Counterfeit Louis Vuitton handbags, sure. But counterfeit condoms, too? Not to sound harsh, but if you’re cheap enough to buy condoms at a 99-cent store, you probably deserve what you get:

Careful with those Trojan brand condoms from the discount store. They may not be the real thing.

Same with the Barbie doll and the Louis Vuitton handbag.

In raids in the metropolitan area yesterday, federal agents arrested at least eight people and charged them with heading a counterfeit products ring. Authorities say the ring has been smuggling into the country and then distributing massive quantities of fake brand-name goods manufactured in China, including Apple iPods, Major League Baseball and National Football League caps and Marvel comic books.

The counterfeits, which included millions of the phony Trojans, were sold for the past three years mainly in small discount stores in the area, as well as elsewhere in the country, including Texas and Virginia, according to court documents.

A spokeswoman for Church and Dwight, the company that manufactures the legitimate Trojan condoms in the United States, declined to comment on whether the counterfeit Chinese condoms could fail to prevent pregnancies or the spread of sexually transmitted diseases.

But a source familiar with the federal investigation said that while the counterfeit condoms were of inferior quality, samples had been tested and they were no riskier to use than legitimate ones.

The packaging of the Chinese condoms is almost identical to the legitimate ones, except that the counterfeit packaging is plastic, while the legitimate product is packaged in aluminum foil, said another source familiar with the investigation. “They [the counterfeiters] spent all their money on printing,” said the source.

The city of hot air actually has a fairly small carbon footprint, making Christmas back home that much more unbearable for the families of smug, self-righteous transplants:

Despite New York’s reputation as a city of avid consumption, the carbon footprint of its residents is among the smallest in America, a new report shows.

In 2005, the average New Yorker emitted 0.67 tons of carbon from residential energy consumption, the 18th-lowest amount of 100 metro areas surveyed, according to yesterday’s Brookings Institution and Regional Plan Association report, which examined carbon emissions from transportation and residential sources. The average American emitted 1.16 tons.

The New York area also had the fourth-lowest carbon emissions per capita among the 100 other metropolitan areas.

. . . and gets to the bottom of that gruesome Bodies exhibition, which, even though he liked and all, just felt funny in the end:

The company behind “Bodies . . . The Exhibition” has agreed to document the origin of the cadavers in its show at the South Street Seaport and give past patrons a full ticket refund, Attorney General Andrew Cuomo said yesterday.

“People have a right to know what they’re viewing,” Cuomo said at a news conference.

“The grim reality is that [show producer] Premier Exhibitions has profited from displaying the remains of individuals who may have been tortured and executed in China.”

There have long been rumors that the bodies are those of political prisoners.

Under the agreement, customers who can establish they would not have attended the exhibition had they known of the questions about the origins of the bodies are eligible for refunds.

Perhaps when more than the ten people who read the Metro section start caring about him then he can feel smart about hiring loyal people, but until then, I don’t think there’s much of a market for a gripping tell-all about the Mayor of New York:

Mayor Bloomberg has no use for aides who write tell-alls like the one former White House press secretary Scott McClellan published.

“I just hopefully hire people who are a little more responsible, that’s the first thing I worry about,” Bloomberg said yesterday. “I’ve always thought that when you work for somebody, you have an obligation to not write a tell-all book afterwards.”

. . . sometimes involves getting mugged at the movie theater:

A nanny and the 5-year-old son of an investment banker — enjoying an action flick at an Upper West Side multiplex — got a harrowing dose of real-life terror when a gunman robbed them in the darkened theater, the victim told The Post.

“It’s either your life or the little boy’s life,” the bandit told Marzena Drus, 27, as she clutched Nicholas Anzivino on her lap, she said.

The shocking incident happened during a showing of “Speed Racer” at Loews Lincoln Square on Broadway at West 68th Street Tuesday afternoon, the nanny said.

“It was an action part and [Nicholas] was into the movie,” she said.

“Someone comes behind me and points a gun at me and says, ‘Hand me the purse!’ I said, ‘No!’ ”

The feisty Drus said the thief just reached over her and Nicholas and grabbed her purse.

“I had the gun pointed at my head,” she said. “Then he grabbed my purse and left.”

A theater manager recovered Drus’ empty purse nearby and offered her two free tickets.

Nicholas’ mom, Stephanie Anzivino, an investment banker at Merrill Lynch, was incensed.

“It seems highly irresponsible, to put it mildly, to have someone running around in a theater with a gun and not to try to do something,” she said.

. . . are so thin-skinned these days:

A Staten Island public-school teacher was properly canned for making childish comments to his students, a state appeals court has ruled.

Douglas Lackow told one of his biology students to take a good look at the model of female reproductive organs he was holding because he “would never see one, so enjoy it.”

When a female student as Susan Wagner HS in Manor Heights yelled “Lackow sucks,” he responded, “No, you suck. Well that’s what it says in the boys’ bathroom,” court papers say.

