Author: Josh Philip Ross

The City of New York Department of Mental Health and Hygeine — they’re the reason we New Yorkers all have such clean minds — has helpfully provided its restaurant inspection results online. Look up your favorite restaurants … if you dare! (A little hint: include The for restaurants whose names start with the article.)

Some highlights from my neck of the woods (Carroll Gardens): The Grocery passed its inspection, as did Banania, but snazzy French bistro Quercy didn’t make the cut, and neither did newcomer Bacchus on Atlantic Avenue. Neighborhood standbys Zaytoons, The Soul Spot, Sam’s Restaurant and Tuk Tuk (best Thai place in town) all failed as well. But then, so did Nobu and Tabla, so it’s not just Brooklyn.

Now go, eat, eat! New York is the best food city in the world! What are you waiting for?

Topic: Around Town
Posted by: Josh

I’m tired of whining alone. Send me your best stories of snowy disaster and I will post them here. And later I’ll tell you about getting snowed upon on the summer solstice.

Dear Mayor Bloomberg,

It’s snowing again, and I for one don’t think it’s funny. At all.

Back in December when it first snowed, I thought it was pretty cool, but then it all just sat there for months turning gray. A leaky hydrant just up Bond Street created a lake of ice that had to be chopped apart and stacked up by city workers. And then it snowed again on Tuesday, and that was totally lame.

So I get up and look out my window today, and what do I see? Snow! Mr. Mayor, my wife was planning to garden today ? her friend was coming over to help and everything ? and then this happened.

These snowfalls are an assault on our freedoms. They hinder us, trap us inside, limit our ability to enjoy this fair city. They are costly to the government and bad for business, unless your business is selling bags of salt. (Maybe the salt merchants are behind this?) And the snow is so very, very not funny.

So please, Mayor Mikey: make it stop.

Correction: It’s not snow. It’s some snowlike substance that falls like snow but then melts actual snow on contact, creating slush puddles the size of Lake Eerie. Truly, it is the season of the Oobleck.

The New Yorker has an excellent article this week on the newly refurbished Kabul-to-Kandahar highway, on which the United States spent $270 million. It gives a good sense of how much still remains to be done in Afghanistan, and it serves as a reminder that the country remains insecure and violent, with a resurgent Taliban making gains for the same reason they did the last time around: because there is a gaping power vacuum.

Yes, the road got built — as one American official in Kabul put it, “It just goes to show what you can do when money is no object” — but I imagine that the country would be in much better shape if instead of invading Iraq, we had focused our military and financial resources on pacifying and rebuilding in Afghanistan. And considering that Afghanistan (and neighboring Pakistan) is where the terrorists actually are, that would have been a more obvious tactic in the war on terror.

Do you find that your digital watch is just too easy to read? Daniel Kleinfeld has alerted me to a great solution.

Hey, that reminds me: what ever happened to Swatch Internet Time? Has it become the Esperanto of chronography?

• Eve Ensler, author of The Vagina Monologues, gave $2,000 to Howard Dean.
• Actor Edward Norton gave $2,000 to Dennis Kucinich.
• One Steven Buscemi donated $1,000 to Wesley Clark.
• Treat Williams gave $250 to Howard Dean.

I don’t know what’s most frightening about this: that this website is giving out celebrities’ home addresses, that our political donations are public information, that all these people live in the same building, or that Edward Norton gave two grand to “the little guy from Ohio,” as I heard him described by a woman from Trinidad at the Wes Clark Rally in Brooklyn a couple of weeks ago.

Update: Gawker has an update:

Oh, it’s just an office address. Boo. Still. They all have the same agent? That’s eerie.