City buses are notoriously late, but many New Yorkers can’t even find out when they’re supposed to arrive.

None of the MTA Bus Company local lines have timetables posted on polls at stops and the Guide-A-Ride listings won’t be coming soon. The MTA just doesn’t have the money to put up schedules along the 46 routes serving the Bronx, Brooklyn and Queens, NYC Transit spokesman Charles Seaton said.

. . .

Most of the shelters are located next to polls serving NYC Transit lines, which usually have paper schedules (and some have digital ones), city Department of Transportation spokesman Montgomery Dean said. A DOT contractor maintains the shelters while the MTA is in charge of the timetables.

Emphasis added.

On Sunday afternoon, a few dozen ashen-faced night owls — looking for a respite from 90-degree temperatures — took to the beach. They plopped themselves, fully clothed, onto striped lounge chairs and stayed there for hours drinking free PBR. Daniel James, a tattooed nightlife promoter, flipped burgers on a big grill. Showing off bedbug-bitten legs, a girl splashed into the water alone, bouncing a beach ball. “Come on in guys, the temperature’s perfect,” she said, eliciting only confused stares from three tattooed friends.

Forget about Suffolk County’s famous sand though, it all took place in a 700-squarefoot sandbox on Suffolk Street — and the body of water was a two-foot kiddy pool. James, for one, said he’d choose the space — called the “Beach Bar” and located at the back of the Clemente Solo Voce Center — over real sand and surf any day. Kicking up his black motorcycle boots he lit up a Parliament. Exhaling, he said, “The Hamptons is way too far.”

Too pronounced to be blamed on the slouchy cut of a T-shirt, too modest in size to be termed a proper beer gut, developed too young to come under the heading of a paunch, the Ralph Kramden is everywhere to be seen lately, or at least it is in the vicinity of the Brooklyn Flea in Fort Greene, the McCarren Park Greenmarket and pretty much any place one is apt to encounter fans of Grizzly Bear.

What the trucker cap and wallet chain were to hipsters of a moment ago, the Kramden is to what my colleague Mike Albo refers to as the “coolios” of now. Leading with a belly is a male privilege of long standing, of course, a symbol of prosperity in most cultures and of freedom from anxieties about body image that have plagued women since Eve.

Grand Unifying Theory about Obama-era contrarianism at the link . . .

“It was like a movie; you would think you would only see this in a movie. That’s how bad it was.”

Cops are looking for the un-patriotic — and not very creative — neighborhood wall-scrawler who commented on one of the worst days in the city’s history with the words “F–K 9-11.”

The mean-spirited missive reportedly popped up on a wall on South 5th Street between Bedford Avenue and Berry Street on the night of July 28, outraged residents said.

After crying poverty for months, Mayor Bloomberg authorized fat raises Friday for 6,692 of his managers and nonunion employees, worth $69 million over two years.

. . .

Those getting the raises will get lump-sum retroactive checks covering 16 months.

The seven deputy mayors will get raises ranging from $16,978 to $18,541, with the salary of First Deputy Commissioner Patricia Harris rising to $245,760.

Top commissioners will get a $23,247 raise, bringing their salaries to $189,700.

. . .

The raise was announced in a written statement by Bloomberg Press Secretary Stu Loeser, on a Friday afternoon, a time frequently reserved for news meant to slip under the radar.

Which is to say, the budget is basically kind of bullshit.

The “performance and infrastructure” review, which goes beyond the agency’s normal oversight of the Coney Island to Queens line, came after state Sen. Daniel Squadron cornered the MTA’s Albany-based lobbyist and demanded action.

“I have been getting increasing complaints about the F line from my constituents and, no less important, my fiancee,” Squadron told The Brooklyn Paper. “So I asked the MTA to do a full review, and they agreed.

“There was definitely a sense in March and April, judging from the e-mails to our office, that something was wrong — the delays were longer, the trains more overcrowded,” Squadron added. “When I brought it up to the MTA, they did a quick search that suggested, at first glance, that something was wrong.

“That’s why they agreed to a full review,” he added. “I’m happy that they’re being responsive.”

