Believe me, I like Jonathan Schwartz as much as the next guy, but if you overdo the branding thing, there’s the real and present danger of turning “public radio listener” into shorthand for “cat lady”:

A cadre of New York singles who wake up to National Public Radio’s “Morning Edition” and listen to podcasts of the network’s “This American Life” are seeking out dates and mates who enjoy public radio as much as they do.

Noticing the number of self-proclaimed “NPR aficionados” on online dating and social networking Web sites, the staffers at a local affiliate, WNYC, decided to sponsor a series of singles mixers. These events are led by the station’s popular on-air personalities, and some feature news and pop culture quizzes — not unlike those heard on a long-running public radio program, “Wait Wait . . . Don’t Tell Me!”

“Just like certain online dating sites attract a specific type of person, WNYC draws a certain type of listener — someone who’s interested in arts and culture,” a 37-year-old city policy director, Alexandra Warren, said during a station-sponsored under-40 singles event, “This is Your Brain on Love,” held at Williamsburg ’s Brooklyn Brewery Thursday.

. . .

“WNYC Singles” events cost $35 in advance, or $40 at the door. In an attempt to maintain a gender balance, the station offers a limited number of tickets to women and men. Station officials say women’s tickets generally sell out weeks in advance.

The Post reports that the first openly bisexual person since David Bowie will be representing the Upper East Side in the State Assembly:

An aide to City Comptroller William Thompson became the first openly bisexual member of the state Legislature last night after defeating his Republican opponent in a special election.

Micah Kellner, a Democrat, took 64 percent of the vote to Republican Gregory Camp’s 36.

Kellner, 28, a top aide to Thompson, has also worked for Rep. Carolyn Maloney (D-Manhattan).

“We campaigned on the issues and I really think that’s what voters responded to,” Kellner said.

The special election in the 65th Assembly District — which covers the Upper East Side and Roosevelt Island — fills a seat held for 33 years by Democrat Pete Grannis, who now heads the state Department of Environmental Conservation. There are currently four openly gay members serving in the Legislature.

We’re still waiting for a statement from Sean Delonas, assuming he knows the difference between gay and bisexual.

In case you assumed New York kids were precocious specimens straight out of a Salinger short story or some Wes Anderson feature, rest assured that they’re just as lame as their culturally deprived suburban counterparts:

High school students in New York City have some of the world’s greatest cultural attractions in their back yard. But they often spend their weekend nights acting like stereotypical students at a college surrounded by cornfields, tossing back drink after drink in what those who follow the situation say is a disturbing and dangerous epidemic of binge drinking.

A 2005 city survey found 28% of white students in the city’s public high schools had, within the month before the survey was taken, consumed the four or five drinks in one session necessary to qualify as a “binge.” White students have been shown to binge drink at much higher rates than their nonwhite counterparts. While no comparable statistics exist for the city’s private schools, interviews with students suggest such behavior is frequent.

. . .

A 16-year-old who lives on the Upper East Side, Hilary Shar, said her friends from the suburbs are incredulous when she complains of having nothing to do on weekends. “They say, ‘Oh, you’re so lucky you live in the city,’” Miss Shar, an 11th-grader at the Dwight School on the Upper West Side, said. “I say, ‘No, it’s really not that different.’ The movie theaters may be bigger, and there are more restaurants to choose from, but the activities are pretty much the same.”

Those activities often include attending alcohol-laden parties at their classmates’ homes.

10021, the 90210 of Manhattan, is set to be split into three new zip codes, confounding demographers*:

The U.S. Postal Service has plans to announce that the affluent neighborhood now identified by the 10021 zip code — stretching between East 61st and East 80th streets, from Central Park to the East River — will be divided into three zip codes in July, leaving 10021 for roughly a third of its original area.

“Too many people” is a reason for the change, Rep. Carolyn Maloney said, adding that was also why the Upper East Side needs the Second Avenue subway. She met with a postal district manager, Robert Daruk, on Friday. Ms. Maloney said, “Pretty soon the other two numbers will be just as honored and prestigious” as 10021.

Not everyone agrees. “This is a puzzle to me,” said the co-chairwoman of Defenders of the Historic Upper East Side, Teri Slater. Ms. Slater said 10021 was widely considered “the zip code” to live in on the Upper East Side. She joked that like Gaul, it was being divided into three parts. She said the post office would have to demonstrate a real need. “I don’t think this is going to sit favorably with many people,” she said.

An Upper East Side resident and president of a co-op on East 79th Street, Theodore Siouris, said people in his neighborhood have expressed concern over no longer being in the 10021 zip code.

. . .

A spokeswoman for the USPS, Pat McGovern, said the growth in the number of addresses and the volume of mail in the neighborhood are prompting the two additional zip codes.

Without describing exactly where the cutoff will be, she said the middle area would remain 10021; the area to the south would be 10065 and to the north would be 10075. She said the mail for all three zip codes would still operate out of the Lenox Hill Station on East 70th Street.

*E.g., “Post Office Politics: The Political Influence of Zip Code 10021 Residents”

A new folksy-sounding quip is born:

New York City taxi drivers hail from more than 130 countries, and America is one of the five most common countries of origin, according to records for 2006 obtained from the Taxi & Limousine Commission.

Just two drivers indicated on their applications that they were originally from Switzerland, making them as rare a breed on the city streets as the new hybrid Lexus taxis. More than 5,200 drivers were originally from Bangladesh, making the South Asian country the most common country of origin among cabbies, followed by Pakistan, India, and Haiti.

America was fifth, with about 2,300 drivers, and New York natives made up more than half of the American-born drivers, according to the Taxi & Limousine Commission documents.

. . .

