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.

When dealing with an important national symbolic gesture like placing the first beam at the Freedom Tower site, remember that stuff like proper flag etiquette is important:

An American flag plastered on the first steel column for the Freedom Tower was removed yesterday after the builders realized the stars and stripes were on the wrong side of the flag.

The Port Authority removed the decal on the 31-foot column after media outlets and readers questioned the display of the flag, with the 50 stars on the right side instead of the left.

Federal flag code requires that, whether displayed horizontally or vertically, the blue field displaying 50 stars is always on the left side to the viewer. When construction workers put the decal onto the column as it lay on its side at Ground Zero, the stars were on the left and in the correct spot, said PA spokesman Steve Coleman.

Once a giant crane raised the column and the flag was displayed vertically, “it was inadvertently put in the wrong position,” Coleman said.

(Let the good folks who snapped up the “ushistory.org” domain explain the rest of it.)

The privilege of selling hot dogs in Central Park for one year exceeds the median price of a single-family home in many parts of the country*:

Vendors have agreed to pay up to $326,000 a year to peddle hot dogs in and around Central Park in the latest contracts awarded by the Parks Department, The Post has learned.

And that’s for a single cart!

Topping the list was north side of the steps to the Metropolitan Museum of Art on Fifth Avenue, one of the most expensive commercial parcels on earth on a square-foot basis.

New York One LLC bid $326,000 for the right to continue selling $2 hot dogs, $1.25 sodas and 50-cent bags of chips from a 10-foot-by-5-foot cart next year. It has been paying $277,000.

In the third year of the deal, the price goes up to $330,000.

But the company balked at a 15 percent price hike — to an astonishing $375,000 — demanded by Parks for a companion cart on the south side of the heavily traveled steps. “We’re paying the city too much,” protested co-owner Thomas Makkos.

. . .

Makkos was tight-lipped about sales, except to say that he was providing a “great service” and bringing in “great revenue” to the city.

In fact, the city hauled in $3.48 million last year from Central Park cart concessions, much of it from Makkos’ company.

*See, for example.

A Department of Sanitation representative tries to explain the five cigarette butt rule to a tough crowd:

When it comes to giving tickets, the city’s Department of Sanitation (DOS) does not have quotas.

That was the word from the agency’s citywide community affairs officer, Ignazio Terranova, who was in the hot seat as he responded to claims that the agency is more than eager to give out summonses, during the December meeting of the Friends United Block Association (FUBA).

Speaking to the group gathered at Temple Shaare Emeth, 6012 Farragut Road, Terranova acknowledged that DOS enforcement officers could make mistakes, but insisted that the agency is not writing tickets simply to make up a certain number and fill the city’s coffers.

“We do not have a quota, whether people choose to believe it or not,” Terranova asserted. Nonetheless, he added, “But we did not hire 56 new enforcement agents to go out and sit in a car and drink coffee all day. Their job is to find summonses, whether five or 50 in a day.”

There are perameters that must be exceeded, said Terranova, for a ticket to be written. “You’re not going to get a summons for one item,” Terranova contended. “If there’s a cap on one water bottle, you’re not going to get a summons. What constitutes a summons is five things wrong with the garbage or five things on the floor. On the sidewalk, it could be one plastic cup and four cigarette butts. That constitutes five items.”

Keeping your sidewalk and 18 inches into the gutter clean, Terranova added, is a matter of making sure it is free of debris two hours a day — from 8 a.m. to 9 a.m. and from noon to 1 p.m. That is actually an improvement, he told his listeners; before a relatively recent law was passed, residents could be ticketed at any hour of the day or night, seven days a week.

*At least he didn’t call it “productivity goals”!

The ACLU says that there are 90 security cameras on a seven-block stretch of 125th Street alone:

The number of surveillance cameras in downtown Manhattan and Harlem has multiplied considerably, making it difficult to walk the streets without being watched.

