Al Sharpton is on a diet:

For the longest time, the only part of the Rev. Al Sharpton’s body that got any exercise was his mouth. “I had the strongest jawbone,” Mr. Sharpton said without even a hint of a smile. Instead, his right hand mimicked someone’s lips flapping up and down.

Mr. Sharpton’s jawbone is still getting a heavy workout these days, whether in politics, entertainment or on his cellphone. But finally, at 50, so is the rest of his body.

“I am her art piece,” Mr. Sharpton said with typical modesty as he introduced his private trainer, Liz Ross, at his $300-a-month gym (not including the private trainer), Reebok Sports Club/NY, on Columbus Avenue in Manhattan one recent morning.

Ms. Ross has, in fact, helped carve out a trimmer Al Sharpton.

In the first six months of his weight loss regimen, Mr. Sharpton lost 15 pounds, 5 inches off his waist and 6 percent of his body fat. A couple of months later, he’s down a total of about 30 pounds and headed toward his goal of weighing 200 pounds, which might be considered svelte for a guy who once tipped the scales at more than 300 pounds.

The “Sharpton Plan” is simple:

Set realistic goals. Exercise three times a week at the gym. Skip breakfast. Salad for lunch (maybe some chicken, too). Salad for dinner (maybe some fish).

And to keep those hunger pains away - cookies. Boxes of cookies. He prefers Aunt Gussie’s chocolate chip and almond. To be fair, the cookies are sugar free and made with organic wheat. But his trainer, Ms. Ross, clearly isn’t pleased. “They’re not carrot sticks, Al,” she said.

Now that the (insert Dr. Evil voice) $21 million worth of Gates are being dismantled (they are, aren’t they?), some are questioning the project’s opaque accounting:

One million square feet of nylon fabric. Five thousand tons of steel. Sixty miles of vinyl tubing. Lots of nuts and bolts.

And a $21 million price tag.

Along with the lofty questions posed by “The Gates” (Is it art? What is art? And haven’t we heard enough of this project?), another query has flitted through the minds of some visitors to Central Park in recent weeks. How did the artists Christo and Jeanne-Claude manage to spend that much money on their tangerine dream?

To pose the question out loud smacks of ingratitude, particularly given what is widely viewed as the project’s benefit to the city: drawing thousands of foreign tourists and pumping an estimated $254 million into New York’s economy. And the artists have paid for the project entirely on their own, using no public or corporate money, and therefore do not need to justify their expenses. They financed “The Gates” by selling other pieces of their own artwork, which their associates say increased in value over the past year as anticipation for the Central Park project grew.

On the other hand, it is that unique financing system, of relying on the promise of “The Gates” to maximize the profits needed to pay its $21 million bill, that poses the question of how the bill was determined. And while Christo and Jeanne-Claude have freely volunteered the project’s high cost, they steadfastly refuse to explain how they came to that figure.

Despite their reticence, or perhaps because of it, the question has taken root in the usual places. On the Internet, bloggers have calculated the probable prices of extruded vinyl and rip-stop nylon, but have come up millions of dollars short. Journalists have pestered the artists’ representatives to break down the costs, to no avail.

A New York filmmaker who dared to dissect the $21 million figure on his Web site was savaged in an anonymous e-mail message, which included a suspiciously European-sounding putdown: “You ridiculous apprentice of nothing!”

Using New York’s public spaces as a sort of outdoor gallery always increases an artist’s value, but if the Gates accounting is wrong, doesn’t it mean that it’s also possible that they actually made a buttload of money off of the project? Or am I reading this incorrectly?

Bonus Point: That “suspiciously European-souding” commenter’s story.

Sunday Styles sociologizing Mary-Kate Olsen’s thrift-store motherlode:

As fall turned to winter and edged toward spring, Ms. Olsen, 18, pushed her version of ashcan chic to emphatic extremes, an evolution charted by glossy magazines that snoop on stars in everyday activities. The look became dottier and dottier, until it morphed into a kind of homeless masquerade, one that was accented by subtle luxuries like a cashmere muffler, a Balenciaga lariat bag and of course her signature carryout latte from Starbucks.

