EVERY ONCE in awhile, when they aren't writing legislation concerning the resale of used underpants or kowtowing to beet-faced conventioneers, New York's City Council actually sets about trying to do something worthwhile. They don't often do it very well, but dammit, they're trying.

At a meeting last Tuesday, the City Council finally moved another step forward toward silencing car alarms for good. Eventually.

Under Giuliani's rule, it was decreed that car alarms could go off for no more than three minutes, and that seemed to help some. But since then, we've all still been kept up now and again by some fucker's car alarm—especially those five-stage jobbies—blaring all night right outside our window.

While an immediate citywide ban on all car alarms was initially proposed, this would mean car owners would be forced to get their factory-installed car alarms disconnected or removed. This, of course, would be a terrible inconvenience to local drivers, and lord knows the City Council isn't about to do anything like that.

Instead, they've decided to go about ridding the city of one of its biggest nuisances in a namby-pamby, half-assed manner. Instead of placing the burden on drivers to get rid of the damn things, they're placing it on manufacturers, asking them nicely to please stop making and installing them sometime in the next few years.

This means, of course, that cars that already have car alarms are exempt. And so long as those cars remain on the streets, we're all still going to have to live with car alarms going off at 3 a.m.—for another decade or two.

But at least they tried. Now, let's hope they get back to the business of all those pesky free newspapers on the street corners.