The location of the 4,468 cameras were detailed yesterday in a new report by the New York Civil Liberties Union.

Seven years ago, a similar survey found just 769 cameras — one sixth today’s total.

No word on whether the guys on the subway qualify as such a retailer:

Starting tomorrow, consumers must take their used rechargeable batteries — such as those that power laptop computers, cellphones and digital cameras — to retailers who sell them.

The batteries will go back to manufacturers for recycling.

The goal is to keep toxic metals like cadmium, lead and mercury out of landfills.

“Every one of these rechargeable batteries is a latent poison pill when thrown into a landfill,” said City Council member Michael McMahon (D-S.I.), chairman of the Sanitation Committee.

Conventional, nonrechargeable batteries are not affected by the law because “they are devoid of any of the toxic heavy metals that are still found in rechargeable batteries,” McMahon said.

The law requires people to take their used rechargeable batteries to any retailer who sells that type of battery. Individuals can be fined $50 for the first violation — and $200 for three or more.

The city Sanitation Department “will not go through garbage or recycling containers” to find violators. “You have to be caught in the act,” said department spokeswoman Kathy Dawkins.

According to detailed analysis of the Hudson River, residents in the Hudson River watershed consume more cocaine than anywhere else in the world:

Researchers for the Nuremberg’s Institute for Biomedical and Pharmaceutical Research scoured the Hudson River for benzoylecgonine — a substance produced by the human body while processing cocaine — and found byproducts equivalent to a total of 16.4 tons of cocaine per year.

An estimated 3.4 million people ages 15 to 65 live in the Hudson’s watershed. Nearly three percent of Americans in this age group use cocaine at least once a year, according to the United Nations “World Drug Report.” That equates to about 95,000 people who are consuming the 16.4 tons of pure coke annually.

The researchers also discovered more pure coke in our river than anywhere else — including Washington’s Potomac River and San Francisco Bay.

Apparently there are some limits to diplomatic immunity:

An international custody battle is brewing over the children of a Kenyan diplomat who was arrested for allegedly beating his 9-year-old son at their Queens home.

Fred Matwanga’s diplomatic immunity has saved him from any criminal charges in the abuse case so far — but it didn’t stop officials from the city’s child-welfare agency from taking custody of his children over the weekend.

Sources yesterday said agents from the city’s Administration for Children’s Services put the injured boy and his little sister in a protective home while officials sort out abuse issues involving their father.

And ACS officials are set to meet with the New York City Office of the United Nations this morning to plot their next move — asking Kenya to waive immunity for Matwanga, the second secretary of its mission to the world body, a well-placed source said last night.

If the African country agrees, local authorities would then proceed with prosecuting Matwanga.

But if Kenya refuses to waive immunity for Matwanga, city officials will ask the U.S. State Department to boot him from the country, the source said.

. . .

Matwanga was busted Saturday night after allegedly beating his son on the head with a wooden stick in their home in South Ozone Park. Cops said the diplomat, 38, was also chasing the boy through the house with a knife.

The frightened child fled his home with a bloodied head shortly after 6 p.m. and tried to take refuge with a neighbor.

“My father’s trying to kill us,” the boy said, according to the neighbor, Cindy Raghu, 23.

Despite his desperate pleas, Raghu’s mother was so frightened that she shut the door, leaving the boy to fend for himself, Cindy Raghu said. The child then ran and hid behind some recycling bins in an alley next to the Raghus’ house.

October is high season for tourists and . . . drag queens:

At a busy wigmaking studio in Hell’s Kitchen on Tuesday, half a dozen craftspeople could be found hunched over synthetic mesh scalps, tying individual human hairs into them as fast as they could. Hair was everywhere: draped across tabletops in horsetail lengths, clinging to the fabric of chairs, scattered across the floor in unruly clumps.

