Photograph of last year’s swim by brooklyn_g_girl on Flickr The Coney Island Polar Bear Club is holding their annual New Year’s Day swim tomorrow. It’s open to all lunatics, so start 2011 right with a bracing dip in the Atlantic ocean. (But be careful !) There’s no fee for swimmers, but the club encourages everyone to make a donation to Camp Sunshine , a year round retreat for children with life-threatening illnesses. The NYC Parks Department will provide changing facilities on the Boardwalk at Stillwell Avenue, and the pre-party and after-party will take place at Ruby’s Bar and Grill — perhaps for the last time, because they’re being evicted to make way for some soulless generic sports bar. For that reason, the after-party will also double as a protest to rally support for Ruby’s, which is fighting the eviction. If you go, you can share your photos by emailing them to photos@gothamist.com or tagging them “gothamist” on Flickr.

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Start 2011 With A Polar Bear Swim In The Atlantic

Nrbelex’s flickr Mayor Bloomberg spent yesterday getting finger-wagged by angry taxpayers over the snow removal failure, and he let everyone know just how lousy he’s feeling about it on his radio show this morning. “This year is not ending the way I would have preferred, but it’s still been a good year. Nobody has a career that goes straight up,” he glumly pronounced. He also added that the city’s failure to plow the streets days after the blizzard was “character building.” We’re sure those disgruntled people stuck on unplowed streets are very pleased to know that this is all about your personal growth. Now that Bloomberg has given a mea culpa or two, he can get down to the hard work of investigating that alleged Sanitation slowdown. Or, he could talk to the Department of Investigation, who it turns out already began a probe earlier this week after hearing rumors of the slowdown. Repentant Sanitation workers now allege that the Sanitation bosses who sabotaged the blizzard cleanup because of massive budget cuts targeted specific politically connected and ritzy neighborhoods in Queens and Brooklyn during the slowdown. One source told the Post , ” It was more targeted than people actually think. Borough Park was specifically targeted [because of]…its ability to sort of gin up the p.r. machine .” The majority of snow removal complaints Public Advocate Bill de Blasio received since the blizzard came from Borough Park. You know what Borough Park residents might have appreciated more than apologies and “character building”? Unplowed streets . Or perhaps Corey Booker.

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Bloomberg Says Plow Failure Is "Character Building"

Creepy baby sculptures on Governors Island (via Dogseat ‘s flickr). Every new year the media likes to make a big fuss over the first baby born in New York. The mayor often even shows up to congratulate the wee one! So, naturally, landing that perfectly-timed pregnant woman is a big deal at local hospitals . Thankfully c-sections “don’t count,” or it sounds like some of these maternity wards would just be ripping the babes out so as to claim the first. Take Linda McNeil, head nurse at Jacobi Medical Center in the Bronx, for example. She told the News that her hospital hasn’t delivered the first baby of the city in the 30 years she’s been there. But if she had her way… “It’s something you can’t control … I wish we could!” she said. But no hospital would try and induce a baby just to get press… or would they ? Harlem Hospital could use a little love in the press ? Seriously though, what all the hoopla about the first baby makes us think about is the poor second baby of the year (not to mention the last baby of the last year). Should they really be denied a visit from Bloomberg just because their timing wasn’t perfect? Not even born yet and already so much pressure!

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Watch Out, the Hunt Is On For the Year’s First Baby

In the wake of Rex Ryan’s FootGate situation (which just continues getting awkward ), everyone’s completely forgotten about TripGate from a couple weeks ago, an actual football-related scandal. Jets conditioning coach Sal Alosi admitted to intentionally tripping a Miami Dolphins player, and was fined $25,000 and suspended without pay for the rest of the season by the team. Now, the NFL has fined the Jets team $100,000 because of the incident. The fine takes into account special teams coordinator Mike Westhoff’s public comments accusing other teams of employing similar tactics. So basically, the team got fined the equivalent of two Brett Favre penis photos .

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Jets Fined $100K By NFL For TripGate

                  Click on the film stills for more details and reviews of this week’s new releases and repertory screenings, which include: The Strange Case of Angelica, Another Year, Blue Valentine, Biutiful, The Red Chapel, Summer Wars, Hadewijch, The Lollipop Girls in Hard Candy, and Coming to America .

