As Lady Macbeth might say, “Unsex me here”:

A production of Shakespeare’s “Macbeth” will replace a hip-hop festival next summer in a DUMBO venue controlled by the Brooklyn Bridge Park Conservancy — and organizers of the rap show believe that race played a role.

The Brooklyn Hip-Hop Festival — which brought thousands of people and big-name rappers to the park-and-condo waterfront development site in 2006 and 2007 — had already scheduled its 2008 production for the weekend of June 22.

But organizers were shocked last month to discover that the Brooklyn Bridge Park Conservancy had given those days to St. Ann’s Warehouse to stage a Polish rendition of that Scottish play.

Festival organizers believe the move was racially motivated.

“Hip hop brings a lot more brown people to this neighborhood, and people who live here are not comfortable with it,” said Wes Jackson, whose Room Service Production founded the festival in 2005.

“[People have told me that residents say], ‘The festival should be in Commodore Barry Park between the projects and the BQE, not next to my $2.5-million condo.’”

Whether racially motivated or not, the rejection of the hip-hop festival sounds very much like the scenario long imagined by critics of Brooklyn Bridge Park, where condo and commercial development will finance greenspace along a 1.3-mile stretch from DUMBO to the foot of Atlantic Avenue. Opponents believe that public events will not be public at all, but subject to the whims of the wealthy condo-dwellers whose maintenance fees will pay for the park’s upkeep.

The recent formalization of the leash law has paved the way for further commercialization of the city’s parks:

If you visited Bryant Park on a recent Tuesday afternoon and muscled your way through the throng of suited spectators standing around the plaza, you could have watched a sleek black dog taking an acrobatic leap into a swimming pool.

The dog was participating in a water sport sponsored by DockDogs, a company that promotes the activity. But the dog’s antics appeared to hold little appeal for Karen Merz, a product development manager who was eating lunch in the plaza with a co-worker.

“If it was in the evening and it was like ‘Let’s watch a funny dog show,’ O.K.,” Ms. Merz said. “But I’m in the middle of work, and I’m all stressed out, and it’s, like, ridiculous.”

According to Maxine Teitler, the chairwoman of the Parks Committee for Community Board 5, such grumblings speak to a larger issue.

“There is a lot of concern about the commercialization of the parks,” said Ms. Teitler, whose board covers an area that includes Bryant Park and the two other parks that form Midtown’s green corridor: Madison Square Park and Union Square Park.

If you’ve ever wondered what happens when someone gets “reassigned” during an investigation, now you know:

Just before 9 a.m., they file into large, sometimes windowless rooms.

In some cases, they punch time cards; in others, they scribble their names on a sign-in sheet.

They take their places in plastic chairs either grouped around tables or scattered haphazardly.

Some immediately pull out crossword puzzles or books. Some knit. Others hold golf-putting contests. One takes out his guitar and strums.

One day last week, another, wearing a leotard and tights, spread out on the floor and stretched before practicing ballet against a wall in a corner.

Nearby, gazing out a window, a man slowly fell asleep, his head in his hands.

It’s all in a day’s work on the city payroll.

For seven hours a day, five days a week, hundreds of Department of Education employees — who’ve been accused of wrongdoing ranging from buying a plant for a school against the principal’s wishes to inappropriately touching a student — do absolutely no work.

In an investigation inside the nine reassignment centers called “rubber rooms” where these employees are sent, The Post has learned that the number of salaried teachers sitting idly waiting for their cases to be heard has exploded to 757 this year — more than twice the number just two years ago — at a cost of about $40 million a year, based on the median teacher salary.

. . .

. . . [A]nother [rubber room attendant], an Army reservist who spent almost 3 1/2 years in a rubber room before he retired, begged to be able to go to Iraq instead of staying in DOE Siberia.

Staten Island psychics conclude that the Mets are toast:

“It ain’t over till it’s over,” Yogi Berra famously quipped, but for one Staten Island psychic, it’s over even before it ain’t.

“They’re not going to come close to winning whatsoever,” seer Jim Weiss said yesterday. “I just don’t get a good feeling about this team.”

Zillions of pundits and fans have been getting bad vibes from this New York nine since they started tanking last month, and you don’t need a sixth sense to read the stats.

The Mets lost a comfortable seven-game lead over the Phillies and now stand a game behind after last night’s 7-4 loss.

Looking ahead to this tense weekend of baseball, which will likely decide whether the Mets will make the playoffs, the Advance consulted with Weiss in his Prince’s Bay office:

“I hope I’m wrong, but I wrote them off back in June,” he said. “It’s as if they’re out of step. They’re not coordinated as a team.”