Many New Yorkers interviewed about their perceptions of cab drivers harbor stereotypes that do not necessarily reflect the diversity of taxi drivers. Tasheem Jones, who lives in Midtown and estimates that she rides in a taxi at least three times a week, describes her typical cab driver as a “rude Arab guy.” Kheeny Khan, a Pakistani who lives in Queens, said he has the impression that most cabbies hail from the same Punjabi districts of Pakistan he still calls home.

After several years of tinkering, participants in the city’s homeless decoy program develop some guidelines about how to sell the part:

The first rule of being a decoy homeless person: Don’t talk about being a decoy homeless person. Also, don’t read books the homeless wouldn’t read, and don’t haggle with real homeless people over their prime hangout spots.

Those were among the instructions officials gave almost 200 people getting paid about $75 each to pretend to be homeless for a few hours yesterday morning. The decoys were acting as statistical checks-and-balances in the fifth annual citywide census of how many homeless people live on the streets and in the subways.

. . .

A professor at the Columbia University School of Social Work, Julien Teitler, said many of the decoys gain an appreciation for what it’s like to be homeless.

If some of the decoys were subjecting themselves to the winter cold for the goodness of their hearts, others were there purely for the cash.

One of them was a costume designer and theater student named Elizabeth Cassarino, who said unabashedly that she didn’t care about the homeless. She planned to use the $75 to buy food and cigarettes.

“I know what goes into being a character. So for this role, playing a homeless person, you have to have the right costume — baggie clothes, layers — you have look sad, you have to play like you’re homeless. You can’t have a smile on your face. You have to do emotional recall, think of a time when you were hungry,” Ms. Cassarino said before deployment. “These are all the things they taught me in school, and now I’m actually getting a chance to perform. You know, my audience is going to be the people waiting for a train at Broadway and Lafayette.”

Is New York is a city where adults have roommates or a city of adult roommates? The cause/symptom connection is unclear:

It used to be that if you were set on having a place all to yourself, you moved to the boroughs. But while rents are significantly less out there in no-man’s land, thanks to gentrification and rising apartment costs, roommates are still largely necessary. Wiener says, “In Brooklyn, [rents] have been creeping up. They call it the second Manhattan now. I have seen a rental increase almost on par with Manhattan. But still, there are deals to be had there.” Howard Wong, 33, a software engineer who lives in Bushwick, Brooklyn, shares a place with three roommates, two in their early 30s and one in their mid-20s. Their combined rent is $2,600, only $650 each.

Clearly, having roommates is the financially savvy way to go. But how does living in a style close to dorm life during the prime of life affect one’s transition into adulthood? Jeffrey Jensen Arnett, author of Emerging Adulthood: The Winding Road from the Late Teens through the Twenties and editor of the Journal of Adolescent Research, says, “Emerging adulthood is a period of your life where you have a sort of independence and freedom to focus on your own life and your own self-development that you will never have so much of before or after.” Whether living with roommates is a cause or a symptom, the fact remains that many New Yorkers suffer from a mutated strain of Urban Peter Pan Syndrome. Without the emotional engagement required by the old ball and chain and the little chainlets and the responsibilities of home owning, these 30-is-the-new-20 roommates are free to indulge in, well, themselves.

The New York Sun reports that cab drivers are resurrecting 1980s-style party lines:

It’s not just wives at home or relatives overseas that keep taxi drivers tied up on their cellular phones during work shifts. Many cabbies say that when they are chatting on duty, it’s often with their cab driver colleagues on group party lines. Taxi drivers say they use conference calls to discuss directions and find out about congested routes to avoid. They come to depend on one another as first responders, reacting faster even than police to calls from drivers in distress. Some drivers say they participate in group prayers on a party line.

“Sometimes one person recites, and a group will listen to him,” a Sikh cab driver from India, Satinder Singh, said. Mr. Singh, who lives in Queens and has been driving a taxi for five years, said that only in the past year or so, since he started using T-Mobile, has he participated in conference calls.

Aleksander Sverdlov, a Russian immigrant who has been driving a taxi for 15 years, said he has accumulated about 150 numbers in his cell phone, most of which belong to colleagues he conferences with on and off during his eight-hour shift. “I know everyone,” Mr. Sverdlov said over coffee and breakfast sandwiches in his cab at La Guardia Airport.

It is during this morning routine, waiting for the first shuttle flights to arrive from Washington and Boston, where many friendships between cabbies are forged and cell phone numbers are exchanged, Mr. Sverdlov said. Once drivers have each other’s numbers, they can use push-to-talk technology to call large groups all at once.

Mr. Sverdlov said he conferences with up to 10 cabbies at a time to discuss “traffic, what’s going on, this and that, and where do cops stay.” He estimated that every month, he logs about 20,000 talking minutes on his cell phone.

Just so you’re clear, it is still illegal for cab drivers to talk on the phone while driving.

And if Cannonball Run suddenly popped into your head, you’re not too far off the mark:

Faruq Ahmed, who is from Bangladesh, says he spends about four hours a day on a party line. “I put it on speaker, and under the clipboard, so they can’t see if I’m on the phone,” Mr. Ahmed said, explaining how he has managed to avoid receiving a summons from the Taxi & Limousine Commission. Cell phones, Mr. Ahmed said, are good for business, driver safety, and even benefit passengers because drivers learn from each other about what’s happening on the streets.

Mr. Ahmed also supplements his party line chats with conversation his CB radio. “Usually on the radio, it’s just one or two talking, and many many people listening in,” he said. Different languages are broadcast on different radio channels.

(Thank god this gave us the opportunity to revisit the 976 phenomenon or we wouldn’t have found this, for example . . . or this.)

What first appeared to downtown observers to be an influx of chunky Midwesterners on some sort of semester-abroad program turns out to be employees of the new Googleplex:

From lava lamps to abacuses to cork coffee tables, the offices may as well be a Montessori school conceived to cater to the needs of future science-project winners. The Condé Nast and Hearst corporations have their famous cafeterias designed by, respectively, Frank Gehry and Norman Foster; but Google has free food, and plenty of it, including a sushi bar and espresso stations. There are private phone booths for personal calls and showers and lockers for anyone running or biking to work.