The artisans had seen and even built wigs of all descriptions, from flowing brown manes for classical operas to buoyant white up-dos for fantastical Broadway musicals. But even the veterans looked up from their needles when Maurice Neuhaus, a 28-year-old German-born wigmaker, actor and sometime drag queen, pulled out a neon-blue extravaganza that looked at first glance like an otherworldly wild animal being released from its cage.

. . .

During Halloween season, the demand for professional drag performers rises, so Mr. Neuhaus has been busy doing performances booked by a talent agency called Screaming Queens Entertainment. Yesterday, Mr. Neuhaus expected to wear a black, Asian-style wig with bangs while entertaining guests at a bar mitzvah reception in Midtown. On Friday, he planned to wear his over-the-top blue wig for a Halloween gig at a game arcade in Englewood, N.J.

For all its high camp and artifice, his wig possesses an exceptional degree of realism — when he wears it, it looks as if “real” blue hair is growing from his head.

Such artistry is much admired by those in the know.

“Only certain very meticulous and experienced drag performers have custom-made wigs,” said Alex Heimberg, chief executive officer of Screaming Queens, who performs as Miss Understood, a character for whom Mr. Neuhaus built oversize wigs in both bright pink and bright green. “You have to reach the point where you know you’re serious about what you’re doing.”

Who has a drag queen at a bar mitzvah?

The Sun explains the pecking order for subway musicians:

While performing in subway stations and on train platforms is legal even without an MTA-issued pass, freelancers are often forced to surrender lucrative, high-traffic spots to musicians licensed by the [Music Under New York] program, part of the MTA Arts For Transit initiative.

Competition for the good spots can get heated.

“We used to have a problem with acrobats and dancers,” Mr. [Lester] Schultz said. “There’d be 10 of them, one of us, and they could do somersaults, and they didn’t care if we had a pass. They just wouldn’t leave.”

Spats between musicians also arise when freelancers do not speak English and fail to understand why they are being forced to move along, according to other MUNY musicians.

Among subway musicians, there exists a social hierarchy underground that is invisible to daily commuters and tourists. It could be compared with a high school cafeteria, where the cool clique can scare away outsiders from a designated table with a practiced eye roll (in this case, the flash of a MUNY pass).

Subway musician Natalia Paruz, who plays the musical saw, performed as a freelancer for years until she became fed up with countless tickets from the transit police and too much time and money lost while searching for a free spot. “Sometimes I’d get to my spot and someone would already be there. I’d lose an hour just trying to find another place to play,” Ms. Paruz said. Eight years ago, she joined MUNY.

Now, Ms. Paruz performs on the high-traffic mezzanine at the Times Square station. Her lips parted slightly, it is difficult to tell whether it is she or her saw producing the eerie sound (it is, in fact, the saw that is singing).

Did you know that the Wall Street Journal actually employs artists to do the unique stipple portraits of subjects who appear in the paper? Metro New York interviews WSJ stipple specialist Noli Novak:

The stipple that we use at the Journal is not a regular pointillism. The dots are larger than regular pointillism and it looks kind of grainy. It’s meant to resemble fashion engravings. It’s not something you can learn in school. It was something that we had to learn at the Journal because the Journal really wants the style to stay the same. They don’t want big differences between different artists’ styles. It takes months [to learn] because it’s a very unique style.

. . .

I got a letter from a guy once whom I noticed in the picture was cross-eyed. In the drawing sometimes, if you do a cross-eyed person, it looks like you made a mistake. This guy was really cross-eyed. He said, “All the operations I’ve had on my eyes, nothing could get rid of it but you did it perfectly!” I didn’t completely move his eye but I had to do something just to make it not look like a mistake and he was very grateful for that.

The Queens Gazette decodes asphalt graffiti:

Most native New Yorkers know the scrawls mean their streets or sidewalks are about to be torn up by some municipal agency or by the cable company, but few know which agency the colors represent.

Before the first shovel goes into the ground in any repair or development project, city homeowners, architects and developers are required to perform a survey to determine the location of “underground facilities.”