. . .

Astrologer Tanya Milton of St. George said it would take several days’ work to run star charts for the bombing bullpen — five days for the whole team. But she did perform a tarot card reading for slumping shortstop Jose Reyes, using his date of birth to predict his fate:

“I’m sensing that he’s feeling very insecure about his fans, and that might put him in a tilt,” she said. “If he could block out negative energy and focus on the game, he will prove himself and it will be a good [series]. Geminis depend a lot on the approval of others. Their egos need to be stroked.”

Inferiority complex, anyone? The results are in on the race to number two:

The Bank of America Tower at One Bryant Park will reshape Manhattan’s skyline and force a revision of the record books that catalog the city’s giants.

The 54-story building stands 945 feet tall, but tops out at 1,200 feet with the addition of an ornamental spire, inheriting the title of New York’s second-tallest skyscraper. It was held by the Chrysler Building since Sept. 11, 2001, when the Twin Towers were destroyed and the Empire State Building returned to the top spot.

“The building is topped off already,” said Jordan Barowitz, director of external affairs of the Durst Organization, the real estate development firm that partnered with BofA to erect the building. “The last piece of steel went in a few weeks ago and the first tenants will arrive in May 2008.”

One Bryant Park doesn’t break any records without its decorative spire, but the use of such a device to raise a tower’s bragging rights isn’t out of the ordinary.

He warns people that we may see Hoovervilles return to Central Park:

Housing in Central Park?

It’s not out of the question if disaster strikes and the city finds itself desperate to find homes for thousands of displaced residents, Mayor Bloomberg said yesterday as he announced a design competition for long-term emergency shelter.

“Clearly, in an emergency, rather than let people sleep on the streets, you would do that,” the mayor said.

And everyone knows that teens love sex — they just tend to be a little cheap when it comes to paying for it, which is why sometimes you need to entice them:

Teens at a Lower East Side high school were getting their sex education outside the classroom after being targeted by pimps who lured them to a nearby brothel and enticed them with cut-rate romps, law-enforcement sources said yesterday.

The brothel, at 39 Eldridge St., was recently shut down by NYPD vice cops following complaints from outraged parents who learned that their sons at Pace HS across the street were targeted by the sleazy operators, the sources said.

Police sources said that a pingpong hall was a front for the whorehouse in the back of the establishment, and that it was run by Benjie Zheng, 47, who lived a few blocks away, and Ming Liuchang, 48, of Queens.

The men would try to lure students to the Robo-Pong Training Center by distributing business cards outside the school, sources said. The cards were printed only with a contact number, an image of a topless woman — and a word, “Good.”

Zheng and Liuchang allegedly recruited immigrant women off the street to peddle flesh in hidden rooms at the center, whose hours were posted on a sign adorned with rulers and pencils and the words “School Days.”

. . .

The rates were apparently designed to attract students who might not have wanted to wait until prom night.

“It was obvious that they were targeting young students, because the prices were so low,” said one disgusted police official, adding, “Most brothels charge at least $100.”

First museums, then cars, then the subway and now airplanes:

New Yorkers by next summer could be paying higher airfares and have access to fewer flights, as the Federal Aviation Administration says it is eyeing congestion pricing and a cap on flights arriving and departing from John F. Kennedy International Airport in an effort to reduce crippling airline delays.

Responding to a summer marked by the worst flight delays since the FAA started keeping records in 1995, President Bush said yesterday there is “a lot of anger amongst our citizens” about unreliable flight schedules.

Mr. Bush has asked his secretary of transportation, Mary Peters, to convene a task force of airline executives and officials from the Port Authority of New York and New Jersey to make recommendations on how to reduce air traffic delays at JFK and throughout the New York region. The group is to issue recommendations by the end of 2007.

Airlines could be charged steeper fees to land their planes during peak hours, which could work as an incentive to steer more flights into off-peak slots, Ms. Peters said. Airlines would be expected to pass on the extra costs to customers.

Exciting because it’s been a while since I’ve thought about “Kill it!”:

The federal government is suing Bloomberg L.P., the financial services and media giant founded by Mayor Michael R. Bloomberg, saying the company engaged in a pattern of discrimination against women after they became pregnant and took maternity leave.

In the suit, the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission charges that female employees at Bloomberg were demoted and had their pay cut after they disclosed that they were pregnant.

