Bronx teen steals car, ends up in toll lane of Brooklyn-Battery Tunnel, falls short of required $4.50 to get through, gets arrested by Bridge and Tunnel police and ends up having the Post tag him as one of the dumbest criminals of all time:

A Bronx teen nabbed yesterday for an alleged carjacking deserves an E-ZPass into the NYPD’s hit parade of dumbest bad guys.

That’s because everything that Darwin David Guity, 18, did — from the moment he set eyes on Vuong Minh’s 2003 Isuzu to when he encountered a cop named Robert Denaro — backfired, sources said yesterday.

It was 5 a.m. when Guity approached Minh walking to his car on Lexington Avenue and East 63rd Street, brandished a plastic, metallic-colored toy gun and demanded his car keys, police said.

After driving around until about 6:50 a.m., the teen found himself in the E-ZPass lane on the Brooklyn side of the Battery Tunnel, cops said.

The car had no pass. And Guity found he only had $3.70 — 80 cents short of the $4.50 toll, a law-enforcement official said.

“If he had had the $4.50, they probably would have allowed him to go through without stopping him,” the source said.

Instead, he faced Bridge and Tunnel cop Robert Denaro, pronounced like the actor. When the teen couldn’t produce a driver’s license, registration or an insurance card, cops ran the plate. And the registrant’s name came back Vuong Minh — but Guity is black and of Honduran ancestry, cops said.

“He tried to tell the cops it was his mother’s car, but the problem was this guy really had trouble passing for an Asian,” chuckled one official.

When cops got a stolen-car report on the Isuzu, they busted Guity and found the plastic gun on the back seat, sources said.

The latest numbers are out, subway crime is on the rise and the MTA is advising riders to protect their devices — in this case, iPods and cellphones.

But in the roughly four months of 2005 there doesn’t seem to be that many thefts — especially considering how many people actually ride the subway. The Times reports that there were 50 iPod thefts and 165 cellphone snatches. As the proud owner of an iPod Shuffle, I can live with those numbers!

Even better news is that the thefts tend to be confined to high school kids. Screw the high school kids! I don’t care about them anyway:

Just as officials in the high-crime 1980’s warned riders to beware of chain-snatchers and pickpockets, so are they now suggesting that iPod users avoid standing out. “Earphones are a giveaway,” one announcement says ominously. “Protect your device.”

It seems that the iPod has joined a list of sought-after products - Air Jordan sneakers, shearling coats, gold necklaces, boom-box radios and pricy leather jackets among them - that have been targets over the years. “We went through a period when you could track crime by the price of gold,” said Michael F. O’Connor, the chief of transit police from 1992 to 1995, recalling the chain snatchings of an earlier era.

Small digital devices now seem to be the prize catch.

Most of the cases involve young people taking iPods from other young people, Police Commissioner Raymond W. Kelly said. “A lot of it happens after school, the kind of tumult that you see when children or young people are getting on the subway station at dismissal time.”

Apple wouldn’t respond to the Times’ request for a comment but former Police Commissioner William J. Bratton did and he took the opportunity to slam the MTA for dirty subways. What a dick:

Mr. Bratton said he rode the New York subways twice during a visit last week and found them to be in shabby condition.

“When you have subway cars that are filthy - and the ones I was riding in were a mess - and it looks like there’s no one in charge, the temptation to commit crime is more significant,” he said.

OK, so maybe the subways are dirtier than they have been, but we all know the Los Angeles Police Chief is just jealous and wishes he was back home. You know L.A. sucks, dude!

A study published in the medical journal Men’s Health Magazine says that New Yorkers are more depressed than Laredoans:

Is New York bumming you out?

Then true happiness awaits in the glittering Texas boom towns of Laredo and El Paso - and even across the Hudson in Jersey City.

A new study by Men’s Health magazine ranks New York among the most depressed cities in the country, while places like Des Moines, Fresno, Calif., and Buffalo - yes, even Buffalo - rate as hotbeds of happiness.

“No way! Are you crazy?” said An Ferree, 30, of Brooklyn. “I wouldn’t want to live anywhere else in the world.”

The study graded cities on sales of antidepressants, suicide rates and the numbers of days residents reported being depressed. So, Laredo got an A+ and New York scored a D-.

New Yorkers reacted with typical defensiveness, helping to prove the study’s findings:

New Yorkers angrily came to the Big Apple’s defense, saying the city’s cultural and culinary offerings keep them very happy.

“It’s the most vital f—— city in the world,” said Al Gordon, 78, of Manhattan. “I’ve been in Paris, I’ve been in Rome, I’ve been in England and this is it.”

Sara Lowman - a selfproclaimed “very happy person” - was miffed that New York was outranked by cities that don’t quite stack up in size, prestige or pothole width.

“I don’t have any interest in going to those places,” said Lowman, 26. “But good for those cities, since they must have so many happy people.”

Still, she said she was in no hurry to swap New York for New Jersey - no matter how happy the move might eventually make her.

“As tempting as it may sound, no,” she said, smiling. “I think I’ll stay here.”

Let’s see: misplaced rage and delusion (”It’s the most vital f—— city in the world”), self-deprecation (pothole width apologies), sarcasm (”But good for those cities, since they must have so many happy people”) and an irrational fear of what lay waiting if one is banished from the promised land (New Jersey). It all sounds like a recipe for depression to me! But all is not lost: Philadelphia and Cleveland rank worse.

