Good News Friday, all-Sandy edition: NY’ers come together. Cory Booker invites people into his home. And a Staten Island hotel owner chooses evacuees over runners

Pretty pooped again tonight after some more work today delivering supplies to folks in the Lower East Side of Manhattan, who are desperately in need of water, food, and shelter.

I know this blog has been very Sandy-heavy this week, but honestly, living in NYC it’s really hard to focus on anything else right now.

But it is Friday, so I found plenty of Good News to be talking about today.

First, this is a great column by Jason Gay of the Wall Street Journal, which gets at the heart of New Yorkers like few others things I’ve read this week. Yes, New Yawkers have the well-earned reputation of being obnoxious know-it-alls who think we have it better than anyone, and that tourists and other NY’ers are often nuisances.

But in a crisis, well, it can be a beautiful city to be a part of.

**Next, here’s Newark, New Jersey mayor Cory Booker, doing a little something very few politicians have ever done: He’s inviting those rendered homeless by the storm to stay in his house.

It started innocently enough on Twitter Thursday, when a Newark resident told Booker that she lived near him and was without power, and could she come over?
He said yes, which led to a dozen more people coming to chill at Chez Booker.

Very, very cool. As I said to a friend Thursday night, the NJ governor’s race between Booker and everyone’s new favorite leader, Chris Christie, in two years, is going to one hell of a race.

**Finally, a big controversy Thursday continued to be the city’s lame-brained decision to keep the New York City marathon on schedule Sunday. I understand why they’re doing it (so many thousands flying in, sponsor money, the economic boom to the city it provides every year) but it’s really just a bad, bad move.

However, at least one hotel owner is standing up to the race. Richard Nicotra, who owns a hotel on storm-ravaged Staten Island, has refused to honor marathon runners’ previous room reservations while he allows storm refugees to stay for a few more days.

It’s something many with a conscience would do, but it’s still a nice sight to see someone with priorities higher than the bottom line.

The NBA star who fought a fire extinguisher (and lost). A perfect cartoon about anti gay-marriage zealots. And building the perfect dorm room

With some stories, the jokes just write themselves.
Monday night, a genius New York Knicks star named A’Mare Stoudemire was frustrated after his team lost again to the Miami Heat. So on his way to the locker room, Mr. Stoudemire decided to take his frustration out.

By punching the glass case surrounding a fire extinguisher.
Not surprisingly, the glass case/fire extinguisher combo remained undefeated in fights, all-time. Stoudemire has lacerations in his hand, and will likely miss the rest of the playoff series. It’s a tough blow for the Knicks, but hey, it wasn’t like they were beating the Heat anyway.
Fortunately for the rest of us non-Knicks fans, Amare’s punch has led to some high comedy. I love the T-shirt above, produced by a company called Crosstown NY, and my e-migo Jason Gay of the Wall Street Journal has a fabulously funny “oral history” of the fight between Amare and the extinguisher, as told by the people who were there (the Snack Machine, the Water Fountain, etc.)

(E-migo, by the way, is a term coined by the great Joe Posnanski to describe someone you’ve never met but are friends with through e-mail and other Internet forms.)

**Moving on, yet another state is going to the polls to determine what constitutes a marriage. It’s so ridiculous that we keep having this debate, but it is nice to see the anti-gay bigots who cling to religion are getting satirized more and more. And that the tide continues to turn toward tolerance and acceptance in this country.
In advance of North Carolina’s Amendment 1 ballot initiative, which says that marriage between a man and a woman is the “only domestic legal union” that would be valid or recognized in the state once it passes, the Charlotte Observer ran the above cartoon, by Kevin Siers. Brilliant.

Right now it looks like the vote could go either way on May 8.

**Finally today, more proof that college kids today are WAY smarter than we were. This kid at UC-Berkeley decided to trick out his freshman dorm room by creating BRAD (Berkeley Ridiculously Automated Dorm), which is about the coolest thing I’ve seen. The video above starts slow, but give it a few minutes and watch what a smart kid with today’s technology can do to make his life easier.