The feral cats at JFK will be “turned over to the proper authorities” alright:

The cat and mouse game between Kennedy Airport felines and the Port Authority has come to an end — and the cats lost.

So say animal lovers who accuse the authority of backing out of negotiations to humanely deal with the hundreds of cats who roam the 5,000-acre airport.

The next stop for the furry creatures, advocates say, could be death.

“They are telling folks that they are trying to adopt these animals out, but that is patently not true,” said Patrick Kwan, New York state director of the Humane Society of the United States.

“These animals cannot be adopted out. This is an extermination program that sentences them to death.”

. . . frist check the return address. Then freak out about it:

A suspicious package with a return address in Saudi Arabia set off a police response that led to the evacuation of an Elm Park neighborhood last night and forced Little Leaguers from their baseball diamonds.

In the end, the small cardboard box was found to contain nothing more dangerous than about 20 hardcover and paperback books on myriad topics, including Middle Eastern culture and the Islamic religion.

Jacqueline DeJesus found the package, which had a shipping label from Riyadh, on the front stoop of her Princess Street home and immediately grew concerned.

“It had my eldest daughter’s first name on it and my address and that was it,” she said. “I’m Puerto Rican and American and have no family in Saudi Arabia, so I have no idea how it ended up here.”

Her daughter is married to a man who emigrated from the Middle East. But Ms. DeJesus said she wasn’t expecting any mail from overseas.

At about 7 p.m., cops evacuated Mrs. DeJesus, her family and neighbors, and stopped games in progress on the nearby West Shore Little League and Babe Ruth League fields.

The NYPD Bomb Squad responded within the hour and — after careful examination — determined that the box didn’t pose a threat.

Because yeah, this is how the Yankees roll:

Alexander Martinez, a 35-year-old Hartford, Conn., resident, made headlines last August for his remarkable feat of catching two long balls in one game. First, he grabbed Hideki Matsui’s 100th big league homer — and later, he snatched a dinger off the bat of Melky Cabrera.

Martinez said he turned over the milestone Matsui ball to Yankees security man Bill Shaw.

In return, Martinez said, Shaw promised him an autographed Matsui ball, the bat Godzilla used to hammer the historic homer and 15 tickets to this season’s All-Star Game — the last at Yankee Stadium.

Martinez got an autographed ball and bat but hasn’t seen any All-Star tickets or an authentication letter for the bat.

Despite using an attorney to reach out to the Yankees, Martinez insisted he would never file a suit against his favorite team.

“I don’t want to go there. As many times as I can tell you, I’m a diehard Yankees fan,” Martinez told The Post.

“I’m not into any money or anything like that. I just want what was promised to me.”

Martinez said he asked Shaw to put their deal in ink. But he quoted Shaw as responding: “We are the New York Yankees. When we give our word, we will do it.”

Moral of the story — perhaps the rock part was overkill:

A hulking mugger who struck twice in five hours was busted yesterday when he picked on the wrong man — a 6-footer who fought back with his fists because “it’s very hard to scare me,” police sources said.

The victim, David Breksa, 39, was slammed in the ear and bitten on the chest by his attacker, Larry Benekin, 35, who allegedly tried to smash a cobblestone over his head — after smashing another man with a rock five hours earlier.

“I turn around to defend myself,” Breksa said. “He comes at me and I punched him in the chest. He goes backward and leans down and picks up a big friggin’ rock. It was a good 20-pounder. It was one of those big cobblestones. That rock is big enough to kill somebody.”

But Breksa, of East Harlem, tackled Benekin and they went at it at 109th Street and Central Park West at 1:15 a.m.

The 6-foot-1, 240-pound Benekin managed to grab Breksa’s cellphone and run off, but Breksa chased him and hailed some passing cops, who collared the mugger and petty thief, the sources said.

San Francisco has homeless people and New York gets bees:

Thousands of years of evolution and cultivation have led honeybees to seek certain qualities in a home — the ideal being something like a hollowed-out wooden tree limb.

A few hundred years of construction by humans in New York City, it turns out, have resulted in an abundance of structures that mimic the conditions bees like best — from the water towers that dot the rooftops to the cornices and overhangs that adorn the buildings.

And each year about this time, thousands of bees swarm to those sites in the city, setting up hives and causing a certain amount of apprehension among the people who spot them.

Many calls are made to the Police Department, and are directed to Officer Anthony Planakis, 46, a beekeeper in his free time and for the last 14 years the department’s in-house expert on the subject.

When Officer Planakis joined the department in 1994 he had to fill out a form listing his areas of interest and expertise, and he put beekeeping — a skill learned from his father — at the top of the list

“New York City provides endless places that make great hives,” he says.

On Tuesday, for the second time in two days, Officer Planakis was dispatched to an apartment building in the Bronx, on the corner of Crotona Avenue and 182nd Street, where a swarm of bees had congregated to build a hive.

