You bastard! Which is to say, the kitchen staff has a hard time living this down when they move on:

When Christopher Russell, a captain at Gramercy Tavern for many years, went to work at Union Square Café, where he is now the general manager, he decided to import a few traditions. (Both restaurants are owned by Danny Meyer.) He banished wordy descriptions from the wine list and switched from a two-fork setting to a single fork; he was successful in encouraging employees to escort customers to the rest room rather than just pointing in its direction. The Gramercy custom of reading poetry before the “family meals” that precede each service, however, met with resistance. (The practice got its start in the late nineties, when a manager was inspired by the performance of Dante’s “Inferno” that the Cathedral of St. John the Divine puts on every Maundy Thursday.)

“The first two years, it fell flat, and I thought, Maybe this isn’t going to work here,” Russell said. But Russell is a man of enthusiasms, and, like Louis XIV with his court tennis, he eventually succeeded in spreading his mania for Shakespeare and Auden to the people. For the fifth season running, the wait-staff at U.S.C. began every day in April, which is National Poetry Month, by reading aloud limericks, haikus, villanelles, and quatrains of their choosing, and, sometimes, composition.

The other Wednesday, an hour before lunch service commenced, eight waiters, a host, and two bartenders, Times Dining sections in hand, were ensconced in green leather banquettes for a buffet-style family meal of snow peas, penne with green peas, grilled steak, French fries, and huevos in stewed tomato sauce.

“A couple of quick notes,” Dina Millan, a dining-room manager, began. A regular, she said, had a table for one-forty-five — “three and the turkey,” meaning she was coming in with two friends and her recently born baby. “O.K., who wants to go first?”

Tessa Antolini, a waitress and sometime actress, cleared her throat. Clutching a yellow paperback, she stood up.

“I called a man today,” she read, in a near-whisper. Her selection was “Calling Him Back from Layoff,” a free-verse workingman’s lament by Bob Hicok, with a trace of terza rima. Her voice gained strength as she worked toward the poem’s climax . . .

I don’t get it:

Disturbing, gang-like graffiti is cropping up all over a Brooklyn elementary school, marring a playground, classrooms and two teachers’ cars, authorities said.

The troubling words “Jump White People” and abbreviation “JWP” have appeared at Public School 224 in East New York about a dozen times in the past three weeks, and some teachers are concerned that it’s not being taken seriously.

“It just quietly gets erased,” one teacher said. “Nothing gets done.”

The words were also scrawled in marker on a Snapple machine, desks and several walls, prompting four students ranging in age from 8 to 11 to be disciplined, cops said.

But the graffiti has continued to surface since the in-school suspensions. As recently as Wednesday, a staff member found JWP in a closet, a source said.

And teachers worry that the markings are not just a prank, but instead show that the kids are mimicking gang culture at a young age.

If nothing else, we’ll finally get to the point where we no longer have to double check the spelling:

When a court awarded $308,000 in 2003 to a Bronx woman who slipped on a snowy sidewalk, the decision was “unconscionable.” When the city’s transit workers went on strike in 2005, their walkout was “unconscionable.” And when Mayor Bloomberg contemplated the possibility earlier this month that the State Assembly might not bring his congestion pricing plan to a vote, the mere thought of such a thing was — you guessed it — “unconscionable.”

As a way to express outrage, linguists say the word is an effective choice. It sounds more astute than “terrible.” It has more syllables than “disgraceful.” It has a certain weight that “unbelievable” and “disgraceful” lack.

And the word implies a subtle yet stinging critique of Mr. Bloomberg’s antagonists: that they lack a conscience. Because its meaning is so loaded, some linguists wondered whether Mr. Bloomberg might be using the word a little too liberally.

“It is a strong word and has a little bit of heft,” said Ben Zimmer, the editor of Visual Thesaurus, a Web site that charts synonyms and their relationships to one another. “So in terms of style, it might be better to use it less frequently.”

. . .

It became one of his favorite adjectives to describe the strike by Metropolitan Transportation Authority employees in 2005, which shut down the city’s subway system for three days during a frigid snap of weather right before Christmas. “This is a strike that is deliberately designed to take place at a time of the year when it can hurt the most people the quickest,” he said. “It is just unconscionable.”

Apparently, “unconscionable” alone was insufficient to describe the mayor’s outrage. During the strike he used the word on more than one occasion with a string of other colorful adjectives like “thuggish,” “cowardly” and “reprehensible.”

By using the word with such regularity, however, linguists said Mr. Bloomberg might be dulling its bite — a process they called amelioration.

Club Kalua goes on, despite the odds:

The club where Sean Bell spent the final moments of his life celebrating at his bachelor party still occupies a narrow plot at 143-08 94th Avenue in Jamaica, Queens. Half-naked women still twirl on poles, trying to interest dollar-tossing patrons. The A.T.M. with the high surcharge still occupies a corner in the back.

But there is something very different these days about this place, the Club Kalua: The alcohol is gone.

