Until then, you’re basically an idiot:

Support for a fast food ban in New York is growing among city lawmakers after the Los Angeles City Council passed an unprecedented bill Tuesday that would make the addition of new fast food restaurants in certain areas of the city illegal for at least one year.

“People are literally being poisoned by their diets — LA’s idea deserves serious consideration as we look for holistic solutions to a serious problem. A moratorium may help stem the problem,” Council Member Eric Gioia, who represents Queens, said in a statement yesterday.

*I’m guessing the Pistachio Crusted Duck Foie Gras Terrine (menu) is just as “bad” for you as a Big Mac.

**Three words for you: Foie Gras Napoleon.

Then it’s “goodbye, pork pie hat”:

No one outside the pub that night would loan me a cell phone to dial 911. Crying, I went inside and borrowed a phone from Melvin. Two uniformed cops responded to the call, a man and a woman, young and as unsympathetic as the patrons at the bar — who hugged me in greeting most nights — and now wouldn’t look me in the eye.

“Nobody knows you,” the cops said. “Nobody saw anything,” they said.

“It’s always like that in there. Someone gets stabbed in the backyard and nobody saw nothing, nobody knows nothing. It’s a matter of time until someone is killed here, and we can shut the place down. What’s a woman like you doing in a dive like this?”

“I love the jazz,” I said.

They looked at me like I was crazy.

. . . stay for the Joni Mitchell trivia:

When the ferry docked at Staten Island, a wave of tourists funneled down the ramp and made a U-turn to board the same boat they had just gotten off.

Few seemed to have heard of anything worth sticking around for in New York City’s southernmost borough. Only a handful ventured over to the makeshift tourist kiosk at the ferry terminal.

“Yes, can you tell me where is Alcatraz?” one woman asked.

Andrew Yuen, 22, who was on duty at the kiosk, maintained a chipper demeanor in the face of such demoralizing questions. He cheerfully handed out maps and brochures, and directed a few people to the red faux trolley outside.

“There’s a tour bus that just opened three weeks ago,” he told one couple from England.

A man in a red vest picked up on Mr. Yuen’s cue and rushed to hand out a flier that begged, “Don’t hurry back on the ferry! New! Discover Staten Island Tour.” The salesman pointed to three small photos of unrecognizable tourist destinations and promised, “You’ll see this, this and this.”

The tour, Staten Island’s newest year-round attraction, is operated by Gray Line New York Sightseeing, which also runs bus tours of Manhattan and Brooklyn. In an hour, visitors get an overview of the island’s north shore. The $15 tour stops at places like the Snug Harbor Cultural Center; the house of Alice Austen, a pioneering photographer in the 19th century; and the Staten Island Zoo. Riders have the option of getting off at any of these places and catching the next trolley an hour later, but one tour guide said that most choose to stay in the bus.

“We’ll just wait to see the Bronx Zoo,” Karim Pacheco said.

. . .

What Staten Island may lack in breathtaking skyscrapers, it makes up for in historical tidbits, most of them involving celebrities. The tour drove by the cream-colored stucco building of the Mandolin Brothers guitar shop, which has been visited by the likes of Jimmy Buffett, George Harrison and Suzanne Vega.

“Joni Mitchell wrote a song called ‘Song for Sharon’ that starts, ‘I went to Staten Island, Sharon, to buy myself a mandolin,’” Ms. McGann said into the microphone.

After passing Wagner College, where Joan Baez’s father taught, the bus merged onto the Staten Island Expressway. Later, Ms. McGann pointed out the Stapleton station of the Staten Island Railway.

“That’s where Madonna filmed her music video for ‘Papa Don’t Preach,’” she said.

. . .

Gray Line declined to say how many people had taken the tour so far, saying it often takes up to five years before a new tour catches on. But the company is optimistic that the numbers will grow as Staten Island — once reputed for its enormous Fresh Kills landfill, which has closed — earns some credibility in the tour books.

“It’s a huge market,” said Eva Lee, Gray Line’s tour guide manager. “And they should be educated that Staten Island is important.”

How’s this for a silvery lining on the white film:

The murky waters of Brooklyn’s Gowanus Canal have caused the demise of a baby whale dubbed Sludgie, stunk up an entire neighborhood and even once caught on fire.

Someday, they may also save your life.

At least that’s what a pair of New York biology professors believe after doing research on the waterway considered by many to be the most polluted, putrid and repugnant place in the city.

New York City College of Technology Profs. Nasreen and Niloufar Haque say the key to combating heart disease, Alzheimer’s and even the AIDS virus may exist in a white film full of bacteria in the canal.

“One of the things we found is that it has a very potential effect as an antibiotic,” Nasreen Haque said Wednesday.

The Haque sisters began researching the Gowanus three years ago equipped with a team of elite divers willing to plumb the depths of the canal — and a hypothesis.

“If organisms can survive in such an area, they must be producing something that protects them,” Nasreen Haque said.

The divers pulled samples of the white gunk, which is a combination of bacteria, microbes and other chemicals, from under the canal bed. The Haques took the samples to a lab.

“What we suspected turned out to be true,” Nasreen Haque said. “Extracts from the microbes in the water proved to be potential sources of antibiotics or inhibitors.”

. . .

Haque said she and her sister found secretions from microorganisms — “some of which operate like antiobiotics” — in the white gunk.

The Haques are testing some of the agents to see if they are able to fight the type of bacteria that leads to staph infections.