The campuslike workspace is antithetical to the office culture of most New York businesses. It is a vision of a workplace utopia as conceived by rich, young, single engineers in Silicon Valley, transplanted to Manhattan.

. . .

Food is a major perk at the Manhattan Googleplex. Every Tuesday afternoon, tea with crumpets and scones is served. In the cafeteria a dry-erase board lists local purveyors of the ingredients in the meals like a sign at the Union Square Greenmarket. (Dry-erase boards are big in Google culture; ideas flow quickly).

All the free food has created a problem familiar to college freshmen. “Everyone gains 10 or 15 pounds when they start working here,” said James Tipon, a member of the sales team, who actively contributes to the four pounds of M&Ms consumed by New York Googlers daily. “I definitely gained that when I started working here, but I think I shed some of it,” Mr. Tipon said. “I try to be disciplined but it’s really hard.”

All over Brooklyn the use of the stoop is declining, leading to a public campaign to preserve the culture:

Brooklyn’s legendary brownstone stoops are little more than speed bumps for the borough’s career-addled, stroller-burdened and iPod-addicted residents, a new Parsons School of Design study has found.

“There are not a whole lot of people taking the time to sit on stoops anymore,” said Chelsea Briganti, one of three Parsons undergraduates working on a report and an awareness campaign that they’ve titled, “Sit Here.”

Briganti said the project aims to understand and address “the decreasing culture of social interaction formerly known as ’stoop culture.’”

So far the findings have been depressing. The youngest wave of Park Slope residents prefers bars to stoops.

“They all say they wish there was more public culture,” Briganti said, “but they go to Southpaw [a Fifth Avenue rock club]” instead of sitting on stoops.

Well, duh! Wouldn’t you rather go to Southpaw to see something like, for example, Christopher Moltisanti’s new indie band? Exactly:

With the success and awards [Michael] Imperioli has garnered in the acting world, including a resume of roles in films helmed by the prestigious likes of Martin Scorsese and Spike Lee, and the media frenzy that’s sure to ignite in April when the final season of “The Sopranos” kicks off, one can’t help but wonder: why is Imperioli launching a rock band now?

With a steady gaze, and some fidgeting with his cell phone, the Tribeca-based actor explained that in part, his decision was based on “living through that 9-11 shit.”

. . .

Imperioli, 40, also revealed that [La Dolce Vita]’s set list primarily consists of original songs — written by the band as well as material Imperioli penned between 1986 and 1996.

. . .

“In some ways, [my songs] were written in a different time period,” said Imperioli, who claims to be a fan of Robert Pollard of Guided by Voices and Courtney Love. But Imperioli’s material is being arranged now with Amitin and Tighe, whom he describes as “great musicians.

. . .

Summing up their sound as New York-influenced, raw and gritty, the trio is humming with excitement over their upcoming Southpaw date, where they will share the bill with Death of Fashion and Generals and Majors. Rather than focusing their energies on long-term achievements like contracts and recording CDs, the LDV boys are just happy for another opportunity to share their music.

Is he the patriarch of one of 29 high-powered families profiled in this week’s Observer? A new, improved nepotism:

Somewhere between the Astors and 2006, it seemed as though the city had lost its class, to put it mildly. But Mrs. Astor — even in her ancient, faded, painted and chipped state, worn down by a century and four years and more of a great life — had saved it once more. She had once more reasserted the importance of life, reminded us that we are a city in which family trumps all. It may have been that the ghosts of Four Hundred society wafted from the vents at Delmonico’s and possessed vengeful Post and Daily News reporters who slashed and whacked at poor Anthony Marshall, who eventually was vindicated by the judge.

But something more important happened, once more, in a city where it has rarely failed to happen: Mother had won. And New York is a town that is defined by families. We have chosen 29 of them, and the power of family defines each, a power that supersedes any other consideration, and that is at once the clearest thing in life, and the most mysterious.

If it were a movie pitch you might say it was Stand and Deliver meets The Joy Luck Club meets Animal House:

Workers at Church of the Transfigur­ation on Mott St. see their greatest success in children of immigrants, who often were born in the United States and stand with one foot in their Chinese past and another in their American future. The church’s Sunday school classes teach the Catholic faith to area children, and some non-Catholic parents see it as a chance for free babysitting, said Sister MaryAnn Scherr, a nun overseeing religious education at the church.

. . .

Every Sunday morning, Scherr and her team of religious educators teach Catholic catechism to parish children. It is a task fraught with complexities, as often these children know very little about Christianity.

“When people come to us, they often come with no religion at all,” Scherr said. “Some of the parents don’t see the value of the religion program.”

Down one flight of stairs from John Hum’s class, Jennifer Yau teaches first graders about books of the Bible, and routinely struggles with non-attentive students.

“This is boring,” said James, a tiny six-year-old boy with an untucked collared shirt, one leg up on his chair, the other dangling above the floor. “I don’t know it.”

“There is no, ‘I don’t know.’ That’s not an option,” said Yau, visibly at wits’ end. “I’m trying to teach you guys something and you’re not really paying attention, so I’d appreciate it if you would.”

. . .

Overall, progress is being made, Scherr said.

“We can have as many as 30 people we baptize each year,” she said. “Many are men.

“We try not to be people who just work to get certificates,” Scherr said. Too often, she says, immigrants believe their participation in church activities will guarantee them citizenship, or at least a green card.

“If they want to really be baptized, then we work with that,” Sherr said. “It’s not completely our job to doubt sincerity.”

As Chinese immigrants come into the city, they bring with them their own ideas and customs. In the Chinese province of Fujian, where most of Chinatown’s newest residents emigrate from, it is perfectly O.K. for someone to spit on the floor, even when inside, since most floors there are dirt, Scherr said. The church staff has tried to limit spitting and educate immigrants on American social conventions.

