From Colonial Williamsburg to . . . Colonial Williamsburg:

It is hereby noted that a cooper — a maker of wooden buckets, tubs, butter churns, and, above all, barrels — came to town a few weeks ago from Williamsburg, Virginia, for purposes of “cross-promotion,” a distinctly modern concept that is nevertheless familiar to Williamsburg’s Colonial citizenry. To honor the upcoming quadrennial celebration of the nearby Jamestown colony, the one-and-thirty-year-old cooper was installed beneath a tent at the South Street Seaport for several days, along with some of his compatriots, to entertain people with knowledge of practices and places obsolete.

. . .

Feeling a pang of homesickness, he doffed his waistcoat and cravat, packed his barrels into a rented van, and, after some brief confusion getting out of downtown Manhattan, drove across the river to a different Williamsburg. (Same name, different namesake: Brooklyn’s Williamsburg was named for Jonathan Williams, who surveyed the area; Virginia’s was named for King William III.)

The cooper and his wife found a parking spot on Havemeyer Street and stopped at a bagel shop for lunch. The cooper looked up and pointed at a wooden water tower on a rooftop. “That’s cooperage!” he said. “I think they’re beautiful. I suppose to the average New Yorker they’re an eyesore. Kind of archaic.”

. . .

On Bedford Street, the cooper and his wife went into an apothecary. He surveyed the soap aisle; his wife bought a pack of Spree. Back on the street, they passed a branch of American Apparel and a few coffeehouses, but there was nary a wigmaker or a silversmith in sight.

. . .

The next stop was Mugs Ale House, which, lo and behold, had a decorative barrel in its back room. The cooper offered a critique. Pointing to one stave, he said, “This part here is pretty ugly. You see how the grain is really twisty?”

Like the Lone Ranger needs Tonto — or was it Silver? — a man needs a trusted automobile:

Harry Ettling, like many people who own classic cars, cherishes his ride — but in reverse.

The Inwood resident has let his 1982 Honda Civic, bought brand new, sink into such an extreme state of rot that it has become a legend in the neighborhood where the Arkansas native has lived for 20 years.

“People actually recognize me in other sections of town because of the car,” he says. “The reactions range from laughter to anger to kindred spirits giving me the thumbs up, and everything in between.”

The car continues to run perfectly well despite 170,000 miles on its odometer, and taking as much punishment as New York can dish out.

“One thing that happened immediately after I bought it is it got totaled along with three other parked cars on Fort Washington Ave.,” the 56-year-old jazz guitarist says. “The frame was bent, but I had a shop straighten it out and it was fine to drive.”

A 1992 riot in Washington Heights resulted in further damage. “I came out to find the car upside down in the middle of Dyckman St. A bunch of teenagers were about to strip it but I shouted, ‘Hey, don’t! It’s mine!’ They turned congenial, and a half a dozen Dominican good Samaritans helped me turn it right side up again; $1,500 later, I was back on the road.”

Recently, two of its tires were slashed along with the tires of other cars parked near Ettling’s Seaman Ave. home, costing him $200.

But his insurance bill is a phenomenally low $800 a year and he usually spends no more than $500 a year on maintenance, which includes changing the oil and whatever else the car needs to pass inspection, though this year nothing needed to be fixed.

Bassist and neighbor Steve Alcott, 55, occasionally occupies the Civic’s passenger seat.

“When the car got turned upside down, that was really the beginning of Harry’s car as we know it today,” he says. “The guys in this neighborhood are really into their cars, and can’t believe someone would drive something that looks like that. But it’s a great car — it’ll get you where you’re going. And junk is in the eye of the beholder.”

The coyote on the loose in Central Park has been caught:

A coyote’s romp in Central Park ended yesterday with a tranquilizer dart and a nap, but only after a messy breakfast (hold the feathers), a dip in a chilly pond and a sprint past a skating rink-turned-movie set.

There was also a final chase that had all the elements of a Road Runner cartoon, with the added spectacle of television news helicopters hovering overhead, trailing the coyote and the out-of-breath posse of police officers, park officials and reporters trailing it.

. . .

