreme expression of what happens when fear is used to fire up hyper-partisanship and hate is deployed to try and delegitimize a duly elected president. As Vanderboegh’s home page warns “All politics in this country now is just dress rehearsal for civil war.”
John Avlon's new book Wingnuts: How the Lunatic Fringe is Hijacking America is available now by Beast Books both on the Web and in paperback. For More of The Daily Beast, become a fan on Facebook and follow us on Twitter.

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The London Times
Hitler letter about ‘cordial relationship’ with UK sells for £8,000
Valentine Low
Hitler declined the invitation to write an article for the Express
Image :1 of 3The letter is the very model of courtesy, expressing warm thanks for the British journalist’s “kind invitation” and speaking enthusiastically about the “truly cordial relationship” between the British and the German peoples. It is also from Adolf Hitler and yesterday was sold at auction at Bonhams for the knockdown price of £8,000.
“It was the most incredible bargain,” said the American buyer, Kenneth Rendell, owner of a Second World War museum in Massachusetts. He would, he said, have paid up to £50,000.
The letter, dated September 30, 1931, was Hitler’s response to an invitation from Sefton Delmer — one of the famous journalists of his generation, and the Daily Express’s man in Berlin — to write an article about the economic crisis facing Britain.
Although Hitler declined, the typewritten letter is revealing about the warmth of Hitler’s feelings towards the British. Writing of his hopes that a new accord would arise between Britain and Germany to replace the settlement made after the First World War, Hitler said: “I hope ... that out of this crisis a new readiness will grow up in Britain to submit the last twelve years to a reappraisal. I should be happy if, as a result of this, the unhappy war-psychosis could be overcome on such a scale as to permit the realisation of the truly cordial relationship between the British and the German peoples so eagerly desired by myself and my movement.”
He went on to say that, “greatly honoured as I am by your kind invitation”, he would not write the proposed article because his views would be seen as a criticism and “part of the British public might consider it presumptuous of me”.
Recalling in his memoirs his attempt to persuade the Nazi leader to write for the Express, Delmer wrote: “What kind of fee do you think brash young reporter Delmer offered Hitler? Ten guineas! Hitler declined with an elaborately courteous letter.”
Delmer, bilingual and partly brought up in Germany, was already on such good terms with the Nazis by 1931 that the Foreign Office suspected him of being a German agent. He was the first British reporter to interview Hitler and travelled with him on his plane during the 1932 election campaign.
His most famous scoop came in 1933 when he walked through the burning Reichstag at Hitler’s side. He had actually been beaten to the fire by the Times correspondent, but managed to time his arrival so that he was able to tag along with Hitler’s party. In his book, Trail Sinister, Delmer described how Hitler lost no time in exploiting the fire for his own political ends. “In the next corridor Hitler fell back a bit and joined me. He was moved to prophesy: ‘God grant,’ he said, ‘that this be the work of the Communists. You are now witnessing the beginning of a great new epoch in German history, Herr Delmer. This fire is the beginning.’ Just then he tripped over a hosepipe.”
Mr Rendell said: “This letter shows that Hitler thinks that Britain and Germany should really work together. This is what leads to his hesitancy at Dunkirk, because he always thought Britain would make a deal.”

San Leandro couple held in gift-card scam
Henry K. Lee, Chronicle Staff Writer
SAN LEANDRO -- A San Leandro couple have been indicted for allegedly stealing people's credit card information, using it to stock up on Nordstrom gift cards and pocketing thousands of dollars in cash refunds from items they purchased using the cards.
Amanda Mata, 20, bought the gift cards over the past year at Safeway stores throughout Northern California, the U.S. Secret Service said.
She and her 27-year-old boyfriend, Lamar Cotton, used some of the cards' value to buy items at Nordstrom and took the rest of the balance in cash, authorities said.
The couple then returned the merchandise for cash at different Nordstrom branches, Secret Service Special Agent Lori Choquette wrote in an affidavit filed in U.S. District Court in San Francisco.
Mata received nearly $52,000 in cash refunds from various Nordstrom stores in California, Oregon and Arizona, authorities said. She allegedly bought $232,000 in gift cards at Safeway stores using counterfeit credit cards.
"This is a multistep process to basically launder the fraudulently purchased gift cards and turn them into cash," Choquette wrote.
In a federal grand jury indictment unsealed Thursday in San Francisco, Mata and Cotton were each charged with conspiracy to possess unauthorized access devices, fraudulent use and fraudulent possession of access devices. Both were being held at Alameda County jails.
The couple were identified with the help of Safeway and Nordstrom employees as well as surveillance photos taken at various stores, authorities said.
Federal prosecutors are seeking forfeiture of Cotton's Jaguar automobile as well as equipment used to make fake credit cards.
E-mail Henry K. Lee at hlee@sfchronicle.com.

States’ Rights Is Rallying Cry of Resistance for Lawmakers

By KIRK JOHNSON NY Times
Whether it’s a correctly called a movement, a backlash or political theater, state declarations of their rights — or in some cases denunciations of federal authority, amounting to the same thing — are on a roll.
Gov. Mike Rounds of South Dakota, a Republican, signed a bill into law on Friday declaring that the federal regulation of firearms is invalid if a weapon is made and used in South Dakota.
On Thursday, Wyoming’s governor, Dave Freudenthal, a Democrat, signed a similar bill for that state. The same day, Oklahoma’s House of Representatives approved a resolution that Oklahomans should be able to vote on a state constitutional amendment allowing them to opt out of the federal health care overhaul.
In Utah, lawmakers embraced states’ rights with a vengeance in the final days of the legislative session last week. One measure said Congress and the federal government could not carry out health care reform, not in Utah anyway, without approval of the Legislature. Another bill declared state authority to take federal lands under the eminent domain process. A resolution asserted the “inviolable sovereignty of the State of Utah under the Tenth Amendment to the Constitution.”
Some legal scholars say the new states’ rights drive has more smoke than fire, but for lawmakers, just taking a stand can be important enough.
“Who is the sovereign, the state or the federal government?” said State Representative Chris N. Herrod, a Republican from Provo, Utah, and leader of the 30-member Patrick Henry Caucus, which formed last year and led the assault on federal legal barricades in the session that ended Thursday.
Alabama, Tennessee and Washington are considering bills or constitutional amendments that would assert local police powers to be supreme over the federal authority, according to the Tenth Amendment Center, a research and advocacy group based in Los Angeles. And Utah, again not to be outdone, passed a bill last week that says federal law enforcement authority, even on federal lands, can be limited by the state.
“There’s a tsunami of interest in states’ rights and resistance to an overbearing federal government; that’s what all these measures indicate,” said Gary Marbut, the president of the Montana Shooting Sports Association, which led the drive last year for one of the first “firearms freedoms,” laws like the ones signed last week in South Dakota and Wyoming.
In most cases, conservative anxiety over federal authority is fueling the impulse, with the Tea Party movement or its members in the backdrop or forefront. Mr. Herrod in Utah said that he had spoken at Tea Party rallies, for example, but that his efforts, and those of the Patrick Henry Caucus, were not directly connected to the Tea Partiers.
And in some cases, according to the Tenth Amendment Center, the politics of states’ rights are veering left. Rhode Island, Vermont and Wisconsin, for example — none of them known as conservative bastions — are considering bills that would authorize, or require, governors to recall or take control of National Guard troops, asserting that federal calls to active duty have exceeded federal authority.
“Everything we’ve tried to keep the federal government confined to rational limits has been a failure, an utter, unrelenting failure — so why not try something else?” said Thomas E. Woods Jr., a senior fellow at the Ludwig von Mises Institute, a nonprofit group in Auburn, Ala., that researches what it calls “the scholarship of liberty.”
Mr. Woods, who has a Ph.D. in history, and has written widely on states’ rights and nullification — the argument that says states can sometimes trump or disregard federal law — said he was not sure where the dots between states’ rights and politics connected. But he and others say that whatever it is, something politically powerful is brewing under the statehouse domes.
Other scholars say the state efforts, if pursued in the courts, would face formidable roadblocks. Article 6 of the Constitution says federal authority outranks state authority, and on that bedrock of federalist principle rests centuries of back and forth that states have mostly lost, notably the desegregation of schools in the 1950s and ’60s.
“Article 6 says that that federal law is supreme and that if there’s a conflict, federal law prevails,” said Prof. Ruthann Robson, who teaches constitutional law at the City University of New York School of Law. “It’s pretty difficult to imagine a way in which a state could prevail on many of these.”
And while some efforts do seem headed for a direct conflict with federal laws or the Constitution, others are premised on the idea that federal courts have misinterpreted the Constitution in the federal government’s favor.
A lawsuit filed last year by the Montana Shooting Sports Association after the state’s “firearms freedom” law took effect, for example, does not say that the federal government has no authority to regulate guns, but that courts have misconstrued interstate commerce regulations.
National monuments and medical marijuana, of all things, play a role as well.
Mr. Herrod in Utah said that after an internal memorandum from the United States Department of the Interior was made public last month, discussing sites around the country potentially suitable for federal protection as national monuments — including two sites in Utah — support for all kinds of statements against federal authority gained steam.
And at the Tenth Amendment Center, the group’s founder, Michael Boldin, said he thought states that had bucked federal authority over the last decade by legalizing medical marijuana, even as federal law held all marijuana use and possession to be illegal, had set the template in some ways for the effort now. And those states, Mr. Boldin said, were essentially validated in their efforts last fall when the Justice Department said it would no longer make medical marijuana a priority in the states were it was legal. Nullification, he said, was shown to work.
Whether the political impulse of states’ rights and nullification will become a direct political fault line in the national elections this fall is uncertain, said Mr. Woods of the von Mises institute.
But in Utah, at least, a key indicator is coming much sooner. The party caucuses to determine, among other things, whether candidates will face primary elections, are to be held next Tuesday, and Mr. Herrod said the states rights’ crowd would attend and push for change.
“Those politicians who don’t understand that things are different are in big trouble because a few people showing up to caucus can have a big influence,” Mr. Herrod said.
A spokeswoman for Gov. Gary R. Herbert, a Republican — who signed a firearms law like South Dakota’s last month declaring exemption from federal regulation for guns made and used within the state — said Mr. Herbert was still studying the new batch of bills passed this week and had not yet made decisions about signing them.

