Breaking News, Brooklyn: Eugene and Schiffman sole candidates for 40th District

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[Updated 2007.04.12 10:00: Added excerpts from and link to article from Hard Beat News.]
[Updated 2007.04.11 22:20: Added link to Board of Elections official Candidates List.]

April 11

In a tantalizingly brief notice, The Politicker observed less than two hours ago:

Mathieu Eugene and Harry Schiffman are the only candidates on the ballot for the April 24 special election in Brooklyn, a Board of Elections spokeswoman told me.

More later when I learn more.

April 12

This morning, HardBeatNews – “Daily Carribean Diaspora News” – carries the story:

The new election was set to be contested by [Mathieu] Eugene, [Harry] Schiffman, Jamaican Wellington Sharpe and two other Haitian candidates, Gina Faustin and Darly Brutus. But Eugene and his side challenged the candidates based on residency, voter registration and eligibility.

While Eugene did not contest the BOE clerk’s report, which placed Schiffman, the lone Jewish candidate on the ballot, he challenged each of Sharpe’s 1,727 signatures. This led to strong objections from Sharpe’s lawyers and testy arguments between the representatives.

Although some commissioners expressed concern that registered voters on Sharpe’s petition were being discounted, the clerk’s report on to Sharpe’s petition was amended from 812 valid signatures to 832, omitting over one hundred of Sharpe’s signatures which his campaign submitted as valid, causing him to fall short of the 1,002 needed to be on the ballot.

This outraged Sharpe representatives who vehemently argued that under the law every signature of registered voters who reside in the District is valid. Rickford Burke, Sharpe’s campaign manager, argued to Commissioners that once the Board has determined that a petition signer is registered to vote in the District, whether they signed the address at which they are registered or another addressed in the District, the signature is valid according to case law. This argument was supported by Steve Richmond, Counsel to the Commission as well as some Commissioners, leading to confusion among the Commission.

The Commission subsequently rejected the clerk’s report. But after realizing that this action automatically placed Sharpe on the ballot, the Commission reversed itself and allowed the clerk’s report as amended to stand, throwing the matter to the Supreme Court for resolution.

Their wording of this last paragraph is interesting. They imply that the Commission ignored their legal Counsel and reversed their decision in order to deny Sharpe a place on the ballot.

This reportage is marred, to my eye, by tagging it with the God-baiting headline “Could Brooklyn’s 40th District Drama End With A Jewish Councilman?“. In a previous article on this issue, they refer to him as “Jewish-born Brooklyn resident, Harry Schiffman.” (They don’t specify the geographic boundaries of “Jewia”.) This morning’s article is also accompanied by the most unflattering photo of candidate Schiffman I’ve seen yet; he looks like someone just woke him up from a long train ride.

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News, Brooklyn: Eugene challenged on grounds he refused seat

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While of little interest to those outside Brooklyn’s 40th City Council District, the serial comedo-drama (drami-comedy?) that is our super-special election takes another twist. I heard about this last night at our neighborhood association meeting. It’s been reported in several venues this morning:

The Wellington Sharpe campaign has filed a Request for Judicial Intervention ( RJI ) in the Brooklyn Supreme Court to invalidate Mathieu Eugene’s Nominating Petition. There will be a hearing on the matter on April 12. Sharpe is a candidate in the April 24 th City Council 40th District Special Election.

The Sharpe campaign in a statement insisted that “The 40th District seat became vacant as a result of Eugene’s declination of the office and his refusal to execute his Oath.”
– Residency and Eligibility in the 40th, Room Eight

It would be morally satisfying to see Eugene go down in this way. But NYC election politics has nothing to do with justice, and my cynicism for politics is surpassed only by Eugene’s.

The section of law cited in the Request reads, in part:

Every office shall be vacant upon the happening of one of the following events before the expiration of the term thereof:
… His refusal or neglect to file his official oath or undertaking, if one is required, before or within thirty days after the commencement of the term of office for which he is chosen.

Eugene himself, the putative winner of the first special election, requested the second special election just so he wouldn’t have to prove he lived in the district he was elected to represent at the time he was elected. But again, a decision on this Request will probably hinge on the timing of Eugene’s “refusal,” which came after the Board of Elections certified his win, but before he was sworn in. Of course, he refused to be sworn in, because that would have required proof of residence.

Got it?

Sharpe is another carpet-bagger. He also didn’t live in the district when he began campaigning for the first special election. By apparently moving in before the date of the first previous special election, he seems to demonstrate at least some basic competencies Eugene lacks: the ability to read a calendar, and to know what day it is.

