My personal assessment of How Bad Things Are Out There is based on a daily perusal of the New York Post's crime blotter. It's a fairly simple formula: when it's mostly "livery cab driver assaulted by drunk passenger at 4 in the morning in Brooklyn," you're pretty much at status quo. When you start seeing office workers mugged in the Flatiron at 2 in the afternoon, that's when it's time to panic. Fortunately, incidents of that sort have been on the decline over the last couple of weeks, recent spate of gun crime notwithstanding. Here, however, is something that caught my eye today:

Two vagabonds brutally beat a fellow vagrant outside a Gowanus supermarket, where they deposit cans they've collected from the street, authorities said yesterday.

Vagabonds! How delightfully nineteenth century! I would like all of my crime news to be delivered in this fashion from now on! You'll be happy to know that the rapscallions were detained by the constabulary, while the unfortunate transient in question suffered only mild abrasions.