After initial indications that they would stay, the facts on the ground are otherwise and the smokestacks on the Pennsylvania Railroad Generating Plant in Hunters Point are coming down:

The much-watched saga of the fate of four smokestacks atop a former power plant in Long Island City, Queens, has a resolution: they are coming down.

Despite a neighborhood campaign to preserve the smokestacks, they will make way for a developer’s glass and aluminum tower, which will form a residential complex when combined with the 1909 power plant, the onetime Pennsylvania Railroad Power Station.

“We had no choice but to look for a different design,” said Cheskel Schwimmer of CGS Builders, the developer. Mr. Schwimmer said he originally had hoped to incorporate the smokestacks into his design, constructing a glass cube between them. “But the city did not approve it,” he said. “We had to look at other options.”

In the neighborhood, where the smokestacks’ plight has sparked debate for months, Mr. Schwimmer’s opponents are not pleased.

“I think it’s sad,” said Paul Parkhill, co-director of the educational group Place in History, who participated in a postcard campaign seeking landmark status for the plant. “It sort of underscores the fact that the city doesn’t do a good job of protecting industrial buildings, especially in the outer boroughs.”

Nevertheless, some residents were not particularly disheartened.

“There are mixed feelings in the neighborhood between newer residents and people who are second or third generation here,” said Joseph Conley, chairman of Community Board 2. “The artists, the newer arrivals in the neighborhood, they tend to be the preservationists.”

But any dispute has been silenced by the scaffolding covering each of the stacks. At last look, one was already halfway gone.

Too many luscious details in this Daily News article about the arraignment of the mafia-dallying cops:

The daughter of reputed Mafia cop Louis Eppolito showed her heart belongs to daddy yesterday when she came out swinging in defense of her disgraced father.

After a routine arraignment of Eppolito and his ex-detective partner Stephen Caracappa - who are charged with soiling the badge by moonlighting and murdering for the mob - Andrea Eppolito blew a kiss to her haggard-looking dad.

He blew her one back, across the Brooklyn courtroom.

“Bye, Daddy, I love you,” said Andrea Eppolito, 28, her eyes wet with tears.

Then the voluptuous, raven-haired beauty - turning heads in a tan suit with plunging neckline - strode out of the courtroom, making a beeline for a bank of microphones outside Brooklyn Federal Court.

The rest of the article just gets better and better:

She launched into an emotional defense of her father who, with Caracappa, is charged with participating in at least eight gangland murders while on the payroll of the Luchese crime family for years.

“My father loved being a cop,” she said. “He was so proud of all the things he did while working for the city. He protected women. He protected children. He worked with the elderly.

“My dad made a vow to protect and serve the people of the city and did it very well,” she added.

“And now it’s time that somebody protect and serve him,” she said, referring to defense lawyer Bruce Cutler, who is best known for representing John Gotti.

“I’m very confident that when this is over, my father is coming home,” she said.

Cutler said the devoted daughter, who lives in Las Vegas and works in restaurant promotions, had asked him if she could tell the press how much she loved her father, and he approved.

“She flew out here to be near her father and brought his heart medication,” Cutler said. “Family support means the world to Lou.”

Protected women! Protected children! Works with the elderly! Family support! The same dapper attorneys who represented John Gotti! Even a Las Vegas connection!

The defiant parting blow:

Before heading back to Vegas, Andrea Eppolito had one last thing to say.

“My father is very, very strong,” she said. “My father is not a man who is weak.”

I feel an HBO series coming on!

I don’t know if “the mayor and his developer cronies are doing a hell of a better job destroying New York than al-Qaeda could ever dream of,” but the news that a mall may arrive on the Coney Island Boardwalk is surely disturbing — especially to the New York Press:

This may well be the last summer to experience Coney Island in a form that even vaguely resembles what we’ve all come to think of as “Coney Island.” It’s looking as if by summer 2006, much of it will be gone, and gone forever.

The Times’ Jennifer Steinhauer presents a sort of monograph of one of the bitchiest neighborhoods in the city — “Sometimes, the West Side Is Just Plain Grouchy”:

The Upper West Side, like all New York neighborhoods, moves to its own rhythms, fueled in large part by population density, acute parenting, entitlement and retail. Some weeks, you feel there is something in the air, a pinched intensity pushing everyone within a 20-block radius just an inch off the platform of reasonable behavior.

On Monday, on Broadway near 90th Street, a mother in low-rise jeans stood waiting for the light lecturing her son, who appeared to be about 5 years old. “If you want to root for the Red Sox, that is your choice,” the mother said, “but you may not sit with the rest of the family during the games.”

The pained child protested. “But we are Yankees fans,” mom replied, ticking off the names of each member of the family as they hurried across the street. The child tripped, fell and dissolved into tears. Mom scooped him up. They made the light.

New School President, 911 Commission Member and former Senator Bob Kerrey yesterday confirmed that he is not running for mayor, leading one to wonder what purpose it served to say what he said the other day.

The Times article suggests that he may have had a Wesley Clark-esque problem in praising his potential opponent before damning him:

And though his potential candidacy had clearly excited some Democrats in the city, there was no clear groundswell of calls for him to enter the race - perhaps because he had potentially undercut his candidacy with positive comments about the mayor.