Ms. Olsen is a fashion pauvre, and so is her equally funky twin, Ashley (the other self-made millionaire N.Y.U. freshman). Their style would seem to mark them as front-runners for Earl Blackwell’s worst-dressed list. In fact the twins are trendsetters for the latest hipster look. They are influencing the same generation of girls and young women who fell for them as wholesome child stars, buying their Mattel dolls, and who later, as tweens, spent $750 million a year on denims and pastel tops from the mary-kateandashley line at Wal-Mart.

“The Olsens are the real thing,” fashion role models for a generation entering adulthood, said Karen Berenson, a stylist who works in New York and Los Angeles. She is unfazed by Mary-Kate Olsen’s widely publicized admission last year to a clinic to treat an eating disorder and her continuing recovery. “She makes skinny girls in baggy clothes look cool,” Ms. Berenson said.

Teenagers and young women have long taken style cues from celebrities, of course. But the sway of the Olsens is especially surprising because it is a radical swing from influences of recent years, like the flamboyantly sexy, skin-baring style of Christina Aguilera and Jessica Simpson, as well as the heiress look popularized by Paris Hilton.

Just months ago, “stylish young women used to wear Gucci or Prada head to toe,” Ms. Berenson said. Today they are more apt to be seen at supermarkets or parties toting a beat-up Chloé bag, their eyes shaded by enormous, high-priced Laura Biaggiotti sunglasses, the faint suggestion of opulence hidden beneath chadorlike layers of cashmere and ankle-length peasant skirts.

David Wolfe, the creative director of the Doneger Group, which forecasts fashion trends, was in Las Vegas last month at a fashion trade show. “The trendiest, coolest people were wearing things like a chiffon skirt with fur boots,” he said. “It looked like they had gotten dressed in the dark.”

The new look has acquired a name: Bobo style. “You know, bohemian bourgeois,” explained Kathryn Neal, 28, a freelance writer in New York, who is partial to billowing Alexander McQueen pirate shirts worn with beat-up jeans.

Quick quiz: The most obnoxious clause is A) “the faint suggestion of opulence hidden beneath chadorlike layers of cashmere and ankle-length peasant skirts,” B) “She [who is being treated for an eating disorder] makes skinny girls in baggy clothes look cool,” or C) “. . . who is partial to billowing Alexander McQueen pirate shirts worn with beat-up jeans”?

Tough call. I say D) All of the Above. And that’s just in the opening paragraphs!

Question Two: The statement most lacking in self-awareness is A) “These days you just feel stupid and shallow walking around with a $1,000 bag”; B) “On a social level Bobo is very New York City. It’s a way of showing that you have no boundaries, that whether you’re at a party on Park Avenue or in an East Village bar, you can jump into anything, cross over into any kind of group and be accepted”; or C) “It’s perfectly fine to look like a bag lady”?

Close, but B) wins out for most grotesque example of lacking self-awareness. For kicks, substitute “East New York” for “East Village bar.” There. I hope to God this person was misquoted.

Williamsburg hipsters fighting the City Planning Department to preserve the neighborhood’s distinctive character:

Ms. [Eve] Sibley, a 28-year-old painter and bartender, and Ms. [Siri] Wilson, a 31-year-old clothing designer, had been blissfully enmeshed in their vibrant Williamsburg scene of parties, music and art. They assumed that their neighborhood - historically ethnic and currently extremely trendy - would change in ways that generally preserved its polyglot character.

Then something gave them pause. Last fall, they began seeing fliers posted around the neighborhood warning that the waterfront development would threaten the area’s economic mix. In December, they went to a community board meeting where local residents were packed to the rafters, expressing outrage over the plan. “There were old Polish women, Puerto Ricans, Hasidic Jews,” Ms. Sibley recalled. “Everyone who’s been living here for years and makes this neighborhood interesting and diverse.”

But one group conspicuously absent, they noticed, was their own. “We say ‘hipsters,’ ” Ms. Wilson conceded, “even though the terminology makes us feel funny.”

