No comment necessary:

Mayor Bloomberg swore he wouldn’t run for a third term — and then he did. He recently promised he wouldn’t seek a fourth term, but Thursday wouldn’t rule that out either.

Asked if he’d be interested in making it 16 years at City Hall, Bloomberg responded, “The law does not permit it.”

. . .

Later Thursday, Bloomberg spokesman Stu Loeser pointed out that the mayor in June said he won’t seek a fourth term — “period.”

Notably, it was Loeser who, back in January 2008, insisted: “The mayor is absolutely not seeking a third term.”

They are coming to get us, and no one is paying attention to the true danger:

It was one of those accidents inevitably described as one in a million: A New Yorker strolling down a leafy path crossed by thousands each day is hit on the head and critically injured by a rotted-out tree branch that snapped under its own weight off a massive pin oak tree.

The branch was four inches thick and fell 20 feet on Wednesday morning, putting a gash in the man’s skull, damaging his upper vertebrae and causing a partial lung collapse. The man, Sasha J. Blair-Goldensohn, 33, began to show preliminary signs of consciousness on Thursday, responding to verbal commands, said his mother, Gwenda Blair, in a phone interview.

. . .

People passing by the site of the accident, near the entrance at Central Park West and 63rd Street, gave a fairly consistent interpretation of the previous day’s events: One in a million accidents are a fact of life in a city of more than eight million people. Plummeting tree branches, most added, are somewhere near the bottom of their daily worries, below falling construction cranes and rogue pedicabs, not to mention the more mundane concerns of everyday life.

“It wouldn’t keep me out of the park,” said Katina Zachmanoglow, 52, as she sat in the shade of a large oak. “It’s too isolated of an incident to be concerned.”

“I’d probably be more concerned about a pigeon doing something to me,” she added.

“I’m more afraid of manholes,” said Sarah Crocker, a 27-year-old musician, cooling off after a jog.

The headline of the day is “Williamsburg wall denounces World Trade Center attacks” though I’m not sure that’s exactly right . . . I guess walls are just a lot less sentimental these days:

Cops are looking for the un-patriotic — and not very creative — neighborhood wall-scrawler who commented on one of the worst days in the city’s history with the words “F–K 9-11.”

The mean-spirited missive reportedly popped up on a wall on South 5th Street between Bedford Avenue and Berry Street on the night of July 28, outraged residents said.

Bats, in the Bronx:

They began emerging from the darkest corners of Van Cortlandt Park a few weeks ago: dark, V-shaped, furry blurs, barely visible against the night sky. With a few effortless flaps of their wings, the creatures buzzed over Broadway at speeds faster than any local bird.

“What the heck was that?” David Moreno, 29, asked his girlfriend when he first saw the animals gliding high above the Parade Ground. Tracking their movements, he eventually realized what he was seeing. “Hon, I think those are bats. Could there be bats in the Bronx?”

The answer, city wildlife experts say, is yes. And now is the perfect time to glimpse the rarely seen, much mythologized creatures. Little brown bats — the most common type in the city — have been making daily flights above Broadway and the Van Cortlandt Mansion throughout July, freshly rested after a season of hibernation.

Normally there isn’t much point in pointing attention to legislative bills that may or may not ever be voted on, much less passed, but here’s an important one that everyone should get behind:

A bill introduced today in the state Legislature would, if passed, profoundly change the way alcohol is sold in New York. Among its provisions:

• Allow stores that currently sell beer (supermarkets, convenience stores, etc.) to also sell wine and liquor.
• Replace the State Liquor Authority’s licensing system with medallions that could be sold to another operator if a business closes.
• Allow liquor stores to sell “complementary” items including snacks, mixers, etc.
• Permit liquor stores to open as early as 8 a.m. and close as late as 3 a.m. (9 p.m on Sundays).

Bloomberg gets Colin Powell — who hasn’t lived in New York since he was growing up in the Bronx — but even with that high-profile “endorsement,” Bill Thompson is now just ten points behind:

City Controller William Thompson has narrowed the gap between him and big-spending Mayor Bloomberg to 10 points in a new Quinnipiac University poll — down from a 22-point margin just a month ago.

Bloomberg would win 47% of the vote in a hypothetical matchup compared with 37% for Thompson, the poll found — versus the 54-to-32 lead he had in mid-June.

“Now there’s a little life in the mayoral race,” said Quinnipiac pollster Maurice Carroll. “Thompson is closer than Democrat Fernando Ferrer was at this point in 2005.”