I wonder if this actually helps Bloomberg though — a feint by a presumably well-respected political figure to underscore the defects of the other candidates. Who knows . . .

The Post reports that the the Times Square site on which the Howard Johnson’s restaurant sits has been sold and the restaurant will likely be gone by the new year:

Times Square’s Howard Johnson’s, a neon-lit, fast-food landmark in the Crossroads of the World for 50 years, will soon be razed to make way for a glamorous new retail development, The Post has learned.

No closing date has been set, but the favorite eatery of Times Square sentimentalists “will not likely see another New Year’s Eve ball-drop,” a source said yesterday.

The four-story building with the winking blue and orange lights at Broadway and 46th Street “will soon come down,” confirmed Cushman & Wakefield real-estate broker C. Bradley Mendelson, who represents the new owner, Jeff Sutton’s Wharton Acquisitions.

Longtime owner Kenneth Rubinstein and his family just sold the HoJo’s site at 1551 Broadway, next-door 1555 Broadway, and a building on West 34th Street to Sutton for “more than $100 million,” Mendelson said.

And by “glamorous new retail development” they mean a box-like Toys-”R”-Us-type store. Glamorous, indeed:

Don’t expect another low-cost eatery: Sutton is the owner of such “trophy” retail venues as the Fifth Avenue sites of Hugo Boss, American Girl Place, and the new Abercrombie & Fitch.

Sources said he plans to level both Broadway buildings and construct a gleaming new “retail box,” similar to the nearby Toys “R” Us, that will “offer a world-class branding opportunity for international or Fortune 500 companies.”

Personally, I’m holding out for the return of the WWF restaurant, or better digs for the Bubba Gump Shrimp Company.

The Post, unable to veil its extreme partisan bent, notes that what really is at stake here is a storied tradition of cheap drinks and fried clams:

Its blue-and-brown booths, old-fashioned counter and bar serving $3.75 cocktails — “except premium brands” — seems an anachronism amidst the “new” Times Square’s concentration of media and financial skyscrapers, hip hotels and bright electronic displays.

The grungy but cozy spot for fried clams and open-faced tuna sandwiches is flanked by more recent landmarks, such as the giant Bank of America supersign, the W Hotel and Toys “R” Us with its indoor Ferris wheel.

Following Bob Kerrey’s provocative statement this weekend that he may just be crazy enough to run for mayor (how did that 911 Commission work out for you, Senator?), the Times investigates the history of carpetbaggers in New York politics. They use the euphemism “recent transplant” instead of the obvious moniker.

The Times goes a long way in investigating a pet peeve of ours: the conspicuous weekday idling of the idle rich:

New York is a city of professionals and predawn discipline, an empire meant to be conquered not by wanderers but by the lusty achievement of the hyperemployed. Languorous weekday afternoons are the province of those deemed to be lacking in power.

Still, a fair portion of the city’s employable population can be found, midweek, far from any office, whiling away the hours in restaurants and cafes. Unlike the corps of freelance writers with their laptops, these loiterers do not appear to be engaged in any income-producing work. Call them flâneurs, if you want to romanticize them with a French name. Some are princes of leisure, who clearly have never learned that a bank account may approach zero. Others are conscientious objectors to the rat race, who have decided that their personal freedom is worth more than the compromises that might gain you a flat-screen TV.

All of them - superrich, rich or merely upper middle class - have somehow inoculated themselves against the fiscal anxiety that drives most unemployed people to try to get a job. And they have enough disposable income to afford the minimum entry (a cup of coffee) into one of the precious places that allows low-revenue loafing.

The Times identifies three categories of Loafer: the sons & daughters of the superrich, who really should hide themselves; American Dream-worthy refugees from the rat race who live off of earned income, e.g., the fortunate beneficiaries of the 1990s tech bubble; and unlikely retirees, generally those who put in excrutiatingly long hours in their 20s and 30s in order to walk away from it all in their 40s.

Hearty big-cheer props to the Times for looking a little deeper into this — next stop, the trendy outer-borough cafes which I continue to scratch my head over when I see them packed in the middle of the day.

In case we needed another example of why the superrich have too much disposable income, producers announced plans to turn Adam Sandler’s “The Wedding Singer” into a Broadway musical. For once, the Times is appropriately snarky:

In the history of Broadway, it is the names of composers that echo in the ether: Cole Porter. Stephen Sondheim. And now, Adam Sandler.

That’s right. If all goes forward as planned, Mr. Sandler, the star of popular teenage films like “The Waterboy” and “Billy Madison” and the composer of the holiday-themed “Hanukkah Song,” will soon be represented on the Great White Way in a new musical version of his 1998 movie, “The Wedding Singer.”

The producers of the show, including Margo Lion (”Hairspray”), said yesterday that they planned to open the show on Broadway next April after a tryout run at the 5th Avenue Theater in Seattle. And while Mr. Sandler’s exact role is still being worked out, Ms. Lion said that two of the film’s original songs, composed by Mr. Sandler with Tim Herlihy, will be part of the stage version.

Ms. Lion, who hit gold with “Hairspray,” set in 1960’s Baltimore, said she suspected that “The Wedding Singer,” set in 1980’s New Jersey, would touch a similar chord with audiences.

“The real appeal of this was that like ‘Hairspray,’ it takes place in a very specific time and place,” she said. “Plus, we can finally say we’re doing a show for all the good people who live in New Jersey.”

