She doesn’t have as a high a profile as Amtrak Julie — that media suckup — but she’s every bit as important, and probably more so, since people actually use Penn Station:

The voice that launched a thousand trips — on Thursday alone — was about to launch another.

Sheila Herriott, sitting in a dimly lighted control room with a microphone in her hand and hundreds of commuters at her beck and call, spoke in a throaty, cabaret-style voice that sent them scurrying toward various tracks throughout Pennsylvania Station: “This will be the final call on Amtrak’s Train 97, the Silver Meteor, en route to Miami departing at 3:15 p.m., making station stops at Alexandria, Richmond, Petersburg . . . . This will be the final call on the Silver Meteor to Miami departing at 3:15 p.m. All aboard.”

Basking in the glow of her computer screen, Ms. Herriott rolled her chair away from her desk and looked up at a half-dozen video monitors to see her audience chugging for their trains.

“Those people really depend on me,” she said. “They don’t know me personally, but over the years, they have certainly come to know my voice.”

For the past quarter-century, millions who have passed through Penn Station have indeed relied on Ms. Herriott for arrival and departure information regarding Amtrak and New Jersey Transit trains.

. . .

Ms. Herriott, who began making track announcements in 1983, said she felt “every bit a part of the history and tradition of Penn Station.”

If you see something, say something. Except for monkeys . . . and perhaps pythons, too:

That monkey on the subway? Illegal in New York City, but not if the owner has a disability. The guy with the snake on the bus? Leave him alone. He needs it for emotional support.

The New York Police Department Patrol Guide, a thick and getting thicker collection of rules and regulations, has been amended to let officers know that guide dogs for the blind are not the only creatures considered service animals — and to give them a better understanding of which straphangers and bus riders are allowed to have members of the animal kingdom as riding partners.

Now, according to the Patrol Guide, it is not just the blind who can have service animals, but those afflicted with epilepsy, heart disease, lung disease and other medical conditions, namely those who say they need an animal to provide them psychological reassurance.

. . .

The NYPD would not elaborate on the Patrol Guide revision, a spokesman said, adding only that the guide is routinely updated. But Becky Barnes, a manager with Guiding Eyes For The Blind, a Westchester dog school that trains canines to work with the blind and visually impaired, said it is not uncommon for people to try to pass off exotic animals, such as pythons, as service animals.

It’s not the start of a joke. They swim:

Apparently, the deer population in Staten Island has been going up, and Friday, for the first time, the New York State Department of Environmental Conservation will release its first ever count of deer in the borough.

And these clever creatures aren’t taking the ferry or Verrazano like the rest of us, they’re swimming over.

“We suspect that they they are swimming over from New Jersey, deer are strong swimmers and the Arthur Kill is a narrow body of water,” said Arturo Garcia-Costas, of the NYSDEC.

1847’s Rural Cemetery Act notwithstanding, it is still possible to be laid to rest in Manhattan:

Former Mayor Edward I. Koch said on Monday that he planned to stay in Manhattan — for good.

Mr. Koch, who turned 83 in December, said that he had purchased a burial plot in Trinity Church Cemetery.

“The idea of leaving Manhattan permanently irritates me,” said Mr. Koch, who represented the East Side in the City Council and in Congress before being elected to the first of three terms as mayor in 1977.

Trinity Church, part of the Episcopal Diocese of New York, operates a nondenominational cemetery at Broadway and 155th Street. Trinity describes the uptown cemetery as the only active cemetery in Manhattan that is still accepting burials.

. . .

The cemetery is on the site of one of the fiercest battles of the American Revolution. Trinity describes it as a grassy retreat, dotted by century-old elms and oaks, and “a special place of peace and tranquillity far from the chrome and glass towers of central Manhattan.”

Those buried include Clement Clarke Moore, who wrote “A Visit From St. Nicholas”; the artist and naturalist John James Audubon; the actor Jerry Orbach; and Mayor Fernando Wood, who proposed that the city secede from the Union during the Civil War and was later elected to Congress, where his colleagues censured him for intemperate remarks.

. . .

A mausoleum at the cemetery offers above-ground niches and crypts, but only a few below-ground burial plots remain vacant. Cemetery officials said they were reserved for special citizens.

Mr. Koch chose a plot on what he described as a “small mountain” overlooking Amsterdam Avenue, and he researched the propriety of being buried in a non-Jewish cemetery.

“I called a number of rabbis to see if this was doable,” he said. “I was going to do it anyway, but it would be nice if it were doable traditionally.”

He said he had been advised to request that the gate nearest his plot be inscribed as “the gate for the Jews,” and the cemetery agreed.

He was also instructed to have rails installed around his plot, so he ordered them.