Bloomberg’s campaign shrugged off the poll numbers, saying they seemed to be influenced by a wording change. Last month’s poll called the mayor an independent, but the new one noted he is running as an independent and a Republican.

And then there’s Tony:

Some colleagues question Mr. Avella’s temperament and world view. He often acts, they say, as if he is the smartest person in the room, and he has a temper. He also evinces little interest in national or international affairs.

They act like that’s a bad thing! A mayor isn’t supposed to be interested in international affairs. A mayor needs to be primarily interested in fixing potholes. Any port in a storm . . .

The $170 million High Line project is a great way to raise property values, so it makes sense to find new ways to pay for all those thin wooden planks that will surely have to be replaced sooner rather than later:

Facing crowds that are much larger than expected and with the recession putting a crimp in fund-raising, the High Line’s founders are proposing a business improvement district that would tax nearby property owners.

“We want to make sure we can keep maintaining the High Line to this level that has worked so well,” said Friends of the High Line co-founder Robert Hammond. “We’ve been talking about it for a while, but now it’s becoming more of a necessity.”

Hammond said that weekend crowds have averaged 20,000 visitors a day, while weekdays typically draw between 6,000 and 10,000 visitors — about four times as many as predicted before the park’s opening on June 9.

With the added crowds have come higher maintenance costs, Hammond said.

. . .

A business improvement district would raise about $1 million a year, leaving Friends of the High Line to come up with the balance from donations and fund-raisers.

The annual fee for the owner of a 1,000-square-foot apartment would range from $30 to $90, depending on where they live.

“When we were planning the park, we didn’t know we’d be in the middle of a recession when it opened,” Hammond said, adding that the group has raised enough money to be able to keep up with the costs for the next year.

Do you ever wonder why the city took such an interest in a 15-foot-wide $170 million project? I do, too.

Location Scout: High Line.

In this tough economy, a young person is forced to explore internship opportunities as early as he possibly can:

A subway rider says he got the shock of his life when he peered into the cab and saw a kid behind the controls alongside the driver.

“I saw him driving. He couldn’t have been more than 8 or 9,” said Jules Cattie, 41. “That has to be the craziest thing I’ve ever seen.”

Cattie, a lawyer who lives on the East Side, said he spotted the child after he got into the front car of a Lexington Ave. express train Sunday.

“I was just in shock,” he said. “I thought, ‘This is really dangerous.’”

The Metropolitan Transportation Authority yesterday said it has launched “a vigorous and thorough investigation” into the charge.

And if the MTA has its way, there will be fewer outrageous subway stories to share with friends and family:

To dramatize the effects of budget cuts on subway cleanliness, the head of New York City Transit on Monday described a recent incident in which someone used an entrance to the Rector Street station in Lower Manhattan as a public bathroom.

“We are in a situation where, between 4:30 a.m. and noon, we are not staffed to deal” with that, the president of New York City Transit, Howard H. Roberts Jr., said at a meeting with the board of the Metropolitan Transportation Authority. (Mr. Roberts’s exact choice of words, which included a relatively graphic description of the events, elicited grimaces from many of the spectators.)

The Daily News confirms it was “human feces,” obviously the best kind of feces.

Seems like bad luck to release doves on your wedding day that end up stranded in the park, clinging to life:

More than two dozen helpless albino ringneck doves — presumably released into the wilds of Queens as part of a wedding celebration — were clinging to life yesterday in a stand of trees after surviving a weekend of storms, heat and predators.

“People are looking to celebrate something joyful, and here they have birds that have never flown released into the air. They have no knowledge of how to find food, and they will literally starve to death,” said Rita McMahon of the Wild Bird Fund.

The birds were found Saturday in a tree near the park and next to the New York Hall of Science, numbering as many as 45 at the start of the weekend.

Location Scout: Flushing Meadows-Corona Park.

It’s not so much the fault of geese or even some turtles that will have their way with us but rather the worms, proving yet again that we need to stop the food chain in order to save ourselves:

Federal wildlife officials studying ways to prevent potentially fatal bird strikes, such as the one that forced a US Airways jet to make an emergency landing in the Hudson River in January, are focusing on mustard, which repels a favorite snack of birds — worms.

After it rains, earthworms crawl onto the runway at La Guardia and JFK airports, providing a smorgasbord for hungry birds, who can then get caught in plane engines, researchers said.

