Things constituents don’t want to hear after learning you were the only council member absent for the most important vote of the session include “I was in Vegas.” But for the record, it was opening day as well:

It was perhaps the most important vote of the year for the City Council.

For hours at City Hall on Monday, council members — who have provided little resistance to the mayor’s initiatives in recent years — debated whether to back Mayor Michael R. Bloomberg’s plan to charge fees to drive in Manhattan below 60th Street.

The measure could not advance to Albany without the Council’s approval, and the behind-the-scenes lobbying was furious.

In the chamber, one council member quoted Franklin Delano Roosevelt; another quoted the Who guitarist Pete Townshend. Several council members from other boroughs rose to oppose the plan, saying the measure would unfairly burden residents from poorer areas beyond Manhattan. But one council member could not be found.

Councilwoman Helen Diane Foster, a Bronx Democrat who has one of the worst attendance records on the council, was not at City Hall. She was not in her district. And her staff could provide no explanation for her whereabouts when voting began.

Reached by cellphone on Tuesday, Ms. Foster said that she had intended to be there, but was unavoidably delayed “on the West Coast.”

After some prodding, she hesitantly acknowledged that she had been in Las Vegas, where, she said, a family member received a community service award on Saturday night.

“Nobody’s more disappointed than me, because I am so against congestion pricing,” Ms. Foster said on Tuesday.

Oh no. It may actually come to pass now that Spitzer finds himself on the wrong side of a press conference about a prostitution ring:

Mr. Spitzer, a first-term Democrat who pledged to bring ethics reform and end the often seamy ways of Albany, is married with three children.

If you mess with the candymaker, the candymaker will hit back, hard:

The giant blue M&M that was banished from two video billboards for imitating Times Square’s Naked Cowboy has come back swinging.

Mars, the maker of M&Ms, has filed a petition with the Patent and Trademark Office accusing the Naked Cowboy, whose real name is Robert Burck, of committing fraud when he obtained his trademark.

Not mine. Yours? Nope, not mine, either:

Despite what the popular colloquialism may have led Sunnyside residents to believe, some rocks just won’t roll. Quite the opposite, in fact, as many neighbors have been perplexed by the neighborhood’s recently acquired inconvenient landmark: an enormous boulder that on 44 St at the intersection of Greeenpoint Ave and 47 Ave. Though it was intrusive and graffiti covered, the boulder quickly became an accepted part of the Sunnyside landscape and city and neighborhood agencies received few if no call on the matter. Its removal this weekend was as quiet and unnoticed as its arrival.

. . .

Although neighbors and city officials are unsure of exactly when the boulder first appeared on 44 St, it has been there since before the first of the year. Jutting out length-wise from the Easter curb of 44 St just north of the intersection, the boulder blocked traffic only slightly more than a typical parked car.

According to the Mayor’s office, the boulder was excavated during emergency sewer work by Maspeth Construction. A number of boulders were excavated during the work, but this particular one was simply too big to be removed, and was left at the intersection.

. . .

Another more minor problem that the boulder has created is that it has been marked with graffiti. One side of the boulder said in green writing, “paddy rock,” while another side was covered in an illegible white scrawl. A large orange road barrier was place in front of the rock to increase its visibility and prevent cars from slamming into it at night.

City officials are unsure of how long it had been there, having only been notified about the problem at this month’s meeting of Community Board 2, but reports indicate that it first appeared shortly after Christmas. Once the issue was brought up at the meeting, the City quickly responded to complaints and dispatched Maspeth Construction to remove it, which was done on Saturday. Today, all that remains of Sunnyside’s own natural oddity are small patches of rubble and scratches on the ground from its removal. Just as its sudden appearance went unnoticed by the neighborhood, so has its removal, and as of Monday afternoon, few neighbors have even noticed its absence.

Michael Bloomberg is the greatest secessionist mayor since Fernando Wood there’s not a damn thing Kevin Sheekey can do to stop it:

Lending lighthearted support to a City Council proposal that the city secede from the state, Mayor Bloomberg said yesterday the plan makes a point that is “well taken.”

The city sends the state about $11 billion more each year than it receives back in services, an imbalance that is prompting Council Member Peter Vallone Jr., a Democrat who represents parts of Queens, to introduce legislation to lay the groundwork for the city to break away from the state.

“I can’t believe he thinks it is going anyplace, but I think he’s right in joking about it,” Mr. Bloomberg said yesterday.

The mayor warned that if the state tries to squeeze too many tax dollars out of the city, it would no longer be a cash cow.

. . .

Mr. Vallone told The New York Sun that his idea is “most definitely not a joke,” but added that he is encouraged that the mayor “likes the fact that I am thinking about it.”