Being buried in Manhattan, Mr. Koch said, would also make it easier for former constituents to visit.

“I’m extending an open invitation,” he said.

. . . or, the time it takes to administer communion at Yankee Stadium:

Communion to the 57,100 faithful went blessedly quick.

For the crowd at Pope Benedict XVI’s Mass at Yankee Stadium, participating in Communion — a highlight of the ceremony — posed a logistical nightmare.

To handle the crowd, however, the Archdiocese of New York dispatched 500 priests into the stands to distribute the blessed wafers, meaning more than enough priests for every section of the Stadium.

The distribution took less than 25 minutes. Worshippers in each small section were signaled to go down, row by row, to receive the host from the priest nearest them.

Though Benedict didn’t hand out each wafer — which after blessed is believed to represent the body of Christ — the pope did distribute Communion to the approximate 100 VIPs assembled on the field.

Among those receiving from the pope were Gov. Paterson.

Location Scout: Yankee Stadium.

Of course you can’t fly a plane into it during a test, but that probably won’t ever happen again:

One World Trade Center has not yet emerged from below ground, but its facade has already survived earthquakes, hurricanes and an explosion that shook the earth a quarter-mile away.

In recent months, two full-size mock-ups of a few floors of the glass and aluminum facade have been built and tested. One is outside Los Angeles, in Ontario, Calif. The other was at a site in central New Mexico that can be reached only over dirt roads in four-wheel-drive vehicles.

At 1,368 feet, with 23 acres of glass-clad surface area, 1 World Trade Center will be subject to tremendous natural forces. The building, also known as the Freedom Tower (at a symbolic 1,776 feet, when its mast is counted), will be the tallest in New York City and as the skyscraping phoenix on the site of ground zero, it may be the target of terrorist attacks, too.

The Port Authority of New York and New Jersey, which is building 1 World Trade Center, and Skidmore, Owings & Merrill, which designed it, said both mock-ups performed well. The facade, called a curtain wall, is being made by Benson Industries of Portland, Ore. The engineering firm Weidlinger Associates is the consultant in blast-resistant design.

“Physical testing is a confirmation that curtain-wall contractors are in fact meeting performance requirements,” said Carl Galioto, a Skidmore partner. “Full fabrication of the curtain wall cannot begin until the mock-up specimen passes these tests.”

. . .

The first mock-up was subjected to a blast test in Socorro, N.M., at the Energetic Materials Research and Testing Center, a division of the New Mexico Institute of Mining and Technology. Because details might arm a prospective attacker — providing information like how much force the curtain wall is designed to withstand — officials would say almost nothing about the test of this mock-up.

“The simple answer is, yes, it passed,” said John McCullough, the project executive for the Port Authority.

Fortunately, no word yet on staring blankly into space, hungover:

It’s official: Surfing the web while at work is enough to get you fired, at least in New York.

A Manhattan court ruled this month to uphold a decision by New York City’s schools chancellor, Joel Klein, to fire an employee in 2006 for excessive web browsing.

The employee, Toquir Choudhri, was an associate education analyst employed by the Department of Education’s Division of Human Resources. After he had been warned about too much web surfing, an internal audit caught Mr. Choudhri visiting over 300 Web sites in six days, with court papers citing examples such as lonelyplanet.com, chinaadviser.com, escapeartist.com, and islandsun.com.

An administrative court had previously recommended a mere reprimand of Mr. Choudhri in 2006, citing the fact that “the Internet has become the modern equivalent of a telephone or a daily newspaper.” Mr. Klein disagreed, choosing to fire the employee instead.

If you’re out and about Monday night:

A football-size chunk was the biggest detectable piece of a malfunctioning spy satellite smashed to smithereens by a Navy missile, but there remains a small chance that dangerous pieces could still fall to Earth, a Pentagon general said yesterday.

If it follows the orbit, the debris field would pass over the city on Monday at 11:37 p.m. on a northwest-to-southeast track, according to heavens-above.com.

In case you ever find yourself free falling 47 stories on window-washer scaffolding, know that there are steps you can take to survive:

By all accounts, Alcides Moreno should have died instantly, as did his brother and fellow window washer, Edgar.

Though neither dismisses the merciful hand of God, a physics expert and the critical-care physician who treated Moreno agree he was saved by a fortunate chain of events.

Brian Schwartz, professor of physics at the Graduate Center of City University of New York, theorizes that the scaffolding beneath Moreno created enough wind resistance to slow his free-fall speed from 100 mph to 50 mph.

That would be enough to make it seem more like an eight-story fall, which is still enough to kill most people.