On Monday, dressed in a protective suit and mask, he had sprayed sugar water to weigh down the bees clustered on a corner of the three-story brick building. He then brushed the queen bee and some 6,000 of her loyal protectors into a brown box and carted them off to his personal hives in Newtown, Conn.

. . .

The largest hive he was called to remove in New York was in a forested area off the Moshulu Parkway in the Bronx, where someone had been keeping bees illegally.

“There were 12 separate hives, each with at least 60,000 bees,” he said.

The keeper was never found.

Although raising bees in New York City has long been a violation of the city health code, the rooftops make an ideal place to keep honeybees and there is a thriving illegal bee scene.

To all graffiti vandals still swimming in their daddies’ balls when the first 9/11 happened, show some respect, assholes:

Recovering the remains of Firefighter Peter Bielfeld in the ruins of the World Trade Center took nearly a year. Desecrating his memory took only a callous vandal and a can of spray paint.

The Daily News revealed the disgusting act of disrespect Tuesday — and is adding $5,000 to the NYPD’s reward for the arrest and conviction of the graffiti vandal who defaced the memorial mural to the FDNY hero.

The 9/11 victim’s outraged father Tuesday compared the aerosol assault in the Bronx to desecrating his son’s tombstone.

“It’s unbelievable,” said Ernest Bielfeld, who worked as a Daily News paper handler for 40 years. “There’s no reason to do something like that.”

The News’ contribution boosts the NYPD reward to $5,750 for information leading to an arrest and conviction of the hoodlum. Bronx artist Eddie Rodriguez spent two weeks creating the mural, which featured Peter Bielfeld, an American flag and the twin towers.

The vandal’s tag — “SIPS” — was sprayed directly over Bielfeld’s face.

“I was really hurt that somebody would desecrate something sacred like that,” Rodriguez said yesterday. “Someone had no regard for someone else’s life and what they pursued.”

The mural was painted outside a bodega where the 19-year FDNY veteran regularly bought cigars. Bielfeld had an unlit cigar in his mouth on the morning of 9/11 when he wrote a goodbye note to his family and headed to the World Trade Center.

Although he was assigned to a firehouse in his native Bronx, he was in the FDNY’s medical office in Brooklyn on the morning of the attacks. He borrowed a colleague’s gear at Ladder 10 in Manhattan and went to his death.

New tenement dwellers scraping by in new tenements:

Drinking and eating carry their own complications. Especially if you are, say, Noah Driscoll, a 25-year-old project manager for a Chelsea marketing company whose salary is comparable to what a rookie teacher might make.

“For a little while I only ate grapefruits for my lunch,” said Mr. Driscoll, who pays $400 a month on his college loans, “because they have a lot of nutrients and they got me through the day.”

Mr. Driscoll has since started packing two peanut-butter-and-jelly sandwiches for lunch. Dinner might be two baked potatoes. On a recent Monday, it was franks and beans. On a good night, he might spend up to $6.

“To live like a human being on the salary that I make is very difficult in this city,” he said. “You’ve got to forget about brands, you’ve got to forget about, you know, what your mom made you growing up, and take what’s out there.”

Mr. Driscoll’s rent is reasonable: $725 for a room in a converted loft space that he shares with five friends in Gowanus, Brooklyn, near Park Slope. Most of his friends, however, earn far more than he does, and Mr. Driscoll is guilty of that quintessential New York sin: coveting thy neighbor’s salary. One recent night, his roommates went to Peter Luger Steak House. Mr. Driscoll waved them goodbye and stayed home.

. . .

Allison Mooney, 27, whose first job in the city was in publishing, often skipped dinner before going out, and instead took along mixed salted nuts in her purse. When things got really tight, she occasionally sneaked a flask filled with vodka into bars. Other times, she reluctantly resorted to flirting.

“I find in other cities guys are more apt to buy you drinks and expect nothing from it,” Ms. Mooney said.

“Here, if they do buy you a drink, which is rare, you have to suffer through flirtations. It’s true,” she said, adding, “It’s really cheesy.”

. . .

Sarah Avrin, a 23-year-old music publicist, said she was struck recently by the sacrifices that some people make to sustain their New York lifestyle when one of her friends endured the long, painful process of selling her eggs.

Let’s, uh, brown bag a toast:

The Brooklyn Bridge was the toast of the town last night, but Mayor Bloomberg was one of just a few allowed a drink in its honor — and even that turned out to be illegal.

Bloomberg . . . drifted away from a closed reception and into Brooklyn Bridge Park — in violation of the city’s open-container laws.

“Is that wine in your glass, Mr. Mayor?” a Post photographer asked Bloomberg.

“Yes, it is,” he admitted. Bloomberg’s spokesman, Stu Loeser, later said, “It was an inadvertent mistake.”

The good news is you get a view from above right down the avenue. The bad news is you have to cut back all those damn trees:

Howard H. Roberts Jr., the president of New York City Transit, said on Thursday that he is considering bringing the two-level buses back to Fifth Avenue.

