For seven years, legal secretary Joanie Kissell has been collecting hole punchings at her job at Kenyon & Kenyon along the Canyon of Heroes.

The 58-year-old from Queens began gathering the little bits of paper even before she scored a job at a firm on the parade route.

Co-workers thought she was crazy. She says she was optimistic.

“They think I’m nuts,” Kissell said. “I’d say to them, ‘Wait! Don’t throw that out!’”

They’ll be grateful today when they can all look to her jar labeled “New York Yankees. 2009″ to join in showering paper onto the Yankees to celebrate their 27th world championship.

. . .

At the Downtown Alliance’s transportation division, sanitation workers were busy yesterday bagging up a half-ton of shredded paper donated by a Red Hook recycling facility.

They planned to drop off about 400 bags of the stuff at buildings along Broadway between 4a.m. and 5 a.m. on Friday.

As a billionaire in one of the dining capitals of the world, he can eat anything he wants. But he is obsessed with his weight — so much so that the sight of an unflattering photo of himself can trigger weeks of intense dieting and crankiness, according to friends and aides.

His food issues have become New York City’s. Although he has described his battle against unhealthy foods as common-sense public policy that will shed pounds (and save lives), many of his targets overlap with his own cravings.

“I like a Big Mac like everybody else,” he confessed the other day, explaining the city’s warts-and-all approach to fast food. “I just want to know how many calories are in it.”

Under his watch, the city has declared sodium an enemy, asking restaurants and food manufacturers to voluntarily cut the salt in their dishes by 20 percent or more, and encouraging diners to “shake the habit” by asking waiters for food without added salt.

But Mr. Bloomberg, 67, likes his popcorn so salty that it burns others’ lips. (At Gracie Mansion, the cooks deliver it to him with a salt shaker.) He sprinkles so much salt on his morning bagel “that it’s like a pretzel,” said the manager at Viand, a Greek diner near Mr. Bloomberg’s Upper East Side town house.

Not even pizza is spared a coat of sodium. When the mayor sat down to eat a slice at Denino’s Pizzeria Tavern on Staten Island recently, this reporter spotted him applying six dashes of salt to it.

And then there’s the concept of Asshole-In-Chief:

When he does not like the food, he rarely holds back. After dining at Blue Smoke, Mr. Meyer’s barbecue restaurant on East 27th Street, the mayor told Mr. Meyer, “I just don’t like it.”

Mr. Meyer tried inviting him back, but the mayor would not budge. “It never feels good when somebody tells you they don’t like your restaurant, but it’s nice when a politician does not pander,” he said, adding that the mayor has heaped praise on Union Square Cafe.

*In fact, Thompson should consider making this a slogan of sorts, e.g., you think it’s OK to suspend term limits just this once, but consider the deleterious long-term effects . . .

“I never understood why we don’t let you drink in the park.”

The brown-bag phase of the mayor’s campaign . . . Avella, you sure you still want to ban foie gras?

It was billed as the first major proposal in Mayor Michael R. Bloomberg’s quest for a third term in office. But in the chronicles of city elections, Mr. Bloomberg’s choice of topic on Monday was an odd one because it involved a sweeping overhaul of mass transit, an area over which the mayor has very little say.

In a 33-point proposal spanning subways, buses, roads, ferries and other parts of the Metropolitan Transportation Authority, the mayor appeared to be trying to assert a greater role for the city in mass transit even though the authority is a state entity.

. . .

But the gap between Mr. Bloomberg’s ambitious plan and actually putting it in place is wide: Unlike the Police Department and the school system, the transportation authority is subject to scant influence by the mayor, who controls only 4 of 17 votes on the authority’s board.

Still, Mr. Bloomberg’s proposal quickly became fodder for widespread discussion, debate and criticism, especially his idea for dealing with Manhattan’s notoriously slow crosstown buses, like the M34, M42 and M50.

Those lines move at such a snail’s pace that the transit agency should stop collecting fares on them so that the buses can load riders and take off more quickly, Mr. Bloomberg said.

New York City Mayor Michael Bloomberg says the governor should dispatch state troopers to haul state lawmakers back into session. He wants them to approve the bill giving him authority over city schools.

I hope the City Council cooperates during what will surely be a smooth third term . . .

