Takers

They gave away water at 15th and Locust Streets yesterday, and it seems everybody came. The Wissahickon Water Co. estimates it handed out about 5,000 bottles in 2 1/2 hours. The idea was to remind folks that fluid intake is important on very hot days.

Walter Anderson writes in the preface of The Greatest Risk of All, "To find true security . . . we must learn to take risks. " His is a very timely book, appearing as it has now when the young no longer want to take chances and are interested only in jobs that offer them regular pay and a nice pension - in other words, security. In my father's generation, the word security was not in young men's vocabularies: They thought in terms of adventure, excitement, challenges. He went to Mexico with $40 in his pocket, no knowledge at all of the Spanish language, and no prospect of finding a job. What he wanted to do was put together a stake so that he could go into business for himself, as he didn't want to work for anybody.

On this page last month I suggested that instead of worrying so much about the poor and the downtrodden, Philadelphians ought to worry more about the rich. With my customary hyperbole, I portrayed Philadelphia as a city of about 1.5 million protesters and litigators and about 1,000 rich people who pay the bills. Several readers immediately questioned my statistics. Consumer activist Max Weiner observed that the city's tab is actually paid by middle-class wage earners and property owners.

Camden's homeless were counted in last week's census as they huddled around fires or slept in the bus station. Last Tuesday and Wednesday, the federal government made its first comprehensive attempt to enumerate the homeless, whether on the streets, in abandoned houses or in public shelters. But in most South Jersey suburbs, the homeless avoided the places where census enumerators could find them easily. Because the homeless in those suburbs - from wealthy Cherry Hill to depressed Gloucester City - sleep in office-building bathrooms, dumpsters or the woods, census-takers missed them.

In the heist thriller "Takers," a bank robber praises himself and his colleagues by saying "we see what we want and we take it. " It's getting harder to tell the bankers from the robbers these days, isn't it? Anyway, it's a creed endorsed by the "Takers" creative team, who saw "Heat" and "The Italian Job" and took them - the stories, the shots, the music. Just about everything but the cast, so instead of grizzled veteran tough guys, you have a gang that includes Paul Walker, Chris Brown, Michael Ealy, and, I regret to say, Hayden Christensen.

Under the bridges and through the woods they went, with flashlights beaming and plastic briefcases crammed with census forms, scouring the crowded shelters and empty streets, the cheap motels, the snow-swept parks, even the darkest catacombs under train platforms, on a mission from the government to count with some precision that most elusive of groups. The homeless. Of course, there were glitches. Of course, there was confusion. Of course, the weather was bad. There were squalls of sleet and snow off and on most of the night.

The videotape shows two men coming into the convenience store. A shot is fired - the owner is wounded off-camera - and pandemonium breaks out. The two men sprint from the shop. A customer grabs the phone, screaming for the Cheltenham police, not realizing he's in Philadelphia. Other people are shouting and running around. Five minutes crawl by like hours. Then police arrive. The stark video is part of the Philadelphia Police Department's new six- week instruction program that starts Monday for 30 emergency 911 call- takers hired in the aftermath of the fatal beating in November of Eddie Polec Jr. "The idea is to let call-takers see what really happens," says Deputy Police Commissioner William Bergman, head of the Communications Division.

It bills itself as the "Barcelona Challenge," promising takers up to $1,000 in prize money for a $19.92 gamble on the Olympics. It may be the Barcelona ripoff. An outfit that uses a commercial mailbox store in Manhattan as its office address has mailed an unknown number of these offers to people, inviting them to bet on outcomes in the Olympic Games. Officials of the U.S. Olympic Committee and the New York City Department of Consumer Affairs warn that the offer by Hankle Productions may be nothing more than a con game.

A mailing fluke last month means that at least 17 area students must take the SAT again because their answer sheets never made it to the Princeton headquarters of Educational Testing Services. About 240 young people took the three-hour, 45-minute test - including a new section to show writing skills - at Abington Senior High School on March 12, said Ernest Johnson, guidance coordinator at the school. The answer sheets were bundled and picked up by Federal Express that afternoon.

The city yesterday took drastic steps to overhaul the 911 emergency call system that came under withering fire in November after a mob beat a 16-year- old to death with baseball bats in Fox Chase. Sixty new call-takers, six times the training, a doubling of supervisors on each shift, and enhanced computer technology were among the major changes announced by Philadelphia Police Commissioner Richard Neal, whose department has been conducting an internal investigation of the 911 system in the last two months.