Where a Meal Can Cost a Fortune, 99¢ Pizza Catches On

By MANNY FERNANDEZ
The signs at the corner of Ninth Avenue and West 41st Street have an unbelievable, you-gotta-be-kidding quality, like free beer or affordable housing — 99¢ Fresh Pizza. Like many things in New York City, they are also too good to be true. They are off by a penny, as one slice actually costs one dollar.
Seven days a week, 24 hours a day, New Yorkers stand at the outdoor counter of 99¢ Fresh Pizza and pay as much for a plain slice as they did for a subway fare in 1986. At $1.50, the fee to use the sidewalk A.T.M. nearby is more expensive.
This being a city with a 10.4 percent unemployment rate in January, this being a recession, there is no such thing as change that is spare. Customers, taking the signs at their word, have been known to ask for a penny back after paying with a dollar bill.
“I give them penny,” explained Mohammad Hossain, a manager at the pizza shop.
No pennies change hands one block down Ninth Avenue, at West 40th Street, where the competition posted signs of their own: “Pizza, $1.00 per slice, tax included.” Postal workers, teenagers and businessmen step into the 24-hour 2 Bros. Pizza, $5 bills in hand. Allegiances have formed. Trash has been talked. A cabdriver said he preferred 99¢ Fresh over 2 Bros., because it was easier to find street parking outside 99¢ Fresh. A patron of 2 Bros. prefers their sauce over the sauce up the block.
Each establishment has the same daily special: Two slices and a can of soda for $2.75, which is what most places charge for a single slice. There is indoor seating at 2 Bros., but none at 99¢ Fresh. There is grated parmesan on the counter at 99¢ Fresh, but none at 2 Bros.
Asked who opened first, Mr. Hossain was adamant, perhaps even offended: “This is first! This is first!”
In New York City, the domain of the $1,000 omelet (Norma’s, at Le Parker Meridien Hotel) and the $41 burger (Old Homestead Steakhouse), the dollar wars between 99¢ Fresh and 2 Bros. are an unlikely development.
The shops are two of a growing number of New York delis and pizzerias offering $1 slices, a phenomenon that has delighted, dismayed and disturbed pizza lovers, food bloggers and rival pizzeria owners while defying a basic fundamental of the city’s economy — charging as much as you can whenever and wherever you can.
About 15 eateries around the city now sell dollar slices of pizza. The owners of 99¢ Fresh and 2 Bros. have turned bargain pizza into a business model: There are four 99¢ Fresh shops in Manhattan, and four 2 Bros., too. Next month, 99¢ fresh will open its fifth shop on 34th Street near Third Avenue.
While dollar menus have become a staple of many fast-food restaurants in New York, the low-cost pizzerias base their entire restaurants around the idea.
Pizza experts said the rise of dollar pizza was an economy-driven counterpoint to New York’s more celebrated high-end pizza. Last year, Di Fara Pizza in Brooklyn, widely considered one of the best in the city because each pie is handmade by the owner using imported ingredients from Italy, raised the price of a plain slice to $5.
“I don’t think a drunk college student cares about whether there’s San Marzano tomatoes on their slice,” Jason Feirman, 25, who writes a pizza blog called I Dream of Pizza, said of the $1 pizza trend. “It’s a good business model. They’re not catering to food blogs. The idea is to turn out these pizzas as fast as they can.”
Theories abound as to how an establishment can sell such cheap food in such an expensive city. Dollar pizza shops have been accused of using frozen dough, skimping on the cheese and sauce and cutting slices too small.
“I think that it’s great for the people that aren’t interested in high-quality product,” said Margaret Mieles, Di Fara’s manager, of dollar-slice establishments.
The owners of 2 Bros. and 99¢ Fresh contend that their slices are made fresh with quality ingredients and that they make their own dough and their own pizza sauce. They describe the dollar-slice business as a kind of public service, with minimal profit margins.
In 2008, when the first 2 Bros. Pizza opened on St. Marks Place in the East Village, the owners decided to have a grand-opening dollar-slice special. It was so popular, they made it permanent.
“Financially, it doesn’t make a lot of sense, but it’s part of our brand,” Eli Halali, 26, one of the two brothers who co-own 2 Bros. Pizza, said as he stood next to sacks of General Mills enriched flour in the East Village shop.
Abdul Mohammad, the owner of the 99¢ Fresh chain, said there was no secret to his formula. His stores are in small spaces with low rent in pedestrian-heavy locations that can support a 400-pie day. “If I sell like 20 pies, 30 pies, I cannot pay the rent, pay the employees,” he said. “My rent is cheap. If I pay $15,000 to $20,000 rent, I can’t do dollar slices.”
He said that he made roughly 15 cents to 20 cents profit per slice and that it was not unusual for one 99¢ Fresh location to produce up to 450 pies a day. His pizza is so cheap some customers treat him like a wholesaler, ordering dozens of pies in the morning and selling the slices elsewhere — for $2 each.
At lunchtime the other day at Ninth Avenue and 41st Street, 13 men and women stood on the sidewalk outside 99¢ Fresh, impatiently ordering and impatiently eating slices amid the ambiance of ungentrified Hell’s Kitchen: idling delivery trucks near the rear of the Port Authority Bus Terminal, a barking dog named Leo someone tied up down the block, a prostitute who hurried by saying something about $150 for a half-hour and a bearded homeless man with a cane who spoke loudly to himself about the size of the average bear. He ate two slices.
Some rave about the slices at the two chains, saying they are as good or better than more expensive slices, while others are only mildly impressed, or flat-out unimpressed. No one, however, complains about the price.
Last April, Adam Kuban, 35, the managing editor of SeriousEats.com and the founder of the pizza blog Slice, had what he called a “cheap-slice showdown” between 99¢ Fresh and 2 Bros. In part because of its “better hole structure” in the crust, Mr. Kuban declared 2 Bros. as the winner. Mr. Feirman of I Dream of Pizza would have voted differently, with 99¢ Fresh being his preference.
“Is it the best pizza out there? It’s not,” Mr. Kuban said in an interview, referring to both 99¢ Fresh and 2 Bros. “But for somebody who just wants bread and sauce and cheese, it’ll do you right.”
The inspiration for the trend, said Mr. Mohammad, considered the dollar-slice trailblazer, was not the cabbies, the tourists or the late-night drinkers of Hell’s Kitchen, but another demographic entirely: the homeless, who used a 24-hour drop-in center at Ninth Avenue and 41st Street.
“If they want to buy Chinese food, they need $4,” Mr. Mohammad said. “For a slice, it’s $2.50. I think about these people. I say, ‘I want to do something for these people.’ ”