Nasreen Haque hopes the substances could be used in anti-inflammatory drugs capable of battling heart disease, among other serious disorders.

Location Scout: Gowanus Canal.

Maybe it’s not Obama’s year after all — people in New York have started chewing tobacco:

On a recent Friday evening, two New York City gentlemen in their 20s were sitting at Vol de Nuit, a Belgian beer bar in the West Village. After some conversation, they removed a couple of small, tea-bag-like packets stuffed with tobacco out of a circular black plastic container the size of a hockey puck and, between sips of Pilsner, placed them inside their respective upper lips.

First came the burning sensation, followed by a slightly unpleasant taste, and then, the nicotine buzz.

“It combines the cleanliness of not smoking with the pleasure of tobacco,” said one of the men, who wished only to be identified by his first name, Lucas, of the substance, a product imported from Sweden called “snus” (rhymes with “loose”). “It’s like a secret. Nobody really has to know you’re doing it.”

In a city where the act of lighting up in a bar or restaurant increasingly seems a part of ancient history, where smokers now huddle in angry little knots under scaffolding, shunned by polite society, could snus be the up-and-coming vice of choice?

“We sell out of them like candy — it’s very popular,” said Mario Chebly, manager of the smoke shop Shisha International on West Fourth Street, of packages of snus, which retail for a recession-friendly $5 apiece (some stores are now pricing cigarettes at $10 per pack). It was a little after 2 p.m. on a Sunday afternoon, and Mr. Chebly was standing beside a refrigerated display case of General brand snus, flanked by shelves of Marlboros and Dunhills. He’d sold 14 containers of the moist oral tobacco to “nice, good-looking, professional people” since opening at around 11 that morning.

. . .

The use of snus brings a certain class, if that’s possible, to this consumer category. It’s quite discreet, and unlike the chewing tobacco or dip favored by baseball players, doesn’t require spitting. And while snus tins do come with the requisite warnings of mouth cancer, gum disease and — yikes! — tooth loss, for some nicotine addicts, it seems like a slightly healthier alternative to hacking up a lung each morning, or smelling like they just bathed in an ashtray.

. . . I’m pretty sure people would avoid them:

A survey of subway toilets found that nearly all the loos in Brooklyn, Queens and Manhattan stations were either locked or so poorly stocked and maintained that they were virtually unusable.

The review — by Brooklyn Assemblyman Dov Hikind — of 18 restrooms in three boroughs found 10 were locked and four of the open restrooms lacked toilet paper.

Only two, on Roosevelt Island and the Church Avenue F train station, were stocked and open — but the latter was being used by transit workers in an area inaccessible to straphangers, according to Hikind’s report.

. . .

But given the conditions of some bathrooms, riders may want to keep their distance. An assessor actually walked in on “two men engaged in sexual activity” during one bathroom evaluation, the report said.

Your teachers’ sex lives, for example:

One day in early May, Michael Soet, the principal of the International High School in Brooklyn, took over the 11th-grade social-studies classes for the day. The juniors had been learning about McCarthyism, and Mr. Michael, as he is affectionately known by his students, saw an opportunity to elaborate on some of the themes of the class by doing something that he had been waiting for just the right moment to do. He announced to his students that he is gay.

“I thought it might fit in with the lesson about paranoia and making assumptions about people just because they are different,” Mr. Michael says of the timing. He had already alerted his staff and invited them to participate in the discussion, which several teachers did. He’d also spoken with Brian Ellner, a senior counselor to Schools Chancellor Joel Klein, and gotten his support. Still, Mr. Michael couldn’t help but feel nervous at first.

. . .

When Mr. Michael came out to his ninth-grade history classes the following year, Ian David Aronson, a filmmaker making a documentary about the school, was there to capture it on camera. He ended up turning the footage of it into a separate 22-minute DVD entitled Did You Know That Mr. Michael Is Gay? The film comes with a teacher’s guide for educators who want to start a dialogue about homosexuality and tolerance in the classroom.

In the movie, the students first appear shocked by Mr. Michael’s announcement—their eyes widen and one boy says “What?”, though he is promptly quieted down by the other kids. Mr. Michael then explains why he decided to tell them and encourages them to ask questions. The students take advantage of the invitation (first question: “How do you feel now that you told us that you are gay?”), and Mr. Michael answers potentially awkward questions like, “Who’s the man and who’s the woman?” (both people share cooking and household chores, he explains) and “Do you think that you would change if you met a girl that you really love?” (Probably not, but you never know because life is funny.)

The bad old days return to the South Street Seaport:

A mystery odor wafting through the seaport’s residential neighborhood for the past few weeks has restaurants reeling, homeowners gagging and tourists left holding their noses.

“It’s disgusting — like rotten fish left out on a sidewalk for a year,” said Venanzio Pasubio, 33, owner of ll Brigante, a restaurant on Front Street.

With the Fulton Fish Market long gone, theories abound on the origin of the odor. Some think it’s illegal dumping; others point fingers at the Waterfalls art project; one person insists that it’s the preserved corpses on display at “Bodies, the Exhibition” nearby.

. . .

Locals describe the smell as “dead rat,” “stinky cheese” and “raw sewage.”

“We’re supposed to be up and coming and trendy,” said resident Ellen Murphy. “Now we just smell like fish.”

The Post brought in smell scientist Dr. Avery Gilbert, author of “What the Nose Knows,” to investigate.

“Yes that is fish,” he said about the elusive smell. “But it’s also yeasty, like bread.”