The Sun takes a look at the New York City ride board on Craig’s List, with varying results:

Looking for a ride to Monsey, N.Y., or to make a quick trip to Lansing, Mich., over Thanksgiving break? Hitching a ride on the streets of New York is illegal, so today’s hitchhikers are sticking out their thumbs with posts on craigslist.org.

Motivated by many of the same needs that inspired their predecessors, virtual hitchhikers say they lack funds, desire companionship or the sheer thrill of an adventure, and sometimes act out of pure desperation.

The craigslist.org New York ride board gets about 25 posts a day, with about an even number offering and soliciting rides. Most posters are looking to team up for shorter drives to destinations along the Northeast corridor, but some seek cross-country travel companions.

. . .

A production assistant, Rudy Samana, who recently sought company for a drive to Florida, said he didn’t get south of New Jersey. “The guy I was driving seemed very unstable,” Mr. Samana said. “He told me he might get a job in Florida, but he didn’t really have a plan, and he kind of wanted to latch up with me, so I just turned back around.”

Then again, I think the people in this example thought the writer meant “Casual Encounters”:

Others said they had better luck. When advertising producer Grellan Harty needed a ride to Vermont last winter for a ski trip, he posted on the site. Kathy Jo Carstarphen responded because she said she was eager for companionship. The strangers had no plans to check in to a motel room in Middlebury, Vt., just hours after meeting, but were forced to do so at 2 a.m. when they got lost on their way. “We’re still good friends after sharing that experience,” Mr. Harty said.

The War on Christmas continues:

Santa Claus has been bumped.

Instead of having pride of place in the center of the Staten Island Mall, the Jolly Old Elf has been relegated to the JCPenney wing — separating him from the holiday congestion near the Christmas tree and train ride.

St. Nick also is being nudged out by two new kiosks installed in center court: Vonage, the online discount telephone company, and the Piercing Pagoda, which also has a kiosk in the Macy’s wing.

It’s a question of space, Mall general manager James Easley insists.

“Center court is always so crowded with . . . [long lines waiting] for Santa and the train. Moving Santa and his chair will allow us to accommodate a lot more people by spreading things out,” he said.

. . .

“These three things — the Christmas tree, the train and Santa — should be together,” said Patricia Leahy of Greenridge, mother of 3-year-old Christopher. “There is plenty of room in center court for a tree, Santa and the trains. I can’t figure out how Mall management thinks there is more room by JCPenney.”

At least Santa will be there, said Ms. Leahy, who e-mailed the Advance last week to check on what turned out to be a false report that Santa Claus would skip his appearance at the Mall in New Springville this year.

But she was skeptical about his new spot: “I personally think it is a way of de-Christmasing Christmas.”

The anthropologist-in-residence at the Department of Sanitation shows she can hang with a san man, and yes, she mongos:

[Director of N.Y.U.'s Draper Interdisciplinary Master's Program in Humanities and Social Thought Robin] Nagle, who is forty-five, has been researching the Department of Sanitation for the past several years, while working on a book, “Picking Up.” At first, the san men were convinced that she was a plant, from one of various surveillance agencies. “We are from different worlds,” she acknowledged. “I have tried to close the gap between us. I walk in, I’m female, I’m an egghead, I’m older, I have a Ph.D. — for some reason, they foreground that. My response is ‘La-di-fucking-da, I have a Ph.D. Whatever.’”

She said that she had earned her commercial driver’s license in 2004, and pointed to a Teamsters Local 831 jacket hanging behind the door, with “Robin” embroidered on the front. “You have to know what you’re doing or you’ll end up killing somebody,” she said. “As one of my instructors told me, if a car can be a weapon, a garbage truck can be a nuclear weapon.”

Nagle’s interests lie more with the trash collectors than with the trash, although the two intersect on the subject of “mongo” — sanitation lingo for “redeemed garbage” or the act of collecting it. (Nagle consulted a lexicographer, looking for help in tracking down the etymology, to no avail.) “Within the department, if you mongo or if you don’t — there’s kind of a dividing line,” she said. “‘He mongos.’ ‘Do you mongo?’ ‘Oh, mongo, are you kidding? I wouldn’t mongo.’” She paused. “Hell, I mongo, absolutely. And I have some pretty nice things.” A book cart to her left bore a sticker that read “NYU Asset Management: Authorized for Disposal.” She had found it on the curb. Maps on the walls outside her office were rescued from a Dumpster. And her winter wardrobe draws heavily from a stash of cashmere sweaters that she found in a garbage bag behind the Dakota, while accompanying a san man known as the Mongo King on his rounds, in 2003.

You know what they say about not quitting the day job . . . this guy actually did it:

Four folks in the group are a self-defined entity, calling themselves the Mortal Beasts and Deities. Hailing from northwestern Connecticut (Falls Village, to be exact), they have made the trek to New York City for three years running, and will stay on their stilts for three hours straight tonight.

“This is an awesome event. We love coming,” says Mark Alexander, who gave up his day job as an art teacher to perform full time. “I want to do this while I still can. It takes balance, rhythm — and lots of ibuprofen.”

Within minutes, the [Greenwich Village Halloween] parade marshals pull back the barricades where Spring St. meets Sixth Ave. The waiting is over. The parade has begun.

Alexander and everyone behind him move eastward, en masse, toward the intersection.

“My mother may be worried about my giving up the day job,” he says. “But look at this spectacle. She can worry all she wants, but I’m certainly not. This is awesome.”

The entity responsible for this nation’s infatuation with trains is coming home:

After almost four decades working out of a sleepy Detroit suburb, Lionel, the toy train and model railroad manufacturer, is back on Madison Avenue, and trying to bring model trains out of the hobbyist’s basement and into the realm of popular culture.

