I missed Mayor Bloomberg’s annual holiday party for the press at Gracie Mansion last night (a leaky roof delayed me upstate), but DN City Hall Bureau Chief Kirsten Danis was kind enough to pass along the script from Hizzoner’s speech, during which he singled out some Room 9 reporters - a group with whom he does not always see eye-to-eye - as the recipients of some joke gifts.
The full script, which is full of China references due to the mayor’s recent jaunt to Asia, afters after the jump. The gifts (he joked they were made in China) were as follows:
-
To The Post’s Frankie Edozien, who was the first to write about what Bloomberg called “the city’s dangerous pigeon population,” the mayor presented “the Deptartment of Health’s very first collection of pigeon birth control.
“Frankie, I don’t recommend you try to give these out to the population yourself,” Bloomberg quipped. “Ask Simcha Felder.”
-
Newsday City Hall Bureau Chief Karla Shuster, who just celebrated her six-month anniversary on the job, which the mayor said is “unprecedented longevity” for the Long Island pseudo tab: A “gold” watch.
-
WCBS’ Rich Lamb, dean of the press corps: A picture of himself covering what Bloomberg referred to as “your beloved St. Patrick’s Day” and posing with St. Patrick himself.
-
WNBC’s Melissa Russo, whose bosses did not send her to cover the mayor’s trip to the Pacific (he intimated it was due to their penny-pinching ways): Some cold noodles, a dumpling, chopsticks, and one fortune cookie. But, said Bloomberg: “You’ll have to share it with Dave Evans and Marcia Kramer, which I know you love to do.
-
The Times’ City Hall Bureau Chief Diane Cardwell, whose paper followed the lead of other broadsheets and downsized its pages earlier this year. Times Growth Hormone. “I got the prescription from Dr. Tom Frieden – but he’ll deny it,” Bloomberg joked. “The label explains the benefits. It says: “All the juice to fit more print.”