Where Hal came from remained a mystery. [Parks commissioner Adrian] Benepe said that he had probably been driven out of Westchester County. Older coyotes do that to young males at this time of the year, wildlife specialists said.

He speculated that Hal had made it down to the Bronx and trotted into Manhattan across a railroad bridge at Spuyten Duyvil — “the narrowest, safest crossing,” he said.

But Mr. Benepe said it was also possible that Hal had dog paddled his way through the water beneath the railroad bridge. From there, he said, Hal probably meandered down the West Side to 72nd Street, where Riverside Park ends. And then, Mr. Benepe said, he turned left.

That was news to people in the neighborhood. “I see a lot of things pass this way,” said Ralph Mascolo, a doorman at an apartment building on 72nd Street between Central Park West and Columbus Avenue, “but never a coyote.”

The coyote then interrupted a Robin Williams film shoot at Wollman Rink:

The search was called off Tuesday night. When it resumed early yesterday, a crew working on a movie called “August Rush” was busy at the Wollman Rink, just across a path from the Hallett sanctuary. Suzanne Kelly, from the film’s wardrobe crew, saw Hal “going after this lady’s dog.” A small dog, a Westie, she said.

Hal “looked hungry, I thought,” she said. “That’s what I was worried about.”

The posse chasing Hal cornered him by the Heckscher Ballfields, but he got away again. Hal retreated to the sanctuary, where a pile of feathers suggested that he had made a meal of a bird, probably a pigeon, Mr. Benepe said. After a quick swim across the sanctuary’s duck pond, he sprinted past the rink, where an actress in a wig was doing figure eights.

After catching the coyote, the plan is to return him to a more suitable environment:

Mr. Benepe said the plan was for a wildlife rehabilitator to take Hal out of the city and, after some rest and relaxation, release him in a more coyote-friendly habitat.

That’s “a more coyote-friendly habitat” as in “Fairfield County, Connecticut suburbs” where they are used to such sightings . . . suckas!

After a false start, pro-amnesty Irish immigrants have found a snappier slogan:

Not long after the pubs shut their doors for the night, the Bronx’s Little Ireland sprang back to life yesterday. Hundreds of the city’s newest wave of illegal Irish immigrants — students and carpenters, waitresses and nannies — descended on Woodlawn’s main strip, bundled against the cold and cracking jokes as they waited in the dark to board buses headed for Washington.

A few hours later, as the Senate Judiciary Committee began its second day of crafting an immigration bill, the busloads from the Bronx joined nearly 2,000 other Irish from across the country, canvassing the halls of Congress in T-shirts emblazoned with “Legalize the Irish.”

More followup on the City’s annual homeless census:

A man with a white cart happens to be rolling it east along the south side of 45th Street between Fifth and Sixth avenues at a little before 1 a.m. on the last day of February. Group G is on the same path at the same time, but moving slower, so he catches up to Suzanne Wagner and Moreen Sinclair, and they ask him the big question.

Meanwhile, a tourist with a goatee enters the block from the northwest, so Jo Anne Bennett stops him and asks the same thing. “Yes,” the tourist says, pointing down the street to his hotel. Bennett tells him why she’s asking. “Oh, sorry,” he says, “No, I do quite well.”

But the man with the white cart isn’t doing so well. So when asked, “Tonight, do you have some place that you consider to be your home or the place where you live?” he says, “No.” And voilà: New York City’s fourth annual census of the street homeless had found one.

. . .

The team turns right on 47th as it starts to flurry. Two Belgian tourists say they aren’t homeless but point to a sleeping guy who is. There’s no one at all on 48th Street, nor on 49th, where the search ends. It’s 1:32. In the 55 minutes it takes for Group G to walk its route, the women encounter 38 people.

And more background about the decoys we read about last week:

One of the “shadow count” bases is on 107th between Broadway and Amsterdam, where the teams of $100-a-night decoys are still trickling in at around 2:30 a.m. Some really go all-out with the wardrobe: The prize for best effort goes to a girl with untied work boots and a yellow caution tape as a belt. There’s an element of cat and mouse to the decoy game: An e-mail from the Homeless Services “command center” says that census takers were able to pick out decoys by the plastic bags they all seemed to carry or wear.