Founded in 1900 by Joshua Lionel Cowen in Midtown Manhattan, Lionel grew to mainstream popularity through the 1950s, when trains were icons of Americana and lifelines of cross-country travel. But when cars and planes began to replace train transportation, Lionel’s sales dwindled, with only hardcore hobbyists buying.

The move to Madison Avenue is part of Lionel’s CEO Jerry Calabrese’s aim to “re-establish what Lionel’s tradition was for its first 65 years and stake our flag back in the world of pop culture,” he said in an interview yesterday.

The Madison Avenue showroom, complete with oak floors and three operating train layouts, marks a nostalgic homecoming for the company. “There are old men who weep that we’re back with a showroom on Madison Avenue,” Mr. Calabrese said. The showroom is now seven blocks north of the company’s original Madison Avenue showroom at 27th Street. “It’s great to be back in the city because the roots of the company are in New York,” Mr. Calabrese said.

If the Lionel-Industrial Complex has its way, a grim future of light rail awaits:

Under Mr. Calabrese’s leadership, Lionel has signed licensing deals with the movies “The Polar Express” and “Harry Potter,” with Nascar, and an exclusive deal with the MTA to manufacture replica subway cars.

Last year’s Lionel train display at Grand Central Terminal drew more than 200,000 visitors to the station Mr. Calabrese refers to as “the St. Patrick’s Cathedral of trains,”during the holiday season when train sets suddenly enter the mainstream zeitgeist. “At the end of the day we’re a pop cultural iconic American brand,” Mr. Calabrese said. “Now we have to catch up with our destiny.”

The Devil squints his black eyes, strokes his fiery goatee and breathes heavily, “Choo, Choo.”

The Queens Chronicle reports that the Irish immigrants of Queens are returning to Ireland:

Martin, 29, an illegal Irish immigrant who has been here for seven years, has had enough. He came to America looking for a better life, but has not been able to obtain legal status in this country. He will soon join the growing trend of Irish immigrants moving back to Ireland, where they can reap the benefits of a booming economy and legal citizenship.

“I’ve had enough of being a subject here. I have to find a life somewhere,” said Martin, who requested his last name be withheld.

Statistics show Martin is one of many Irish immigrants who are opting to return home as a result of the current immigration situation in the United States and the burgeoning economic state back home. According to Ireland’s Department of Social and Family Affairs, 132,000 Irish have returned since 2001, with more than 61,000 returning between 2002 and 2004.

In Queens, the flight of Irish immigrants has become very apparent. Neighborhoods like Woodside and Maspeth, formerly known as predominantly Irish enclaves, have taken on new identities, as Hispanics, Filipinos, and Koreans move in.

Maria, a 22 year old Irish immigrant who also requested her last name be withheld, is a bartender in Astoria and plans to study nursing at LaGuardia Community College. She came here a year and a half ago because she wanted to travel and see the world. She knows, however, that many who came to America for similar reasons will end up moving back.

“People are moving to Ireland because of the legal system in this country. The government doesn’t want to give us any legality or citizenship,” said Maria, adding that the irony of the situation is that, “there’s no such thing as a true American and I feel like this government has forgotten its roots.”

The article adds that that whole “Leave No Paddy Behind” thing hasn’t worked out so well:

Siobhan Dennehey, the executive director at Emerald Isle Immigration Center, said that while many immigration reform movements have lobbied to legalize the Irish, their exhaustive work has gone unanswered, possibly because the Irish are often overlooked as an immigrant population.

“The automatic assumption is that if you’re Irish you don’t have an immigration problem, which is quite far from the truth,” Dennehey said, adding that her colleague once told her, “our Irish ancestors helped build this country, build the roads, but we can’t drive on them, we can’t reap the benefits of which we’ve sown. That’s the Irish story.”

Dennehey also said that the public protests and marches supporting the legalization of the Irish have possibly done more harm than good, uncovering undocumented workers who had previously lived under the radar. “There has not been any positive sign,” said Dennehey, who cites the lack of improvement in legalizing immigrants and the Irish economy’s success story as reasons for the mass migration back across the Atlantic.

Bad news for those who worry that New York is becoming more and more like LA everyday:

City and state transportation officials are planning to give highway drivers real-time travel information, calculated in part with E-ZPass technology and displayed on a network of roadside message boards in the five boroughs.

Motorists on major thoroughfares like the Belt Parkway and the FDR Drive will get forecasts of how long it will take to go between various points in the city based on the average times of other drivers.

Currently, such level of detail is being displayed only to drivers on the New Jersey approaches to the George Washington Bridge and at two Metropolitan Transportation Authority bridges. The plan is to have real-time travel information displayed along highways in all five boroughs within about three years, a spokeswoman for the city Transportation Department said.

It will begin with a pilot program along the Staten Island Expressway by the end of the year.

We’re desperate, get used to it.

MTV’s “True Life: I’m A Staten Island Girl” continues to have repercussions on the island:

MTV’s recent “True Life” documentary, “I’m a Staten Island Girl,” hit a nerve when it portrayed the borough’s youth as catty, road-raging, privileged and Gottiesque. Then the show cut deeper and compounded that unflattering list of stereotypes by portraying Islanders as — cringe — tanning-salon-orange.

. . .

After the episode first aired on national television on Oct. 18, viewers posted more than 230 comments to the entertainment forum on the local Web site silive.com.

Bloggers ranted.

Some recorded the episode to watch again. Others couldn’t bear to watch.

Islanders wrote in to the Advance calling the episode “embarrassing,” “horrible,” “hilarious” and “emotionally disturbing.”

“We are not orange,” was their cry.

. . .

Said Ms. [Danielle] DiPietro [one of the show's three subjects]: “I know a lot of people are really p.o.’d about the show and they have a right to be. But they should have been at the auditions for the show.”

