Well-known activist defense attorney and self-described big mouth Ron Kuby said he was walking home from his law office in New York's Chelsea neighborhood last week when he noticed that the female member of a young couple ahead of him was repeatedly shouting "an anti-gay slur." (I won't use it here but it begins with an F). "Since I am congenitally incapable of shutting my mouth or not sticking my nose in," Kuby said, "I quietly remonstrated with her."

"I said, 'Look, stop with the f—– stuff,'" Kuby told the NY Daily News. "You're in the middle of Chelsea. If you want to do it, do it in your own neighborhood." I infer from this (it seems correctly) that Chelsea has a large gay population and that, as Kuby also concluded, the couple did not live there. (She turned out to be from Long Island.) The young woman sheepishly apologized and went on her way.

No she didn't.

"Shut up, old man!" she yelled at Kuby (he is 56) and charged at him. Kuby said she spit at him, slapped him and knocked his glasses off, and that when he pushed her away, her boyfriend joined in and punched him in the nose. He seems to have really connected, according to Kuby, who as the Daily News put it then shifted into a Howard-Cosell-type third-person play-by-play mode in describing what happened to Kuby.

"Kuby goes down," Kuby reported. "Blood all over the face. Kuby gets up, tired of being hit. Kuby hits boyfriend with a right hook." And unfortunately (he is 56), "Kuby wrenches his back." There were witnesses to all this, and with their help the two assailants were arrested and charged with disorderly conduct and misdemeanor assault. Kuby declined medical attention.

"I regret that I have but one nose to give for the LGBT community," he told the Daily News.

Kuby's one previous appearance here was due to another great quote: when commenting last year on the venue of the civil suit against Dominique Strauss-Kahn, he described juries in the Bronx as "the greatest tool of wealth redistribution since the Red Army."

(via @scottgreenfield)