One Alligator, Two Alligator...

Anyone who has ever played touch football in the street knows that you give the quarterback 10 seconds to make the play. The play is always a pass, because there is little room in the street with parked cars, if there are any, to spring plays from slot-back running formations, and anyway, the quarterback running with the ball is a no-no.

There is always one poor schnook whose job it is to guard this pass thrower by waving their arms in the air and counting, "one Mississippi, two Mississippi," or "one alligator, two alligator," up to 10, then yell that the ball is in flight. Counting to 10 this way is a pretty good approximation of 10 seconds, unless of course if you stutter. Then it's delay of game.

I'm going to go out on a sturdy limb here and guess that @CoreyKilgannon is likely considered a senior reporter at the NYT. How else can you explain the subjects he writes about and the generous space given to his pieces.

Recently he's told us about the jewel thief 'Murph the Surf' the mastermind (perhaps a generous title considering how quickly he was caught) behind the Star of India heist from the Museum of Natural History in 1964; a photo essay on the soon to be displaced auto repair shops that inhabit the ever decreasing area around what is now Citi Field; the effort to catch up to the rare common merganser duck slowly paddling around the Central Park lake that's got a piece of plastic stuck in its mouth inhibiting it from diving underwater for food. It is slowly starving.

Never mind that because there are whales around the world, but not here, that have ingested pounds of plastic, starting Match 1st in New York State plastic bags are verboten. They will be replaced by paper and will cost you 5¢ if you want one. That paper is now going to replace plastic is not lost on anyone who remembers that plastic replaced paper in an effort to help save the forests. All I can say, timber growth must be good.

That duck that Mr. Kilgannon has written about will derail ANY effort to bring back plastic. The duck is Bambi.

Today's story on NYC alligators is as good an example as you need to prove there is value in buying a newspaper, paper or digital. What paper other than the NYT would give you a FULL page devoted to the history of alligator sightings in NYC sewers?

There is a chronological presentation of the NYC alligator stories that have made the news. Alligators in sewers have been sighted, but nowhere near the proportions that the urban myth has created.

Tucked away in Mr. Kilgannon's piece is a nugget of information that even a porn movie has used the urban myth of alligators in NYC sewers as a "plot" line. 'Sue Prentiss, R.N.' in 1975 was about how a group of nurses help a crew of scuba divers who have come up from the sewers in search of alligators to relax without clothing

The movie was surely not reviewed by the NYT, so how did Mr. Kilgannon pull that one out of his notebook?

I Tweeted Mr. Kilgannon that I fully admit to having seen 'Deep Throat' at the World Theater in the very early '70s. When the director of 'Deep Throat,' Gerard Damiano, passed away in 2008 he rated a tribute obit in the NYT  by Margalit Fox.

As always with obituaries, I learned two things. One was that the movie was only 45 minutes long. I always thought it was way longer, but then I did sit through it twice.

The other nugget was Margalit digging up a quote from Mr. Damiano who boasted that the movie made so much money so fast they didn't count the take, they weighed it. I have now forever thought of my $5 bill getting weighed.

True to being a reporter who will not give up his sources, Mr. Kilgannon wasn't forthcoming when I revealed my knowledge of 'Deep Throat' and wondered about his knowledge of  'Sue Prentiss, R.N.' and her helpmates. All he did was "like" my Tweet.

Obviously, Mr. Kilgannon and his editor collaborate on some novel pieces. My wonder is if we're due to get another piece on the disappearance of Judge Crater. (Look it up.)

The story I'd like to see is why the 14th Street Union Square Station on the Lexington Avenue line is so crooked that the trains that stop there are not flush with the platform. A heavy steel grated platform has to move out from the platform and meet the train so that the gap is not the Grand Canyon ready to swallow passengers.

I've been hearing the announcement, "please stand clear of the moving platform" for over half a century now and have never read a story what the planners and engineers had to go around that left the platform so twisted.

Did they have to go around the alligators?

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