Petition challenges will also be heard by a judge this Thursday. Hopefully, that evening we’ll know who we can vote for in two weeks on April 24. Again.

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New York Magazine: How Much Is a Street Tree Really Worth?

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The London Plane Tree in front of our house. It’s taller than the house, and provides shade in the summer and fall.
Sycamore Maple? Street Tree, Stratford Road

Over the last two summers, more than a thousand people volunteered to conduct a tree census of the five boroughs, the second in the city’s history (the other was in 1995) — and the first to put a price tag on each specimen.

… Each tree’s type, age, size, and location was fed into a computer program, developed by the U.S. Forest Service and the University of California, Davis, that quantified the plant’s annual value in saving energy costs (more shade means less air-conditioning), improving air quality, absorbing storm-water runoff, and prettifying the block. The study determined that street trees are collectively worth $122 million a year to the city, with an average of $50 to $300 apiece.

– How much is a street tree really worth?

Not surprisingly, the oldest and largest are worth the most. … The standard formula says a dwelling with a tree in front is worth .88 percent more than a home without one … The city’s math allowed for a tree’s effect on property values, but with a limitation: The survey priced all houses equally, at $537,300, the median cost of a single-family home in 2005.

The article goes on to profile the value to the city and the homeowner of four different street trees in four different settings. Based on its age, and the real estate prices in our neighborhood, I’m estimating our street tree is worth $300-400 a year to the city, and adds about $10,000 to our property value.

via New York Observer

Blog Against Theocracy #3: Adolescence

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Easter 1911, St. Patrick’s Cathedral, New York.
Credit: Shorpy: The 100-Year-Old Photo Blog.

My partner and I went to church today. More accurately, he went to church and I tagged along. He’s a minister and works every Sunday. Easter being a big day, and him even preaching today and all, I went for moral support.

When I attend religious services, I stand and sit appropriately, out of respect. Other than that, I feel like a dog in church. There are interesting sensations: frankincense lingering from the morning service, the smell and feel of old wood, vivid colors from the sun shining through stained glass, music and the song of human voices. When it’s my choice to do so, I enjoy such experiences in my own way, without feeling that I betray myself, or disrespect those around me.

I don’t remember how old I was – 13 or 14. My parents were getting ready to goto church. I wasn’t. They asked why I wasn’t getting ready.

I’m not going to church.
Why not?
Because I don’t believe in God.

I came out to my parents as an atheist that Easter morning 35 years ago. I didn’t go to church that day, nor for many years after that. It was a moral choice for me. I did not want to act out something I did not believe.

Throughout my school years, “home room” was the first classroom assembly of the day, before classes began. Attendance was taken and announcements were made. And we recited the Pledge of Allegiance:

I pledge allegiance to the flag of the United States of America, and to the Republic for which it stands, one Nation under God, indivisible, with liberty and justice for all.

I became increasingly uncomfortable with following this ritual. In 1975, my senior year of high school, I decided to stop standing for the recitation of the Pledge. When challenged, I gave my reasons: I didn’t believe it. I didn’t believe in God. I didn’t believe that there was “liberty and justice for all.”

This precipitated intimidation and harassment to get me to comply. Other faculty and administrative staff came to home room to question me, and stand and glare at me while I sat during the pledge. Other students in the classroom shoved my desk and called me “godless, commie fag” (though they could not have known how technically accurate that was, since I wasn’t out yet). Word got out. I was physically threatened in the hallways between classes.

I knew it was my right to refuse to stand. I never discussed the First Amendment. I wasn’t refusing to stand just to make a point. I simply did not want to be compelled to act in hypocrisy to my beliefs and feelings. I didn’t think it was right.

Faculty and staff gradually relented. Harassment from other students continued sporadically. I don’t remember how long this went on before another student, a friend of mine, also refused to stand. She was also challenged, but she was not physically harassed or threatened as far as I know. Another day, another student refused to stand. By the end of the school year, the morning Pledge had been abandoned in my home room class. I assume it continued in others.

I didn’t learn until much later that the phrase “under God” was added just four years before I was born.

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Blog Against Theocracy #2: Childhood

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Blog for Separation of Church and State
Credit: I Speak of Dreams

I’m an atheist. I was raised Catholic, but it didn’t take.

A Secular Education

I went to public schools. I was usually the “smartest” kid in the class. (I now know there are many kinds of intelligence, not all of which enjoy conventional rewards.) I was a teacher’s pet, a favorite of my peers (not).

