I’ll tell you what — if cab drivers quit being such assholes and accept credit cards, I’ll gladly look the other way if they want to curse at each other:

A New York City cab driver has been fined $1,000 for launching a foul-mouthed tirade at another cabbie. The confrontation occurred Oct. 8, 2007, on the West Side of Manhattan when neither driver had a passenger.

Driver Malik Rizwan honked at fellow cabbie Zbigniew Sobczak after Sobszak cut him off, prompting Sobszak to jump out of his cab and use a vulgarity repeatedly.

Rizwan called the police and accused Sobczak of assault. A city administrative law judge found Sobczak guilty of verbal harassment, not assault, and recommended a $350 fine.

But Taxi and Limousine Commission Chairman Matthew Daus, in a ruling last Friday, increased the penalty to $1,000 and a 30-day suspension.

There was a time when cab drivers were given more leeway with language.

A 1982 legal decision in a case called TLC vs. Baudin found that a “driver’s use of profanity during a fight with a pedestrian was not misconduct given cognizance to the realities of life in New York City.” But Daus, in a letter to Sobczak, said, “To the extent that decisions issued before my tenure, such as TLC vs. Baudin, may be read to overrule the penalty of license revocation for verbal harassment or abuse, I would override those decisions.” “The city has changed over the years,” Daus said in an interview Wednesday. “It’s become more civil. … The days when drivers can curse at each other are over in my opinion.”

Then again, not all agencies agree:

Using profanity may be unprofessional for cabdrivers or newscasters, but cops are often free to shoot their mouths off, city officials said.

In fact, a well-placed F-bomb can be part of good police work, and may even help prevent the use of deadly force, said Andrew Case, spokesman for the Civilian Complaint Review Board.

. . .

The NYPD patrol guide calls on cops to be “courteous and respectful,” but does not explicitly forbid profane language.

Of the 4,024 complaints lodged against officers for “discourteous” (as opposed to offensive or bigoted) language in 2007, only 6.6 percent were substantiated.

And in 7.6 percent of cases, choosing to swear and protect was not only acceptable, but actually warranted, Case said.

The rest of the complaints were either unfounded or impossible to prove.

“If [cops] have used ordinary language and a person continues to do what was improper, [the officers] are allowed to raise the tone of the exchange,” Case said. “It is called using verbal force.”

Because if you didn’t buy counterfeit goods, then we would have more police to investigate the selling of counterfeit goods:

The city is poised to unveil a campaign to educate tourists and locals alike about the harsh realities of supporting the counterfeit goods industry, which officials say costs the city more than $1 billion in lost sales taxes each year.

Beginning Monday, posters adorned with messages that relay the lesser-known perils of counterfeiting will be plastered on phone booth kiosks in areas of the city infamous for harboring peddlers of fake name-brand goods, such as Chinatown and Times Square, officials announced yesterday.

Unveiled at the Harper’s Bazaar Anticounterfeiting Summit, the posters warn shoppers about the harmful consequences of counterfeiting with messages such as “when you buy counterfeit goods, you support child labor.”

Deputy Mayor Edward Skyler announced the two-month campaign in front of a room of executives from businesses wounded by counterfeiting, an industry experts say generates upward of $650 billion a year. He said the sales tax lost to counterfeit goods would provide the city with funds to hire 10,000 new police officers, firefighters, or teachers.

“This is a problem that is a little like weeds, we need to keep pulling them out,” he said.

Except that . . . if all sales taxes only generate $4.5 billion for the city budget (see, for example, this .pdf from the city’s Independent Budget Office), is it really possible that New York City is losing $1 billion in revenue from counterfeit bags? Doesn’t that basically mean that counterfeit bags account for 25% of all sales in the entire city? (Geez, maybe New York really has become the Tijuana of the U.S.)

This is not to say that buying counterfeit goods is some kind of harmless, victimless crime — I don’t believe it is — but, again, what is the city doing carrying the water for the fashion industry? Don’t the police have better things to do? And citing “lost sales taxes” isn’t enough . . . if that were true then we should crack down on all sorts of things . . .

Thank goodness a more accurate label has emerged:

Five weeks into a federal probe of City Council slush funds, Mayor Bloomberg revealed yesterday that he kept his own secret taxpayer-funded cash stash — and used it to reward favored lawmakers.

The mayor’s $4.5 million slush fund had never before been made public — and some council members said they weren’t even aware of it.

After being doled out to selected lawmakers, the money was passed along to dozens of nonprofit groups supported by legislators — including at least one with a checkered history.

The largest chunk, $1.9 million, went to Councilman Simcha Felder (D-Brooklyn), one of the mayor’s most ardent supporters.

Brooklyn Borough President Marty Markowitz, who has publicly praised Bloomberg as the greatest mayor in city history, received $900,000 to help fund two popular concert series.

Poor Christine Quinn . . .

[Heart] the brand, lest things get out of control:

This year, state officials plan to introduce new tools — like a difficult-to-reproduce hologram — that will assure consumers that a product is officially licensed by New York State.

For those who sell unofficial “I ♥ NY” products, officials plan to warn and then penalize offenders.

Thomas Ranese, 37, chief marketing officer at Empire State Development, admitted, “We haven’t always invested in protecting the brand as much as we should have.”

Trademarks were allowed to expire in the 1990s in the United States and abroad, leading to the widespread perception that the heart symbol was in the public domain and did not require a license, he said. The trademark registrations have been renewed, he said, but the damage had already been done.

New York State has lost millions, if not tens of millions, of dollars in licensing fees since the symbol was introduced in 1977, Mr. Ranese said.

The result, visible all over New York City but especially in Midtown Manhattan, is a vast alternate universe of “I ♥ NY” products, almost all of which are unlicensed fakes.

Is there any way for a public-spirited tourist to detect a fake? “The simple answer is no,” Mr. Ranese said. Even the registered trademark symbol is easily counterfeited, he said.