Whoops:

Sgt. Michael Arenella and Police Officer Jerry Bowens arrested a thug — actually an undercover officer — in November, seizing $250 and 40 bags of crack cocaine in the bust, officials said.

The undercover agent was sent in by the NYPD’s Internal Affairs Bureau with the drugs and money after they suspected the two of skimming from the drugs they seized on other occasions.

Sometime after they busted the undercover agent, Arenella and Bowens allegedly gave one of their informants $40 and two bags of crack in exchange for information, officials said.

New federal guidelines may make it more difficult for New York City to outgrow itself by 2030*:

By counting all sorts of housing, including conversions of questionable legality, New York City reached eight million people for the first time in 2000 — but stricter counting rules for the 2010 Census could leave the city with a loss of population, according to a Queens College demographer.

With the permission of the U.S. Census Bureau, local enumerators in the 2000 Census counted types of housing not previously permitted, and now the federal agency is challenging some of New York City’s reported population.

Andrew Beveridge, professor and demographer at Queens College, suggests that New York City could possibly lose population in the 2010 Census under new and more stringent federal counting rules.

“While more people did live in New York City in 2000 than in 1990, a large share of the growth recorded by the 2000 Census — when the city reached 8 million for the first time — is due to the efforts of the Population Division of the Department of City Planning and its director Joseph Salvo,” Beveridge wrote in the Gotham Gazette.

“Indeed, perhaps half the growth can be attributed to their efforts to include formerly overlooked households in the census and make sure they were counted. Some of these households were never reached, so the data on them came from their neighbors, with the Census Bureau filling in some of the blanks,” Beveridge said.

“Now the Census Bureau headquarters in Washington is challenging the methods and approaches that led to New York City’s surprising growth. In effect, it claims, some of the households counted do not actually exist.”

*For more on 2030, see this and this.

With his traffic congestion plan stalled, the mayor makes the unsexy decision to limit city employee parking perks, something that actually might help reduce traffic:

Mayor Michael R. Bloomberg, taking aim at one of the most treasured perks of city employees, announced Thursday that he would reduce by 20 percent the number of parking permits issued to city employees.

The parking placards — given to police officers, teachers and a wide array of city agencies, including the Department for the Aging and the Tax Commission — have long been a source of frustration for drivers and residents in some parts of the city. Not only do those who have them use up parking spaces, but some employees have abused the privilege by double parking or parking illegally in places normally off-limits, like sidewalks and bus stops.

The city cannot even say for certain how many of the permits are in use, because they have been given out by multiple agencies with no central accounting. The city estimates it has distributed about 70,000 placards, but federal and state agencies have issued thousands of their own.

. . .

Deputy Mayor Edward Skyler said the changes were meant to complement the mayor’s push for a congestion pricing plan, which aims to reduce traffic by charging drivers who take their cars into the busiest parts of Manhattan. That plan is being evaluated by a state commission that is studying traffic congestion in Manhattan. Mr. Skyler said a reduction in parking placards is also meant to ease a dearth of parking spaces in areas like Lower Manhattan, where a large number of government workers use the permits to park.

“We felt that 20 percent would be substantial enough to improve parking conditions for residents without impairing agencies’ abilities to operate,” Mr. Skyler said.

“We’re trying to find the right balance between city employees that have a job to do and city residents and people, either who work here or who are frequenting businesses here,” he said. “It’s New York City, and space is at a premium.”

Paul J. Browne, a Police Department spokesman, said the department has issued about 8,000 placards for use by officers on official business and an additional 6,000 placards to other law enforcement agencies, such as the Federal Bureau of Investigation and district attorneys offices in New York City. He was unable to say how many permits had been issued to police officers enabling them to park their private cars near precinct houses during their work shifts, but the number would appear to be in the thousands. He said that about 15,500 officers are assigned to precincts around the city.

Mr. Browne said that the department’s contracts with the police unions contain “general language that talks about making efforts to provide parking,” but still gave officials leeway to reduce the number of permits.

Margie Feinberg, a spokeswoman for the Department of Education, said the agency had 183 placards for use on official business. But she said that the department itself had issued “tens of thousands” of permits to teachers and school staff members. Those permits allow department employees to park on the street in areas reserved for them during school hours.

New York City — always cooking the books:

Jeffrey A. Straus, the president of Countdown Entertainment, the company that organizes the ball drop in coordination with the Times Square Alliance, estimated that Monday night’s crowd totaled at least one million people.

“I’ve been doing this now for 13 years,” he said. “I’m in the TV truck with our cameras. We can see people from 43rd Street to Central Park on Broadway and Seventh Avenue.” Monday’s crowd was swelled by the mild weather, he said.

