So many salient details in such a short story — which one do you focus on? Is it A) That honeybees are back? B) That they’re taking over the Upper East Side? C) That the police department has a beekeeper? or D) That the story comes out suspiciously close to a bill being floated by the Council to legalize beekeeping? Mind reels:

Some 8,000 to 10,000 honeybees had surreptitiously moved into the neighborhood sometime in the past month and managed to build a giant hive in a tree between 80th and 81st streets without anyone noticing.

The queen decided to bust out at around 4 p.m., and flew south for a half-block before returning home.

She was followed dutifully on her outing by all of her subjects.

“It was a three foot column of bees,” said Doug Becker, 40.

Police Officer Anthony Planakis, the NYPD’s resident beekeeper for 30 years, said it was “one of the biggest swarms I’ve ever seen.”

He took all the bees into custody as a crowd of onlookers applauded, and said he’d bring them “to a farm in Connecticut to pollinate.”

This bees got loose only days after a swarm of amateur beekeepers buzzed around City Hall in support of a bill to legalize their hobby.

. . . is it just me or is the mayor/city council .5 percent sales tax increase not listed on Governor Paterson’s special session to-do list?

Then again, if the city is continually cooking books (“Surprise, here is a half billion!”), then they won’t really have to worry about it until after November 3 at least:

In May, the mayor hoped to generate $1.5 billion in revenue by raising the sales tax, doing away with a sales tax exemption for clothing and negotiating with the city’s unions on both health care costs and pensions.

He was partly victorious: The City Council signed off on hiking the sales tax to 8.875 percent from 8.375 percent and agreed to do away with the exemption for clothing selling for more than $110. The city’s unions also went along with contributing to some of their health benefits.

Elsewhere, the mayor was not so persuasive. He was unable to secure the creation of a fifth pension tier for new city employees in Albany, and the City Council refused to endorse a five-cent tax on plastic bags. In the end, the fiscal year 2010 budget agreement came up $359 million short.

This also doesn’t factor in the uncertain situation in Albany, where the legislature must approve all of the mayor’s tax proposals. The state will have to OK the sales tax increase, among other revenue measures, by July 1.

An administration spokesperson said the city will make up the revenue shortfall elsewhere. Conveniently, the city’s budget department reported last week that an additional $438 million to help fill the gap was generated thanks to “conservative” revenue projections.

But what some see as faulty revenue projections, others caution is a misleading budget process.

“It amazes me that they find a half a billion dollars,” said Councilmember Lewis Fidler. “Surprise, here is a half billion.”

“They are not playing all the cards on the deck,” added Fidler, who says the administration squirrels away funding to keep the City Council out of the budget process.

Some advocates also question whether the administration is being completely open about its revenue projections.

“If they are not being transparent about where the money comes from it makes me nervous for New Yorkers who rely on programs that are less politically popular, like AIDS housing programs,” said Barry. “We aren’t firehouses.”

Others wonder about the politics and whether the entire budget process represents an attempt to make the city’s fiscal situation appear OK for now, until after the city elections. In an analysis of the mayor’s budget, the city’s Independent Budget Office not only predicted far higher deficits in future years — climbing to $5.8 billion in fiscal year 2012 — but also observed, “Given that this a municipal election year, the difficult decisions about spending cuts and tax increases that lie ahead are unlikely to be addressed until November.”

Some advocates fearfully agree.

“People expect these cuts to be back on the table in the November financial plan after the city elections,” said Barry.

Those counterfeit goods they’re buying on Canal Street may be making them immoral:

“The effect on morality, people don’t anticipate,” said Prof. Dan Ariely, the author of “Predictably Irrational,” who conducted the studies. “We asked them if wearing fakes would get people to cheat more, they didn’t think it has an effect.”

. . .

In one of his studies, half of the 250 subjects were told that the designer glasses they were wearing were “real,” while the other half were told they were wearing “counterfeits.” They were told to do a number of tasks that seemed to be related to the glasses, like evaluating scenery. But tucked into the sequence was a math test. Researchers found that 60 percent of those who were wearing “counterfeit” glasses cheated, while only 20 percent of those wearing “real” glasses cheated.

Location Scout: Counterfeit Triangle.

But seriously, is there anyone on Staten Island who doesn’t understand what calamari is? I’m shocked:

When Jeanmarie Ritger’s 10-year-old daughter swims with friends in the family’s backyard pool in Dongan Hills, the children are captured on a video camera posted on a neighbor’s roof.

There is nothing Ms. Ritger can do about the unwanted surveillance of her yard, her life and her daughter, say officials.

That’s because the camera is not trained on her bedroom or bathroom window — places where New York law says a person has a reasonable expectation of privacy and such surveillance would be illegal.

“I’m stuck and I’m very uncomfortable and I’m concerned,” Ms. Ritger, an elementary school teacher, said during a recent interview in her yard under the watchful eye of her neighbor’s camera. “When does surveilling someone’s property become an invasion of someone else’s privacy?”

Not when it’s in a homeowner’s back, side or front yard.