Still, the products are fun.

In need of something sartorial? There is a “I ♥ NY” men’s tie (with Statue of Liberty) for $4.99 and a Betty Boop “I ♥ NY” T-shirt for $19.99. Crave something culinary? There’s a dinner bell for $3.99, salt and pepper shakers for $8.99, a beer can holder for $4.99 and a dinner plate for $12.99. And a kitchen towel, $8.99, to clean up.

Need something for the children? There are teddy bears ($9.99 small, $19.99 large) and baby clothes for $9.99. Need authentic New York tchotchkes? There’s a computer mouse pad for $8.99, a thimble for $3.99, a glass paperweight for $14.99.

Feel the need for exercise? There is a baseball for $9.99, golf balls for $12.99, and a fur football for $9.99.

Only one of the above is an officially licensed product.

It’s embarrassing that it takes a Republican from New Hampshire to state the obvious:

New York officials were outraged Tuesday when a Republican lawmaker compared a planned rail line to the Ground Zero vicinity with pointless pork-barrel projects, calling it a “train to nowhere.”

Sen. Chuck Schumer (D-N.Y.) had attached nearly $2 billion to a transportation bill to extend the existing AirTrain between JFK Airport and Jamaica, Queens, to lower Manhattan.

But Sen. Judd Gregg of New Hampshire, the top Republican on the Senate Budget Committee, complained on the chamber floor that New Yorkers were trying to fleece taxpayers.

“They have decided to raid the federal treasury for the purposes of building this, this train to nowhere,” Gregg told fellow senators.

An incensed Schumer insisted Ground Zero is hallowed ground, not a dead-end destination, and that the cash is the “last part of the $20 billion that President Bush promised to New York after 9/11″ to rebuild the devastated city.

“It was always intended for transportation projects around lower Manhattan,” Schumer said. “It is blasphemy to New Yorkers and all Americans to exploit the sanctity of Ground Zero to score a cheap political point.”

Gregg’s portrayed the effort as a “train to nowhere” was an allusion tohis Republican colleague Sen. Ted Stevens’s infamous “bridge to nowhere” — a $223 million project to connect a tiny Alaskan island to the mainland.

“This ‘nowhere’ of lower Manhattan is also the heart of American and world finance,” said Mayor Bloomberg’s spokesman, Stu Loeser. “The senator might not remember what happened there seven years ago and what happens there every day, but the rest of us cannot forget.”

One of Gregg’s top aides insisted the senator wasn’t trying to sting New York’s 9/11 victims, but to point to a questionable project.

$354 million, now safely on its way to Los Angeles, where I hear they actually have a pretty bad traffic problem:

Los Angeles snagged a $213 million federal grant to help speed traffic along its clogged highways — winning a big chunk of the $354 million New York had to give up when the Legislature killed congestion pricing.

“It’s safe to say they’re loving New York in L.A. today,” U.S. Department of Transportation spokesman Brian Turmail said Friday after announcing the award.

New York had been guaranteed the pot of cash to set up a congestion pricing system but lost it when Albany killed the plan behind closed doors without voting this month.

Turmail said DOT has not yet decided what cities will split the remaining $141 million.

Chicago is one of them, Mayor Bloomberg said.

“Like Los Angeles, Chicago has also benefitted from New York’s loss and last week Mayor [Richard] Daley thanked Mayor Bloomberg,” said spokesman John Gallagher.

Oh well . . . at least we’ll always have those 18,000 trees . . .

As Health Department-mandated chain restaurant calorie counts seem to be surviving last-minute legal maneuvers, some customers yawn:

In an unused corner of a Burger King on Hylan Boulevard, an official-looking sign goes unremarked.

Its tiny print, disclosing the nutritional facts of the fast food on offer, resembles nothing so much as the legal mumbo-jumbo that no one really wants to acknowledge.

But if the city Health Department gets its way, the information soon will be front and center.

Health Code 81.50 mandates that all New York restaurants that are part of a nationwide chain of 15 or more locations must post a calorie count on their menu.

The Restaurant Association, which claims that the proposed law goes against the First Amendment, has until Friday to seek a stay from an appellate court.

While some eateries, such as Starbucks, Quiznos, Jamba Juice and Chevy’s, have accepted the new regulations and posted nutritional information in restaurants, others, such as McDonald’s, Burger King, KFC and Taco Bell, have refused.

. . .

Freida Dibartolo, who admits to not being a regular customer of Burger King, agrees that information should be readily accessible, but doesn’t believe it will affect how people order.

“If you don’t eat it often, you don’t pay attention the few times you eat it. If you eat it everyday, you don’t give a (expletive),” said the Dongan Hills resident.

. . . superfunny curses aimed at sticking it to legions of obnoxious Yankees fans and rapacious team ownership:

Were it not for the tale one loyal Yankee fan overheard while downing pints of Guinness at a Bay Ridge bar, that Red Sox jersey would still be embedded in the concrete under the new Stadium.

Billy DiCristina, 27, a carpenter from Bensonhurst, had just watched the Rangers playoff game at the Bean Post Pub early last Thursday morning, when a fellow patron with whom he was vaguely acquainted told the story of a Red Sox jersey that had been buried in an effort to curse the Stadium.

“I asked him about it, and at first I thought he was breaking my chops,” DiCristina told The Post. “But when he said he was ‘dead serious,’ I went crazy. I was furious. I said, ‘We have to get that Boston garbage out of our Stadium’ ”

“Give me The Post,” DiCristina shouted to the bartender, and began dialing every number he could find on Page 2, including the circulation and customer service departments.

He ended up leaving a series of slurred, rambling, giggling messages on the voice mail of one reporter who had recently written about the stadium, calling it an “anonymous tip.”

“I had had a few too many I guess, and I forgot to leave my phone number,” he said yesterday.

