To the sounds of enormous jungle roars, a police sniper rappelled down the side of a Harlem apartment building yesterday and fired tranquilizer darts through an open fifth-floor window to subdue — seat belts, please — a 350-pound Bengal tiger.

The daring, and creative, bit of sharpshooting helped end an episode in which the New York Police Department, unaccustomed to bagging big game, nonetheless managed to sedate the beast. Officials planned to send the tiger, temporarily being held at the Center for Animal Care and Control on 110th Street, to a conservancy in Ohio….

It was shortly before 4:30 p.m. when the police sniper, Officer Martin Duffy, armed with a dart gun and a rifle with live ammunition, began to rappel down toward the window. He fired one dart a few minutes later, which drew a knee-shaking roar from inside the apartment….

As hundreds of onlookers gathered on the street, some began to wonder if this urban big cat would get along so well in the less cosmpolitan reaches of Ohio. “My concern is that the city cat won’t make it in the country,” said Lynnette Braxton, 49. “He’s going to have no jazz, no hip-hop. He’s going to miss the Harlem Renaissance.”

No explanation of how the cat got there (along with a 4-5 ft. alligator-like reptile called a caiman). Presumably, the owner (now in custody) brought them in when they were much smaller. Compare the size of hand and paw:

One man on lower Broadway complained to a police officer about a vendor immediately hiking the price of bottled water from $1 to $2…. “Y2K finally happened, people” cried a young man walking up Broadway, stutterstepping through the crowd…. On Sixth Avenue, a man, walking down a center traffic lane, said to his friend, “This is like in those movies, man, when a bomb drops or something and you have to live off the land.”

Mr. Tropea said some people argue that he has bought an overpriced “geek magnet.” But it is rather a people magnet, especially for the opposite sex, he said. “If I wasn’t married, this is what I would need to meet girls,” he said.

It is no exaggeration. A young woman catches his eye and asks about his ride. “Can you go fast?” she asks, and raises an eyebrow playfully. “Do you think you could catch me?”

“There is probably a downside — a more liquid, fast-moving marketplace may cause some people to feel that they can always trade up, and you can make a case that endless options are the enemy of contentment,” says Rufus Griscom, co-founder of Nerve and chairman of Spring Street Networks. “This is the quote-unquote late-capitalist existential crisis. Well, you can reminisce about the good old days when you lived on the family farm and married your cousin. Sure, life is simpler and more stable when people have very few options. I’ll take the present.”

BTW, the faux historicism implied in “late capitalism” makes it one of my favorite phrases.

So, I was quite interested in this article on ‘privatopia’, and whether HOAs represent the end of the American Dream.

“Once the statute of limitations for suing the developer — usually one to three years — has expired, the association is on its own. Suddenly, roofs begin to leak, streets break down and the HOA realizes it needs to begin serious repairs.”

All true, although of course residential houses also tend to run into problems 15 years after construction. Especially when they are not well maintained.

‘Even when an HOA is well run and filled with great people, adds McKenzie, “it’s only one election away from a disaster.”‘ Also correct, but isn’t that also true for any democracy? Don’t all democracies get exactly the government they deserve?

They’re brilliant proposals. I especially support building something bigger, taller, and more audacious than we had before.