In response, the two women took it upon themselves to act as emissaries to the hipster constituency, and to do so in true hipster fashion. Dubbing themselves the Williamsburg Warriors, they set up a Web site, www.williamsburgwarriors.org, “with the help of this hacker dude I was dating for a second,” Ms. Sibley said.

Irony abounds as life appears to imitate the Onion:

“Siri and I have been partying in this neighborhood for a long time,” Ms. Sibley said one afternoon recently as she tapped the ash from her cigarette. “We know our friends care about the community, but they didn’t know this was going on.”

Ms. Wilson added: “I tell them they’re planning 40-story towers and rezoning that would make 3-story buildings into these 12-story monstrosities. All our favorite coffee shops will become Starbucks, and our cute little North Seventh pharmacy will become Duane Reade.”

For anyone needing more convincing, the women pull up illustrated renderings of the waterfront proposal on the city’s Web site. “Look,” Ms. Wilson said, pointing aghast at one computer animated figure. “Dockers!”

The Wall Street Journal’s Daniel Henninger noticed that the Gates are still up (they’re being taken down s l o w l y) and checked in with critical bonus coverage:

I saw The Gates a week ago from a window on the edge of the Park, and they looked unimpressive. This past Monday, after a doctor’s appointment near the Park, I walked over for a better look. For sure, my experience of The Gates was unusual. The event had “closed” on Sunday, but it was still up.

As happens in February, the Park was bare, cold and gray. There was some snow, the trees and pieces of green. The apartment buildings along Fifth Avenue stood as they always do in winter–immutably concrete, like the grand, drab facings of inactive hydroelectric dams. The Park was quiet and almost deserted–except for The Gates.

If one opened one’s mind just a crack, it was hard not to be touched by them, and lifted.

The Gates had dignity. They stood still, moving just a little, like the leafless trees. The trees didn’t seem to mind their brief companions. Indeed, they tamed The Gates. Like this: Across a glade, rising to the clock tower by the Metropolitan Museum, the branches of the trees broke down The Gates’ stolid rectangles into glimpsed, cracked shapes of the branches’ choosing. Many people thought The Gates were made for walking through. I thought they were made for standing and staring, turning, and staring again. Amid bleak February it was hard there in the orange-tinged Park not to feel, well, happy.

Writing in this space recently, I suggested that a world made too fast by computers and too harsh by 24-hour news more than anything needed its artists and architects to provide it with respite, rather than the emotional or visual pistol-whipping of too much recent art. I do understand that Olmsted’s Park is self-sufficient solace. But by my definition, Christo’s Gates qualified.

Even though Henninger enjoys the occasional “knee-jerk kick against hype’s fat backside” (note this glorious phrase for further use!), he found the Gates palatable:

Walking earlier this week in Central Park among the 7,500 cookie-cut “Gates” of Christo and Jeanne-Claude, my thoughts turned to Ed Banfield. Edward Banfield was a famous government professor at Harvard with zero tolerance for conventional wisdom. He was known for his unusual insights into the political and social life of cities, but in 1982 he upended the art establishment with an article in Harper’s titled, “Art Versus Collectibles: Why museums should be stuffed with fakes.” Stuffed with fakes?

Citing Picasso’s “Girl With Mandolin,” then valued at $2 million, Ed Banfield argued that nearly all of that claimed “value” was about scarcity and investment, while most of the work’s aesthetic appreciation could be had with a high-quality $850 reproduction. He proposed widely distributing the pleasure of Picasso’s painting “for only $850,” thereby giving most museums “$1,999,150 left over to purchase other sources of aesthetic satisfaction.” Needless to say, a Sistine Chapel’s worth of art-world rage fell on Banfield’s head.

Ed Banfield would have relished what has been loosed from The Gates of Central Park.

For 16 days, the masses flowed through and around Central Park’s 843 acres to see 7,500 replicates of what some called “art” and others “totalitarianism” or “defacement.” On the first weekend, 800,000 people showed up, about 790,000 more than show up at the upscale art galleries downtown on Saturday. A friend arriving from California that Sunday reported the airport aflutter with out-of-towners flying in for The Gates. Ultimately millions came.