From Times of London
Soldier blinded by a grenade in Iraq can 'see' with his tongue
Lucy Bannerman

A soldier blinded by a grenade in Iraq revealed yesterday how his life has been transformed by ground-breaking technology that enables him to “see” with his tongue.
Lance-Corporal Craig Lundberg, 24, from Walton, Liverpool, can read words, identify shapes and walk unaided thanks to the BrainPort device, which gives him “lingual vision”.
The Liverpool fan, who plays blind football for England, lost his sight after being struck by a rocket propelled grenade while serving in Basra in 2007.
He was faced with the prospect of relying on a guide dog or cane for the rest of his life.
However, he was chosen by the Ministry of Defence (MoD) to be the first person to trial a pioneering device — the BrainPort, which could revolutionise treatment for the blind.
The BrainPort is a tiny video camera attached to a pair of sunglasses which are linked to a plastic “lolly pop” which the user places on their tongue to read the electrical pulses.
It works by converting visual images captured by the camera, into a series of electrical pulses which are sent to the tongue. The different strength of the tingles can be read or interpreted so the user can mentally visualise their surroundings and navigate around objects.
Lance-Corporal Lundberg explained: “It feels like licking a nine volt battery or like popping candy.
“The camera sends signals down onto the lolly pop and onto your tongue. You can then determine what they mean and transfer it to shapes.
“You get lines and shapes of things. It sees in black and white so you get a two-dimensional image on your tongue. It’s a bit like a pins and needles sensation.”
He demonstrated the device yesterday, reading correctly three letter words, such as CAT, from word cards held around a metre in front of him.
“It’s only a prototype, but the potential to change my life is massive. It’s got a lot of potential to advance things for blind people.
“One of the things it has enabled me to do is pick up objects straight away. I can reach out and pick them up when before I would be fumbling around to feel for them.”
The soldier vowed that his new-found lingual vision would not be at the expense of his beloved guide dog, Hugo.
“There is no way I’m getting rid of my guide dog Hugo, though - I love him.
“This is another mobility device, it’s not the be-all and end-all of my disability.”
The MoD said it expected to pay the US around £18,000 for the device and training to enable the trial to take place.
Unveiling the BrainPort at the MoD headquarters in Whitehall, US Major-General Gale Pollock, who worked on the scheme, said the BrainPort has 400 points sending information to the tongue connection.
She said: “I think this provides huge hope, because there has really been no clear advance for the visually impaired since we invented white canes and guide dogs.
“It’s just so exciting to finally be able to say to people: here is a tool that may help you and start to restore hope to the visually impaired community. It’s just wonderful.”
Designers plan to expand this to 4,000 points, which would vastly upgrade the clarity of the image.
Users cannot speak or eat while using the BrainPort so designers are hoping to create a smaller device that could be permanently fixed behind the teeth or to the roof of the mouth, enabling more natural use.
Lance-Corporal Lundberg, who served with 2nd Battalion, Duke of Lancaster’s, suffered injuries to his head, face and arm in the grenade blast.
His left eye was removed and he is profoundly blind in his right eye.
The MoD said that between July 2004 and July 2008, 62 soldiers sustained eye injuries while serving in Operation Herrick in Afghanistan. Of these, 15 lost their sight in one or both eyes.
Fewer than five soldiers were blinded during Operation Telic in Iraq, the MoD said.

From The London Sunday Times
Jihad Janes spread fear in suburban US
Christina Lamb in Washington
Since terrorists turned planes into bombs on September 11, 2001, US intelligence has been on constant alert for the latest threat from Islamic extremists. The last place they expected to find it was in an army of bored divorcées from small-town America.
Yesterday it was revealed that a second American woman had been arrested, this time a blonde Colorado mother, just days after the FBI announced it was holding a housewife from suburban Pennsylvania who called herself Jihad Jane.
Jamie Paulin-Ramirez, 31, from the small town of Leadville in the Rocky Mountains, left her job as a medical orderly last September and set off with her six-year-old son to meet a Muslim man she had enountered online. The next her family knew she was under arrest in Ireland in an investigation into an alleged conspiracy to murder a Swedish cartoonist.
Like Jihad Jane, 46, whose real name is Colleen LaRose, Paulin-Ramirez was a discontented divorcée who spent her spare time on internet social networking sites.
LaRose had posted a desperate message complaining: “I’m so bored, I want to scream.” Paulin-Ramirez, who is said by family sources to have been married as many as four times, was equally fed up.
“She never liked who she was,” Christine Holcomb-Mott, her mother, told The Wall Street Journal. “She was always looking for something.”
Instead of taking a lover, or Prozac, or finding a hobby, both women decided the answer lay in radical Islamic jihad causes.
Paulin-Ramirez, a nursing student, changed her Facebook photograph to one depicting her in a hijab with only her eyes showing and told her astounded family she had converted to Islam. “It came out of left field,” her mother said.
She began posting messages on Facebook forums with headings such as “Stop calling Muslims terrorists!” and communicating with Islamic radicals around the globe.
LaRose, 1,800 miles away in her second-floor flat in Main Street, Pennsburg, was doing the same on her laptop.
Kurt Gorman, her then boyfriend, said he had no idea of her secret life and believes she had never met any Muslims before fleeing their home last August. “She seemed normal to me,” he told local newspapers.
On Thursday LaRose will appear in court on charges of conspiring with terrorists to kill a Swedish cartoonist who had drawn the head of the prophet Muhammad on top of a dog’s body.
The charges have astonished those who knew her. “She wasn’t no rocket scientist,” said Gorman. Neighbours said they often heard her talking to cats.
LaRose came to the FBI’s attention in July, alerted by a member of the Jawa Report, the online community, who was concerned that she was using her Twitter social networking account to raise funds for Pakistani militants.
A month later LaRose took off for Europe. There she declared online: “Only death will stop me now I am so close to the target.”
In September she applied to join Ladonia, an online artists’ community run by Lars Vilks, allegedly her intended victim. Vilks’s cartoons of Muhammad in a Swedish newspaper in 2007 caused an outcry among Muslims and a $100,000 (£66,000) bounty was put on his head.
According to court documents, LaRose tried to track Vilks down but on October 15 she flew back to Philadelphia. She was arrested as she stepped off the plane. Held on charges of identity theft, she was later charged with terrorism. Her testimony apparently led to the arrest of Paulin-Ramirez and six others in Ireland last week. One was an Algerian said to be Paulin-Ramirez’s husband.
That the two women were arrested in connection with the same alleged plot suggests they were in contact, although no details have yet emerged.
The pair are the latest in a string of American citizens to have been arrested in recent months, suggesting the country is facing a rising problem of home-grown terrorism.
Until recently US authorities believed this was a problem peculiar to Britain. “The feeling was we’re a country of immigrants and people tend to come to the US and feel accepted, whereas in Europe they are caught between two worlds,” said Stephen Grand, director of US-Muslim relations at the Brookings Institution, a leading Washington DC think tank.
The past eight months have seen 13 cases in which 30 American citizens allegedly plotted to carry out attacks or joined jihadist organisations in Pakistan or Somalia.
“I think these are just the tip of the iceberg,” said Sue Myrick, a Republican member of the House intelligence committee. “But people in this country are in denial. They don’t want to admit what’s happening and it scares me.”
Last week Sharif Mobley, 26, from New Jersey was arrested in Yemen by the country’s intelligence services during a sweep of suspected Al-Qaeda members. For six years before moving to Yemen, Mobley had worked at three nuclear power plants in New Jersey.
Al-Qaeda has long tried to attract Americans and Europeans to its cause. The recruitment of American women as home-grown jihadists presents a nightmare for the US authorities. “It’s like looking for the proverbial needle,” said a senior FBI official.
The women’s alleged target is far from complacent. Vilks, the cartoonist, has installed barbed wire in his downstairs hall, barricaded all the doors to his home and keeps an axe within easy reach.
“If anyone comes I will be able to fight for 30 minutes,” he said. “I won’t hesitate to use the axe if it is a life or death fight.” He has even written a poem about his alleged assassin. “Jihad Jane will come when it is dark . . .” it starts. “It is a sexual drama,” he explained.