He said the culprit is most likely “amines,” which is the fish-like smell of “proteins breaking down.”

Location Scout: South Street Seaport.

Did TBS stop showing reruns of Larry Clark’s 1995 masterpiece, “Kids” or something? Ew, ew, ew, ew:

It was after 4 a.m. on a Sunday morning last month when Sophie and Jeff drunkenly stumbled upstairs to his East Village walk-up. They had met a week earlier at an art gallery opening, and now, after a few drinks at Gallery Bar, followed by a nightcap and a joint at Jeff’s apartment, they were having sex when the condom broke.

“We pinky-sweared we were both clean, and continued having sex,” recalls Sophie, 24, a painter who lives on Avenue A and who is not on birth-­control pills. “In the morning, we got Plan B [an over-the-counter emergency contraception pill] and split the cost. It was kind of romantic. I’m sure he was sleeping with other people, but the condom had been his idea, so I wasn’t worried about STDs because I figured he was a regular condom user.”

. . .

Among the single New Yorkers in their twenties and early thirties interviewed for this story (all of whom have slept with at least three people in the past three months), it’s usually when they sleep with people they know that they forego protection, or rely on Plan B as their Plan A. Nadia, 25, a writer who lives in Carroll Gardens, says she’s taken the morning-after pill “probably 15 times in the past three years. I got pregnant for the first time recently having sex with an ex and we didn’t use a condom. But the abortion didn’t make me scared of sex, and my behavior hasn’t changed because of it,” she admits.

. . .

For some, it is simply about getting off. “I’ve had sex with two people since breaking up with my girlfriend four months ago, and I haven’t used a condom,” says Rob, 27, who works in finance and lives in Brooklyn Heights. “It’s not the smartest thing, but I’ve never gotten off with a condom on.”

. . . the typical easy target:

Hizzoner said yesterday uncollected taxes on cigarettes sold on Indian reservations could spare straphangers at least one of two proposed fare hikes to close a $700 million hole in the MTA’s budget.

“That just alone would replace one of those fare increases,” said Bloomberg, who was in New Orleans for the National Conference of State Legislatures. “We want to make sure that the state goes and finds alternative sources.”

. . .thanks to the economic contributions of Center Moriches and Bridgeport:

New data show the New York metropolitan area is the largest contributor to America’s gross domestic product, but its position at the top of the national ranking may be due more to the inclusion of neighboring economic powerhouses such as Greenwich and Stamford, Conn., than its own economic strength.

New York City actually is responsible for less than half of all economic activity in its own metropolitan area, the data show. According to the city comptroller’s office, its economic activity constitutes 43% of the region’s total economy.

. . .

The New York City metropolitan area, which includes parts of Connecticut up to Bridgeport, as well as Long Island and northern New Jersey, accounts for 6.6% of the country’s population while contributing 9.1%, or $1.129 trillion, of the country’s GDP.

The Los Angeles metropolitan area came in second place, contributing 6.3% of U.S. GDP or $788.9 billion. Although the New York region has 7% more people than the Los Angeles area, New York contributed 43% more to the country’s GDP.

That stupid, stupid, stupid asinine Christmas rebate back in 2005 is looking stupider and stupider now that the MTA is squawking about consecutive years of fare increases:

The subway fare is accelerating faster than a runaway express, as the MTA yesterday announced two fare hikes in the next 30 months.

Straphangers are due to get slammed by the pair of increases — totaling 13.4 percent by January 2011 — on the cost of tolls, commuter tickets and MetroCards, according to the MTA’s financial plan.

An 8 percent hike is slated for July 2009, and another 5 percent is due to be tacked on 18 months later. Added to the 3.85 percent hike enacted in March, the fare will have risen nearly 18 percent in 34 months.

“I don’t want to pay more money,” said Wendell Trupe, 49, of Harlem. “What are they doing with the money from the last fare hike? These damn people are out of their minds.”

The 8 percent increase, due to raise $202 million next year, is proposed to take effect six months earlier than originally planned. It is the first time riders have been hit with fare hikes in consecutive years since the early ’80s.

The MTA is also expecting to spring a 5 percent raise on the cost of MetroCards in January 2011 to bring in an additional $272 million that year.

“This is a function of where we are now,” said MTA executive director Elliot Sander. “The last thing we want do is to be up here right now asking for this.”

(And are we in for a similar shock after years of idiotic property tax rebates? Likely!)

. . . who will then proceed to rough up the young punk, asking him What does he think this is, some kind of Norman Rockwell tableau? No sir, this is no game. Then they’ll take him into custody:

Time was, the pea shooter was a staple of the schoolboy arsenal. Classmates and teachers made tempting targets.

But yesterday, a developmentally disabled 10-year-old who let fly on a school bus was arrested and charged with two misdemeanors.

His alleged crime was shooting a fellow pupil, a 9-year-old, in the back of the neck with a bean.

The incident occurred at 7:16 a .m., as the bus was en route to PS 373, a District 75 school that teaches children with developmental challenges.

The driver, following standard procedure, stopped the Staten Island Bus vehicle on Sobel Court between Bowen and Targee streets in Clifton, and police and students’ parents were notified, said Carolyn Daly, a spokeswoman for the company.

The child who was hit was taken to Staten Island University Hospital, Ocean Breeze, with pain and swelling at the area of impact. He was treated and released, according to a hospital spokeswoman.