Both aspiring actresses and publicists, these two “Staten Island girls” have no regrets. They also thought the show was pretty accurate.

“Not everybody has spiky hair. Not everybody has an orange tint to them. Not everyone does, but the majority of Staten Island does,” said Ms. [Lauren] Laner [another of the show's subjects].

October is high season for tourists and . . . drag queens:

At a busy wigmaking studio in Hell’s Kitchen on Tuesday, half a dozen craftspeople could be found hunched over synthetic mesh scalps, tying individual human hairs into them as fast as they could. Hair was everywhere: draped across tabletops in horsetail lengths, clinging to the fabric of chairs, scattered across the floor in unruly clumps.

The artisans had seen and even built wigs of all descriptions, from flowing brown manes for classical operas to buoyant white up-dos for fantastical Broadway musicals. But even the veterans looked up from their needles when Maurice Neuhaus, a 28-year-old German-born wigmaker, actor and sometime drag queen, pulled out a neon-blue extravaganza that looked at first glance like an otherworldly wild animal being released from its cage.

. . .

During Halloween season, the demand for professional drag performers rises, so Mr. Neuhaus has been busy doing performances booked by a talent agency called Screaming Queens Entertainment. Yesterday, Mr. Neuhaus expected to wear a black, Asian-style wig with bangs while entertaining guests at a bar mitzvah reception in Midtown. On Friday, he planned to wear his over-the-top blue wig for a Halloween gig at a game arcade in Englewood, N.J.

For all its high camp and artifice, his wig possesses an exceptional degree of realism — when he wears it, it looks as if “real” blue hair is growing from his head.

Such artistry is much admired by those in the know.

“Only certain very meticulous and experienced drag performers have custom-made wigs,” said Alex Heimberg, chief executive officer of Screaming Queens, who performs as Miss Understood, a character for whom Mr. Neuhaus built oversize wigs in both bright pink and bright green. “You have to reach the point where you know you’re serious about what you’re doing.”

Who has a drag queen at a bar mitzvah?

And we’d watch but the infinity mirror started to hurt our head too much:

The Burg is a single-camera scripted series filmed mostly inside this apartment and on a few street corners around the block. The episodes, ranging from one to 15 minutes in length, can be viewed at www.theburg.tv or downloaded through iTunes. Or observed in real time at any number of stops along the L train.

“The thing about Williamsburg,” said Kelli Giddish, a blond aspiring actress who plays a blond aspiring actress on the show, “is all the ugly people are trying to look pretty and all the pretty people are trying to look ugly.” She paused to let the observation sink in, then pulled a faded white satin nightshirt over her starlet-thin frame, belted it up tight with an oversized tan suede sash, topped it off with a white crocheted shawl and pronounced the new look “Granny Chic.” Several of her co-stars applauded.

The Burg is about the precious scenesters of Metropolitan Avenue and the silly things they do to be cool. Ms. Giddish has another soap job, on actual television, playing a onetime stripper named Di Kirby on ABC’s All My Children. On the Web, she plays Courtney, a sporadically anti-capitalist ditz.

Courtney’s friends in the Burg are more of the same: Spring, played by Lindsey Broad, is a youthful brunette who cares about the environment and wants to break her generation’s credit cycle. Jed, played by Bob McClure, wears thick black plastic glasses and forcibly prevents his friends from drinking anything other than Pabst. Xander, played by Matt Yeager, is a starving artist with a huge inheritance.

In place of holding steady jobs or contributing to the local economy, Spring, Xander and the gang spend their days coordinating their American Apparel leggings and their thrift-store cowboy boots with 18 plastic bracelets and two vinyl headbands from junior high. Their days are occupied with chemical boycotts, bike trips to Astoria, auditions for independent films and hours spent cursing gentrification and analyzing the complicated etiquette of modern bohemia.

It’s like Rent, only instead of AIDS, some of them have trust funds.

This year features borough-specific haunted houses:

Last Halloween, [Timothy] Haskell, a theatre director, staged a public haunted house on the Lower East Side, and so many people showed up that hundreds never made it inside. “We realized that we had to turn away a lot of local people,” Haskell said. So this year he put up haunted houses in all five boroughs, tailored to prey on the fears peculiar to each one.

For months, Haskell and his crew polled residents of the five boroughs to find out their worst nightmares. . . . People from the Bronx and Queens, they said, tend to fear things that might actually happen, like being mugged (harpaxophobia), while Manhattanites are frightened of fantastical and unlikely occurrences (flying sharks, riding in an elevator that rockets through the roof of a building). “In Manhattan and Brooklyn, we heard ‘fear of the homeless,’” [chief designer Paul] Smithyman said. “Then, in the Bronx, we heard ‘fear of becoming homeless.’” Staten Island residents apparently dread chemical spills and gas leaks.

. . .

The challenge of creating a tableau representing acrophobia, the fear of heights (and the seventh most common fear of Manhattan residents), almost stumped the designers. “One idea was that we’d have people walk up a staircase and onto a Plexiglas floor and see teeny-tiny furniture beneath them,” Haskell said. “But there were liability issues.” Instead, they paired a video of someone falling off a ledge with an evocative sound effect: vroooooom, splat. For illyngophobia (fear of dizziness, No. 11 among Manhattanites), the team installed a giant spinning tunnel; for entomophobia (insects, No. 3), they glued a thousand dead cockroaches onto a wall; and for musophobia (mice, No. 6), they ordered an essence of dead rat from an outfit in Chicago called Sinister Scents.

Preschoolers don’t just seem older, they actually are older:

Children who turn 5 even in June or earlier are sometimes considered not ready for kindergarten these days, as parents harbor an almost Darwinian desire to ensure that their own child is not the runt of the class. Although a spate of literature in the last few years about boys’ academic difficulties helped prompt some parents to hold their sons back a year, girls, too, are being held back. Yet research on whether the extra year helps is inconclusive.