A surprise hit on screen, “The Wedding Singer” tells the story of a brokenhearted, mullet-headed crooner (played in the film by Mr. Sandler) who falls for a woman who already has a fiancé. Much hilarity ensues.

You know you’ve got trouble when Constitutional whiz Laurence Tribe (who on an admittedly imperfect liberal-conservative axis is like the polar opposite of, say, Antonin Scalia) says your bill is likely unconstitutional:

One of the nation’s leading constitutional scholars is scheduled to testify today that a bill aimed at halting the conversion of The Plaza hotel to condos is illegal.

“I started with an open mind,” said Harvard University Professor Laurence Tribe. “I was retained to do an analysis. I have concluded it’s unconstitutional.”

The legislation would prevent hotel owners from converting more than 20 percent of their rooms to condos or co-ops.

Tribe, one of the nation’s foremost authorities on the Constitution, performed the analysis for Elad Properties, which wants to convert part of the hotel to condos.

At the behest of the hotel workers union, the City Council is considering a bill that would ban such conversions except in cases of financial distress.

Tribe will testify before the council’s Economic Development Subcommittee today.

Tribe said in an interview that the council’s action amounts to the taking of private property by a government body, for which there must be just compensation.

“Here, there is no compensation, and that’s what makes it unconstitutional,” he said.

Will this stop the Council from moving ahead with the bill and wasting everyone’s time and money? Probably not . . . but at least they can tell the unions they tried!

Shopping mall developer speculates on real estate along the Coney Island Boardwalk, Joey Clams out by the end of summer, Applebee’s to open in its place?

New York Magazine’s Daniel Gross wants us to believe that there is a trickle-down effect of “ridiculous wealth”, and sommeliers all over the city should be counting their lucky stars.

Point taken — rich bastards spend absurd amounts of money propping up an absurd service economy, but I’m skeptical. Doesn’t the housing market — one in which a frightening number of New Yorkers spend more than 50 percent of their income on — quickly become unaffordable as average housing prices rise? To be sure, it’s part of their “to be sure” paragraph:

Before we get too carried away in enumerating all the great gifts New Yorkers humbly receive from the very rich, let’s admit some limits. The ever-climbing cost of living hits us all. It’s not just the price of apartments; everything from sneakers to a jug of milk costs more here and prices are rising fast. The Consumer Price Index in New York City has been growing at a 30 percent greater clip than the national rate. For the vast majority of people, inflation cuts directly into their standard of living.

As for real estate, if this boom does turn into bubble, the really rich will be bummed, but they’ll disappear for a week to St. Barts and return good as new. People with mortgages they can barely swing—like those three-year, fixed-rate, interest-only “deals”—could be wiped out.

But it’s inescapable. Of course rich people make our lives better — they fix Central Park, they contribute to MoMA, they subsidize two operas (take that, L.A.!). So on behalf of the squeezed middle class all over the city, thank you for helping us eke out a living.

Graffiti apologist Hugo Martinez is having his apartment redecorated by graffitists:

This year, at least since late January, he’s been living amid graffiti designed to be part of a studio apartment that has been spruced up by two Dutch designers (who call themselves Kaptein Roodnat) and decorated by 13 graffitists. The graffitists range in age from 19 to 48, Mr. Martinez said, “and what links them is the clarity of their vision and the fact that they’ve all passed the threshold of criminality.”

Some, he said, have been arrested as many as 30 times, for everything from vandalism - for their graffiti - to selling crack.

The apartment decoration is part art prank, part reality show - there are plans for a Webcam - and part public service. Mr. Martinez would like to see city housing agencies deploy similar decorative strategies in their buildings - not that he’ll be knocking on any doors, mind you.

“I just put stuff out there,” he said. “I’m not going to call the mayor and beg.” “The Project in the Projects,” as this dressed-up apartment is called, is the ultimate act of graffiti. By painting and altering the regulation colors of an apartment in a 1960’s-era low-income housing project, Mr. Martinez’s team has done what graffitists the world over do - which is to mark up private property. Whether the result is enhancement or defacement is up to the beholder.

So what does it look like? From the slide show, it looks like someone basically tagged his refrigerator. But the Times finds a curiously post-modern parallel — Pottery Barn:

Inside this apartment, grim references become festive. There’s police-style tape laid down in a kind of mod plaid on the floor, and yellow utility lights strung from the ceiling - one assumes in an attempt to “quote” from the environment of your basic graffitist. In other words, here are things you’d find in a subway, or a crime scene. The effect is both colorful and goofy, like the rooms in Pottery Barn’s teen catalog.

Instead of shades, rolls of paper hang from dowels over the window and are decorated by a few graffitists. Others have made plexiglass boxes that can be stacked and used as a headboard for the bed, as supports for the bed and desk, and, when covered with a pistachio-colored square of foam, remarkably comfortable seating. One graffitist, Nato, filled plexiglass boxes with old spray cans gathered from the subway tracks, like a time capsule of his art - making it seem distant, almost forgotten. You can see the old Rustoleum cans - the 70’s-era paint of choice, Mr. Martinez said - and American Accent cans, a 90’s brand.

But since the proof is in the smooth, glossy rust-proof finish, that existential question of all art eventually nagged at Martinez:

Mr. Martinez said he’d awakened that morning worrying “that none of this was any good.”