Frugal San Francisco

By MATT GROSS NY TIMES
DAY after day in January, the rain poured down on the California coast without pause or pity — some of the worst storms to hit the state in a decade. High winds took out power lines and overturned SUVs. Garbage washed up on beaches. Hundreds of people were evacuated from their mudslide-threatened homes. And on one particular Tuesday afternoon, in the Mission District of San Francisco, the heavens focused their fury on a visiting father from Brooklyn — i.e., me — who, so self-absorbed he was blind to the calamities around him, had decided to walk home from the supermarket with his 13-month-old daughter, Sasha, in her stroller.
Only six and a half blocks, I thought. No need to use my weeklong bus and cable car pass ($26). But within a block, the downpour had rolled off my waterproof jacket and soaked my jeans through. On the next block, a homeless woman joined us, complaining that “it’s a terrible thing when you have to steal cupcakes to eat.” True enough, but I was too stressed to commiserate. And on the third block, the inevitable happened. The paper grocery bag hanging over the back of Sasha’s stroller disintegrated in the rain, spilling a week’s worth of organic groceries — a dense honeydew melon, supple young broccoli, tiny cremini mushrooms — across the flooded sidewalk.
Defeated, I screamed words that young Sasha probably should not have heard. This was not how the week was supposed to go. With her mother in Berlin on a business trip, Sasha and I had flown here for a little low-budget, daddy-daughter bonding time. Ambitious? Perhaps. But in her brief life span, Sasha had already proven herself a hardy voyager, with four overseas trips under her belt. She also had flying down to an art, sleeping almost from takeoff to landing, with hardly a squeal in between. This trip was a chance to demonstrate my talents not only as a frugal traveler but as a self-sufficient, all-in-one SuperDad! I would feed, dress, clean and entertain my little girl for an entire week, while exploring a strange city on the other side of the country — and doing so, of course, without spending a lot of money.
At first glance, San Francisco would seem to be precisely the wrong place to do this. According to Forbes magazine’s 2009 survey of America’s most expensive cities, San Francisco ranks fourth, and according to 2008 Census figures, San Franciscans have fewer children than the rest of the state. The hills are rough on strollers, and the homeless people, strip clubs and ubiquitous pot smoke can challenge a protective parent’s patience. Do the math, and it looks crazy to take a baby there for vacation.
But baby vacations involve a complicated calculus. For one thing, at just over a year old, Sasha isn’t exactly a sophisticated traveler. All she wants is to run around and see new things — whether on the street or at an art gallery — which meant that, for the most part, we could go wherever I wanted. And although San Franciscans may not be the most family-oriented, those who do have kids form fierce, tightly knit communities centered on schools, playgrounds and the Internet, which I hoped to tap into. The, uh, colorful street life, meanwhile, would hardly intrude on a 1-year-old’s consciousness; no awkward explanations necessary. And as for the expense, well, I knew I’d find ways around that.
On that front, that rainy Tuesday was actually going well. Sasha’s stroller was sturdy and lightweight, the cheapest in the Maclaren line and ideal for travel, and its transparent rain fly was keeping her warm and dry. Those groceries bobbing in the flood had been a bargain, too, despite the fact that they’d come from the Rainbow Grocery, a co-op that composts, shuts down for both César Chávez Day and Gay Pride Day and is, generally, expensive. Except on Tuesdays, Wednesdays and Thursdays, when you can deploy a coveted coupon, found in the local phone book, to knock 20 percent off your bill. (Mine came to $26.95.)
And when we finally soldiered home — after I’d taken a deep breath, found the reusable grocery bag I’d hidden in Sasha’s diaper bag and gathered up our food — it was not to a cheap hotel but to a gorgeous Victorian house for which we were paying $90 a night. I’d found the place through AirBnB.com, a Web site that lets people rent out their futons, spare rooms and entire apartments to travelers like myself; it’s a cross between Craigslist, CouchSurfing and VRBO.com. In fact, I never even looked for a hotel at all. Why spend more for less room, a hip lounge and a fitness center? Traveling with a young child brings new requirements: a kitchen where I could make Sasha cheap, healthful meals; a spacious bathroom where I could bathe her; free access to laundry machines; and plenty of space to run.
AirBnB is particularly strong in San Francisco, too, with nearly 400 listings to choose from. And I was sorely tempted by many of them — a two-bedroom apartment near Golden Gate Park for $64, a big one-bedroom for $95 in the Richmond District — but not all were available on my dates. Not that that mattered once I found the listing entitled “Victorian splendor in San Francisco.” The photos were brilliant, the amenities spectacular and the 19 reviews enthusiastic (“calm and sunny oasis to return to after a day packed with sightseeing,” wrote one). Plus, it was in the Mission, a heavily Latino neighborhood that has seen a lot of gentrification in the last two decades, resulting in a place where serious-minded parents push strollers from playground to taco truck to craft-beer bar — in other words, my kind of place.
“Victorian splendor” was an entire floor of a classic painted-lady Victorian, with hardwood floors and super-high ceilings, plush couches and a soft bed, a washer and a dryer and a fully equipped kitchen, all decorated with relics and photos that the owner, Joyce Ferman, a teacher, photographer and tour guide, had taken from trips to Ecuador, Vietnam and beyond. (Most of these I moved to higher shelves, away from Sasha’s curious hands.) The kitchen had staples like rice, olive oil and coffee, and Ms. Ferman, who was away in Los Angeles almost the whole week, had left us a fresh-baked loaf of banana bread and, stuck to the refrigerator, that Rainbow Grocery coupon.
With the weather so miserable, I was grateful for the kind of creature comforts that would have cost a fortune at a hotel. In the mornings, after Sasha had eaten her breakfast of bananas, oatmeal, yogurt and orange juice, we’d play in the living room and listen to Dan Zanes on my laptop, and Sasha would stare out the big bay windows at the damp, quiet street, cheering and tapping at the glass in wonder. Often, just as the rain would ease, she’d get sleepy and I’d put her down for a nap in her PeaPod, an ultralight travel bed more than worth its $60 price tag. For the next two hours, I’d anxiously plan excursions, hoping the rain would hold off long enough for us to get out, have fun and be back by 5 p.m. to begin the nightly routine of dinner, bath and bedtime.
As soon as Sasha woke up, we’d rush out the door to the Mission Playground, which had slides, a jungle gym and swings. Sasha went “Whee!” as she swung on the swings and swooped down the slides, and at times I could relax on a bench and watch her from afar, knowing that the moms and dads and grandparents and nannies were all keeping half an eye on one another’s charges. We didn’t interact much beyond “And how old is this one?” But there was something comforting about simply being together as our children played.
And whenever the drops would fall, Sasha and I would dash off in search of shelter. We didn’t have far to go: The Mission has lots of kid-friendly businesses. The Curiosity Shoppe was, you guessed it, filled with curiosities like Silly Putty eggs ($2), smiley face buttons ($1) and marbles (10 cents). Almost next door, Little Otsu carried printed curiosities: books, postcards, notepads — all illustrated with a careful, if twee, touch. I bought “The Tour Diary,” by Allison Cole ($9, marked down from $14), a beautiful travel journal in which Sasha may one day jot down notes and travel observations of her own. (A dad can dream, can’t he?)
The Mission itself could probably have sustained us the entire week — bilingual rhyme time at the local library, a tour of Mission murals — but my legs were restless. So I consulted Mission Parents, a 420-plus-member parenting-themed discussion group on Yahoo, which hosts similar groups across the country (like Dallas DiaperFreeBaby, BaltimoreSingleParents). These are some of the best places to seek out advice on everything from cheap diapers and toy stores to baby sitters and E.R.’s, and are worth joining whenever you have a trip planned.