No more watered-down $20 glasses of Champagne for strippers to push on patrons. No more $16 Long Island iced teas to keep the bartenders busy. No more drink menu on the wall.

The state stripped the Club Kalua of its liquor license more than two weeks ago, reducing the club, essentially, to a juice bar with strippers.

But what surely would have been a death knell for many other bars is, for this gritty dive, merely the latest chapter in its remarkable, and in many ways inexplicable, longevity. It remains open 12 hours a day, seven days a week. Nothing, it seems, can bring down the Club Kalua.

. . .

At midnight Wednesday, there were nine men and four strippers around Kalua’s main bar. The atmosphere was turgid.

One dancer approached the bar, sighed and said, “I need some liquor.”

Not too long ago, a stripper could make more than $500 a night working at the Club Kalua. Now, one is lucky to walk away with more than $100, a dancer said.

Regulars like Andre, 36, a music producer who goes by the nickname Boogie, are among the dancers’ biggest supporters. Andre, who refused to give his last name, said that he felt it was his civic duty to be there, despite the absence of alcohol.

“It’s about supporting the community,” he said, sucking on an unlit Black and Mild cigar and twirling a small plastic cup of water with his hands. “These girls, they’re part of the community. Some of them got children. It’s about giving back.”

So at this rate, it will only take $545 million more to reach the lofty goal of 1 million new trees:

David Rockefeller and Mayor Michael Bloomberg — two of the city’s biggest philanthropists — spent yesterday afternoon in front of East Harlem’s Thomas Jefferson public housing complex, where they planted a rosebud tree. They hope it is just one of many.

Rockefeller gave $5 million to help fund the mayor’s initiative to plant 1 million trees as part of PlaNYC, his sustainability agenda for the city. Bloomberg matched Rockefeller’s gift with his own $5 million.

“We’re all in this together,” Bloomberg said. “We shouldn’t wait for others to do it.” Not only do the trees provide shade and clean the air, he said, they “also improve property values.”

The $10 million announced yesterday will cover the cost of 18,000 new trees, “nearly three-quarters of all the trees in Central Park,” Bloomberg said.

. . .

He expects to have 250,000 of the 1 million trees in the ground before he leaves office. But then what? The initiative is funded by charitable donations and has no legal mandate.

“They should plant jobs,” added Olga Bernabi, who works at the Jefferson Houses library. “I know a lot of people getting pink slips.”

Central Park has 26,000 trees in 840 acres (31 trees an acre). New York City (at 322 square miles) has 206,080 total acres — 1 million new trees means adding 4.8 trees to each acre of land in the city. A city block is 2.5 acres. That’s 12 new trees on each city block . . . in addition to the 592,130 street trees, which have stocked city streets to 73% capacity, with room for 220,000 more trees. So then there are 780,000 left to be accounted for . . . um, has anyone figured out where all the new trees will go? And don’t tell us that this will simply replace old trees because that’s just cooking the books . . .

With all this China-Tibet-Darfur business, boycotting Coke seems a little quaint:

The University Senate will vote Thursday on whether to repeal NYU’s ban on Coca-Cola products, potentially ending a 28-month ban on the soft drink and angering students who continue to accuse the company of labor and human rights violations.

In December 2005, the Senate passed a resolution banning the sale of Coca-Cola products on campus until the company agreed to an investigation of allegations that it sponsored the murder of union leaders at its Colombian bottling factory. But while supporters of the ban say little has changed, the Senate is nonetheless voting on whether to approve the resolution rescinding the ban later this week.

Late last month, a coalition of student groups from NYU’s School of Law submitted a report to the Public Affairs Committee objecting to the resolution.

The report — undersigned by groups including the Latino Law Students Association, Law Students for Economic Justice, Law Students for Human Rights, Law Students for Reproductive Justice, Coalition for Legal Recruiting, National Lawyers Guild and OUTLaw — pleaded to uphold the Coke ban.

“The bottom line is that Coke’s purported willingness to allow an investigation is a pretext to justify lifting the ban,” the law students’ report said. “Coke has not agreed to an independent investigation. More importantly, they have not changed their policies in Colombia. At the very least, NYU should await unequivocal evidence that Coke has met the terms of NYU’s 2005 resolution before considering lifting the ban.”

You had me until you got to the part about slapping a couple coats of cheap house paint on my beautiful stone wall:

The public war against ugly graffiti scrawled on borough walls and fences must be fought on a private front.

And to help battle the “tags” on homes and businesses, City Councilmen James Oddo and Vincent Ignizio want Staten Islanders to sign a waiver that grants cleanup crews permission to enter private property with paint, power washers and solvents in hand, to clean up the mess as soon as it’s seen — for free.

When it comes to tackling the graffiti scourge, “the sooner you get it down, the better,” Oddo said.

But until now, waiting for permission from property owners has been the biggest source of delay.

To solve that problem and make the anti-graffiti efforts as persistent as the graffiti vandals, the councilmen will distribute the waivers to local home- and business owners in areas where graffiti is an issue.