In the end, he decided it was good. Which is why soon many of us will have graffitists redecorate our homes — and then graffitists will either have to discover new avenues of self-expression or be forced to give away their craft for free. I feel an Ayn Rand novel coming on.

The Mayor’s kitchen cabinet in full gear, someone remembered the Bears’ Super Bowl Shuffle and lo and behold, a rap penned in honor of Mayor Bloomberg emerged:

“Mayor Mike’s Rockin”
BY ALISTAIR (CHARLIE BIGGS) SEALY
and LENNY (MR. L) MOORE

Who’s running the city an’ making it airtight?

I can tell you that nobody cares like Mayor Mike

Make your own way, go against that grain

It takes an independent mind to wanna change this game …

For people who thought he was keepin’ his dough

Saved the Harlem Dance Theatre when it needed him most …

The Board of Ed failed, that remains a true thing

Some are scared to change the way we do things

Mayor Mike is gettin’ with the times

Leaders should be independently inclined

City . . . airtight . . . can’t breathe . . . help!

The forgotten final verse (with apologies to Jim McMahon):

I am the funky mayor, known as Bloomberg.
They call me hizzoner, and I’ve got to return.
My funky kitchen cabinet gets into the mix
‘Cause they know I can’t dance, but that I can take the six.
Olympic Committee, I like to tease.
Board of Ed, I make them say please.
Anything about the Jets, any foolish kerfuffle
Is quickly forgotten after the Funky Mike Shuffle.

Jennifer 8. Lee investigates the notion that men going out to dinner with each other are secretly homosexual:

The delicate posturing began with the phone call.

The proposal was that two buddies back in New York City for a holiday break in December meet to visit the Museum of Modern Art after its major renovation.

“He explicitly said, ‘I know this is kind of weird, but we should probably go,’” said Matthew Speiser, 25, recalling his conversation with John Putman, 28, a former classmate from Williams College.

The weirdness was apparent once they reached the museum, where they semi-avoided each other as they made their way through the galleries and eschewed any public displays of connoisseurship. “We definitely went out of our way to look at things separately,” recalled Mr. Speiser, who has had art-history classes in his time.

“We shuffled. We probably both pretended to know less about the art than we did.”

Eager to cut the tension following what they perceived to be a slightly unmanly excursion - two guys looking at art together - they headed directly to a bar. “We couldn’t stop talking about the fact that it was ridiculous we had spent the whole day together one on one,” said Mr. Speiser, who is straight, as is Mr. Putman. “We were purging ourselves of insecurity.”

Anyone who finds a date with a potential romantic partner to be a minefield of unspoken rules should consider the man date, a rendezvous between two straight men that is even more socially perilous.

. . .

Although “man date” is a coinage invented for this article, appearing nowhere in the literature of male bonding (or of homosexual panic), the 30 to 40 straight men interviewed, from their 20’s to their 50’s, living in cities across the country, instantly recognized the peculiar ritual even if they had not consciously examined its dos and don’ts. Depending on the activity and on the two men involved, an undercurrent of homoeroticism that may be present determines what feels comfortable or not on a man date, as Mr. Speiser and Mr. Putman discovered in their squeamishness at the Modern.

Both Sex and the City and Seinfeld are long gone but it’s not too late to coin glib terms for New York City culturo-athropological phenomena:

Simply defined a man date is two heterosexual men socializing without the crutch of business or sports. It is two guys meeting for the kind of outing a straight man might reasonably arrange with a woman. Dining together across a table without the aid of a television is a man date; eating at a bar is not. Taking a walk in the park together is a man date; going for a jog is not. Attending the movie “Friday Night Lights” is a man date, but going to see the Jets play is definitely not.

“Sideways,” the Oscar-winning film about two buddies touring the central California wine country on the eve of the wedding of one of them, is one long and boozy man date.

She of course conveniently forgets that the technical term for two or more men being out “on the eve of one’s wedding” is “bachelor party.” Nothing to see here, move on: Gentlemen, rest assured, your manhood is intact.

The Daily News’ Michael Malone notes that the still-winless Mets have no bar to call their own:

Whether it’s dinner and drinks at Mickey Mantle’s or a cold Bud up at the Yankee Tavern, there’s no shortage of Yankee-friendly bars in the city. But you’ll have an easier time finding a cap to fit Mr. Met than finding a Mets bar in this town.

Meanwhile, the New York Press’ C.J. Sullivan argues (persuasively) that the hapless Mets embody the spirit of New York City more than the Yankees:

The Mets are more like New York because Shea Stadium—the house the Mets built badly—is a mess in constant need of repair, much like most city apartments. Even the bathroom plumbing is decrepit. The workers are rude. The Mets also have bad season after bad season, losing more than they win, just like most of us. When was the last time you won anything?

The Yankees, on the other hand, are like a small leafy town in the far reaches of Connecticut. They have all this faux history and myth and ghosts that haunt the stadium. If M. Night Shyamalan made a film about the Yankees and their Babe Ruth/Lou Gehrig/Mickey Mantle/Thurman Munson legends, the lead character would be some spoiled kid from Westchester, sitting in his box seat telling his father, “I see dead Yankees . . .”