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Weekend Movie Forecast

Ekonon’s Flickr Is it appropriate for the Department of Sanitation to clear snow off bike lanes before every single street in New York City is made hospitable to motor vehicles? Not in the pages of the NY Post, where the tabloid is stirring up anti-bike lane ire with two straight days of reportage on the utter outrage of snow-free bike lanes. Yesterday reporters spotted six workers shoveling the bike path on Columbus Avenue, and got a perfect quote from an anonymous Sanitation Department staffer: There are thousands of people who would be unhappy about this, [but] there is a bicycle person who is happy about this. I’m just a sanitation worker. I take orders. I don’t question them. It’s like the military: If that’s what they tell me to do, I do it. My supervisor told me to do it… Who gave him the orders? I can only imagine. It couldn’t have been Mayor Bloomberg, who was telling reporters at a press conference in Queens, “Nobody’s going out and clearing bicycle lanes where you’re not likely to see people riding bikes with the slush and everything.” So WHO IS RESPONSIBLE FOR THIS INJUSTICE? Stay tuned for a probing follow-up from the Post’s Steve Cuozzo ; we expect him to reveal the identity of the sinister bureaucrat who diverted the shovelers off street-shoveling duty, in an article headlined DOT Dictator Sadik-Kahn Makes Snow Sense. But what do YOU think? Should the streets be cleared of snow for all moving vehicles—regardless of whether they use internal combustion engines—or should the city just let the cost-efficient power of the sun clear the bike lanes, and pay workers to shovel streets?

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Should Sanitation Workers Shovel Bike Lanes So Soon?

            The milder weather has people waiting in Times Square for the New Year’s festivities pumped . Reader Valerio Bruscianelli sent some photographs just now and tells us, “They’ve set up the usual barricades and are letting people into each section one by one. There were only about 10 people who claimed their spots around 10am this morning, looks like there are a few thousand now. Every now and again the crowd gets really loud, I have yet to discover why from all the way up here but the energy is incredible out there, must have something to do with the nice weather ( last year was much much colder).” Times Square’s streets are starting to close —and the area will be pretty locked down . The Times Square Alliance has an app for folks in the thick of the action which also has a “LIVE, six-and-a-half-hour, commercial-free mobile stream of New Year’s Eve in Times Square” (plus suggests an app for clinking champagne flutes , since alcohol isn’t allowed in the zone) and its website also has a livestream .

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Times Square Revelers Getting Ready To Ring In 2011

This isn’t nearly the worst that we’ve seen, either (via BitchCakesNY ‘s flickr). After a week of being snowed in and not being able to throw out our trash things are starting to get a little rank back home, so we can’t tell you how happy we are to report that the Department of Sanitation is gearing up to start collecting ” in a limited capacity ” on Monday. Street sweeping will also resume then (to sweep away the unplowed snow?), so cars in metered spots are going to have to move. Alternate side rules, however, remain suspended.

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Trash Pick-Up Resumes Monday!

Joseph Grucci An elderly member of the Grucci fireworks family shot his grandson yesterday after a heated argument over noise. Joseph Grucci, the cousin of former Republican congressman and fireworks magnate Felix Grucci, got into a fight with his grandson, Christopher Giresi, when Giresi had some friends over around 3 a.m. Thursday night and repeatedly refused to keep the noise down. Grucci told cops his grandson actually attacked him when he told the youngins to shut up; after that, Grucci got his shotgun and fired at the 20-year-old from about 20 feet away in his Bellport, Long Island home. Grucci and his wife Carol legally adopted Giresi almost a decade ago, because his own parents were mired in drug addiction. There has been a lot of tension between the two men in recent years according to Grucci’s wife, largely stemming from Giresi’s drug use and circle of friends. The grandmother says her grandson is so nervous about going to jail on pending drug charges, he has been regularly taking steroids to prepare for the possibility. Giresi is expected to live, and his grandfather is calling the attack a case of self-defense, especially since his 6-foot-2, 220-pound grandson towers over his 5-foot-6,150-pound frame. Carol added that she and her husband aren’t part of their family’s fireworks company , and because of a family rift, she doesn’t expect they’ll get any help from his cousin.

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Grandfather Shoots Grandson Over Noise Argument

Last night at MSG (Graham Lucas) As we noted yesterday , Phish is in the midst of a three-night run at Madison Square Garden, making the area around Penn Station a no-go zone if you’re trying to walk to the train without losing your faith in humanity. And tonight, it being NYE, just forget about it —the sidewalks are going to be absolutely packed, with pandemonium for a three block radius around the Garden. Obviously, the band’s fan base makes for deliciously easy targets , but it should be noted that the quartet thoroughly crushed their first gig of the run last night, with highlights including an exuberant cover of Little Feat’s “Fat Man in the Bathtub” from the album Waiting for Columbus (which Phish covered in its entirety this Halloween), an improvisationally-inspired Set II Tweezer, and a room-shaking Axilla, which is probably the best rock song ever named for the armpit. If you’re curious why grown adults still put up with the humiliation and indignity of attending a Phish show in these foul years of our Lord, the band is doing a live HD webstream of tonight and tomorrow night’s show. There’s a mob scene outside the Garden for a reason, and it’s not just about the drugs. For reference, here’s a video of the band’s a cappella performance of “The Birdwatcher” in Worcester on Tuesday night:

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PSA: Phish Fan Advisory Still in Effect, Live Webcast Available