“It’s hard enough to own a home or business without having to worry about idiots defacing your property,” Ignizio said.

Once the paperwork is signed, graffiti removal teams can clean up any defaced property, but before signing, be warned: The waiver stipulates the paint may be done in blocks or patches, and the paint color may not match exactly and may cover natural stone.

So far, two homeowners and two businesses, including Planet Wings on Lincoln Avenue in Grant City have taken up the offer.

“Even if you don’t have it now, send it back so we can go on your property immediately and bring it down,” Oddo said of the graffiti, which he called “an Islandwide embarrassment.”

One wonders how teachers introduced the assignment, and whether clarification was necessary:

A year ago City Councilman Leroy Comrie (D-St. Albans) led a successful battle to ban the N-word from New Yorker’s lips and last week he honored youngsters who made sure it stays that way.

The councilman awarded 26 city middle-schoolers official city citations for winning the second annual Black History Month Essay Contest at City Hall on March 19. The subject for the 250-word essay was “Why the N-word Should Never be Used,” a theme Comrie supports strongly.

These students were able to express their ideas about why the ‘N-word’ should never be used and it is my hope that they will begin to work with their peers in hopefully putting an end to this cultural phenomena,” he said in a statement.

Of the 26 winners, 15 were from Queens schools, including MS 8 in Jamaica, MS 172 in Floral Park, MS 226 in South Ozone Park, IS 147 in Queens Village, MS 147 in Cambria Heights and MS 268 in Jamaica.

Not only are New Yorkers getting fat because of the smoking ban but some parts of the city are also noticing a disturbing trend of rising numbers of underage patrons in bars:

A new South Slope bar has waded into the ongoing battle over whether kids should join their parents at taverns by siding with the stroller set.

Minus the strollers, however.

The owners of the one-month-old Toby’s Public House, a pizzeria/bar on the corner of 21st Street and Sixth Avenue, have posted the seemingly contradictory sign on the door reading, “NO STROLLERS, FAMILY FRIENDLY.”

But there’s no contradiction — kids are welcome. General Manager Tim Judge will even give you a bike lock to secure your stroller outside.

“We have a very small space, so we can’t let strollers inside,” said Judge. “But we’ve got locks for six or seven strollers. If the weather gets really bad, we’ll even bring them down into the basement.”

The fact that such a sign is even necessary shows the struggle that bar owners face when they choose to open in family neighborhoods: bars that welcome kids run the risk of alienating harder-drinking patrons, while bars that ban babies outright stand to lose their parents as customers.

Even though Manhattan just gets tweedier, speculating on a dorm strains credulity:

The city can legally deny developer Gregg Singer a permit to build a student dormitory in the East Village on the basis that he does not have an educational institution lined up to use the facility, the New York State Court of Appeals has ruled.

In the ruling yesterday, the court wrote that if the dormitory were completed and no school leased its space, the city would be unnecessarily forced to either allow Mr. Singer to use it for other purposes or require it to be torn down or left vacant. The 7–0 decision overturned a ruling by a lower appellate court.

The long-standing dispute involves the former home of P.S. 64, on East 9th Street between avenues B and C, which Mr. Singer purchased from the city in 1998 for $3.1 million.

Community groups protested the developer’s plans to build a 19-story student dorm on the site, saying it was an attempt to illegally build luxury housing. In 2004, the city’s Department of Buildings rejected Mr. Singer’s application to build the dormitory, saying the building needed to be affiliated with a specific academic institution beforehand. A state court upheld the city’s decision in 2006, but last year an appellate court sided with Mr. Singer. Yesterday’s decision, by the state’s highest court, reversed the 2007 ruling.

. . . does that mean that I can’t park it in front of my house because I don’t have the right permit? I don’t know, why don’t you tell me:

Mayor Bloomberg unveiled a residential parking permit plan on Wednesday to bolster his controversial proposal to charge Manhattan-bound drivers a “congestion-pricing” fee — and the permits quickly had the desired effect, swaying two ambivalent Brooklyn lawmakers toward supporting the fee.

The mayor’s congestion-pricing proposal, which would charge $8 to enter Manhattan, has been under fire from Brooklyn elected officials for ignoring the possibility that many drivers would avoid the fee by parking in and around Downtown Brooklyn and continuing their commutes from there.

Officials said the residential parking permit plan should ease that concern.

Indeed, hours after the mayor’s announcement on Wednesday, skeptical Councilmembers Letitia James (D–Fort Greene) and Bill DeBlasio (D–Park Slope) both said they were now more likely to vote in favor of congestion pricing.

. . .

Aaron Brashear, a Greenwood Heights activist, added that the plan was “just a bunch of bulls–.”

“[If Park Slope got parking permits] suddenly Windsor Terrace, Greenwood Heights, and Sunset Park would become parking lots,” said Brashear, who owns a car.

“We’re already seeing people do the park-and-ride in our area. And there’s no congestion pricing yet.”