Schwartz also speculates Moreno was lying flat on the scaffold platform and it probably hit the ground with a corner first, which would further reduce the impact.

But take away that cat and the subject of a well-worn axiom will take its place:

Across the city, delis and bodegas are a familiar and vital part of the streetscape, modest places where customers can pick up necessities, a container of milk, a can of soup, a loaf of bread.

Amid the goods found in the stores, there is one thing that many owners and employees say they cannot do without: their cats. And it goes beyond cuddly companionship. These cats are workers, tireless and enthusiastic hunters of unwanted vermin, and they typically do a far better job than exterminators and poisons.

When a bodega cat is on the prowl, workers say, rats and mice vanish.

. . .

But as efficient as the cats may be, their presence in stores can lead to legal trouble. The city’s health code and state law forbid animals in places where food or beverages are sold for human consumption. Fines range from $300 for a first offense to $2,000 or higher for subsequent offenses.

. . .

Still, many store owners keep cats despite the law, mainly because other options have failed and the fine for rodent feces is also $300. “It’s hard for bodega owners because they’re not supposed to have a cat, but they’re also not supposed to have rats,” said José Fernández, the president of the Bodega Association of the United States.

Luis Martinez, 42, has managed his brother’s grocery in East New York, Brooklyn, for two years. At first, despite weekly visits from an exterminator, the store’s inventory was ravaged constantly by nibbling vermin.

“Every night I had to put the bread in the freezer,” he said, pointing at shelves filled with bread and hamburger buns. “I was losing too much inventory. The chips and the Lipton soups all had holes in them.”

Then, last winter, a friend brought Mr. Martinez a marmalade kitten in need of a home. Mr. Martinez, who was skeptical of how one slinky kitten could fend off an army of hungry rats, set up a litter box in the back of the store, put down an old fleece jacket and named the kitten Junior.

Within two weeks, Mr. Martinez said, “a miracle.”

“Before you’d see giant rats running in off the streets into the store, but since Junior, no more,” he said.

Yes, there are times when it just might be better to get out and walk:

Riding the New York City Marathon on the city’s mass-transit system was almost as grueling as running it.

It took seven buses and three subway trains to trek through five boroughs along roughly the same 26.2-mile route some 40,000 runners will follow this Sunday.

My race began on the S53 bus in Staten Island, and like the start of the actual marathon, there was little space to breathe.

I had to duck errant elbows and fists, and thanks to one of my fellow riders, I was overcome by the odor of a thousand people sweating.

. . .

If I made every single connection, I could complete the marathon in three hours, 45 minutes — a respectable finish an hour quicker than my running time last year.

. . .

I crossed the finish line in Central Park in four hours, 57 minutes — two minutes slower than I ran the race in 2006.

Of that time, I spent three hours, 15 minutes riding buses and subways and another one hour, 42 minutes waiting for them.

Along the route that took me on seven buses and three subways, I swiped my MetroCard 10 times.

If anyone has a copy of the memo instructing Cosmo staff to keep their legs closed, well, you know where to reach us:

The cascading glass escalators in the lobby of Norman Foster’s new Hearst Tower, which carry the ladies of Cosmopolitan, Town & Country, and Harper’s Bazaar to their offices, also offer a view up their skirts. Some editors were concerned enough that they warned members of their staff prone to wearing trendy mini-minidresses or ballooning short skirts to take care to keep their legs closed. “It’s the visitors that see the ‘view,’” said one editor. “A lot of tourists walk in from the streets to see the building.” Other employees were more blasé. . . . [one editor said,] “I’m not sure it’s that much of a problem considering the fact that I can probably count the number of straight men who work in the building on one hand.”

It’s a good week for city employees to slack:

Some of the most senior officials of the Bloomberg administration seem to be itching to get out of town early on Fridays.

Calls to 25 city agencies last Friday found that 10 top officials had left early or were gone for the day. One was vacationing in the West, another had just begun a weeklong holiday with his family, and others had skipped out of the office early.

A spokesman for Mayor Bloomberg, Stuart Loeser, did not appear concerned about the missing officials, telling The New York Sun via e-mail that when a commissioner is out of the office, it’s typically the first deputy commissioner who takes charge.

With the state Legislature on break, the City Council calendar nearly empty, and New York settling into the quiet stretch of summer that begins with August and doesn’t end until after Labor Day weekend, there could be more of that going on than usual.

. . .

The head of the New York Civic, Henry Stern, a former parks commissioner, said the old adage “When the cat’s away, the mice will play” is true for city agencies. “When the commissioner leaves the building, you don’t expect much business to be transacted in his wake,” he said.