Mr. Straus said that for many years the police shared its estimates with the organizers. The last time the police provided a number was Dec. 31, 2000, he said, when the estimate was also one million people.

Other estimates in recent years have been much lower. In most years in the late 1990s, newspaper accounts tended to cite figures of around 500,000.

That is fairly consistent with the numbers issued by the Police Department when it still provided crowd estimates. A chart printed in The New York Times in 1993 showed that from 1986 to 1991, police estimates of Times Square attendance on New Year’s Eve ranged from about 300,000 to about 600,000.

The one major exception was Dec. 31, 1999, for the countdown to 2000. Rudolph W. Giuliani, who was mayor at the time, said that the crowd was “pushing two million.”

That prompted an analysis by The Times, which found reason for skepticism.

The crowd is penned behind metal barriers on Broadway and Seventh Avenue on the blocks north of 42nd Street, with a lane about 10 feet wide kept clear on the street. That means there is a fair amount of open space.

The Times calculated the total surface area on Seventh Avenue and Broadway, including the street and sidewalk, from Central Park South to 34th Street (where many people in 1999 watched the ball drop on large television screens).

Using a measurement of two square feet per person, which has long been standard in estimating crowd sizes, the analysis determined that the total capacity of the viewing area that year was approximately 430,000 people. Adding some additional capacity to account for spillover onto side streets, the analysis determined that there was room for about 700,000 people — during what was certainly the most ballyhooed celebration in the history of the Times Square event.

This year’s crowd covered less area, however, than that throng. It extended from Central Park South only to 42nd Street, along Broadway and Seventh Avenue, Mr. Browne said, with some additional crowds in Central Park and along the side streets.

. . .

Mr. Straus, the event organizer, acknowledged that calculating the number of people packed into Times Square on New Year’s Eve can feel a little like guessing the number of jelly beans in a jar.

“It’s an art, not a science,” he said. “And at the end of the day, does it really matter? It’s a lot of people.”

Backstory: Future Shock: One Miiilllllion People!

Sorry, A-Rod the “landlord caricature”:

Past a psychic’s storefront and coin laundry on Martin Luther King Jr. Boulevard in Tampa, Fla., a sign reading “We [heart] Our Residents” is planted beside manicured shrubs and an iron gate with a fresh coat at the entrance of Newport Riverside apartments.

The paint is camouflage for the mottled backside of the complex, where an exhausted appliance sits on a porch, cardboard is taped over broken window panes and missing spindles give rickety banisters the look of a snaggletooth smile.

Some residents here tell tales of roaches overtaking kitchen cabinets in a bumper-to-bumper crawl to the corn flakes, of carpets stained in the 1990s and quick-trigger evictions.

“My mom comes here and she ain’t no rich person, but she thinks I live in the projects,” said Miguel Ruiz as he sat on the second-floor landing of Building 2-A on a recent Sunday afternoon. “She’s scared to come over here, for real.”

As Ruiz spoke, he pulled a boy named Elijah from a gap in the railing that opened when yet another piece of the banister rattled loose and fell to the ground.

“See, stuff like that, with kids around, it’s messed up here,” Ruiz said, adding, “Honestly, I was raised in a ghetto and I was brought up a little better than this.”

This is one of six apartment complexes in the Tampa area, and one of at least 16 nationwide, that Rodriguez owns and operates as the chief executive of Newport Property Ventures.

An examination of his high-rolling corporate side, as well as a glossy A-Rod Family Foundation short on largess, reveals a portrait of Rodriguez as a player about to enter Yankee Take II solely for business purposes, primarily as a branding tool. He emerges as an obsessive pursuer of cold, hard numbers on and off the bases, with serially disingenuous nods to his ever-challenged image.

A-Rod isn’t exactly a slumlord — some renters interviewed at his other properties had milder complaints — but he has become a landlord caricature among dwellers who hold him accountable for, say, the stack of molding mattresses by the dumpster at Newport Villas on MacDill Avenue.

Elliot Spitzer learns the hard way that executive experience is not at all like the “rollicking discussions” he once enjoyed as a youth around his parents’ dinner table. Less than a day — or if you believe the Sun, just hours — after details emerge about the governor’s proposed Amazon tax, he clumsily retreats:

In a second major policy reversal in less than a day, Governor Spitzer is backing down from a plan to require Amazon.com and other online retailers to charge state and local sales taxes on all purchases from New York.

Yesterday, just hours after The New York Sun reported on the new revenue collection scheme, the Spitzer administration announced that it was burying it for the time being — at least until after the Christmas shopping season. The move saved New York City shoppers from having to pay an additional 8.375% on many Amazon.com goods.