The worst thing about the Spitzer resignation is the inevitable shoot-shit-what-if game that follows:

As news broke yesterday of Eliot Spitzer’s repeat visits to high-end prostitutes in the employ of the Emperor’s Club, offices across the city were buzzing with speculation about what “unsafe” sexual favors the Governor might have requested.

Although Governor Spitzer reportedly paid about $3000 for his Feb. 13th date, the most expensive Emperor’s Club ladies are paid $5,500, according to the New York Times. I wondered: what would New York women do in a boudoir with Eliot Spitzer for $5,500? Answer: a lot!

“Pee on him, shit on him. He could pee on me but not shit on me — have to draw the line somewhere!” wrote an accomplished graphic designer with two kids, in an email. . . .

. . .

Another writer, a politically savvy one in her early thirties, sounded like she was positively fantasizing about the idea of a date-for-hire with Mr. Spitzer. “I would be Joe Bruno,” she instant-messaged “And, like, mocking him, with a strap-on. . . . I would let him come on my face, I think. He could tie me up. Actually, that would be kind of hot.” I suggested she’d need a safe word. “Troopergate,” she typed. Then she suggested that she would also consider a threesome with Andrew Cuomo.

Which is worse — appropriating the name of a famous Quaker or one of your friends? It’s a tough one:

George Fox, the longtime pal whose name Eliot Spitzer allegedly adopted for his tryst with a prostitute, says the governor has personally apologized for “the unauthorized use of his name.”

“The news that his name may have been used as an alias comes as a great surprise and disappointment,” Fox, a high-powered hedge-fund manager, said in a statement yesterday.

Sources said Spitzer used Fox’s name to rent the room for his rendezvous at a Washington hotel.

But really, “Members Spring Fest” sounds more like spam email than anything else:

A decision by the Prospect Park Alliance to rename its annual “Family Day” event is drawing criticism from those who say the new name, “Members Spring Fest,” represents a frivolous bow to political correctness.

“Family Day,” an annual event organized by the Prospect Park Alliance for its members, features carousel rides, pedal boats, and tours of the park’s Audubon Center.

A senior vice president of the Prospect Park Alliance, Robyn Bellamy, who approved the name change, said dropping the “family” from the event’s title was intended as an attempt to boost attendance by conveying to single people, seniors, and other members that they were welcome. A recent postcard mailed to neighbors announcing “Members Spring Fest” reads in parentheses, “formerly known as Family Day.” “We look at our membership base, which is the public, and it includes young people who just moved in, families who have been here for awhile or are new, seniors — it really runs the gamut of ages and interests,” Ms. Bellamy said in an interview. “We’re still offering the same event in the spring but letting people know that it’s really for all members.”

Go ahead and psychoanalyze America’s state of mind:

Prewar used to refer to sturdily built apartment houses with high ceilings, walls so thick you couldn’t hear your neighbors and perhaps black and white tiled floors in the bathroom.

It also used to mean stately edifices built before World War II.

Such fine points apparently have not stopped developers who are building a 20-story luxury condominium at 535 West End Avenue at 86th Street, with apartments of up to 14,000 square feet and prices from $8.5 million to more than $25 million. The developers are describing the building as prewar, both in advertisements that have appeared in recent weeks in anticipation of the building’s opening in summer 2009 and on a large sign wrapped around the scaffolding at the construction site.

. . .

. . . The label, [Gary Barnett, president of Extell Development Company] said, is intended to refer to the grand foyers, high ceilings, elegant moldings and spacious living and dining rooms, as well as to a brick exterior and limestone base that echo that of the building’s elegant older neighbors.

“It’s meant to evoke the style of prewar, right smack in prewar country on the Upper West Side,” Mr. Barnett added. “Of course, somebody called us and said, ‘What war are you planning in the 21st century?’”

Brokers find Papal Mass to be a weak draw:

Tight security at Pope Benedict XVI’s April 20 mass at Yankee Stadium is keeping some Staten Islanders from seeking the limited number of tickets available, and providing another reminder of how life in New York City has changed since the terror attacks of 2001.

Those hoping to attend the 2:30 p.m. mass have to commit to at least a 10-hour day and arrive at their parishes before 8:30 a.m. to board buses. No private cars will be allowed into the Stadium parking lot. Even the priests who will celebrate mass with the pope and serve communion in the stands will travel by bus.

. . .

The lower-than-anticipated demand for tickets made it easier on pastors, who weren’t looking forward to disappointing their parishioners.

St. Adalbert’s Church in Elm Park planned to hold a lottery drawing last Wednesday night to distribute its 22 tickets. Each name pulled from the pot would receive two tickets. But with only 10 parishioners showing up, no one went home empty-handed.

“I was hoping it would work out this way,” said the Rev. Eugene Carella, pastor. “This way people who really, really, really wanted it were here tonight and they got them. And there were no hard feelings, so that’s good.”

. . .

Some parishes, like St. Christopher’s in Grant City, with 41 tickets, found the demand equaled the supply, and, as of Wednesday, Our Lady Star of the Sea in Huguenot still had 57 tickets available from its allotment of 143. Monsignor Jeffrey Conway, pastor of Star of the Sea, said any unclaimed tickets would be returned to the archdiocese and reapportioned to other parishes.