The 10-year-old was arrested at 7:54 a.m. and charged with assault in the third degree with intent to cause physical injury, and reckless endangerment in the second degree for using a pea shooter while on a bus, police said.

School officials declined to comment.

While some might question whether the punishment fits the crime, one veteran law enforcement source said the actions of the police seem justified.

“To cause an injury with a weapon is an assault,” the source noted. “And, I’ve actually heard of Emergency Service Unit cops being called in for kids younger than 10 for similar situations.”

Donk Donk!

The doorman who decided to keep his job even after winning $5 million in the lottery is now reconsidering his decision:

Richie Randazzo had vowed to hold on to his $40,000-a-year job, even after becoming an overnight millionaire and in the face of what he called increasingly hostile threats from his “jealous” bosses to fire him for infractions.

. . .

Although quitting would kill his chances of collecting unemployment insurance, Randazzo isn’t exactly hurting for cash.

On Monday, when he was supposed to be at work, the doorman hit the Trump Taj Mahal casino in Atlantic City with his new gal pal, Swedish model Sabina Mari Johansson, 23.

. . .

Randazzo missed another day at work yesterday while taping a segment for TV’s “Inside Edition” and squiring Johansson around his native Brooklyn.

Meanwhile, the building’s superintendent, George Skintej, was left holding the door.

“There are problems that are going to be big problems,” Skintej said. “He’s a millionaire now. He should stay a millionaire. He’s a jerk. He’s the biggest jerk.”

Randazzo said it was his regular day off. He said he is not scheduled for a shift until Friday.

Apparently Rep. Weiner can be kind of a dick:

It started as a routine conference call. But at some point during the call, Representative Anthony D. Weiner became furious, convinced that his scheduler had not given him a crucial piece of information.

His scheduler, John J. Graff, who was in the next room, suddenly heard the congressman yelling at him through the wall.

Then, Mr. Graff recalled, Mr. Weiner started pounding his fists on his desk, kicked a chair and unleashed a string of expletives.

Two weeks later, Mr. Graff, a Navy veteran, became the latest of a sizable number of staff members who have resigned after an abbreviated stint with Mr. Weiner, a Democrat who represents parts of Brooklyn and Queens.

“I push people pretty hard,” said Mr. Weiner, who acknowledged getting upset at Mr. Graff. “And there are, from time to time, staffers who don’t take to it or just don’t like being pushed that hard. But I really regretted him leaving. He was a marine. I’m like, ‘How bad is this?’ It’s even worse than boot camp.”

It is rarely easy working for any member of Congress, with the low pay, long hours and endless politics. But Mr. Weiner, who is running for New York City mayor next year, is without question one of the most intense and demanding, according to interviews with more than two dozen former employees, Congressional colleagues and lobbyists.

Mr. Weiner, a technology fiend who requires little sleep and rarely takes a day off, routinely instant messages his employees on weekends, often just one-word missives: “Teeth” (as in, your answer reminds me of pulling teeth) or “weeds” (as in, you are too much in the weeds). Never shy about belting out R-rated language, he enjoys challenging staff members on issues, even at parties.

And, in a city saturated with transient career hoppers, Mr. Weiner has presided over more turnover than any other member of the New York House delegation in the last six years, according to an analysis of Congressional data. Roughly half of Mr. Weiner’s current staff has been on board for less than a year. Since early 2007, he has had three chiefs of staff.

Mr. Weiner’s actions as a boss of 20 or so employees, representing almost 700,000 people, offer clues about how he might handle perhaps 300,000 city workers, with eight million constituents.

. . .

The congressman says that his ferocity is simply reflective of his New York roots, and that he speaks at a high decibel level most of the time, so it may sound to others as if he is shouting. His district staff — perhaps more accustomed to an aggressive style — tends to be more steady than his Washington office.

“When you grow up in Brooklyn, you know, sometimes arguing is the sport,” he said.

Still, he admitted that he could occasionally be rough on office furniture, and said: “Very often people say things to me on the phone that frustrate me. I sometimes hang up phones with an excess amount of enthusiasm after a call hasn’t gone my way.”

Some former employees suggest that if he were elected to City Hall, the congressman might face a difficult transition to a job requiring executive aplomb and delegation. Do not be surprised, these former employees say, if a Weiner administration experiences a high degree of turnover.

Skin cancer will cause the deaths of 7,000 Americans this year, and maybe more if the most evil team in baseball has its way:

Yankee fans are seeing — and turning — red over a ban on sunscreen, which Stadium security guards say was widely expanded in the last few weeks.

Security guards collected garbage bags full of sunblock at the entrances to Yankee Stadium over the sweltering weekend, when temps hit 96 degrees and the UV index reached a skin-scorching 9 out of 10 — a move team officials said was to protect the Stadium from terrorism.

But fans baking in the bleachers and upper deck argued that the sun may be a bigger threat than Osama bin Laden.

“I was really pissed because, since I am Irish and I have a bald head, I need my sunblock,” said Sean Gavin, 40, who had to toss his SPF 30 at the gate Saturday.

“After they saw me dousing myself with it, it should have been obvious to them that it was sunblock and not some explosive.”

. . .

Four weeks ago, Stadium officials decided that sunscreen of all sizes and varieties would not be permitted, a security supervisor told The Post before last night’s game.

“There have been a lot of complaints,” he said. “We tell them to apply once and then throw it out.”

For fans who bring babies or young children to cheer on the home team, the guard had suggested they “beg” to take the sunblock in.