Another Thanksgiving, another super-cloying Times article about how new immigrants celebrate that ur-immigrant holiday:

Every November, Thanksgiving - a celebration of the original immigrant feast - plays out in this city of immigrants as the Pilgrims and the Wampanoag Indians could have hardly fathomed in 1621: a cross-cultural hodgepodge holiday improvised by new American families often inspired and instructed by some of their youngest members. The children of immigrants act as pint-size ambassadors of all things Thanksgiving, urging parents throughout the world to prepare all-American turkey meals that they learned about in school and sharing their incomplete yet innocently sweet knowledge of the holiday’s origins.

. . .

Sometimes, the children are not so much teachers as they are cheerleaders. Occasionally, they are simply culinary advisers. Maha Attieh, 47, a Jordanian-born Palestinian, takes her children to the market when she goes shopping for Thanksgiving, which she usually celebrates at her home in Midwood, Brooklyn, with a turkey stuffed with rice, chicken cutlets, nuts and raisins.

“They make their own menu,” said Mrs. Attieh, who works at the Arab-American Family Support Center in Brooklyn. “What they hear in school, what they hear from friends, they want the same thing. I say, ‘As long as it’s halal meat, I’ll do it.’”

The Times previews one of the quirkier ways New York City is fetishized — the New York Botanical Garden’s annual Holiday Train Show:

The scene inside was New York in delicious disarray: the Apollo Theater next door to the Chrysler Building, the golden Prometheus statue from the Rockefeller Center skating rink reclining just beyond the center field wall of Yankee Stadium, and half of the Brooklyn Bridge teetering on a wheelbarrow.

Workers were busy sprucing up these miniature landmarks recently and placing them carefully along 1,000 feet of miniature train track that winds through a landscape of plants in the Enid A. Haupt Conservatory greenhouse.

The 150 miniatures are part of the Holiday Train Show, which opens on Saturday. The miniature city is made not of concrete and steel but of leaves, twigs, mushrooms, branches, berries and pine cones. In this botanical metropolis, the romanticized models are made out of bits and pieces of plants.

. . .

They are the creations of Paul Busse, a quirky Kentucky landscape architect who has built the models for the holiday season since 1992. This year, the new batch of miniatures includes Yankee Stadium, with floodlights fashioned from acorn shells and fans made from a potpourri.

. . .

As he crouched next to the New York Public Library, he inspected the lion statues on the steps, with their fuzzy wheat manes and peppercorn eyes. He checked the stained glass on the facade of St. Patrick’s Cathedral, fashioned from translucent flower petals coated with urethane. He dusted off the red script of the Radio City Music Hall sign, painstakingly made from radish seeds.

“Every year, we take a ride into Manhattan,” he said. “But after working with our buildings, the real thing can almost be a letdown.”

Bonus: New York Botanical Garden Holiday Train Show Information Page

Which is stranger? That a lost tourist can roam the Upper East Side for two days or that 70 is considered elderly? The Daily News reports, you decide:

An elderly Japanese tourist was reunited with her daughter yesterday after getting lost on Fifth Ave. and spending two days wandering the upper East Side.

Takako Maeda, 70, who speaks no English, was without food, money or any recollection of the name or address of the hotel where she’s staying - the upscale Pierre at Fifth Ave. and 61st St.

“She drank water from a bottle left on the street next to a pay phone,” said Satoru Kuwajima, a Japanese man who found her yesterday.

“She walked by a police station, but didn’t think they would understand her - so she kept on walking,” he said.

Maeda was separated from her daughter on Saturday about 3:30 p.m. as they walked into St. Patrick’s Cathedral.

Motoko Maeda, 37, the daughter, told cops that she lost sight of her mother in a sudden rush of people and after a long day of sightseeing.

Police used bloodhounds in an attempt to trace the woman and found a surveillance tape that showed her walking past the entrance to the Pierre.

Yesterday, she walked into the lobby of Kuwajima’s building on E. 63rd St. and was relieved to encounter someone who spoke Japanese.

