Here’s what I don’t get about the Indian Point nuclear power plant.

First, it’s old and it leaks stuff. I mean nasty stuff—stuff you wouldn’t rub your face in unless you wanted to be transformed into the toxic avenger. And when it leaks, the operator of the plant doesn’t feel anxious about telling anybody about it.

Then there’s the emergency warning system. It doesn’t work very well. They test these sirens, and the sirens don’t go off. How hard can it be to get sirens to work? Pretty hard, I guess.

Finally, there’s the evaucation plan. If something bad happens, some kind of China Syndrome nightmare, the plan is supposed to allow people within a 10-mile radious of the plant to safely and efficiently get out of Dodge. The problem here is that no one believes the evacuation plan will work. In a crisis, there will be likely be traffic jams and widespread panic. All hell will break loose.

So here’s what we have. We have three levels of incompetence. We have a plant with serious systemic problems, a warning system that doesn’t work to trigger an evacuation that can’t possibly be implemented without chaos.

Last week’s flood has created a booming business for the region’s 1-800-Get-Junk franchises. They’ve been hauling ruined furniture and other stuff out of basements and garages on a nonstop basis for the past seven days.

David Fitts, who heads up the Yonkers office, said he’s been so busy that he’s in the process of hiring more workers. His franchise serves Yonkers, Bronxville, Eastchester, Tuckahoe, Hastings and the Fleetwood section of Mount Vernon.

“We’ve been extremely busy,” he said. “I’ve been in business for 18 months so this is my second spring of operation. Obviously, you see a natural growth in your business as we come out of the winter months into the springtime months. It’s been compounded in a fairly busy way by the fact that we had that major nor’easter.”

He estimated that last week he collected five more tons of junk than normal. That’s how great the demand has been.

To help out, he’s looking for big strong guys who “have a good customer service and sales way about them and can operate the truck.” The pay is above minimum wage.

Does this strike you as funny? Gina Pane, the Manhattanville College graduate, who for awhile earned more than chump change as a professional dominatrix, has filed a lawsuit against the Greenburgh Police Department, demanding $5 million to compensate her for “pain and suffering.”

Pain and suffering…a dominatrix. Uh, yeah, right. Isn’t that just a little bit like the pot calling the kettle black?

Pane (pronounced Pa-nay) is suing on the grounds that she was unjustly treated by the cops in January of 2006 when she was arrested for driving while ability impaired and possession of marijuana. The half-crazed media attention that followed (Oh my God, Harold, a dominitrix in Westchester!) caused irreprable damage to her reputation and scotched her chances at getting a job on Wall Street, she alleges.

No fair, I say. Practitioners of the sadistic arts should not be discriminated against and should get an equal shot at any job opening at a brokerage firm. After all, greed and inflicting pain work hand in hand, don’t they?

Jack Lee of Yorktown Heights says he’s not criticizing Donald Trump. Indeed, he praises Trump for donating acres and acres of land in Yorktown and Putnam Valley for a state park. The land gift was made last year.

Since then, no park facilities have been created, but the over-exposed developer managed to get the state Department of Transportation to put up signs on the Taconic Parkway directing motorists to the Donald J. Trump State Park.
So, in effect, they’re a big Trump advertisement paid for and erected by taxpayers. Worse, it’s a sign that leads to nowhere.

To put it politely, this seemed a little premature. But many people, among them Lee, think the Trump sign is inappropriate. Trump, he says, should be honored with a plaque inside the park, but the park name should be changed.
Lee feels so strongly about this that he created a Web site to not only discuss his views but to test public opinion.

Click on the blue highlighted Trump and you’ll get a history of the park and an update on its status. He also asks two questions:
What should be done with the signs?
What is your favorite name for the new park donated by Trump?

The previous posting talks about a guy in Bronxville who lost a brand new Mercedes Benz in the April 15 flood.
My mechanic Tony over at Bams Service Station on Kraft Aveneue topped that today. He told me that another village resident lost a nearly new Lexus AND a Mercedes.
This storm hit so many people so hard in the pocketbook that the rest of us really should pause and count our blessings. I know I am. It’s why I always live on high ground.
The Indians were smart. They always made sure to create their hunting paths above the rivers and off the coastlines. A good example is the Boston Post Road, which was originally an Indian trail. Notice something? It ever floods.
The white man? Well, look where we put our parkways—the Bronx River Parkway, the Saw Mill River Parkway, the Hutch…Need I say more?