. . .

The Stadium does sell 1-ounce bottles of Arizona Sun SPF 15 for $5 — a huge markup that makes its beer seem cheap.

Dermatologists said that, security concerns or not, leaving 56,000 fans unprotected from potential skin cancer is “very dangerous.”

“This is especially bad for children, as their younger skin is particularly sensitive,” said Dr. Babar Rao, a specialist at the Skin and Cancer Center of New York. “Sunblock needs to be reapplied every two hours, even if you are not swimming in the ocean or pool.”

Major League Baseball even has a skin-cancer prevention program called “Play Sun Smart.”

An hour after being asked about the sunscreen ban, Yankee spokesman Jason Zillo told The Post that the rules would be changed to permit 3-ounce containers.

(And MLB doesn’t just have a namby-pamby “program” to battle skin cancer — it’s actually one of Commissioner Bud Selig’s pet projects, Selig himself diagnosed with skin cancer in 2004.)

A-Rod and C-Rod want a quick divorce:

Yankee superstar Alex Rodriguez and his estranged wife are expected to begin negotiations in the Big Apple this week, hoping to quickly settle their divorce case to avoid a public “slugfest” over money, sources told The Post yesterday.

“They’re going to try and arrive at a settlement so they don’t have a very public dispute,” said a source familiar with the situation. “The two of them are coming to New York so they don’t end up with a battle royal. It’s to avert . . . a slugfest for dollars.”

. . . and fortunately for them they can go elsewhere to dissolve the marriage, as New York is one of the few places that does not provide for no-fault divorce . . .

As on-time performance plummets amid talk that fares could rise again, the MTA scrapes the bottom of the barrel for a solution:

Overcrowded subway trains would skip certain stations during rush hour under a plan New York City Transit is considering to speed up lagging service.

One of the slowest trains, the No. 4, had an on-time record of only 70 percent in May, according to the latest statistics, underscoring the need to find solutions quickly, agency officials said.

But transit advocates immediately expressed skepticism, especially because transit officials stopped skip-stop service on the former No. 9 line in 2005.

“If you were along the part of the line that was skipped, you hated it,” said Gene Russianoff, a staff attorney for the Straphangers Campaign, an advocacy group.

. . .

No. 4 train riders were mixed on the idea.

“It’s a great idea as long as it doesn’t skip me,” said Katy Burke, 23, of Throgs Neck.

You know, the ones co-opting the white supremacist message of “not anti-black but pro-white”. This is obviously fake:

They’re straight, they’re proud and they want to beat up gay people.

Such is the mixed messages sent by the Reggae record label [name redacted so as not to encourage stupid publicity stunts] who announced this week that they’re planning a “Straight Pride Parade” in Brooklyn for late August.

The announcement came via a blog post, although the group hasn’t apparently taken any steps to make this dream a reality.

But the announcement alone may have given them exactly what they wanted -– press for their album “18 Karat Reggae 2008: Global Warming.” They have also ruffled the feathers of area Lesbian, Gay, Bi-Sexual and Transgender (LGBT) residents who have lashed out against the violent lyrics against homosexuals in their ditty “Hit Them Hard.”

The not-so cheery chestnut, written by [name redacted so as not to encourage stupid publicity stunts] -– the Reggae rapper, not the piece of office equipment -– encourages listeners to attack “all men who visit men backyard and leave all the women to starve,” according to the lyrics.

Officials from the independent record label defended the lyrics, claiming that the song is not homophobic, but “pro-family.”

Their parade is also going to be pro-family as well, they claim.

“The Straight Pride Parade is a chance for heterosexuals to gather together and proudly embrace their sexuality,” according to a statement sent out by the record label, who claims that the album has suffered financially due to criticism from the LGBT community. “Adults are encouraged to bring their children along for the celebrations, as the event will be family oriented,” the statement read.

Organizers said that the parade will celebrate “reggae, dancehall and family in love and unity.”

“I sat quietly and watched as they cancelled artists like Buju Banton, Sizzla Kalonji and Capleton,” [name redacted so as not to encourage stupid publicity stunts]’s president explained. “But when the gay community went after [name redacted so as not to encourage stupid publicity stunts] artists like [name redacted so as not to encourage stupid publicity stunts], [name redacted so as not to encourage stupid publicity stunts] and [name redacted so as not to encourage stupid publicity stunts] we decided that we must make a show of strength.”

“The Straight Pride Parade is a great idea,” said rapper [name redacted so as not to encourage stupid publicity stunts], who identifies himself as a “dancehall sensation.”

“When a song like ‘Hit Them Hard’ by my label-mate [name redacted so as not to encourage stupid publicity stunts] can be banned just because it stresses the importance of a male and a female in every family, it is a sign that heterosexuals need to wake up,” he said.

. . .

Terrance Knox, co-president of the Lambda Independent Democrats, the borough’s leading LGBT political club, said that the “so-called parade is nothing to be proud of.”

“My whole thing is that whoever you are, be proud about it,” said Knox. “But this Reggae song is steeped in homophobic rhetoric.”

. . .

Knox added that the anti-gay obsession of some reggae groups like [name redacted so as not to encourage stupid publicity stunts] raises the question of their own sexuality.

“The more these so-called artists obsess about gay men, the more they sound like tortured guys on the down low,” he said.

Just bum out everyone while you’re at it:

Marine biologists say there may be more jellyfish than usual in New York waters this year.

