Fans of “The Office” know that the TV comedy is set in the fictional branch office of the Dunder-Mifflin paper company in less-than-glamorous Scranton, Pa.

Although the show is produced on the West Coast and most of the scenes are interiors, more than a few references are made to such local Scranton landmarks as the Anthracite Heritage Museum and Abe’s Deli. The people of Scranton love this stuff and, in fact, have developed a strong affection for the make-believe world of “The Office.” The city’s mayor and members of the chamber of commerce are frequently quoted in feature stories about how the show has put the old town (pop. 76,000) on the map of American pop culture.

Of course, the show is really about the misery of modern corporate life as seen through they eyes of feckless pod drones and their craven supervisors, but that’s irony for you.

Scranton—the very sound of it suggests a dead-end job.

That’s why it’s fun that in the Dunder-Mifflin back story, there are seven other branch offices that are occasionally mentioned in the show’s episodes. And guess where one of those offices is located?

Yep. Westchester County’s favororte funny town—Yonkers.

That’s it, however. The show’s creators have provided no comic details to the Yonkers angle, leaving it up to our imagination.

So. OK. I think it’s time for us to imagine how Dunder-Mifflin might be essential to the economic well-being of the City of Hills.

We’ll work on it.

Westchester County government—that is to say County Executive Andy Spano and the board of merry legislators—are obsessed with fat. No, not the fat in the bloated county budget, but the fat in people.

They can’t stop talking about it. They come up with stuff like “No Junk Food” weeks and other gimmicks in an attempt to lead the way in the fight against national obesity. Their latest idea is a law that would require restaurant chains to put calorie counts on menus. There was a public hearing on the law just the other night.

Now, you’d think with all this alarming talk of an obesity crisis that Westchester would rank especailly high in the blubber department. Not so, according to Forbes.com., which came up with a list of the nation’s 20 most obese cities. You might be relieved to know that none are in Westchester. So cheer up. If you live in these parts, maybe you’re not so fat after all.

Load up on an order of fries…and super-size it!

Gov. Eliot Spitzer must be politically tone deaf. The more we see this man in action, the more it seems that he can’t possibly make it past one term.

His first misstep was the comptroller appointment fight he had with Assembly Speaker Sheldon Silver. I actually thought Spitzer was right to challenge Silver on this issue. But when he didn’t get his way with the Democratic-controlled state legislature and Tom DiNapoli was given the job, the governor reacted in a bullying fashion. Assemblyman George Latimer of Rye took the brunt of this almost immediately after the legislature voted. Spitzer showed Latimer up by holding an unrelated press conference in Latimer’s district without notifying him. Then he basically told me that Latime would have to shape up if he expected the governor’s support in the next election.

This was a troubling sign of things to come. Then there was “Trooper-gate” with Republican Majority Leader Sen. Joe Bruno, which was extraordinary in that it showed how vindictive motives can backfire. In attempt to expose corruption, Spitzer released the foul smell of corruption in his own office. It almost made me sympathize with Bruno…no mean feat.

By taking on the powerful Bruno and Silver, Spitzer, one presumes, was merely trying to break the political gridlock that has earned the state of New York the embarassing title of having the most dysfunctional government in the nation. But Spitzer blew it, pure and simple. He picked the wrong fights, hit below the belt, rabbit punched and cried foul …and then when he lost those silly battles, he failed to quickly cut his losses to minimize the damage to his administration.

Angering the Albany power brokers was one thing, but Spitzer turned around and angered the voters, too. The tug-of-war over granting driver’s licenses to undocumented workers was a monumental debacle, proving that despite his huge victory in the election, Spitzer simply does not have his finger on the pulse of the every day citizen in New York.

And it gets even worse. Just the other day, Spitzer tried to mend fences with the Assembly Democrats. What does he do? He tells them they deserve a raise!

Forget about the fact that they are part-timers and that many of them receive stipends over and above their base salaries of $79,500. And don’t get bogged down on the question of whether or not they deserve a raise. I don’t know, maybe they do.

But while he’s talking about handing out pay raises, the state university system has just raised tuition five percent! That’s what I mean about tone deaf.

I wonder how many parents who send their kids to SUNY colleges are getting a pay raise next year.

On the positive side, Spitzer did preserve the $2 subway fare, though other fares going up.

Nevertheless, the governor is a disappointment so far. Perhaps the expectations were too high. He bravely took on the crooks and chiselers on Wall Street and won. That was quite an accomplishment, and it put him in the governor’s chair.

Please pardon my tortured alliteration, but now he looks more and more like an ordinary pol, prone to pettiness and pandering.