The Post was able to find construction workers to confirm the tip, and by Sunday the insidious David Ortiz jersey had been unearthed and would no longer be poisoning the new ballpark.

The Beatles seem to be absent in all this hubbub:

Apple Computer is taking on The Big Apple — or at least its eco-friendly logo.

New York officials are biting into a trademarked Apple with their logo for the GreeNYC campaign — or so claims the technology giant run by billionaire Steve Jobs.

California-based Apple Inc. is taking on the Big Apple over a federal application by NYC & Company for its own apple logo. But city officials say the design resemblance is only skin deep.

“We believe the ‘infinity apple’ design and its mission to create environmental awareness are unique and distinctive and do not infringe upon the Apple computer brand,” said Kimberly Spell, of NYC & Company, the city’s tourism and marketing arm.

NYC & Company developed the bisected apple topped by a small stalk and leaf for its campaign to promote environmentalism. It sent the new logo to the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office in May 2007.

The GreeNYC apple was to start appearing on bus shelters, hybrid gasoline-electric taxis and cotton shopping bags, all part of the city’s efforts to get greener.

The Apple folks challenged the application early this year, insisting their internationally known logo was the one true corporate representation of tree-borne fruit.

Not only that, the company said, the New York logo was “likely to cause confusion, mistake or deception in the minds of consumers.”

Mayor Bloomberg is a man who loves all kinds of gadgets. So disturbing hobby time is a risky proposition, done at your own peril:

A defeat of congestion pricing in the Assembly may irrevocably rupture the relationship between Speaker Sheldon Silver and Mayor Bloomberg and provoke an open conflict between the two city leaders.

Mr. Bloomberg, who has said repeatedly that he supports politicians who back his policies, might be tempted to do the opposite if his plan to charge motorists a fee to drive into the busy parts of Manhattan collapses in the Assembly, on which Mr. Silver wields tremendous influence.

“The danger could be that it does get personalized,” a former top aide to Mr. Bloomberg, William Cunningham, said. “Could there be a time when the mayor gets fed up with the games? Yes, I suppose so. He’s human.”

The mayor may use his political influence and fortune against Mr. Silver, political insiders say. This year, Mr. Silver, 64, is expected to face at least two Democratic primary opponents in September. Mr. Bloomberg could go as far as to endorse and provide financial support for one of the challengers.

An early start to looting at old Yankee Stadium:

Stealing and bunting are normally encouraged in baseball, but a pair of dumb Yankee season-ticket holders learned the hard way that the two do not go together.

John Bunjaporte, 41, and Keith O’Rourke, 39, both of Westchester County, allegedly tried to snatch a piece of the red, white, and blue bunting that hangs over the edge of the upper deck, police said.

The team took the highly unusual step of revoking their $55-per-game season tickets because the Yanks intend to auction off every last brick and grain of dirt in the stadium after the season, officials said.

Both were charged with petit larceny and criminal mischief. They face fines and up to a year in prison.

Location Scout: Yankee Stadium.

Part of the problem of city employees taking advantage of free parking is that many of the permits are actually fake. That’s some clown shit:

The city’s most comprehensive study of curbside parking has found that 9 percent of all vehicle permits in lower Manhattan are phony, The Post has learned.

The yearlong study confirmed what regular motorists have been screaming about for years — that privileged parkers are creating havoc downtown.

Among the study’s other findings:

• Nearly one in eight vehicles with permits were parked illegally at a bus stop, crosswalk, fire hydrant, driveway or were double parked.
• Forty-two percent of vehicles with “official business” permits parked outside their designated spaces for more than three hours, a violation of their permits.
• On a typical day between 9 a.m. and 5 p.m., more than 3,300 vehicles displayed a law-enforcement placard.
• Each parked an average of 41/4 hours, meaning they accounted for almost a quarter of all the “vehicle hours” available.
• Eighteen percent of meters weren’t available to the general public because privileged parkers hogged them.

But when no one blinks at across-the-board five percent cuts, you might have to make your threats a little clearer:

Insisting the state budget is shortchanging the city by nearly $750 million, Mayor Michael Bloomberg’s administration is mandating that each city agency cut its upcoming budget by 3 percent, in addition to the 5 percent cuts the mayor laid out earlier this year.

The supplementary cuts, which will affect agencies typically held harmless from the budget ax, such as the Department of Education, stunned City Council members who learned of them yesterday from Mark Page, director of the city Office of Management and Budget.

Page announced the combined 8 percent slash for fiscal year 2009 during his annual budget testimony before the Council’s Finance Committee in City Hall. He delivered scathing remarks about the state’s proposed budget, which he said reduces city funding by $747 million.

And don’t forget to roll out the children:

Council members and education advocates, already reeling from the $100 million cuts hitting the city’s roughly 1,400 public schools last month, slammed the additional reductions.

“This year, with the 2.5 [percent], it’s impacting the schools and it’s hurting the kids. I have literacy programs that aren’t fully supplied with [materials]. These are the things that impact kids,” said Sean Rotkowitz, the Staten Island liaison for the teachers’ union. “At the very least, the classrooms and the schools should be held harmless.”

But bitching about not being acknowledged is rather unbecoming:

The Villager was the source of last week’s hottest international business news story, though one would never have known it from the many media outlets that failed to give the newspaper a mention.

I mean, really . . .

Marty Scorsese has blood on his hands:

A wiseguy wannabe who killed for the mob apologized yesterday to Italians everywhere for being a living, breathing stereotype — and blamed Hollywood for turning him into one.

“Although I made all my drastic decisions on my own, Hollywood intensified my love for that life and in the process blindsided what being Italian meant,” Bonanno crime-family informant Francesco Fiordilini said at his sentencing for killing a drug dealer in 1993.

“The mob is a gang. It’s made up of individuals with very low self-esteem who together feed on the weak — and most of the time their own,” Fiordilini told Brooklyn federal Judge Nicholas Garaufis.