Mr. Roberts said his interest was based on simple economics. Double-deckers can carry about as many people as the longer bus that the transit agency now uses, according to Joseph Smith, senior vice president for the agency’s bus operations. But they cost less to maintain because they lack the complicated connector and accordion apparatus that links the two portions of an articulated bus.

Those who rode the double-deckers in their heyday have fond memories.

“Back in the days when money was important, it was great to take a date out and you could have a nice ride up and a nice ride back on a summer evening,” said William J. Ronan, 95, who first rode the buses when he came to New York during his student days in the 1930s (three decades later, he became the first chairman of the Metropolitan Transportation Authority).

“It was sort of a genteel way to travel and perfectly respectable,” he said. “Between that and the Staten Island Ferry you could have a wonderful date.”

Mr. Ronan said the seats in front on the upper deck were considered the best ones. “You tried to get up in the front seats, which were great because you had the view up the avenue,” he said.

. . .

Mr. Ronan tried to bring the double-decker buses back in 1976, when the transportation authority bought eight of them from a British company to be used in a pilot program. [Transit spokesman Charles F.] Seaton said the buses had mechanical problems and were off the road after about two years.

But there were other problems, including on the continuation of some Fifth Avenue routes where the buses travel along Riverside Drive.

“The problem then was all the trees along Riverside Drive had grown such that the branches were in the way of the bus,” said Robert A. Olmsted, who worked at the authority with Mr. Ronan. If the buses are brought back, he said, “they’d have to do some clearance runs and trim some trees, which may upset some people, too.”

Which is to say, when they start imitating Celebrity Rehab, we should talk, but until then:

Life is imitating television on the Upper East Side, where an anonymous eighth-grade girl has founded a gossip Web log modeled after the one that is the backbone of “Gossip Girl.”

While on the TV show the fictional parents and school leaders appear oblivious to the catty Gossip Girl blog, the real-life provocateur, who calls herself Miss ITK (for Miss In The Know), has caused an incredible stir. School hallways are buzzing with the name of her URL; eighth-grade girls across the city are reportedly breaking down in tears, and, in the final climax, an unknown force has pushed the site offline.

Before it was shut down earlier this week, the blog had generated more than 300 comments, with some posters remarking on Miss ITK’s accuracy and others begging her to kill the blog, describing many tears shed and some friendships broken.

Miss ITK chronicled the social lives of what she described as the class of 2012’s “elite A-list.” One post described two girls’ attempts to revamp their images: one through eye-coloring contact lenses and another by dancing suggestively at a bat mitzvah. Another crowned a couple “our very own Queen and King.” Later, a post cataloged the class of 2012’s “A List” and “B List.”

Parents and students said the blog seemed like a deliberate copy of the one that is the heart of “Gossip Girl,” and whose author, Gossip Girl, narrates the show.

Like the television Gossip Girl, Miss ITK had her own signature salutation. On television, it’s “XOXO.” In real life, the line that reverberated with students was “Hello my butterflies.”

It’s like a punch in the gut, like hearing that sweet 18 year-old you’ve been dating is actually more like 16:

For two decades, the city’s official directory, the Green Book, has stated definitively that the five boroughs encompass nearly 322 square miles of land.

Not so, Mr. Miller and his staff recently discovered: New York’s land area actually totals 304.8 square miles.

The shrinkage generally is not the result of rising sea levels from global warming or beach erosion or any other act of nature. It is largely the work of man, mainly Mayor Michael R. Bloomberg, whose yen to precisely measure everything from poverty to traffic congestion led the planning department to recalculate the city’s land mass.

Acting on the mayor’s mandate, Mr. Miller and his team spent months analyzing thousands of digitized, high-resolution aerial photographs of the squiggling shoreline and other geographic features to calculate the city’s size anew.

“This is not a reflection of a change in the physical area, but a refinement of the measurement,” Mr. Miller said.

Seventeen square miles may not seem like much. But consider:

• 17 square miles could accommodate 13 more Central Parks, nearly a third of Washington, D.C., about three dozen versions of Vatican City and nearly two dozen replicas of Monaco.
• If 17 square miles were populated at Manhattan’s density, New York might be home to as many as 1.1 million more people.
• At the price of an acre in Midtown, as recently computed by the Federal Reserve Bank of New York, 17 square miles could be worth $1 trillion.

The Vermontization of the Lower East Side:

The National Trust for Historic Preservation designated the Lower East Side of Manhattan as one of the 11 most endangered in places in America on Tuesday.

But for some people, the designation only makes explicit the obvious: that the wide swath of Manhattan well known for its immigrant communities and countercultural vibe has long ago given way to rampant real estate development and gentrification.

In a news conference at Seward Park High School, the National Trust warned that construction of new hotels and apartment towers threatened to efface the area’s immigrant past.