(That said, Senator, you might want to carefully consider how campaigns like this craft your public image especially while things are so topsy-turvy.)

Imagine narrow European-style roadways shared by pedestrians, cyclists and cars, all traveling at low speeds. Sidewalks made of recycled rubber in different colors under sleek energy-efficient lamps. Mini-islands jutting into the street, topped by trees and landscaping, designed to further slow traffic and add a dash of green.

This is what New York City streets could look like, according to the Bloomberg administration, which has issued the city’s first street design manual in an effort to make over the utilitarian 1970s-style streetscape that dominates the city.

. . .

Urban planners say that the document is long overdue, and that it promises to be as much a map to the future as it is a handbook for the present: getting people to think about streets as not just thoroughfares for cars, but as public spaces incorporating safety, aesthetics, environmental and community concerns.

Robert Moses, Mr. Bloomberg is not.

“Moses had a sort of utopian view of orderly, suburban places that de-emphasized New York’s ‘cityness,’ while Bloomberg embraces the soul of the city itself and recognizes it as a solution to the region’s environmental, sustainability, and energy problems,” said Robert Puentes, senior fellow at the Brookings Institution’s Metropolitan Policy Program.

Some drivers, though, are reserving judgment. Taxi drivers, for one, say that while they appreciate the city’s efforts to beautify the streets, they hope that they do not lead, even indirectly, to fewer parking spots or traffic that is too slow.

Another way to look at it: “Robert Moses” attempted to build infrastructure that spurred economic growth while Mayor Bloomberg seems to prefer tree pits and European-style lawn furniture in the middle of Broadway. Sure, he’ll “calm” traffic . . . by getting it down to the size where he can drown it in the bathtub.

Based on the amount of television time the mayor has purchased, the average New Yorker is likely to see the ads about 12 times.

Howard Wolfson, a spokesman for the campaign, said that New Yorkers “will certainly see the ad.” But, he added, “It will not saturate the airwaves.”

Asked about the timing, Mr. Wolfson said: “If it were up to me, we would have run ads a month earlier than today. This issue of jobs and the economy is one that we want to engage the public with in a conversation.”

So why burnish your middle class cred back in April? Is it because the Executive Budget is due in less than a week or so? Remember Chekhov’s Gun . . .

Laid off in December from a private equity firm downtown, Trent Calabretta, 26, found himself last month within a cubicle’s length of Angelina Jolie on a Manhattan set for the movie “Salt.”

“I’m not one to get star-struck, but it was a bit surreal,” Mr. Calabretta said. “There were thousands of people there, and we were going up and down Park Avenue for this one parade scene. People were playing military officials and past presidents, and everyone was in different uniforms, and we were all trying to come together to shoot this one scene. When I saw Jolie, my first thought was, ‘Well, she’s definitely not ugly.’ ”

The $8 an hour Mr. Calabretta earned as a nonunion extra — more recently, he was on the set of the CW’s “Gossip Girl” — will not cover the $1,750-per-month rent on his Upper East Side apartment, but he hopes the money he saved during three and a half years in finance will last until he finds a similar job.

“I’ve gotten a few paychecks as an extra, but I haven’t even looked at them yet,” Mr. Calabretta said. “My intention is to get back into finance, and in the interim, I’m going to keep doing these fun little side jobs.”

Managers at casting agencies around New York said they were seeing increasing numbers of people like Mr. Calabretta who have little experience in, or even aspirations for, acting, but are filling hours they used to spend at office jobs with gigs as extra, also called background, talent.

At Extra Talent Agency, a Manhattan firm that casts extras for commercials, television shows and documentary films, the actor database swelled to 9,680 in March from 6,850 in December. Fleet Emerson, assistant casting director at Sylvia Fay/Lee Genick and Associates Casting, has seen correspondence from aspiring extras triple over the past several months, something he called “quite a phenomenon.” And Grant Wilfley Casting, also in Manhattan, had open calls for new background talent in February and March that yielded 1,500 and 1,300 people, respectively.

*Location Scout: Old Tucson.