Ms. Ritger’s video-taping neighbors defended their rooftop camera, saying they are protecting their yard and in-ground pool, not spying. They accuse Ms. Ritger and her brother, who lives in the house next-door, of throwing worms, berries and calamari (squid) into their pool over the last few years. Ms. Ritger has flatly denied those claims, calling them “ridiculous.”

“It’s watching my yard and her yard,” the neighbor, Peter Malvagna, said of his camera. “It’s legal and I can’t get in trouble for it.”

. . .

William Smith, a spokesman for the Richmond County District Attorney Daniel Donovan, said the Staten Island office was the first to win a felony conviction in the state under Stephanie’s Law. A retired firefighter was convicted here in 2004 of secretly recording his girlfriend’s teen-age daughter undressing in his home.

Before the enactment in 2003 of Stephanie’s Law, which was created after a Long Island woman was secretly recorded by her landlord undressing in her apartment, there were even fewer protections from prying eyes.

“In plain language, New York State law defines unlawful surveillance as recording someone, without their permission, at a place and time when a person has a reasonable expectation of privacy, specifically a place where a person believes he or she could disrobe in privacy. This law has not been interpreted to cover the outside of a residence, especially in an urban or suburban environment like Staten Island,” said Smith.

Crazed ex? Pissed off creditor? No one knows:

Residents of a block in Boerum Hill have known for months that rogue urinators were defiling their street, but they never had the proof to convince local police of a scatological conspiracy on Dean Street — until now.

A two-liter container of human urine, complete with syringes bobbing in the waste, was found Sunday morning between Bond and Nevins streets — and the repulsive find was finally enough to prove to cops that residents were being tormented by micturating hellions and not merely dogs with overactive bladders.

“It’s absolutely gross,” said Joseph Samulski, who had the misfortune of finding the container on his front steps. “I don’t even know how you could accumulate that much urine.”

But on the brighter side, “It was the first time we were able to establish what we’ve been saying on our block — that someone has been pouring urine on cars.”

. . .

The pissing match broke out on the day of the block party last September, when several people emerged from their homes near the Nevins Street end of the block to encounter an overpowering stench of liquid waste on the street and in one man’s pickup truck.

Since then, that pickup truck has been showered at least two other times.

“Thankfully, whenever it happened, my truck needed a good washing anyway,” said good sport Kevin McGowan.

I don’t know what it means, but I don’t like it:

On Sunday, March 2, the Russian & Turkish Baths on East 10th Street in the East Village was living up to its history of hosting damp celebrities such as Sean “P. Diddy” Combs, Jennifer Lopez and John Belushi. . . .

. . .

. . . Sean Lennon, two topless young women and Mr. Lennon’s mother, Yoko Ono, stole the show. They were in the Russian Room, sweating it up.

“Sean was pouring water over Yoko’s head,” reported a witness, who was sitting among the packed crowd in the room, which is essentially a giant oven. “She recoiled momentarily when he poured the ice cold water, but soon began enjoying it. She was sitting down with a towel around her head. She was wearing one of the bath-issue togas.”

Mr. Lennon and his two female friends were standing in the middle of the room.

“They were massaging each other’s boobs suggestively,” the source said of the young ladies. “Sean was sweating like crazy. The two girls he was with were like 19, pretty hot, and he was making out with one of them.” Mama Ono did not seem to notice.

Because you’re never assured that the amphibians you also get have been raised organically:

A health-conscious Brooklyn mom says she nearly jumped out of her skin when she found a little green frog napping between the leaves of a head of organic lettuce she brought home.

“I jumped away” said 39-year-old Yvonne Brechbuhler, fearing she’d uncovered a dead bug or worse, a slug.

“I didn’t know what it was. But once I realized it was a frog, I was okay.”

The Prospect Heights mom, who doubles as a stage actress, described the tiny visitor no bigger than the tip of her pinky finger as “one tough frog.”

She said first the frog survived a journey from South Florida to the Park Slope Food Coop, then another three days in her refrigerator.

Finally it narrowly escaped being part of a pesticide-free salad she was making last week.

In case you were wondering how Citi Field and the new Yankee Stadium stack up:

A study of the two new baseball stadiums by feng shui expert Judith Wendell found the Yankees’ future home has good luck while the Mets’ Citi Field will be plagued by “a lot of disturbed energy.” Wendell visited the two sites, which are slated to open in 2009, exclusively for The Post.

There is one bright spot for Met followers: Citi Field’s color scheme of dark blue exposed steel with green seats and red brick are what Wendell calls a “power combination.” They are certainly “much better” than the team colors of blue and orange, which she deems “antagonistic.”

The Yanks broke ground on Babe Ruth’s birthday, Aug. 16, and are repeating many elements of the old stadium, including the angles for home plate and the positions of the dugouts. Cathedral arches and the entire façade will also recapture the old Yankee Stadium incarnations.

“In feng shui terms, they are taking the ‘predecessor chi’ and bringing it with them and graphing it on to the new stadium, which is very good for luck,” said Wendell . . .

Location Scout: Citi Field, New Yankee Stadium.

