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Scoopy’s Notebook, Week of Sept. 21, 2017

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Rise and Resist members marching from the Citi Bike dock at Greenwich and Eighth Aves. — where too many bikes had been “reserved” by other bike-share users — to another dock in the Meatpacking District where they would hopefully find some cycles for their mission up to the U.N. to protest President Trump. Photos by Scoopy

Wigging out on wheels: Why were a phalanx of nude-bodysuit-and-wig-wearing, spray-tanned Donald Trump clones marching around the Village and then hopping on Citi Bikes earlier this week? But of course to protest the president, who was addressing the United Nations. It was none other than the fighting activists of Rise and Resist — who maybe should also alternatively be known as Ride and Resist due to their pedaling prowess. Ride on!

The naked truth: Trump, “the emperor,” has no clothes — was the theme of the group’s protest action — and the problem we’re all stuck with!

Moving on up: Now that Carlina Rivera is the Democratic nominee for the Second City Council District after winning last week’s primary election, she’s obviously pretty much a shoo-in to win the East Village seat in the Nov. 7 general election — though she still faces a challenge from G.O.P. candidate Jimmy McMillan (“The rent is too damn high!”). She has assured that she and her husband, Jamie Rogers, the chairperson of Community Board 3, will vacate Rivera’s Section 8 low-income apartment once she becomes councilmember, with its salary of more than $140,000. We asked her this week if there’s been any movement on the moving front, at this point. “As I had said to folks during the course of the campaign,” she told us, “I would be looking for an apartment elsewhere should I become councilwoman. As we continue to work hard on the general election campaign, we have already begun looking based on my prospects, and we will move as soon as a prospective landlord and our current budget allow.”

Weed watch: Since our article a few weeks ago on poisonous plants along the Hudson River bikeway and in the Route 9A median, we hadn’t heard an update from former Parks Commissioner Adrian Benepe on the situation. It was Benepe, an avid cyclist, who first started tweeting that locoweed and black nightshade were growing wild, literally, in patches along the bike path’s planted edge and in the planted highway divider. “When I last checked — two weeks ago — there was still the big patch on 21st St., and some more at 48th,” Benepe told us this Wednesday. “There seems to have been a major weeding elsewhere by contractors since The Villager article broke. I don’t know who is overseeing the contractors, but I assume that New York State Department of Transportation is funding it. I will be out riding over the weekend and will let you know.” Yet, while things are looking up on the locoweed front along the waterfront, the situation may be spreading. Reader Nancy Pasley reports that she spotted a Jimsonweed plant a.k.a. locoweed growing in a tree pit at 240 W. Fourth St., at W. 10th St. Maybe local dogs can nip that one in the bud, literally!