They say one breed in particular — the lion’s mane — showed up about a month earlier than usual. The biologists blame everything from breeding conditions and climate change for the abundance of jellyfish so early in the season.

Cornell University biologist Mark Bain says there is “widespread evidence of increasing jellyfish around the world.”

The lion’s mane are blamed for stinging athletes who jumped into the Hudson River on Sunday during the swimming stage of the New York City Triathlon.

. . . keep in mind the demographic you’re falling into:

Where can New York’s nightlife kingpins turn after they’ve conquered West Chelsea and the Hamptons? The Middle East, of course. “Dubai is right now what Las Vegas was ten years ago,” says Josh Kaiser, an owner of Pink Elephant, the 27th Street megaclub. He recently returned from Dubai, where he learned that a chic sheikh might drop up to a quarter-million dollars in a night; he and his partners are planning a branch in a hotel to open there next year.

Earlier: A Freckle On The Face Of The World.

Fortunately there are many spots on community boards and the like; work your way up:

A rent-stabilized apartment in New York is a precious find. Which could explain the indignation that greeted the disclosure that Representative Charles B. Rangel was occupying four of them in the luxurious Lenox Terrace towers in Harlem, where Gov. David A. Paterson also has one.

Throughout the city, the well-connected (or just plain lucky) have been able to snare such prizes and retain them over the years.

But few rental buildings in the city have been as hospitable to public officials, past and present, as the Rudin Management Company’s high rise at 215 East 68th Street, where a shouted, “Good morning, your honor!” could turn every head in the lobby.

A fancy white brick monolith of 608 apartments between Second and Third Avenues, the 33-story structure, built in 1962 — when a seven-room unit went for $615 a month — is home to an unusual concentration of luminaries of the public and private sectors.

Some entered as rent-stabilized tenants; some retain that status, while others are paying deregulated prices, though often below what today’s bloated real estate market could command.

Former Mayor David N. Dinkins lives there, as did a predecessor, John V. Lindsay. Norman Goodman, the New York County clerk, and Burton B. Roberts, former administrative judge of State Supreme Court in the Bronx, are tenants, as are Betty Weinberg Ellerin, former presiding justice of the state’s Appellate Division, First Department, and Justice Jacqueline W. Silbermann, administrative judge of the civil branch of State Supreme Court in Manhattan. Also Howard Safir, a former police commissioner; Thomas Von Essen, a former fire commissioner; and John Roland, the former WNYW-TV/Channel 5 anchor.

Richard Aurelio, a deputy mayor under Mr. Lindsay, used to live there. So did Andrew P. Beame, a lawyer and grandson of another former mayor, Abraham D. Beame; Hazel N. Dukes, the former president of the Off-Track Betting Corporation who pleaded guilty to embezzlement; and Melvyn Altman, a lawyer who did time for racketeering. Tony Bennett once lived there, and so did the songwriter Sammy Cahn — until, his widow says, they were forced out to make way for a preferred tenant.

In fact, some residents say, there are still so many boldface names on the roster you could practically establish a city government right in the building.

“As you mention it, there are a lot here,” said Justice Roberts, in seeming wonder.

“It’s a small line between happiness and misery”:

Diamonds may be a girl’s best friend, but a Staten Island jeweler needed some of the city’s Strongest to be reunited with her $20,000 earrings.

Haya Sharon got her three-carat earrings back with a big hand from city sanitation workers, who helped her find the baubles in the former Fresh Kills landfill.

. . .

Sharon’s needle-in-a-trash-mound saga started on Tuesday when she put the earrings — an 11th anniversary gift from her husband — in an empty jar of cleaning solution.

A worker at Sharon’s jewelry store tossed the jar in the trash — and soon it was in the back of a garbage truck.

Sharon called the Sanitation Department the next day and officials were able to narrow down the area in the former landfill where trash from her neighborhood was about to be compacted and shipped out of state.

A few smelly and sweaty hours later, someone spotted the jar — with the jewels still inside.

“It’s a small line between happiness and misery,” Sharon said.

And once that happens, we’ll finally be able to realize white asphalt:

Black rubber mats designed to break a child’s fall turn blistering hot in the summer, soaring to higher than 165 degrees, a Daily News investigation found.

Doctors at two city hospital burn units reported seeing 16 to 18 young children with playground burns a year, mostly from the mats under junglegyms and sliding boards.

“I have nightmares,” said Anne Casson, whose toddler son, Will, ditched his shoes at Carl Schurz Park on the upper East Side one day last May.

“He stepped onto the black mats and was screaming hysterically,” Casson said. “When I picked him up, the skin was just hanging off his feet.”

The baby spent four days in New York-Presbyterian Hospital Weill Cornell, where doctors administered morphine for intense pain.

The News, accompanied by NYC Park Advocates, took the temperature of mats under junglegyms at playgrounds in all five boroughs last Friday.

“It is unconscionable that the city continues to install products in playgrounds that hurt the most vulnerable park users — small children,” said Geoffrey Croft of NYC Park Advocates, who took a 166.9-degree reading on the mats at Carl Schurz. “How many more have to get hurt until someone is held accountable?”

. . .

Parks Commissioner Adrian Benepe said signs were posted in playgrounds warning against going barefoot.

“We’re not going to remove [the mats],” Benepe told The News. “Our playgrounds are the safest in the world.”

Reyhan Mehran, a marine scientist from Carroll Gardens, Brooklyn, said her son Kian Mehran-Lodge was 14 months old in July 2004 when he was burned at Van Voorhees Park.