You might be wondering how a body of water can catch a venereal disease. So is everyone:

Scientists have discovered that the long-contaminated Gowanus Canal is not just toxic, it’s also infected with gonorrhea.

The cringe-inducing find was revealed by New York City College of Technology biologist Dr. Niloufar Haque in this month’s Scienceline, an NYU publication.

While developers have envisioned the canal someday turning Brooklyn into a bit of Venice with idyllic gondola rides, Haque’s team found their own emergence of hanky-panky in the Gowanus’ waters.

“One group of students found gonorrhea in a water drop,” the professor told Scienceline.

It’s not the first time the toxic waterway — dubbed the Lavender Lake because of its oily, purplish hue — has come up positive with disease. In the mid-1970s, the channel was found to contain typhus, typhoid and cholera.

Location Scout: Gowanus Canal.

. . . sounds creepy when you put it that way:

In an ongoing campaign to prevent a possible outbreak of West Nile virus, the New York City Department of Health and Mental Hygiene (DOHMH) has announced yet another round of helicopter missions to eliminate mosquito larvae.

According to DOHMH, the helicopters will be dropping “natural bacterial granules” on non-residential marshlands in Queens, Staten Island and the Bronx, on Thursday, August 16, Friday, August 17 and Monday, August 20, from 6 a.m. to 9 p.m. each day. In case of rain, the campaign will continue the following day.

DOHMH says the “larvicide” pellets are meant to kill the mosquito larvae, which live near the surface of pools of stagnant water, before they can emerge as adult insects.

. . .

The agents being used by DOHMH are VectoBac CG and/or VectoLex CG, which contain a bacteria, bacillus thuringiensis israelensis.

If only Discovery were doing reality programming in 1984, there’d be such a tie-in opportunity:

There might be an appliance theme to the haunting of the Merchant’s House, a nineteenth-century town house in the East Village that was owned by a single family until 1933, when it was turned into a museum. In the nineteen-seventies, someone decided to fit the kitchen with a cast-iron stove. One day, the story goes, a museum worker witnessed the stove shaking violently, as if someone were pushing it from behind. In the early nineties, the museum’s curator installed a computer. The machine froze every time she typed “Tredwell” — the last name of the house’s original owner. “Well, not every time, but three out of five,” Pi Gardiner, the museum’s current executive director, explained one night recently. “Our theory was that the spirits were, like, ‘What is all this newfangled technology?’ ”

. . .

Seabury Tredwell, the patriarch of the presumed ghost family, bought the house for his wife and their seven children in 1835. When he died, his kids stuck around — most notably Gertrude, the youngest, who stayed until her death, at the age of ninety-three. [Dan] Sturges, a veteran of more than fifty missions with Paranormal Investigation of NYC, is searching for their spirits pro bono. (He did the same for the Belasco Theatre and for the restaurant One If by Land, Two If by Sea. He supplements his income with acting gigs; see the 2002 Hungry Man “XXL” commercial.)

Sturges unpacked his equipment: a digital-video recorder, two electromagnetic-field meters, a thermocouple — like an iPod, with a metal coil to tell temperature (you look for cold spots) — a digital camera, and a tape recorder. “My dad was a fisherman,” he said. “I tell people I go out fishing. You don’t always catch something. Plenty of times, you get skunked.”

. . .

Using the tape recorder, he conducted an Electronic Voice Phenomena test. “Is there anybody in the kitchen tonight?” he asked. (“Ideally, we would hear, ‘Yes! It’s Gertrude!’” he explained.) No reply. In the family room, he inspected two mannequins — one bald, both in yellowed nineteenth-century dresses. He held up the recorder again: “If there’s anybody here in this room, can you make a noise? . . . Can you shake the chandelier? A knock on the wall or the ceiling would be great.” There was a sort of shuffle outside, on East Fourth Street, but Sturges dismissed it.

Any good newsman will tell you some stuff you just can’t make up:

A walk last week through the denuded ex-headquarters of the Times, on West Forty-third Street, was kind of spooky for a citizen already in an apocalyptic frame of mind. The paper’s empty offices, mid-gutting, suggested the twin desolations of war and obsolescence. But in the eyes of the “architecturologist” Kevin Browne, who searches modern ruins for loot, these wastes were full of possibility. Browne had come to the Times Building from another scavenge job (the old Queens County Courthouse — spectacular terra cotta) to look in on some of the spoils he’d been coveting since the Times decamped to Eighth Avenue, last month.

Browne, fifty, is the president of a salvage operation called Olde Good Things, which has showrooms in Chelsea, Chicago, Los Angeles, Florida, and Scranton, Pennsylvania. Olde Good Things is owned by the Church of Bible Understanding, a sect founded by a former vacuum-cleaner salesman. For a couple of decades, the church ran a cut-rate carpet-cleaning business that employed teen-age runaways. About a dozen years ago, Browne steered the church into the junk game. “It was totally Jesus leading us,” he explained. In the Lord’s name, he has salvaged artifacts from demolitions and renovation jobs all over town: the Plaza, Alice Tully Hall, the Morgan Library. The Times had already consigned most of its valuable stuff to be sold at auction. Now Browne had a shot at whatever leftovers he could find.