“The community, with little recourse for protection,” it said, “is reeling from the recent destruction of its cultural heritage, including the defacing of several historic structures and the loss of First Roumanian Synagogue. Slapdash and haphazard renovations have led to the destruction of architectural detail, while modern additions to historic buildings sharply contrast with the neighborhood’s scale and character.”

I maintain that in retrospect, it was probably for the best:

Mr. Bloomberg is often a man of quaint politeness in public. But in recent days, as he has endured setbacks on projects crucial to his legacy, another Michael Bloomberg has spilled into view: short-tempered, scolding, even petulant.

The mayor has watched the collapse of his congestion pricing proposal and the blocking of his plan to link teacher tenure to student test scores. He is hoping a revived deal to develop the far West Side of Manhattan, another crucial part of his vision for transforming the city, can become a reality.

And, with his presidential hopes shelved, the often fawning attention from the media has faded, too.

Suddenly, as he enters the twilight of his term, he is openly dressing down commissioners, taking obvious shots at officials who disagree with him and invoking the royal “we” while refusing to answer questions whose topics or phrasing he finds distasteful.

. . .

In some respects, associates say, Mr. Bloomberg’s anger stems from incredulity that systems do not function as they should, and from never fully adjusting to the last-minute, secret deal-making culture of politics, which he believes is a bad way to conduct business.

. . .

Mr. Bloomberg’s mercurial nature has been emerging most clearly in his dealings with members of the news media, with whom he has recently come to resemble the “Seinfeld” Soup Nazi of municipal government.

At a news conference on May 1, Mr. Bloomberg snapped at a reporter who tried to ask him about a discrimination lawsuit at Bloomberg L.P. “What does this have to do with the budget?” he asked, even though he had already offered his views on other issues. “Next time, don’t bother to ask us a question. Stick to the topic. Everybody else plays by the rules; you’ll just have to as well.”

Last week, at another news conference, he cut off a reporter who used the word “maintain” in a question, calling the word inappropriate because of its confrontational connotation.

“Next time you have a question, you want to insinuate that I lie, just talk to the press secretary,” he said, jabbing his finger toward the reporter. “I don’t think we have a question for you.”

. . . now let’s work on that icky acronym:

Regina Massaro is an animal-rescue worker without borders.

From junkyards in Jamaica to gritty industrial lots in St. Albans, Massaro seeks out some of Queens’ roughest addresses with one goal in mind — fighting animal overpopulation.

Earlier this month, Massaro, founder of the nonprofit group Spay Neuter Intervention Project, or SNIP, journeyed to a Springfield Gardens used-car lot, where Bobo, a 9-month-old mastiff with a tan coat and a black muzzle, patrolled the yard.

Though a giant in the making, Bobo acted every bit the attention-loving puppy when Massaro approached the gate. “He came right up to the fence, wagging his tail and licking my hand,” said Massaro, 58, of Maspeth. “He’s like a big baby.”

Working dogs like Bobo are often treated by their owners as property, not as pets, and play a large role in overcrowding at the city’s teeming shelters.

“I believe the junkyard dog is the root cause of dog overpopulation,” Massaro said before taking Bobo to be neutered at a mobile veterinary clinic operated by the American Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Animals.

Massaro, who founded SNIP (www.snipnyc.org) in 1996, travels to industrial areas in Queens and Brooklyn looking for dogs like Bobo. She does the same with feral cats, trapping them in vacant lots and seedy areas behind shopping centers.

For Massaro, who runs SNIP with three volunteers on a shoestring budget, arranging for 50 dogs and cats a month to be spayed or neutered demands sacrifice.

. . . congestion pricing for taking crying children into a movie theater:

Clearview Cinemas on First Avenue and 62nd Street last week stopped offering reduced-price tickets for children and seniors, charging $12 across the board — even for a matinee.

And several other theaters are also expected to raise children’s ticket and concession prices to make up for their cost increases, The Post has learned.

“I feel like everywhere I go, I’m getting nickeled-and-dimed these days,” said Jack Miller, 40, who took his 7-year-old son, Benjamin, to see “The Chronicles of Narnia: Prince Caspian” at the Clearview yesterday afternoon, only to find that a children’s ticket had shot up $2.50.

“Everything is expensive,” he griped.

Davina Kahlon, a 31-year-old nurse from Manhattan who saw “Narnia” with her son Jahan, 2, called the price jump “horrible.

“I don’t think it’s fair,” she said. “It’s bad enough we [adults] have to pay $12. Children will be children. He may fall asleep or start to cry, and I might have to leave early. It’s not just.”

Rita Richardson, 46, said she plans to boycott the theater.

“They charge more to go to the movies here than in Times Square,” she said. “I won’t be coming here anymore.”

Making matters worse for the kiddies is the fact that a large tub of popcorn costs 50 cents more at the Clearview than it did last year — up to a whopping $6.50 — a concessionaire said.

A ticket seller in the box office said the admission-price increase started last week as a pilot program for theaters in the area.

