By Edward Mazza | Contributing Writer
On the one hand, we boast about them. "Our cockroaches chase dogs away," we might say. Or: "Rat? What rat? Thats a hamster," might be the reply if a tourist points out a particularly large rodent.
On the other hand, we dont actually want to be around them. And we certainly dont want them around our food.
Thats why one of the most talked-about editions of New Yorks Daily News is the one with all the restaurant ratings. Not reviews, but a mere list of popular city eateries and how they fared on their most recent Health Department inspections.
No bureaucratic report has ever received so much attention, none so closely read in its raw form. But the Daily News could list only some of the citys 18,000 restaurants. Getting the rest used to require a certain -- if small -- amount of initiative.
These reports have always been available to the public. A quick phone call can have the results of the most recent inspections at five restaurants sent out free, and the number to get those reports is now posted inside every law-abiding greasy spoon.
But now those results are available on the Web www.nyclink.org/html /doh/html/rii/index.html . All the time, all the restaurants, fast and free. Its part of a series of New York City initiatives to get government services online and keep people as far away from bureaucratic contact as possible. Parking tickets, taxes and water bills are next to go online, according to the city. This cannot be a bad thing.
"The city is focusing its attention on an electronic government strategy," explained Deputy Mayor Joseph Lhota. "It is our vision that city services, such as the DOH restaurant inspections Web site, will be available, wherever practical, through the Internet and other Web-based technologies."
The one other major service currently online is birth certificates. Anyone born in the city can now request a copy over the Web, eliminating God-only-knows how many hours of getting to the right place and finding the right form -- and getting it to the right person.
"In the larger picture, there has been a citywide effort to focus on the Internet," said John Gadd, a spokesman for the citys Health Department, which runs the restaurant site.
The system has come under fire: An article in a recent issue of the Daily News points out that the Web site shows the results of the most recent inspection -- ignoring all those that came before, no matter how stomach-churning.
So a caf