In the front lobby, Browne, a man with a Tommy Chong beard and a loping stride, put on a hard hat and led the way up some stairs to a vast newsroom. “You see anything you like, you can have it,” he said. There wasn’t much to like, just drifts of paper and trash: computer disks, laser printouts of war photographs, a sci-fi paperback (“Earth: Final Conflict — The Arrival”), a lei. Browne spoke into a walkie-talkie. “Junior, those glass doors to the newsroom that said ‘New York Times’ — they gone?” Junior assured him that they were not. “If it says ‘New York Times’ on it, it has value,” Browne said.

. . .

Down at the loading docks, Browne poked around in the back of his van. It was crammed with booty: a pair of oxidized bronze sconces, some antique iron nail pullers, a laser printer. He pulled out a giant black-and-white photograph, printed on poster board, of a Times reporter, in shirt and tie, sitting in front of a typewriter — a real Mohican. Browne had no idea who it was, but he was determined to find out.

People are sure edgy nowadays:

Judith Monaco Callet was walking her neighbor’s dog one afternoon in April when she saw a man in an S.U.V. with tinted windows park on the west side of LaGuardia, near Bleecker. The man –Callet thinks he was Caucasian, and wearing a cap — got out of the S.U.V., crossed the street, and threw a big pile of birdseed onto the pavement. “Out of the corner of my eye,” Callet said the other day, “I saw a big black net, like a butterfly or fishing net. So I see it moving, and I’m thinking somebody’s lost a cat. The guy swooped the net up, closed it off, and there he went.” He made off with about fifteen pigeons.

. . .

In and around LaGuardia Corner Gardens recently, theories abounded on where all the birds have gone. [Wilhelmine] Hellmann, snapping on a pair of yellow rubber gloves, asserted that her first sighting of the birdnapper, on Eighth Street, had left her stunned. “I can’t judge people, but that a person thinks he has a right to scoop up pigeons — that just drives me crazy,” she said. She wanted to put to rest, while she was at it, the stereotypical association of pigeons with breadcrumb — sprinkling elderly women. “That is a made-up concept,” she said, rooting around in the dirt for a dead rat. “There are plenty of little old men.”

Only a few weeks ago, Hellmann said, she was at the garden when a van pulled up. Same deal: sprinkle, net, swoop. Joe O’Connell, the resident rosarian, tried to scare the intruder off. “I was waving a shovel, screaming every word under the sun,” he recalled. “Boom — he was in the van with them and gone.” O’Connell said he had heard that the birds were being ground up to make meal for ferrets. He added, “This may sound like a paranoid theory, but does it have anything to do with bird flu?”

A few plots over from Hellmann, a gardener who gave his name as Jack was pruning his daylilies. A couple of years ago, he said, he’d seen something similar happen early on a Sunday morning. He put forth two explanations: either the pigeons were being eaten, perhaps in Chinatown, or they were being taken to shooting ranges in Pennsylvania. “You know something — just hit me right now?” he asked, his tone turning ominous. He looked across LaGuardia to the umbrellas of Señor Swanky’s. “Rich folk don’t like pigeons.” Jack pointed out a set of spiky metal apparatuses that, along with a parliament’s worth of owl decoys, had been installed on the window ledges of a nearby building. “It’s, like, follow the money.” Another gardener whispered, “Maybe it’s N.Y.U.!”

Hey, Post — they’re called “little people” — not “midgets” — even if you are talking about a dice-throwing, beer-guzzling crack-dealing midget whose only concern is that he’s not known as a “dwarf”:

The short, troubled life of a drug-dealing Harlem midget came to a violent end yesterday when he was gunned down while guzzling beer and shooting dice outside a housing project.

Cops found a huge .380-caliber pistol in the waistband of little person Joshua Agard, 18, along with 15 vials of crack that he was peddling while hanging out in a courtyard with pal Manuel Zabater, who was also killed in the attack.

“He was just so big. So [I thought], how much could he get into?” said distraught neighbor Debra Daniels, 61. “He was a good person. I loved him.”

Though Agard was just 3 feet tall, he had a police record a mile long. So far this year, he had been busted twice, once on assault charges for throwing a bottle at a man’s head and once for trespassing when he was caught inside 425 E. 105th St. He also had two other arrests, cops said.

The final, fatal trouble for Agard came at about 4:30 a.m. yesterday while he and Zabater, beers in hand, were in the courtyard of the East River Houses project on East 105th Street.

According to cops, three or four black males approached and, without saying a word, blasted Agard several times.

Witnesses told The Post that the project grounds were clear of the usual cast of thugs at the time of the shooting, indicating that many knew the hit would be going down.

As rounds tore through the tiny target’s head and torso, Zabater committed an act of bravery when he rushed to his friend’s side and tried to pull him to cover, witnesses said. That’s when Zabater — who was on parole for drugs — was hit twice in the torso.

. . .