(”Pilot program” . . . what else did they call a “pilot program”? Oh yeah.)

Losing an alcohol license didn’t kill Club Kalua, but eminent domain might:

The strip club Sean Bell visited the night he was killed in Jamaica could be demolished as part of a larger redevelopment plan for that area of Queens.

The Greater Jamaica Development Corp. is moving forward with plans to turn Jamaica into a transit-oriented development center and is assembling sites on which to build new hotel, “affordable” housing to lure some of the 35,000 employees who work at nearby John F. Kennedy International Airport, and additional parking.

The development corporation has already targeted a number of nightclubs for demolition, and sources with knowledge of the plans have suggested Club Kalua could be next on the chopping block.

The president of the development corporation, Carlisle Towery, said the area’s positioning as a nexus of the Long Island Rail Road, the AirTrain to JFK airport, three subway lines, and dozens of bus lines makes Jamaica an ideal place to build an airport village.

“It is highly accessible. A lot can get to it and a lot goes through it and we are tying to make it a destination, not just a transfer point,” he said.

Mr. Towery said there are no fixed plans to condemn Club Kalua, but he made his feelings about the establishment clear.

“It’s been a social blight for years,” he said. “What its future is, I don’t know. But it certainly doesn’t belong here.”

And Mayor Bloomberg kills two birds with one stone, eliminating the source of Sean Bell and solidifying his legacy in one fell swoop. Funny how that works out sometimes.

So that explains it:

New York City Transit has spent close to $1 billion to install more than 200 new elevators and escalators in the subway system since the early 1990s, and it plans to spend almost that much again for dozens more machines through the end of the next decade. It is an investment of historic dimensions, aimed at better serving millions of riders and opening more of the subway to the disabled.

. . .

The New York Times spent months examining the system, the money spent on it and the oversight by management — conducting dozens of interviews and reviewing thousands of pages of documents. Through an analysis of more than 10 years of records not previously released by the transit agency, reporters were able to track breakdowns, repair calls and maintenance for every escalator and elevator in the system.

What emerged was a portrait of startling shortcomings.

The more than 200 mechanics who maintain and repair the subway’s elevators and escalators receive as little as four weeks of training, a fraction of what they would receive in other transit systems or in private industry. And transit officials concede the system is so inefficient that many elevator and escalator mechanics spend barely half of their shifts actually working on troubled machines.

Managers often rush balky elevators and escalators back into service without identifying the underlying causes of mechanical problems, leading to more breakdowns.

Many problems occur because of basic design flaws or mistakes made during the construction of the machines, when contractors worked with little or no oversight. Those conditions left many of the machines virtually broken from the outset.

“They don’t have enough competent people with the proper training,” said Michele O’Toole, the president of J. Martin Associates, which the transit agency hired in 2006 to evaluate its elevator operations. “It all reflects back to qualifications, training, capabilities.”

Transit officials say the subway presents unique challenges.

Elevators and escalators are spread out over a far-flung system, requiring more mechanics and slowing responses to breakdowns. There has been little standardization of parts, so mechanics must cope with a bewildering hodgepodge of machinery. And the machines, which operate 24 hours a day, are subject to all sorts of abuse: Elevators become makeshift bathrooms, and escalator steps are pounded by heavily loaded hand trucks.

. . . is run through ExxonMobil’s gigantic supercomputers and reflected in mysterious gas prices around the city:

Major oil companies use secret mathematical formulas to figure out the varying price of gas from one city to city — even as specific as one neighborhood to another.

Gas stations owned by large oil companies, such as ExxonMobil, determine the cost of gas by creating “geographic pricing zones” based on competition from nearby pumps, traffic patterns and the makeup of the local population.

Oil companies claim they use the formulas to confine competition to the smallest possible area in order to maximize prices at each outlet.

But independently owned stations set their prices based on the owner’s assessment — factoring in how much it costs to buy the gas from a distributor and the price of his nearest competitors.

. . .

The cost of crude itself accounts for about half the retail price at the pump. The rest of the cost is for refining, shipping, taxes and the cost of running the station.

But why does gas cost so much in Manhattan compared to Staten Island?

“There are fewer gas stations in Manhattan,” [New York State Petroleum Council lobbyist Cathy] Kenny said. “And there’s even fewer of them since owners figured out that selling the land is a lot more profitable than selling gas.”

This past weekend, the priciest place to get gas in the city was at a Shell station in Brooklyn and an Exxon station on Staten Island, both of which were charging $4.25, according to newyorkgasprices.com.

Lord, these people need to get out of their heads, and perhaps off that island, too, but at the very least get out of the neighborhood for even an afternoon — there are many nice parks, for example — or maybe they should think about a trip to the beach, or take in an afternoon ballgame . . .:

Some are celebrating it as a reclaimed pedestrian space and a welcome amenity for local residents and tourists. Others, like longtime neighborhood resident Erik Wensburg, are questioning the “mammary motif” of the circular bollards. But everyone agrees that the once-chaotic and hazardous five-way intersection at Gansevoort St. and Ninth Ave. is no longer what it used to be.