The only thing more depressing than Labor Day weekend is contemplating the holiday season in August:

Yes, Virginia. A sweaty army of New Yorkers is already toiling to deck the halls.

Retailers are ordering their fixin’s and trimmin’s. Macy’s is racing to complete a construction miracle on 34th Street, preparing for the onslaught of 300,000 visitors to Santaland on its eighth floor in Herald Square. Workers are making way for new displays at North Pole Town Square, including the animated teddy-bear marching band. The one with eight teddy-bear musicians.

Currently, Santa is helper-challenged. “We’re sending out letters to elves who’ve worked in the past,” said Bob Rutan, the director of event operations. He needs 140.

Calling David Sedaris. Anyway, Christmas marches on elsewhere:

Paul Olszewski, whose title is director of windows, is coordinating the efforts of 65 workers to fill said space at Macy’s with “something no one has ever seen before in the city,” he pronounced ominously. Not space aliens or even Parson Brown, he insisted, but that’s about all he would reveal, save that the team started working to fill the 40 windows in February, “and we feel as if we’re behind schedule.”

In the heavy air, there’s a feeling of Christmas at Rockefeller Center, bracing itself for the invasion of 400,000 to 500,000 visitors per day from late November through the first week of January. “It’s fourth quarter here with six minutes left in the game,” said Thomas A. Madden Jr., a managing director of Tishman Speyer Properties, owners of Rockefeller Center.

About the Christmas tree hunt (by helicopter, throughout the metropolitan region): “We’re down to several finalists,” said Mr. Madden, who refused to say how many, or where. After all, the felling of the lucky pine cannot be breathlessly announced until November.

Rockefeller Center Zamboni tuneup? Check. Gourmet magazine Christmas cookie photo shoot? Check. Satin-lined, zipper-front Santa Claus suits? Check! And on and on and on it goes until the dreary winter months fall upon us . . .

Illustrating how deer and bears likely migrated to Manhattan, a raccoon yesterday made the trip on a bus arriving from Montclair, NJ. The raccoon went unnoticed by a bus full of students until the driver something odd walking down the aisle:

A New Jersey raccoon made an improbable journey to the big city yesterday, stowing away on a crowded charter bus unnoticed until all of the passengers had gotten off.

“Oh, man, it scared me,” said Decamp driver Winford Bellamy, 57, who spotted the masked bandit while driving drove down 11th Ave. near W. 51st St.

“I looked in my mirror, and saw him just walking up the aisle to the front of the bus,” Bellamy said.

The 2-foot female raccoon came strolling down the aisle minutes after Bellamy dropped off his 50 passengers, a group of Montclair State University students, at a firehouse on W. 51st St.

Immediately after seeing the raccoon, the shocked driver pulled up alongside a police car.

“Man, I got an animal in this bus,” he told a cop.

The officer instructed Bellamy to turn on 40th St. and get out of the bus.

By the time NYPD Emergency Service Unit officers arrived, the raccoon was clinging to the curtains above the bus’ door.

Officer Brian Glacken, 30, opened the driver-side window and hit the normally nocturnal animal with a tranquilizer dart.

The dazed raccoon was collared moments later.

The raccoon was later killed.

If you feel that New York is an inappropriate place for your garden-variety Newfoundland or Irish Wolfhound, fear not — you can now rent pets, affording one the chance to simply return them before they slobber up the place:

Jared Wasserman’s parents aren’t wild about his current crush. One recent morning as this long-lashed 5-year-old sat tugging on his big toe in the pristine den of his parent’s duplex, he announced he had fallen in love. “I’d like to marry Rudy,” he said.

It is an interesting choice; Rudy is male and can’t talk. He is Jared’s hamster. Jared and Rudy, however, have not moved in together yet. This is because the parents Wasserman like having their home pet-free.

“I’ve never been an animal person,” said Jared’s mother, Marla Wasserman. “I could do without the flies.”

