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| Two house pets in midtown Manhattan searching in vain for Super Bowl "frenzy" on Saturday afternoon. Extra police were on duty directing traffic around Super Bowl activities, and I didn't see any traffic jams related to pre-game events. |
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| Nearby, a deli is offering a breakfast that is lost in the translation. |
By VICTOR E. SASSON
Editor
Even without the distraction of the Super Bowl and the need to assign news reporters to cover a sports story, Editor Marty Gottlieb has produced a number of lousy Sunday editions in the past two years.
Today's could have been a duesy, but it turned out to resemble a douche bag.
Wrapped in hype
The first mistake was to wrap the paper in another 8-page "Super Bowl Special" section with a verb-less banger head that lands with a thud:
"Jersey's stage now"
That hides a front page that doesn't answer the question on everyone's mind:
Does Governor Christie deny he knew about the politically inspired George Washington lane closures when they happened in early September, as his onetime Port Authority crony asserts?
Instead, a small photo shows the GOP bully seated at a Super Bowl event in Manhattan's Times Square on Saturday, with his hands clasped (A-1).
Harrison who?
Page 1 is dominated by thousands of words on renovation of the PATH station in Harrison, a town near Newark that few people in Bergen or Passaic counties care anything about (A-1).
This is another instance where star reporter Stephanie Akin follows up on a story by her husband, Shawn Boburg, the reporter assigned to cover the Port Authority, who is just now paying attention to the agency's lagging mass-transit operations.
I can just imagine how these driven reporters' pillow talk is dominated by endless discussions of the Bridgegate scandal, and its cast of characters:
From Christie to David Wildstein, the high school pal who ratted out the governor after he was kicked out of his cushy Port Authority job; to Bridget Ann "Bridge" Kelly, onetime Christie deputy chief of staff, who e-mailed Wildstein:
"Time for some traffic problems in Fort Lee."
"Got it," responded Wildstein, former director of capital projects at the Port Authority.
Manhattan, Kan.
On the Local front, wrong-way Road Warrior John Cichowski is back today with another dire traffic prediction that is as hollow as his head (L-1).
When Carolyn Stefani leaves Carnegie Hall a little after 6 p.m. tonight after seeing Handel's "Theodora," her favorite opera, she will have absolutely no problem driving home to Bergenfield.
In fact, she will probably be able to dance in the middle of West 57th St. as millions of metropolitan area fans stay glued to their TVs for the start of the Super Bowl at 6:30 p.m.
Fox TV coverage began at 11 a.m. today.
'Drunk' reporter
The real danger is after the game is over at 10 p.m., and hundreds of thousands of inebriated and drunk fans climb behind the wheel and attempt to drive home from the game or Super Bowl parties (12,000 have parking passes at the stadium in East Rutherford).
The addled Road Warrior even has Stefani driving to the George Washington Bridge "through the Theater District," which is many blocks south of Carnegie Hall and completely out of the way (L-1 and L-7).
His opera lover will be able to drive west on 57th Street to the West Side Highway, turn north and literally fly up the road to and over the bridge.
And Stefani doesn't have to go anywhere near the stadium, which Cichowski sets up as a boogeyman in his first paragraph.
Turd alert
Let's hope Gottlieb, the former New York Times editor who now runs the Woodland Park newsroom, is hiding his head in shame that Cichowski doesn't even know the basic geography of Manhattan, and that his six-figure production editor, Liz Houlton, completely misses all of his stupid mistakes.
The work of The Record's other burned out columnists -- Mike Kelly, Charles Stile and Bill Ervolino -- is scattered through today's paper like so many sidewalk turds readers have to be careful not to step in.
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