Yankee Stadium and Citi Field combined use enough electricity to power 20,000 homes, twice as much as the old ballparks, Con Ed says.

Citi Field, the smaller of the two, has the higher peak capacity — 11 megawatts, enough to power 11,000 homes. That’s 120 percent more than Shea’s maximum 5-megawatt draw.

The new Yankee Stadium has access to 9 megawatts, enough for 9,000 homes. That’s about twice the power draw of the old Stadium.

Blame the stadiums’ big potential power use on what makes them great — hi-def TV screens, huge scoreboards and extra elevators, escalators and lighting, said Con Ed spokesman Bob McGee.

The Yankees’ new main scoreboard, at nearly 6,000 square feet, is seven times bigger than the lower-tech scoreboard in the old Stadium.

And both new stadiums have plenty more elevators. Citi Field has 11; at Shea there were just four. The new Yankee Stadium has 16 elevators, compared to three in the old park.

. . .

The standard for green ballparks has been set by the Washington Nationals’ stadium, which opened last year and won a silver rating from the US Green Building Council — the first major pro stadium to earn such certification.

Nationals Park uses about 15 percent less power than the old RFK Stadium did, thanks in part to energy-saving lighting that reduced peak power usage from 1,293 kilowatts to just 1,011 — a savings worth about $440,000 over 25 years.

Location Scout: New Yankee Stadium, Citi Field, Nationals Park.

A bill to be submitted this week in Albany seeks a permanent name change for the tower at Ground Zero, officially declaring it the Freedom Tower.

Brooklyn Sen. Marty Golden is submitting the legislation in defiance of the Port Authority, which owns the site.

Earlier: “Leading Economic Indicator: Delinking Financial Centers From The Concept Of ‘Freedom’”.

Subway and bus riders need to get “mad as hell” at state lawmakers stalling a plan that would prevent crippling fare hikes and debilitating service cuts, Mayor Bloomberg said today.

“When you see what’s going to happen to your commuting costs you should call your state legislators and say, ‘I’m mad as hell and I’m not going to take it any more,’” Bloomberg suggested.

Congress’ planned 90 percent tax on bonuses paid by bailed-out companies will snatch $12 billion at the very least from employees of firms that are based in New York City or have big operations here, experts said.

And that would have a dire effect on the city’s economy, impacting everyone from top luxury retailers to taxi drivers to tax collectors.

The crushing tax passed in the House yesterday would affect workers who make over a quarter-million dollars a year at companies that took more than $5 billion in rescue funds from the taxpayers.

Several executive-compensation experts said that under those standards, at least half of all of the windfalls granted by bailed-out firms would be affected.

“And that’s a conservative estimate,” said Chuck Collins, a compensation expert at the Institute for Policy Studies.

For example, he said, at least 50 percent of the $2.6 billion that Goldman Sachs gave its employees in bonuses would likely be hit with the tax.

New Yorkers lost more than $25 million because of service cuts to the No. 7 subway line during an eight-week period in January and February, according to the preliminary results of a study City Councilman Eric Gioia’s (D−Sunnyside) office conducted.

Gioia said the shutdown of the No. 7 line on weekends from Times Square and Queensborough Plaza from January to early March cost commuters $25.9 million and at least 950,000 hours because of extra travel time over eight weeks.

“New Yorkers not only lose their time, but their hard-earned money when they have their commutes interrupted by service delays,” Gioia said. “The subway lines are the lifeline for most New Yorkers — when the trains don’t run, New Yorkers suffer. The MTA needs to take tangible steps towards making sure that when there are service interruptions, they have a minimal effect on New Yorkers.”

Using a formula developed by Princeton University economist Alan Krueger, the study analyzed how much money detours, additional trip segments and increased wait times were costing the average rider of the No. 7 subway line, which runs from Manhattan to Flushing through northern Queens.

Look, shutting down the 7 between Times Square and Queensboro Plaza on the weekend certainly sucks, and I’m sure there is a “cost” to making the commute longer, though it’s obviously minimized on the weekend, but the other thing that sucks is neglecting infrastructure, and, you know, getting delayed at more inopportune times. But Councilmember Gioia got a lot of mileage out of this eminently grandstandable issue (MTA bad! Beleaguered outer-borough residents!) and there’s no reason to stop even after the delays are over . . .