In some cases, managers questioned the women’s ability to carry out their work because of their family responsibilities, according to the suit, which was filed in United States District Court in Manhattan yesterday.

. . .

The discrimination is said to have occurred after Mr. Bloomberg became mayor in 2002, and though he remains the majority shareholder of the firm, company officials stressed yesterday that he had not been involved in its day-to-day operations since early 2001.

The case could be damaging to the mayor, however, as he seeks to boost his national profile and flirts with a presidential bid. In a similar case, Mr. Bloomberg was sued in 1997 by a sales executive who claimed that after she became pregnant, Mr. Bloomberg urged her to have an abortion, telling her, “Kill it!” and saying sarcastically, “Great! Number 16,” apparently referring to the number of pregnant women at the company. Mr. Bloomberg adamantly denied any wrongdoing and settled the case out of court for an undisclosed amount.

Fame, power and inevitable recriminations:

This should be a moment to savor for the venerable Latin food vendors of the Red Hook soccer fields in Brooklyn.

With help from well-placed allies and the passionate advocacy of their media-wise organizer, the vendors — lately a cause célèbre for pro-immigrant groups, free-market cheerleaders and gastrobloggers alike — recently won an extension of their operating season and an inside track on permanent status for the open-air multinational food court they have run on a temporary basis since the 1970s.

But just as they get ready for a difficult winter-long effort to comply with the city health code while preparing a formal bid for the concession rights, the vendors find themselves a family deeply divided over questions of leadership, money and less tangible issues.

In the last three weeks, the group’s organizer and public face, Cesar Fuentes, resigned as its day-to-day operator, threatened to sue vendors who spoke against him, threatened to quit representing them in city negotiations, then agreed to return, after all the vendors signed a petition on Wednesday avowing their “total support” and asking him to stay.

. . .

. . . Ricardo Ramirez, who helps run the largest stand, said that vendors felt that Mr. Fuentes acted as if he was not accountable.

“We want to know where the money goes,” Mr. Ramirez said last week. “How much he pays for insurance, how much he pays the workers who clean up. But when we talk to Cesar and ask him these things, he gets mad.”

Several vendors said they blamed Mr. Fuentes’s publicity efforts for attracting the attention of the city’s regulators, something they found particularly annoying because the resultant influx of non-Hispanic customers has been offset by a drop in Latino customers. “Business is the same,” Ms. Carrillo said. “But now there’s more problems.”

Mr. Fuentes said that he had provided the vendors with an accounting, and that the salary he pays himself — $20 per vendor per day, a total of $560 per weekend from the 14 vendors — was justified by his work.

Early this month, the vendors met without Mr. Fuentes. At the meeting, Esperanza Ochoa, a supporter of Mr. Fuentes who runs a Guatemalan stand and attended the meeting, said, some vendors spoke of keeping Mr. Fuentes around long enough to help them win the parks concession, then deposing him.

It was that meeting, Mr. Fuentes said, that prompted his resignation.

Location Scout: Red Hook Ballfields.

Just saying is all:

At this moment, one in four gay men in New York City is infected with HIV, an incurable disease that has infected more than 100,000 men in New York City, 20,000 of whom have no idea they have even been infected.

In the last six years, new diagnoses of the disease among gay men in New York City under the age of 30 rose by 33 percent.

Among gay males between the ages of 13 and 19, the rate of infection has doubled.

The disease has spread across the nation — where government estimates put the total currently diagnosed at over one million — but nowhere has it taken hold more than in New York, where its incidence is four times the national average, with more cases than Los Angeles, San Francisco, Miami and Washington, D.C., combined. In Manhattan, the incidence of the disease among gay men has more than doubled since 2001.

. . .

Indeed, the facts that appear in the first three paragraphs of this article — stunning developments worthy of the attention of every breathing New Yorker — were reported in only a single paragraph buried in the metro section of the September 12, 2007, New York Times.

“Yes, people have forgotten,” said Sara Markt, a spokesperson for the city’s Department of Health, which put out the report on September 11. She sounded surprised that the statistics didn’t attract the attention they should have, given the alarming growth of HIV among young, gay New Yorkers — precisely the group that first faced the alarming threat of AIDS in the early 1980s.

Now, more than a quarter century later, the eyes of a concerned world focus almost exclusively elsewhere when HIV and AIDS are mentioned. The epidemic in Africa has, by some estimates, cost 25 million lives, with millions more likely to die over the next several years.

But in New York City — where aggressive drug treatments have slowed the death rate from AIDS to a trickle, and heightened protections have reduced the number of infections caused by needles, or passed from mother to child — a different sort of crisis has emerged. While few die from a diagnosis of HIV, many thousands of New Yorkers who engage in unprotected gay sex find themselves living with the painful consequences, a catastrophic illness that they mistakenly believed had passed them by. Their lives are still forever transformed by a disease that rarely finds itself in the pages of The New York Times — except in coverage of pharmaceutical developments — or discussed openly by public officials outside the halls of the city’s impassioned health department. “We’re headed in the wrong direction,” declared Dr. Thomas R. Frieden, the city’s health commissioner, in his September 11 announcement. “Unless young men reduce the number of partners they have, and protect themselves and their partners by using condoms more consistently, we will face another wave of suffering and death from HIV and AIDS.”

The Post story the cops want you to read this morning . . . if true, is actually really smarmy:

A key witness in the sensational police killing of Sean Bell told cops after being collared for slugging his girlfriend that he doesn’t work because he gets money from the Rev. Al Sharpton, a law-enforcement source said yesterday.

“Whatever I need they give me,” Trent Benefield, 24, told detectives Tuesday night after he was brought to the 113th Precinct station for questioning about the beating of gal pal Nyla Page Walthrus, 19, the source said.

When Benefield said he was unemployed, a detective asked him why.

“Sharpton and my lawyer don’t want me to work,” he replied, without naming the attorney, the source said.

Then how does he get by, the cop asked.

“Whatever I want they give me — whatever I need. Every month they give me whatever I need,” he boasted.

He said the amount could reach $3,000 a month.

. . . to the MTA at least in a case of man versus machine:

The MTA can’t nickel-and-dime straphangers — but it has no problem taking their quarters.

The Metropolitan Transportation Authority acknowledged yesterday that one BIG reason it wants a 25-cent bus and subway hike is because its vending machines can dispense only dollar coins and quarters.

MTA spokesman Jeremy Soffin defended the increase as fair and said upping it by a nickel or dime wouldn’t be enough.

“The limitations of technology would make a $2.10 fare extremely costly to implement and would provide a much poorer quality of service,” Soffin said.

. . .

Riders weren’t buying it.

“It’s an outrage,” said Anthony Thompson, a Queens engineer. “Our money is being spent because of a hardware defect?”

Recruiter Jisele Lazo, 22, of Queens, said: “It stinks. Why don’t they just leave it at $2? Why are they making it easier for the machines? There are far more commuters than machines.”

. . .

Soffin said smaller change would mean longer lines and riders being saddled with pockets full of silver.

He said the size of the fare hike was not unreasonable because the $2 base fair had remained steady since 2003.

A 25-cent jump would amount to a “cost-of-living” increase for the system, Soffin said.

A rider buying a single-ride ticket priced at $2.10 with a $5 bill would be carting away 11 quarters and three nickels, or 58 nickels, he pointed out.

The machines also would likely run out of change more quickly, have to be filled more often and likely need more frequent maintenance, he said.

Out-of-service machines would result in longer lines at token booths, he said, estimating the added costs to be millions of dollars.

Not sure what Fred Flintstone has to do with it but whatever:

A troubled student wearing a Fred Flintstone mask and carrying a .50-caliber rifle was arrested at St. John’s University in Queens yesterday afternoon, prompting the authorities to lock down the campus for three hours while they searched for a possible second gunman, the police said.

The student, Omeash Hiraman, a 22-year-old freshman, was walking through the campus carrying a black plastic bag with the gun’s barrel sticking out of it when a campus security guard approached him and grabbed at the weapon, police said.

A struggle followed, and another student, Chris Benson, came by and helped subdue Mr. Hiraman. Mr. Benson and campus security guards restrained him until the police arrived.

The police later determined there was no second gunman. There were no injuries.

The police said Mr. Hiraman’s gun contained one round of black powder-charge ammunition. His lawyer, Anthony J. Colleluori, described the gun as “kind of like a Dick Cheney hunting rifle.” Charges are pending, the police said.

Mr. Colleluori said Mr. Hiraman had graduated from Stuyvesant High School in Manhattan and enrolled at Cornell University, then transferred to St. John’s, a school he “happens to love.” He said his client was “very tired, he’s confused,” and surprised to hear that his arrest had caused an uproar on the campus.

“He’s not a person who would walk into Columbine and shoot people up,” he said.

Mr. Hiraman’s father, Pat, said his son had recently undergone surgery for scoliosis and may have been reacting to medications. “We believe this is a misunderstanding,” he said.

Then there’s the report in the Cornell Daily Sun (where the suspect was enrolled) quoting a former roommate and Stuyvesant grad who “totally saw it coming.”

Update: Who Was That Mask, Man?; result inconclusive.

The pathology of 9/11 victimhood, writ small:

Tania Head’s story, as shared over the years with reporters, students, friends and hundreds of visitors to ground zero, was a remarkable account of both life and death.

She had, she said, survived the terror attack on the World Trade Center despite having been badly burned when the plane crashed into the upper floors of the south tower.

Crawling through the chaos and carnage on the 78th floor that morning, she said, she encountered a dying man who handed her his inscribed wedding ring, which she later returned to his widow.

Her own life was saved, she said, by a selfless volunteer who stanched the flames on her burning clothes before she was helped down the stairs. It was a journey she said she had the strength to make because she kept thinking of a beautiful white dress she was to wear at her coming marriage ceremony to a man named Dave.

But later she would discover, she said, that Dave, her fiancé, and in some versions her husband, had perished in the north tower.

As a matter of history, Ms. Head’s account made her one of only 19 survivors who had been at or above the point of impact when the planes hit. As a matter of emotion, her story deeply moved audiences like college students to whom she spoke and visitors at ground zero, where she has long led tours for the Tribute W.T.C. Visitor Center for visitors including Mayor Michael R. Bloomberg, former Mayor Rudolph W. Giuliani and former Gov. George E. Pataki.

“What I witnessed there I will never forget,” she told a gathering at Baruch College at a memorial event in 2006. “It was a lot of death and destruction, but I also saw hope.”

. . .

But no part of her story, it turns out, has been verified.

The family and friends of the man to whom she claimed to be engaged say they have never heard of Tania Head and view the relationship she describes with the man, who truly died in the north tower, as an impossibility.

A spokeswoman for Merrill Lynch & Company, where she told people she worked at the time of the terror attack, said the company had no record of employing a Tania Head.

And few people, it seems, who embraced the gripping immediacy and pain of her account ever asked the name of the man whose ring she had returned, or that of the hospital where she was treated, or the identities of the people she met with in the south tower on the morning of 9/11.

. . .

In recent weeks, The New York Times sought to interview Ms. Head about her experiences on 9/11 because she had, in other settings, presented a poignant account of survival and loss. But she canceled three scheduled interviews, citing her privacy and emotional turmoil, and declined to provide details to corroborate her story. During a telephone conversation on Tuesday, she would not explain her reticence, saying only that she had not filed any claims with the federal Victim Compensation Fund. “I have done nothing illegal,” Ms. Head said.

She has retained a lawyer, Stephanie Furgang Adwar, to represent her. Also on Tuesday, in response to a question about the accuracy of Ms. Head’s account, Ms. Adwar said in an e-mail message, “With regard to the veracity of my client’s story, neither my client, nor I, have any comment.”

(The Times likes this sort of thing, doesn’t it?)

Probably not like this mom does:

An Annadale woman is set to face the music after she allegedly stabbed a teen Monday night because she believed he stole her son’s iPod.

Davida Montano, 56, approached 19-year-old Joe Applebaum near his Monterey Avenue home around 10:30 p.m. Monday, accusing Applebaum of stealing the portable music player, a cop source said yesterday.

When Applebaum denied it, Ms. Montano slapped him in the face, breaking his prescription glasses, the source said.

Then, Ms. Montano — who lives around the corner from Applebaum on Marne Avenue — allegedly grabbed one of the broken lenses and stabbed Applebaum once in the right side of his chest.

Applebaum fled to nearby Barlow Avenue, leaving a bloody trail before he collapsed on a resident’s front stairway, the source said.

When it comes to the City Council’s new bill banning the pilfering of curbside recyclables, where the Times fears to tread, the Post understands what we most want to know:

Sanitation officials say their staff has witnessed unmarked trucks with out-of-state plates carting materials meant to be recycled. The current penalty for taking recyclables is only $100. Since January, 128 summonses have been issued.

The new law is aimed solely at those who come with trucks or cars — not people who simply rummage through trash looking for treasures.

“This is not a bill that goes after the occasional garbage pilferer,” [Councilman Michael] McMahon said, “or somebody who is looking for a new couch for their college room or picking up recyclables with a push cart.”

. . . when he compares the Iraqi insurgency to George Washington’s militia:

In his most detailed comments on the Iraq war, Mayor Bloomberg last night suggested the United States was in the same difficult position as the British in the Revolutionary War — facing a determined band of insurgents.

Bloomberg said the comparison occurred to him when he visited his mother recently and was driving through Lexington, Mass., where a scrubby group of farmers rose up against a well-trained militia more than 200 years ago.

“We’re the British,” the mayor said during an interview with Tom Brokaw at Cooper Union, part of a series featuring potential presidential contenders hosted by former Gov. Mario Cuomo.

Pitch perfect and ready for prime time!

With any luck, Lee Bollinger personally will have strengthened Ahmadinejad’s public perception in Iran and possibly contributed to the delay of the clerical regime’s inevitable demise — that is, if anyone outside the Northeastern U.S. even notices what happens at Columbia:

Before Iran’s president took the stage at Columbia University on Monday, the university’s president, Lee C. Bollinger, sent out an early-morning e-mail message, calling on students and faculty “to live up to the best of Columbia’s traditions.” Yesterday, many critics questioned whether Mr. Bollinger had met that test himself.

On campus and in editorials across the nation, on political blogs and throughout academia, there was a sharp division of opinion about Mr. Bollinger’s pointed introduction of the Iranian president, Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, as a man who exhibited “all the signs of a petty and cruel dictator” and whose denial of the Holocaust was “either brazenly provocative or astonishingly uneducated.”

. . .

Abraham H. Foxman, national director of the Anti-Defamation League, said Mr. Bollinger’s speech was counterproductive.

“If you invite someone, you have to be polite,” he said. “Ahmadinejad scored points, especially in their culture. If you permit an enemy to come into your home, you still treat him with dignity and respect. Therefore, we lost. The points that President Bollinger made were fine. But to close with insulting words almost undid everything he said before. It was not a good teaching experience.”

Buried lede — the researchers at Media Matters may be the only ones who pay attention to him:

After eating dinner at a famed Harlem restaurant recently, Bill O’Reilly of the Fox News Channel told a radio audience, he “couldn’t get over the fact” that there was no difference between the black-run Sylvia’s and other restaurants.

“It was like going into an Italian restaurant in an all-white suburb in the sense of people were sitting there and they were ordering and having fun,” he said. “And there wasn’t any kind of craziness at all.”

Mr. O’Reilly said his fellow patrons were tremendously respectful as he ate dinner with Al Sharpton.

The comments were made during Mr. O’Reilly’s nationally syndicated radio broadcast last week. The liberal media watchdog Media Matters for America called attention to them by distributing a transcript and audio clip on the Internet. Karl Frisch, a Media Matters spokesman, called Mr. O’Reilly’s comments “ignorant and racially charged.”

Some claim that overdevelopment is threatening the cultural heritage of old Queens:

Those transit meatheads caused gushers of trouble.

Such is the sentiment in Archie Bunker’s old neighborhood — known outside of the TV world as Glendale — where residents believe a recent water main break was caused by a bus re-routing that put too much stress on the street.

“It’s absolutely the bus routes — it can’t be anything else,” said Dorie Figliola, a member of Community Board 5. “It just can’t withstand [the pressure]. Our old pipes are just going.”

The Q54 bus was re-routed in July so it could stop at the Shops at Atlas Park, a retail complex that opened last year at 80th St. and Cooper Ave.

Atlas Park management hoped the move would attract more customers, and it wants the Q23 and Q45 re-routed so that they also pass by the mall.

But the new route raised concerns about noise, pollution and traffic in a residential area that includes the Cooper Ave. home featured in the opening credits of the hit 1970s sitcom “All in the Family.”

Location Scout: Archie Bunker’s House.

So not only do they clog the streets with their motorcades, get out of parking tickets and beat DWI raps but their security detail radios are also messing with your television reception:

Residents in the area near the United Nations may be noticing fuzzy reception — even on cable — while all the foreign dignitaries are in town attending the General Assembly.

The problem is caused by high-powered radios used by security details protecting the diplomats, said Time Warner Cable spokeswoman Suzanne Giuliani.

“It happens every year,” Giuliani said of what amounts to “intermittent signal problems” on some channels.

The affected area generally stretches from 42nd Street to 86th Street on the East Side, Giuliani said, adding that the cable company has posted a recording on its phone systems to let callers know there’s a temporary problem.

The two-way radio signals can interfere with TV reception when the cable isn’t secured tightly, Giuliani said.

Again, lay off the “sixth borough” talk — spare hard-working Philadelphians your evil scheme to turn their city into the next Ridgewood:

“The vibe here,” said Shawn Hennessey, “is the jawn.” The 27-year-old musician gestured at the neon sign for Silk City, a club-cum-restaurant housed in an old dining car in the gentrifying Northern Liberties neighborhood.

“The jawn is a Philly word,” said Brian Nadav, Mr. Hennessey’s friend and bandmate. “It means ‘a good thing.’ It can be a noun, like you can say, ‘Yo, pass me that jawn’ or ‘I’m the jawn.’” But, he cautioned, “It is never a verb. You never say, ‘I jawned.’”

You sniff at the Nasonex revolution at your own peril:

The Metropolitan Transportation Authority yesterday proposed charging people less if they ride subways or buses during off-peak periods, in hopes of easing overcrowding during the commuting rushes.

Under the plan, however, most riders would be hit with steep increases, as the authority seeks to generate $580 million from fare and toll increases during the next two years.

The proposal was one of two possible fare-increase formulas offered by the transit agency. The other called for a more traditional set of increases, raising the base bus and subway fare to $2.25 from $2.

The off-peak discount proposal, which if approved would take effect early next year, also calls for a $2.25 base fare. Under this plan, a discounted fare of $1.50 would be available to some MetroCard users during off-peak hours.

But riders who buy the popular unlimited weekly or monthly passes would pay as much as 8 percent more and would not gain from the off-peak discount. Nearly half of all rides taken on the system are paid for with unlimited-ride passes.

And the authority would eliminate the current 20 percent bonus given to people who put $10 or more on a pay-per-ride MetroCard, which now gives them six rides for every five purchased, making the cost of each ride effectively $1.67.

. . .

. . . Elliot G. Sander, the chief executive of the authority, said the alternative structure could help address the system’s rush hour congestion as well as generate more money.

“This is clearly new territory for us,” Mr. Sander said. “It is a very serious, innovative proposal.”

That’s Columbia the university, not the country:

President Lee Bollinger of Columbia, in a dramatic speech broadcast around the globe yesterday from Morningside Heights, delivered an oratorical haymaker to President Ahmadinejad, attacking his record on human rights, Israel, and terrorism in remarks that will likely overshadow anything the Iranian might say during his diplomatic rounds in America.

In systematic fashion, Mr. Bollinger, who was being closely watched in New York and beyond because of criticism that he had blundered by inviting Mr. Ahmadinejad in the first place, rebuked the Iranian president for calling for the destruction of Israel, for funding terrorism, for fighting a proxy war against America within the borders of Iraq, for persecuting women and homosexuals, and for flaunting the international community in the pursuit of nuclear weapons.

Mr. Bollinger called Mr. Ahmadinejad’s stated denial of the Holocaust “brazenly provocative or astonishingly uneducated.” His remarks were made all the more dramatic by the fact that the Iranian leader was seated only yards away, in a corner of the stage where he listened as an interpreter translated Mr. Bollinger’s words.

“Mr. President, you exhibit all the signs of a petty and cruel dictator,” Mr. Bollinger said, after challenging the Iranian to admit a delegation from Columbia to speak at an Iranian University.

Mr. Bollinger’s remarks were met with a rant from Mr. Ahmadinejad, who called his remarks “an insult to the knowledge of the audience here” and a “vaccination” of the event.

And is this really a surprise?

Many audience members expressed some disappointment, if not surprise, that Mr. Ahmadinejad evaded answering almost every question posed to him by the dean of Columbia’s School of Public and International Affairs, John Coatsworth, who read questions from index cards that were filled out by students and faculty members in the audience.

Free association: With the dollar what it is, and foreclosures what they are, maybe it’s time to put the Irish back in Irishtown:

On Sunday, a little more than 200 people gathered in the Knights of Columbus hall on Beach 90th Street in the Rockaways to dance, have a drink and travel back in time to Irish Town, a cluster of bars and bungalows that served as a summer refuge for Irish New Yorkers until it was razed 50 years ago to make way for high-rise apartments.

To hear the recollections, one would think Irish Town was a piece of heaven in Queens that had dropped out of the sky and nestled along the boardwalk from Beach 116th Street to Rockaways Playland. (Not to be confused with the Irishtown in Woodside, Queens.)

. . .

Like many visitors to Irish Town, George Lang, 67, lived in a railroad apartment on the West Side of Manhattan — his family paid $38 a month — and worked on the waterfront. Mr. Lang, whose father was a tugboat captain, became a longshoreman.