One of the more amusing things you see are the daily snipes the two big tabloids take at each other — not always amusing enough to point out, but amusing nonetheless. So here’s a good New Yorker piece on the recent (Drudgetastic) kerfuffle between the Daily News and the Post:

No longer can it be said that the News, traditionally the more restrained of the city’s rival tabloids, lacks a fighting spirit. The paper, reeling (or so said the Post, many times) from a lotto-game debacle that awarded cash prizes to thousands of readers by mistake, stepped up last Monday and finally played Hatfield to the Post’s McCoy. First, the News touted its own success—“daily newsad sales hit record high”—while also noting the “sorry picture of the shrinking business prospects of the New York Post.” Then, over the next several days, it ran a series of articles exposing an apparent “dump-and-pump” scheme at the Post, a “frantic, desperate effort” to boost circulation through bulk sales. The News, of course, has the higher circulation of the two.

. . .

Meanwhile, back from vacation, Mort Zuckerman reported with pleasure that the attention seemed to be increasing Scratch n’ Match participation. He also said that the News’ dump-and-pump story, which referred to “bloody shrapnel from publisher Lachlan Murdoch’s carpet-bombing propaganda machine,” was not retaliatory. “That wasn’t a response, obviously, to this latest—what my grandfather would have called mishegoss, which is a Yiddish word for craziness,” he said. “Who was that sociologist at Columbia—Robert Merton?—who said that every group has a reference group? Our reference group is not the Post—it is our readers.”

Up at Post headquarters, Lachlan Murdoch tried to play nice. “We don’t really think about the Daily News that much,” he said. But when he learned that a reporter had spoken with Zuckerman he asked, “How were the Galápagos?” He referred repeatedly to “Scratch n’ Stiff,” without winking or smiling, and accused the News, on the issue of bulk orders, of being a “pot calling the kettle black,” since the News sells a lot of bulk copies, too.

Col Allan, the editor, arrived, complaining about the “hypocrisy of these people,” and seemed more eager for a scrap. “They’re still shoving fifty papers a day in bulk into the prisons of the mentally insane on Wards Island,” he said. “I mean, give me a break.”

“I might even read the Daily News if I were stuck in a white padded cell,” Murdoch said.

Allan laughed: “Yes, very good.”

Murdoch said that he thought the nicknames had gone too far.

“It may have been a little exuberant,” Allan said. “But you’ve got to remember that the folks at the Daily News have this curious view of the world, and it really is that they feel that they can throw shit at the fan and never get dirty.”

Allan got up to leave. “If they want to attack us,” he said, “they shouldn’t do it in the business section—because nobody reads it.”

Why make like you care when you can just have your diverse, storied, veteran kitchen cabinet make like you make like you care? Shape your image without lifting a finger! Ridiculous ledes like this ensue:

A group of power brokers privately warned Mayor Michael R. Bloomberg’s re-election campaign this week that he must erase his image as an elitist billionaire and show that he cares about the concerns of average New Yorkers. [emphasis added]

The top secret meeting was top secret:

Campaign officials declined to comment on the meeting, saying it was a private strategy session, but several of the participants said they were led to believe that their ideas would be followed in some way. The mayor’s communications director, William T. Cunningham, who also attended the meeting, said yesterday that candidates always retold their life stories in a re-election fight, and that Mr. Bloomberg would do so during his campaign. [emphasis added]

Details of the secret meeting were scant, and few of those attended revealed much:

The meeting, described by seven participants [I could be reading it wrong, but the Times only mentions seven people being at the meeting!], provides a window into the challenges Mr. Bloomberg faces at an early but important stage of the mayoral race, when he has a chance to define his own image while his Democratic opponents are preoccupied with fighting for their party’s nomination. [emphasis added]

In fact, details were so scant, the Times only was able to uncover the most mundane, ultra-detailed details:

For some people sitting around the fold-out, cafeteria-style tables at the meeting, the mix of personalities alone was worth the invitation. As they enjoyed plain and chocolate croissants, cantaloupe and kiwi, some participants said they were amused to see Mr. Minarik, for instance, listening to Mr. Koch - who in spite of supporting some Republican politicians is still a quintessential Democrat for many upstate conservatives.

The Post now reports (”Elevator Moo Goo Guy Ran” — I know, not at all funny) that the delivery guy who was trapped in the elevator for three days has gone into hiding, fearful of being deported (which was probably why it took him so long to pull the alarm, now that I think about it):

The Chinese food deliveryman who was trapped for 3 1/2 days in an elevator went into hiding yesterday — fearing his newfound fame may get him in hot-and-sour soup with immigration officials.

“He left the city,” one of Ming Kuang Chen’s roommates said through an interpreter. “He’s an illegal immigrant and he’s afraid people will catch him.”

After his ordeal — which set off an intensive police manhunt — Chen’s co-workers at the Happy Dragon restaurant in The Bronx said they didn’t know if he would return to work.

“He’s recovering. We don’t know if he’s coming back. We haven’t spoken to him,” said a woman working the counter.

Might get him in “hot and sour soup?” Like “hot water,” but soup? Because it’s something you order from a Chinese restaurant? Between the silly headline and the clumsy turn-of-phrase, I’m not at all happy. Not at all!

