A brave Brooklyn adman looked more like Superman when he jumped in front of an oncoming subway train to rescue an 18-year-old fashion student who fainted and fell unconscious onto the tracks.

Also, people please, please, please eat breakfast before you get on the subway.

A Queens World War II veteran said he and his wife became the latest victims of Toyota accelerator woes when his 2009 Camry’s gas pedal jammed — sending the car careening into a synagogue.

His State of the Borough address at the Park Slope Armory Wednesday night featured singing, dancing, lights and sirens — and even Markowitz’s head photoshopped onto newly-elected Sen. Scott Brown’s naked body from a 1982 Cosmo photo spread projected onto a big screen.

A judiciously placed file folder inscribed with “Fuhgeddaboutit” left a little something to the imagination.

“I don’t need Howard Wolfson, I’ve got my strategy all figured out,” said Markowitz, suggesting the beefcake photos could help him get elected mayor in 2013.

“I have four years to get in shape,” he told the crowd of about 1,600.

. . .

There was as much singing, dancing, and noshing as there was speechifying — though there was plenty of that — Markowitz’s speech clocked in at just under an hour and 15 minutes, more than triple Queens Borough President Helen Marshall’s 20-minute address.

The Venuto Brothers belted out Italian opera; the Brooklyn Tabernacle Choir sang hymns; the Brooklyn Ballet put on a modernist dance, and six-year-old Michael Jackson impersonator Ikim Whitley of East Flatbush in a top hat and pleather jacket came up on stage mid-speech to do the moonwalk.

Markowitz himself briefly got into the act, swaying hand in hand with feathered bikini and headdress-clad performers from the award-winning Sesame Flyers dance troupe, famous for their performances at the West Indian Labor Day Parade. “I’m not staring, Jamie, I’m not staring,” he promised his wife.

The borough president even whipped out a police light and jokingly pledged never again to break out the lights and sirens that got him in hot water when he was caught using them to speed in his official car to a press conference last month.

A $750,000 personal campaign contribution that Mayor Bloomberg channeled through the state Independence Party during last year’s mayoral election landed in the hands of a top aide, The Post has learned.

The aide, John Haggerty Jr., served as a Bloomberg “volunteer involved in some of the activities” of Special Election Operations LLC, a hastily formed company that hired 200 to 300 workers to do poll watching on Election Day, according to Ken Gross, counsel to the campaign.

. . .

One veteran GOP consultant said he believed Special Election Operations was designed to dispense “street money” — cash that’s spread around on Election Day to volunteers and for such incidentals as lunch.

But Howard Wolfson, the mayor’s campaign spokesman, insisted the $750,000 — part of a $1.2 million personal contribution Bloomberg made to the state Independence Party right before the election — didn’t go for that purpose.

“The [Independence Party] made the same Election Day expenses that all party committees make every election for Election Day workers,” he said in an e-mail.

“Because the IP does not have the infrastructure to handle this kind of activity in-house, it used Special Election Operations to handle the payroll payments to all these individuals.”

Wolfson’s “explanation” even sounds like it’s street money. And $750,000? That’s not even close to what was suggested Obama would have to spend to get elected in Philadelphia. We’re taking a lot of pizza parties!

See also: Bloomberg For Mayor 2009.

Actually, the joke’s on us. Even as newspaper fortunes sank in recent years, Bloomberg diligently courted media barons like Zuckerman, Murdoch, and Sulzberger, who he understood could make his life difficult if they so chose. Minus their support, as Joyce Purnick’s new Bloomberg biography proves, he would have never risked his end run around term limits. But he knew he had little to fear. As Purnick’s book also tells us, even his weekend disappearing act to go to his mansion in Bermuda has gone unchallenged.

“He does his radio show Friday morning,” a former aide told her. “At 11:05, the latest, he’s in his car. At 11:30 he is at the airport. His plane is in the air at 11:40, he’s in Bermuda at 2:10. He’s on the golf course by 2:30. . . . Almost every weekend, spring and fall.”

There’s a photo op that’s been even more closely guarded than military caskets arriving at Dover Air Force Base: Mayor Mike, golf bags over his shoulder, striding across the tarmac toward Air Bloomberg.

But of course all that golfing had a purpose — like puff pieces about the mayor’s golf score. And then there are the I [heart] NY golf balls. And of course the mayor’s own vision of immigration reform . . .

See also: Bloomberg For Mayor 2009.

And a number of political analysts say that a predicted record-low turnout next Tuesday may jeopardize Mr. Bloomberg’s projected double-digit victory margin and even deliver him a third term with the lowest total vote received by a New York City mayor in nearly a century.

