Tamiko T.
Cambria Heights
Name:  Tamiko T
Height:  5’7
Weight:  130
Stats: 36C, 28, 38
Black Cartel

    Cambria Heights-born-and-bred model Tamiko T. is only 22, but she’s got the poise, confidence and body of someone a lot more mature.

    She describes herself as “outgoing” and “fun,” and said she loves to laugh.

    “I’m not stuck up,” she said recently.  “You see more smiles on my face than anything else.”

    The smiles are on our faces, too.  Tamiko wooed us here with her endless praise for the borough she called home until only a few years ago.

    She moved to Virginia to be near some family, she said, and has taken up a job as an office manager at Fairfax Hospital there.

    It’s not the same.

    “I miss it,” Tamiko said of life in Queens.  “Down here, this is a different atmosphere.  I’m a city girl, you know?”

    The modeling, acting, traveling, shopping and entertainment hound said that where she lives now, “they’re probably about five steps behind on a lot of things.”

    Tamiko got her start when she was 13, with a four-year runway modeling stint.  She got into it most seriously after high school.

    She has quite a bit of experience at it, too, having modeled for numerous magazines, clothing companies, the movie and television industries and even non-profits. 

    She’s also a co-host on the public cable show "Mad Flava," which is shown in major urban areas across the country including right here in Queens.

    These days, Tamiko wants to go into modeling full time, and is hoping to move to Manhattan to “be closer to the things I want to do.”

    And even though Cambria Heights won’t help her modeling career as much as SoHo or the Upper West Side may, she still maintains that her fondest New York memories are from right here in Queens, particularly during the summertime.

    “There’s really nothing like summertime in Queens,” she said.  

‘Wubba, Wubba, Woo’

Though some criticize her husband’s presidency as imaginary, Laura Bush visited Queens recently to talk to a group of creatures that embody the positive meaning of that term.

The First Lady toured "Sesame Street," the beloved children’s television program filmed at Queens’ famed Kaufman Astoria Studios.

During her visit, Mrs. Bush – a former librarian – read to a group of eager puppets, who hung on her every word. Bush read, “No matter what you look like, no matter what you do, everyone likes to say, ‘wubba, wubba, woo.’” 

Though it may have reminded some adult viewers of a quote from her husband’s press conferences, the First Lady was actually teaching children about the letter “W.”  Her phonics lesson did not include tips on infusing the letter with the Texas-twanged “Dubya” sound used by adults around the world to refer to her husband.

"Sesame Street" just began screening its 34th season on PBS stations across the country.  Other notable figures from reality that interact with the Big Bird, Elmo and other legends of the street this season include singer Sheryl Crow, newswoman Diane Sawyer, actress Natalie Portman and TV-star Wayne Brady.

Hot Stuff

Leah Remini

Fictional Queens dweller Carrie, played by Leah Remini on “King of Queens,” has been caught on film smoking, according to one web site. The site, www.smokingsides.com, is a Brown University student’s compilation of smoking data. It lists almost every celebrity you can think of, detailing their on and off-screen smoking habits.

With the new smoking ban trouncing the rights of smokers, will Remini have to quit her fictional habit?

The Ghost of Woolworth’s

    Most Bayside residents remember the good old Bell Boulevard Woolworth’s store, with its old-fashioned soda shop and candy counter, and its wide variety of merchandise to satisfy all sorts of household needs.

Photos by Angela Montefinise

    The store and neighborhood hang-out operated on Bell and 42nd Avenue from the 1930s to the 1990s, when the chain eventually went out of business and the store shut its doors. After sitting vacant for several years, the old Woolworth’s building became an “Associated Supermarket,” which has given way to a headquarters for OTC, a new cellular phone store.

    Frank Skala, a longtime Bayside resident and community hoohah, said he fondly remembers the Woolworth’s store explaining: “I grew up there. All the kids did back then. There was nowhere else to go . . . We would get candy and ice cream, and we would get hardware and Christmas decorations and anything else. It was a store for everything.”

    Well, a reminder of the “store for everything” was revealed several months ago when construction workers renovating the old Woolworth’s building removed the Associated Supermarket awning and uncovered the outline of lettering from the old Woolworth’s sign. The word “Woolworth’s” is clearly visible along the Bell Boulevard strip, haunting the area and blasting Bayside residents right back to the past.

    The sign was still visible on Bell Boulevard at presstime, although construction workers said the new OTC sign should be installed soon, once again covering up the oddball piece of neighborhood history.

My God!

You wouldn’t think there’s much about South Jamaica drug dealer-turned superstar-rapper 50 Cent that the Greater Allen Cathedral, a 15,000-member superchurch in Jamaica, would want to emulate.

True, both parties gross millions in the course of enamoring the public with their words and their deeds.  But with the rapper’s rap sheet (from the NYPD, not his producers) and the church’s many charitable and subsidized housing projects, the similarities seem to end there.

Or do they?

The opening page of 50 Cent’s website, at www.50cent.com, features a picture of the chiseled rapper facing you and pointing a handgun straight into your face. 

The opening page of the site at: www.allencathedral.com, features a quote from Isiah 13:13: “Therefore I will shake the heavens, and the earth shall remove out of her place…”

Both pages, as different as they may seem, use a new Web technique in which the entire screen appears to shake, as if someone has slapped your monitor.

Or as if a drug dealer has shot you in the face, or as if God has shaken the heavens.     

After surfing dozens of different websites every day in the course of our work, we can say that this is a little used technique.

And even though Allen does so much good work in the community, we have to give 50 Cent’s people kudos for their Web authoring skills even though their  sound contains background of gunshots and glass breaking.