The bloody end for Agard came after a life in which he struggled to overcome the deaths of his parents, and his size, which sometimes made him the object of mockery.

“When people would taunt him, he would say, ‘I’m a midget, I don’t want to be called a dwarf,’” said one pal. “He did everything normal. He played ball, everything. Everybody knew him. He’s a loving person.”

Things weren’t always so bad for Agard. When he was 9 years old he appeared in a performance of “A Christmas Carol” put on by Harlem’s The Play’s The Thing Theatre Company. Fittingly, he played Tiny Tim.

Now that a little time has passed*, the Times can finally address the salient fact of that particular story:

She worked at the Red Lobster in Times Square and lived with her husband near Yankee Stadium. Yet one night, returning home from her job, Odine D. discovered that African custom, not American law, held sway over her marriage.

A strange woman was sitting in the living room, and Ms. D.’s husband, a security guard born in Ghana, introduced her as his other wife.

Devastated, Ms. D., a Guinean immigrant who insisted that her last name be withheld, said she protested: “I can’t live with the woman in my house — we have only two bedrooms.” Her husband cited Islamic precepts allowing a man to have up to four wives, and told her to get used to it. And she tried to obey.

Polygamy in America, outlawed in every state but rarely prosecuted, has long been associated with Mormon splinter groups out West, not immigrants in New York. But a fatal fire in a row house in the Bronx on March 7 revealed its presence here, in a world very different from the suburban Utah setting of “Big Love,” the HBO series about polygamists next door.

The city’s mourning for the dead — a woman and nine children in two families from Mali — has been followed by a hushed double take at the domestic arrangements described by relatives: Moussa Magassa, the Mali-born American citizen who owned the house and was the father of five children who perished, had two wives in the home, on different floors. Both survived.

. . .

But the Magassas clearly are not an isolated case. Immigration to New York and other American cities has soared from places where polygamy is lawful and widespread, especially from West African countries like Mali, where demographic surveys show that 43 percent of women are in polygamous marriages.

And the picture that emerges from dozens of interviews with African immigrants, officials and scholars of polygamy is of a clandestine practice that probably involves thousands of New Yorkers.

*It makes you wonder whether someone at early editorial meetings yelled out “Too soon!” as if it were a tastelessly ill-timed 9/11 joke.

Even this generation’s Raymond Burr* couldn’t convince Community Board 5 to honor Jerry Orbach with a street renaming:

In a twist worthy of a “Law & Order” script, the decision on whether to name a Midtown street corner for the late actor Jerry Orbach effectively ended in a hung jury last night. Not even a cameo appearance by his longtime colleague Sam Waterston could change the outcome.

The members of Community Board 5 were evenly divided, and admittedly conflicted, about whether to relax their standard objections and approve the naming of the 53rd Street and Eighth Avenue intersection the Jerry Orbach Corner.

A few hours after a committee voted 3-2 for the renaming, the full board voted 18-17 for it, with one abstention. But that slim margin was not enough to qualify as an approval because the votes in favor were not a majority of the votes cast. The decision — or lack of one — is merely advisory; the City Council ultimately decides on street renamings.

. . .

[Orbach's] regular-guy appearance and lifestyle made him a sentimental favorite among the board members, who have routinely rejected applications for street renamings in the last few years. They turned down Guy Lombardo, Hal Holbrook and even St. Francis of Assisi. But many found it hard to say no to Jerry Orbach, consummate New Yorker, especially in the face of his widow, his son Tony and a living, breathing star, Mr. Waterston, who plays the prosecutor Jack McCoy on “Law & Order.” He read passages from a letter from the Detectives Endowment Association and from Mr. Orbach’s obituary in The New York Times.

It wasn’t Mr. Waterston’s presence that flustered Vikki Barbero, a board member who voted against the renaming. It was the face of Tony Orbach, 45, who bears a strong resemblance to his father.

“It’s like he’s here,” Ms. Barbero said, referring to Mr. Orbach.

“That’s why I’m here,” Tony Orbach responded.

*See, for example, quasi-Atticus Finch Forrest Bedford, white-shoe sounding stock trading pitchman and even Abraham Lincoln.

. . . but super-tough nickel-alloy ones, on the other hand:

A rookie cop was “shielded” from death in Queens yesterday when his badge stopped a drunken maniac from plunging a knife into the officer’s heart, authorities said.

The kitchen knife broke into five pieces as it hit the shield.

Officer Stuart Ingram, who joined the force just three months ago, suffered only cuts to his hand in the dramatic clash with crazed Joseph Leonardi, 50.

“When it happened, I was in shock,” Ingram said.

Despite the force of the knife, there were no scratches on Ingram’s NYPD shield. The nickel-alloy badges have been known to deflect a bullet.

“Thanks [to the badge manufacturer] for making it stronger than the knife,” Ingram said.

Leonardi had earlier tried to run over a Catholic nun, cops said.

Meanwhile, somewhere a lowly factchecker pleads for his job:

There’s a plaque on Shore Road where bicyclist Ivan Morales was struck by an SUV nearly a year ago. After being hurled more than 30 feet in the air, his helmet split in half. So did his skull. The NYPD and news reports said he was dead.