Guys like this. And then you get to learn more about their ideas for homeland security:

He obsessively references his reading, spouting off his take on philosophers such as Nietzsche and religion and motivational authors like Anthony Robbins and Robert Greene.

“You can talk to me about any topic in the world, especially philosophy and theology. I can break down Buddhism, Taoism and Shintoism, any religion there is, and explain how it literally all means one thing,” he said.

Since deciding to run for mayor of New York City, Burck started watching Fox News for hours on end and reading such books as Bill O’Reilly’s “Culture Warrior” and “A Documentary History of the United States” by Richard Heffner.

. . .

After his daily reading, Burke, who lives in his girlfriend’s town house in a pleasant gated community with her three children, straightens up the house, dusts, vacuums, takes out the garbage and, time permitting, touches up the white paint on the walls with a tiny brush.

“If you have an environment that looks chaotic and s- – -, it changes who you are,” he said.

He is so into cleanliness that he will pick up other messes he comes across.

“If I go to the gas-station bathroom, I clean the toilet if it’s a mess,” Burck said.

. . .

He routinely runs 10 miles a day. When he is on the elliptical exercise machine, he reads his six-page list of 30 affirmations, a rambling, cosmic wish list.

No. 5: “I have the No. 1 reality show in the world!!!”

No. 21: “I go the distance for the populations of the world.”

No. 27: “My NYC penthouse has glass ceilings and walls!”

Despite his Spartan lifestyle, his goals center on making billions and becoming a revered world figure. He says he wants to be bigger than the pope or Michael Jackson in the 1980s.

I don’t know which is more annoying — that an enterprising parking space hoarder discovered a way to prevent people from parking in a legal space or that parking enforcement cops are really this uninformed:

Motorists have been parking their cars for years in three spots between the Catherine Scott Promenade and Seashore Restaurant. Now, many have been slapped with tickets even though the Department of Transportation deemed a “No Standing” sign at the location bogus.

. . .

After seeing pictures of the “No Standing” sign which was attached to the utility pole with sheetrock screws, a DOT spokesman said that the sign would come down.

“This sign is illegally posted and it will be removed,” said DOT spokesman Montgomery Dean on July 17.

Those who have been utilizing the spots, many patrons of the Seashore Restaurant at 591 City Island Avenue, were shocked to receive $115 parking summonses.

“A bunch of retired and active police officers and I have been meeting in the Seashore Restaurant for years and using those spots, which can hold roughly three cars,” said City Island resident and retired NYPD lieutenant Bob DiMartini. “We were parking there because they were legal parking spaces.”

DiMartini said all of that changed when three people he knew received summonses for parking in the spaces.

“It is a real Department of Transportation sign,” DiMartini said, “but it does not belong on the pole.”

. . .

“It is the first restaurant when you come onto the island,” DeMartini stated. “They have their parking attendants put out cones to direct traffic, where the three spots are located.”

The problem when you cast yourself as a scold, er, worldwide environmental leader, is that you open yourself up to charges of hypocrisy:

In just the past week, the city-owned SUVS that hustle hizzoner around the city were timed idling from 10 minutes to more than an hour eight times, The Associated Press reported.

Bloomberg strengthened the city’s anti-idling law earlier this year, allowing just three minutes of idling. Environmentalists praised the law as the nation’s toughest. But the Mayor’s SUVs are exempt from the law because they are considered emergency vehicles.

“We’re doing our best,” to reduce idling, Bloomberg spokesman Stu Loeser insisted, noting the SUV’s are supposed to park in the shade so engines don’t have to run the air conditioning.

Most of the vehicles were clocked in mild temperatures last week and were parked in the shade — but the engines were still on.

Hyperlocal website jacked after letting domain expire, hilarity ensues:

In a sharp reversal from the Rover’s previous incarnation as a hyper-local news and commentary blog, the new Web site consists of incoherent ramblings that seem like they were written from, well, halfway around the world.

A July 17 post extols on imaginary Bay Ridge eateries like “Purple Haze,” allegedly an Italian restaurant “tucked away in the serene ambience of Cherry Bay in the South East of Bay Ridge,” and the made-up “Hotel Prime Sweden,” which allegedly serves a popular meatball dish in the so-called “Columbia area” of Bay Ridge.

In a piece titled, “Bay Ridge, all set to stand tall,” the pseudo-Rover claims the neighborhood is undergoing an “increase in immigrants, especially the Irish and Italians,” while a post titled, “The place to be” describes the nearby neighborhoods of “Green Park, Rock Avenue and Slopebush.”