The joke is on me…sort of.

It turns out that my charitable switch to the hapless Republican Party (see Nov. 15 column) won’t be official until after the next election, according to state law. That’s because I waited until after this year’s election to make the party switch.

Which means, alas, I won’t have the opportunity to vote in the GOP primary. I only did it to help, fellas. The Westchester County Republicans are losing members faster than the plunging Dow.

Also, Milt Hoffman, the emeritus Journal News politics hound, has informed me that it’s worse than I even thought. He reports that the latest Nov. 6, 2007 enrollment figures show that there are 268,985 Democrats and 166,048 Republicans, a differential of 103,000.

Tomorrow’s column is about Abraham Lincoln’s Thanksgiving Proclamation of 1863, which permanently made Thanksgiving a national day of observance.
If you want to read the whole document, just click on the bold-faced word. And have a happy Thanksgiving.

It’s only a matter of time (and can probably be counted in days rather than weeks) before the economy-stupid becomes the driving issue in this coming presidential election.

Sure, this is the season of Thanksgiving. And yes, people should be counting their lucky stars, but there is a palpable sense of gloom hanging over everything right now. Jobs are threatened. Pensions are non-existent. Home mortgages are foreclosing. Debt is through the ceiling. And the rich keep getting richer and richer and richer. The average salary on Wall Street is now $17,000 a week, and a lot of those guys are crying because THEY’RE NOT MAKNG ENOUGH!

Meanwhile, kids (and some are not kids) are dying in Iraq. It’s time to kick start the draft, but I suggest that everybody over the age of 45, men and women, be eligible for some form of national service. No deferments, except for veterans.

There is very little leadership in this country. It’s pathetic. I don’t have the energy today to rant on, so I’m posting this audio, a speech from one of my favorite movies of all time, “Network” which came out in 1976. The Cold War was still going on then, but the message eerily applies to this day. (Ball, you’ll appreciate this) The writer Paddy Chayefsky said it better than anyone, through the character of Howard Beale. Click on Mad and then have a happy Thanksgiving.

It’s interesting to see that Congress is coming up with ways to force nursing homes to reveal who is that actually owns them.

Well, we already know who owns thousands of them—private equity firms. That’s right. America’s aged are at the mercy of bottom-line managers, whose interests have little to do with geriatric care and everything to do with cost cutting and maxmizing profits. You see in an aging society, old people represent an ever-expanding “growth market” for greedy investors interested in buying up the larger nursing home chains. Think of the private contractors who’ve done so poorly in Irag…and now think of the same kinds of guys running the facility where your grandmother lives.

It’s a big reason why the quality of nursing homes is poor and getting worse.

Will the nightmare of Soylent Green ever become a reality? I wonder.

My recent enrollment in the depleted and defeated Westchester Republican Party (see today’s column) has gotten rave reviews from my new GOP colleagues. They’ve welcomed me with open arms.
Yonkers City Councilwoman Dee Barbato even suggested I run for office. Hmm…How about mayor in 2011? Term limits will prevent the current Republican mayor, Phil Amicone, from running again.
So here’s my slogan: “The New Phil. Better Than the Old Phil.”

Miguel Hernandez, the former mayor of Ossining, has been steamed at me ever since I wrote a column that was unsupportive of the idea of establishing a museum at Sing Sing Prison. It’s a classic federal “pork barrel” project.
Hernandez has most recently taken me to task for Tuesday’s column, which was probably the most benign, least controversial piece I’ve written all year. It was about the season of Thanksgiving and Veterans Day—and centered on a recent trip I made to Plymouth, Mass. where the Pilgrims landed. Go figure…we live in a nasty time when even the act of trying to say something nice gets slammed.
Hernandez decided to set me straight on “the facts” by writing a condescending letter to the editor, which I have provided here in full. From time to time, I feel compelled to publish some of letters I get, especially the dopier ones.
This qualifies as dopey for three reasons: 1) It completely (and perhaps deliberately) misses the point of the column. 2) It’s pompous and factually incorrect and 3) The guy spells my name wrong.

Anyway, here it is. My response follows.