Rudy is part of a small population of pets in New York that can be leased or adopted part-time. He lives in a cage with Jared’s name on it on East 91st Street at the Art Farm in the City, an indoor petting zoo and educational center that is home to 15 kinds of small creatures like millipedes and cockatiels, all of which can be rented yearly for $100 (for a tarantula or a frog) to $300 (for a chinchilla or rabbit, which require more upkeep). In general they live at the Art Farm and make occasional visits to their part-time owners’ homes.

Before you stomp your foot and sigh, “What will they think of next?” know that renting pets helps fight against a particular sort of scenario:

Sean Casey, the owner and founder of Sean Casey Animal Rescue in Brooklyn, has adopted out everything from wallabies to alligators and currently has cats, parakeets, hairless rats and a dozen other types of animals ready for adoption or part-time foster care. He said corn snakes and rat snakes are the ones people ask for the most. Cats and dogs tend to be the animals that are returned the fastest because they require more work and training than people expect.

Mr. Casey said he tries hard to screen out anyone who might take animals for dishonorable reasons, but he cannot always be sure someone is not just taking a puppy for a day or two in order to pick up women in the park. “I’ve turned away people who say they want a snake for a few days so they can freak out their roommates,” he said. “Or one woman asked me for a bird temporarily because she felt her cat was bored and needed something to swat at.”

At certain perfect moments, the Times channels J.D. Salinger. This is one of those moments:

Occasionally, when [Art Farm co-founder] Ms. [Valentina] Van Hise feels especially comfortable with the part-time pet owners, she’ll let them take the animal home for a short stay. Jared and his sister, Alison, who live on the Upper East Side, were allowed to bring Rudy home, at no extra charge.

After struggling to get the cage into a cab and getting home, lots of pictures were taken of Jared, in pajamas, cuddling Rudy on the kitchen floor. Jared even asked his mom if he could have a farmerlike red-checkered shirt and a pair of overalls like the Art Farm caretakers wear. He brought the pictures to school for show and tell, and gave one to his teacher as a gift.

Then two days later Rudy returned to Ms. Van Hise.

“I just kept thinking how they’re part of the rodent family,” Mrs. Wasserman said. “When I brought him back, Valentina said, ‘You’re welcome to keep him longer,’ but I said ‘No, it’s time for him to come back here now.’”

If you were lucky enough to catch the news coverage last night, you would have been treated to harrowing live footage of a dog evading cops and drivers on the Major Deegan. We saw him get clipped by a car, but for a while there, it was hilarious. Newscasts took several minutes out of their schedule to follow the breaking news, which was better than O.J., in my opinion.

The Times picks up the story:

A runaway poodle named Snoopy found fame yesterday afternoon when he was spotted negotiating traffic on the Major Deegan Expressway near Yankee Stadium.

Helicopter news cameras beamed nail-biting images of Snoopy dodging cars and police officers approaching him. One officer braved a retaliatory nip, scooped him up and stuffed him into a squad car.

You might be wondering whose dog this was; the Times tracked him down:

Officials refused to turn the dog over to Ken Baez, a truck driver, who showed up to claim the 6-year-old mixed poodle. Mr. Baez said that his mother-in-law, Altagracia Santana, is in the Dominican Republic and that he and his wife, Elosia, had been caring for Snoopy when he escaped.

He had watched Snoopy’s adventures unfold on television. “We were looking all day and we went to take a rest,” Mr. Baez said. “That’s when we saw him on TV.”

Workers at the [American Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Animals in Manhattan, where the dog was taken] said they were concerned that, his ordeal notwithstanding, the mixed-breed poodle appeared unkempt. and they wanted to make sure he was receiving proper care. Gail Buchwald, a vice president, said Snoopy was given a mild sedative.

. . .

The Baezes said they had been trying to find Snoopy since 2:30 p.m., when he bolted from their apartment at 150th Street and Macomb Avenue, where he had been staying while his owner was away.

Somehow, Snoopy made his way from there to the Major Deegan, where he was finally grabbed at 5:55 p.m.

Mr. Baez’s nephew, Jose, 15, said Snoopy, whom he described as an enthusiast of jumping and licking, didn’t know any tricks, at least until he developed his escape routine.

He added: “I was going crazy because the dog was on the highway. They were like, he was neglected, but he wasn’t. Everybody knows that dog.”