After apologizing to the drug dealer’s family, Fiordilini offered a sweeping apology to Italians everywhere for “conspiring and utilizing our culture in the same manner the entertainment industry does with its stereotypes.”

Every so often it’s good to be reminded how self-obsessed people in Manhattan are. For example, Borough President Scott Stringer drawing a comparison between NYU’s occupation of Greenwich Village and Israel’s occupation of the West Bank:

Eager to cool its often rancorous relations with its neighbors in Greenwich Village — and to pave the way for its next 25 years of expansion — New York University has agreed to try to push some of its expansion farther from its central core, to consult the community when it designs new space and to develop policies to relocate tenants when they must be moved because of university construction.

The agreements are part of an unusual accord that the university has hammered out over the past year with many of its fiercest critics, including public officials and community leaders. The planning principles, which are aimed at making the university’s growth smoother and less disruptive, are to be unveiled on Wednesday by university officials and other members of a task force that drew them up.

“The county and N.Y.U. have been in turmoil for well over 20 years,” said Scott M. Stringer, the Manhattan borough president who led the task force that shaped the accord. “This is the first joint announcement ever. Like the Israeli peace plan, I can’t guarantee that there will be peace. But this is definitely N.Y.U. changing direction.”

And so it begins:

In the days leading up to Thursday, Jan. 10, the offices of Cadwalader, Wickersham & Taft were wracked with anxiety. Something was about to go down at the white-shoe law firm with a knack for attracting both celebrities and bedbugs. But nobody knew what.

The availability of conference rooms at Cadwalader is visible on the firm’s intranet, and observant associates noticed that Mitch Walsh, Cadwalader’s executive director, had reserved an entire floor of conference rooms on that Thursday. Patti Ellis, the firm’s head of Associate Development and Recruitment, had reserved another half-dozen conference rooms for the day.

Some speculated that associates were going to be called up to conference rooms and notified individually of their year-end bonuses. Others wondered if a merger was afoot. But the biggest fear was that Cadwalader was about to announce layoffs, and the conference rooms would be used to process the victims. It was a widespread theory, and turned out to be correct. Still, not everyone was prepared.

“I thought I was being called in for my year-end review,” one unlucky associate said. “I totally wasn’t expecting it.”

The associate, who asked to remain unnamed, was among 35 lawyers Cadwalader laid off that morning — the firm called them “targeted personnel reductions” — in its U.S. offices. The laid-off lawyers were in the capital markets and global finance departments, two areas of the practice hit especially hard by the credit crunch.

I don’t recall reading certain details in the New York Magazine pushback piece on Anthony Marshall. Like, for example, this:

Brooke Astor’s only son and one of her former lawyers have been indicted on criminal charges stemming from the stewardship of her financial affairs and the handling of her will, according to people who were briefed on the situation.

Her son, Anthony D. Marshall, 83, and the lawyer, Francis X. Morrissey Jr., have been told to surrender to authorities today, those who were briefed said.

A Manhattan grand jury has been hearing evidence from witnesses since mid-September, following an investigation by the district attorney’s office into, among other issues, the management of Mrs. Astor’s fortune by Mr. Marshall as well as Mr. Morrissey’s role in the signing of a third amendment to her 2002 will.

The exact charges against the two men, who have been partners in a theater production company, were not known.

Prosecutors were believed to be investigating millions of dollars in cash, property and stocks that Mr. Marshall obtained over the years in his role as steward of his mother’s finances.

That included the sale of one of Mrs. Astor’s favorite paintings, “Flags, Fifth Avenue,” also known as “Up the Avenue from Thirty-Fourth Street, May 1917,” by Childe Hassam, for $10 million.

Mr. Marshall collected a $2 million fee from his mother for handling the transaction.

Fame, power and inevitable recriminations:

This should be a moment to savor for the venerable Latin food vendors of the Red Hook soccer fields in Brooklyn.

With help from well-placed allies and the passionate advocacy of their media-wise organizer, the vendors — lately a cause célèbre for pro-immigrant groups, free-market cheerleaders and gastrobloggers alike — recently won an extension of their operating season and an inside track on permanent status for the open-air multinational food court they have run on a temporary basis since the 1970s.

But just as they get ready for a difficult winter-long effort to comply with the city health code while preparing a formal bid for the concession rights, the vendors find themselves a family deeply divided over questions of leadership, money and less tangible issues.

In the last three weeks, the group’s organizer and public face, Cesar Fuentes, resigned as its day-to-day operator, threatened to sue vendors who spoke against him, threatened to quit representing them in city negotiations, then agreed to return, after all the vendors signed a petition on Wednesday avowing their “total support” and asking him to stay.

. . .

. . . Ricardo Ramirez, who helps run the largest stand, said that vendors felt that Mr. Fuentes acted as if he was not accountable.

“We want to know where the money goes,” Mr. Ramirez said last week. “How much he pays for insurance, how much he pays the workers who clean up. But when we talk to Cesar and ask him these things, he gets mad.”

Several vendors said they blamed Mr. Fuentes’s publicity efforts for attracting the attention of the city’s regulators, something they found particularly annoying because the resultant influx of non-Hispanic customers has been offset by a drop in Latino customers. “Business is the same,” Ms. Carrillo said. “But now there’s more problems.”

Mr. Fuentes said that he had provided the vendors with an accounting, and that the salary he pays himself — $20 per vendor per day, a total of $560 per weekend from the 14 vendors — was justified by his work.

Early this month, the vendors met without Mr. Fuentes. At the meeting, Esperanza Ochoa, a supporter of Mr. Fuentes who runs a Guatemalan stand and attended the meeting, said, some vendors spoke of keeping Mr. Fuentes around long enough to help them win the parks concession, then deposing him.

It was that meeting, Mr. Fuentes said, that prompted his resignation.

Location Scout: Red Hook Ballfields.

The best way to make the case against cars in the five boroughs is to pin the problem on the hipster — because everybody likes to snicker at the hipsters:

The cars came by twos and twos, ones and threes, swimming into the parking lot of the Red Hook Fairway like salmon returning to their childhood stream.

It was shortly after four on a summer Wednesday — not even rush hour — but the six lanes of asphalt lot were already two-thirds full. They were jammed with cars of every shape and origin — with boxy Acuras and slope-backed Subarus, snub-nosed Jeeps and bug-shaped Jettas, braggy Mercedes, rah-rah Fords, and a strange BMW-minivan chimera the color of a fresh picket fence. In the distance, the Manhattan skyline reared up flat and two-dimensional, signifying City. But here, as car alarms twittered and shopping carts squeaked, as shoppers kowtowed to the shrine of their trunks, the vibe was pure car-country nirvana.

“I didn’t realize how much I missed the car until I had it here,” said Lauren Robinson, a 25-year-old dietician with pixie-cut brown hair, a fetching dimple, and a bearded beau who was dutifully loading groceries into her Honda CR-V. The Honda was a relic of her youth in upstate New York, but she had recently brought it to the city after moving from car-hostile Manhattan to auto-friendly Brooklyn. She didn’t really need the vehicle, and, theoretically, she could have grabbed a bus to Fairway. But, as she explained, “It’s just so easy to jump in and drive somewhere.”

“I don’t think you need a car,” she said, “but I think it’s definitely a plus. And it definitely makes me feel more” — she paused to search for the word — “well, not like such a city person.”

Ms. Robinson is hardly alone in her secret suburban car lust these days. In fact, for all the talk of the evils of automobiles, she is in decidedly turbo-charged company. From Greenpoint to Red Hook, Inwood to Astoria — across all of the city’s young, lifestyle neighborhoods, really — New Yorkers of a certain breed and background have taken to toting their four-wheeled friends down to the city, dragging them through the streets like well-worn baby blankets. Lured by the musk of vinyl and gasoline, they have lined the lanes of Fairway with out-of-state license plates. They have given their cars names like Ruby, Monty and … Digger. (”I call it my baby,” said Digger’s driver, Michelle Barlak.) And though few would dare admit it, they have made sections of the city seem so, well, L.A.

“Oh, I hope New York’s not becoming L.A.-ified, because I moved to New York to get away from L.A.,” gasped Laura Allen, 24, a giggly SoCal native, right before she hopped into her boyfriend’s white Jeep Cherokee and turned its muscular tires onto the smoothness of Williamsburg’s North First Street.

. . .

But there is something strange — or particularly strange — about the car culture that has taken root in certain swaths of the city in recent years, sprouting up alongside the former kids of suburbia as they have continued their march across Boerum Hill, the South Slope, Williamsburg, Astoria. As many of these drivers will admit, they wouldn’t keep a car if they lived in the parking-space tundra of Manhattan. But with their move to the boroughs — to the land of “far-flung” specialty stores, parking-space-lined streets, and the accelerated domesticity of brownstone life — they have realized that they can resurrect the customs of their pre-urban past.

Never mind the weird, globally warmed weather patterns or the congestion-clogged streets. And forget the fact that many of these drivers probably came here to escape the cul-de-sac culture of their youth. For reasons both deep and ineffable, these young transplants just can’t help bringing suburbia with them.

“The day we leased the car and got the keys was like my 16th birthday all over again,” Melissa Walker, a 30-year-old writer, Park Sloper and leaser of a silver Saab 9-3 sport wagon told The Observer in an e-mail message. “I felt a great sense of freedom, like I could go to a beach other than the A-train Rockaways, like I could hit a Rhinebeck B&B at a moment’s notice, like I could go to Fairway and load my groceries into a trunk just like a suburban girl!”

. . .

This tableau of the cute girl and the big car — with or without the neutered cur — is uncannily common in Williamsburg these days, despite its oddly Teflon reputation as the home of the hipster. While it’s still possible to stumble on the odd, tricked-out hearse or pass a small Tour de France’s worth of bicyclists (biking is big there), gently distressed Volvos — thanks, Ma and Pa! — are equally ubiquitous, as one recent visit revealed.

In the short distance between North Fourth and North Ninth Streets on Driggs Avenue, The Observer counted nine of these family-friendly vehicles glinting in the sun. Most of the them were classic four-door types, but there were also two-doors and wagons, old Volvos and new — a whole menagerie of in-state and out-of-state vehicles littered with everything from tennis racquets to Pottery Barn catalogues to an Atlas of the five boroughs. The total afternoon Volvo-count came to 23.

But perhaps the real sign of the car culture apocalypse — the hint that, when it comes to wheels at least, Williamsburg and Winnetka might not be so different after all — is the sobriety check that cops have set up on Meeker Avenue, near one of the on-ramps to the Brooklyn Queens Expressway. No one can say exactly when the checks began or whether they are a direct response to the influx of postcollegiate boozers. (The New York Police Department did not respond to a request for a comment.) But several sources agreed that they first noticed them sometime within the past year — a floating barricade of police, batons and breath-a-lizers, just like back home!

It’s break dancer-backing drummers vs. carriage drivers in a fight over who can be the most annoying midtown obstacle:

In an unquiet city like New York, Fifth Avenue and 59th Street is especially known for its uproar. Double-decker buses rumble past. Taxicabs honk. Tourists mill. Workers refurbish the Plaza Hotel.

All the while, up to 20 horses quietly stand by, waiting to take passengers on carriage rides in Central Park.

On Friday, one of them bolted after it was apparently startled by a loud noise. The horse, a 13-year-old mare named Smoothie, ran nearly a block, and when her carriage became caught on a tree, she collapsed and died.

Witnesses told reporters that somebody walking past and beating a small drum may have been the source of the noise.