On Mission Parents, for example, when I mentioned I was considering going to the ever-popular Exploratorium, one of the members warned me it was “geared more towards older kids.” Instead, several parents suggested the California Academy of Sciences, a museum in Golden Gate Park, for its baby-friendly aquarium and indoor rain forest. Another parent cautioned that it was expensive ($24.95!), but on the third Wednesday of every month, the museum was free.
That very Wednesday, I hauled Sasha by Muni to the academy. It was perfect. Wherever Sasha looked, there were fish — orange and blue, green and red, yellow and black — all of them just the other side of the glass, where Sasha could almost reach them. Ghostly jellyfish. Fragile seahorses. Lumbering 200-pound sea bass. An ocher starfish whose knobbly skin she tentatively touched. Even better, she could roam freely among the crowds, stopping where and when she wanted to marvel at the undreamed-of creatures of the deep, or to befriend another equally fascinated toddler. She was giddy.
The thing is, I knew she would be equally giddy wherever we went, just as long as she had something new to look at. Adult-focused, child-appropriate, it didn’t matter. I could go wherever I wanted — within reason. The Museum of Modern Art, for example, was a surprisingly good choice. Admission had been cut to zero (from $15) in celebration of its 75th anniversary, which meant not only did we get in free but so did thousands of other people as well, and the general bustle of the crowds, I knew, would mask any noisy, naughty behavior by Sasha. But she was a doll, and the only sounds that emerged from her were spontaneous chuckles as we listened to the writer Michelle Tea discuss Andy Warhol’s work in front of his self-portrait.
The Cartoon Art Museum (admission $6, under 6 free), which traces the history of comic strips, comic books and animated films from Japanese prints to contemporary Web comics, was the exact opposite — quiet and untrafficked. And even if there were other patrons for Sasha to disturb, it was a cartoon museum — how can you complain about kids there? While I gravitated to the samurai-themed exhibition (Usagi Yojimbo! Samurai Jack!), Sasha took advantage of the open gallery space to wander hither and yon, settling down (on my lap) only to watch a screening of the 1990 computer-animation classic “Grinning Evil Death.”
When I look back on these excursions now, they seem almost ideal — a balance of highbrow culture for adults and fun-filled kiddie joy. But at the time, I was beyond stressed. At the cartoon museum, I went cross-eyed focusing on both the art and Sasha’s whereabouts, and at the modern art museum I tried hopelessly to get her to drink warm steamed milk from the museum’s Blue Bottle Coffee stand. At the Steinhart Aquarium, I even snapped at an employee who asked me to move off the stairs, where I was struggling to get Sasha’s jacket on. I hope if he’s reading this, he’ll accept my apologies.
Likewise, feeding Sasha every day was a Herculean task. Actually, feeding a baby frugally and healthily can be quite easy, especially if you have a kitchen: just buy groceries and cook at home. And that’s what I was doing some of the time, preparing Sasha’s favorites — rice and broccoli, spaghetti with meat sauce — with plenty of leftovers for lunch. But this was San Francisco! We couldn’t just stay home. I felt compelled to expose Sasha to the wealth of taquerias and street carts and artisanal bakeries.
At Udupi Palace, an Indian restaurant recommended by a Mission Parents member, I plopped Sasha into a highchair and ordered lunch: saag paneer with rice ($9.95), seemingly a surefire hit with a girl accustomed to Malaysian curries and Thai stir-fried noodles. But no luck. Sasha spat out the puréed spinach and made a face at the rice, though she ate the paneer with gusto. That night, we dined at home on a chicken-mole burrito ($7.50) from Papalote, one of the healthier, fresher Mexican spots in the Mission. Again, she was uninterested. It turned out she preferred the cheaper, greasier and far superior burritos ($5.45) from El Farolito.
Another night, I pushed us harder, hopping the BART one stop south to the Chenery Park Restaurant, a white-tablecloth place where Tuesdays are kids’ nights, meaning Sasha could make noise and drop food on the floor, and no one would notice. But when her safe-bet macaroni and cheese ($6) arrived, she would have none of it. I despaired, powering through my excellent smoked pork chop ($20) and Russian River ale in hopes of getting out of there quickly, until finally I let her taste some spinach sautéed with garlic — and she loved it. “But,” I wanted to yell, “you hated spinach yesterday!”
Now, however, I remember only the good: Sasha’s laugh and my cold beer; the friendly waitresses and the bus passengers who graciously ignored the stroller bumping at their toes. But I also know that every day depleted me so fully I couldn’t stay awake past 9:30 p.m. One week with this baby was more physically challenging than hiking across Montana and more psychologically draining than ... anything I’ve ever done.
Which was why, whenever I had the chance for a reprieve, I leapt at it. One day, I corralled some friends — travel-happy dads like me — for drinks at Vino Rosso, an Italian wine bar recommended by a Mission Parents member for its “Wine & Whiners” Wednesdays, where we knocked back $4 glasses of prosecco while our children played with dishwasher-sterilized plastic toys provided by the bar. In one corner, a few moms watched us, and we felt like superstars — responsible dads with social lives to boot.
My last night in San Francisco, I got really lucky. Ms. Ferman, my AirBnB landlord, had returned from her trip and agreed to baby-sit, a simple job, as Sasha sleeps soundly from 7:30 p.m. till sunrise. Around 9 p.m., I left with Ryan — an old friend from Shanghai — and cruised the neighborhood, from the yuppified Beretta, where $10 buys an innovative cocktail like the Dolores Park Swizzle, to the divey, red-lighted Mission Bar, where we couldn’t have spent more than $3 each on our drinks, to Nombe, an ostensibly Japanese restaurant that served Laotian tongue tacos, two for $3. They were amazing, and drizzled with a honey-habanero salsa, they were the spiciest things I’d eaten in 10 years; my mouth was still on fire when I got home. It was not even 1 a.m., but I felt like I’d been out till dawn.
As I climbed into bed, careful not to disturb my sleeping daughter, I wondered what Sasha would make of the trip. Would she even remember any of it?
Probably not, but then again, at her age memory is a funny thing. The specific images may fade — however preserved in photos and videos — but some vestigial instinct for travel may remain. Like all babies, Sasha is an explorer of new worlds, even when they’re close to home, and I like to think the trip gave her a burst of confidence in her abilities. For me, I know, it certainly did. IF YOU GO
Numerous airlines fly nonstop from New York City area airports to San Francisco, with late-March departures starting at just under $300, according to a recent Web search.
One-, three- and seven-day passes good on all San Francisco Muni buses and cable cars are sold at the airport. BART trains between the airport and the 24th and Mission stop cost $5.10 each way.
WHERE TO STAY
A recent search on AirBnB.com found nearly 400 listings in the San Francisco area, ranging from a $23-a-night spare room in the North Beach neighborhood to a $600-a-night, six-bedroom apartment near Alamo Square. AirBnB charges an additional 6 to 12 percent service charge, depending on the cost of the rental and the length of your stay.
WHAT TO DO
California Academy of Sciences, 55 Music Concourse Drive; (415) 379-8000; calacademy.org.
San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, 151 Third Street; (415) 357-4000; sfmoma.org.
Cartoon Art Museum, 655 Mission Street; (415) 227-8666; cartoonart.org.
WHERE TO EAT AND DRINK
Udupi Palace, 1007 Valencia Street; (415) 970-8000; udupipalaceca.com.
Papalote, 3409 24th Street; (415) 970-8815, papalote-sf.com.
El Farolito, 2779 Mission Street; (415) 824-7877; elfarolitoinc.com.
Chenery Park Restaurant, 683 Chenery Street; (415) 337-8537; chenerypark.com.
Vino Rosso, 629 Cortland Avenue; (415) 647-1268; vinorossosf.com.
WHERE TO SHOP
Rainbow Grocery, 1745 Folsom Street; (415) 863-0620; rainbowgrocery.org.
The Curiosity Shoppe, 855 Valencia Street; 415-671-5384; curiosityshoppeonline.com.
Little Otsu, 849 Valencia Street, (415) 255-7900; littleotsu.com.
Chloe’s Closet, 451A Cortland Avenue, (415) 642-3300; chloescloset.com, is a children’s clothing consignment shop, with $3 Bob Marley T-shirts and a well-stocked baby-changing room.
MATT GROSS writes the Frugal Traveler blog, which appears every Wednesday, and is a founder of the urban parenting blog DadWagon.com.

