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| Smorgasburg in DUMBO. Photo: MK Metz |
The Brooklyn Eagle reports that Brooklyn's burgeoning food sector is an engine of job growth for the borough, based on a study done for the Brooklyn Chamber of Commerce.
Brooklyn’s “food chain” -- supermarkets, restaurants, gourmet food shops and food makers— accounts for 16 percent of businesses in Brooklyn and 12.5 percent of Brooklyn’s private sector jobs.
Restaurants, cafes, coffee shops and grocery stores added one out of every five new jobs in Brooklyn since 2000. In 2011 alone, wages in the Brooklyn food sector came to $1.46 billion.
While not all food-related jobs rack in big bucks, many do -- and start-ups and "one-person specialty food manufacturing businesses" are adding tremendous vitality to the mix.
So ha ha yourself, haters. And pass the kimchi tacos.
Go to McBrooklyn's HOME PAGE.
We finished last in our race to be the congressman in Arizona's Fourth Congressional District as the candidate of the Americans Elect party, one of Arizona's five recognized political parties entitled to ballot access. 
At last count, we had almost 2,400 votes, giving us 0.98% of the vote. 
Here is the story as reported by Phoenix TV station KPHO (CBS5):
Just a few blocks from our current home in Bay Ridge, very early this morning, the amazing volunteers from Occupy Sandy, which has done such wonderful work during the last few weeks since the hurricane, were busy preparing what seemed like zillions of Thanksgiving dinners for people in hard-hit areas.
The kitchen began prep work at 8 a.m. yesterday, was open all night, and volunteers were here even at 2 a.m. 
We're really grateful for Occupy Sandy on this Thanksgiving.
The front page of The Wall Street Journal today, Friday, November 23, 2012, features an above the fold photo of yesterday's wonderful Occupy Sandy Thanksgiving dinner outside St. Camillus in Rockaway with the headline: "A Sunny Thanksgiving Feast for Storm's Victims." 
At least one person pictured was a volunteer taking a break to eat a delicious apple muffin. 
We're a little embarrassed (but not that much) to be pictured when so many of our fellow volunteers and the regular crew at Occupy Sandy in Rockaway aren't. But we are proud of being a tiny part of such a good effort. And we also like that at the extreme left of the photo you can just make out the Dayton Towers West building at 102-00 Shore Front Parkway.
For thirty years our beloved Aunt Tillie -- our grandfather's sister -- and Uncle Morris Metz, had an apartment there on the second floor, where we spent several holiday dinners (Thanksgiving, Rosh Hashona) with them and our Grandma Ethel back in the 1980s. That was the last time we were featured on the front page, albeit of the second section, of The Wall Street Journal. A story by Brooks Jackson about our presidential campaign was published on November 28, 1983, just about 29 years ago.
It ran with the headline "This Presidential Candidate Wants Jane Wyman as His Running Mate," It ended:
After a week that began with getting our fourth and final wisdom tooth extracted at Park Slope Oral Surgery and continued with final classes and final exams at Borough of Manhattan Community College, The School of Visual Arts and Fashion Institute of Technology, on one of our last nights in Brooklyn, 
we had the pleasure of going to indieScreen on Kent Avenue in Williamsburg to attend the New York premiere of Shoplifting from American Apparel, director Pirooz Kalayeh's wonderful adaptation of the Tao Lin novella.
It's a shrewd opening up of a deliberately airless autobiographical literary work -- its airlessness making the book brilliant to its champions and somewhat tedious to its critics (we liked it) -- with a dizzingly "meta" movie, which dispenses with the book's "Sam" and "Luis" characters and instead us the "actual" Tao Lin (who exists somewhat outside Kalayeh's film, mostly in his own videos), 
an actor (Brad Warner, real-life subject of a documentary by the director) playing the "character" Tao Lin (Sam in the novella), and another actor (an uncanny Jordan Castro, superb at channeling the mannerisms and verbal tics of the original) as the "real" Tao Lin -- along with the "real" (actual?) Noah Cicero and the "character" Noah Cicero, played by actor James Roehl.