Less than a month ago, construction was completed on the new Gansevoort Plaza in the heart of the historic Meatpacking District. The cobblestone intersection, formerly a bottleneck clogged by truck and taxi traffic, now is home to an array of scattered tree planters, stone slabs conducive to sitting and bollards with white reflectors on top resembling, in the eyes of some, a female breast. Meanwhile, traffic flow has been reduced to a single lane.

The project is the fruit of a community-based effort that began in 2005 with the recognition that the Meatpacking District was moving farther away from its traditional uses and toward a new identity as a center for nightlife and upscale shopping, with all the traffic that accompanies such a change. A group of community leaders formed the Greater Gansevoort Urban Improvement Project to spearhead a ground-up initiative to address their concerns about traffic, safety and preservation of a neighborhood that had been designated a historic district by the city’s Landmarks Preservation Commission in 2003.

. . .

The plaza is a temporary D.O.T. project that will continue to be shaped by community input and available funding down the line. The streetscape improvement was paid for out of D.O.T.’s budget, with contributions by [the Meatpacking District Initiative] for additional plantings. M.P.D.I. has assumed responsibility for the plaza’s maintenance for the meantime. However, M.P.D.I. ultimately hopes a formal business improvement district, or BID, is approved for the area, after which a funding stream will become available for streetscape maintenance. M.P.D.I. is four months into the roughly 18-month process to gain approval from the city to form a BID.

For now, M.P.D.I. will be distributing a survey to local residents and business owners to solicit feedback on the plaza’s design and use. The organization will then compile these results and submit them to D.O.T. for review. The space is currently being considered for outdoor events and a weekly Greenmarket.

Some active residents, however, have already informally let their opinions be known, expressing concerns over the choices of materials used and design scheme. Marge Colt, vice president of the Horatio Street Association, pointed specifically to what she called the “defacement” of the cobblestone street, the “senseless” traffic pattern and the “conflicting” seating designs.

“I think the whole thing is an abomination,” Colt said. “It looks like it has been thrown together by people who have no design experience. And the breasts must go.”

And now they don’t know what to do now that alternate-side parking has been temporarily suspended while the Department of Sanitation replaces street signs this summer:

Park-Anywhere Day arrives Monday, with the indefinite suspension of alternate-side parking rules in Park Slope, and no one knows just what to expect, with bring-it-on bravado and it-can’t-get-any-worse resignation meeting just-you-wait-and-see predictions of the worst. The city announced the suspension in Park Slope this week, to give workers time to change 9,200 parking signs. In the meantime, drivers may park along the curbs of Park Slope without being forced to move their cars as they did up until now, often twice a week for three hours at a stretch.

Rosemary Fine, 47, a coffee shop owner born in Limerick, Ireland, plans to greet the new day in high style.

“I’m going to pop open a bottle of Champagne, sit in my car and celebrate!” she said on Thursday. “What if that’s what all the Park Slopers did on Monday, we went into the streets with Champagne?”

But elsewhere, outrage.

Another seasoned immigrant, Marlyse Henchoz, who did not give her age, stopped sweeping in front of her home and said, “Terrible.”

“Whoever thinks up these schemes, I don’t know what they are thinking,” she said. “That’s why I want to move back to Switzerland. They couldn’t do this. We have referendums and we vote.”

. . .

The Department of Transportation estimates that the suspension will last a few months. So after the Champagne is gone, there will be several lingering questions about what people are and are not allowed to do with their vehicles.

City law prohibits “street storage” of vehicles: “When parking is not otherwise restricted by posted signs, no person shall park any vehicle in any area, including a residential area, in excess of seven consecutive days.”

The police said Thursday that they did not have records of how often such a ticket was written, or how such a violation could even be tracked, short of cumbersome surveillance of every vehicle.

. . .

One benefit of the new signs in Park Slope will be that alternate-side rules will now be in force only 90 minutes once a week, down from three hours and twice a week.

But even that concept seemed to backfire with some residents, like Barat Ellman, 49, a university Bible instructor.

“I work out and plan my work schedule based on car parking,” she said. “Ninety minutes may be too short of a time to be able to get things done and move the car. We’ll see.”

What should I wish for, Mother?

A gentleman caller:

Administrators at St. Peter’s Girls High School have mandated that juniors wanting to attend the May 22 prom must be escorted by male companions.

Even students unaffected by the sudden policy change at the New Brighton school said they don’t understand the couples-only rule.

“I just heard about it now; they can’t go unless they have a date,” said senior Deanna Stropoli, 17, of Dongan Hills, who is attending tonight’s senior prom with a boyfriend. “I think it’s kind of messed-up. Some people aren’t going to be able to go.”

There is no such restriction on the senior prom.