The surveys are performed by workers dubbed “locaters”, who measure and mark the distance of water, gas, electric and cable lines that lie precariously close to projects requiring excavation, a representative of the City Department of Design and Construction said.

A red mark denotes an electric project dealing with power lines, cables, conduit and lighting cables, Tony DeRoma, a manager at NY 1 Underground, a private firm hired by the city to provide project markings using New York’s Uniform Color Code, said. Yellow refers to gas, natural gas, oil and steam utilities. Orange markings refer to alarm and cable systems. Blue markings mean the job is related to water mains and other potable water systems. Pink paint is used to mark for temporary surveys-a “preliminary mark”, DeRoma said.

Markings in green paint mean a street is in line for new sewers or a new drainage system, and white paint indicates an “imminent excavation” near the marking.

Interesting, but what’s new here? In short, purple:

The city recently added a new color to the spectrum of its Uniform Color Code, DeRoma said. Purple markings refer to reclaimed water systems, irrigation and slurry lines, which could mean that work is about to begin on lines connected to a nearby car wash.

The color purple indicates water rated a degree below drinkable, but usable by a private business through a “holding tank.” The water, though “non-drinkable,” can be used in irrigation systems or in a filtered system that takes out suds, making it perfect for use by a car wash, DeRoma said. Such systems must be drained and maintained on a scheduled basis-a process that requires excavation.

Telling a cop to go fuck him or herself is not necessarily protected free speech:

Screaming an anatomically impossible obscene suggestion at a police officer is against the law, a Manhattan judge has decided.

The quirky ruling, made public yesterday, concerns the case of Brooklynite Ramon Morena, who is charged with creating a public disturbance by shouting “Go f - - - yourself” at a cop in the Theater District in March.

Morena’s lawyer had tried to convince the judge that civilians enjoy a First Amendment right to criticize and verbally challenge police officers. The charges, he argued, should therefore be thrown out of court.

But Manhattan Criminal Court Judge Richard Weinberg didn’t buy it. If you’re disorderly, you’re disorderly, the judge wrote — and there is no “police officer exemption” to the rule.

Morena now faces up to 15 days jail if found guilty of disorderly conduct.

. . .

. . . [A]ny alleged screaming would be merely “a private annoyance” limited to the cop, the defense lawyer argued — and as such should have rolled off the officer’s back.

The judge countered, “To adopt defendant’s arguments would be to effectively carve out a police-officer exception from the disorderly conduct statute and to condone the heaping of verbal abuse upon a police officer regardless of the circumstances. This the court will not do.”

Don’t tell the kids — alcohol really does turn you into Superman:

A 60-year-old man, apparently drunken, jumped five stories off the roof of his Hell’s Kitchen apartment at about 10:30 last night and was barely injured, cops said.

The first thing Alexander Mikhailov asked cops for when he got up: a drink.

“I don’t know how he survived it,” said a police source at the scene of the fall from the top of 527 W. 47th St.

It was broken by some “potted plants” on an elevated level of a building behind Mikhailov’s, the source said. He was taken to St. Vincent’s hospital in stable condition, officials said.

Hubba hubba:

It has hot pink, angry-looking nipples and eyes. Its fang-like teeth match menacing claws. It’s a 30-foot-tall inflatable rat and it’s been seen recently at a Starbucks, the New York Stock Exchange and elsewhere.

A union protest fixture in the city, the rat has become a symbol of labor tension. Two even made an appearance on The Sopranos.

“The labor movement needs to get creative and colorful, and the rat is a creative, colorful way to highlight the behavior of an employer,” said Daniel Gross, an IWW Starbucks Union organizer. “The rat conveys a message.”

“We’ve done cockroaches, skunks, bulldogs, even a corporate fat cat wearing a striped suit, smoking a cigar and choking a union worker,” said Mike O’Connor, owner of Big Sky Balloons & Searchlights, the Plainfield, Ill. company that designed and sells the rat.