This is only a sampling of the peculiar reportage that has turned the once-savvy community blog into a bizarre hub of misinformation — and Web-connected Ridgites aren’t happy about it.

“I don’t get it. You must be blogging from an alternate universe,” a commenter named Tara exclaimed after a particularly strange article touted fictional Bay Ridge stores like “Eva Mall Stop,” “Electronica Mall,” “Sparkle,” and “Jacy’s.”

But the new Rover told The Brooklyn Paper that he’s trying as hard as he can to cover Bay Ridge — even though he’s doing it from Greece.

“We intend to bring the site back to [its] previous glory either by keeping it [on] our network and updating it often, or giving it to someone interested [in] it,” said Stelios Vathrakokoilis, who noted that he decided to purchase the site because his grandfather was one of the first Greek immigrants in Bay Ridge.

“When I saw the site being filled with filthy ads and having lost all the content it used to have, I decided to pay the price and try to at least bring the old content back and then to add new articles,” he said. “Although it is hard for me to keep the standards the old site had, at least I try.”

If Thompson and Avella can’t do the job, maybe the Naked Cowboy can:

The Naked Cowboy, in a statement announcing the official launch of his candidacy tomorrow, said his platform would include a stimulus plan for small businesses.

“No one knows how to do more with less than yours truly, and that’s the kind of thinking I plan on sharing with my fellow New Yorkers when you elect me,” he said, promising new ideas on tax breaks, tourism, gay marriage, transit and homeland security.

One, unless you’re comparing Nazis to actual Nazis, refrain from using Nazi comparisons, because that’s just, as they say in Gaelic, “meshuganah.”

And two, never, ever, ever allow anyone to be able to use a headline like “REP. CAROLYN MALONEY APOLOGIZES FOR USING ‘N WORD’,” even if you are just repeating what someone else told you.

Hmm . . . actually I can think of a few cooler things, but to each his own:

The only thing cooler than a pool party on a summer night in New York City is a secret pool party.

And the only thing cooler than that, as a few enterprising developers recently discovered, is a secret pool party in a pool made out of a Dumpster on the banks of the Gowanus Canal in industrial Brooklyn.

. . .

“The water’s amazingly fresh, for swimming in a Dumpster,” said Alexis Bloom, a documentary filmmaker from TriBeCa, after doing a few laps. She compared it favorably to the pool at Soho House, an actual urban country club.

So much leadership, it hurts:

New York City Mayor Michael Bloomberg says the governor should dispatch state troopers to haul state lawmakers back into session. He wants them to approve the bill giving him authority over city schools.

I hope the City Council cooperates during what will surely be a smooth third term . . .

Now with 50 percent less leadership! Mayoral Control apparently won’t be taken up in Albany before September:

It was another setback for the mayor’s legislative agenda in Albany, where he has been repeatedly thwarted by lawmakers who complain that he employs a my-way-or-the-highway approach.

The failed negotiations over the school control bill were a replay of similar battles the mayor has fought in Albany in the last few years — like his campaign to construct a stadium on the West Side of Manhattan and his plan to charge drivers a fee to enter the busiest parts of Manhattan.

“The mayor’s people are telling us they will not budge, they will not accept anything that isn’t their version of the bill,” said Senator Bill Perkins, a Harlem Democrat who is one of several senators from the city calling on the mayor to accept the changes. “We live in a democracy, not a dictatorship.”

He’s still campaigning about “getting the job done” or something, right?

Taking its cue from the Parks Department and Board of Education, the Long Island Rail Road recently instituted a new volunteer program to encourage community participation and trim costs:

A witness has told police that a Long Island Rail Road engineer let a passenger operate a train bound for New York City.

MTA Police Chief Michael Coan says the train ran smoothly and no one was injured.

The witness told police that he saw another passenger in the cab without the engineer during part of the run on July 2.

The double-decker train left Port Jefferson at 6:45 a.m. It normally has about 400 passengers and goes up to 80 mph.

OK, I’ll bite . . . it’s the pizza. There are a lot worse reasons to run for office than the opportunity to sample pizza in every borough:

[City Councilman John] Liu is most readily known among the press corps in Queens for his overbooked schedule and uncanny ability to rattle off reporters’ phone numbers from memory. But in an interview with TimesLedger Newspapers about his ambitions for comptroller, Liu displayed a lesser known trait: pizza aficionado.