THE HERNANDEZ LETTER

“Phil Riesman’s recent article about the founding and settlement of Plymouth, Massachusetts repeats some errors that he may have learned from the Plymouth, MA Tourist Board. First of all, the oldest street in North America in what is now the United States is in St. Augustine, Florida and not in Plymouth Massachusetts. St Augustine was founded on September 8 1565 by Don Pedro Menéndez near the sight of where Don Juan Ponce de León first landed in 1513. Thus St. Augustine trumps Plymouth by at least 55 years and is the oldest. continuously inhabited settlement in the United States. Second, the landing on Plymouth’s shores was on December 21 1620, not November 11 as Mr Riesman reports. Third, The so-called “Pilgrims” never went by, or otherwise called themselves by that name. They described themselves as “Puritans” and “Separatists” meaning that their ultra-orthodox protestant faith was pure and untainted and that they had separated themselves form the Church of England. Furthermore, they only religious freedom they cared about and believed in was their own and as such they were extremely intolerant and mistreated and forced out of their settlements Indians and Englishmen who did not adhere to their fundamentalist beliefs.

Also, the “first” Thanksgiving in North America did not take place in the Plymouth colony. In 1598 Don Juan de Oñate the son of a noble Spanish family led one of the first major colonization efforts into what is now the United States. Four hundred men, 130 with families, left Santa Barbara (in north-central Mexico) for New Spain in January of that year. Four months later, after plodding across the torturous Chihuahua desert, they arrived at the banks of the Rio Grande near present day El Paso. On April 30, at the the Feast of the Ascension, Don Juan claimed the land for King Phillip of Spain, hosted a thanksgiving meal for his colonists and the Indians who converted to the Catholic faith, and presented for the enjoyment of all, a play, written by Captain Marcos de Fárfan, This was the first thanksgiving service and the first dramatic presentation in America.

I suggest that a good place for Mr. Riesman to begin learning the true history of the “Pilgrims” and their colonization of North America is by reading, “Mayflower” by Nathan Philbrick. Also, David Weber’s “The Spanish Frontier in North America” will also help readers learn about Spanish contributions to the founding, settlement and creation of the United States.”

MY RESPONSE:
Phew Miguel, but that was long-winded. I’ll try to be as wordy.

First, I did read Philbrick’s book, “Mayflower,” and you might want to re-read it because the Pilgrims did, indeed, land on Nov. 11, on the tip of Cape Cod. It’s in all the Pilgrim histories, including “Saints and Strangers,” which I also recommend you read.

Incidentally, I wonder if you just didn’t read the cliff notes to “Mayflower.” Philbrick’s first name isn’t “Nathan,” it’s Nathaniel.

Second, I never said the Pilgrims called themselves “Pilgrims.” Also, I never said they were “tolerant.” In fact, I said quite the opposite.

Look, I always expect to hear from sticklers, but I do get frustrated when the sticklers get so carried away with the game of “Gotcha” that they start seeing cross-eyed and don’t read carefully. It’s embarassing.

Your other criticisms strike me as trivial, even disingenuous. For example, you know full well that the American Thanksgiving tradition is traced to the Pilgrims…Abraham Lincoln had more than a little something to do with this back in the grim days of the Civil War. In any case, the column wasn’t about the origins of the holiday, nor was it about any debate over historical claims…and you know that, too.

On the “first road” question, well, guess what? We’re both technically wrong. The Indians had paths before either of our ancestors came to the New World. The Boston Post Road, for example, was originally an Indian path. And oh yeah, did you know that the Indians didn’t call themselves “Indians?” Just checking.

One more thing—I still think the Sing Sing museum is a dumb idea.

I thought this was pretty funny. A reader e-mailed this fantasy damage control scenario, involving a fictional ancestor of a certain Chappaqua resident. It’s not too far-fetched.

POLITICAL PACKAGING

Dr. Judy Wallman, a professional genealogical
researcherdiscovered that Hillary Clinton’s great-great
uncle, Remus Rodham, was hanged for horse stealing and train robbery in Montana in 1889. The only known photograph of Remus shows him
standing on the gallows. On the back of the picture is
this inscription: ‘Remus Rodham; horse thief, sent to Montana
Territorial Prison 1885, escaped 1887, robbed the Montana
Flyer six times. Caught by Pinkerton detectives,
convicted and hanged in 1889. Judy e-mailed Hillary Clinton for comments.
Hillary’s staff of professional image adjusters sent back the
following biographical sketch:
‘Remus Rodham was a famous cowboy in the Montana
Territory. His business empire grew to include acquisition
of valuable equestrian assets and intimate dealings with the
Montana railroad. Beginning in 1883, he devoted several years of
his life to service at a government facility, finally
taking leave to resume his dealings with the railroad. In 1887, he was a key player in a vital investigation run by the renowned Pinkerton Detective Agency. In 1889, Remus passed away during an important civic
function held in his honor when the platform upon which
he was standing collapsed’ And THAT is how it’s done, folks !