O’Connor designed the rabid pest back in 1990, when a Chicago union man called asking for something his members could picket with, suggesting a “dirty rat kind of thing.”

The first rat O’Connor designed was “basically a cutesy rat, but he wanted something mean, with fangs. So I went back to the drawing board and made the rat how he looks today.”

Unions all over the country order the rats — and recently an order came in from Nova Scotia — but New York, New Jersey and other northeastern states are O’Connor’s biggest clients. Big Sky sells about 100 of the inflatable rodents every year.

. . .

Some employers respond in kind. Last October, musicians in Radio City Music Hall’s Christmas Extravaganza went on strike. Their employer placed an inflatable cougar over the marquee, baring its teeth at the protesters and any rats they might have brought with them.

Rat:

See also: Sir, Step Away From The Rat*, which seemed to indicate that the rat was on its way out.

*I think this upheld the judge’s decision in that case — so what gives? Labor specialists, let us know where the rat stands!

New York Magazine explains once and for all what happens when manhole covers explode:

The copper electrical wiring running beneath the streets is hung on the manhole walls and sheathed in insulation, which can crack and warp owing to age (many are 60 years old), chemical corrosion (a major culprit is road salt, which is carried down with rain), or hungry rats.

Cables carry an average of 13,000 volts. With demand up, the cables have to carry more power and begin to heat up. This heat, coupled with the electricity leaking through the cracks in the wiring, starts to burn the insulation.

Carbon monoxide, an extremely flammable gas, is released from the smoldering insulation and collects in the empty chamber; the cover is pushed up like a lid on a pot of boiling water.

An electrical spark can ignite the gas. This is surprisingly common: In one 24-hour period in July, the Fire Department reported 25 manhole explosions in Astoria. Not all result in the covers being shot into the air: That depends on how much gas and electricity is involved. But some covers have been flung over 50 feet.

Two Queens bank robbers find out the hard way that when it comes to exploding dye packs you should really send out your laundry:

Two men tried to launder money –literally — at the Metro Motel, 73-00 Queens Blvd., Woodside, last Friday, July 14, but were interrupted by police and arrested. The men, 51-year-old Anthony Digiosaffate and Paul Villaneuva, age unknown, had allegedly robbed a Queens County Savings Bank in Howard Beach of about $65,000 earlier in the week. A dye pack in the money exploded, covering the money and the two alleged robbers with red dye. The two checked into the Metro Motel and tried to clean the money in a washing machine in the motel’s laundry room, but were arrested. They are being held without bail.

The Fire Department explains how to go about blowing up your own home:

Dr. Bartha’s real estate agent, Mark Baum, said that Dr. Bartha was something of a handyman and had worked on the house himself. “He had engineering skills,” he said. “He had carpenter skills.”

One official, who spoke on the condition of anonymity because the investigation is continuing, said of the gas line, “I don’t know what’s in this guy’s mind, but it was definitely tampered with.”

Investigators were also seeking to determine whether the furnace and hot water heater had also been tampered with, the official said.

The city’s chief fire marshal, Louis F. Garcia, said the hose had been attached to a valve near the gas meter. “This certainly is against any kind of plumbing code,” he said. “It shouldn’t be there.”

. . .

Chief Garcia said that natural gas reaches the explosive range when it replaces 5 percent to 15 percent of the air in an enclosed space. An explosion can be sparked by anything from a telephone to static electricity.

The portion of the inch-and-a-half hose that was in the basement, which investigators were looking for in the rubble yesterday, was attached to the main gas line before it reached the meter, fire officials said. The gas line leading out of the meter was much smaller in diameter, one utility official said, suggesting that would have speeded the volume of gas escaping into the house.