“Governor Spitzer believes that now is not the right time to be increasing sales taxes on New Yorkers,” Mr. Spitzer’s budget director, Paul Francis, said in a statement. “He has directed the Department of Tax and Finance to pull back its interpretation that would require some Internet retailers that do not collect sales tax to do so.”

The turnabout came just hours after Mr. Spitzer said he was dropping his plan to allow illegal immigrants in New York to obtain driver’s licenses.

In this latest instance, Mr. Spitzer wasted little time before pulling the plug on another controversial policy, aborting it before it threatened to snowball into a distraction for his administration.

And do you really believe this part?

Mr. Francis, in an interview, said the governor was unaware of the new tax policy, which the tax department quietly issued with a memorandum on Friday. It was supposed to go into effect next month, in time for the holiday shopping rush.

“The governor really wasn’t aware of this. My focus is to raise revenue, and the governor has a broader perspective,” Mr. Francis said. “It’s a big government, and in hindsight, we probably should have made sure he focused on it. It’s one of those things, so you live and learn.”

And a new political axiom is born: if there’s one thing the netroots hate, it’s taxing crap they buy on Amazon (and all for a lousy $100 million . . . that’s somehow using political capital wisely?).

Hillary has an opening here to become the one true Yankees fan running for President:

As he moves about the country campaigning for the White House, Rudolph W. Giuliani is not always kind in describing where he comes from. New York City, he will say, is a tough town, hard to govern. It’s liberal to a fault and unruly as a child.

Now, however, there has come what is for many the true unpardonable insult: Mr. Giuliani has declared he will be rooting for the dreaded Boston Red Sox against the Colorado Rockies in the World Series, which began last night. From the Bronx to his childhood haunts in Brooklyn, there was a baffled anger bordering on rage.

“They should burn his seat that he sat in at Yankee Stadium — how’s that?” said George Patsin, a Brooklyn restaurateur. “They should burn it on TV so I can watch.”

. . .

By way of explanation, Mr. Giuliani couched his shift in loyalty as support for the American League. (”I’m an American League fan and I go with the American League team,” he told reporters — not coincidentally — in the primary state and Boston neighbor of New Hampshire.) “I thought he was loyal to New York,” said Kebrae H. Scott, 30, a maintenance worker who wore a Yankees cap as he was heading to his home in the Ebbets Fields Apartments in Brooklyn near where Mr. Giuliani grew up.

. . .

Of course, his most revealing comment on the subject was perhaps the answer he provided to The Providence Journal in Rhode Island when asked, this June, if he would agree to be president if it hinged on his becoming a Red Sox fan.

“I have great respect for people who really are fans of the team they say they are fans of,” Mr. Giuliani said. “But probably that’s a deal I could not make.”

Community groups have turned down help from Scores before, but even on the sexiest of holidays, volunteers from Scores still can’t catch a break:

Scores strippers set to help out at a Halloween festival held at a Brooklyn middle school have been told thanks, but no thanks.

Ladies from the jiggle club were scheduled to volunteer at the Puppetry Arts Theater’s Halloween Carnival Benefit at MS 51 in Park Slope on Saturday, but wouldn’t have worn their, uh, work uniforms.

“The benefit is not an appropriate venue for volunteers identified as adult dancers,” said Department of Education spokesman David Cantor.

Maybe Congress is the best place for her after all:

Nine months into her tenure as congresswoman for New York’s 11th district in Brooklyn, a freshman Representative, Yvette Clarke, submitted her first bill this week. She was the only remaining first-term congresswoman to have not yet introduced legislation. Her lack of activity contributed to her earning a “D” grade last month from a congressional watchdog, CBC Monitor.

It turns out that the big Post story about 30 NYPD officers being investigated for taking steroids was off by about a zero:

Yesterday’s Post incorrectly reported that as many as 30 cops were rounded up to take drug tests as part of the NYPD steroid investigation. In fact, three officers were ordered to an NYPD medical facility, and a total of six are being probed.

. . . when he compares the Iraqi insurgency to George Washington’s militia:

In his most detailed comments on the Iraq war, Mayor Bloomberg last night suggested the United States was in the same difficult position as the British in the Revolutionary War — facing a determined band of insurgents.

Bloomberg said the comparison occurred to him when he visited his mother recently and was driving through Lexington, Mass., where a scrubby group of farmers rose up against a well-trained militia more than 200 years ago.

“We’re the British,” the mayor said during an interview with Tom Brokaw at Cooper Union, part of a series featuring potential presidential contenders hosted by former Gov. Mario Cuomo.

Pitch perfect and ready for prime time!