In case you were wondering what deliverymen consider to be a good tip:

[25-year-old Chinese immigrant Justin] pedals back to Ollie’s [Noodle Shop & Grille] to lock up his bicycle, and soon he’ll be on his way home, to a tiny, $300-a-month cubicle on the second floor of a residential house in Jackson Heights, a floor he shares with six men from different parts of China, garment workers and factory workers, none of whom he really knows. By the time he gets in, it’s 1 or 1:30 a.m. and he’s usually hungry but too exhausted to cook. So he does what any New Yorker would do: He pulls out his cell phone and orders food. He always calls the same Fuzhou restaurant, which stays open until 2 a.m., and on a $10 or $12 order, he makes a point of giving the deliveryman a $3 tip.

Bemused Midwood residents still don’t understand what happens “As The World Turns”:

The show has been filmed in New York for its entire 51-year history, and it’s safe to say that its souped-up world of sex and chicanery rarely resembles life on the sidewalks outside. But seven years ago the producers moved their studio from Midtown to Midwood, and with a healthy dose of real estate irony, the relocation coincided with a sharp growth in the local Orthodox Jewish community. As Midwood’s Orthodox population soared to perhaps three-quarters of the neighborhood, the gap between sidewalk and soap opera became a gulf.

Now, when Oakdale’s powerful, scheming blondes and sensitive, square-jawed men step out of the warehouse at Avenue M and East 14th Street, they encounter women wearing very long skirts and men with very long beards.

In Oakdale, your daily life might include falling into a coma, learning that you have an evil twin, or developing amnesia. Your romantic relationships would be more fleeting and unstable than the average high schooler’s. Above all, you would be in constant danger of getting kidnapped — Lily Snyder, for instance, has been kidnapped no fewer than eight times.

Outside the studio, by contrast, all premarital contact between the sexes, even handshakes, is forbidden, and many residents do not allow television into their homes.

Inside the studio, a woman might be hanging from a bell tower by her fingernails, while in the streets outside, the most dramatic scene is the group of elderly people holding court in the kosher Dunkin’ Donuts.

“We’re strangers in a strange land,” said Christopher Goutman, the show’s executive producer. “There aren’t even any bars around here.”

The studio, which was built in the late 1920s, still features Esther Williams’s old pool and more recently provided the setting for “The Cosby Show.” But the good citizens of Midwood are oblivious to the past and present dramas unfolding within the high fortress walls, and even close neighbors are unclear about the building’s function.

The owner of the Korean deli around the corner was sure that some type of cartoon was being filmed there, and the restaurateur across the street insisted that the warehouse contained “the news.” When informed of the building’s true purpose, most were still in the dark.

“Soap opera?” asked a pale 19-year-old who would identify himself only as Tzviyanky. “Those are the shows where everybody’s cheating on each other, right?”

Of course the lede buried here is that express trains only save you six minutes:

Mets fans can now shave six minutes off their trips home with the service change recently announced by the MTA. Starting last Thursday, the 7 train will now offer express service from the Shea Stadium station.

The move marks the second time in the past few weeks that the MTA has made an effort to improve 7 train service. The first, reported in last week’s paper, was the “Rider Report Cards” that were distributed to riders.

Councilman John Liu, chairperson of the City Council’s Transportation Committee, applauded the change. He called the six minutes “an eternity to any subway riders frustrated by all the local stops on the Number 7 line.”

The ironic thing about the Amazing Technology That Is The Internet is that the basis for it is remarkably low-tech:

Daniel Rayas moved to New York in January from El Paso, Texas, to care for his newborn granddaughter, Eva Lucia. But he needed a job to pay his room and board, one flexible enough to allow for daily diaper-changing duty.

The unlikely solution: collecting take-out menus.

Allmenus.com, an online yellow pages for restaurants, sent him on a quest to reel in menus from eateries across the New York metropolitan area. Four months and one worn out pair of boots later, Rayas has snapped up 10,000 take-out menus.

“My motto is ‘No menu left behind,’” said Rayas, 55, who gets paid $2 for each menu.

It all began one March morning when baby Eva was taking a nap. Rayas — an accountant by trade who worked demolition in El Paso before his move east — was crunching numbers part time for a law firm to pay his rent. But it wasn’t enough. He answered a Craigslist ad: “Earn Money by Collecting Menus.” He sent an e-mail and thought it would go unanswered.

“But the same day I got a response that said, ‘Get started.’”

So Rayas set out from his Washington Heights home in his brand new rust-colored High Sierra boots.

He walked down Broadway. Then he walked up and down Amsterdam Avenue, St. Nicholas Avenue, Audubon Avenue and Fort Washington Avenue. “All the numbered streets, too,” Rayas said.

