The Thrown Fantastik, The Personal Photos And That Toothsome Bartender You’re Potentially Dating

Latey we’ve been seeing examples of how the economics of New York City dictate that full-fledged, non-related adults live together, sometimes four to an apartment, regardless of one’s budget. Now we must revise this to say that there are actually full-fledged adults who are related but not sleeping together sharing living spaces, regardless of their budgets: “Sibling Seeks Same to Share Apartment”.

You might have assumed that siblings live together out of economic necessity but it’s actually more complicated than that:

While siblings have sometimes lived together in middle or old age out of necessity, some psychologists and researchers of sibling relationships say that young adult brothers and sisters who become roommates could be laying the foundation for a lifelong support system. Siblings are often close as children, become distant during adolescence and then increasingly reliant on each other as adults, through parenthood, career changes, divorce and old age, said Victor Cicirelli, a professor of psychology at Purdue University.

Kristin Meyer, 27, who lives in Brooklyn with her sister, Alessandra, 24, said she wanted to have her personal photos in her living room. “The only way to do that was to live with my sister,” she said.

Experts note the benefits of rooming with your sibling:

Self-selection assures that sibling-roommates are probably on solid footing to begin with, said Michael D. Kahn, an author of “The Sibling Bond.”

And when they don’t get along, siblings tend to resolve conflicts swiftly and bluntly. “I threw a bottle of Fantastik at her,” Kristin said of a recent time Alessandra angered her by using Windex to clean their kitchen table.

Still, there are clear disadvantages:

But sibling roommates might not be comfortable with each other’s casual relationships, making one less apt to bring that toothsome bartender back to their shared quarters. “The weirdness comes in when you’re potentially dating a lot of people,” Kristin Meyer said. “It’s not something you want your sister to know. If it’s a roommate, you can get away with it.”

Gentle Reminder

Today’s 61 degrees (so far!) serves as a gentle reminder of how out of touch Metropolitan Diary can be. See, in particular, today’s “January Lament”: “The weather shows it’s not July/and empathy’s in short supply.”

Has this person ventured outside in, I don’t know, the last 30 days? Because it’s not just today — the Sun reported on the warm weather — this January is one of the top ten warmest ever — back on January 11th:

In Midtown yesterday, it was evident that the recent bout of unusually warm weather is beginning to affect people’s perceptions of winter.

Some wore scarves but not jackets; others discarded all the trappings of the season and simply wore T-shirts.

Not that yesterday was a record breaker for warmth: The mercury in Central Park topped out at 49, 6 degrees above normal but 11 short of the record set in 1876. Monday was the record-setting day, when the temperature climbed to 60 at La Guardia Airport, shattering the record of 50 set in 1998.

. . .

So far this year, temperatures have dipped below freezing only three times, according to the National Weather Service. Normally by January, the jet stream is blowing cold air from Canada through the steel and concrete canyons of the city.

“Typically, by this time of year, things have shifted around where the northern branch of the jet stream has taken over, but that hasn’t happened yet, and it doesn’t look like it will happen soon,” a meteorologist with the National Weather Service, Adrienne Leptich, said.

Instead, warm air from the west and south has kept temperatures high. Warm days are expected for the rest of the week, with the warmest weather coming Friday, when temperatures could reach 60.

Don’t You Know Who I Am?

Why of course we know who you are, sir! Please, let me show you to your table:

If you think there’s no such thing as a free lunch, then meet Mac Montandon.

The 34-year-old free-lance writer from Brooklyn lived high on the hog in the Big Apple for five days, scoring not only free lunches, but breakfasts, dinners, lodging, theater tickets, booze — even an appointment for a complimentary colonic.

“I didn’t do it to be malicious, it was more of a curiosity — just how far could I push it?” Montandon, who chronicled the adventure for his Web log www.blacktable.com, told The Post.