With any luck, Lee Bollinger personally will have strengthened Ahmadinejad’s public perception in Iran and possibly contributed to the delay of the clerical regime’s inevitable demise — that is, if anyone outside the Northeastern U.S. even notices what happens at Columbia:

Before Iran’s president took the stage at Columbia University on Monday, the university’s president, Lee C. Bollinger, sent out an early-morning e-mail message, calling on students and faculty “to live up to the best of Columbia’s traditions.” Yesterday, many critics questioned whether Mr. Bollinger had met that test himself.

On campus and in editorials across the nation, on political blogs and throughout academia, there was a sharp division of opinion about Mr. Bollinger’s pointed introduction of the Iranian president, Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, as a man who exhibited “all the signs of a petty and cruel dictator” and whose denial of the Holocaust was “either brazenly provocative or astonishingly uneducated.”

. . .

Abraham H. Foxman, national director of the Anti-Defamation League, said Mr. Bollinger’s speech was counterproductive.

“If you invite someone, you have to be polite,” he said. “Ahmadinejad scored points, especially in their culture. If you permit an enemy to come into your home, you still treat him with dignity and respect. Therefore, we lost. The points that President Bollinger made were fine. But to close with insulting words almost undid everything he said before. It was not a good teaching experience.”

Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad won’t be allowed to lay a wreath at Ground Zero but he will be allowed to speak at Columbia:

The Iranian Mission to the United Nations requested the invitation through a professor in the Middle East department, Richard Bulliet, who is a specialist on Iran.

“Opportunities to hear, challenge, and learn from controversial speakers of different views are central to the education and training of students for citizenship in a shrinking and dangerous world,” the dean of SIPA, John Coatsworth, said in a statement. Mr. Coastworth invited Mr. Ahmadinejad to kick off a series of lectures and events about Iran, he said in a statement. The president of Columbia University, Lee Bollinger, is scheduled to introduce Mr. Ahmadinejad on Monday to an audience that will be made up exclusively of Columbia students, faculty, and a few invited guests.

Mr. Ahmadinejad was invited by SIPA to speak at Columbia last fall, but Mr. Bollinger revoked the invitation on the grounds that he could not ensure that the program would reflect the academic values of the university. In his talk on Monday, Mr. Ahmadinejad will field questions from the audience and from Mr. Bollinger on his government, as well as his views on Israel and the Holocaust.

In the mayor’s plan to outbid poverty, participants seem very pleased:

For Wayne Logan, a single father of two, being selected for the city’s experimental cash-rewards program for the poor was like hitting the lottery.

“I’m happy. I’m grateful,” he declared, sounding somewhat amazed at his good fortune.

“To get paid to do things I’m doing anyway is a welcome feeling.”

Logan, 49, was among the first enrollees in a daring $50 million pilot project launched by Mayor Bloomberg with private funds to pay poor families as much as $5,000 a year simply to do the right thing.

A child getting a library card is worth $50.

A student who passes a standardized math or English exam is eligible to get a $300 payoff for each.

Complete two dental visits a year? That’s $100 in your pocket.

Logan insisted that almost all the 28 activities prescribed by the city are already on his checklist.

He was recertified for Medicaid (worth $40), gets an annual checkup ($200), and recently took his son to the dentist.

. . .

Surprisingly, only 3,000 of the 5,100 families selected for the program signed up by Sept. 1, leading officials to extend the deadline by a month.

Half of the families will be in a control group that doesn’t receive benefits.

Deputy Mayor Linda Gibbs said some families in the six neighborhoods picked for the program “found it hard to believe it’s real” and didn’t enroll.

But she said officials intend to track down the non-responders because “we want to see how incentives work in those hard-to-engage households and those who are the poorest of the poor.”

The first rule of politics is never to exaggerate easily verifiable claims:

On at least three occasions, in responding to accusations that the city failed to adequately protect the health of workers in the wreckage, [Presidential candidate Rudy Giuliani] has boasted that he faced comparable risks himself. In one appearance he declared that he had been in the ruins “as often, if not more” than the cleanup workers who logged hundreds of hours in the smoldering pile.

Another time he brushed aside safety claims by asserting that his long hours at the site had left him susceptible to “every health consequence that people have suffered.”

So, how much time did Mayor Giuliani spend at ground zero?

A complete record of Mr. Giuliani’s exposure to the site is not available for the chaotic six days after the attack, when he was a frequent visitor. But an exhaustively detailed account from his mayoral archive, revised after the events to account for last-minute changes on scheduled stops, does exist for the period of Sept. 17 to Dec. 16, 2001. It shows he was there for a total of 29 hours in those three months, often for short periods or to visit locations adjacent to the rubble. In that same period, many rescue and recovery workers put in daily 12-hour shifts.

(Who’s ghoulish now?)

Step one is easy:

Independence Party activist Lenora Fulani yesterday renounced for the first time her past anti-Semitic rhetoric as she declared she’s considering a run for mayor.