Chief Garcia said the blast began in the basement, in the front of the house. He said that Dr. Bartha was found on the top of the stairway, on the first floor, directly above where the hose was attached to the gas line. He and other officials said the hose stretched through the basement. By last night Fire Department investigators had determined that it had not reached the furnace at the back wall of the house, though they did not know where it ended, one official said.

Police Department officials were careful not to describe Dr. Bartha as a suspect, and he has not been arrested or charged with any crime. But prosecutors in the office of the Manhattan district attorney, Robert M. Morgenthau, are examining the possibility of bringing felony arson charges against him, officials there said.

Another great term for the city lexicon:

On the West Coast, some firefighters call it a “Habitrail house.” In the Midwest, it is often a “packer house.” In parts of Nevada, it is a “multiple waiting to happen,” meaning a multiple-alarm fire.

But in New York City, and along much of the East Coast, a dwelling jammed rafter-high with junk is referred to by rescue personnel, with dismay and no small degree of respect, as a “Collyers’ Mansion.” As in, primary searches delayed because of Collyers’ Mansion conditions.

The phrase, as many New York history buffs know, refers to the legendary booby-trapped brownstone in Harlem in which the brothers Homer and Langley Collyer were found dead in 1947 amid more than 100 tons of stockpiled possessions, including stacks of phone books, newspapers, tin cans, clocks and a fake two-headed baby in formaldehyde.

The Collyer Mansion is not just a slice of urban lore and a monument to what psychologists now recognize as obsessive-compulsive disorder. It is, in New York, an official term of art, taught in the Fire Academy to cadets learning the potential dangers that can await in burning buildings.

So, on Monday, after 14 firefighters were injured putting out a three-alarm apartment fire in Sunnyside, Queens, Deputy Chief John Acerno described the scene this way: “They tried to open the door, and they couldn’t get it open because of all the debris that was behind the door. In Fire Department jargon, we call that a Collyers’ Mansion. There was debris from the floor to the ceiling throughout the entire apartment.”

This answers that question — not dead but not good either:

In a shocking episode, a drunken 21-year-old Penn State student fell onto the third rail in Union Square Station early yesterday — but miraculously lived to tell the tale.

Steven Waddell, of Fairfield, N.J., told The Post from his bed at St. Vincent’s Hospital yesterday evening that he doesn’t remember much, but knows he’s fortunate to be alive.

“I feel like I should be dead now,” he said. “I really didn’t feel like dying that day, I guess.”

Despite lying on the rail for more than two minutes, Waddell only suffered burns to his right elbow and thumb.

“It paralyzed me right away. I tried to pull away from it, but your body doesn’t let you,” he recalled. “I thought I went to hell. It felt like my body was being literally torn apart.”

Before the incident, Waddell had been out for a night of high-voltage drinking with some friends from high school at a bar on Lafayette Street.

Around 2:30 a.m., he and a pal called it quits and walked to the N and R platform to catch the train to his father’s Manhattan apartment.

Woozy with drink, the college senior leaned over the platform’s edge to see if a train was coming and lost his footing, tumbling into the tracks and onto the third rail — which was coursing with 600 volts of electricity.

As his buddy ran to get help, Waddell passed out and lay on the track for more than two minutes before authorities were able to pry him free.

This answers once and for all whether it’s possible to blast your way into an ATM:

A man set off a small explosive device last night in a failed attempt to rob an automated teller machine in the West Village, police said.

No one was hurt in the 11:40 p.m. blast outside New York City Bagels on Sixth Avenue between 16th and 17th Streets.

Cops said the small blast didn’t even dent the cash machine, which is attached to a wall outside the store, facing the street.

New York Magazine’s locally applicable etiquette guidelines (since calling it “The Urban Etiquette Handbook” is lame).

Saturday Night Live castmember Amy Poehler’s contributions:

1. Be nice to everyone, especially people wearing hospital bracelets.

2. Don’t ask white girls if they “left their ass at home.”

3. If you have to bring your baby to a movie, make sure he laughs at appropriate times.

4. Don’t eat Cheetos and then sit down at a fancy hotel piano.

5. If you are in Central Park and think you are getting mugged, first check to see if maybe you’re just part of a student film.