That deluge that struck Westchester County last week was a mini-Katrina. The stories about property losses from water damage are still rolling in.

This is purely second hand information, but I heard that a man living along the Bronx River lost a $54,000 Mercedes Benz in the flood. The worst part is that he had just purchased it on the Friday before the nine inches of rain fell.
By Monday, the car was destroyed.

You could predict everything that was going to happen. First the blame game kicked in.
Cho Seung Hui could’ve, should’ve and would’ve been stopped from killing a total 32 VA Tech students and himself if only…If only the university and the Blackburg cops hadn’t detained the wrong person and instead given sufficient warning that a killer was on the loose after the first fatal shooting…If only authorities had kept Cho under some kind of restricted psychiatric care after teachers recognized he was a disturbed young man two years ago…If only guns weren’t so easily procured.
If only. If only. If only.
If only there wasn’t evil in the world. If only life wasn’t so damn unfair.

Here’s the way I look at: Evil is like cancer. It’s a tragic fact of life. Medical researchers are making amazing strides in the study of cancer cells in the human organism. They’re learning how cancer cells replicate and mutate. They believe cancer cells inevitably exist in all people, especially the elderly. The only question is how to determine whether those cells are benign or dangerously malignant.
It’s the same with humanity at large. We’re all one giant organism, all of us swimming around in a churning, ceaseless sea of collective life. We come from the same place,. We’re made of the same matter. We have a common origin and in the final analysis, we are all one.
And just like in the human body, there inevitably are violent, evil cancers within the body of society. Cho was one of those cancers. You can study the possible causes of this type of cancer—isolation, paranoia, anger, cultural dysfunction, etc.
But the problem is that you can’t always predict if and when a cancer will become malignant, whether it will metastasize and attack the good cells.
I think it’s amazing that in the vast ogranism of humanity with all its complex day-to-day issues that anyone was able to flag Cho at all. Metaphorically, he was under a microscope long before Monday’s rampage. His English professor expelled him from class. He wrote violent plays and had a propensity for taking photographs under his desk of women’s legs. Cho was angry, anti-social.
He was counseled by cops. In short, a lot of professionals in academics, law enforcement and psychiatry, deserve credit for their efforts TO HELP THIS KID IN THE FIRST PLACE.
There are a lot of nut jobs out there, who are never detected. And there are lot of people with violent fantasies who never act on those fantasies. There was no way of accurately predicting that Cho was going to act on his.
We still live in a free society and we can’t lock everybody up on the grounds that they’re odious and weird.
Sometimes, you can check cancer in time. Sometimes you can’t.

The other predictable reaction to every mass killing is the reflexive call for greater gun control. No law is going to stop someone who’s hellbent to commit murder. It’s as simple as that. Cho was a methodical killer. This guy had a plan. It’s silly to suggest that he would have aborted any plan to kill, no matter how many gun-control roadblocks were thrown in his path.

Finally, there is the predictable handwringing over sending children to college. Ridiculous. It’s a risk just letting your kid borrow the car to go to the mall.

My guest on “High Noon” tomorrow is Ronnie Wilkerson, a standup comedian from White Plains, who has some very definite ideas about Don Imus and his “nappy headed ho” comment.

The show airs at 12 noon on WVOX, which is 1460 on your AM dial. If you’re out of the tin-can range, you can listen by logging onto www.wvox.com

You read it here first.
Former Yonkers City Council President Vincenza Restiano is planning to formally announce for Yonkers mayor tomorrow night at her home. This came from two people in the political know.
I put a call to Restiano this morning and left a message. Expect a press advisory coming from her later today.

This is barely noteworthy, I realize. But I wonder if anyone else noticed a strange coincidence in the news last week.
First, radio-TV personality Don Imus got fired after uttering the phrase, “nappy-headed hos.”
And then the one famous person in the world you could actually call a “Ho” without risk of retaliation died at the age of 76—That was the Hawaiian crooner, Don Ho.
Ho Ho.