On the Bow’ry

By DAN BARRY

NY TIMES
OPEN the door to a small hotel on the Bowery.
A small hotel, catering to Asian tourists, that used to be a flophouse that used to be a restaurant. That used to be a raucous music hall owned by a Tammany lackey called Alderman Fleck, whose come-hither dancers were known for their capacious thirsts. That used to be a Yiddish theater, and an Italian theater, and a theater where the melodramatic travails of blind girls and orphans played out. That used to be a beer hall where a man killed another man for walking in public beside his wife. That used to be a liquor store, and a clothing store, and a hosiery store, whose advertisements suggested that the best way to avoid dangerous colds was “to have undergarments that are really and truly protectors.”
Climb the faintly familiar stairs, sidestepping ghosts, and pay $138 for a room, plus a $20 cash deposit to dissuade guests from pocketing the television remote. Walk down a hushed hall that appears to be free of any other lodger, and enter Room 207. The desk’s broken drawer is tucked behind the bed. Two pairs of plastic slippers face the yellow wall. A curled tube of toothpaste rests on the sink.
Was someone just here? Was it George?
Six years had passed since I was last in this building at 104-106 Bowery. Back then it was a flophouse called the Stevenson Hotel, and I was there to write about its sole remaining tenant, a grizzled holdout named George; toothless, diabetic, not well. He lived in Cubicle 40, about the length and width of a coffin.
All the other tenants, who had paid $5 a night for their cubicles, had moved on or died off, including the man known as the Professor, and Juliano, who used to beat George. The landlord, eager to convert the building into a hotel, a real hotel, had paid some of them to leave. But George had refused, saying the last offer of $75,000 was not enough.
It was as though he belonged to the structure, a human brick, cemented by the mortar of time to the Professor and Alderman Fleck and all the others who gave life to an ancient, ordinary building on the Bowery.
Now the place is the U.S. Pacific Hotel, and George is nowhere to be seen. I dim the lights in my own glorified cubicle, and give in to musings about his whereabouts, and long-ago murders, and the Bowery, where, the old song said, they say such things and they do strange things.
On the Bow’ry. The Bow’ry.
THE building at 104-106 Bowery, between Grand and Hester Streets, has been renovated, reconfigured and all but turned upside down over the generations, always to meet the pecuniary aspirations of the owner of the moment. Planted like a mature oak along an old Indian footpath that became the Bowery, it stands in testament to the essential Gotham truth that change is the only constant.
Its footprint dates at least to the early 1850s, when the Bowery was a strutting commercial strip of butchers, clothiers and amusements, with territorial gangs that never tired of thumping one another. Back then the building included the hosiery shop, which promised “all goods shown cheerfully” — although an argument one night between two store clerks, Wiley and Pettigrew, ended only after Wiley “drew a dark knife and stabbed his antagonist sixteen times,” as The New York Times reported with italicized outrage.
Over the years the Bowery evolved into a raucous boulevard, shadowed by a cinder-showering elevated train track and peopled by swaggering sailors and hard-working mugs, fresh immigrants and lost veterans of the Civil War. The street was exciting, tawdry and more than a little predatory. The con was always on.
By 1879, 104-106 Bowery had become a theater and beer hall, with a bartender named Shaefer who was arrested twice in two weeks for selling beer on Sunday. The adjacent theater, meanwhile, sold sentiment.
During one Christmas Day performance of “Two Orphans,” precisely at the audience-pleasing moment when the blind girl resolves to beg no more, someone shouted “Fire!” A false alarm, it turned out, caused when a cook in the restaurant next door dumped hot ashes onto snow. The crowd returned to rejoice in the blind girl’s triumph.
The theater changed names almost as often as plays: the National, Adler’s, the Columbia, the Roumanian, the Nickelodeon, the Teatro Italiano. In 1896, when it was known as the Liberty, the police arrested two Italian actors for violating the “theatrical law.” He was dressed as a priest, she as a nun.
But the building’s dramas were not relegated solely to the stage. One of its theater proprietors skipped to Paris with $1,800 in receipts, leaving behind a destitute wife, six children and many unpaid actors. One of its upstairs lodgers drowned with about 40 others when an overloaded tugboat, chartered by the Herring Fishing Club, capsized off the Jersey coast.
In 1898, two men were laughing and drinking at a vaudeville performance when a third walked up, drew a revolver and shot one of them in the head. Hundreds scrambled for the exits to cries of “Murder!”
The shooter, Thompson, told the police that he had seen the victim, Morrison, on the street with his wife. “He has ruined my life; broken up my home,” Thompson said, as he gazed at the man groaning on the floor. “It’s a life for a wife.”
And the fires, the many fires. The one in 1898 gutted the building and displaced the families of Jennie Goldstein and Sigmund Figman, while the one in 1900 sent 500 theatergoers fleeing into the Christmas night, prompting a singular Times headline: “Audience Gets Out Without Trouble, but the Performers Were Frightened — Mrs. Fleck Wanted Her Poodle Saved.”
MRS. MABEL FLECK, whose poodle survived, was the wife of the proprietor, one Frederick F. Fleck: city alderman, bail bondsman and self-important member of the court to the Bowery king himself, Timothy D. Sullivan — “Big Tim” — a Tammany Hall leader said to control all votes and vice south of 14th Street.
Alderman Fleck was there whenever Big Tim staged another beery steamboat outing for thousands of loyal Democrats, or another Christmas bacchanal for Flim-Flam Flannigan, Rubber-Nose Dick, Tip-Top Moses and hundreds of other Bowery hangers-on. There to provide bail when some Tammany hacks were charged with enticing barflies at McGurk’s Suicide Hall to vote the Democratic ticket in exchange for a bed, some booze and five bucks.
When Alderman Fleck was not demonstrating his Tammany fealty, he was managing the Manhattan Music Hall, here at 104-106 Bowery, a preferred place for dose in de know.
But the city’s good-government types, the famous goo-goos, hated how the Bowery reveled in its debauchery. In 1901, a reform group called the Committee of Fifteen raided Alderman Fleck’s establishment and charged him with maintaining a disorderly house. He responded by calling the arresting officer “a dirty dog.”
Undercover agents testified to having witnessed immoral acts on stage and off. One reported seeing a woman lying on a table, moaning; when he asked what was wrong, he was told she had just consumed $60 worth of Champagne, and so was feeling bad.