Fueled by the increasingly rigorous nature of kindergarten and a generation of parents intent on giving their children every edge, the practice is flourishing in New York City private schools and suburban public schools. A crop of 5-year-olds in nursery school and kindergartners pushing 7 are among the most striking results.

“These summer boys have now evolved to including girls and going back as far as March,” said Dana Haddad, admissions director at the Claremont Preparatory School, in Lower Manhattan, referring to children who turned 5 in those months but stayed in nursery school. “It’s become a huge epidemic.” In some corners, the decision of when to enroll a child in kindergarten has mushroomed from a non-issue into an agonizing choice, as anxiety-generating as, well, the private school kindergarten admissions process itself.

“It’s kind of crazy to hold them back,” said Jessica Siegel, 40, whose daughter, Mirit Skeen is back for another year at Montclair Community Pre-K in New Jersey, although she turned 5 in late August and the public school cutoff there for kindergarten is Oct. 1. “Someone’s going to be the youngest. Someone’s going to be the smallest.”

Ms. Siegel and her husband considered the decision for months, waiting until the week before public school started before making it final in case Mirit “suddenly had some kind of huge emotional shift.”

“I felt like her whole experience is about being the smallest and the youngest, and I wanted to change that experience for her,” Ms. Siegel said, adding, “The more people do it, the more people do it — partially because you don’t want yours to be the last.”

To stave off preschool fatigue, some city parents send their children to public school kindergarten for a year, hoping to transfer them to a private kindergarten the next year. Columbus Park West Nursery School on the Upper West Side is considering opening a “junior kindergarten” to accommodate children who in the past would simply have headed for the real thing.

Suggesting that it just may be a gyro* after all, the New York Sun invokes the halo effect:

The daily pita pilgrimage begins at 7:30 p.m., when New Yorkers — and a handful of in-the-know tourists — begin lining up at the corner of 53rd Street and Sixth Avenue. Within minutes, the line emanating from the fragrant gyro stand there stretches halfway down the block.

Two other gyro carts within a half-block radius have no wait at all. But city foodies contend that Halal Gyro and Chicken is worth waiting on a line that can exceed 45 minutes on some evenings. The stand’s $5 platter includes chicken, lamb, rice, salad, pita, and, most importantly, customers say, a tasty combination of white and red sauces.

. . .

In New York, a city of seemingly limitless choices, inhabited by famously fast-paced people, there are still some things for which residents are willing to wait in line. What’s worth the idle time? For some it’s a bargain; for others it’s a status symbol. For some, it’s a gyro platter; for others it’s a pair of sneakers, a basket of Buffalo wings, a museum exhibit, a stuffed toy, a cupcake, or two tickets to “Shakespeare in the Park.”

The heightened anticipation for what’s deemed worth waiting for can enhance the mind’s perception of those cart-cooked gyros, saucy chicken wings or buttercream-frosted cupcakes, a New York-based clinical psychologist, Robert Leahy, said, referring to a phenomenon known as the “Halo Effect.” “Today people are very insecure about getting the right thing, and the easiest way to make a decision is to seek out what everyone else is buying,” Mr. Leahy, who heads up the American Institute for Cognitive Therapy on East 57th Street, said. “If they didn’t feel like they had to fit in, and they just looked at what they value, they might make different decisions.”

*Or Buffalo Wings, Noodles, Buttercream Frosting or Cheese Omelettes.

“Cat Lady” — myth or reality? The Queens Tribune investigates:

Pomonok Houses certainly isn’t the first housing complex in Queens, let alone New York City, to have the noxious scent of cat urine seep into its walls and it won’t be the last, according to the New York City ASPCA.

ASPCA Senior Outreach Manager Allison Cardona said the agency sees at least 50 to 100 cases similar to Pomonok throughout the city each year.

“It wasn’t until recently that the data is being recognized as a social problem, a mental health problem,” explained Cardona. “In the past, everyone heard of a cat lady or a little old lady who rescues too many cats, but instances like these are considered animal hoarding.”

Hoarding is when an individual has more than the typical number of companion animals; is in denial of the inability to provide this minimum care; and is in denial of the impact of that failure on the animals, the household, and human occupants of the dwelling, according to the he Hoarding of Animals Research Consortium, a non profit academic research group.

“A lot of times the situation is approached from social service stances, where it’s recognized that you can’t just remove all the animals and everything will be fine,” she said, “because no it’s won’t be fine, and yes, something needs to happen for the human or else they will begin hoarding all over again.”

. . .

Melanie Neer, an Elmhurst woman who had caught national attention for housing close to 120 cats in her studio apartment in 2000 is an example of an animal hoarder who agreed to give up her companions and once again found her apartment crawling with 45 felines in 2006.

Neer was facing eviction and since March 2006 has seen Animal Care and Control cage 27 of her cats, emphasizing that she knows of eight for which they could not find adopters, and which have been euthanized.

Neer never saw her number of pets as being a problem. She simply saw it as living with her “closest friends.”

It is important to recognize that hoarding knows no age, gender, or socioeconomic boundaries, according to HARC. It has been observed in men and women, young and old, married as well as never married or widowed, and in people with professional or white collar jobs.

Backstory on the Pomonok Stench: A Cautionary Tail.

More than 60 years after Little Flower left office, Italian-Americans are still shockingly underrepresented in the CUNY system:

As Columbus Day approaches, a number of prominent Italian-Americans are expressing concern that the City University of New York has a vendetta against them.

Nearly 30 years after that ethnic group was included in CUNY’s affirmative action program, Italian-Americans still face discrimination there, according to a university-commissioned report.

A three-member panel appointed by CUNY officials and the Calandra Italian American Institute determined there has been no significant progress in boosting the proportion of Italian-Americans in CUNY’s faculty and staff since 1977. The figure that year was slightly more than 6%. The panel’s report found that number largely unchanged today.