Fulani had previously refused to disavow her 1989 statement that “Jews had to sell their souls to acquire Israel” and had to “function as mass murderers of people of color.”

. . .

But at a press conference on the City Hall steps yesterday, Fulani said, “My comments reflected my feelings about the situation during that time. I felt it important to stand up for the people I thought were singularly oppressed.

“The language I used was harsh and today I would call it excessive,” she added, insisting she “never intended to express anything demeaning or derogatory to Jewish people here or in Israel . . . I do not view Israel as an aggressor.”

“In light of that, I am repudiating my remarks of 18 years ago,” she said.

Step two — explaining how you’re a member of a quasi-Republican, anti-tax party to a city where Democrats outnumber Republicans five to one — will be a little more difficult, I imagine.

The proposal to ban the “b-word” (you know which one) is facing fierce opposition in some quarters:

The New York City Council, which drew national headlines when it passed a symbolic citywide ban earlier this year on the use of the so-called n-word, has turned its linguistic (and legislative) lance toward a different slur: bitch.

The term is hateful and deeply sexist, said Councilwoman Darlene Mealy of Brooklyn, who has introduced a measure against the word, saying it creates “a paradigm of shame and indignity” for all women.

But conversations over the last week indicate that the “b-word” (as it is referred to in the legislation) enjoys a surprisingly strong currency — and even some defenders — among many New Yorkers.

. . .

While the bill also bans the slang word “ho,” the b-word appears to have acquired more shades of meaning among various groups, ranging from a term of camaraderie to, in a gerund form, an expression of emphatic approval. Ms. Mealy acknowledged that the measure was unenforceable, but she argued that it would carry symbolic power against the pejorative uses of the word. Even so, a number of New Yorkers said they were taken aback by the idea of prohibiting a term that they not only use, but do so with relish and affection.

“Half my conversation would be gone,” said Michael Musto, the Village Voice columnist, whom a reporter encountered on his bicycle on Sunday night on the corner of Seventh Avenue South and Christopher Street. Mr. Musto, widely known for his coverage of celebrity gossip, dismissed the idea as absurd.

“On the downtown club scene,” he said, munching on an apple, the two terms are often used as terms of endearment. “We divest any negative implication from the word and toss it around with love.”

Darris James, 31, an architect from Brooklyn who was outside the Duplex, a piano bar in the West Village, on Sunday night was similarly opposed. “Hell, if I can’t say bitch, I wouldn’t be able to call half my friends.”

. . .

“I think it’s a description that is used insouciantly in the fashion industry,” said Hamish Bowles, the European editor at large of Vogue, as he ordered a sushi special at the Condé Nast cafeteria last week. “It would only be used in the fashion world with a sense of high irony and camp.”

Mr. Bowles, in salmon seersucker and a purple polo, appeared amused by the Council measure. “It’s very ‘Paris Is Burning,’ isn’t it?” he asked, referring to the film that captured the 1980s drag queen scene in New York.

Because of course everybody loves firefighters:

Fire officials poured water yesterday on the wildly popular calendar featuring the department’s hunkiest hunks after a video featuring this cover boy waving his God-given hose began making the rounds of gay porn sites.

“We will no longer be participating in this. There will be no more calendars,” said FDNY spokesman Francis Gribbon.

The embarrassing video of 22-year-old firefighter Michael Biserta of Brooklyn’s Ladder Co. 131 and his enormous member is featured in the 2004 Joe Francis-produced DVD “Guys Gone Wild.”

. . .

In the clip, the female camera operators goad Biserta to show them his fire pole. When they ask him to dance for them or get up on the bed, he refuses, but does agree to get in the hotel room’s shower in the nude.

Officials said Biserta won’t be disciplined because the video was made before he was hired. But officials at the department’s fund-raising arm — the FDNY Foundation — said the decision to cancel the calendar was a huge disappointment, because at $15.99 a pop, it brought in on average $150,000 a year for them.

David Chase has a lot to answer for:

He wrote them threatening letters, telling them to stuff a paper bag with $10,000 worth of twenties and fifties and drop it off in a secluded area of Clove Lakes Park.

If they didn’t do as he said, their jewelry stores would be damaged and their families would face the consequences, he wrote.

He signed the letters, “Cosa Nostra.”

The extortionist, police say, was not some mobster or wannabe tough guy.

Instead, they say he was a teen-ager from Sunnyside. The 15-year-old Sunnyside boy allegedly wrote extortion letters to nine jewelry stores, demanding the stores’ owners leave $10,000 in a brown paper bag in Clove Lakes Park or face the consequences, according to authorities. His name is being withheld because of his age.