“We cannot understand why the city wouldn’t immediately remove material that is known to severely burn children,” she said.

Come on, you know Staten Islanders get upset about this kind of stuff*:

Just about everyone on Belmar’s beaches is there for the same purpose: To lounge on the sand in a swimsuit and soak up some sun.

Until, that is, the mayor of the Jersey Shore town says something offensive to pit them against each other.

In this case, it’s the Jerseyans against the Staten Islanders, the natives against the allegedly noisome summer renters.

In the July 4 issue of his weekly newsletter, Mayor Ken Pringle talks about an “SI girl behaving badly” after she got into a fight with a peer at a club.

“As the Staten Island girl was pummeling the Boonton girl’s face, she used the hand she was still holding her drink glass in,” the newsletter reads. “Now, we’re not sure if the glass was stuck to her hand cause of all the hair spray or if this is a technique Staten Island girls learn in Brownies, but we are thankful she left her brass knuckles and straight razor in her other purse.”

The slurs occasioned a furor among Island residents who frequent the shore, even inspiring one councilman to tell people to “avoid (Pringle’s) town like the plague.”

And the newsletter didn’t only single out Staten Island girls. It also talked about “guidos” from just about anywhere — they’re “as welcome as, oh, Canada Geese” — and “blondes” who apparently told a code enforcement officer they had a mountain of garbage in the backyard because they didn’t know how to take out the trash.

. . .

Pringle said he started the newsletter last year to remind renters about the rules after people who bought houses in the area started complaining about noise from summer renters. He said the newsletter goes out to 300 or so summer tenants from the tri-state area and addresses issues such as noise, maintaining clean properties and other quality-of-life laws.

“It was designed to be funny but at the same time give them information and keep them out of harm’s way,” Pringle said. “Mainly, I try to make it enjoyable and interesting to read.”

He said the snarky newsletters have been effective and that the number of noise summonses has drastically decreased, but he added that it’s not worth the commotion he has stirred up and that this week’s newsletter will be his last. It will include an apology to anyone he offended.

Full text here:

In our never-ending quest to keep our summer renters informed and our wider readership amused, we have culled the Belmar police blotter for items of potential educational value to our readers. Which brought us to a reported incident earlier this summer in which two women had a spat in (you’ll never guess) D’Jais. Now, if that isn’t shocking enough, hold on to your seat: One of the women was from Staten Island!! (Unbelievable, right? Only one of the women? We thought all of the women in D’Jais are from Staten Island.). The other woman was from, of all places, Boonton, NJ, which according to Google maps appears to be a suburb of either Towaco or Hibernia. (We’re guessing the Boonton girl was either in D’Jais on some kind of sick bet, or was practicing for an audition on Survivor.

Then again, maybe she just happened by, saw the people on the line out front, and thought, “Cool, a costumeparty!”). Anyway, the spat ended the way most fights with SI girls do. The SI woman grabbed the Boonton woman by the hair (we’re told that in Staten Island, this is the female equivalent of a guy kicking another guy in the groin — only without the warm and friendly connotations) — and began punching her face in. We realize, so far, this is not exactly newsworthy. Journalistically speaking, “SI woman punches other woman” is right up there with “Dog bites man.” But here’s the twist: As the Staten Island girl was pummeling the Boonton girl’s face, she used the hand she was still holding her drink glass in. Now, we’re not sure if the glass was stuck to her hand cause of all the hair spray or if this is a technique Staten Island girls learn in Brownies, but we are thankful she left her brass knuckles and straight razor in her other purse.

*They can be sensitive, you know.

And we’re not talking no fun-and-games “big rock candy mountain” version, either:

Be they surreptitiously sipped from brown paper bags or openly downed from plastic tumblers at movie nights or concerts in an array of parks, drinks of all stripes and potencies surface in force, rather brazenly. And thus the hazy morning of the next summer day is often contemplated through the secondary haze of a hangover.

Citizens of New York City, welcome Brooklyn-born Steve Guttenberg back to the east coast:

About two years ago, Steve Guttenberg walked into the showbiz haunt Crustacean on Santa Monica Boulevard in Beverly Hills.

“I walked in and the maitre d’ made a big deal for me,” said Mr. Guttenberg. The Goot — as he’s known to his friends — appreciated the show. To hear him tell it, eating in public in Los Angeles is a dangerous business for an actor whose last box office hit was Three Men and a Baby in 1987.

“All of a sudden, the maitre d’ says, ‘Get out of the way!’” said Mr. Guttenberg. “And they literally threw me to the side and Tom Cruise came in. And he sat Tom Cruise and said, ‘I’m so sorry, but you know, Tom Cruise.’ And I’m like, ‘Holy fuck.’”

So after three decades in L.A., he bought a place on the Upper West Side. “I came to New York to find a better life,” he said. Uprooting took some time. The 15-year-old golden retriever he loved dearly was old and sick; the golden died a month ago. So two weeks ago, the wavy-haired, Brooklyn-born 49-year-old actor, who describes his career as a “32-year-overnight success,” finally made it back to New York City.

. . .

Mr. Guttenberg was wearing a starched white V-neck, a pair of black aviators hooked at the V, distressed jeans ripped at the knee, and some Wallabees. Textbook Hollywood-casual.