Older parishioners and those without the proper documentation have decided not to pursue tickets “after we explained what they’ll be getting into,” said the Rev. Michael Flynn, pastor of St. Mary of the Assumption Church in Port Richmond and Our Lady of Mount Carmel-St. Benedicta in West Brighton.

The question remains how you get trains off an island:

They were a vision in disco-era orange and yellow when they debuted in the 1970s, subway cars to put a smile on the face of the most jaded New York straphanger.

A bunch were delivered in 1973 to Staten Island, where they became the workhorses of the railway.

They’re still reliable and mechanically sound. But all this time later, the cars are as dowdy as leisure suits and as passe as The Hustle.

To buy more time before new cars are purchased some five to eight years from now, the 64-car Staten Island Railway fleet is scheduled for an upgrade.

An $11 million mini-overhaul is planned to spruce up the floors and seats, repair leaky ceiling panels to prevent soaked bottoms, and beef up the climate-control system.

Later this year, the cars will taken two at a time to New York City Transit’s Coney Island maintenance shop in Brooklyn. Each pair will stay in the shop for about a week, and the entire fleet should be rehabbed over 12 months.

You know things have turned around in New York when instead of the bad old days you have “You don’t expect this . . . especially not in front of Starbucks”

A brazen robber pistol-whipped a man yesterday on a Midtown street, wrestling a black duffel bag filled with $150,000 cash out of his hands as dozens of pedestrians looked on in horror.

Investigators are looking into the possibility that Seton Ijams, 50, was a victim of an inside-job robbery, and that someone may have tipped off the thief as to what time he would pick up the cash, a police official said.

Ijams, a vice president at Columbia Artists Management Inc., had just withdrawn the money from a Chase Bank branch on West 56th Street at Sixth Avenue shortly after 2 p.m., police said.

As he walked west along 56th Street, a young man followed Ijams and tried to grab his money bag.

When Ijams resisted, his assailant — described as a black man in his 20s and wearing a black coat — dragged him along the sidewalk while hitting him in the head with a silver pistol.

While he continued to whack Ijams in the head, the pistol went off, witnesses said.

. . .

Ijams, bleeding profusely from the head, fell to the sidewalk in front of a Starbucks as the robber got lost in the crowd carrying the bag filled with wads of bills.

“I saw the guy running” after leaving the victim on the ground, said Amado Delacruz, 34. “You don’t expect this — not on 56th Street, and especially not in front of Starbucks.”

And way to squeeze one off, asshole! If you’re going to beat someone over the head with your piece, try keeping the safety on . . .

The Talk of the Town tests the Empire-State-Building-as-electrical-Bermuda-Triangle theory:

There are real differences between the original Bermuda Triangle (between Bermuda, Florida, and Puerto Rico) and the one that, as the News reported last week, plagues a five-block radius around the Empire State Building. The first affects planes and ships, and is attributable to (depending on your point of view) ocean-floor gases, magnetic fields, wind patterns, U.F.O.s, or a time warp. The second takes down cars. As soon as vehicles approach the Empire State Building, things get weird: locks stop functioning; engines die. The cause, some experts believe, is the giant cluster of antennas at the top of the building, which interferes with cars’ remote key-lock systems. In the case of both Triangles, the victims and the authorities can’t agree. Empire State Building officials deny the claims; doormen and tow-truck drivers stand behind them. “Every day it’s at least four breakdowns,” Rony Yaakobovitch, the president of the neighborhood AAA service, said.

In a city full of malevolent electricity — cell-phone dead zones, electrified manhole covers — the antenna theory sounded plausible. “It’s possible,” Brian Klopfer, a mechanic with Union Electronics, who works on electric-key and alarm systems, said. Klopfer explained that many alarm and key-lock systems use radio signals, which can go haywire around large antennas. Car alarms, he added, often have a “starter kill” built into them, which shuts off the engine. Paul Diament, a professor at Columbia who specializes in electromagnetics, confirmed this but was skeptical about the Empire State Building’s role: “Blaming the antenna — you might as well blame the little green men on Mars.” More likely, he said, something else in the area, perhaps ground-level electrical equipment, had caused “sparking.” But to know for sure, he said, “it would have to be tested.”

With no official studies on the horizon, a highly scientific Talk of the Town field test was arranged. The equipment: an Electrosmog meter ($199), a remote-control-type thing with a digital readout topped by a yellow plastic ball, which, according to an Internet vender, is used to measure radio-wave pollution; a test vehicle (a 2005 Ford Crown Victoria taxi, with remote key lock); and a pilot (Michael Gati, a cabdriver for thirty years). The experimenter, remembering that Columbus’s compass had behaved erratically in the Bermuda Triangle, brought one, too.

. . .

