Brooklyn Angle: Last week’s Department of Health proposed ban on trans-fats in restaurants city-wide caused such a firestorm that I immediately called Brooklyn’s great chef Alan Harding to find out what it would mean for his customers. Comment.

Brooklyn Angle: He had me at Merlot. Of course, I was sympathetic towards Brian Robinson, a nice Brooklyn guy, even before he started plying me with spoiled French grape juice. Comment.

Brooklyn Angle: Park Slopers may be furious about the recent raccoon invasion, but the neighborhood famous for its peaceniks and organic produce consumption loves its albino squirrel. Comment.

Brooklyn Angle: Michael Rakowitz’s Iraqi dates have finally completed a 6,000-mile, three-month journey from Baghdad to New York City — but it’s unclear if the fruit will make the last six miles to Rakowitz’s Atlantic Avenue store. Comment.

Brooklyn Angle: A Park Slope mom is throwing cold water on a hot-weather staple: bottled aqua — and no, she’s not crazy from the heat. Comments (1).

Brooklyn Angle: Let me explain. Yes, that’s your humble columnist above flanked by Gavin MacLeod — best known as Captain Merrill Stubing from “The Love Boat” — and Captain Andrew Proctor of the new ship, the Crown Princess. Comment.

Brooklyn Angle: In an astounding triumph that could change the course of American history, a California college student has gone where no American has ever gone, eating 50 hot dogs and buns in 12 minutes last week. Comment.

Brooklyn Angle: Precinct houses are bugs trapped in amber. The desk sergeant greets outsiders like they’re ne’er-do-well uncles looking for a handout. In the far corner is a Shine-o-Mat machine with two worn-down brushes that look as though they haven’t been replaced since men wore hats. Comment.

Brooklyn Angle: Ahmed Samhan has turned the tables — make that the alphabet — on the Metropolitan Transportation Authority. Comment.

Brooklyn Angle: I realize that there is no cliche so tired, no complaint so insipid, no whine so tedious as the cry of the affluent, successful middle-aged white man. Comment.

Brooklyn Angle: Look, I know what I saw. As the accompanying photo shows, something happened at the 10-minute mark of last week’s 91st annual Nathan’s hot-dog-eating contest at Coney Island. On the left is American record-holder Joey Chestnut, pointing at five-time world champion Takeru Kobayashi. On the right is newcomer Patrick Bertoletti, pointing at Kobayashi. Comment.

Brooklyn Angle: Full disclosure: I drank the first pint of Labatt’s at Freddy’s this week. Comment.

Brooklyn Angle: OK, this may seem like a completely gratuitous column about my new book, but it is actually a story about how intolerant a neighborhood famously liberal Park Slope can be. Comment.

Brooklyn Angle: You don’t see this very often. A group of Muslim men is bowing towards Mecca, kneeling in prayer and chanting “Allahu akbar” in the basement of a synagogue. Comment.

Brooklyn Angle: Root canal patients and Novocaine junkies shuddered at the news last year that the Williamsburgh Bank Building — once home to 150 dentists, oral surgeons, hygienists and their victims — was being converted into luxury condos Comment.

Brooklyn Angle: The revolution will be telephoned. And it will be fueled with Dunkin Munchkins, Fig Newtons, strong coffee and gallons of Arizona Iced Tea. Comment.

Brooklyn Angle: Park Slope author David Shenk is hawking a new book — a remarkable history of chess — which is great news for readers and bad news for me. Comment.

Brooklyn Angle: “We are a city of skyscrapers. We are a city of towers.” That’s what Empire State Development Corporation Chairman Charles Gargano said last week, casting Brooklyn as the new Manhattan — a vision for the borough that many longtime residents and the newer Manhattan exiles simply do not share. Comment.

Brooklyn Angle: Another major civil rights barrier will fall this week when a Brooklyn man becomes the first Hasidic rabbi to ever address the nation’s largest comic book convention. Comment.