Once out of The Gates, however, many headed for more–at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, the newly upgraded Museum of Modern Art and the New York Historical Society. I assume nearly all those people thought the experience to be had in the museums was more or less the same as they’d just had among the waving saffron flaps in Central Park. How bad can this be?

The Post reports on the arraignment of four police officers who were arrested for accepting bribes — in the form of counterfeit Coach bags and sports jerseys — in return for going easy on street vendors:

The officers, all from the 13th Precinct, turned themselves in yesterday to face charges — including receiving bribes — that could land them in prison for 12 years each.

All four — Detectives Rodney Lewis and Brian Bartlett and Officers George Santiago and Jaime Albertelli — pleaded not guilty at their arraignment last night. They were released without bail.

The cops allegedly accepted bogus Coach bags and sports jerseys as kickbacks from a street vendor who sold counterfeit merchandise around Broadway and 27th Street.

A fifth cop, Jashua Penalo, 32, was arrested earlier in the week.

. . .

The peddler at the center of the probe, Jamil Faied, 44, was charged with bribery.

. . .

In exchange for the bogus goods, Faied allegedly got favors for himself and his peddler friends.

Penalo tipped him off when search warrants were issued so he could hide his illegal wares, authorities say.

Bartlett and Lewis are accused of handing out a desk-appearance ticket to another vendor instead of making an arrest, because Faied asked them to do so.

Santiago and Albertelli made a competitor of Faied relocate, authorities said.

Are they nuts? Fake Coach bags? Why bother?

If you’ve ever wondered how much to tip the delivery guy, the Times helps out:

An unscientific survey of men and women who dispatch dumplings showed that tips can range from a meager dollar to a nice 15 percent of the total bill (maybe $5 on a $30 order). And if the weather is particularly bad, the figure goes even higher.

This seems appropriate; apparently they don’t even make minimum wage:

Nazario Benitez, 32, has been delivering roasted ducks and chickens for East Side Poultry on the Upper East Side for about a year. He uses his own bicycle and said he makes a total of $30 to $60 a day, relying on tips to supplement the $3 an hour he earns.

And who knew there was a “do not deliver” list?

Whatever you do, do not get on the do-not-deliver list.

Failing to tip is one way to land there, said Kristyn Watters, a manager of the Park Slope Ale House in Brooklyn. So is ordering food and then not being home to accept the delivery, a big problem when people call during their commute home and then get caught on a slow train. And even though you swear your barking dog is friendly, keep it away from the door when the food arrives. For cat owners, there is a corollary: Don’t expect the delivery person to block a fleeing animal.

And of course it is always a good idea to avoid threatening behavior if you ever want to get food delivered from a particular restaurant again.

Mr. Chu, the manager at Ollie’s [Noodle Shop in Times Square], recounts a recent example. One of his deliverymen brought $15 worth of food to a nearby apartment building. The customer only had $13 but promised to make it up the next time. The delivery man would not leave the food, and the customer pulled a knife from his pocket.

The delivery man ran, still carrying the bag. The next day the customer called back and tried to place another order, explaining that he was going to give the knife to the delivery man as a way to make up the $2. If there ever was a candidate for the do-not-deliver list, he was it.

The Daily News’ primer on party crashing is out — an example of lemonade?

Helpful terms describing the four types of gatecrashers:

• Slip-Ins: “They just wait at a door until someone well known appears - say DeNiro and Streisand at the “Meet the Fockers” premiere. When the cameras flash and organizers are distracted, they dodge in behind Bob ‘n’ Babs.”
• Fakers: “Rather than claiming to be Kidman or Cruise, they’re always B-listers like ‘Charlie’s Angels’ weirdo Crispin Glover or fashion icon Hamish Bowles.”
• Don’t You Knows: “Less artful,” Don’t You Knows’ “every loud sentence begins with that phrase. Always hysterical, they’ll erupt when questioned at the door as if their very honor has been insulted.”
• P.I.s (Presumed Inviteds): The rarest, “these socialites and high rollers simply presume an invitation was lost in the mail - rather than that they weren’t wanted.”