To see just how far p.r. reps would go to get publicity for their clients, Montandon printed up business cards for seven fictitious magazines with ridiculous premises. Next, he hit the phones, schmoozing publicists about featuring their products in his mags.

The freebies and invitations rolled in, including a costume party thrown by the Hearst family in an Upper East Side mansion, where he hobnobbed with Ivana Trump; meals at the Gramercy Tavern and Tavern on the Green; “Sweeney Todd” tickets on Broadway; and lodging in Brooklyn B&Bs.

“If this was my full-time job, I could have gotten a lot more,” he said.

“I’m fairly certain I could have acquired a Smith & Wesson pistol, a karaoke machine, hockey equipment, Trojan condoms, a night at a sleep-therapy lab, Canadian bird-flu vaccine, and nights at the Hilton and Trump International Hotel.”

See also: The Best Things In Life Are Given To You By Publicists: How To Score Loads Of Free Shit.

Deep Pockets?

Don’t restaurants have slim profit margins? Apparently some don’t think so:

A Manhattan Realtor claims she got a nasty surprise at Jean Georges Vongerichten’s swank three-star restaurant in Columbus Circle when she bit into a blackberry and chomped down hard on a small black pebble.

Joanna Cutler claims she bit the berry hard enough to shatter a bridge during the meal on Feb. 5, 2003.

Cutler — whose suit describes the pebble as a “pit” — claims she had to undergo emergency oral surgery and get dental implants.

“I have good taste, perhaps not in dessert,” said Cutler, who runs Joanna Cutler Real Estate.

In her lawsuit, filed Jan. 19 in state Supreme Court in Manhattan, Cutler accuses Jean Georges restaurant, the crown jewel in Vongerichten’s culinary empire, of serving her the bad berry in a fruit plate. She is seeking $500,000 — a hefty tab, even for the famed French culinary master.

“It’s a big claim for a $16 dessert,” Vongerichten told The Post.

Ghoulish!

The Daily News reports that many small businesses took advantage of federal recovery grants following 9/11:

Donald Trump, the Rockefeller Group and Ford Models were among the tycoons and huge corporations that received federal 9/11 recovery grants earmarked by Congress for small businesses, a Daily News investigation has found.

Other unlikely recipients include subsidiaries of corporate giants Dell Inc., Morgan Stanley, The AXA Group and the Bank of China, records show.

Even World Trade Center leaseholder Larry Silverstein’s company qualified for some small-business recovery aid.

The firms were allowed to collect small-business grants because the state agency that dished out the free money, the Empire State Development Corp., ignored the federal definition of a small business and adopted a much looser standard.

The ESDC used employee counts — setting the maximum for its $556 million Business Recovery Grant program at 500 workers — to determine whether applicants were small businesses.

Federal law requires that the size category of the types of businesses most common in lower Manhattan — finance, insurance, real estate and law firms — be determined based on annual revenue. Only the wholesale, manufacturing and mining sectors — obviously uncommon downtown — are measured by number of employees.

Also, in totaling the number of employees, the ESDC didn’t require applicants to include employees of subsidiaries and other affiliated businesses. Federal regulations require that linked companies are included in determining whether a business is small. The News found dozens of examples of large firms slipping through as small ones.

One couldn’t tell from ESDC records, for example, that “40 Wall Street LLC” is owned by Trump.

The Donald bills himself as the “largest real estate developer in New York,” Last week, Trump sued a New York Times reporter for concluding in a book that the host of “The Apprentice” isn’t a billionaire.

But the ESDC’s rules transformed Trump into a small-business man. His company collected a $150,000 grant for losses at 40 Wall St. The grant application describes the corporation through which Trump owns that building as having 28 employees and $26.8 million in annual revenues.

That passed the ESDC’s small business test of less than 500 employees. But the revenue amount would put the single Trump property over the federal definition of a small business — which is $6 million annually for lessors of nonresidential buildings.

See who else cashed in. Names like “Dell,” “AXA Group,” “The Bank of China” and “Tamir Sapir” abound.