A man held in a hostage drama earlier this month has been charged with murder in a fatal shooting in West Philadelphia in April. Demetrius Young, 20, was arrested in prison and charged with shooting and killing Marcus Smith, 28, of the 5700 block of Filbert Street, at 60th and Market Streets at 3:45 a.m. on April 1, police said. Investigators have not disclosed a motive in the shooting or what led them to arrest Young. Young, of the 4200 block of Ogden Street, and two other men were arrested early May 2 after they held the owners of a Chinese restaurant and their young daughter hostage when a robbery went awry, police said.

IF YOU'VE been thinking about getting your GED and you're not too good with computers, then get a move on. Effective January 2014, the high-school equivalency test will be more rigorous and entirely computerized, requiring a level of digital fluency that education advocates here say could hinder many test-takers. The GED was last revised in 2002, but for its next incarnation the test will be overhauled by a magnitude never before seen in its 70-year existence. Last year, the American Council on Education, which manages the test nationwide, partnered with a computer-based testing company to develop an assessment that they believe will better prepare students for modern workplace demands.

MINEOLA, N.Y. - The millions of students who take the SAT or ACT each year will have to submit photos of themselves when they sign up for the college entrance exams, under new security measures announced Tuesday in the aftermath of a major cheating scandal on Long Island. The two companies that administer the tests, the College Board and ACT Inc., agreed to the precautions under public pressure brought to bear by Nassau County District Attorney Kathleen Rice, who is overseeing the investigation.

More than 1,200 new Marcellus Shale natural-gas wells have been drilled in Pennsylvania this year. Because each well requires many workers to build and operate, there's no shortage of new jobs in the drilling regions - at least a certain kind of job. The problem is that not enough high school graduates from southwestern Pennsylvania want the jobs, allowing workers from the nation's oil-rich South to capitalize on Pennsylvania's bustling new...

LIKE HIS "JACKASS" co-stars, Ryan Dunn seemed unbreakable, a daredevil who routinely risked his life for others' amusement - and lived to tell about it. But yesterday morning, the prankster who wasn't above diving into a vat of sewage or getting punched in the face for a laugh was killed in a fiery one-car crash in West Goshen Township after a night out with friends. Dunn, 34, was driving his 2007 Porsche 911 GT3 on Route 322 about 2:30 a.m. when the car barreled over a guardrail and into a wooded area, police said.

In 2004, Sister Mary Scullion wrote a letter to the Philadelphia Housing Authority, asking for help. Could her nonprofit acquire two of the agency's boarded-up homes in the 2100 block of North 28th Street? Empty for years, the North Philadelphia houses would be part of a block-wide project to fix vacant homes for resale to low-income families. For seven years, Project HOME, which helps homeless people with services and housing, waited for a decision. And waited. "We never knew where we stood with PHA," Scullion said.

A man who took his ex-girlfriend hostage shot himself in the head and then was wounded by police early today, ending a nearly four-hour standoff in North Philadelphia, authorities said. The 23-year-old gunman was reported in critical but stable condition at Albert Einstein Medical Center with a self-inflicted deep graze wound to the back of the head and a police bullet in his chest, officials said. The hostage, also 23 and the mother of the gunman's child, was released unharmed before he shot himself in the basement of a home on the 5200 clock of Arbor Street in Olney.

In this day and age (read: lean economic times), how do you sell a Main Line manse? Well, by invitation only, and with $1,800 worth of finger food. And make sure to hire valets to park everyone's car so an impatient agent doesn't drive across the freshly seeded lawn - which is just what happened one Wednesday in October at the first open house for the estate in Wynnewood called Pen y Bryn, for "top of the hill. " Craig and Mac Brand, the husband-and-wife real estate team showing 212 Cherry Lane, went all out for the reconstructed estate's debut.

No sale. That's the verdict from public-transit experts on an effort to unload the PATCO commuter-train line owned and operated by the Delaware River Port Authority. A proposal for the DRPA to divest itself of the PATCO line, and its $20-million-a-year operating subsidy, is the brainchild of DRPA board member and Philadelphia labor leader John "Johnny Doc" Dougherty. Having failed last month with a resolution to unload the rail line, Dougherty is seeking creation of a DRPA committee to study the feasibility of such a sale.

TO: MESSERS Toomey, Casey, Brady, Fattah, Meehan, Gerlach, Fitzpatrick and Runyon. Will you agree to live by these words in 2011? "I will be civil in my public discourse and behavior. I will be respectful of others whether or not I agree with them. I will stand against incivility when I see it. " So reads a 32-word civility pledge circulated in 2010 by Lanny Davis, a liberal lawyer and longtime Hillary Clinton confidante, and Mark DeMoss, a conservative public relations executive and author.