To keep me interested, I was given more challenging assignments, advanced reading. Dr. Seuss replaced Dick and Jane, then science fiction and non-fiction replaced Dr. Seuss. When I finished my assignments early, I got to read or study topics of my choosing. I taught myself origami from books. I studied oceanography and marine biology. I read a book about Alfred Wegener and his theory of continental drift, and the then-new (in the mid-1960s) discovery of the mid-oceanic ridges and plate tectonics. I studied botany – flower structures and pollinators – on my own. I developed multimedia presentations on these topics and presented them to my class, and to whole class assemblies in the cafeteria.

I was a nerd. I was inquisitive. I was hungry for knowledge. I was encouraged to question.

So when I began to go to Sunday school, catechism class, I approached it the same way. It was just something else to learn, another course of study, another body of knowledge to master. I didn’t know I wasn’t supposed to question.

I was 10 years old, an atheist in formation.

What I Learned in Sunday School

There were three specific questions I remember asking, for which the answers were inadequate and unsatisfactory. In fact, this was when I learned they were wrong, no matter the authority to which they laid claim. My atheism was forged in Sunday school.

Our catechism textbooks had the same style as the Dick and Jane readers, a watercolor romanticization and idealization of some notion of childhood (a very, very white childhood). One of the paintings in the book showed a boy playing with a toy boat in the water. He was using a stick to push the boat, leaning out to reach, clearly in danger of falling in. Standing behind him was a guardian angel. You could tell it was an angel because you could see through it and it had wings. The angel was half reaching out toward him, but not reaching him.

Question: Will the guardian angel save the boy?
Answer: No.
Q: Will the angel warn the boy?
A: No.
Q: Then what good is it?! (Not my exact words, but to that effect.)
A: The guardian angel is there to take the boy’s soul to heaven.

Now this made no sense, on so many levels. Wasn’t the boy going to go to heaven anyway? Wouldn’t the boy’s soul go to heaven without the guardian angel? Was it going to get lost after he died? Was there some kind of spectral devil-wolf that was going to come out of the dark woods of the afterlife and consume the soul unless the angel was there to guard it?

That was Strike .

Then there was the whole baptism thing. For the uninitiated, Catholic doctrine of the time (I’ve heard rumors of revisionism, but frankly, there’s no point in me keeping up on current events in the Catholic Church) stated that, because of Original Sin, you had to be baptised to go to heaven. Which led to the following exchange:

Q: Do unbaptised babies go to heaven?
A: No.
Q: Why not? It’s not their fault.
A: Original Sin.
Q: Why are they being punished for something they didn’t do?
A: They’re not being punished.
Q: But they don’t get to be with God. (Okay, not really a question.)
Q: So where do they go?
A: They go to limbo.
Q: But that’s not heaven.
A: It’s not hell, either.

As a child I understood that denying reward was punishment. Neglect is abuse, no matter who your daddy is. The innocent were being punished for something they did not do. This destroyed any moral authority the church had in my mind. This was Strike .

Finally, the coup de grace, Strike :

Q: When I die and go to heaven, will my dog Smokey be there?
A: No.
Q: Why not?
A: Animals don’t have souls.

Whoa. I knew my dog Smokey loved me. He was the clearest, purest source of unconditional love in my life. He expected nothing of me. He didn’t care what grades I got in school. He wanted nothing more than to run in the yard with me, chase me, pull off my sneakers, and wrestle with me on the ground. He was my protector, powerful, strong, and devoted. If I had a soul, then so did he.

And I didn’t want any part of their heaven. An eternity without animals was hell, not heaven. Just like the Twilight Zone episode.

So that was it. I knew they were wrong: logical and morally wrong. They were lying to me. I didn’t understand why, but I knew they were. They were not to believed. Everything they had claimed to be true was open to question.

So I did.

[Continued]

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Poem: Speak for Yourself (Blog Against Theocracy #1)

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Speak For Yourself

how many voices have you silenced?
whose truth do you fear?

what sends you running for shelter
in your god’s shadow,
clinging to the hem of his rotten shrouds,
praying to him for the bad words to stop?

your ignorance is vile
dangerous
violent

you would see me struck down
silence my voice, my truth
to preserve your fragile ballast of lies

preaching vainly of greater good
you bring greater harm

there isn’t room enough in hell for both of us

you go first

(April 1992)

I had wanted to start posting for Blog Against Theocracy yesterday, Friday, but I was too tired. I have lots of material, too much and too varied to organize into a linear presentation. This will be the first of an indefinite number of, let’s say several, posts this weekend. My instinct is that a larger number of shorter posts will serve this topic, and me, better.

I just woke up, restless, unable to sleep. The inner monologues was ranting loudly, the rage and anger in my head railing against an unnamed “you”: You hate who I am, You hate what I am, You hate me, You want me dead.