“My relatives were sea people from County Wicklow, and in New York they gravitated to the piers, the waterfront,” he said. “All my friends met their wives down in Irish Town. Back then, all the families seemed to know each other. The mothers would tell each other, ‘If my kid needs a smack, you give it to him.’ You don’t have that today.”

Beers were a nickel, he said, and since the bars, like the Dublin House, Flynn & McLoughlin’s, Gildeas, Leitrim Castle, the Shamrock, O’Gara’s and O’Donnell’s, stocked the same-size glasses, customers could roam from one bar to another to buy discounted refills.

At another table at the Knights of Columbus on Sunday, Patrick McGrath, 80, told of how he grew up, one of 12 children, on a farm in the County Mayo town of Cong, where the movie “The Quiet Man” was filmed. He came to New York as a teenager, and he met his wife, Margaret, in Irish Town.

“If you got arrested for fighting, we had a police captain who was very religious,” Mr. McGrath explained. “He’d take you to Mass the next morning and then let you go without a ticket.”

The Rockaways, which was known as the Irish Riviera, “was a paradise for the Irish,” he said, “but the subway ruined that.”

Sister Peggy Tully and her identical twin, Mary Kelly, both 64, emphasized that Irish Town was not all about drinking. “It was good, clean fun,” she said. “I would see people on the boardwalk saying the rosary.”

Location Scout: The Rockaways.

And somehow it still comes off as priggish:

In at the Brooklyn Public Library: rock concerts, children playing and singing, adults talking.

Out at the Brooklyn Public Library: getting shushed by librarians.

That’s because recently-appointed Brooklyn Public Library Executive Director Dionne Mack-Harvin views libraries as community centers — places where people are expected to talk to each other, not sit in silence.

Mack-Harvin is so determined to end the shushing that librarians from all 60 branches have been attending training sessions to get the word out about her approach.

“We’ve moved away from what some consider the ’shushing library’ model of the past, from being a sterile, educational place that’s somewhat elitist,” she said, “to being a community space where everyone walking in the door can find a place for themselves.”

Yet I guess some guys have all the luck:

Seconds after a man popped the question to his sweetheart in Central Park, a gunman sprang from the bushes and robbed the couple but at leat they saved the ring.

Luke Jacunski, 30, had picked a romantic setting to propose to his girlfriend of six months — the gazebo off Strawberry Fields in Central Park.

So at about 8:30 p.m. Saturday, he asked his intended, Mami Nagase, to accompany him on a stroll in the park.

He got down on his knee, and the 24-year-old artist had just accepted — when they were confronted by an armed man.

It clearly wasn’t Cupid — he was carrying a gun, not a bow and arrow.

“He shouted, ‘Give me your money and get down on the ground! Give me your jewelry!’” said Jacunski, a musician.

As the couple complied — the second trip to the ground that night for Jacunski — he managed to slip the silver engagement ring off of his fiancée’s finger.

The move caught the mugger’s eye, and he demanded, “What are you doing?”

Jacunski played dumb and replied, “What are you talking about?” as he slid the band under his arm.

The engagement crasher stuck his silver gun into Jacunski’s stomach and ordered him to roll over, but Jacunski still managed to hide the ring.

After warning the couple, “Don’t look at me! Don’t look at me!” the thug grabbed other jewelry off of Nagase’s fingers, a family-heirloom Rolex watch from her wrist, and $125 from Jacunski, which he had been planning to spend on dinner.

On the one hand you have “Hey Ho — You Owe!”. On the other we see “Hey! Ho! Let’s Sue!” Now care to guess which is the Post and which is the Times?

With the foundation set, and the hourly rates are next:

There are no heralded restaurants or strobe-lit nightclubs nearby. The area has no tourist attractions. Finding a yellow cab would be akin to spotting a U.F.O.

Still, a hotel is in the final stage of construction in a remote stretch of Hunts Point, wedged between the Sheridan Expressway and the Bronx River. Neighbors of the four-story, butter yellow building, which will have at least 60 rooms, include a body repair shop, a boiler repair outfit and a junkyard.

But rather than hailing the hotel as an economic boon to the gritty industrial area, community leaders wish it would simply go away.

“Who in their right mind is going to come from Oklahoma and stay in a location like that?” demanded Francisco Gonzalez, the district manager of Community Board 9. “It’s a deleterious location.”

Central among local concerns, said Albert Alvarez, chief of staff to City Councilman Joel Rivera of the Bronx, is that “this hotel, opening up in an area that’s pretty much desolate, is going to be a haven of prostitution and drugs.”