“I eat pizza almost every day,” Liu said, while taking a bite of his second slice of cheese pizza at Amore Pizza in Flushing. “That’s one of the best things about running for a citywide office: I get to sample pizza from all over the city. No matter where you are in New York, there’s always at least one pizza place.”

Liu’s discerning taste quickly became apparent as he rattled off the equivalent of his cheers and jeers list of pizzerias.

“VIPizza, yes. That’s a good place. You know what else is good up at the Whitestone Shopping Centeri Pizza Chef, you should try that one,” Liu said. “But one place you should never go, and I won’t mention names, but there’s a place right across from the Empire State Building that’s just awful. How they can even have the audacity to call that pizza is beyond me.”

Liu also dismissed the popular John’s of Bleecker Street.

“That’s not a real pizza joint,” he said. “There’s a clear difference between a pizza joint and a pizzeria that is more of a restaurant.”

And big props to Liu for having the stugots to publicly diss John’s. He may earn a vote or two from that.

Pleasurecraft docking in that big oil spill between Brooklyn and Queens:

It’s one of the most polluted waterways in New York — a fetid stew of oil, sewage and sludge.

But Newtown Creek is paradise for Max Mulhern.

The 47-year-old London-based sculptor is spending part of his U.S. vacation docked at the notorious waterway separating Brooklyn and Queens as part of a quirky family boat trip.

“I like to stay off the beaten path,” Mulhern said on Thursday aboard his 40-foot sailboat. “It leads to much more interesting encounters.”

Keeping his boat tethered to a crumbling cement wall in an industrial section of Long Island City has another key perk: he’s staying in the city rent-free.

Mulhern, an accomplished skipper on an artist’s budget, seeks out the desolate and sometimes very dirty nooks as he travels along the East Coast en route to Maine.

On this, his second such boating trip in as many years, Mulhern has already spent two days docked at another unlikely locale, Coney Island Creek.

Location Scout: Newtown Creek.

I don’t know, but I doubt it would involve setting off firecrackers in front of Starbucks, as is alleged:

When a homemade bomb constructed from fireworks explosives, a plastic bottle and electrical tape was set off outside a Starbucks coffee shop on the Upper East Side early on May 25, the police initially thought the explosion might be linked to three others with similar profiles.

But on Wednesday, after the arrest of a Chelsea teenager in the Starbucks attack, the police said there was no connection between that attack and the three others. Instead, the Starbucks bomber had his own agenda, the police said: to emulate the assaults on corporate America planned by a character in the movie “Fight Club.”

The teenager, Kyle Shaw, 17, was arrested Tuesday night and charged with first-degree arson and first-degree criminal possession of a weapon, the authorities said.

“His statements indicated he was launching his own ‘Project Mayhem,’ ” Police Commissioner Raymond W. Kelly said at a news conference on Wednesday, referring to a plan hatched by the protagonist of “Fight Club,” played by Brad Pitt, to sabotage corporations by destroying property. Mr. Shaw had told a friend to “watch the news on Memorial Day,” May 25, Mr. Kelly said.

. . .

Mr. Shaw’s affinity for “Fight Club” was well known.

“He saw the movie and he read the book,” Mr. Lewis said. “He wanted to watch the movie in our English class in the 11th grade. We were discussing existentialism in class, and he suggested we watch the movie as an example. We ended up watching ‘I Heart Huckabees.’ “

If only for newspaper ledes like this:

As mayoral control of city schools teetered on the brink Tuesday, an angry Mayor Bloomberg said state senators should stay in Albany until they put him back in charge.

Is it Williamsburg or Big Rock Candy Mountain? Hahahahahahaha:

Heroin-addict hobos from around the country are overrunning hipster haven Williamsburg — living in stalled luxury condo projects in the trendy Brooklyn neighborhood.

The newcomers, who call themselves “gutter punks,” are stirring outrage among residents and shopkeepers who charge the bums brawl on the sidewalk, shoplift and shoot heroin in trendy cafe bathrooms.

“It’s like St. Marks in the ’70s,” said Williamsburg activist Philip DePaolo[*], referring to the notorious East Village hangout. “It’s the bad old days all over again. There’s crack and heroin all over the neighborhood.”

The squatters, from middle-class families, hop freight trains to the city, where they can earn up to $150 a day panhandling in Manhattan. At night, like plenty of other borough commuters, they return to their homes: grubby hideaways inside boarded-up lots that pock the once-booming neighborhood.