One letter, sent to Buono Jewelers on Hylan Boulevard in Grasmere last Friday, instructed the owner to drop the cash behind “a rowboat half buried verticaly (sic) opposite the entrance to the lake club” at 9:30 a.m. Sunday.

“If Law Enforcement is notified or intervines (sic) with the exchange you can be sure that not just your store will be harmed but also your family,” the teen allegedly wrote. “If you wish that no damage or harm come to your store or family you will pay.”

But when he showed up at the park, the teen found a paper bag filled with nothing but paper — and the police, waiting for him, according to law enforcement sources.

“I thought it was a joke, and I just handed it to the Police Department,” said the owner of Buono, who spoke on condition of anonymity, saying that he has been robbed in the past and doesn’t want to speak publicly.

The letter arrived in the mail Friday, he said. ‘The letter came, ‘To the owner.’ It wasn’t addressed to anybody,” he said. “The wording was all misspelled.”

The problem with perseverating on traffic issues is that you have to start seriously considering other mitigation schemes — even if they don’t come with a giant pot of money:

Mayor Bloomberg, who once insisted the proposed Cross Harbor Tunnel would “destroy neighborhoods,” said yesterday he would be willing to take another look at the plan.

Bloomberg told U.S. Rep. Jerrold Nadler, a proponent of the tunnel, that he and Deputy Mayor Daniel Doctoroff would meet with him to discuss the plan — which would connect Brooklyn, Queens and Long Island with the national railroad freight network.

“I’m not so sure he’s wrong,” Bloomberg said after being quizzed by Nadler during a speech to the New York Building Congress. “It’s not the worst idea. It has some problems and who knows?”

The mayor’s comments came as a surprise to members of a Queens community group who had hailed him as a hero during Bloomberg’s 2005 reelection campaign when he declared, “We should not build this tunnel.”

Allowing the Times to interview the guy who cleans coins out of all the fountains on the premises must seemed like a good idea at the time to to the Met’s press department:

In the hour before the museum opened the other day, [Metropolitan Museum of Art employee David Mendez] filled about a third of a large white bucket. As he worked he talked about everything from the 40th president (a hero of Mr. Mendez’s whom he calls “Mr. Reagan”) to the museum’s director, Philippe de Montebello (”I love the way he talks. He just knows how to say whatever he’s saying.”).

He talked about V.I.P.’s who have visited the Met in the 19 years he has worked there, including Queen Sofía of Spain.

“Mrs. Juan Carlos,” he called her, referring to the king. “She had super-thick ankles. He was so tall and handsome, and she was so petite. I guess it was an arranged marriage. You know how those things are.”

Other quirky (museum) jobs that are probably just quirky jobs include.

After earlier sounding an alarm about how they would handle all the additional commuters MTA president admits that it actually wouldn’t be that big of a deal after all:

Amid all the bad news, the president of NYC Transit feared an underlying message had been lost about the benefits of Mayor Michael Bloomberg’s proposed congestion pricing plan.

During rush hours, the busiest train lines — including the 2, 3, 4, 5, 6 and E — are running at or over capacity. Yet Roberts insisted the system could still “fully support” the increased ridership projected from congestion pricing. “In fact the current strain on parts of the system is a big argument in favor of congestion pricing, not against it,” he said.

Roberts believes the business-day toll could pay for subway improvements and for such big-ticket projects as the first leg of the Second Avenue Subway, which is already $1 billion short.

On Monday, Roberts proposed quick “fixes,” including adding more cars to trains and extending station platforms. But these remedies would take “four or five” years. More importantly, they all require money the MTA doesn’t have.

“Congestion pricing is critical to putting these fixes into place,” Roberts said yesterday.

The city’s Department of Transportation estimates congestion pricing would dissuade 94,000 current drivers over an entire day, but believes only 7,000 of them will shift to subways and buses at the peak morning rush between 8 and 9 a.m. “Other drivers presumably come from areas where it is more convenient to use commuter rail,” said DOT spokesperson Molly Gordy.

If half of that 7,000 end up in the subway, they would add just 1 percent to the current morning peak-hour load of 345,000 riders. Roberts noted they would also be spread across the subway’s 22 lines.

“This is a minimal bump that the system can unequivocally absorb,” he said.

But doesn’t that also actually kind of undercut one of the main reasons to support congestion pricing — that so many more people will use public transportation?

And what’s more, has everyone simply taken at face value the notion that there will be an increase of one million new people in New York City in just over twenty years? (Questions to ask include but are not limited to: Really? Who are these people? Where will they come from? Will New York somehow magically get more affordable? Will Manhattan turn from a neighborhood of pied-a-terres to a solid middle-class enclave of families exceeding replacement levels? Will there be some massive new industry that will move here?) Or I guess it’s to everyone’s benefit to just assume there will be that many people here:

NYC Transit President Howard Roberts has expressed concern about how the system will handle expected population growth of 1 million people by 2030. Some lines, including the Nos. 2, 3 and 4, already are grossly overcrowded and operating at or above capacity.

“We’ve got to begin to look at how we get to comfortable rides, comfortable capacities, for people in that time period . . . given how long it takes for capital projects to get done, we don’t have a lot of time to do it,” Roberts said yesterday.

The strain on the system is a “big argument” for congestion pricing, Roberts said. The city’s pricing plan would generate billions of dollars to fund mass transit projects by charging drivers to enter Manhattan below 86th St.

Gene Russianoff of the Straphangers Campaign agreed.

“The choice is clear: We either act now to handle the coming million . . . . or drown in the crush,” Russianoff said. “Congestion pricing is the answer.”

Thanks to the Bush Administration’s solid lock on Congress, that giant vat of federal money for congestion pricing is a slam dunk:

A powerful congressman has warned Gov. Spitzer and legislative leaders that the $500 million in federal aid that Mayor Bloomberg claims will be available for his congestion-pricing plan has not been approved.

Rep. Peter DeFasio (D-Ore.), chairman of the House Subcommittee on Highways and Transit, told Spitzer, Assembly Speaker Sheldon Silver and Senate Majority Leader Joe Bruno in a letter that even if the money is eventually authorized, New York City may not be eligible to receive it.

“I write to express my concerns about the assurances by [U.S. Transportation] Secretary Mary Peters . . . that New York City will receive a significant amount of federal funding for implementation of Mayor Bloomberg’s proposed congestion-pricing program,” DeFasio wrote in the letter obtained by The Post.

“You should know that Congress has not authorized the [Transportation Department's] Congestion Initiative or its component parts,” DeFasio added.

DeFasio told Spitzer he had “serious doubts that New York City or Mayor Bloomberg’s congestion-pricing program” would be eligible for federal funding under several DOT projects from which the funds had been expected to come.

“Before you rush to enact legislation authorizing the establishment of Mayor Bloomberg’s congestion-pricing program, I urge that you obtain all the relevant information, including asking Secretary Peters and DOT for clarification, and written assurances, that New York City will be eligible to receive federal funding under the programs,” wrote DeFasio in the letter to Spitzer, which was copied to Silver and Bruno.

“I caution you to carefully consider the expectation that the federal government will deliver those funds,” he continued.

So when Bloomberg takes the subway, it’s not really about reducing congestion, saving time or fighting pollution — in that respect, it’s sort of like how congestion pricing really isn’t about the environment either:

Mayor Bloomberg took the subway yesterday to a news conference about a new green-car initiative — but he also brought along his SUV.

After his small, fuel-guzzling motorcade arrived at the Museum of Natural History on West 79th Street to join a Hertz Corp. announcement about adding 3,400 hybrid cars to its fleet, the mayor insisted he and his aides had driven only a short distance.

“We drove here from [the] 86th Street [station],” Bloomberg said, pointing out that he wasn’t inside the SUV that took the trip from City Hall, but instead had hopped on the subway.

That raised the question: If the mayor rides the subway uptown but is met by an SUV driven from City Hall — with or without him in it — where’s the carbon-emission savings?

An aide later explained that the NYPD tails Bloomberg wherever he goes and has his specially equipped SUV at the ready in case of emergency. Also, Bloomberg’s SUV is equipped with “flex-fuel” tanks and runs on a mixture of ethanol and gasoline, the aide said.

You would never believe that your neighbors keep pythons at home . . . until you find out that they do:

Shocked firefighters stumbled upon a menagerie of deadly animals — including two alligators, two cobras, black widow spiders and a python — while putting out a blaze in a Queens apartment yesterday.

Tony Baez, 23, was in tears after his animals were removed and he was issued a summons by the Health Department.

Lt. Ed Ireland said he and his crew discovered dozens of reptiles and spiders after they put out a fire in a basement apartment at 39th Avenue in Corona at 11:30 a.m.

All of the animals were caged, except for a python, which Ireland said he was “startled” to discover near his leg as he entered the room.

“It felt like something out of a science-fiction scene,” he said. “It looked like a biology lab. The whole room was in cages.” The cause of the fire remains under investigation, but Ireland said it was not considered suspicious. Baez’s “ark” included two 2-foot-long alligators, numerous frogs, turtles and tarantulas and at least two cobras.

. . .

Angelo Diaz, 55, who has lived on the block since 1970, was shocked to learn his home was just feet away from dangerous snakes.

“You never know if one night the snake could get out. We feel very happy that they came to get them,” he said. “We have babies here, it isn’t safe. We never would have thought that animals like that are here.”