Warsaw de Deus

http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/europe/6200539.stm

"Polish MPs bid to make Jesus king

A group of Polish members of parliament have submitted a bill seeking to proclaim Jesus Christ king of their overwhelmingly Catholic country.
Forty-six deputies - 10% of the lower house - signed the bill, which was tabled earlier this week, reports say.

Some Polish clerics however have criticised the move as unnecessary.

If the bill becomes law, Jesus will follow the path of the Virgin Mary, who was declared honorary queen of Poland by King John Casimir 350 years ago.

The motion has been backed by MPs from the far right League of Polish families (LPR), the conservative Law and Justice (PiS) party and the Peasants' Party (PSL).

They argued Jesus should be made king on both theological and historical grounds.

PiS deputy Artur Gorski said colleagues were "praying in the parliamentary chapel for [Jesus'] coronation", Reuters news agency reported.

But Monsignor Tadeusz Pieronek, a member of Poland's episcopate and rector at Krakow's Papal Academy of Theology, dismissed the move.

"Christ doesn't need a parliamentary resolution to be the king of our hearts," AFP news agency quoted him as saying.

"These lawmakers would do better to look after their constitutional prerogatives and let religious institutions and the Church do our work," he said."

In other news, there's a guy behind me talking really loudly on his cellphone to someone named Laurence. Strange. But the mofo is stopping me from coming up with something funny to say about the Polish-Jesus-King story. I mean, c'mon...

NYC 2030: City of Gloss

I usually throw out the glossy pages hiding between the folds of my New York Times – especially when, like today, they fall on the grimy floor of the L train – but I found these particular pages of interest. Ten of them, glossy as previously mentioned, filled with photographs, regular graphs, and witty captions about Plan NYC’s plan (or lack thereof) for the next twenty-five years. Factoids, too – did you know that a third of New Yorkers pay more than half of their income towards rent? Or that two million New Yorkers live more than ten minutes from a park? Or that together we can create a sustainable city? Alright, the last one isn’t a factoid, but it is in the report, and it does sound nice.

The insert – which I saw on the ground again later in the day, this time on Jay Street, glossy pages too heavy to flap in the Dumbo wind – is heavy on the statistics and heavy on the idealism, asking (and answering): “By 2030, will you still love New York? It’s up to you.” And just so we take things seriously, page three features the following admonition: “We should be proud. But we should not become complacent.” The insert continues: “Previous generations looked ahead… now it is our turn.” So, one asks, what is the modern equivalent of the forward-looking thinking behind Central Park, the subway, and the water tunnels? And must it involve glossy inserts?

Well, the Mayor’s Sustainability Advisory Board will tell you, first you’ve got to get a handle on the problem. To provide this handle, they list the “top three things you should know about New York over the next 25 years,” a list I actually like (in an intellectual way – the reality of the situation is depressing): First, one million new New Yorkers; second, aging infrastructure – subway signals from the ‘40s, water tunnels from the ‘30s, energy grid from the ‘20s; third, pollution. The urbanophile in me is tickled pink, but the flaneur is a sickly green from imagining hoards of dirty people on deteriorating trains drinking contaminated water. Something must be done.

Unfortunately, for all the worthy goals in the insert’s conclusion, the particulars are lacking. Not that such an insert needs to be a call to action, but its silence on specific projects indicates a timidity, a refusal to engage in the brick-and-mortar (or, if Frank Gehry has his way, the steel-and-glass) politics of the day. Any “official” document dealing with the future of New York City must either deal with these, or become a historical footnote. Or blog fodder. Or both. (To its credit, Plan NYC’s website attempts to give some specifics, though most are limited to the household.) Pretty pictures notwithstanding, this publication is an invitation to think of urban reality as larger-than-life, or, at least, larger-than-me.

Clearly, I’m a pragmatist. I find this idealistic vision of the city standing in the way of necessary action. It either inspires overly large urban transformations – Atlantic Yards anyone? – or leads to impossibly long delays – the Second Avenue Subway and East Side Access, a LIRR tunnel to Grand Central, have both been on the books for decades and are just receiving necessary funds. The Mayor’s Sustainability Advisory Board is too optimistic – their glasses are half full because the subways are only half full, though they say that, without improvement, the subways will be all full by 2030. Then the advisors’ glasses will be half empty, or all empty, jostled by elbows and winter coats on a downtown 6, because nothing will have happened besides more press conferences, publications, and public hearings. As things stand – which is to say, clutching a pole while trying to do a crossword puzzle with one hand – the City of Dreams needs to wake up and go to work.

Hey Young World

I’ve been linked. In honor, I’ve taken the whole link thing one step further. I’ve distilled this gem (crumb?) from the link after mine in GL’s Monday Brooklinks section, a New York Times article about a suspected murder-suicide:

“It was also unclear how long the four had been dead. A neighbor, Ana Tirado, said Ms. Soto came to her apartment on Dec. 1 with an uncooked chicken, asking that Ms. Tirado prepare it with her own popular recipe, but that Ms. Soto forgot the ingredients for a sauce and left to get them.

“And then she never came back,” Ms. Tirado said. “I got a little worried, but I thought she took the kids to her mother’s.”

Eventually, Ms. Tirado ate the chicken, not wanting it to go to waste, she said.”

The sick thing is, I think Michael Wilson and Ann Farmer – or, more likely, the copy editors and style guiders – thought it was funny when they wrote it.

“Crumbs…” – Slick Rick

What You Doin? Gettin Shot At

Last week, on the B6 heading up Glenwood to Flatbush Junction, I looked up from the new Lil’ Wayne and Birdman album because I felt the bus turning before it was supposed to and, sure enough, those were sirens at the Junction. I say sure enough because an innocent bystander was shot two weeks ago outside the Rockaway Parkway L station, and because once I hit the second bodega and picked up my New York Times, before I realized I had lost the Arts Section and thus the crossword puzzle but didn’t really care because it was Monday, I read a metro brief about a shooting around the corner from me. Saturday. I was in Virginia.

Virginia freaks me out. So do shootings. As I crossed the street near the taped-off grocery store I heard a guy say “Somebody got popped. I think he was in a wheelchair.” I couldn’t help but wonder if Mercury were still in retrograde.

Later in the day, after detailing the three incidents to my coworkers, one of them asked me, “is it always this bad?” I couldn’t really say. I told her that on the New Year and the fourth people shoot their guns into the sky, and I was going to mention the soldier home for Christmas from Iraq shot in a club a few blocks from my house. I also thought about mentioning the exploded car around the corner, the police chases over the garage, and the dead body on the neighbor’s fence, but I didn’t think it prudent.

The fifty shot Dialou rehashing should come as no surprise to anyone from Brooklyn or to anyone whose head isn’t buried in sand for that matter. And there might just be sand soon, because this place in turning into the Wild Wild West. Gun violence is a party and everybody’s invited. Soldiers and SWAT units with automatic weapons don’t help anything, they only encourage the idea that more bullets means more good.

Lil’ Wayne’s got guns. Why do I trust him more than NYPD?