We don't have the critical vocabulary do a "review" (the film's Los Angeles premiere last weekend elicited some nice reviews) nor the common sense, either (we once told Tao it was our opinion as a lawyer that he should never publish anything about his arrest at American Apparel), 
but it seemed to us that the financial constraints and logistical and personnel problems that limited the production -- the director at one point says something like indie filmmmaking always means things going wrong 100% of the time -- worked to the advantage of the adaptation and somehow made it truer to the vision and spirit of Lin's novella than a straight-forward retelling would have been.
By using the backstory of the writer writing about something that really happened and taking questions from both his readers and the filmmakers and actors about it, by largely abandoning the book's black-and-gray hipster New York setting for sunny Southern California and the brighter, more open bleakness of Rust Belt Ohio (in Lin's books, most of the "sense of place" is internal anyway -- or by "the soft blue light of Internet Explorer"), by calling attention to the static nature of the Gmail chats and artfully have the most self-referential, self-conscious text comment even more upon itself, 
by turning hyperrealistic fictional scenes in the store and jail into surreal filmmaking challenges -- all this "gets" what made Shoplifting from American Apparel a book that spoke to many young people ("We are the fucked generation") and makes it accessible to a wider audience.
It's also laugh-out-loud funny. We broke up at a scene where "Tao" (Castro), placing fast-food chicken bits around the Hollywood Walk star of James Dean, tells "Noah" (Cicero) and director Kalayeh that he doesn't actually know who James Dean is -- but that's only one of many comic "making of" sequences that brought to mind some of the best moments of Adaptation and Annie Hall. 
The film's performances from professional actors and nonprofessionals (some picked up, apparently, on the streets of Hollywood and Youngstown) range from perfectly modulated to surprisingly credible. Production values are high; even the purposefully ragged edges appear major-studio sleek (we hope that comment is not something people will take as being negative; sleek does not mean slick).
Outside, this evening, it was New York's annual Night of the Drunken Young Santas and Lubavitchers asked us four times on our walk from the Bedford Avenue L stop to the theater, "Are you Jewish?" (our responses were the lies "No," "No, I hate them," "Not anymore," and finally "Gai in drerde"). We were the first person to enter the screening room and so sat in the aisle seat of the last row (for the sake of our prostate)
in indieScreen's very comfortable sold-out auditorium and enjoyed the 1969-ish song from The Ohioans (Jordan Castro and Andrew Borstein) that preceded the film, along with the trailer for the director's forthcoming adaptation of Noah Cicero's novel The Human War.
During the Q&A session with Pirooz Kalayeh and several of the actors from Shoplifting, the director, wearing an "I ❤ KOREA" T-shirt, seemed grateful that given the film's, uh, complexities, no one had walked out, but he should have known better. Even our prostate didn't want to miss a scene. (We did notice Tao come in with a friend late in the film, stand in the back of the theater next to us with a drink from the bar, but soon turn with his back to the screen and then walk out a few minutes later. When we asked him afterwards if he couldn't stand watching his work onscreen, Tao said no, he'd just seen it several times before.) Anyway, we're extremely grateful for having been privileged to attend the New York opening of Shoplifting from American Apparel. When we got an email on August 27, 2007 that said
We're from a different generation, people that got up every day, and did things, were proactive, got things done -- in other words, we're one of the people who suck. Frankly, we feel about Tao Lin, Noah Cicero, Jordan Castro and Bebe Zeva the way our Grandma Ethel felt about her sister-in-law Aunt Betty: we hate them like poison. 
And growing up in a Garment Center family and selling schmattes in our relative's retail outlets since age 14, we were taught to despise shoplifters.But fair is fair, and we know enough to say that you definitely do not have to be young or alienated or a hipster (who of course must deny being a hipster) to like Pirooz Kalayeh's movie version of Shoplifting from American Apparel. It's for intelligent moviegoers of any age and level of productivity. Go know!
That's My Congress, a politically independent journal of the campaigns and legislation of the United States Congress, covers our candidacy for Congress in Arizona's Fourth Congressional District: