Perhaps even more depressing than the idea that those September 11 honor roll walls are quickly going to be out of date is the notion that 9/11 responders are desperately resorting to Scientology to rid their bodies of cancerous toxins:

Hubbard’s detoxification program, which Scientologists refer to as the “purification rundown,” requires an individual to ingest a vitamin cocktail and cooking oil, run on a treadmill and sweat heavily in a sauna with temperatures ranging from 140 to 180 degrees Fahrenheit for about a month. If Downtown Medical is to be believed, that combination is a miracle cure for many ailments. “Patients have had black paste coming out of their pores in the sauna,” states Woodworth on the site. “Their sweat has stained towels purple, blue, orange, yellow and black. They have reported bowel movements that are blue, or green, or that have smelled like smoke — despite the fact that they had not been at a fire scene for months.” A picture of a program participant holding a purple stained towel in his hands appears in a slideshow on their website, and program administrators say they have other similar photos available. Shards of glass have leaked from the pores of detox participants, according to the website. And accounts of the program’s benefits, written by rescue workers who served at Ground Zero, cover the site.

Every once in a while it can be really satisfying to witness an idealistic one-man campaign get unceremoniously snuffed out:

Faced with an overwhelmingly negative response to the proposed ban, a committee of the [Metropolitan Transportation Authority's] board has recommended that the cocktail hour be allowed to continue on the trains and platforms of the Long Island and Metro-North railroads, according to a member of the committee and two people briefed on its findings. The full board is expected to take up the issue next month, and appears likely to follow the recommendation.

. . .

The authority first agreed to consider a halt to alcohol sales on commuter trains and in rail stations in December, at the urging of Mitchell H. Pally, a board member from Long Island. Mr. Pally said he was concerned that passengers would drink on the train and then drive home, creating a liability for the authority if they became involved in an accident. He also said he worried that rowdy drinkers might be disturbing other passengers.

A committee of five board members was created shortly afterward to study the idea.

. . .

Gene Colonese, the rail administrator for the Connecticut Transportation Department, said that an official from the department met with the committee in April and strongly urged it not to change the policy, saying alcohol sales were “a valuable service to our customers.”

The committee also met with the presidents of the two railroads, conductors and a representative of the authority’s police force, which patrols the commuter trains and stations. “There was no overwhelming evidence of drunkenness or anything like that, or accidents,” the board member said.

He said the only person who met with the committee to speak in favor of the ban was Mr. Pally.

Earlier: The Tallboy Rebellion, Follow The Money.

An example to remember when you’re blowing the grocery money on scratch tickets:

You could call him irresponsible, but luck was on the side of a 43-year-old Bronx man who spent his fiancée’s grocery money on a winning $1 million lottery ticket this month.

Anthony Knowles and Regina Smith received a fat check at New York Lottery headquarters in lower Manhattan yesterday.

Two other winners claimed checks for $2 million apiece — not even close to the $105 million Mega Millions jackpot won by a Queens grocery worker last month, but still life-changing to the winners and their families.

“I was supposed to buy food, but I bought this ticket instead,” admitted Knowles, who spent the $15 Smith gave him on scratch cards. The winning “Million Dollar Player’s Club” ticket cost $5.

“It was the first time I bought this one,” he said. “I was praying so hard for God to let me win. I prayed the night before, and the morning before I bought the ticket. When I saw the word ‘jackpot,’ I couldn’t believe it.”

Smith never had the chance to be angry over her fiancé’s hasty long-shot bet, since Knowles transferred the prize to her.

“She’s the one who bought the ticket for me,” he said. “It’s only fair that she should collect the prize. Ever since she’s been in my life, I’ve had a lot of luck.”

You could lazily view the city from the comfort of your computer or you could actually get out there and do it yourself. Wish them good luck and god speed:

Remember Matt Green and Don Badaczewski, those two guys who last August broke the record for circumnavigating the city by subway?

Well, Green is back — with a new teammate, college buddy Rob Moncure — for another urban adventure: a five-day, 150-mile walk across the city. That’s 30 miles of pavement, or roughly 10 hours of trekking, a day, starting Monday on Staten Island.

“We’re most worried about how our feet and knees are going to hold up, rather than being concerned about our cardio-vascular health,” said Green, 27, a transportation engineer living in Bay Ridge. “We’re going to wear sneakers. We were considering hiking boots because they’re waterproof, but we just want to wear what’s most lightweight.”

They will have plenty of moleskin for blisters and extra pairs of socks. They’ll also stock up on underwear and an emergency roll of toilet paper, Green explained.

They won’t be carrying much in the way of food, because walking is not all the duo expects to do. They have a quirky checklist, too, that includes eating “as much ethnic cuisine as we can,” Green said.

Other items on the checklist: ride a camel (Bronx Zoo), “go to a hipster bar without looking or acting hip,” perform music on a subway platform, go fishing (Central Park rents rods, Green said) and go swimming on top of a sewage treatment plant (Riverbank State Park on 145th Street). On Staten Island, they plan to scale Todt Hill (elevation 410 feet), the highest natural point in the city.

If you were perhaps concerned by all the Volkswagen Beetles you’ve noticed videotaping your apartment, rest assured that it’s just Google’s ambitious new bodega-mapping project:

Heralded by observers as a step that could change the way people travel, live, and work in the city, Microsoft and Google have launched features that allow computer users to fly over realistic 3-D renderings of the city’s skyscrapers or take street-level tours such as following Broadway between Battery Park and Yonkers.

The developments were announced yesterday at the Where 2.0 Conference in San Jose, Calif.

Google users may view 180-degree photographs of almost every street and intersection in Manhattan, as well as sections of the other boroughs. For the past 18 months a company, Immersive Media, has sent Volkswagen Beetles outfitted with about $250,000 worth of video equipment to drive almost every mile of Manhattan and other parts of the city, the company’s president and CEO, Miles McGovern, said.

On top of the car is a dodecahedron camera with 11 lenses, each taking in streaming video at 30 frames a second. Google licensed the images and integrated them with its maps.

Mr. McGovern estimated that the 40,000 miles of America his company has documented — 2,000 of them in New York City — are captured in about 120 million spherical images.

. . .

A product manager for Google Maps, Stephen Chow, said he used the technology to scope out neighborhoods where he was looking for apartments in San Francisco.

“I would go to that location and see whether the listing was right for nearby restaurants and public transportation,” he said. He said he could also zoom in on parking signs to find out when he had to move his car to avoid getting a ticket.

(Nice URL, by the way.)

The cleverly contrarian Observer wonders whether all of Coney Island is really worth saving:

Several iconic Coney Island attractions — including the rickety, whiplash-inducing Cyclone rollercoaster and scenic 150-plus-foot-tall Wonder Wheel — are already city-protected landmarks that [developer Joe] Sitt can’t touch. Same goes for the long-defunct Parachute Jump structure, commonly referred to as Brooklyn’s Eiffel Tower, and the original Nathan’s hot-dog stand, built in 1916.

And the nonprofit group Coney Island USA, which operates the freaky circus-themed Sideshow by the Seashore, is in contract to buy its own 12,000-square-foot building along of Surf Avenue for more than $3 million.

The contested turf, therefore, mostly boils down to a dense, three-block-long stretch of video arcades, bumper cars, kooky haunted houses, various food and beverage vendors, and trite plush-toy prize contests.

Does the public really care if that stuff gets bulldozed?

Well when you put it that way . . .

Location Scout: Coney Island Amusement Core.

Apparently Hizzoner really isn’t running for president:

U.S. troops will be fighting in vain if New Yorkers aren’t healthy enough to enjoy the freedoms they are defending, Mayor Bloomberg said yesterday — making a tenuous Memorial Day link between the war and his congestion pricing plan.

After marching in the Laurelton Memorial Day Parade, Bloomberg made a push for his plan, calling it a “win, win, win, for everybody.”

“Our soldiers are fighting so that we have our freedoms. Unless you have good health, you’re not going to be around to enjoy them,” Bloomberg said.

“The pollution that’s going into the air today is causing our kids in a lot of neighborhoods in New York City to have four times the national asthma rate.”

The mayor enlisted a group of environmental activists to buttress his case and emphasized that the city’s air is simply not good enough.

“It is not healthy for you; it’s not healthy for our children yet to be born, or our children who are here today.

“We have to do something to reduce the pollution in the air and the only solution really is mass transit and the only place money is going to come for mass transit is from something like congestion pricing,” Bloomberg said.

Some bold plans to remake Governors Island refuse to shy away from the important debates — stem cells and Al Gore, for example:

The Philadelphia firm WRT, teamed with Urban Strategies, from Toronto, mixed its inspirational metaphors. “We were looking at forms in nature like oysters and pearls and stem cells,” says WRT partner Margie Ruddick. “Things that have a forgiving architecture, and where one thing is nested in another.”

Her team’s plan carves a series of interlocking ovals into the flat southern landscape, nesting a play lawn inside a larger great meadow, and an artificial hill inside a new wetland at the southern end. Rather than building up the center, the WRT scheme builds up the edge, stringing a series of structures that could house a spa and retreat center on a rocky promontory, plus a working waterfront along the Brooklyn side. These buildings, however, would not pop up out of the landscape but be part of it: Green roofs would slope up from the interior toward the water at one or two stories, turning the center of the island into a protected bowl.

“I have been reading Last Child in the Woods,” Ruddick says. “It is about how those of us who connected very closely to nature as children have a sense of responsibility for it. I thought at one point of calling it Gore Island.” To this end, the team envisions a camp in a new forested ravine and a sustainable farm and garden. The southwest side of the island has evolved into a sandbar beach and reef. The plan has a hotel on the west side (perhaps one of the new Starwood eco-hotels), but not for the business traveler: “It should be considered a retreat.”

Location Scout: Governors Island.

Ridiculously outsized notion gets Calatrava-ed:

The proposed penthouse at the top of the Woolworth Building was to be one of the most coveted living spaces in New York. With five floors, 7,500 square feet, a private cylindrical glass elevator, and a terrace with sweeping views of nearly the entire city, the apartment would provide, as Corcoran Group CEO Pam Liebman put it, “tremendous ego gratification,” and cap off the conversion of the 1913 building’s slender Gothic tower into apartments. In 2000, the Witkoff Group, which owns the building, said it would add a screening room, wine cellar, cigar lounge, and spa under the building in hopes of luring residents east of the heart of Tribeca. But now nobody will; after gutting the tower, Witkoff is shifting gears. In another sign that the office market is hotter than the condo market, the Woolworth tower is being converted back to commercial space.

Not sure it’s a true sign that the condo market has cooled, but you’ve got to appreciate the symbolism.

Location Scout: Woolworth Building.

For the MTA, words like “buff” and “enthusiast” are euphemisms for “putting the fox in charge of the henhouse”:

[Jason] Brown had just gotten the subway fan’s equivalent of a Broadway callback. A year and a half earlier, he had taken the examination to be a conductor, and now he was being called in for a medical exam and an interview.

Had Mr. Brown scored lower, he might have waited even longer. The current list of conductor candidates, which is based on the 2004 exam, had 21,749 names on it in 2005. If previous lists are any guide, only about a third of those names will have been called by the time the list expires in 2009.

This wait is frustrating enough for ordinary applicants. But it is agonizing for subway buffs, the people who linger in stations waiting for a rare new-model test car to pass, stay up for 24 hours trying to travel every inch of the city’s tracks, or speculate online about how conductors relieve themselves in an emergency.

Some passengers may not want a starry-eyed hobbyist at the wheel of their train, but for a transit buff the chance to drive a subway car is a dream come true, a dizzying intersection of the workaday world and the realm of fantasy.

“When I was a kid, I’d always had a crazy little dream to drive a subway train,” said Vincent Sbano, 48, a retired tax lawyer from Bensonhurst, Brooklyn, who took the exam in 2003 and started as a trainee train operator on April 30.

. . .

Mr. Sbano does not consider himself a through-and-through subway buff, but he confirmed a piece of advice widely dispensed to job candidates on Rider Diaries: When applying for a job with the M.T.A., keep your subway enthusiasms to yourself.

The transportation authority denies that it discriminates against train fans, but on Rider Diaries the idea is alive and well. As a fellow transit fan wrote to Mr. Brown: “Don’t even hint you are a buff.”

Time was when you wanted to offensively overstate your case all you had were Nazis. Fortunately today we also have terrorists:

With its signature royal blue exterior, Mill Basin’s Lowe’s Home Improvement Center might one day look like any of the other hardware stores the company has dotted across the country.

But in the eyes of one state lawmaker, everything is not as it appears.

“Terrorists come in all shapes and sizes,” State Senator Carl Kruger told Lowe’s officials last week.

“This plan, in its very simplest form, is a terrorist attack on the Mill Basin community,” Kruger said at Community Board 18’s monthly meeting.

At the meeting, company officials, including Kevin Bulger, Lowe’s senior site development manager, and Deirdre Carson, its land use attorney for this project, got an earful.

“I know what an attack on a community is all about — I know what a stealth attack is,” Kruger said. “When you find a terrorist in your neighborhood . . . you deal with them.”

Those who block the box are indeed vile scum but is it really possible just to change the infraction from a “moving” to a “nonmoving” violation (they’re still moving, right?)? Or maybe no one cares* . . . this, as Hizzoner’s War on Congestion rolls along unimpeded:

Ticketing drivers who block intersections would become much easier under a plan announced yesterday by Mayor Michael R. Bloomberg as part of a broader attack on traffic congestion.

At the same time, Mayor Bloomberg announced that the city is adding 117 enforcement agents to direct traffic at busy intersections throughout the city.

Under the proposal to deter drivers from blocking an intersection, the infraction, now a moving violation, would be reclassified as a nonmoving violation to simplify issuing tickets, the mayor said. The change, which requires Albany approval, would allow traffic enforcement agents to issue tickets to be mailed later by entering a license plate number into a handheld device. Currently, only police officers and a small number of enforcement agents can issue summonses, which must be given out at the scene.

The new system would reduce the severity of the offense, which now carries a $90 fine and two points on a driver’s license. Under the new proposal, a driver would not incur points but would face a fine of $115. Authorizing all agents (there are currently 2,800) to issue tickets would sharply increase enforcement, officials said.

“One of the major causes of gridlock occurs when drivers decide to cross an intersection even though there is no room for them on the other side,” the mayor said at a Times Square news conference. With the changes, he added, “we’ll be able to increase the number of tickets we issue, which will ultimately discourage more people from breaking the law.”

*Q: Is that legal? A: Do I care?

But as for those pigeons and black birds, good riddance:

Four female Peregrine Falcon chicks have been found atop the Queens tower of the Throgs Neck Bridge, transit officials said yesterday.

Hatched about three weeks ago, the newborns are already feasting on pigeons, black birds, and blue jays about five times a day. Their talons have grown to nearly the size of a grown man’s hand.

An official with the Department of Environmental Protection yesterday climbed the 360-foot tower to tag the chicks.

Peregrine falcons, which are on the endangered list in New York, have made a comeback in recent years. About 32 now live in the city.

The falcons mimic their natural habitat of high cliffs by nesting atop bridges, church steeples, and high-rise buildings, wildlife experts said. The last falcons born on the Throgs Neck bridge hatched in the 1980s.

Location Scout: Throgs Neck Bridge.

By the way, that trendy “neurolaw”-based defense turned out to fail in the end:

The jury in State Supreme Court in Manhattan rejected the defense argument that [douchebag] was delusional and so mentally ill that he lacked the intent to commit a crime.

He was convicted of 10 counts of kidnapping, burglary, robbery and sexual abuse — every charge against him except arson. He faces 25 years to life in prison on the most serious charge, kidnapping, at his sentencing, set for next month.

The verdict, which came after the jury had deliberated for barely four hours, was an uncommonly swift finish to a three-week trial. The jury began considering the charges about 12:30 p.m. and sent a note announcing its verdict to Justice Thomas Farber at 4:23 p.m.

Postgame recap: Mychal Judge Was A Hero To Most But He Never Meant Shit To Pete, Sunday Times Magazine Sets Up Peter Braunstein Defense, God Help Me If The Post Ever Notices My Hair, Leaving Brooklyn? Fuhgeddaboudit! They Do That?

Once people find out that you live in a four-bedroom apartment on Central Park West, they travel from far and wide to visit and are reluctant to leave:

A pair of unwanted house guests ambushed and beat their host in Central Park after she told them to get packing, law-enforcement sources said yesterday.

Vivian Gonzalez, 21, and Alan Reid, 22, had been staying with Amanda Nuñez in her four-bedroom apartment at 86th Street and Central Park West.

When she finally told them to leave, they hatched a scheme to humiliate her, cops said. A third man, Jason Grant, lured Nuñez to Central Park at 3:35 a.m. last Thursday, where Gonzalez and Reid waited.

Gonzalez allegedly beat Nuñez in the knee with a baseball bat, forced her to strip and stole her purse, law-enforcement sources said.

How that would have forestalled the pair from leaving seems a little unclear . . .

Putting the Tom Ford profile in New York Magazine’s cancer issue was an editorial masterstroke — so if you get disgusted by passages like:

At 45, Ford is still the only handsome male fashion designer, with perfect stubble, manicured nails, and not an ounce of fat: “When my clothes are getting tight, that’s not a sign to me that I need to go to another size — it’s a reminder that I have to stop eating, or suffer,” he explains.

. . .

“I am my own muse,” he says.

. . . you can just follow it with, you know, Rose Tisnado’s first-person account about living out her final days in a hospice:

Hospice embraced me. It’s incredible what they do. If I had money, I’d leave it to them. I called to schedule when I could come in, and they said, “No, honey, we come to you.” Before, I could barely get out of bed half the time; they gave me a fentanyl patch — that’s a pain patch — and I couldn’t believe the difference. Then my hospice doctor put me on steroids, and a day later I was eating like a horse — having fantasies about roast beef and Yorkshire pudding at three in the morning. I called my family, chattering away, and my brother said, “Rose, you sound high.” And I said, “I am!” When I’m sick, you know, I can be a cranky bitch — just roll over and want to die. But when I’m well, I feel absolutely, let’s say, cured! And to continue living my life is obviously what I would want to do. I mean, everybody would.

Or if you get nauseated (sorry, wrong word) when you see something like “‘I feel,’ [Ford] says breathily, ‘that I am keyed into the female consciousness’” just flip back to, say, Jenny Saldana’s account of surviving breast cancer:

Even now, I’ve not gotten used to seeing myself without the nipple. I used to sleep naked, and I don’t anymore. And listen — you can look at me and you’ll never know that I have a tummy tit. But I see the little differences. I see that the new breasts aren’t as full on top. Still, now I’m even more proud of my breasts; I just want to show them, and I want to see if anyone notices the difference. I want to feel normal. I miss my breast. With this one, I kind of feel like I have a turkey stapled to my chest. A month after the surgery, when they took the bandages off my breast, the scar was really raw and black — and I lost it that day. I was calling myself the Bride of Frankenboob.

I’m at the point now that I need to feel like I’m the sexiest girl alive. I’m just starting to feel like a woman again. And it’s very important to be reassured that I’m still attractive. That may sound vain, but that’s what women need.

Thirty-something born-and-raised Manhattanites wear subway molestation like a badge of honor:

The rest of the country thought we were goners, collapsed in a sputter of crime, crack and fiscal disaster. There were landlords burning down their buildings — you couldn’t give ‘em away! Hookers hanging out on 83rd and Broadway — right near Zabar’s!

But you know what? We liked it.

The dog shit was piled so high in the streets you needed a mountain ax just to traverse the sidewalk — but we liked it. The buildings were so blackened by grime you could barely see them in the dark — but we liked it. The subways were so dangerous you felt you were descending into Hell — and we liked it, we loved it, hallelujah!

For a certain generation of New Yorker — a generation that came of age at the city’s economic nadir, but also in the glory days of Bella Abzug, checker cabs and CBGB — this city of yore seems as perversely lovable as some long-lost episode of The Magic Garden.

“It seems kind of weird to say that one would be nostalgic for times when you were scared to get mugged going out at night and riding the subways was taking your life on your hands,” said Dalton Conley, 37, an Alphabet City kid turned New York University sociology professor, who memorialized his childhood in the book Honky. “Yet I think there is something that’s lost.

“The old New York is kind of like an old spouse that you just complained about the whole time,” he said, “but then, when it’s gone, you realize you loved him or her.”

New York has always been a breeding ground for nostalgia; constant change will do that to a place. But sometime in the last few years, between the outlawing of the squeegee men, the terrorist attacks of Sept. 11, 2001, and the coronation of Michael Bloomberg, this sentiment has been particularly overwhelming to those natives who took their first bite of chocolate at Barton’s Candy on West 86th Street in 1974 (now a Gap), bought their first Duran Duran album at West Side Records on Broadway, or perhaps got their first human biology lesson from some random guy in a trench coat.

But between the born-and-raised (read: “never-been-west-of-Newark-Airport”) New Yorker and the new New Yorker — “the kind who has just moved to Manhattan with dreams of dinner at Per Se and dancing at Bungalow 8″ — exists a truly pernicious third group who moved to the city as adults in the bad old days and now bemoan the departure of treasured institutions like, say, Western Beef. To these people we say “Move along, gramps! It’s twenty and out for you!”

Twenty And Out, we’re certainly impressed by you still only paying three figures for a West Village apartment. That must feel good each month! But we also look at it this way — you live on an island that is well on its way to becoming the modern equivalent of Bruges. And even if we could afford anything south of 191st Street, we certainly couldn’t afford the price of, I don’t know, toilet paper at your local bodega.

So yeah, it’d be a blast to live in “Tribeca” or the “West Village” or “Alphabet City” or “SoHo” (oh those great historical names!) but when you think about it, Flushing is kind of far from there, no?

And let’s be clear — “Twenty and out” should apply to all transplants (god help me if I ever start pining for the glory days before Queens had guidebooks). The real problem could be that New York City is just way too fetishized, in which case everyone should just get over it and finally move to Philadelphia. Besides, I hear they still have a big violent crime problem*!

*This could become the great anti-statistic for upper-middle class thrill seekers!

Nice:

Moments after his 18-year-old nephew took two bullets meant for him, Earl Samuels did something despicable, cops say.

He flipped the young man’s lifeless body face-up, then started rifling through his pockets and underwear, looking for something to take.

“If you can believe it, he was robbing his own dead nephew,” a police source said.

Police arrested Samuels on Monday, a day after the teen, Wayne Kennedy of Brooklyn, was shot and killed in the Park Hill Apartments in Clifton. Authorities charged Samuels with felony tampering with evidence and misdemeanor obstructing governmental administration.

New Yorkers are figuring out that congestion pricing will actually increase traffic and parking problems in certain neighborhoods:

Under the mayor’s congestion pricing proposal, drivers will have to pay a toll to go south of 86th Street in Manhattan. At a City Council hearing yesterday, Councilwoman Jessica Lappin drew a bleak picture.

“There will be a crush of cars circling around 86th Street looking for parking spots that don’t exist,” said Lappin, who feared the downtown-bound bridge-and-tunnel crowd would use her Upper East Side district as a parking lot before catching a train. “I envision idling, and more congestion, and more pollution in the air, because there aren’t places for these cars to go.” Parking in a garage would be out of the question, she said: “The garages up there are full.”

. . .

New parking garages would be an ironic byproduct of congestion pricing, which is meant to reduce commuters’ reliance on cars. The request for city garages was seconded yesterday by Queens Councilwoman Helen Sears, who noted that her Jackson Heights neighborhood only has one and it’s “the most densely populated district in the entire city.”

“Any thought of building municipal garages?” she asked, before complaining about cutbacks in placards that allow city officials to park with impunity.

(Nice dig at the end there!)

One thing though — if the number of taxis and livery cabs in Manhattan doesn’t change and the number of delivery trucks doesn’t change, how much will congestion pricing help reduce traffic? Even if you reduce traffic by ten percent — a huge effect — that only means that there are nine cars instead of ten. Or it could just be about raising money for public transit**:

Mayor Bloomberg’s plan to charge $8 to drive into a large swath of Manhattan would not affect most city commuters, the new transportation commissioner said yesterday.

Just 4.7% of working Brooklyn and Queens residents, for example, commute by car into Manhattan’s central business district, City Transportation Commissioner Janette Sadik-Khan said at a City Council hearing.

And many of those motorists already pay tolls at the Midtown or Brooklyn-Battery Tunnels — so they’re already paying part of the $8 fee the mayor is seeking.

Still more could opt to take a subway because they live within walking distance of a station, Sadik-Khan said. That leaves just 1% of workers in those boroughs paying the full congestion pricing fee or having a longer commute if they live where mass transportation is less convenient, Sadik-Khan said. The benefits will include less traffic for those who do drive into Manhattan, less pollution and the health problems it creates, and hundreds of millions of dollars a year to improve mass transportation, she said.

*Besides — I take the subway to work. So what do I care about reducing congestion***?

**Which is fine (just call it that!)

***Unless you actually believe the cost of congestion is somehow higher (.pdf)****.

****And higher than what businesses would do to pass on a $8 congestion fee to its customers.

But in all of my years in the business, I have to say that I’ve never actually seen the pimp rule book:

So this guy from Minnesota comes to New York looking for a good time. He goes on craigslist and sees an ad from Tiffany and a few very suggestive photos.

But when boy met girl at the Intercontinental Hotel Sunday, it quickly became clear that a match made in heaven was not in store.

Turns out the hooker wasn’t Tiffany — at least not the woman in the pictures. And she wasn’t particularly interested in providing an “unrushed session.”

What she was interested in was taking his money.

The tourist, whose name was not released, was assaulted and robbed by the woman and her female partner, who was hiding in the hotel room closet, police said.

Candice Lang, 19, and Cedra Neely, 18, each stand about 5-feet-2 and weigh 110 pounds — but police say they’ve become quite the pilfering pair.

They’ve been arrested twice in the past week for robbing and assaulting their unsuspecting johns in midtown hotels, a police source said.

. . .

“They live by the pimp rule book, which means a trick is a trick, and they’ll get their money no matter what,” said the source.

For some unknown reason people still prioritize living in Manhattan:

Oh, to be a young bohemian with a Manhattan apartment — these days it seems difficult to pay rent without a trust fund. But Jessica Delfino — comedian, musician, voiceover artist — has found a way.

She and her boyfriend converted their living room into what essentially is a studio apartment, and they rent out the bedroom to travelers.

“We did have a roommate at one point, but the apartment is kind of small,” Delfino said. Tourists help offset the roughly $1,600 monthly rent. “We don’t do it every night. In between we take a night off to wash and clean everything and have some privacy.”

Whenever they post on Craigslist — the current rate is $70 a night for a private room in an elevator building with Wi-Fi, A/C, unlimited local calls and balcony access — Delfino, 30, gets nearly 100 e-mails during the first three days.

. . .

She discourages people from bringing guests or staying more than a week.

“The longest stay was 10 days — an older German couple,” Delfino recounted. “It was kind of a disaster. She broke the bathroom door knob and it was locked for days. I couldn’t get the super to come fix it. She walked around naked. I walked into the kitchen in the middle of the night and there she was naked, peeing in a cup.”

The benefits of several years of work on the L train are still several years away:

Riders on the crowded L subway line, who at peak hours frequently have to wait for two or more trains to pass at some stations before squeezing aboard, will have to keep on squeezing for at least a few more years, according to a report released yesterday.

The report, provided yesterday to the Metropolitan Transportation Authority’s board, said that an additional 64 specially equipped subway cars cannot be fully up and running before January 2010. The additional cars would allow fuller use of a new high-tech signal system intended to increase the line’s capacity.

The crosstown L line, which stretches from Eighth Avenue and 14th Street in Manhattan to Rockaway Parkway in Canarsie, Brooklyn, currently runs with 15 trains an hour during the morning and evening rush, or one every four minutes.

Once more of the computerized trains are added, the authority will be able to run as many as 26 trains an hour on the line during the rush, according to Paul J. Fleuranges, a New York City Transit spokesman. That works out to one every 2 minutes 18 seconds. Mr. Fleuranges said the agency expected to have the new cars up and running by mid-2009. But a consulting engineers’ report to the authority’s board said the system was not likely to be fully operational with the new cars until January 2010. He said that in the interim some conventional trains will be added to the line later this year to increase peak capacity to 17 trains an hour.

Is it creeping Gioiaism or is landmarking a building really the only way to preserve affording housing in some neighborhoods? Things are pretty bad when you have to resort to having the Landmarks Commission step in:

Hip-hop was born in the west Bronx. Not the South Bronx, not Harlem and most definitely not Queens. Just ask anybody at 1520 Sedgwick Avenue — an otherwise unremarkable high-rise just north of the Cross Bronx and hard along the Major Deegan.

“This is where it came from,” said Clive Campbell, pointing to the building’s first-floor community room. “This is it. The culture started here and went around the world. But this is where it came from. Not anyplace else.”

O.K., Mr. Campbell is not just anybody — he is the alpha D.J. of hip-hop. As D.J. Kool Herc, he presided over the turntables at parties in that community room in 1973 that spilled into nearby parks before turning into a global assault. Playing snippets of the choicest beats from James Brown, Jimmy Castor, Babe Ruth and anything else that piqued his considerable musical curiosity, he provided the soundtrack savored by loose-limbed b-boys (a term he takes credit for creating, too).

Mr. Campbell thinks the building should be declared a landmark in recognition of its role in American popular culture. Its residents agree, but for more practical reasons. They want to have the building placed on the National Register of Historic Places so that it might be protected from any change that would affect its character — in this case, a building for poor and working-class families.

Throughout the city, housing advocates said, buildings like 1520 Sedgwick are becoming harder to find as owners opt out of subsidy programs so they can eventually charge higher rents on the open market.

The Sedgwick building is part of the state’s Mitchell-Lama program, in which private landlords who receive tax breaks and subsidized mortgages agree to limit their return on equity and rent to people who meet modest income limits.

Of course this is in the paper, so maybe it works!

After all, that $100 million isn’t only good for challenging Ross Perot’s relatively impressive 19 percent of the vote benchmark — it also could do a lot of good trickling down through the economy! And if you don’t think he’s considering running (and 2012 still counts!), here are some numbers to consider:

Over the past year, our very private mayor has made very public trips to fifteen states, with a combined 284 electoral votes, more than the 270 needed to win the White House.

When profiles of Cindy Adams are really chugging along on all four cylinders they tend to take on a surreal quality, something you might dream while nodding off on the subway:

“Hello! I’m your hostess!” Cindy Adams was saying as she stood in the entryway of her Park Avenue apartment, welcoming a small group of women to a ladies’ tea for Marianne Williamson, the New Age author, and Ellen Burstyn, the actress and memoirist. Adams did not know all her guests, since the party had been conceived in Burstyn’s public-relations office rather than in the generous heart of New York’s saltiest gossip columnist, but she struck a note of instant intimacy.

“Can I tell you, these crappy dogs just cost me nine hundred dollars to do their teeth, and that’s with the fifteen-per-cent discount the vet gave me?” Adams asked, as her two Yorkies, Jazzy and Juicy, swirled around her feet in a brown-and-black blur, before disappearing behind a concealed door into the kitchen.

. . .

Adams’s attachment to her own small animals was clear: mid-party, she lay down on the marble tiles of her hallway and fed a pastry to Juicy from her mouth, a transfer requiring much licking and wagging from the canine party. Shortly afterward, Adams retreated to her tabloid-papered inner sanctum and, when asked if she considered herself a spiritual person, struck a note of uncharacteristic gravity. “I am somebody who is a seeker,” she said. “There are two parts to every person. There’s the brittle part that everybody sees. And then there’s the part that would rather lie on the floor with the dog. The private part.”

New York never had those nerdy duck tours . . . er, just don’t call it a duck:

The operators of the Gray Line tour buses and the New York Waterway commuter ferries teamed up to devise a peculiar version of the amphibious tours that have become tourist staples in Boston, Washington and other cities. The service, which they are calling New York Splash Tours, was scheduled for a launch in early June, but it began quietly picking up passengers on Seventh Avenue near 47th Street a few days ago.

For $29 a ticket and less than an hour of their time, passengers can ride one of these hybrids on a minitour of Times Square and Hell’s Kitchen, interrupted by a sudden plunge into the Hudson and a brief cruise. On the water, the AquaBuses loop northward past the most commercial section of the riverfront, offering a view of the skyline and the George Washington Bridge, but only a faraway glimpse of the Statue of Liberty.

. . .

Amphibious tours have been operating for years in other cities, originally using reconditioned surplus military vehicles known as ducks. But those old floating troop carriers are too weak and unstable to operate in the Hudson’s powerful currents. The Coast Guard has been reluctant to approve their recreational use since one sank in an Arkansas lake in 1999, killing 13 people, said Eric Christensen, a commander with the Coast Guard in New York.

. . .

Bonnie Young, a tour guide who identified herself as Barnacle Bon, tossed the occasional “Avast!” into her patter as she pointed out the high- and lowlights along the route, including the spot on the Palisades in Weehawken where Aaron Burr dueled with Alexander Hamilton.

But the best part of the tour was definitely the plunge. The bus had pulled off the West Side Highway into a garage-size tent at the end of 38th Street lined with video screens and filled with speakers. A brief video simulated a crossing of the Atlantic Ocean by Henry Hudson, ending with the bus being made to rock as it was virtually sideswiped by the Queen Mary. Seconds later it rolled down a ramp, its front end slapped the surface of the river, and the children aboard let out a collective yelp.

Graeme Clark, a visitor from Puerto Rico, rated the trip a pleasant surprise. “It wasn’t quite what I expected,” he said, “but then I really didn’t know what to expect.”

A pocket of dead-enders refuses to give up the fight:

Just a few hours after bagel man Ravi Aggarwal put up an “Arena Bagels and Bialys” sign on his soon-to-open Fifth Avenue shop, opponents of the basketball stadium that inspired the name made their feelings clear: they planned to protest outside Aggarwal’s store if it remained “Arena Bagels.”

. . .

“For me, naming it ‘Arena’ was all about location,” [Aggarwal] said. “I just knew I wanted to come to Brooklyn with my bagels, which are the best, by the way. I don’t know anything about the Atlantic Yards project.”

He quickly got an education about the mega-project — and the negative passions it provokes in some.

From the moment the sign went up this week, people started complaining — and some were openly hostile, he said.

“At first, I said, ‘No way. I’m not going to be pushed around,” Aggarwal said.

But that steadfast conviction didn’t last long. Aggarwal said the sign would come down on Thursday — after this issue went to press. His other stores are named “Slim’s Bagels,” so he said it’s likely that he’ll name the Fifth Avenue store “Brooklyn Slim’s.”

This week, Atlantic Yards opponents were pleased that they’d beaten the bagel man into submission.

“I think the whole story shows perfectly how passionate this neighborhood is against Atlantic Yards,” said Jon Crow, one of the people who expressed his displeasure to Aggarwal.

Just when you think New York City couldn’t possibly get any more fetishized, someone tattoos the Williamsburgh Savings Bank Building on their bicep:

Last week, Manushka Montemuino became the proud owner of what could be the first-ever brownstone tat, a six-inch black-ink rendering of the century-old Henry Street building she calls home.

The brownstone image — pedestals, cornices, wrought-iron-fence and all — nestles on her right scapula, between a larger tattoo of a red rose and one of a ghostly angel . . .

. . .

“New York City tattoos [are] a total grab bag of cross-cultural and pan-national references,” ["New York City Tattoo: The Oral History of an Urban Art" author Mike McCabe] said. “After 9-11, the World Trade Center was very popular. The Katz’s deli sign is popular, the Empire State building, the Staten Island Ferry. The brownstone is a new one.”

. . .

Montemuino’s rite of urban passage took place on a recent Friday at Brooklyn Tattoo, a popular ink shop on Atlantic Avenue near Hicks Street.

The shop’s owner, Adam Gould, said Montemuino was the first customer who asked for a tattoo of a brownstone — but the homegrown tattoo artist believes that she won’t be the last.

Indeed, he has already reserved a piece of his forearm for a rendering of the Carroll Gardens brownstone where he grew up.

The Tompkins Place house will nestle between an image of a Japanese bat and a banner of his nom de plume, “Suerte,” which he picked up working at a tattoo parlor in Manhattan, where “a lot of the kids didn’t trust a [tattoo artist] with a Jewish last name,” he said.

“When you draw something on your skin, it becomes part of the timeline of your life. In that way, it makes sense to tattoo a piece of the town you love on yourself,” said Gould, whose calf is emblazoned with a drawing of a subway station that resembles the F stop at Carroll Street that Gould has used since he was a kid.

Gould, a 37-year-old bachelor with wild, hard-rock hair, is reluctant to call Brooklyn-centric tattoos trendy.

“We aren’t talking about a 718 T-shirt here,” he said.

But even he admits that the number of people running around with the image of the Cyclone, the Brooklyn Bridge or the Williamsburgh Savings Bank building on their biceps is rising right along with the cachet of the borough itself.

“I’ve been doing a lot Williamsburgh Bank clock towers recently,” he said. “I’ve done the word ‘Brooklyn’ on backs, hands, stomachs, the neck of a kid from Park Slope. I tried to talk that kid out of it, but he was adamant. He had a huge sense of Brooklyn pride that transcended mine.”

It’s getting to be a cliche to say that you wouldn’t believe you can find such-and-such in New York City (for example), but it’s not often you find a Major League pitching prospect from the Lower East Side:

To have a heart-to-heart talk with young Dellin Betances or to just look him in the eye, a stepladder would come in handy, because this 19-year-old baseball pitcher from New York City stands a whopping 6-foot-9-inches tall, without his cleats on. He has been affectionately nicknamed the “Baby Unit,” a reference to “The Big Unit,” Randy Johnson, the Hall of Fame-bound southpaw, because on a good day, Betances, a righty, throws heat up to 97 miles per hour, averaging around 93 to 94 miles per hour.

Better than winning the lottery, at 18 years old, Betances agreed to a $1 million signing bonus with his favorite team, the New York Yankees. During the draft, he had been sitting around at the home of Mel Zitter, his Youth Service League coach, when his older brother, Anthony, called to him from the other room, “You’ve been drafted by the Yankees!” Anthony had been feverishly following Draft Tracker on MLB.com when the notice came up that Betances was drafted in the eighth round, the 254th pick over all.

. . .

Young Betances attributes his success to his loving, supportive family, especially his mother, Maria, his father, Jaime, and his brother, Anthony, who are fielding questions about the rising star from their home on Avenue D. He thanks Anthony for teaching him the value of working hard toward his goals, and also telling him to quit high school basketball when he got two teeth knocked out. The basketball team’s big loss was the Yankees’ gain.

David McWater, founder of the L.E.S. Gauchos baseball organization, said when he started the Gauchos in 2002, all the young players in the neighborhood were raving about Betances.

“He was a schoolboy legend down here,” said McWater.

Rafael Roman, commissioner of the Felix Milan Little League, said Betances was a quiet — and just normal-sized — kid when he played with them on the East River Park ball fields on the F.D.R. Drive. Roman said he thinks it’s good for Betances to get out of the city and into, hopefully, a healthier environment.

“If he sticks with it, he can make it,” Roman said. “If he stays out of the street, he can make it. He has a very good head on his shoulders, and he can make it if he puts 110 percent into it.”

You would never believe that your neighbors keep pythons at home . . . until you find out that they do:

Shocked firefighters stumbled upon a menagerie of deadly animals — including two alligators, two cobras, black widow spiders and a python — while putting out a blaze in a Queens apartment yesterday.

Tony Baez, 23, was in tears after his animals were removed and he was issued a summons by the Health Department.

Lt. Ed Ireland said he and his crew discovered dozens of reptiles and spiders after they put out a fire in a basement apartment at 39th Avenue in Corona at 11:30 a.m.

All of the animals were caged, except for a python, which Ireland said he was “startled” to discover near his leg as he entered the room.

“It felt like something out of a science-fiction scene,” he said. “It looked like a biology lab. The whole room was in cages.” The cause of the fire remains under investigation, but Ireland said it was not considered suspicious. Baez’s “ark” included two 2-foot-long alligators, numerous frogs, turtles and tarantulas and at least two cobras.

. . .

Angelo Diaz, 55, who has lived on the block since 1970, was shocked to learn his home was just feet away from dangerous snakes.

“You never know if one night the snake could get out. We feel very happy that they came to get them,” he said. “We have babies here, it isn’t safe. We never would have thought that animals like that are here.”