James Williams, the drummer who had been playing near Smoothie’s carriage, said yesterday, “We did not do anything malicious, like walk up and hit a drum in a horse’s ear.”

Yesterday Mr. Williams, who plays for tips, found himself facing the kind of attention he did not want. Reporters asked him where he had been playing and how loudly. Horse owners complained about him and the break-dancing group, Two Steps Away, that he accompanied on Friday.

The Horse and Carriage Association of New York said it planned to hold a news conference this afternoon at 59th and Fifth to call on the city to ban street musicians and “overly loud” music in the area. The group said it also would ask the city to provide secure hitching posts for the horses, which are often tethered to trash cans and street lamps.

I support the strike, but . . .:

Most New Yorkers didn’t even notice yesterday’s taxi strike because the vast majority of drivers chose to hit the streets — and ended up hitting the jackpot.

Several thousand cabbies did engage in a hackout to protest new global-positioning satellite technology being installed in all 13,000 yellow taxis. But the ones who thumbed their noses at the strikers and drove right past the picket line had record paydays — thanks to a combination of less competition and emergency per-person rates imposed by the city.

Drivers told The Post their incomes doubled and, in some cases, even quadrupled. Fred Amoaf, who normally earns a little over $100 a day, said that yesterday, he raked in $400.

“I support the strikers but I already paid for my car,” he said.

Another driver said, “Tuesday, I worked for 12 hours and I only made $200 all day. Today, I started at 5 a.m. and I have $270 already. By 5 p.m., I will make at least $350 — all because of the strike.”

When the story of who killed the Red Hook Ballfields is written it will turn out that we are all guilty:

Honduras Maya, a restaurant owned by one of the vendors that serves Latin American food on weekends at the Red Hook Ball Fields, was closed down by the Health Department this week after an inspection stemming from the city’s crackdown on the vendors.

The shutdown could merely be a taste of what’s to come if the 13 food vendors at the ball fields fail to meet strict health code requirements by this weekend. And the city’s Department of Parks and Recreation may not extend the vendors’ temporary permit — which officially expires after Labor Day — until the soccer season ends in late October, as earlier promised.

. . .

Cesar Fuentes, executive director of the Food Vendors Committee of Red Hook Park, said health inspectors are expected to start issuing fines — or shutting down vendors — this weekend for not meeting requirements like providing hot and cold running water, refrigeration, and preparing food in commercial kitchens rather than at home.

Suany Carcamo, the owner of Honduras Maya, has been operating a Honduran food stand specializing in baleadas at the ball fields for more than a decade. Fuentes said her restaurant was investigated by the city’s Department of Health and Mental Hygiene as a follow-up to a letter she submitted to prove that she was preparing her food for the stand in a city-certified commercial kitchen — her own restaurant.

The Park Slope restaurant received 122 violation points, compared to the citywide average of 14 points, according to the inspection report. Among the 20 violations listed were: missing Choking First Aid, Alcohol and Pregnancy, and Wash Hands signs; evidence of flying insects and mice; toilet facility not maintained and provided with toilet paper; and wiping cloths dirty or not stored in proper sanitizing equipment.

The owners were not available for comment by press time. An employee, when reached by phone, confirmed that the restaurant had been shut down.

But Carcamo could be viewed as one of the lucky vendors. She is one of only two that also owns a restaurant, while many of the others are struggling to find a commercial or community kitchen certified by the Health Department where they can prepare their food.

“The report from my vendors is that it is basically very, very difficult to do,” said Fuentes. After word traveled that Honduras Maya was shut down, “a lot of people were denying vendors the use [of their facilities] out of fear that the Department of Health would enforce harshly.

“Anyone who doesn’t have that letter wouldn’t be allowed to sell,” he said.

(The vendors do nothing to conceal it, we visit there because we want to eat it, we blame the Health Department for being there, but we are all there . . .)

I guess it’s back to those old reliable subway churros for us . . .

Things are not all hoo-do-lee-doo Transportation Alternatives and everything as city officials tackle the dark, seemy underbelly of bicycling:

“The cyclists hit people left and right and just keep on going,” the president of the 20th Police Precinct community council on the Upper West Side, Sam Katz, said. Ms. Katz and other leaders are counting on a new law that takes effect Thursday to help address the problem. The law, passed in March, requires restaurant managers to provide their deliverymen with safety equipment such as helmets, bells, and headlights. It also obliges restaurant managers to hang up posters — written in both English and the language spoken by the deliverymen — outlining the rules of the road for cyclists.

Deliverymen on bicycles irk residents on the Upper West Side so much that they are the no. 1 complaint heard by the 20th Precinct there, Lieutenant Biagio Carbone said.

“Every community board meeting, they’ll ask us, ‘How are our bicycle summonses going?’” Lieutenant Carbone, who has worked in the 20th Precinct and the 19th Precinct, on the Upper East Side, said. The abundance of restaurants that deliver in the two precincts makes the areas the worst in the city for reckless cyclists, he said.

. . .

“I explain it to them 1,000 times,” the manager of Bagels and Co. at Amsterdam Avenue and 79th Street, Ronnie Wachsler, said. The deli’s deliverymen receive summonses from the police almost every week for breaking traffic laws, he said.

“Riding on the sidewalks, I agree it’s a problem,” Mr. Wachsler said. “But delivery guys in general, the faster they make a delivery and get back, the faster they make another one. Time is of the essence.”

An intellectual property suit filed by the owners of Pearl Oyster Bar will test the boundaries of how much you can rip off and then try to accuse others of having ripped off:

Sometimes, Rebecca Charles wishes she were a little less influential.

She was, she asserts, the first chef in New York who took lobster rolls, fried clams and other sturdy utility players of New England seafood cookery and lifted them to all-star status on her menu. Since opening Pearl Oyster Bar in the West Village 10 years ago, she has ruefully watched the arrival of a string of restaurants she considers “knockoffs” of her own.