Then I remembered I’d written this poem. The subject of the poem was … well, maybe I’ll get to that another time. Suffice that it was someone whom I did not choose to have in my life at the time, and is no longer.

Thank god.

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A Visit to the Brooklyn Botanic Garden, April 1, 2007

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[Updated 2007.04.07 14:30 EDT: Added photos from the Rock Garden.]
[Updated 2007.04.07 11:30 EDT: Began adding photos to this post, and added more photos to the map.]

Screenshot of my Google Map of my visit to BBG on Forsythia Day
Screenshot of my Google Map of my visit to BBG on Forsythia Day
The post title and the image above are linked to my first attempt at using the new MyMaps feature of Google Maps. Let me know if/how it works for you. Is this annoying? Helpful? Interesting? Too geeky? Too slow?

The path shows the route I took, roughly, through BBG the day of my visit. Most of the areas and placemarks on the map along the way contain photos. The photos in turn are linked to their Flickr pages. You can also just browse the Flickr set of photos from my visit.

Here are some of the photos from my visit.

Forsythia Distribution

Waiting for Forsythia Waiting for Forsythia Opening the Gates Forsythia Line Forsythia Handouts

Forsythia Distribution Center

Rock Garden

I did get to see the Rock Garden as I had planned. I wasn’t disappointed. I don’t usually get to see this garden. It just seems off the beaten path during my usual visits. I want to visit it more often.


Dyer's Broom? Genista tinctoria Rock Garden Flowers, Erica carnea “Springwood Pink”


Rock Garden Rock Garden Leaves, Dyer's Broom Hellebores, Rock Garden Some kind of Willow flowers Corylopsis pauciflora, Buttercup Winterhazel

Other images


Signs of the Day Cornus mas and my doppelganger Andromeda Flowers Brooklyn-Flatbush Boundary Line

Children's Garden Cornus mas flowers Korean Azalea, Rhododendron mucronulatum Andromeda flowers Brooklyn-Flatbush Boundary Marker

Another reason to loathe real estate brokers …

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Trying to locate their recent report on sales figures, I idly browsed the Corcoran (“Live Who You Are”! Be All That You Can Be!) Web site for my neighborhood. I don’t expect to find Beverley Square West. I would hope to find Victorian Flatbush. They’d don’t even list Flatbush. I found what I expected:

Ditmas Park: Runs from Parkside Avenue to the north, Ditmas Avenue to the south, Ocean Avenue to the east and Coney Island Avenue to the west.
– Corcoran Neighborhood Guide to Ditmas Park

Lest one quibble “Oh, it’s just a real estate name,” they continue in the second paragraph:

… This landmarked district …

WRONG! The landmarked Ditmas Park Historic District lies only within the boundaries of Dorchester and Newkirk Avenues, and Ocean Avenue and the B/Q line. The only other landmarked area within the boundaries they describe is Prospect Park South. The rest of their “Ditmas Park” is not landmarked.

It’s worse than that. They have no idea where they are.

Their descriptions conflate several neighborhoods – some landmarked, most not – and get basic information wrong. They provide the wrong school number for P.S. 139. There’s this:

These homes were originally built for the likes of the Guggenheims and films stars like Mary Pickford and Douglas Fairbanks.

Again, not in Ditmas Park. The Guggenheim Honeymoon Cottage is in Beverley Square West, my neighborhood. The Pickford/Fairbanks House is in Ditmas Park West.

And there’s this:

Many have porches and garages and sit on wide tree-lined streets with English sounding names like Argyle and Rugby.

Only the streets between Coney Island Avenue and the B/Q lines – half the area they claim to describe – carry these names, borrowed from the status of Prospect Park South. Four different neighborhoods span those streets from Parkside to Ditmas, and none of them are Ditmas Park.

The boundaries they give describe only part of greater Victorian Flatbush; they omit half the neighborhoods. Extending the southern boundary from Ditmas Avenue to Avenue H, between Coney Island Avenue Ocean Avenue lie West Midwood, Midwood Park, and Fiske Terrace. The latter two are proposed Historic Districts and are on track to become landmarked. Extending the eastern boundary to Flatbush Avenue, the Albemarle-Kenmore Terraces Historic District lies east of Prospect Park South, between Ocean and Flatbush Avenues, and South Midwood lies between Ocean and Bedford Avenues, and Foster Avenue south to Brooklyn College.

I’ve never had any dealings with Corcoran. We tried working with them when we were shopping for our home three years ago. They had yet to “discover” this area, and so had nothing to show us. Their reach had only extended to Windsor Terrace at that point, and we went to one open house there.

And, don’t bother trying to find a house a house on their Web site. You won’t find any. They only have “townhouses” …