We need more old-school-frumpy condescending arts reviewers like Gia Kourlas:

When the Barnard College department of dance puts on a show, the results aren’t always pretty because the dancers aren’t always, to put it kindly, in the best shape. Aspiring performers need only audition, and when the pickings are slim, everybody seems to get in. But at Barnard Dances at Miller, seen Friday night, the standard deer-in-the-headlights incidents were blessedly few.

That’s what I’m talking about!

A Drudgetastic story that will be repeated around the watercooler all across the country — the delivery guy who was stuck in the elevator for three days:

Ming Kuang Chen, a deliveryman for a Bronx restaurant called Happy Dragon, walked out Friday night at about 8:30 p.m. with a large order of curried shrimp with onion and a small shrimp fried rice, and never came back.

Worried co-workers found his bicycle chained up in front of the 38-story apartment building of Tracey Towers, at 40 West Mosholu Parkway near Jerome Avenue, and feared the worst: At least three deliverymen for Chinese restaurants have been killed in New York City in the last five years, for money or for food.

For three days, the police searched in and around the buildings for Mr. Chen, going door to door to the 871 apartments, sending bloodhounds and cadaver-detecting dogs into nearby Van Cortlandt Park and Woodlawn Cemetery, dropping with scuba gear into the cold waters of the Jerome Park Reservoir.

And all that time, it seems he was right in the middle of them - trapped in an express elevator, where he spent more than three days in a 4-foot by 6-and-a-half-foot cab without food or water before being rescued shortly after dawn yesterday. He had made his last delivery before becoming trapped.

“I kept yelling,” a weary Mr. Chen said through an interpreter after his rescue, briefly describing his roughly 81 hours of captivity.

The offending building:

The Post headline: “Deliverance.” The Daily News headline: “Sat in hell-evator for days.” I liked the Daily News headline more until I considered the implicit snobbiness of “Deliverance.” So the tabloid-to-tabloid headline battle ends in . . . a draw! On to the next bizarre story!

Who would have thought that there would be so many foreign-language newspapers in a city in which 40 percent of its residents are foreign born? The New York Times! No, really:

Near the back of a garment district bookstore and gallery, the paintings on exhibit are blocked in part by newspaper pages taped to an overhang. The pages are not on exhibit, but they will soon be seen by many as part of the redesigned Nowy Dziennik, the Polish-language daily newspaper whose offices occupy several floors in the same modest building.

“We are trying to make it more appealing to young people,” said Ewa Kern-Jedrychowska, a reporter at the paper. “We have competition here, surprisingly. There are three Polish daily papers in New York.”

Many New Yorkers had no idea there was even one, much less three. For that matter, who would have imagined that there are 26 ethnic daily newspapers in New York that keep immigrants in touch with their homelands while educating them on how to survive in their adopted one?

The good news is that someone finally has legitimized hooking up by publishing a handbook on the topic.

The bad news is that this means young women are setting benchmarks for what constitutes being a slut:

For the young and the single in New York dating has always been a numbers game, whether it is tabulating the guy-to-girl ratio at a bar or guessing at the bank balance of the quarry across the dance floor. Still, it is not every night that a group of unattached young women in low-slung jeans sit around pondering questions that might stump a mathematician at Caltech, questions like can one plus nine ever equal just nine?

“I know a lot of people who will go home with the same guy they have before just because it’s not going to raise their number,” explained Jennifer Babbit, 26, a publicist.

“A lot of my friends will say: ‘I started having sex with this guy, but it only lasted a minute. I don’t know if it counted,’ ” offered Beth Whiffen, a former associate editor at Cosmopolitan.

. . .

Yes, there are conquests, but there should not be too many of them. So among this group of women with three-inch heels tipping out of their $200 jeans what is the right number, that is, the last number before you hit the wrong one? Few women would want to go over 20, or even 15, Ms. Babbit said, because they would “think of themselves as big sluts.”

“Ten at the most,” Caroline Homlish, 24, summarized in a tone that brooked no dissent.

And while the good news is that girls aren’t so hung up on that commitment thing, the bad news is that they’re still hung up on the commitment thing — and now it’s explicitly likened to shopping:

And while “The Hookup Handbook” explicitly forbids its readers to mistake a hookup for a potential boyfriend, not everyone thought that was realistic. “People who are hooking up are trying to get into a serious relationship,” insisted Caitlin Gaffey, 24, a beauty assistant at the magazine Shop Etc. “On the girls’ side, that’s almost always true.”

“You can’t just hook up with anyone,” added Ms. Gaffey, a graduate of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. “You have to learn a lot about him before you hook up. Guys are not picky. We’re the ones who are picky. It’s kind of like shopping.”

The good news is that thanks to such handbooks, vodka and sex are explicitly linked. There is no bad news to report on this front:

Ms. [Kate] Kilgore [who is in public relations at Victoria's Secret Beauty] estimated that out of a random group of 10 women her age, only two or three will have a steady boyfriend, and the pressure that existed even a decade ago to be seen having a boyfriend had lessened. That, she said, is liberating. “I’ll go through phases where I’m hooking up or making out with a guy a week,” she said matter-of-factly, “but then go a month” without.

She guessed that on average she probably hooks up 10 or 12 times a year, something that can mean “lots of vodka, feeling the connection,” but not always sex.

“It’s all about fun,” Ms. ["The Hookup Handbook: A Single Girl's Guide to Living It Up" author Andrea] Lavinthal added of her approach to dating. “It’s not the death of romance. It’s like relationship light. No one’s going to say no to making out with a cute guy on a Saturday night.”