Yesterday she filed suit in Federal District Court in Manhattan against the latest and, she said, the most brazen of her imitators: Ed McFarland, chef and co-owner of Ed’s Lobster Bar in SoHo and her sous-chef at Pearl for six years.

The suit, which seeks unspecified financial damages from Mr. McFarland and the restaurant itself, charges that Ed’s Lobster Bar copies “each and every element” of Pearl Oyster Bar, including the white marble bar, the gray paint on the wainscoting, the chairs and bar stools with their wheat-straw backs, the packets of oyster crackers placed at each table setting and the dressing on the Caesar salad.

God bless Caesar Cardini. But of course it’s not just about the Caesar:

Ms. Charles’s investment was modest. She built Pearl Oyster Bar for about $120,000 — a cost that in today’s market qualifies as an early-bird special.

She acknowledged that Pearl was itself inspired by another narrow, unassuming place, Swan Oyster Depot in San Francisco. But she said she had spent many months making hundreds of small decisions about her restaurant’s look, feel and menu.

Those decisions made the place her own, she said, and were colored by her history. The paint scheme, for instance, was meant to evoke the seascape along the Maine coast where she spent summers as a girl.

“My restaurant is a personal reflection of me, my experience, my family,” she said. “That restaurant is me.”

White marble bars — OK, everyone has that — but I totally own the Maine seascape!

So when Assembly Speaker Silver says that the health benefits of congestion pricing “aren’t clear,” what he really means is “there’s no way we’re going to allow you to collect hundreds of millions of dollars, no strings attached, like that troll Robert Moses sitting under the Triborough Bridge,” which in turn can be boiled down to the snappy slogan “Manhattan below 86th Street is not your own little private Triborough Bridge”:

Assembly Speaker Sheldon Silver, in his strongest language yet against Mayor Michael R. Bloomberg’s plan to charge people who drive into the most congested parts of Manhattan during the day, questioned the health benefits of the proposal yesterday. He also suggested that many of the environmental goals Mr. Bloomberg has outlined could be accomplished without congestion pricing.

His comments suggested that two hours of testimony by Mayor Bloomberg at an Assembly hearing on Friday had not swayed the Democrats who control the chamber. Mr. Silver even seemed to outline new concerns, saying that the plan could actually hurt areas with high asthma rates.

“The children of the South Bronx, Bedford-Stuyvesant and Harlem, among others, are the ones who have been exposed to a lot of pollutants,” he said. Not only would those neighborhoods not benefit from the plan, he said, “some of those areas will become parking lots with people driving around the neighborhoods looking for parking spots in order to avoid congestion pricing fees.”

“There is a plan that can be put together that would obviously alleviate the environmental negativism of what takes place in Manhattan right now,” he said, but added that it could be done “with or without” congestion pricing.

. . .

But Mr. Silver’s remarks underscored that he may once again serve as the mayor’s foil in Albany. His opposition doomed the mayor’s plan to build a West Side football stadium for the New York Jets. Asked about parallels to that battle, Mr. Silver harked back to the mayor’s contention then that a Manhattan stadium would not cause undue congestion.

The stadium, Mr. Silver pointed out, would have been “right in the middle of this congested zone.”

“At that time, a year ago, there obviously was no congestion,” he added, facetiously. “We can even put this stadium to attract 100,000 people to come in right in the middle of the zone and there was no problem.”

. . .

Mr. Silver’s skepticism partly reflects the wide concern about the plan among the more than 100 Democrats who control the Assembly.

“I’m sort of torn here,” said Assemblyman Ruben Diaz Jr., a Bronx Democrat. “On the one hand, I really want to address the environmental issues,” he said, but added that he was concerned that congestion pricing could mean “that folks from other places are going to park their cars in my community” or that the toll would end up being a tax on his constituents without much benefit.

“I think in its present state,” he said, “there are too many concerns, certainly for us to rush to any judgment.”

Mr. Silver said that he was left with “a lot of questions.” But he did not say outright that he would reject the plan, and said that it was “very possible” that an agreement on some environmental plan for the city could be struck by August.

Now that they’ve taken care of trans fat and smoking, the Health Department now may be ready to take on labor issues:

Today, a piece of legislation is expected to be introduced in City Council that would give the Department of Health and Mental Hygiene more power to crack down on restaurants with labor violations. The bill was drafted with help from the Restaurant Opportunities Center of New York — a workers’ rights group — and the Brennan Center for Justice at New York University.

The bill would require restaurants to self-report any violations, which the health department would then list on its Web site. The bill would also give the department power to revoke restaurant licenses based on labor violations.

“The department of health has this already on the books in a sense — to get an operating permit you have to be in compliance with city, state and federal law,” said Rajani Adhikary, ROC-NY’s policy organizer. “We’re saying, the city has to step in, so restaurants will no longer be above the law.”

Health officials said they will review the legislation when it’s introduced.

There’s the issue of the man who somehow stole $3.6 million from the city to buy jewelry:

In more than a year, a Brooklyn man stole $3.6 million from one of the New York City comptroller’s bank accounts, the Manhattan district attorney’s office said yesterday.

Tracy Ball, 49, made 604 electronic transfers from the bank account to a jewelry retailer, Jewelry Television, which shipped him diamond earrings, bracelets, necklaces, and watches, according to investigators.

But this is probably worse:

Even after a year, the comptroller’s office did not notice the money was missing from a fund used to pay workers’ compensation claims. Jewelry Television noticed that Mr. Ball was making multiple purchases in a day and contacted the bank, JP Morgan, which in turn contacted the comptroller, a spokeswoman for the Manhattan district attorney, Jennifer Kushner, said.

. . .