By the end of the day, blisters covered his toes and he limped into a Rite Aid on 125th Street to buy a box of Band-Aids. “I leaned against the wall, took off my socks, popped the blisters and taped up my toes,” Rayas said. “Man, it felt good.”

Months later, he knows to tape up his feet, tighten his shoelaces and check Google Maps before setting out on his evening and weekend menu hunts, which at his current pace would net him about $60,000 a year. His subway and bus maps are covered with yellow and pink highlighter markings, his legs no longer get sore, and he’s lost 20 pounds. Meanwhile, his boss started calling him “the vacuum” for his astounding proficiency in bringing in menus.

. . .

“Chinese people believe in menus,” he said. “Jamaicans don’t. I ask, ‘Do you have a menu?’ They point to the wall.”

Rayas is grateful he’s no longer knocking down walls and hauling bricks. And he’s grateful to the pizza parlors and Chinese restaurants that have given him menus. “Whenever you don’t think there’s a restaurant around the corner, there’s always a pizza parlor and always a Chinese restaurant,” he said.

All of those fanciful flights of freedom for live poultry market fugitives pay off in the “long run”:

Actually, being loose on the mean streets of New York is not really the fun part. That starts once you are scooped up by the police, delivered to animal rescue experts and sent north to the farm.

In this case, “the farm” is not a euphemism parents might use when the family pet has to take that last fatal trip to the vet. For farm animals found running loose in New York City, it often means taking up residence at Farm Sanctuary, 175 acres of vegan nirvana nestled here among the vineyards and vegetable stands in the Finger Lakes region.

The newest New Yorker to arrive is Lucky Lady, a lamb who was found tearing through the Bronx on June 13. Seeing her agricultural tags, the people who saved Lucky Lady concluded that she had escaped from a live animal market where the culinary and cultural value of certain kinds of meat comes from the timeliness and manner of slaughter.

Lucky Lady, indeed.

At Farm Sanctuary, she is attended by a staff of 16 led by Susie Coston, the shelter director. The sanctuary began in 1989, and Ms. Coston has been there almost as long.

The people who run the sanctuary call Ms. Coston the Jane Goodall for farm animals. The analogy becomes clear when, during an interview, she nestles next to a drooling pig twice her size and rubs its belly, ignoring the animal’s tusks.

Lucky Lady is in isolation for a couple of weeks, trying to shake a case of contagious ecthyma, or sore mouth, a condition Ms. Coston described as lamb herpes. But even in isolation, she does not have it so bad. Her hay-lined accommodations are about twice the size of the average Manhattan office worker’s cubicle.

. . . the Americans with Disabilities Act extends to beaches:

[T]o make it easier for . . . people with disabilities to get close to the water, the city’s Parks Department said yesterday that it was installing heavy-duty mats at four city beaches to give wheelchairs and walkers a smooth pathway over the sand.

Called Mobi-Mats, the blue mats — bought for a total of $130,000 from Deschamps Mat Systems, a French company — are made of polyester and are anchored into the sand by 19-inch heavy-duty staples. The mats are at Beach 116th Street in the Rockaways in Queens, on Orchard Beach in the Bronx, on Midland Beach in Staten Island and on Brighton Beach until Labor Day, a Parks Department spokeswoman said. Each mat runs in a straight line from a boardwalk or pavement toward the water, where it then branches out into a T, and varies in length from 200 to 400 feet, said Katia Taillard, a representative of Deschamps.

The move to install the mats comes after a state audit two years ago, spurred by complaints, that found that the Parks Department was failing to meet many of the requirements of the Americans with Disabilities Act, the federal law that mandates cities to provide equal access to most facilities. Adrian Benepe, the parks commissioner, pledged to make improvements, and the department has responded by hiring an accessibility coordinator, increasing the number of signs for disabled users and installing special equipment in various playgrounds.

. . .

People in wheelchairs were not the only ones using the mats yesterday. They were dotted with mothers pushing strollers, young children riding bicycles and older men with walkers as well as those who seemed to prefer walking on a mat rather than exposing their feet to the warm sand.

Councilman, I’m pretty sure that Food Dynasty sells, you know, vegetables:

Forget calories and carbohydrates. The Eric Gioia diet involves only counting the cents.

The Queens Democratic councilman stocked up on Ramen noodles and cheap white bread in an effort to live like thousands of his constituents — on only $28 a week.

The stunt is his effort to find out what life’s really like on the average food stamp allotment for a single recipient.

“I usually shop at Whole Foods or online at FreshDirect,” he said, scanning a list of special offers while doing his weekly shopping at Woodside’s Food Dynasty.

“I don’t even look at the cost. I look for the brand I like, and I buy it.