This weekend, Time’s Up!, a bike advocacy group, organized a tour of sites throughout the city where cyclists were killed by motor vehicles. When News 12 broadcast a segment from the spot where Morales was killed, his fellow churchgoers were shocked.

Ivan Morales is alive and well and living in the Bronx.

“I was actually dead at one point,” the 62-year-old retired Metro-North computer analyst said yesterday. “In the ambulance, they said, there’s nothing we can do for this guy. What happened, by the grace of God, I came back.” He was in a coma for four days and didn’t remember anything about the Jan. 9, 2006, incident after waking.

No word on whether the plaque was returned.

Did someone leave the burner on over the weekend? Because I’m starting to feel a little lightheaded:

Con Edison, the fire department and multiple city agencies are investigating the source of a gas odor throughout Manhattan this morning.

Widespread reports of the smell have been coming in since around 9 a.m.

The city’s Office of Emergency Management says it is aware of the situation and at this point they are investigating.

Reports indicate the odor is concentrated on the West Side, as far north as the 80s. The odor has also been reported to be particularly strong around Herald Square and in NY1’s neighborhood in Chelsea.

Previously on mysterious, unexplained smells: The Sweet Smell Of Maple Doughnuts, Or Perhaps Eggos, Smell Returns? Mysterious Smell Comes, Goes And Leaves No Clues In Its Wake, Sweet Syrupy Smell, I Wish I Knew How To Quit You!

Critics charge that the city’s chronic lifeguard shortage is its own doing:

Bullies conduct the testing for lifeguard positions at city beaches and pools, said parents of kids who claim they were humiliated by City Department of Parks and Recreation workers.

An ad hoc committee has been formed to get the City Council to investigate the allegations. Committee members say abuses include grown men cursing at young girls, testers purposely failing swimmers who met qualifications and closed-door trials out of public view.

. . .

The committee report recommends that training and testing be expanded beyond the department’s 59th St. pool in Manhattan. It also suggests open testing and improvements in recruitment efforts.

The committee additionally called for the ouster of Peter Stein, president of Local 508, the lifeguards’ union. The committee charged that Stein has run the lifeguard program for decades as his own “little fiefdom.”

Do you wonder if recipients of the Billy Joel scholarship will ever feel a little lame? NYU announces the first year’s winners:

Several graduate students in the department of music and performing arts professions were awarded a total of $500,000 from the Billy Joel Scholarship fund this summer.

In its first year, the fund will cover part of the tuiton for three Steinhardt School of Education students: Yuval Cohen of Jerusalem; Peter Cruz of Perth Amboy, N.J.; and Michael Eckroth of Las Vegas. All of these students started at NYU this September.

. . .

A multi-Grammy winner and 2002 Musicares Person of the Year, Billy Joel — whose daughter, Alexa Ray, attended NYU’s musical theater program — is a supporter of musical education.

“Billy Joel’s extraordinary talents as a composer and a performer, and the impact of his work on the musical scene and industry resonate perfectly with NYU Steinhardt’s numerous bridges to the music profession,” said Lawrence Ferrara, chair of the music and performing arts department, in a statement.

That seems a little effusive.

Poachers are stealing Brooklyn’s wild parrots:

Who is bird-napping Brooklyn’s wild monk parrots?

The many who dislike the colorful birds might not care — but Max Ovadia of Midwood does.

Ovadia believes parrot poachers have been loose in the Brooklyn wild late at night.

“We heard them squawking,” he said. “At night, that’s not normal.”

Around midnight one day last month, Ovadia said, he saw a man with a huge net on a 25-foot pole. Accompanied by two teenagers, the suspected poacher even had pole extensions to reach high nests, he said.

The trapping of wild animals, including monk parrots, is illegal without a license.

Ovadia said he scared off the poachers twice, but the nests the parrots called home are now empty. “Only sparrows are going in there,” he said.

. . .

The story of Brooklyn’s monk parrots has come full circle. Native to South America, the first birds were trapped to be brought north as pets.

But many of the original birds were either let loose by pet owners who no longer wanted them or, as legend has it, escaped from a broken container at Kennedy airport in the 1970s.

Large colonies of the birds now live on the walled Brooklyn College campus and Green-Wood Cemetery, where they are protected.

Not all borough residents are thrilled. Homeowners have complained the birds are loud and dirty.

I can almost hear Jerry Orbach say it — “Some strange characters hang out in this neck of the woods”*:

The body of a man clad in a kinky black leather mask and decked out head to toe in S&M gear was hanging from a chain-link fence on Hudson Street yesterday — as many passers-by ignored it, thinking it was a Halloween display.

The slightly built, fair-skinned mystery man may have been choked to death by a dog collar around his neck, it’s other end strapped around a 3-foot-tall fence post, police sources said.

The 40ish, tattooed man was found kneeling, braced face-first against the fence in front of 424 Hudson St. at around 6:45 a.m.

In a bizarre twist, the body had been there for at least an hour, dismissed by some who walked past as a quirky seasonal display in an area scattered with S&M and gay bars.