Do’s and Don’ts include:

Don’t dress to impress. It just looks like you’re trying too hard. Instead, stick with a black dress and one killer accessory, like this season’s hot bag or a great big ring. “Keep your makeup minimal - most of the fashion crowd wear very little makeup and look slightly windblown - and act bored on the outside, internally amused,” says Cutrone.

Don’t turn up in a limo. These days, real VIPs roll up in Humvees or Range Rovers.

. . .

Don’t claim to be Chris Martin. Better to say you’re a different member of Coldplay. “The really good way of doing this is saying you’re a guitarist, not the lead singer, in a hot band,” says event planner Nancy Kane. “Nobody knows what Modest Mouse’s bassist looks like.”

Do double-fist those drinks. Crashers are always by the bar. “They’re not very clever - usually you’ll see them all clustered together there,” says P.R. exec James LaForce.

Forget liberal or conservative bias, savvy readers know that the Post’s coverage is really driven by whether lead paragraphs have sufficient alliterative potential. “Cops Hunt Cagey Parrot Pirate”:

Long Island police — armed with surveillance photos — are searching for the perpetrator who pirated a pair of parrots from a Petco in Patchogue.

That makes for an Alliterative Magnitude of 6. Impressive!

The Daily News notes that City Councilman and mayoral hopeful Gifford Miller is accusing Mayor Michael Bloomberg of being a gay communist “Big diff in Giff riff bared”:

Gifford Miller’s oft-repeated campaign slogan - “We don’t need a red-state mayor in a blue-state city” - has a slightly different meaning in Russian.

Loosely translated, the City Council speaker has declared Mayor Bloomberg both Communist and gay - an unintentional gaffe noted by many of the city’s 300,000 Russian immigrants.

“We see it as a joke,” said an amused Vladimir Chernomorsky, a columnist for Novoye Russkoye Slovo (The New Russian Word), the country’s oldest Russian-language daily.”

Gifford’s campaign is mum on the mistranslation, leading to speculation that the wording was possibly intentional:

Miller’s campaign aides wouldn’t comment on what got lost in translation.

“Here in New York City, it means we have a Republican mayor who is unable or unwilling to stand up to a Republican President and governor to secure the city’s fair share,” Miller’s campaign spokesman Reggie Johnson replied.

OK, I’m sure it wasn’t intentional, but wouldn’t it be satisfying if it was? What a perfect way to smear one’s opponent!

Now that NYPD Blue is ending its 12-year run, real policemen can come clean: Barney Miller is more accurate. NYPD Detective Lucas Miller explains:

Many police officers maintain that the most realistic police show in the history of television was the sitcom “Barney Miller,” far more so than that father of reality TV, “Cops.” The action was mostly off screen, the squad room the only set, and the guys were a motley bunch of character actors who were in no danger of being picked for the N.Y.P.D. pin-up calendar. But they worked hard, made jokes, got hurt and answered to their straight-man commander.

For real detectives, most of the action does happen off screen, and we spend a lot of time back in the squad room writing reports about it. Like Barney Miller’s squad, we crack jokes at one another, at the cases that come in, and at the crazy suspect locked in the holding cell six feet from the new guy’s desk. Life really is more like “Barney Miller” than “NYPD Blue,” but our jokes aren’t nearly as funny.

This past week there were two significant victories in the continuing struggle against Red State Encroachment in New York. The first one came when developers abandoned plans to include a Wal-Mart at a proposed development in Rego Park. Now we hear Brooklyn says “fuhgeddaboudit” to Cracker Barrel (Did I have to fall back on that tired cliche? Why yes I did!):

Brooklyn has yanked the welcome mat out from under Southern food chain Cracker Barrel Old Country Store due to accusations of discrimination.

Borough President Marty Markowitz, who invited the company to check out Brooklyn, dropped his Southern hospitality following outrage among black and gay leaders over a history of discrimination claims against the chain.

“I do not believe they are ready for Brooklyn,” Markowitz said yesterday.

“It is our greatest source of pride that Brooklyn’s diversity of races, faiths and ethnicities is unrivaled anywhere in the world, and any company that is interested in doing business in Brooklyn must respect and celebrate that diversity. We have no plans to meet with Cracker Barrel.”