“Now I can’t let myself think about what tastes good or what’s good for me. I’m thinking only about what it costs.”

That ruled out meat — save for three cans of bargain Chicken of the Sea tuna for $2.

. . .

Instead, he picked up white bread — 50% cheaper than healthier whole wheat — five boxes of pasta for $3 and a $1 jar of tomato sauce.

“I can’t even eat healthily,” said Gioia, whose bill came to $24.44. “I’ve found out that the cheapest food is also the unhealthiest.

“On a long-term diet like this, I’d be facing major health problems like diabetes or heart disease.”

For only a week, the main side effect is likely to be just a loss of appetite.

“It looks like I’ll be having toast for breakfast, tuna or peanut butter for lunch and pasta for dinner,” he said.

Gioia can blame Oregon Governor Theodore R. Kulongoski when he gets constipated . . .

Metro-North recently streamlined and modernized its lost-and-found system to make it easier to recover your misplaced prosthetic limb, sailor:

Since joining Metro-North in 1994, [lost-and-found chief Mike] Nolan has applied the analytical skills he honed as a Wall Street analyst to a tracking system that once depended on pen and paper and that in many ways had not changed in decades. He has modernized it, designing a database that allows agents to gather information over the phone from customers and see if an item has been found.

To streamline the process, Metro-North a few weeks ago unveiled a page on its Web site where customers can type in information about what they have lost. Mr. Nolan said he expects the online system to eliminate one-third, or about 500, of the phone calls that his office receives about lost items each month.

. . .

By computerizing so much of the process, Mr. Nolan’s workers have more time to deal with people like 68-year-old Gary Lewis, who walked up to the window at Grand Central last week and said he had lost his wide-brimmed brown hat on the ride into the city from the Croton-Harmon station.

John Pepe, one of Mr. Nolan’s employees, retrieved a hefty box marked “March Hats” and dumped the contents on the counter. He and Mr. Lewis rummaged through the pile without success.

“I’m known for losing things,” Mr. Lewis said with a shrug.

The number of lost hats, scarves, gloves and jackets explodes as the weather gets warmer. The lost-and-found is also a window into the latest trends. Just weeks after Motorola started selling its popular Razr cellphones a few years ago, for example, they began showing up in the lost-and-found.

The number of one-of-a-kind items also says a lot about Metro-North’s 125,000 daily riders. Mr. Nolan’s team has found and returned a violin worth $100,000, a packet with four season tickets to the Knicks — and two sets of false teeth that were lost about the same time.

When three people showed up for the dentures, the railroad had difficulty confirming the proper owners. But one man was so insistent that he volunteered to try them on.

“He was that desperate, so I gave them to him,” Mr. Nolan said.

. . .

Other items have become office lore. In the day when Metro-North trains stopped near a veterans’ hospital in Montrose, more than a few sailors and soldiers returning from New York after a night of drinking left behind their prosthetic limbs.

And one woman, so the story goes, purposely abandoned her late husband’s ashes to repay him for the nights he claimed to have fallen asleep on the last train home when, in fact, he was with his mistress. The railroad learned this months later when a woman called to confess. She never did pick up the ashes, though, and Metro-North had to get rid of them and the urn they came in.

The folk singer Pete Seeger stopped by the window not too long ago with his granddaughter to retrieve a banjo he had left on a train to Poughkeepsie, Mr. Nolan said.

Of course, there are limits to lost-and-found searches, something Mr. Nolan’s staff had to tell a man who called in 2003 looking for a duffel bag he lost in 1957.

If you felt like being cruel by sending someone on an errand in Manhattan, we suggest doing it on what might be the single most crowded hour of the year:

Tim Tompkins, president of the Times Square Alliance business improvement district, has a convincing answer. He puts the most crowded time at 5 to 6 p.m. on the Wednesday after Christmas, which will be Dec. 26 this year.

“You have, on the one hand, all the tourists who are here,” he said in an e-mail message. “Then you have people who have left the matinee and people who are coming to evening shows and eating dinner before or after the shows.” Add the commuters who are still pouring out of offices, along with people returning gifts or using their gift cards.

Finally, Times Square attracts onlookers curious to see where the New Year’s Eve ball will be dropped — if not the heartiest of revelers intent on camping out there for five days.

A new folksy-sounding quip is born:

New York City taxi drivers hail from more than 130 countries, and America is one of the five most common countries of origin, according to records for 2006 obtained from the Taxi & Limousine Commission.

Just two drivers indicated on their applications that they were originally from Switzerland, making them as rare a breed on the city streets as the new hybrid Lexus taxis. More than 5,200 drivers were originally from Bangladesh, making the South Asian country the most common country of origin among cabbies, followed by Pakistan, India, and Haiti.

