If you're a fan of New York City high-school basketball, you no doubt like to follow one of the  winningest teams, the Lincoln High Railsplitters.

Now, every Sunday night at 8 during the season, you can watch them in your living room as the NYC Life channel airs "City Hardwood," featuring the powerhouse team, now ranked 37th in the nation by ESPN.

The Railsplitters, coached by Tiny Morton, is featured in the series, “City Hardwood."

Echoing HBO’s “Hard Knocks,” which features  NFL teams during training,  “City Hardwood” follows the  players as they strive  to take the PSAL city championship back from Boys & Girls High.

Each episode of the show is repeated several times throughout the week; you can also download it for free on iTunes.

“We’re so excited to be able to showcase this amazing talent that’s coming out of Lincoln High School,” said Marybeth Ihle, a spokeswoman for the  Mayor’s Office of Media and Entertainment, which operates the NYC Life channel. “[The series illustrates] how much talent and effort goes into those games."

The premiere episode featured Lincoln sophomore Isaiah Whitehead. Also in the first installment, athletic director Renan Ebeid described Whitehead and his teammates as having normal high-school lives even though they're in the sports spotlight.

Film-maker Adam Salazar is producing and directing the series

This is hardly the first time the team has been on the small or large screen.  Former Railsplitter Lance Stephenson starred in a documentary  “Born Ready” before he graduated in 2009, and Sebastian Telfair, once a Lincoln point guard who now plays in the NBA for the Phoenix Suns,  was  in a 2005 documentary,  “Through The Fire.”

Spike Lee's  film,  “He Got Game” (1998)  featured the fictional Railsplitter Jesus Shuttlesworth, portrayed by NBA star Ray Allen.

If you miss any of the episodes on your TV screen, you can copy and paste this link to go to your computer screen:

www.nyc.gov/html/media/html/tv/nyctv_life_cityhardwood.shtml

 

State Senator Carl Kruger resigned Tuesday, Dec. 20,  just before pleading guilty to four counts of taking bribes from a hospital executive and a lobbyist for favorable treatment by the legislature and state officials.

 

Kruger, 62, and co-defendant Dr. Michael Turano, 50,  accepted nearly half a million dollars in bribes,  prosecutors said.

 

"Instead of serving the people who elected him, Senator Kruger monetized his public office and served himself," U.S. Attorney Preet Bharia said in a statement.

 

Turano, a gynecologist who shares a mansion in Mill Basin with his mother and with Kruger,   also pleaded guilty.

 

"I accept responsibility for my actions and am truly sorry for my conduct,"  Kruger, who wiped tears from his eyes, told Manhattan Federal Court Judge Jed Rackoff.

 

Kruger faces nine to 11 years in jail when he's sentenced in April, along with some $900,000 in fines and restitution. Turano could be sentenced up to five years.

 

Despite the guilty plea, Kruger, who had been in the state senate for 16 years,  reportedly will still get his $60,000-a-year pension.

 

Two of the counts were related to Kruger accepting  bribes from a supermarket lobbyist -- who currently is fighting the charges --  to push the legislature to crack down on tax-free cigarette sales on Indian reservations.

 

The other two counts involved bribes Kruger received from an executive with the former Parkway Hospital in Queens to influence state approval of Parkway's merger with another hospital. The excutive was convicted in the scheme earlier this year.

Republican Bob Turner --  who was tagged as a Tea Partier by his opponent but easily, and surprisingly, won the seat vacated by Anthony Weiner, who was forced out by a sexting scandal,  in heavily Democratic District 9 -- says he "will not caucus with the Tea Party."

There was considerable media build-up leading to, and of course including, the 10th anniversary of the September 11 attacks on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon. Seemingly every local and national news outlet printed or broadcast special editions or programs (we didn't join in, simply because we really didn't feel we could add very much to the saturation coverage, although we will report on the local 9/11 memorials in our next issue).

There's nothing wrong, of course, with such commemorations (although the increased level of advertising for these special projects suggests that the tributes were not solely altruistic).

But it is  a curious phenomenon that any anniversaries seem to take on tremendously more significance whenever their cardinal numbers end in a zero, like 10th, 20th, and so on. Why was last year's ninth anniversary of 9/11 any less important, and why will next year's 11th not generate anywhere near the attention (there's speculation that even  the reading of the victims' names may not take place)?

There's another curious thing about the numbers. The  9/11 commemorations quite rightly pay tribute to the nearly 3,000 people who were murdered by the terrorists -- but make scant reference, if at all, to the thousands more Americans who were killed or seriously wounded  in the Iraq war spurred by 9/11 (even though Saddam Hussein had absolutely nothing to with the attacks and, in fact, was a sworn enemy of Al Quaeda) and in the Afghanistan war that is being continued even after the disposal of Osama ben Laden -- not even counting the hundreds of thousands of civilians killed or maimed by the U.S. in both wars.

Indeed, often when a media outlet would pay tribute to the American war dead, it would face accusations of being anti-war, unpatriotic left-wingers (for example, when a few years back  ABC's Nightline dared to list several of the dead with their pictures, some affiliate stations across the country refused to air it).

So let's review: Anniversaries ending in zero are suddenly much more important. Nearly 3,000 people wiped out is (of course) outrageous, but more than 4,000 killed in a misdirected response to that horror is acceptable.

Perhaps numbers really don't lie -- but they certainly can be manipulated.

Even though we in southern Brooklyn are very close to the beach, this time of year there’s a proliferation of inflatable pools in neighborhood backyards.

The July 11 abduction and brutal murder of Leiby Kletzky was every parent’s worst horror – even more so because of where it occurred. Such a crime was unheard of in Borough Park, a close-knit Orthodox Jewish community where a spate of shoplifting would be considered a crime wave.

If, like many others in the city and nation, you and your family are planning to rent a car this summer, you no doubt are assuming that whatever vehicle you choose is safe.

 

You may want to think again.