But this was Big Tim’s Bowery. A jury quickly acquitted Fleck, prompting a night of revelry at the music hall. A Times reporter took note:
“Strangers as soon as they entered were piloted in the same old way by a watchful waiter to the gallery and curtained boxes upstairs, and as if by magic women ‘performers’ in abbreviated costumes appeared on the scene with capacious thirsts, which could be satisfied only with many rounds of drinks at the same music hall — $1 per round.”
Soon, Alderman Fleck was competing in the “fat man’s race” at one of Big Tim’s annual outings, weighing in at 260 pounds. Soon he was back in his rightful place as a minor character along a boulevard so chock-full of characters — the predatory, the dissolute, the tragicomic — that slumming parties of uptown swells would tour the Bowery to gawk and feign allegiance. Some locals were even hired to portray Bowery “characters” to meet tourist expectations.
But denizens who lingered too long on the Bowery often paid a price. A few doors up from Fleck’s place was a saloon owned by the famous Steve Brodie, whose survival of a supposed leap from the Brooklyn Bridge earned him the lucrative lifetime job of recounting the tale. After his premature demise at 43, the saloon’s new owners hired his son, Young Steve Brodie, as a tough-talking character, but he soon drank himself into the more tragic role of Bowery inebriate.
As he lay dying in the gutter, young Brodie, 27, gazed up at a concerned police officer and whispered: “I’m in, Bill. Git me a drink of booze, quick.”
The officer obliged. It was his civic duty.
The downfall of Alderman Fleck, who once sported diamond-encrusted cufflinks, was less dramatic. First the city marshal came after him for not paying for 281 chickens he had ordered for yet another Tammany dinner. Then his poodle-loving wife sued for divorce. Then he wound up spending a night in jail, following a row with a butcher over another unpaid bill.
His obituary a quarter-century later made no reference to goo-goo raids or fat men’s races, to precious poodles, Big Tim Sullivan or a street called the Bowery. It described him instead as having been in the theatrical business for many years, which seems close enough.
THE theaters and music halls, the museums for suckers and the likes of Steve Brodie — they all gradually faded from the Bowery. Big Tim Sullivan, who in later years championed women’s suffrage and labor law reform after the Triangle Shirtwaist fire of 1911, was seen less and less, in part because disease, probably syphilis, had rendered him mentally incompetent.
One afternoon in 1913, Sullivan escaped from his handlers, only to be struck and killed by a freight train in the Bronx. His body lay unclaimed in the morgue for 13 days, until a police officer, glancing at yet another corpse bound for potter’s field, did a double-take and shouted: “Why, it’s Tim! Big Tim!”
More and more, the Bowery became the place for men with nowhere else to go: thousands and thousands of them, from war veterans to would-be masters of the universe, often seeking the deadening effects of alcohol and, later, drugs. They found cheap beds and brotherhood in flophouses that fancied themselves as hotels.
After housing a variety of passing ventures — a moving-picture theater, a rag-sorting operation, a penny arcade — the building at 104-106 Bowery became the Comet Hotel, a flophouse. And it remained a flophouse for decades, as wholesale restaurant suppliers and lighting-fixture stores moved onto the street; as many other flophouses disappeared; as the fits and starts of gentrification claimed loft space.
In the late 1970s, the Comet’s lodgers would trudge up the 17 steps to the lobby, where a television hung from the wall and a proprietor in a cage-like office collected the fee — slightly less than $3 a night — slipped under a grate. One of the floors upstairs was an open room, with 65 beds and 65 lockers. The other two floors had 100 cubicles combined, each one measuring 4 feet by 6 feet, with partitions 7 feet high and a ceiling of chicken wire.
Cubicle No. 40 was home to a Greek immigrant named George Skoularikos. A sometime poet, he moved here in 1980 and stayed, and stayed. As it became the Stevenson Hotel. As the other men left or died. As the current owners, Chun Kien Realty, tried to entice him with money to move.
By 2004, when I visited George, he was 74 and this flophouse’s last lodger, sleeping in a cramped, green-painted cubicle that he secured with a loop of wire. A Housing Court judge and a Legal Aid lawyer were advising him to take the landlord’s offer of $75,000. Looking with exasperation upon this frail, sick man, the judge had said, “And who do you think will last the longest?”
But George would not, perhaps could not, leave.
Today, at 104-106 Bowery, what used to be a hosiery store and a beer hall and a theater and a penny arcade and a flophouse is now a hotel of less than luxurious means. Tucked between a Vietnamese restaurant and the Healthy Pharmacy, it has a blue marquee in English and Chinese. The cubicles and chicken wire are gone, as is George.
I found him, eventually, in court files. In late 2004, a few months after my column about him, a city-appointed psychiatrist came calling to the squalid and all-but-deserted flophouse. She later wrote that George was delusional, paranoid and in need of a guardian who could help move him to “more amenable accommodations.”
But George refused to go. At one point a social worker tried to take him to a hospital, but George barricaded himself on the flophouse’s second floor. Police officers eventually forced open the door to conduct a search by flashlight. And there they found him, hiding in a cubicle, a Bowery holdout.
In late 2005, the matter of George Skoularikos was adjudicated in State Supreme Court in Manhattan.
ORDERED, that the landlord pay George’s court-appointed guardian the sum of $80,000;
ORDERED, that the guardian arrange for “an appropriate place of abode” for George in Greece, and set up a mechanism for payment of his bills;
ORDERED, that a caseworker accompany George to Greece to make sure his new residence is properly established.
In a sense, this Bowery building that once received George had returned him to his native Greece, where he would die a few months later, in April 2006. There was enough money from his settlement with the landlord to pay for his funeral and marble tomb.
SCREAMS at the bottom of the night disrupt a Bowery sleep. A woman on the other side of the hotel is crying, “I love you, I love you,” to someone who seems not to love her back. Her wails last an hour, unleashing into the pitch a swirl of imagined sounds and whispers.
The glass shimmers of a million beer mugs. The faint strains of a thousand vaudeville ditties. The entwined polyglot murmurs, of English and German and Yiddish and Italian and Mandarin — and Bowery. The stentorian blather of a Tammany blowhard. The final exhalation of a dying inebriate. A weepy farewell toast to Big Tim. The shouts of “Fire!” The bark of a poodle.
The echoing clatters of a lone man building a barricade.
At morning’s light, the sounds recede into the walls. It’s a new day on the Bowery.