America was fifth, with about 2,300 drivers, and New York natives made up more than half of the American-born drivers, according to the Taxi & Limousine Commission documents.

. . .

Many New Yorkers interviewed about their perceptions of cab drivers harbor stereotypes that do not necessarily reflect the diversity of taxi drivers. Tasheem Jones, who lives in Midtown and estimates that she rides in a taxi at least three times a week, describes her typical cab driver as a “rude Arab guy.” Kheeny Khan, a Pakistani who lives in Queens, said he has the impression that most cabbies hail from the same Punjabi districts of Pakistan he still calls home.

The first Westminster Dog Show in the post-Vivi era takes place this week:

It has been nearly a year since a prize-winning whippet named Vivi broke out of her cage on the tarmac of John F. Kennedy airport and bounded away. The 131st Annual Westminster Kennel Club Benched Dog Show starts today, and she hasn’t been found despite the efforts of a dozen searchers.

Among dog owners in the show, the memory of Vivi is anything but faded.

“I was just talking about her. I tell you — it’s scary,” an owner from Michigan, Bobby Bidwell, said in the lobby of the Hotel Pennsylvania. After leaving her 96-pound Otterhound, Marilyn Monroe, in the car for a minute, she realized the risk she had taken.

“I was so scared that someone was going to steal her,” Ms. Bidwell said. “I just kept thinking of the whippet.”

Meanwhile, Vivi’s owner vows never to return to New York:

While the fate of Vivi the whippet remains unknown after she bolted from her travel cage last Feb. 15, Karin Goin believes retracing the dog’s steps at this year’s show would simply be too painful. “I’m not coming to New York . . . it hurts too much,” Goin, 40, said from her California home. “I don’t want to have to be at that airport again.”

. . .

While Goin has not gone back to the world of show dog competitions, she did adopt a puppy a few months ago to fill the void in her life that Vivi once occupied. “Her name is Lucy Brown and she’s a Jack Russell [terrier] mix,” she said. “And, when we travel, she fits in my carry-on bag and I never . . . let her out of my sight.

These people sure have control issues. Back to the Sun article:

There are 2,628 dogs in this week’s show at Madison Square Garden, many of which were brought to New York in airplanes from cities across the country. Owners say this is the riskiest part of the trip, because it is the one time when the dogs are completely out of their control.

An owner from Port Jervis, N.Y., Kimberle Schiff, said she has adopted a new set of security measures for flying.

“I now drill holes in the sides of all my crates and we use cable straps” that have to be cut off, she said.

See also: Vivi the Whippet.

And now you know what a dead body smells like:

The Fulton Street subway stop on the G line in Fort Greene is the site of a smelly mystery. An unknown stench fills the underpass connecting Brooklyn-bound trains to Queens-bound trains — but it’s unclear where the smell is coming from because the underpass is actually clean and well maintained.

Riders don’t know what to make of it.

“It made me want to throw up,” said Rashell Jenkins, “It’s disgusting, it smells like a bathroom.”

“It smells like urine in an open space,” added Joshua Fried of Williamsburg, “I think it’s refrigerated and that affects the smell.”

“It smells like that everyday,” added Charlie M. of Queens, who rides the line each day.

“It smells like a dead body, that’s exactly what a dead body smells like,” added another rider, who did not want to give her name.

Ladies, there’s still time to convince your man that the free gown is worth it:

You live together, you have kids together, but married you’re not. Author Maryann Reid wants to change your status.

Reid is looking for 10 couples with kids in the New York City area who would like to tie the knot next fall on the second Marry Your Baby Daddy Day. The first one, back in 2005, was a huge success, she said.

“All ten couples are still married. Many went on to buy houses, to change jobs, and one wife told me communication is much better,” said Reid, who lives in Brooklyn. “We want to keep replicating this.”

The author of the novel “Marry Your Baby Daddy,” Reid, 31, is single, but passionate about preserving marriage and strengthening two-parent homes.

. . .

Marry Your Baby Daddy Day promises free designer gowns, wedding cakes, limos and other perks to the couples selected for the Sept. 27 event.

Hundreds applied to be the 10 selected in 2005, Reid said. Some went on to wed even though they weren’t chosen for the event.

Interviews are conducted to select the participants.

“These aren’t surprise weddings,” Reid said. “I have some women who call and say, ‘I don’t want to tell my boyfriend because I don’t know if I’m going to be selected.’ I say, ‘You’d better tell him tonight because we need to meet you and him.”