The assistant district attorney prosecuting the case, Andrew Seewald, said it wasn’t yet clear how Mr. Ball gained access to the bank account. Mr. Seewald said Mr. Ball had been arrested on a federal charge in the past, but he did not give details.

Mr. Ball worked for a homeless shelter and addiction recovery group in Greenwich Village called Project Renewal and would sometimes have the jewelry shipped to his work address on East 3rd Street in Manhattan, the district attorney’s office said.

Investigators charged that Mr. Ball would at times make purchases in bulk. On March 11, for example, he ordered 10 pairs of diamond earrings, 15 diamond necklaces, and 15 gold necklaces in the span of 12 minutes, the district attorney’s office said.

When police came to Mr. Ball’s house to arrest him, he was watching Jewelry Television on a plasma screen, Mr. Seewald said. Officers recovered $30,000 in cash and about 100 pieces of jewelry.

After the Great Rat Uprising of 2007, many restaurant owners are noticing stricter health department inspections:

The owners of the Coffee Shop, a popular cafe on Union Square, say they had never failed a city health inspection in 17 years of business. So when inspectors came last week and shut them down — citing a number of violations that the owners say would have earned them a slap on the wrist in the past — they could think of only one thing: the KFC/Taco Bell rat video.

“We’re a clean operation,” a co-owner, Charles Milite, said in a news conference yesterday to announce that the violations had been corrected. “It’s clear to us we got caught in the cross hairs of this unfortunate Taco Bell situation.”

The “situation” is the widely seen news video of rats swarming inside a KFC/Taco Bell on Avenue of the Americas in Greenwich Village. It was broadcast Feb. 23, one day after the fast food restaurant had passed inspection.

The New York City Department of Health and Mental Hygiene has been closing down restaurants at a furious pace ever since. Between Feb. 26, the Monday after the rat video made its debut, and last Saturday, the department closed 94 restaurants and take-out outlets.

Health department statistics show that closings have been on the rise for more than a year and spiked in October, when 58 restaurants were shut. Another 68 were closed in November, and in January, 75 were shuttered, the most since at least March 2005, the earliest numbers available.

Department officials say inspectors may be making visits with a more watchful eye since the KFC/Taco Bell rat video. But they say the increase is not part of an organized crackdown and is not intended to “save face or make examples,” as Mr. Milite wrote in a sign he pasted to his cafe windows after it was shut down last Wednesday.

So what is a restauranteur to do? Hire a public relations firm, of course:

The owners of Coffee Shop, the chic eatery here, decided to call in a high-powered PR firm — the Marino Group — and hold a press conference yesterday to announce that health code violations have been remedied and they’re open for business. They also coyly mentioned “several of our celebrity friends” are expected to dine there today to show support.

“We’ve always had inspections,” said co-owner Charles Milite, who has been running the establishment for 17 years. “This inspection was tough.”

. . .

Milite believes he was caught in the fallout of the rat infestation at a Greenwich Village KFC/Taco Bell.

“Obviously, that was a big awakening for the city. Obviously, they have tightened up a bit,” Milite said, though the city has denied these allegations. Since the KFC/Taco Bell incident last month through March 10, the health department closed 94 restaurants.

“People will see those stickers and put us in the same category as Taco Bell,” said Milite, explaining the press conference was “our chance to at least defend ourselves and say, ‘We are not Taco Bell.’”

What’s that about repeating the negative?

Apparently Councilmember John Liu’s constituency includes low-rent Chinese takeouts:

The scandal started when a patron of the restaurant called CW11 on Monday, January 29, claiming to have gotten a fried mouse in her take-out, according to [reporter Chris] Glorioso, who has been acting as the station’s spokesman on the matter. He said he received the assignment upon getting to work at 3 p.m., and was out inspecting the grisly morsel at the woman’s house by 5 p.m. He then went over to the restaurant to confront the cook, who maintained the meat was just a mouse-shaped piece of chicken.

Glorioso said he picked up the meat in a plastic-gloved hand and showed it to “at least a dozen people” standing around the restaurant who agreed that it looked awfully rodent-like.

Nevertheless, he said his assignment desk did make a few attempts to get a laboratory back up to the woman’s claim — including calling the city’s health department — before News at Ten’s deadline, but no lab was open at that hour. He said there wasn’t a great deal of debate about what the right thing to do was, and stressed how guilty he would feel if someone got sick eating at the restaurant — which had been cited for “evidence of mice” three times in the past three years — while the station waited to get a second opinion.

But just what constituted “common sense” — and indeed, knowledge itself — was the subject of the screaming match during Sunday’s icy protest. Liu considered it unforgivable that the station would have run the original story without getting laboratory confirmation first. But he stepped into a debater’s trap when he said, “The reality is, all you needed to do was stick a fork in that piece of chicken to determine there was no hair, there was no skin, there were no bones,” since this implied that regular folk, not just trained biologists, are capable of figuring out what kind of animal was fried beyond recognition in the oil vats that day.

But just what constituted “common sense” — and indeed, knowledge itself — was the subject of the screaming match during Sunday’s icy protest. Liu considered it unforgivable that the station would have run the original story without getting laboratory confirmation first. But he stepped into a debater’s trap when he said, “The reality is, all you needed to do was stick a fork in that piece of chicken to determine there was no hair, there was no skin, there were no bones,” since this implied that regular folk, not just trained biologists, are capable of figuring out what kind of animal was fried beyond recognition in the oil vats that day.

Liu and the restaurant’s lawyers are disputing the biologist’s report, claiming it was “rife with spelling errors” and that the station did not follow proper forensic procedure in the chain of handling the evidence.

Liu and the restaurant’s lawyers are disputing the biologist’s report, claiming it was “rife with spelling errors” and that the station did not follow proper forensic procedure in the chain of handling the evidence.

Evidence aside, the real crime in Liu’s mind was the little quip about “fried mice” — a play on fried rice — in the introduction to the original piece, which he said made the whole segment racist.