School interim principal Florence Bricker wouldn’t comment this week on the policy, which is a change from previous years, and St. Peter’s R.C. Church Monsignor James Dorney said it was strictly a school matter.

Other Staten Island all-girls high schools polled by the Advance said yesterday they have no such policy for their junior proms.

The city Department of Education doesn’t have a formal policy governing proms at public schools, but a spokeswoman said yesterday that a dates-only dance would be “highly unlikely.”

“It wouldn’t happen in public schools — everyone’s invited,” said DOE spokeswoman Margie Feinberg, although she said prom arrangements are up to each school.

St. Peter’s always has declined to divulge its student numbers, but the total is thought to be less than 300. The couples-only policy might have been enacted with an eye to boosting attendance at the prom.

But seriously, who has a prom on a Thursday? When did that happen?

I’ll tell you what — if cab drivers quit being such assholes and accept credit cards, I’ll gladly look the other way if they want to curse at each other:

A New York City cab driver has been fined $1,000 for launching a foul-mouthed tirade at another cabbie. The confrontation occurred Oct. 8, 2007, on the West Side of Manhattan when neither driver had a passenger.

Driver Malik Rizwan honked at fellow cabbie Zbigniew Sobczak after Sobszak cut him off, prompting Sobszak to jump out of his cab and use a vulgarity repeatedly.

Rizwan called the police and accused Sobczak of assault. A city administrative law judge found Sobczak guilty of verbal harassment, not assault, and recommended a $350 fine.

But Taxi and Limousine Commission Chairman Matthew Daus, in a ruling last Friday, increased the penalty to $1,000 and a 30-day suspension.

There was a time when cab drivers were given more leeway with language.

A 1982 legal decision in a case called TLC vs. Baudin found that a “driver’s use of profanity during a fight with a pedestrian was not misconduct given cognizance to the realities of life in New York City.” But Daus, in a letter to Sobczak, said, “To the extent that decisions issued before my tenure, such as TLC vs. Baudin, may be read to overrule the penalty of license revocation for verbal harassment or abuse, I would override those decisions.” “The city has changed over the years,” Daus said in an interview Wednesday. “It’s become more civil. … The days when drivers can curse at each other are over in my opinion.”

Then again, not all agencies agree:

Using profanity may be unprofessional for cabdrivers or newscasters, but cops are often free to shoot their mouths off, city officials said.

In fact, a well-placed F-bomb can be part of good police work, and may even help prevent the use of deadly force, said Andrew Case, spokesman for the Civilian Complaint Review Board.

. . .

The NYPD patrol guide calls on cops to be “courteous and respectful,” but does not explicitly forbid profane language.

Of the 4,024 complaints lodged against officers for “discourteous” (as opposed to offensive or bigoted) language in 2007, only 6.6 percent were substantiated.

And in 7.6 percent of cases, choosing to swear and protect was not only acceptable, but actually warranted, Case said.

The rest of the complaints were either unfounded or impossible to prove.

“If [cops] have used ordinary language and a person continues to do what was improper, [the officers] are allowed to raise the tone of the exchange,” Case said. “It is called using verbal force.”

How does a firefighter afford a Cadillac SUV? That looks like an Escalade. Prices start at $56,890:

A Cadillac SUV registered to Firefighter Christopher Santana was photographed parked just 3 feet from a fire hydrant on a Bronx street.

And in what seems to be a pathetic attempt to dodge a ticket for the gross — and potentially dangerous — parking violation, a handwritten note was placed on the dashboard alongside a worthless fire union parking placard. “I’m really a fireman,” the note read. “I work in Engine 46.”

“Ask Traffic Agent Maria Daniel,” the note continued. “Thank you for your courtesy.”

The black SUV — boasting the vanity license plate BRAVEST1 — was parked on Van Cortlandt Park South at the corner of Gale Place in Kingsbridge on Sunday afternoon. Neighbors said the car was frequently parked in that spot. It was stationed just 3 feet from the fireplug, far less than the 15 feet required by city law.

“Every firefighter in the City of New York knows not to park in front of a hydrant,” said one high-ranking FDNY source. “Don’t they teach that on the first day of the [Fire] Academy?”

“Could you imagine if a fire engine couldn’t reach the hydrant because of that guy?” the source asked.

Santana, 34, is assigned to Engine 46 and has been with the Fire Department for more than four years, according to an FDNY official.

More gloating, this time on the part of the Daily News:

You might want to think twice before you take any sweet-tooth recommendations from the New York Post.

Just Wednesday, the fact-challenged paper crowned a Staten Island bakery named Cake Chef as the best in the city for classic black-and-white cookies.

Too bad the Health Department shut the place down last week for a string of sanitary violations.

The Post crowed that the bakery on Jewett Ave. is “fabulous” and “one of the best in the city,” but inspectors ordered the place shut last Thursday after it racked up 62 violation points.

The place was deemed “conducive to vermin,” there was evidence of mice and workers’ personal cleanliness was rated “inadequate,” according to the report.