Apparently stealing real estate is harder than we thought:

A Brooklyn man was arrested yesterday on charges that he fraudulently tried to claim ownership of the SoHo Grand Hotel, one of the premier inns in Lower Manhattan and the scene of oh-so-many gossip items about celebrities in illicit entanglements.

The man, Kouadio Kouassi, 46, filed a deed with the city showing himself as the hotel’s owner, but it was not processed because it lacked signatures, officials said.

When Mr. Kouassi returned to see if he had been declared the rightful owner, a Department of Finance employee believed something suspicious was afoot and notified the city Department of Investigation.

But, apparently undaunted and bent on claiming the prized property, Mr. Kouassi returned several more times to get his deed processed, officials said.

City investigators contacted the hotel’s true owners, the Hartz Group, which said it had never heard of Mr. Kouassi and had no intention of giving him the hotel, valued at $76 million, according to city records.

“We think that since we bought the land, built the hotel and have run it for 12 years that we actually own the hotel,” said Ron Simoncini, a spokesman for Hartz.

. . .

Mr. Kouassi was charged with attempted grand larceny and offering a false instrument for filing. The authorities said he was in custody last night and had not yet hired a lawyer. If convicted, he will face up to 15 years in jail.

Then again, if you’re reading newspaper articles on December 29 to figure out how much to tip your doorman, it’s probably hopeless:

End-of-season tipping can be fraught with anxiety at large Manhattan buildings. This year, there was out-and-out conflict at one Upper West Side building, where resident manager Efrain Lopez confirmed last week that staff members had been suspended after changing locks on the lockboxes where they receive holiday gratuities.

Management at the Columbia Condominium, at 275 W. 96th St., last year set up individual boxes for staff to receive gratuities, with each employee receiving a key. In prior years, envelopes from residents to employees were dropped into a common box that lay behind the front desk, under video supervision.

This year, three employees, concerned that the same keys were being used as last year, decided to have the locks changed on their boxes. They were dissatisfied with security precautions to protect their tips from theft or loss.

On December 11, the management company disciplined them, suspending two and giving one a warning. All three are now back at work, the director of communications for SEIU Local 32BJ, which represents building service employees, Matt Nerzig, said. The union is looking into the matter and has filed a grievance, he said.

. . .

A doorman at a building with about 100 apartments in the West 90s told The New York Sun most tips he receives are in the $50 to $150 range. He said often the most demanding residents tip least. “That’s a true statement,” he added, “You can ask any doorman.”

(Last year I think we got the tipping thing straightened out a little earlier . . . thanks for nothing!)

If you think the Christmas tree business is all about the sweet smell of pine and hot French-Canadians, think again:

There are a series of secretive cash drops, about three cell phone numbers and a land line that connect the street force to cash managers and suppliers, specific phone calls that need to be made after the border crossing, and a boss known by some as the “Myth.” Welcome to the Christmas tree business in New York City.

Kevin Hammer, the man behind the majority of sidewalk tree stands in the city, runs a cash-only conifer enterprise that some former and current employees say grosses more than a million dollars during the month-long holiday season.

Although Mr. Hammer’s mostly French-Canadian workforce has been specifically instructed not to speak publicly about his business practices, several of Mr. Hammer’s experienced tree-sellers, asking to remain anonymous in fear of not getting paid, spoke with The New York Sun to explain how the city’s largest Christmas tree business operates.

“Everything is very organized and incredibly secretive,” one tree seller who works for Mr. Hammer said.

. . .

Every day, a “collector” arrives at the stand in a SUV with Florida license plates. He pulls up at an unannounced time after the tree-seller has called a number with a 212 area code saying how much cash was collected for the day.

When the collector arrives, the tree seller approaches the car with an envelope full of cash from the day’s sales up his or her jacket sleeve, according to the source. The “drop” includes a daily cash report worksheet printed in both English and French and is passed to the “collector” through the passenger side window. Conversation is usually brief.

. . .

One of Mr. Hammer’s former employees who currently works for another tree business in the city said the average tree-stand grosses about $30,000 a season, of which Mr. Hammer promises employees 50% of the profit after expenses.

“There is no way of knowing the expenses,” the source said. “You don’t know the cost of each tree.”

Tree-sellers receive cash payments from Mr. Hammer’s staff on the night of December 24, after excess trees have been collected and stands have been dismantled. The amount varies each year, and tree-sellers on the same team sometimes get paid different wages.

. . .

Tree prices at Mr. Hammers stands vary dramatically, and are dependent on the location of the stand. Buyers in affluent neighborhoods generally pay more for trees.

“We’re told to get the highest price possible, but to always sell the trees even if we get bargained down,” the source currently working for Mr. Hammer said.

Mr. Hammer did not return phone messages from the Sun.