A New Breed of Guard Dog Attacks Bedbugs

By PENELOPE GREEN
CRUISER made four house calls on a recent rain-soaked Tuesday. There were two happy endings and two unhappy ones, a fairly typical outcome for a typical day in the life of a bedbug-sniffing puggle.
“Except that there’s nothing typical about this business,” said his handler, Jeremy Ecker, 35, whose six-month-old company, the Bed Bug Inspectors, has vetted hotels, college dorms and Midtown office buildings, suburban homes, bare-bones Brooklyn rentals and tony Manhattan co-ops. (Mr. Ecker, who charges $350 for a residential inspection, is an independent inspector, meaning he has no affiliation with an exterminator, though many hire him to check a property they have treated.)
Increasingly, real estate lawyers are urging buyers in contract to inspect apartments before they close, and in their advertising, many pest control companies exhort would-be tenants to “inspect before you rent.” And dogs like Cruiser can inspect a room in minutes, whereas lesser mammals like human beings need hours to conduct a visual inspection.
Bedbug-sniffing dogs, adorable yet stunningly accurate — entomology researchers at the University of Florida report that well-trained dogs can detect a single live bug or egg with 96 percent accuracy — are the new and furry front line in an escalating and confounding domestic war.
While experts cite a host of reasons for the upsurge, they agree on one thing: the bugs, which were mostly eradicated in this country at midcentury by now-banned pesticides like DDT but remained a constant scourge overseas, are finding their way back to the United States through an increase in global travel.
And in cities like New York, where neighbors are often separated only by bricks and mortar, one person’s infestation is everybody’s problem, since bedbugs can crawl through walls and along wiring and pipes, and hitchhike on clothing, furniture, luggage and more. In this city of 8.3 million, it seems as if everyone has a bedbug story.
Just ask Gale A. Brewer, a self-appointed bedbug evangelist and a City Council member from the Upper West Side. She prodded the Mayor’s office to convene a bedbug advisory committee last fall, after years of what she and others felt were woeful public policy inadequacies in the face of the relentless advances of what some have called “the pest of the century.” (The committee — entomologists, civic policy experts and advocates for children, the elderly and others — will issue its recommendations next month.)
The breadth and scope of the problem has been captured anecdotally in anguished tales — the family living in a tent outside their lovely-but-infested Long Island home, the woman in the Upper West Side one-bedroom who spent $9,500 on extermination and lived out of plastic bags, at friends’ apartments, for three months — posted on blogs like bedbugger and newyorkvsbedbugs, the likes of which have been spreading like, well, bedbugs, over the last few years. They are told over and over at community board hearings presided over by Ms. Brewer and others, and recorded in mainstream media. Another picture, though still incomplete, comes from the city’s Department of Housing Preservation and Development, which has been tracking bedbug complaints and violations through calls to the 311 help line. Consider that six years ago, there were 537 bedbug complaints and 82 violations (in other words, verified infestations); last year, complaints topped out at nearly 11,000, with 4,084 violations cited (nearly double that of the previous year).
But the complaints registered with the department and 311 relate only to rental properties; reports of bedbugs scampering through the private sanctums of hotels, co-ops and condos, colleges and office buildings remain largely uncounted, though real estate lawyers and brokers report that co-op minutes reveal a world that’s just as infested as the rest of the city.
In the last three months, and for the first time in her 21-year career, for example, Lori Braverman, a Manhattan real estate lawyer, advised buyers she was representing in three deals to inspect apartments they were in contract for, having noted in the co-op boards’ minutes instances of bedbugs in their buildings. “One was described as a ‘significant infestation,’” she said. “It’s the deep, dark secret of co-ops and condos.” (All three checked out clean, including a classic five on the Upper West Side inspected by Cruiser.) Still, as Ms. Brewer said darkly, “Those bugs are everywhere.”
After a day or two with Cruiser, one would have to agree.
NINE-THIRTY in the morning in Borough Park, Brooklyn, at the home of a family of seven, two of them still in diapers: the family was poised to move to a new house, their things in boxes, the rooms askew, to the horror of the mother, who had to welcome a reporter and a photographer into the pre-move disarray. (Like all the bedbug sufferers in this story, she asked not to be identified because of the stigma surrounding the pests.)
Cruiser had been invited because the mother had found a dead bedbug floating in the bath of one child the night before, and she wanted to make sure, if there was an infestation, that it didn’t travel to their new home. The house next door had had a problem, she said, and she knew bedbugs travel easily through walls. All this was related to Mr. Ecker, while Oscar Rincon, his colleague, waited outside with Cruiser.
“I don’t want to know the details,” Mr. Rincon said later, lest the knowledge affect his body language and interfere with the dog’s inspection.
Mr. Rincon, 42, is an old friend of Mr. Ecker’s who worked for years at the North Shore Animal League. He and Mr. Ecker, Cruiser and his partner, a beagle called Freedom, were all trained for their work at J&K Canine Academy in High Springs, Fla., where rescue dogs are schooled in the scent detection of termites, bedbugs, bombs, some cancers and canker, a scourge on citrus crops. The school has an ongoing relationship with the University of Florida, which has been testing its results.
In two weeks training with Cruiser and Freedom, Mr. Ecker and Mr. Rincon learned how to hide live hives of bedbugs — little gangs of bugs tucked into vials fitted with mesh covers, so the scent can travel, but the bugs stay put — and work with the dogs in constantly changing scenarios (hiding bugs in high cupboards, in drawers, under rugs and so forth). Like all scent-detecting dogs, Cruiser and Freedom work for food; put another way, they are fed only when they find their target, which keeps them accurate and keen on their jobs.
This poses challenges, however, for a dog handler. Back home in Fresh Meadows, Queens, Mr. Ecker discovered pretty quickly that his new career required an extreme lifestyle commitment. Not only would he have to live with bedbugs to train and feed his new roommates, Cruiser and Freedom, he would have to feed the bugs, too. Remember that dinner for a bedbug is a nice long quaff of human blood; Mr. Ecker rolled up a sleeve to reveal a horrifying tattoo of old bites. (Bedbugs don’t carry disease, but their bites can itch like crazy.)
Happily, the bugs need to eat only once a month or less, he said. “It’s not so bad. You can hardly feel it.”
A few days later at his home, Mr. Ecker demonstrated, tipping a vial of bugs onto his forearm, which the critters latched on to like hungry newborns, their bodies quickly swelling with blood. Meanwhile, Mr. Rincon was cleaning vials, ensuring that the dogs learn to detect only live bugs and eggs. He swept the debris — bedbug feces, maybe some eggs — into plastic cups, which he filled with water and stuck in the freezer, since extreme temperatures are proven bug snuffers. “You have to be very focused,” Mr. Ecker said. “You can’t sneeze, or answer the phone. The cat has to be out of the room. Want to try?”
BACK in Borough Park, Cruiser had started to work. Mr. Rincon wiped his paws with a towel and began leading him around the house. The family’s boxed possessions, stacked in the basement, were quickly vetted. But a wooden crib in a child’s room gave Cruiser pause. The father turned it back to front and the dog began pawing the mattress, signaling an alert. (What Cruiser does is detect the scent of a bug or an egg; it’s up to an exterminator, said Mr. Ecker, to visually confirm the presence of bedbugs in the spots a dog has noted.)
The mother exhaled slowly. “That’s where my 2 ½-year-old sleeps,” she said. She had the expression, a sort of satisfied wince, familiar to parents everywhere, when a nagging suspicion — the toe is broken, the teeth need braces, the itchy scalp is really lice — has been confirmed.
Returning Cruiser to a crate in the back of his white Subaru Outback, Mr. Ecker, who had been in the extermination business for six years, reflected on his new career. Since he and Mr. Rincon returned from Florida in September, they’ve done hundreds of inspections. Despite the ick factor, “it’s very rewarding work,” he said. “We get to walk dogs for a living and we help people get peace of mind.”
Mr. Rincon added: “We see people who literally haven’t slept for weeks. They think everything is a bedbug. At a place in Jersey, the wife was a total wreck. She’d saved 15 samples of stuff, thinking it was bedbugs.”
It was mostly lint, as it turned out.
A mother of 7-month-old twins in a bedroom community outside of New York was not so lucky. It was Cruiser’s last stop of the day; after Borough Park, he’d inspected a Midtown office and an apartment in Riverdale. Both were bedbug-free, the day’s happy endings. Outside the city, the rain was still coming down in sheets. A Manhattan-dwelling relative of the mother had had bedbugs, perhaps the source, she said, of her house’s infestation, which she had had heat-treated, at a cost of $5,000. (Many sufferers with animals or young children choose this nontoxic method, in which very hot air is channeled into a space.)
She and her husband and their young family had decamped to a hotel. Back in her pristinely renovated 19th-century brick row house a week later, however, she was convinced she was being bitten again. The woman extended a graceful bare foot with a large, angry welt on the arch. She had called the pest control company she had used, but they were backed up on inspections and couldn’t promise a dog for another week. “I can’t wait that long,” she said.
When Cruiser arrived, he greeted the woman by placing his paws on her knees.
“Does that mean I’ve got them?” she wondered. “I feel like one big bug. If I can get through this, having twins isn’t going to be an issue.”
Cruiser spent 15 minutes at the house and alerted four times, scratching a parlor-floor loveseat, an upholstered side chair nearby, the mother’s side of the bed and a small black suitcase in a closet.
The mother’s eyes welled. “I have to remember no one is sick, no one has cancer,” she said. “Is it possible, when we went to the hotel, I brought them with me and then brought them back?”
“It’s possible,” Mr. Ecker said. “I’m sorry.”
Cruiser insinuated his wet nose into the reporter’s hand, and she scratched his silky ears.
Back in the car, she wondered: Shouldn’t the mother wrap the couch, the chair and the suitcase in plastic? What about her mattress? Does the inspection mean that heat treatment doesn’t work? Should the reporter, who had taken off her muddy boots in the house, throw away her socks?
Mr. Ecker shook his head. “What if I tell her to do one thing and it contradicts the pest-control company’s plans?” he said, referring to the client. “There’s nothing wrong with heat. There’s more than one way to cut apples.”
He added: “We’ve never taken a bug home with us. They’re not like fleas. They don’t jump on you.”
Bedbugs need time to get to know you, he explained. A short visit to a bedbug lair poses no risks. Still, as Mr. Rincon pointed out, “I never sit down.”
Moving Them Out
In the last several years, bedbug infestations have increased exponentially in New York City, but so have the resources to deal with them. The city offers a guide at nyc.gov. Bedbugger.com, a blog, is a Baedeker for treatment and a group memoir; newyorkvsbedbugs.org focuses more on city policies than remediation.
Think you have bedbugs? Bites might be the first sign, but not everyone reacts the same way: on some they look like welts or hives, on others mosquito bites and some people don’t react at all. Once you’ve met a bedbug, though, you won’t mistake it for anything else. The bugs look different at each life stage: the eggs are clear and the size of a pencil point, the babies are semi-transparent and poppy seed-size and adults are rust-colored and as big as an apple seed. The city’s Web site advises using an exterminator that describes itself as an “integrated pest management” service; make sure it is registered with the New York State Department of Environmental Conservation; ( 718) 482-4994 or go to www.dec.ny.gov.
To reach the Bed Bug Inspectors: (917) 455-6865.