“I’ve got to sleep somewhere, and I might as well do it in Williamsburg,” said Stuart, 22, a Florida college dropout.

The admitted alcoholic and heroin user makes $15 an hour panhandling in Union Square, holding a sign that reads “Traveling Broke and Sexy.”

“The girls here like it that I’m dirty and I ride trains,” he added.

*He’s gotten a couple of mentions recently; Honey, is the BS detector still in the garage?

Is Norman Lear still alive? If so, he should start working on the pilot because it’s a sit-com waiting to happen:

It’s an impressive space they live in, and one that is decidedly “grown-up” for a neighborhood teeming with party-loving youths who share messy apartments four or five to a lease. They have two floors. High ceilings. Terrace off the master bedroom. Brand-new everything, including granite countertops in the kitchen. By any measure, their domestic life is one that any young couple living in New York City would envy, with the exception, perhaps, of one small detail: They have a roommate.

His name is Juan Carlos “J. C.” Villars, and he was sitting on an adjacent couch with his legs kicked up on an oak-colored coffee table, a stubbly faced fellow in a dark blue dress shirt and jeans fiddling alternately with a set of hex head wrenches and a controller for the Nintendo Wii.

Mr. Bronstein, 31, a marketing consultant in dark-rimmed glasses (you might also remember him as a former editor-at-large at FHM magazine, or from Road Rules season four), and Ms. Hoge, 27, a pretty event manager for Lincoln Center who wore her brown hair clipped up, said that they couldn’t imagine ever not living with Mr. Villars, 32, an engineering project manager — even if, one day in the not-so-immediate future, marriage and kids entered the picture.

“We talk about not moving, and we talk about not imagining J. C. leaving,” said Mr. [Jake] Bronstein, who’s been close friends with Mr. Villars for more than three years, longer than he and Ms. [Kristina] Hoge have been dating. “So I think, by transitive property, that all adds up to getting married and still staying with J. C.”

“We’ve joked about it, and none of those things seem like a reason why we’d wanna get rid of him,” Ms. Hoge said with a laugh.

“I can’t even imagine how I’ll ever get there, quite honestly,” Mr. Bronstein said. “How I’ll ever get beyond . . . this.”

How about five dollars:

Loyalty apparently has no limits: Di Fara’s Pizza has raised the price of one slice to an astronomical $5, but devoted customers continue to gobble up the cheesy fare.

. . .

According to the pizza-centric Web site Slice, $5 for a plain slice is believed to be the highest pizza price outside of an airport or ballpark. Value seekers might want to invest in an entire Di Fara’s pie, priced at $25, or a round pie, at $30, the site notes.

Just last year, Di Fara’s raised its prices to $4 a slice. At the time, the shop said the increase was long overdue, and critical to cover the costly fresh ingredients.

Longtime customers remain unfazed. Some, like Park Slope resident Mitch Feldman, didn’t even notice the increase until queried by a reporter. “It’s certainly a lot of money, but then again, there’s pizza and then there’s pizza,” he said. “I’d rather pay more and get a better product.” He conceded his limit per slice would be $10.

Location Scout: Di Fara Pizza.

It’s not good enough to willingly give unions 4 percent raises and then come back with the argument that they were somehow forced to do the same for managers:

A little before 5 p.m. on Friday, when much of the City Hall press corps was headed home for the weekend, the Bloomberg administration disclosed the raises — 4 percent retroactive to March 3, 2008, and another 4 percent raise effective this past March 3.

Senior aides to the mayor stand to gain the most. Deputy mayors, for example, will receive raises of more than $15,000. The salary of Patricia E. Harris, the first deputy mayor, will rise to $245,760, up from $227,219. Edward Skyler, the deputy mayor for operations, will make $212,614, up from $196, 574. The mayor’s press secretary, Stu Loeser, will earn $200,096, up from $185,000. The mayor himself takes a $1-a-year salary.

Aides to the mayor said the increases were long overdue. Traditionally, City Hall staff members, ranging from lawyers to secretaries, have received the same raises as members of District Council 37, the city’s biggest municipal labor union. Last fall, the mayor gave the union workers back-to-back 4 percent raises, but withheld raises from managers because of the souring economy.

Thompson should have said something along the lines of anyone can placate the unions with 4 percent raises in an economic downturn — we really need Bloomberg for that?

Kickball, dodgeball and now cardboard tube fighting.

Location Scout: McCarren Park.