Condit Least of Our Woes Pol must take a backseat to cell phone commandos & Van Gundy or most New Yorkers, Gary Condit is a figure of some remote fictional world. He allows us to play armchair sleuths or saloon moralists. But he has nothing to do with our lives. Here on the ground, in the real world, there are too many other aggravations. Here's a short list of mine: 1. The Yell Phone The rude, narcissistic idiots with the cell phones are everywhere now. They yell on buses. They yell in restaurants. They yell on the street. Our only refuge is the subway, where we can read newspapers and books, and now they are trying to penetrate its shiny new cars. Most of them are men and the shouts are usually inane: "What KIND of veal? No, no, TELL me! How many POUNDS?" Or, "You believe this? They got Lindros! Are they NUTS? The guy had SIX brain CONCUSSIONS!" Or, "Where ARE you, baby? I'm in the BUS! I'll be there in, I dunno, 10 MINUTES? What's the STOP? Yeah. YEAH! Meet me DOWNSTAIRS!" These yo-yos don't seem to understand how close they are coming to sudden death. A few weeks ago, three members of Lil' Kim's posse stopped at a deli in Brooklyn, on the way to the airport. A guy inside was barking into his yell phone. The apprentice rappers asked him to talk more quietly. (And hey: If a rapper thinks you're too loud, you're too loud.) The man went on yelling. Naturally (the cops tell us), the trio pulled out rods and fired 15 bullets at him. Only one hit the guy with the yell phone and he walked to Brooklyn Hospital Center. But all over the city, citizens heard this news and must have shouted, "Yes!" To avoid a drastic increase in assaults and homicides, the politicians should ban yell phones from all buses and city property. They should be banned from all restaurants, theaters, concert halls and other closed public spaces. If the yellers want to bark about veal, the Rangers or dating arrangements, they can walk outside and talk in traffic. 2. Token Booths Without Token Clerks All over town, baffled New Yorkers, and even more puzzled foreign tourists, head into the subway to buy tokens and find that the clerk has vanished. To board a train, they must buy MetroCards from a machine and pass through revolving doors. If they need directions, they must trust strangers for help. The Metropolitan Transportation Authority is clearly determined to remove every human face from the system. But in practice, this is a mess. At certain hours in the Canal St. stations of my neighborhood, many women get off the trains wheeling baby carriages, and find themselves trapped. The turnstiles are barricaded shut. The service doors are locked. They can't get the carriages or strollers through the revolving doors. Yes, sometimes the turnstiles and a clerk are working on the other side of the tracks. If the women with carriages are on the downtown side, they must go to the uptown side. That means they must then negotiate stairs, a tunnel and another flight of stairs just to get out. The MTA board should try using this system, five days a week for a couple of months, with baby carriages in hand. The clerks would soon be back in the booths. 3. Commercials in Moviehouses This vile development has been going on for years, of course, but it is now worse than ever. The commercials are filled with numbing computer-driven images intended to scramble human brains. The music is an assault, its volume beyond the limits of human endurance. But if you pay $10 to see a movie, you shouldn't have to put up with this nonsense. You pay to see a movie, not commercials that peddle junk. A suggestion: When the commercials start to play, all ticket buyers should hiss, whistle, jeer and throw jellybeans. There is, of course, one other thing in a moviehouse that is generally worse than the commercials: The movie itself. This has been a summer when virtually every new movie has been dumb, incoherent, vulgar, brutal or preposterous. All are gussied up with computer fakery. All assume that the audience is made up of total morons. Maybe every potential moviegoer should take the $10, buy a book instead, rent a Fellini video or go to the ballpark. Eventually, the cynical men and women of Hollywood might produce at least a few movies that are humane and intelligent. 4. People Who Say "24/7" Where did this start? What are they trying to say? That they (or you) work 24 hours a day, seven days a week? Is it a synonym for workaholic? Is it the score of a Jets game? The phrase now slides into all kinds of discussions, from baseball to physics. It has become the equivalent of that dumb fad of using two fingers on each hand to make quote marks. That is, to tell your presumably brain-slow audience that you are using a word ironically or sarcastically. Can you imagine Abraham Lincoln using this phrase? Or Duke Ellington? 5. Garbage Pickup There are hundreds of thousands more people living in New York than were here 10 years ago, and like all human beings, they produce garbage. But the poor, overwhelmed Sanitation Department workers, the primary guardians of our health, still make it to most neighborhoods only three times a week. Meanwhile, great mountains of garbage pile up on streets or inside apartments. Citizens must use a variety of colored bags to separate this stuff, and are often forced to keep it indoors until the proper day of collection. Some grow desperate, and heave the bags into streetcorner trash cans, where it spills into the streets. On Friday nights in my neighborhood, when bags of plastic bottles are left at curbside, patrols of homeless guys move through the streets, tearing open the bags for bottles or cans that can be exchanged for cash. The worthless bottles then scatter over the streets. The building gets a ticket, not the homeless guys. I would vote for that mayoral candidate who promises to pick up the garbage at least five days a week. 6. Jeff Van Gundy He's still here, still the coach and he'll soon be back. His gray, sour presence will be forced upon us by the Knick management, and of course forced upon the Knicks. His disdain for his players will permeate the locker room and the court and all corners of the Garden. Eating desire. Eating joy. His clenched, unhappy face will press upon us all. If he smiles, some flunky will rush to him with a Chap Stick. The permanent sour cloud that envelopes him will rise up through the rafters of the Garden and into the New York air, staining all boroughs, choking all hope. No. No, not again. Not another whole season of bruised twilight. Doesn't anybody at the Garden have a number for Chuck Daly? I'm almost certain he doesn't use a yell phone.