“One would have to say it’s disappointing, considering that Italian-Americans have been identified as an affirmative action group,” said panel member Richard Alba, a sociology teacher at SUNY-Albany.

The panel report was mandated by a 1999 settlement of a landmark class-action civil rights suit filed by Bronx native Joseph Scelsa, former head of the Calandra Institute, which was named after the late Bronx state Senator John Calandra.

Local leaders in the Italian-American community are blasting CUNY over the report.

“It has been 30 years of affirmative ‘inaction’ against Italian-Americans,” said Bronx Columbus Day Parade Committee member Jay Savino.

Is part of the reason CUNY supposedly sucks so bad that they’re dithering over affirmative action for Italian-Americans?

Sure, blame it on the strollers:

As the Park Slope mommies, daddies and Bugaboos multiply, a fringe group that once dominated a piece of the neighborhood has taken itself back to the fringe.

. . .

The southward shift of the lesbian community is far from surprising.

One obvious reason is the skyrocketing cost of living in Park Slope. On average, men earn 21 percent more than women, an income discrepancy that becomes wider for women-only households. But finances are only part of the neighborhood’s waning desirability among lesbians.

In the end, the real turnoff may be simply too many people who look like one another.

“I went to the Tea Lounge the other day and it totally freaked me out,” said Gabrielle Belfiglio, a lesbian who once lived in Park Slope, but has since moved to Windsor Terrace. “Everyone looked like they were part of the same photo shoot, posing with a laptop or a baby.

“There used to be a sense of diversity that isn’t there anymore,” she added. “You can walk around Windsor Terrace and Kensington and see a Hassid next to a woman in hijab next to a Jamaican kid. You can be who you are in that mix of people.”

It’s great to feel comfortable in a “mix of people” . . . do the Hassids and women in hijab feel the same?

And although I like the idea of tying the decline of lesbian community in Park Slope to the male-female economic gap — interesting theory! — this story isn’t exactly new, is it? Even the Times was writing about the exodus from “Dyke Slope” back in January 2005:

When Emily Haddad moved to New York shortly after finishing college in 2001, she didn’t know much about the city, but being gay, she knew she wanted to live in a gay-friendly community.

Her neighborhood of choice? Park Slope.

“It seemed like lesbian central in New York,” said Ms. Haddad, 24, whose unaccented speech belies her North Carolina roots.

Park Slope was the neighborhood where she marched in the Brooklyn Pride Parade during her first summer in New York. She spent another afternoon at the Rising Cafe, a lesbian coffee shop on Fifth Avenue, and ended up in a spirited discussion with some women from Dyke TV, a weekly television show. It was also the neighborhood where she volunteered at the Lesbian Herstory Archives, on 14th Street near Prospect Park. The Archives, and by extension Park Slope, became her adopted home.

But she never did make Park Slope her actual home, nor did any of her lesbian friends. “Dyke Slope,” as it is affectionately called by many lesbians, was too expensive for them, as it has become for many other New Yorkers. Instead, Ms. Haddad found a cheap, newly renovated two-bedroom apartment in a rowhouse on 51st Street, deep amid the residential sleepiness of Sunset Park. She splits the $1,500 monthly rent with a female roommate, who is straight.

(In fact, it’s such old news that the Brooklyn Paper story even features a picture of someone who was interviewed in the Times piece. She’s still not living in Park Slope.)

The Post analyzes top Netflix choices by borough and finds it says much about who we are:

Manhattan’s top choice is a documentary about itself, followed by “Barbarians at the Gate,” a film about money and excess, the foreign flick “Divorce, Italian Style,” and the patriotic musical “Yankee Doodle Dandy.”

Brooklyn’s top picks are about Hasidic Jews and graffiti, and local hero Spike Lee’s “Crooklyn.”

Queens’ list reveals its mixed personality — with Spike Lee’s “25th Hour” taking the top spot, followed by the counter-terror hit “24,” and the kvetching of “Seinfeld” creator Larry David on “Curb Your Enthusiasm.”

Rounding it out is a film about suicide bombers in Israel and “The Chorus,” a French film about a singing troupe.

In The Bronx, the hip-hop crime drama “Killa Season” is No. 1, followed by documentaries about Puerto Ricans in America and the Latin Kings, and the Paul Newman police flick, “Fort Apache, the Bronx.”

And Staten Island is all over the map, starting with the original version of the horror film “The Omen,” followed by the gang-war classic “The Warriors,” a show about plastic surgery, the straight-to-video action film “Covert One: The Hades Factor,” and “Dumbo.”

The New York Press attempts to learn just what the fuck it is dudes with metal detectors are doing:

James is mad as hell about something or other involving money — I don’t ask — and we’re tromping through the streets of Brooklyn in giant strides. He’s got a farmhand’s build, autumn-wheat hair and a scar that extends to the right side of his frown. In his hand is a metal detector as big as a bazooka.

Every morning James wakes up believing he might strike it rich on that very date. “One attic, one backyard or behind one door,” he trails off as we head out to dig up whatever fortune is buried in Prospect Park.

“You take a ring and throw it as hard as you want at the grass, and you ain’t gonna hear it make a sound,” he explains. “The dog walkers, that’s another thing. Tissues they use to clean up with, they put in the same pocket as their change. They pull out the tissues and where do you think the change goes?”

. . .

Dark clouds had followed us to the park and now thunder is rumbling in the distance. The headphones on James’ ears buzz a mosquito-like sound, which grows louder and fainter as he pans his detector side to side. The wind picks up and scatters leaves, and I see James on his knees carving a circular wound in the ground with a painter’s spatula. He flips over a hangnail of sod and reaches into the earth. A nightcrawler squirms across his knuckles. He plucks out a dime that looks like it was found on the Titanic.

Within an hour we have 65 cents in a baggy and are nearly swimming in the downpour.