But before you cry “cheap and easy grandstanding,” take comfort in Clyde Haberman’s contrarian take on the Wal-Mart decision:

Wal-Mart was to be part of a new shopping mall in Rego Park, Queens. That was before an alliance of labor unions, small businesses, environmentalists and neighborhood groups persuaded politicians that this was the worst idea since Lincoln chose to take in a play.

With the City Council getting ready to give it a hard time, the mall’s developer decided that running into walls was not worth the pain. It dropped Wal-Mart from the project.

Never mind the usual concerns about traffic and the collapse of mom-and-pop stores. Wal-Mart’s child-labor practices, its aggressive anti-union philosophy and its imperious air were all guaranteed to punch the alarm buttons of New York politicians given to social engineering.

The fact that many Americans happen to like Wal-Mart because it keeps prices down got relatively scant attention. While they prefer to see themselves as a breed apart, New Yorkers have been known to enjoy low prices themselves.

I swear I’m not a Wal-Mart apologist — it’s just that I had no idea McDonald’s didn’t make it to New York until the 1970s:

It might help to take a short journey through time, back to the early 1970’s, when McDonald’s made its first inroads here. The issues then were different from today’s. But the attitude of many New Yorkers was much the same: the barbarians were at the gates and had to be repelled.

Not that the city was unfamiliar with fast-food operations. It had the likes of Nedick’s, White Castle, White Tower and Chock full o’Nuts. But McDonald’s terrified people. Protesters marched through Greenwich Village. Upper East Siders rallied. The end, all agreed, was near.

Typical was the lament of a woman who appeared in 1974 at a community board hearing to oppose a planned McDonald’s franchise on East 66th Street. “It would be a smelly, noisy pestilence,” she said, predicting plagues of rats, garbage and exhaust fumes. No less worrisome, she predicted, were the unsavory types “who would hang around such a place.”

One man rose to add his own battle cry. “Winston Churchill,” he said, “gave the boys at Eton just six words of advice: ‘Don’t give up. Never, never, never.’ ”

So much for those playing fields.

In case you didn’t notice, the golden arches are everywhere in the five boroughs - 250 outlets, the company says. Somehow, the city has managed not to collapse. Nor have McDonald’s employees been observed waylaying people on the street and dragging them inside to be force-fed Egg McMuffins.

Quite simply, many people enjoy eating there. And they might similarly want to shop at Wal-Mart if given the chance.

Not automatically following Lil’ Kim’s trial on perjury and obstruction of justice charges against her, I almost missed the hilarious voir dire:

In a selection process that began last week, many prospective jurors were eliminated because of what Judge Lynch called “significant negative stereotypes” about rap music. Prosecutors and defense lawyers agreed to eliminate one juror who said on a pretrial questionnaire that “a lot of them seem to shoot each other.” Another juror who was removed from the pool said that drugs and crime seemed “to be part of their culture.”

A number of possible jurors objected to the raunchy lyrics and scant clothing of Ms. Jones, who is described as the Mae West of rap music on her main fan Web site. One juror complained that she “spends a lot of money on diamonds,” and seemed “like she would do almost anything for money.” The juror was dismissed.

Judge Lynch declined to eliminate several jurors who he said had disliked Ms. Jones’s “fashion sense,” but they were struck from the pool by government and defense lawyers.

Am I alone in thinking this perfect fodder for haikus? Three Haikus about Voir Dire at the Trial of Lil’ Kim:

I see drugs and crime
They seem to shoot each other
Part of their culture?

Or:

She spends much money
Does anything for money
Money for diamonds

And:

Even though I said
I disliked her fashion sense
I am not dismissed

And don’t miss the kicker at the end of the Times article:

By midafternoon, a jury of five women and seven men was selected that provided a cross section of New Yorkers, including a nursing assistant, a post office window clerk and a freelance writer.

Judge Lynch told them that they could not listen to Hot 97, a major New York hip-hop and rap station, during the trial, and they all agreed that it would not be a hardship for them.