“I turned around, and took a good look at myself, and I didn’t like what I saw,” he continued. “I started to lose some of my values. Hollywood is a place where people spend more than they make to impress people they don’t like, who don’t care anyway. And I have a certain weakness of character, and I’m at this point in my life, I’m not strong enough to live there.

“I pop out of bed at 6:30. And I say my prayers, and every day have a little hot water and lemon, that’s my start,” he said. “And I go take a run in Central Park.” The other day, he met an attractive female jogger. Got her digits. They went on a date. Didn’t work out, but last Thursday he took a blond Cornell grad to the Water Club.

“Nothing sexier than a smart woman,” he said. “The Goot is on the loose.”

. . .

The Goot does have his vices.

“I indulge in wine, and I love vodka, I do,” he said. “And I love scotch, you know. And I love weed. And I love women. And I do have, you know, those … Addiction is such an overused word. Addiction is just someone famous walking around the street. It’s so whacked out, but I think that there are certainly times that I use money to make me feel better.” A couple years ago, he got in a big fight with his mom, and he bought her a $25,000 diamond necklace.

“If I feel lousy, I’ll do what the next president of the United States did: smoke a joint,” he said. “It’s documented in his book. I’ll go into a bar and down two beers. I’ll go out with women, because it’ll make me feel better. Women that I shouldn’t be around, but maybe they’ll make me feel better.”

Screw the stupid frieze:

As players were beseeched by countless members of the news media to eulogize Yankee Stadium as it hosts its last All-Star Game, those sufficiently provoked Monday were willing to discuss what they would not miss about the old — very old — ballpark in the Bronx.

Players from the past had no problem saying goodbye to the Astrodome’s rats and Candlestick Park’s hurricane-force winds. Today’s All-Stars have their own reasons to dry their eyes at Yankee Stadium’s funeral.

“The smell,” the Texas Rangers’ Michael Young said.

“The tiny clubhouse,” Justin Duchscherer of the Oakland Athletics added.

“Hitting my head on the dugout,” the Chicago White Sox’ Joe Crede offered. “Every time somebody scored or got a hit, you jumped up and forgot how low the ceiling is in there.”

Yankee Stadium is holding up about as well as any 85-year-old can be expected to, but the ballpark’s 1970s facelift has begun to droop. Players found reasons for moving on easy to come up with.

Olfactory issues led the voting, although few players were able to identify what the problem has been. Is one of Babe Ruth’s half-eaten hot dogs still rotting under one of the grandstands? Are the foul lines marked with sulfur? And how long does pine tar keep, anyway?

“Especially when it rains, the smell that comes up through the drainage system is not pretty,” said Jason Varitek of the Boston Red Sox. “It affects your sinuses, I’ll tell you that much.”

Young added: “It depends on the day. The last time we were there, which was a couple of weeks ago, a pipe burst. I was going back up the tunnel, and there was a flood — a sewer line broke or something like that. So I still have that kind of in my nose right now.”

Location Scout: Yankee Stadium.

If they let people in more often, maybe they’d see they’d get better press than the occasional Anheuser-Busch local reax story:

Local lore has it that Budweiser is, or at one point famously was, the drink of choice in Breezy Point, a flyspeck of a beach community that sits at the western tip of the Rockaways. The talk is that Breezy Point’s ZIP code — 11697 — once had the highest per capita consumption of Budweiser in the world.

And so it was with bitterness, and resignation, that many Breezy Point locals met the news on Monday that Anheuser-Busch, the St. Louis-based maker of Budweiser, was to be sold to a Belgian company for $52 billion.

“I don’t like it, I don’t like it a bit,” Mr. Dooley said. Then he raised his empty glass, which the bartender, Tom Coady, promptly refilled.

Breezy Point is overwhelmingly Irish-American, with an official year-round population of 4,226, a figure that is estimated to more than double in the summer. It is also fiercely insular, a private community that is run as a cooperative with its own security force.

A reporter and a photographer, setting out to gauge local reaction to Anheuser-Busch’s sale on Monday, were intercepted by a security guard at the community’s tiny shopping plaza, escorted back to the bungalow that houses Breezy Point’s security headquarters (along with several boxes of Budweiser cans confiscated from local teenagers), and tersely told to leave town. Officials later relented, and gave the reporter and photographer the go-ahead, so long as they promised to leave within the hour.

One hour, as it turned out, proved to be enough time to capture at least a fleeting sense of the devoutness instilled in the people of Breezy Point: They are as committed to their favorite beer as they are to their privacy. They would continue drinking Bud, they said, so long as its price and taste stayed the same.

Try explaining this PSA to your children:

City transit officials have prepared a campaign to combat deviants who grope or molest women on the subway — but have been sitting on it because of fears the ads could actually encourage sickos.

The New York City Transit campaign was set into motion after a study last year by Manhattan Borough President Scott Stringer found that 10 percent of women surveyed reported having been sexually abused in the subway and 63 percent claimed to have been sexually harassed.

Stringer recommended a publicawareness campaign, which NYC Transit quietly prepared. The agency made it as far as developing mock-ups, which never went to print.

Sources said the agency held off on launching the campaign out of fear it could actually provoke deviant behavior.

. . .

Anti-groping campaigns have been launched in cities such as Boston, where trains and buses are adorned with posters bearing such slogans as “Rub against me and I’ll expose you,” and “Flash someone and you’ll be exposed.”

The number of reported groping incidents there did rise with the campaign, officials said. Boston police said there were 38 incidents reported through June of this year compared with 17 during the same period last year — but attributed the rise to increased reporting.