“The body was covered with a black suit and he had a mask on his face,” said deli owner Indra Patel, who first spotted the strangely posed corpse when he opened next door around 5:30 a.m.

“I thought it was a dummy. It looked like a dummy, because every year they do decorations like that. I was wondering why they put up the [Halloween] decorations early.”

Patel said at least an hour went by before a woman walking her dog realized the sidewalk exhibit of a man wearing a pair of leather spiked gloves, chaps and a vest was a real person and called police.

Cops were investigating if the man had committed suicide or died during some sort of bizarre auto-erotic sex game.

. . .

Another witness, Kevin Samuel, 50, a porter for a building across the street, said he had looked at the body several times but it just never clicked that it might be a real person.

“I’m staring at him and I think, ‘Is that a prop or a real person?’ His legs looked like he was twisted on an angle and that he fell in it [the fence]. It looked like he was stuck there and couldn’t get up, like he lost his balance,” Samuel said.

*OK, OK — being Jerry Orbach is harder than it looks!

The Manhattan Cat, whose entire existence is informed by dank, cramped apartments they never leave, gets much, much freakier:

Josh is a $4,000 cat, bred to keep from setting off allergic reactions like sniffles, teary eyes and hives in people like me — who until now could never have a meaningful relationship with a feline.

The 3-year-old male was bred by a company called Allerca, which set up our meeting yesterday at the W Hotel.

After hiding under the bed, then behind a pillow, he let me cradle him in my arms.

I waited and . . . nothing. No sneezing. No tears.

. . .

The special cats won’t be available to the general public until early next year. Already, there’s a long waiting list. New Yorkers are actually paying an extra $2,000 to be bumped to the front of the line.

Allerca developed the pets by selectively breeding cats that had a “changed” glycoprotein, the genetic property that triggers an allergy, said Bernadine Cruz, Josh’s vet. One in 50,000 cats has this altered protein.

“Joshua is second generation and there’s many more to come,” Cruz said, adding that he’s the result of three years of research.

Just say no to genetically modified cats!

The patient who received “last rites” from the priest who then got a traffic ticket calls on authorities to show some mercy:

Nelly Munoz, 65, is so grateful to the Rev. Cletus Forson of St. Andrew the Apostle for rushing to her bedside at Maimonides Medical Center following emergency intestinal surgery she wants to find a way to pay for the ticket.

“The operation was very bad, but when he came to visit me it made me feel very good,” said Munoz, who is originally from Colombia and worked in a laundry before becoming ill last month.

“I’m really upset. When I heard what happened, I wanted to pay the ticket if I could,” added Munoz, who has no source of income and is recovering at a friend’s house in Bay Ridge, Brooklyn. “I feel very grateful that he came to give me prayers.”

. . .

Yesterday, The News found four private cars parked illegally in the same zone without tickets — including vehicles apparently belonging to a doctor, two EMS workers and a cop.

Does this partially explain that convoluted Yalta reference in his suicide e-mail? Let the conspiracy theories begin:

The four-story Upper East Side town house that was destroyed in a gas explosion yesterday once served as a clandestine meeting place for a circle of prominent New Yorkers who informally gathered intelligence for President Franklin D. Roosevelt before and during World War II, according to several published histories.

Known simply as “the Room,” the covert network held monthly meetings to exchange gossip and tips in a bland rented apartment in the building at 34 East 62nd Street, as early as 1927.

No one lived in the apartment, and the phone number was unlisted. It is not clear where the apartment was in the building, which was completed in 1882. The meetings apparently continued until the early 1940’s.

. . .

The covert group, founded in 1917, included the real estate heir Vincent Astor, a close friend of Roosevelt; the book publisher Nelson Doubleday; Winthrop W. Aldrich, the president of the Chase National Bank; Kermit Roosevelt, a son of Theodore Roosevelt; David K. E. Bruce, a son-in-law of Andrew W. Mellon and a future ambassador to France, West Germany and Britain; the philanthropist William Rhinelander Stewart; and Marshall Field III, a newspaper publisher and heir to the Chicago department store fortune.

Members of the Room, which had close ties with Britain’s Secret Intelligence Service, reported on their conversations with world leaders and gathered to hear speakers like the polar explorer Richard E. Byrd and the writer W. Somerset Maugham, who had been a secret agent in World War I.

. . .

After World War II began in Europe in 1939, the group shifted its efforts to counterespionage; at President Roosevelt’s request, it drew up plans to guard arms factories against sabotage and tighten border controls to prevent foreign spies from entering the United States, according to Mr. [Phillip] Knightley’s “Second Oldest Profession: Spies and Spying in the 20th Century” (Norton, 1987).

The Room used its contacts to examine bank accounts suspected of being used by foreign spies; monitor Japanese naval activities in the South Pacific; and report on conditions in the Canal Zone, the Caribbean and Peru.

The group was eventually supplanted by the more formal intelligence-gathering efforts that resulted in the creation of the Central Intelligence Agency in 1947.