. . .

Mr. Bloomberg won in 2001 with 744,000 votes. He won a second term four years later with 753,000 of the 1.3 million cast. If as few as 20 percent of eligible voters turn out and Mr. Bloomberg wins even by a 10-percentage-point landslide, he would be re-elected with fewer than 500,000 votes — the lowest total since John F. Hylan’s in 1917.

That, by the way, was before women were allowed to vote and when the city’s population was smaller by nearly three million.

Which is all funny, in a ha-ha funny kind of way, as Clyde Haberman reports:

Buoyed by the polls and his own astonishing campaign spending, Mr. Bloomberg seems confident that four more years at City Hall are in the bag for him. Monday morning, he spoke about the New York that he envisioned in 2013, when his third term would end. This was in a speech to students attending New York University’s Robert F. Wagner School of Public Service.

He was pleased, he told them, to speak at a school named for “a distinguished three-term mayor.”

That produced thin laughter. Maybe the students had the Monday morning blahs. Or maybe they simply didn’t think it was funny.

“I thought I’d get a better laugh than that,” Mr. Bloomberg said. “It’s not easy to do three-term jokes, folks.”

There’s a reason for that.

See also: Bloomberg For Mayor 2009.

Following the Yankees’ clinching win over the Los Angeles Angels, the Fox cameras were trained on the podium, as various presentations were made and interviews conducted. And just to the right, Mayor Bloomberg held his position on the podium, so long that it almost seemed awkward.

See also: Bloomberg For Mayor 2009.

The Thompson campaign seems to think [the term limit extension issue is salient for voters], and they’re looking at the recent mayor’s race in Albuquerque, where the mayor, Martin Chavez, was defeated after he successfully sued to throw out the law barring him from seeking another term.

. . .

Three days after Chavez’s defeat, a reporter asked Bloomberg if he was afraid the same thing would happen to him. Bloomberg, standing in his campaign headquarters with the term-limited mayor of Miami, Manny Diaz, said he wasn’t, because “the politics there are different than the politics here.”

Some differences:

In Albuquerque, there were three candidates.

In Albuquerque, the third candidate in the race was a Democrat, like the incumbent. One siphoned votes from the other while the Republican candidate, Berry, consolidated his base. Also, both Berry and the other challenger, Romero, focused their attacks on Chavez.

In Albuquerque, the election was nonpartisan.

And most notably, in Albuquerque, all the candidates participated in a public financing program that capped their spending.

That last difference — spending — explains the absurdity of Bloomberg arguing that it “costs a lot of money to get a message out” — this despite the fact that he has had eight years to craft said message, and that he has the best name recognition of any other mayor in America.

See also: Bloomberg For Mayor 2009.

New York City’s campaign finance system is one of the best in the country. He does everyone a disservice by not complying with the system’s limits on spending.

Elsewhere on the opinion page, Bob Herbert calls the mayor’s race baiting a sign of vulnerability:

That the mayor is now willing to lock his principles in a safe deposit box and start riding the broomstick of ethnic politics suggests that he’s worried about the outcome of his race against Mr. Thompson . . .

*Everyone except El Diario, that is. And the Amsterdam News. Good for them. Also, do you wonder why the Times chose to run this endorsement on Saturday?

See also: Bloomberg For Mayor 2009.

Michael R. Bloomberg, the Wall Street mogul whose fortune catapulted him into New York’s City Hall, has set another staggering financial record: He has now spent more of his own money than any other individual in United States history in the pursuit of public office.

Newly released campaign records show the mayor, as of Friday, had spent $85 million on his latest re-election campaign, and is on pace to spend between $110 million and $140 million before the election on Nov. 3.

That means Mr. Bloomberg, in his three bids for mayor, will have easily burned through more than $250 million — the equivalent of what Warner Brothers spent on the latest Harry Potter movie.

The sum easily surpasses what other titans of business have spent to seek state or federal office. New Jersey’s Jon S. Corzine has plunked down a total of $130 million in two races for governor and one for United States Senate. Steve Forbes poured $114 million into his two bids for president. And Ross Perot spent $65 million in his quest for the White House in 1992 and $10 million four years later.

. . .

He has spent at least 14 times what his Democratic rival in the race, William C. Thompson Jr., has: $6 million.

The heady display of overwhelming force also provokes adulation from supporters and admirers:

The Sanitation Department reported yesterday that Thompson’s campaign is facing a hefty $125,775 bill for plastering city property with 1,677 illegal campaign posters.

. . .

In contrast to Thompson, Bloomberg’s campaign has been cited for 70 violations.

See also: Bloomberg For Mayor 2009.