Electrosmog readings were high on Park Avenue, very high at the Polish Consulate, at Thirty-seventh and Madison, and low-to-normal outside Empire Erotica, at Thirty-third and Broadway. Then, on the ground floor of the Empire State Building, a breakthrough: the Electrosmog meter dropped to zero, and the compass, placed on the floor in the middle of a hallway, read backward — South pointed North. No test results could be gathered from the top of the building. The Electrosmog meter was confiscated by security guards before it could get through a metal detector, and the experimenter, after being made to wait for a supervisor, was asked, “What are you doing in here with an R.F. meter?” The supervisor called the corporate office on his BlackBerry. It seemed like a good time to vanish without a trace.

No 311, no honey:

Next week, the city begins a series of seminars at venues all over town on avoiding bedbugs — except in the Bronx.

The reason isn’t that city officials don’t want to come to the Bronx - but rather that, apparently, the bedbugs don’t.

While some residents of Brooklyn, Manhattan and Queens are in a near panic over the worsening citywide infestation, people in the Bronx don’t seem to be bugged by the critters — yet.

“The Bronx had the second-lowest number of complaints last year,” said Seth Donlin of the city Department of Housing Preservation and Development, which keeps track of such calls to the city’s 311 hotline.

“It’s the lowest total after Staten Island, which is statistically insignificant,” Donlin said.

Bronx residents called to complain about bedbugs just 1,117 times last year, and HPD documented only 347 actual infestations.

Brooklyn saw the most complaints by far, according to HPD, with 2,382 calls and 692 infestations — double the Bronx totals.

Manhattan followed with 1,729 calls, just ahead of Queens, which saw 1,602 complaints.

Infestations by the blood-sucking insects in the city have skyrocketed in recent years.

In fiscal year 2004 the 311 hotline received only 1,800 calls about bedbugs citywide, but by 2007 the number had more than tripled, to nearly 7,000 overall.

Bedbugs were all but eradicated in the United States decades ago. But with the banning of the powerful pesticides used to kill them and increased global travel there has been a resurgence.

The MTA’s lost-and-found procedures focuses on the former at the expense of the latter:

Misplacing valuables like a diamond earring or wallet stuffed with money in the city transit system may mean losing them forever, according to MTA Inspector General reports released Thursday, which found that less than one in five commuters are reunited with their lost item.

As part of a year-long probe, auditors tested New York City Transit’s lost and found procedures by handing over 26 items — including cell phones and cameras — that they claimed commuters left behind. Only three of those items made it to the Lost Property Unit.

In another probe, auditors tracked 10,000 lost articles received by the unit and found less than half got there within 10 days of being turned in to transit employees. About 13 percent took more than a month to reach the unit.

No, seriously, a felony:

Council members will gather at City Hall today to call on the State Assembly to pass a law that would make the displaying of a noose a felony. “Right now if you hung a noose at City Hall trying to intimidate people, it’s not a crime,” Council Member Robert Jackson, who co-chairs the Council’s Black, Latino, and Asian caucus, said yesterday. “Considering that we live in New York City, the most diverse city in the world, we’re sending a message that we’re not going to tolerate hate or threats like that.”

But maybe in jail he can get the speech therapy he obviously needs:

A bouncer who studied sword fighting and ninjitsu, adopted a Japanese surname and urged himself to become a “monster in the most positive way” was convicted yesterday of two 2005 murders but acquitted of a third.

The bouncer, Stephen Sakai, 32, was surrounded by 16 court officers as the verdict was announced in State Supreme Court in Brooklyn. He rose, thrust his arms back to accept handcuffs and paced to the holding pens, the picture of discipline.

The split verdict, one juror said, apparently reflected acceptance of some of Mr. Sakai’s testimony, a wide-ranging account of conspiracy by police assassins who coveted his private security business. Though he was born Stephen Sanders in Queens and has no passport, Mr. Sakai testified in a thick, wavering accent, transposing L’s and R’s.

“It was laughable,” said the juror, who spoke on the condition of anonymity. “I brought it up multiple times, and the rest of the jury really didn’t see it.”

The verdict closed the last chapter in the improbable history of the Sweet Cherry, a sleazy strip parlor that lasted a decade, in defiance of the authorities, on the docks of Sunset Park. The scene of various assaults and a documented in-house narcotics trade, the club closed last year after Mr. Sakai’s arrest.

. . .

Mr. Sakai’s bizarre performance on the witness stand captivated the courthouse. All week, lawyers and stenographers, clerks and officers argued: Was his accent real? Why wasn’t it shared by his mother when she spoke out from the gallery? How did he develop it without leaving the country? Plans to test him with a Japanese phrase or two were abandoned for lack of volunteers.

Two things — one, isn’t it “easy” to allow smuggled goods into the country if you set up a sting to do it? And two, when you think about it, the fact that an undercover customs agent can pose as a bribe-taking longshoremen’s union official and stay undercover sort of says something about the longshoremen’s union:

Federal officials announced the arrests yesterday of 10 people they said were members of an international smuggling gang that illegally shipped millions of dollars’ worth of counterfeit apparel into the New York region from factories in China, often in falsely labeled shipping containers.