Am I reading this correctly? The second time in a week this guy plays good samaritan and this time he creams the thief with his car? Too weird:

A serial purse-snatcher was critically injured last night when he was struck by a passing car moments after he stole a woman’s pocketbook on a Chelsea street, authorities said.

The thief, who was not identified, was riding a bike when he was struck at 17th Street and 11th Avenue after he had dashed off with the woman’s handbag.

The driver, Peter Welsh, said he heard a woman scream, “He’s got my purse! Someone help!”

That’s when Welsh barreled into the thief as he tried to get off his bike.

“I tried to get in front of him and intercept him,” Welsh said. “I didn’t mean to hit him.”

The thief, wanted for a string of purse-snatchings in Manhattan, was taken to St. Vincents Hospital in critical condition.

The incident comes a week after Welsh said he chased down a carjacker who crashed into four cars and hit a pedestrian June 14 near a Brooklyn movie set where Welsh was working.

It turns out that this is for real:

He goes by Peter Parker but says he’s no hero.

The good Samaritan movie-set worker who ran down a purse snatcher in Chelsea said he just likes to help.

“I don’t feel like a hero, but I felt like ‘I’ve got to help out,’” said Peter “Parker” Welsh, 33, who carries the moniker of the web-slinging “Spider-Man” character. The real-life Peter used his van to knock the thief off his bike late Friday.

And it’s not the first time this month alone that Welsh has done a good deed. On June 14, he chased down a fleeing carjacker who ran off after crashing into four vehicles at a Brooklyn movie set where Welsh was working. He brought the vehicular villain down and into the arms of law enforcement.

He’s known as Peter Parker because he co-runs Location Parking Security Services, which handles parking for movie shoots around town.

Get it? “Parker” . . . as in parking . . . cars . . . get it?

You could call them beaches, but then it’d seem like you could actually swim there:

Call them the secret beaches of New York.

Hidden in the nooks and crannies along the city’s riverbanks lie dozens of small, sandy oases.

But don’t grab the beach towels just yet. Most of the estimated 60 to 70 “beaches” in the five boroughs and New Jersey are isolated, neglected and debris-strewn. Still, some nature enthusiasts are optimistic.

“Right now . . . these beaches are not great sunbathing options,” said Rob Buchanan of New York Harbor Beaches. “But they could become that if people start to take care of them.”

Buchanan, 47, is among a group of hikers and boaters who spent the last year combing the East, Hudson and Harlem river shorelines.

Not everyone is pleased with the idea of opening up the small beaches. Officials at Community Board 1 in downtown Manhattan, for example, downplayed the area under the Brooklyn Bridge for fear of increased drownings.

But John Lipscomb, patrol boat captain for the nonprofit group Riverkeepers, sees people fishing, crabbing and wading along the shoreline around the city all the time.

“People want to use the water,” he said, adding that pollution remains a major problem. “We need to get to a point where mothers can take their children there to play and build sandcastles. We’re on our way, but we’re not quite there yet.”

Not all the beaches lie on public land, and many are not easily accessible. They’re tucked under bridges, below city parks and on rocky strips in neighborhoods like DUMBO, Astoria, Battery Park and the South Bronx.

See also: New York Harbor Beaches.

Some will go to great lengths to avoid even the appearance of Satan:

A Brooklyn woman says she was ready to go through hell to avoid delivering her son today — on the bedeviled date 6-6-6 — but fortunately, he was a little angel and arrived early.

“I’m not superstitious but I just didn’t want to put my kid through any teasing at school,” said Bela Ioffe, 25, who had even scheduled a C-section for yesterday to ensure that she wouldn’t give birth on a date associated with the devil and the Apocalypse.

Thank God she went into labor on her own at New York Hospital of Queens, the new mom said.

“My husband thought it would be cool [for the baby to be born today] — but he didn’t get his way,” Ioffe said.

The beaming mom said her husband has already jokingly dubbed their child “Little Devil” — although the baby will soon get a proper name straight from the Bible: Daniel.

I don’t know how you forget about an entire golf course, but whatever:

It’s tee time on Governors Island, where a long-forgotten golf course will be revived for a celebrity competition this fall.

The Manhattan Golf Classic on Governors Island, announced yesterday for Oct. 22, will pit female champs Annika Sorenstam and Natalie Gulbis in an 18-hole battle of the sexes against actor Dennis Quaid, rated Hollywood’s best player by Golf Digest, and another star yet to be named.

Actors Craig T. Nelson and Bruce McGill, who was the rowdy D-Day in “Animal House,” will be among those squaring off in a four-man celebrity contest also being planned.

. . .

ArenaCorp Holdings, which is paying $75,000 plus expenses for use of the island, will restore the nine-hole course last used by Coast Guard officers before the service left in 1996.

The nine holes, spanning a relatively compact 10 acres or so, will do double duty by rearranging the tee approaches and placement of the pins.

“We’ve been able to embrace the historic character of the property . . . with meandering holes around Fort Jay, the skyline and the Statue of Liberty,” said Robert McNeil, president of The Northeast Golf Co., which is helping to restore the course.