6. If you see Oprah at a fancy function, don’t grab her wrist and ask for money. Quietly sneak up behind her and whisper, “You give me that money, Oprah. You hear me?”

7. When walking on a New York street, try not to spit, litter, bleed, or take a crap.

8. If you need to do any of these things, try to do it between two parked cars.

Most things you can Google. For everything else, there’s the New York Public Library Telephone Reference Service:

. . . [T]he persistence of this service raises its own questions. Like why, in the age of search engines, would anyone bedevil a human being with such questions? And what human being would choose to be so bedeviled?

Harriet Shalat, 62, of Forest Hills, Queens, for one. She is the chief of the service, known as telref. “We are detectives,” she said. “We know more than people think we know. We’re not little old ladies stamping books and telling you to be quiet.”

Paul Duguid, an adjunct professor at the School of Information at the University of California at Berkeley, said there would always be a place for such human search engines.

There are “dark areas” on the Internet, Mr. Duguid said, vast databases that are not scanned by search engines like Google. Mr. Duguid (pronounced do-good) is a co-author of “The Social Life of Information” (Harvard Business School Press, 2002), about data that computers cannot process.

“If you have a good search question, Google is great for answering it,” Mr. Duguid said. “If you don’t have a good question, you will get 17 million responses and you will wish you hadn’t asked.”

Some caller questions are verboten. The telref staff won’t answer crossword or contest questions, do children’s homework, or answer philosophical speculations or guilty-spouse questions (what is my wife’s birthday?).

. . .

When a challenging question comes in, the staff quivers, like human parallel processors, checking reference books and pooling information. They can also consult with as many as 50 other researchers in the library system.

Under library rules, each inquiry must be answered in under five minutes, meaning the caller gets an answer or somewhere to go for an answer — like a specialty library, trade group or Web site. Researchers cannot call back questioners.

The deadline is meant, in part, to focus the staffer’s attention. “Otherwise,” Ms. Shalat said, “once we get going, we would never stop.”

Almost all telephone calls are in English, although researchers can get by in Chinese, Spanish, German and some Yiddish. Specialty libraries, like the Slavic and Baltic division, can lend a hand with, say, Albanian.

The haughty and the impatient tend to be men, Ms. Shalat said. Physicians are the worst. “It’s not a man thing, it’s a conceit thing,” Ms. Shalat said. “This is Doctor So-and-So calling and I need blah blah blah. Run and get it, honey.”

A person might ask, “Tell me about Africa,” Ms. Shalat said. A few quick questions will elicit her real interest in animals, then in elephants, and finally the reproductive cycles of elephants. “Now that’s a question we can answer,” Ms. Shalat said.

Attention potential suicides — the Verrazano is not the bridge for you:

A male jumped from the Verrazano-Narrows Bridge early this morning — and survived. He jumped just before 6 a.m. from the upper level of the Brooklyn-bound side of the span. The man was brought to Lutheran Medical Center in Brooklyn in critical condition, a police spokesman said.

This comes after a jump back in November failed to kill a 19-year-old Brooklyn man.

Later — the Advance reports that the man actually only fell off a seawall:

A man reported to have jumped from the Verrazano-Narrows Bridge yesterday morning actually fell into the water from a seawall in Brooklyn, police have determined.

Police Commissioner Ray Kelly said yesterday that the man who was pulled alive from the harbor shortly before 6 a.m. was a bicyclist in Bay Ridge who fell after climbing onto rocks at the water’s edge.

What’s more — this bridge definitely should not be fucked with:

On Wednesday, police recovered the body of a New Dorp man from New York Harbor. He had been missing since the car he was driving was found abandoned on the bridge on May 9.

Verrazano skeptics stand corrected!