The smuggling scheme, involving fake merchandise with a retail value of more than $200 million, was one of the largest smuggling operations ever discovered, the United States attorney’s office in Manhattan said.

The charges, revealed yesterday in a complaint issued in Federal District Court in Manhattan, followed a yearlong investigation in which an undercover customs agent posed as a longshoremen’s union official and took nearly $500,000 in bribes to let the illegal shipments pass through the Port Newark-Elizabeth Marine Terminal in New Jersey.

The undercover agent had nearly daily contact with the smugglers, who included Chinese manufacturers, a customs broker and a husband-and-wife team that owned a Brooklyn trucking company, officials said.

While officials declined to say how the investigation started, the complaint said that in August 2006, Michael Chu, 70, of Manhattan, approached the undercover agent and asked for his help in moving the illegal containers through the port. Mr. Chu paid the agent $100,000 in cash bribes to smuggle about 20 containers carrying fake consumer goods with a value of more than $24 million, the complaint said.

The apparent ease with which the containers — 40 feet long, 8 feet wide and 9 ½ feet high — were moved through the port with false bills of lading highlights frailties in the security system at the region’s ports, said Michael J. Garcia, the United States attorney in Manhattan.

The Bloomberg Administration has given its qualified support to Council Member Vallone’s proposed anti-Tom legislation. While it seems the telescope lobby is safe for now, staircase trolls, among the worst of the perverts, may finally face up to their transgressions:

City Councilmember Peter Vallone Jr. got a promise of support from the Bloomberg mayoral administration last week for his first-ever legislation to punish Peeping Toms.

The promise came from Karen Agnifilio, general counsel to the Criminal Justice Coordinator, according to Vallone. Agnifilio said the administration supports the “private place” section of Vallone’s legislation and plans to work with the council to change some provisions of that section of the bill.

. . .

Vallone’s bill, the first in New York City against Peeping Toms, has been narrowly crafted to capture the worst perverts, those that stand under stairways or drill holes in apartment walls. It will not go after the “casual observer” on the street, Vallone added.

“There are people out there using their eyes to degrade others and invade their privacy,” Vallone stated. “We are trying to craft a law that stops the worst of these perverts without capturing innocent conduct.

“Right now, if a person cuts a peephole in a dressing room and films a woman undressing, they can be charged with an E felony, but if they only use the naked eye, it’s not even a crime.”

And if you can figure out what this means, make sure all the pervs you know are put on notice:

The way Vallone’s legislation is written, to be found guilty, violators must repeatedly position themselves in a public place to view parts of another individual’s person that otherwise would not be visible to the public.

In other words, one cannot be in public looking at stuff that isn’t visible to the public . . . right? Repeatedly, that is.

The other part of the legislation takes aim at urban astronomers (i.e., pervs with telescopes):

If the peeping occurs in a private place, a violator must view these parts when the person has a reasonable expectation of privacy, such as when they are undressing in the bedroom of their apartment.

Exit question: Does one have a reasonable expectation of privacy even when living in high-rise, glass-intensive ant farms? Or should Vallone stick to Council resolutions on the appropriate amount of homework for schoolchildren?

Perplexing standing conviction has been overturned:

The Court of Appeals, New York State’s highest court, threw out the conviction yesterday of a man who was arrested for standing and not moving on a Times Square corner in 2004.

The man, Matthew Jones, was on the corner of 42nd Street and Seventh Avenue in the early morning of June 12, 2004, chatting with friends as other pedestrians tried to get by.

As a result of Mr. Jones’s behavior, “numerous pedestrians in the area had to walk around” him and his friends, the arresting officer, Momen Attia, wrote. Mr. Jones refused to move when asked, Officer Attia later wrote, then tried to run away. Mr. Jones was charged with disorderly conduct and resisting arrest.

. . .

The conviction was upheld by an appellate court, but yesterday, the Court of Appeals unanimously reversed that decision. Writing for the court, Judge Carmen Beauchamp Ciparick concluded that the allegations in the document used to charge Mr. Jones did not meet the burden of factual proof required.

“Nothing in the information indicates how the defendant, when he stood in the middle of a sidewalk at 2:01 a.m., had the intent to or recklessly created a risk of causing ‘public inconvenience, annoyance or alarm,’” Judge Ciparick wrote.

She later added: “Something more than a mere inconvenience of pedestrians is required to support the charge.

“Otherwise, any person who happens to stop on a sidewalk — whether to greet another, to seek directions or simply to regain one’s bearings — would be subject to prosecution under this statute.”

Elliot Spitzer learns the hard way that executive experience is not at all like the “rollicking discussions” he once enjoyed as a youth around his parents’ dinner table. Less than a day — or if you believe the Sun, just hours — after details emerge about the governor’s proposed Amazon tax, he clumsily retreats:

In a second major policy reversal in less than a day, Governor Spitzer is backing down from a plan to require Amazon.com and other online retailers to charge state and local sales taxes on all purchases from New York.