Brooklyn Angle: WHEN PRESIDENT Bush was asked last month about a newly recorded Spanish-language version of the National Anthem, he brusquely said the song “ought to be sung in English.” Comment.

Brooklyn Angle: Brooklyn is losing the ground war. Comment.

Brooklyn Angle: No one is likely to call the Mark Lanes in Bay Ridge “paradise.” It’s a bit cramped, the lighting gives everyone sullen, Steve Buscemi eyes and the woman behind the counter looks over newcomers like El-Al security guards. Comment.

Brooklyn Angle: That damn Starbucks still burns at David Walentas. The Starbucks is on the corner of Main Street and Front Street, in the heart of DUMBO. Comment.

Brooklyn Angle: Talk about a brew-ha-ha. Coffee-and-scone lovers in Park Slope and Cobble Hill — whose caffeine cultures are as different as surfer dudes and stockbrokers — were rocked this month to wake up and smell this coffee: each neighborhood’s best-loved cafe had opened in its rival’s turf. Comment.

Brooklyn Angle: Follow the money. That old journalistic mantra might be as applicable to Brooklyn’s competitive newspaper market as it was to Watergate, now that the Sheepshead Bay’based Courier-Life chain is revealed to have been giving thousands of dollars to the politicians it routinely covers. Comment.

Brooklyn Angle: This could be the year when I get to see a grown Japanese man cry. Comment.

Brooklyn Angle: It has been wisely said that I scream, you scream and, indeed, we all scream for ice cream. Comment.

Brooklyn Angle: So this is what all the fuss was about? That art show that got banned by the Parks Department because it was “inappropriate” for children and veterans opened late last week in DUMBO — and I was first on line. Comment.

Brooklyn Angle: Sahara Meer is still angry. Place a copy of Bruce Ratner’s recent Atlantic Yards mailing on the table, and she’ll put her handbag over it. Show her the pictures of happy Brooklynites smiling for Ratner’s cameras and she’ll cringe. Comment.

Brooklyn Angle: You never know what you’re going to get in the morning mail: a glossy catalogue, a piece of political literature, some junk mail. Comment.

Brooklyn Angle: This columnist has such a deep and abiding respect for the office of Vice President, that he has resisted the temptation — succumbed to by so many of his colleagues — to lampoon the current occupant for shooting his friend in a hunting accident. Comment.

Brooklyn Angle: How many Jews does it take to screw in a light bulb? OK, hold your hate mail. That ain’t my joke. It’s the actual name of a campaign being waged by Reform Jewish congregations nationwide to save this planet one lightbulb at a time. Comment.

Brooklyn Angle: You know what the main problem with Domino’s “Brooklyn-style” slice is? It stinks. Comment.

Brooklyn Angle: The Mets say their new stadium design was “inspired by the tradition” of Ebbets Field. Comment.

Brooklyn Angle: He’s baaaack. She’s baaaack. And their kids are baaack, too. Fortunately, so are the unsung heroes of the United States Department of Agriculture — who are back on the streets in a violent, block-by-block, house-to-house, tree-to-tree battle against the Asian longhorned beetle. Comment.

Brooklyn Angle: Hate to break the news to you, Rubber Girl, Insectavora, Helen Melon and Kerosene Queen, but the cliche is finally true: the good ones are all gone. Comment.

Brooklyn Angle: In the end, Clarence Norman’s fall was anti-climactic. Comment.

Brooklyn Angle: Time was, the Brooklyn Bridge was so powerful a symbol that protesters would only march across it to complain about Really Big Things: police brutality, civil rights, abortion rights, war. Comment.

Brooklyn Angle: The “new” Brooklyn is being built, stoop-by-stoop, gut-rehab-by-gut-rehab, bluestone-by-bluestone, in neighborhoods like Boerum Hill, Prospect Heights, Gowanus, the South Slope and Clinton Hill. Comment.

Brooklyn Angle: Louis Schlamowitz: Public Enemy #1 or just an old guy with a lot of time on his hands? Comment.