The good news is that these women are cautious of the “disease thing.” The bad news is that they refer to it as the “disease thing.” Everybody, all together now — “sexually transmitted disease.” Still, thank goodness no one’s being irresponsible here:

But while the language of the hook-up culture sounds debauched (”Drink Till He’s Cute” is one chapter heading), most of the women who will plunk down $14.95 for the book are children of the 80’s. These girls grew up just wanting to have fun but knew not to have too much.

“We’ve had so much sex ed,” Ms. Lavinthal said. “With strangers, we are really cautious of the disease thing.”

In Manhattan, where guns and steak are now “quirky,” the red-state revolution is nearly complete:

Among the artifacts hanging on the basement walls of the Westside Rifle and Pistol Range in Chelsea - frontier reward posters, a “Ripley’s Believe It or Not” blurb about a stylish, bulletproof suit - is a picture of Robert De Niro in “Taxi Driver,” sighting down the barrel of a pistol in a scene filmed at this very range.

Used to be, a vigilante psycho had someplace to go in this town, somewhere to practice. Pity Travis, then, were he to walk into the range on a Tuesday night last month and find Gina DeMasi, 25, a SoHo bartender, decked out in a cowboy hat, shiny belt buckle and tight blue jeans tucked into her boots.

Dianne Mackley, her friend from MercBar, was also outfitted à la prairie party girl. Across the room a group of middle-aged men in trucker hats, members of the Chelsea Gun Club, quietly ate McDonald’s takeout and cast periodic glances at the interlopers.

“I like things that are quirky,” Ms. DeMasi said. Then a gunshot boomed from the next room, and she flinched.

. . .

An instructor gave each student a .22-caliber rifle, helped the students load the guns with a 10-round magazine, and led them to the range with its 16 stalls. The shooters clipped targets to a rope that swept the paper downrange with the turn of a crank. The smell of cordite soon grew thick, and the spent shell casings clinked off the counter and walls and floor and shoes.

When they were finished, they took their targets and walked outside to hail a cab for Frank’s.

“I do need a drink,” Ms. DeMasi said in the back seat.

Speaking of the apparent inability of some New Yorkers to understand sports metaphors, the Times reports on yesterday’s decision by the MTA’s board to accept the Jets’ offer to buy the airspace above the West Side railyards for a multi-zillion dollar stadium, using the smart headline “Jets Win Stadium Battle by 2 Touchdowns.” Too bad they had to add the redundant explainer: “(the Vote Is 14-0).”

As I’m hearing Brian Lehrer on WNYC try to convince listeners that in order to counter steroid use, Bud Selig is instituting a new rule lowering strikes batters are allowed to two — not plausible, Brian! We actually watch baseball! Although at least one listener has called up believing him . . . clueless New Yorkers! — I see that the Times has written about April Fools’ hoaxes:

Shortly before noon today, the 20th annual April Fools’ Day parade will start its zany prance down Fifth Avenue, complete with whimsical floats, cacophonous music and this year’s grand marshals, SpongeBob SquarePants and impersonators standing in for former Gov. James E. McGreevey of New Jersey and the filmmaker Michael Moore, who will goad spectators to spar him on his own “wrestling float.”

Sounds like a real crowd pleaser.

As in year’s past, news cameras from around the globe will be on the sidelines hoping to capture the perfect wacky shot of what organizers bill as “a commemoration of the perennial folly of mankind.”

And as in year’s past, those reporters who do show up will end up playing the fool. That is because New York’s April Fools’ Day parade is a great big hoax, the brainchild of Joey Skaggs, the éminence grise of pransksterdom who has been duping the news media with his outlandish stunts for decades.

There’s a sucker born every minute, P. T. Barnum reportedly said, and the phantom parade, advertised through official-looking press releases, has drawn a wide range of news media outlets in the past, including CNN, USA Today and, without fail, a camera crew or two from Japan. (As of last night, Fox’s “A Current Affair” and the morning show on WB-11 news had confirmed their plans for coverage, Mr. Skaggs said.)

“Sometimes a reporter will call me from Fifth Avenue in a panic, saying he can’t find the parade, and I’ll say: ‘Oh, they’re probably already down at Washington Square. You’d better run,’ ” he said. “It’s an important opportunity for all of us to review our inherent foolishness.”

Brian just raised the bar, saying that a foul ball after the first pitch will be considered a strikeout.

This Craig’s List-related prank isn’t bad, however:

Anecdotal evidence reveals that workplace pranks are far more elaborate and mortifying than those unleashed at home. Just ask Steve Wyatt, an associate creative director at Kenneth Cole who received scores of odd calls last April 1 - some from prospective semen donors looking to collect $500 for a deposit, others from people seeking free Thai massages or cheap luxury rentals.

After a few dozen such calls, Mr. Wyatt and the company’s other victims discovered their phone numbers on a series of fake ads on Craig’s List, courtesy of some conspiring underlings. “I found it very amusing, but it did get a bit tiresome when I kept getting calls three weeks later,” Mr. Wyatt said.

Now Brian is saying that Mayor Bloomberg likes the rule change so much that he wants to build three new baseball stadiums — and lure the Giants back to New York. Representative Anthony Weiner just called in to object. I sure hope the other guy was a plant, too!