Yesterday, just hours after The New York Sun reported on the new revenue collection scheme, the Spitzer administration announced that it was burying it for the time being — at least until after the Christmas shopping season. The move saved New York City shoppers from having to pay an additional 8.375% on many Amazon.com goods.

“Governor Spitzer believes that now is not the right time to be increasing sales taxes on New Yorkers,” Mr. Spitzer’s budget director, Paul Francis, said in a statement. “He has directed the Department of Tax and Finance to pull back its interpretation that would require some Internet retailers that do not collect sales tax to do so.”

The turnabout came just hours after Mr. Spitzer said he was dropping his plan to allow illegal immigrants in New York to obtain driver’s licenses.

In this latest instance, Mr. Spitzer wasted little time before pulling the plug on another controversial policy, aborting it before it threatened to snowball into a distraction for his administration.

And do you really believe this part?

Mr. Francis, in an interview, said the governor was unaware of the new tax policy, which the tax department quietly issued with a memorandum on Friday. It was supposed to go into effect next month, in time for the holiday shopping rush.

“The governor really wasn’t aware of this. My focus is to raise revenue, and the governor has a broader perspective,” Mr. Francis said. “It’s a big government, and in hindsight, we probably should have made sure he focused on it. It’s one of those things, so you live and learn.”

And a new political axiom is born: if there’s one thing the netroots hate, it’s taxing crap they buy on Amazon (and all for a lousy $100 million . . . that’s somehow using political capital wisely?).

But it at least began as a nice gesture:

Lawyers from firms across the city will stop billing clients for half an hour today to rally in support of the lawyers and judges of Pakistan.

The rally, planned for 1 p.m. in front of the New York County Courthouse at 60 Centre St., is expected to draw hundreds of attorneys to protest the arrests and detentions of thousands of Pakistani lawyers and judges as part of President Musharraf’s emergency decree, according to Barry Kamins, president of the New York City Bar Association, which has helped to organize the rally.

“I’m trying to mobilize as many attorneys from around the city from all spectrums of the profession to stand up and show support for the lawyers and judges of Pakistan,” Mr. Kamins said. “When a government goes after its lawyers and judges, that’s the quickest way to destroy a democracy.”

Maybe like Justice Stewart’s description of obscenity they know it when they see it:

Millions of people have paused to stand amid the hustle, bustle and neon of Times Square.

And sure, those who pause — to gawk, talk or eat a gyro — can slow the progress of pedestrians around them.

But when Matthew Jones of Brooklyn lingered on the corner of 42nd Street and Seventh Avenue in the early morning of June 12, 2004, gabbing with friends as other pedestrians tried to get by, something unusual happened: He was arrested for it.

A police officer said Mr. Jones was impeding other pedestrians and charged him with disorderly conduct.

Mr. Jones is not taking the charges lying down (so to speak). After trying twice to get the charges dismissed, he has taken his case to the state’s highest court, the Court of Appeals, which heard arguments here on Wednesday.

In the prosecution’s view, it appears, the innocent do not dawdle. According to the original complaint against Mr. Jones, the officer “observed defendant along with a number of other individuals standing around” on a public sidewalk in June 2004. Mr. Jones was “not moving, and that as a result of defendants’ behavior, numerous pedestrians in the area had to walk around defendants.”

. . .

And on Wednesday, Mr. Jones’s circumstances appeared to reach a friendly audience before the Court of Appeals.

“Isn’t that lawful conduct?” wondered Judge Robert S. Smith. Later he added, “Your conduct can’t be illegal just because an officer noticed it.”

. . .

The court is likely to rule on the case next month. Should it rule against Mr. Jones, the available evidence on the scene on Wednesday suggested that the police would soon have their hands full.

Just before 5 p.m., near the corner where Mr. Jones was arrested, stood the following assemblage: a man eating clams out of a Styrofoam container; two men smoking cigarettes together; a man waiting for a woman to finish a phone call; a guy looking at a map; a young woman sending a text message; two men handing out tour brochures; and a family of five, including an infant in a stroller, who stopped to look at the brochures.

This will save you that precious wasted half block walking in the wrong direction (what do you think this is, Rome or London or some truly confusing city?):

Compass decals will be installed in the sidewalk at four locations in Midtown to guide pedestrians, the city Department of Transportation, the Grand Central Partnership, and the Metropolitan Transportation Authority announced yesterday.

“Not a single person, native New Yorker or visitor, can truthfully claim that they have not, at least once, been confused as to which direction to walk when emerging from a subway station,” the city’s transportation commissioner, Janette Sadik-Khan, said.

. . .

Temporary versions of the compasses, designed by sculptor Gregg Lefevre, will be tested for one week, until October 23, at four subway exits: two at Grand Central Terminal and one each at the subway stops at Lexington Avenue-51st Street and Fifth Avenue-53rd Street. If they receive a positive response from the public, the temporary decals can be replaced with a more permanent installation, and other neighborhoods can ask the DOT for help replicating the program.