Gaspar Libedinsky, one of the High Line park designers, was all for the voyeurism: “It is like an urban catwalk. It is a place to see and be seen.”

Location Scout: High Line.

Wilson told me she usually writes about “obscure stores that don’t exist outside of Manhattan,” and she thinks of her audience as “1,300 women in Connecticut and urban gay guys in Manhattan.” She said it was “kind of provincial of me” not to realize how big The Times was and how her audience would expand when she reviewed a store like Penney’s. She said she also thought she hit a raw nerve with people already disposed to think of The Times as disconnected and unsympathetic. “It was dumb on my part not to see this coming,” she said.

But give bonus points to Wilson for ripping on Connecticut ladies in the process . . .

Why would this perennially square department store bother to reanimate itself in Manhattan — in the sleekest, scariest fashion city in America — during a hair-raising economic downturn, without taking the opportunity to vigorously rebrand itself? Why would this dowdy Middle American entity waddle into Midtown in its big old shorts and flip-flops without even bothering to update its ancient Helvetica Light logo, which for anyone who grew up with the company is encrusted with decades of boring, even traumatically parental, associations?

. . .

It took me a long time to find a size 2 among the racks. There are, however, abundant size 10’s, 12’s and 16’s. The dressing rooms are big, clean and well tended. I tried two fairly cute items: a modified domino-print swing dress with padded shoulders by American Living (a Ralph Lauren line created for Penney’s) and a long psychedelic muumuu of a style generally worn by Rachel Zoe. Each was around $80; each fit nicely andlooked good. I didn’t buy either because I can do better for $80, but if I were a size 18, I’d have rejoiced.

And herein lies the genius of J. C. Penney: It has made a point of providing clothing for people of all sizes (a strategy, company officials have said, to snatch business from nearby Macy’s). To this end, it has the most obese mannequins I have ever seen. They probably need special insulin-based epoxy injections just to make their limbs stay on. It’s like a headless wax museum devoted entirely to the cast of “Roseanne.”

Our choice of words should be thoughtful and precise, and we should never talk down to readers. But how often should even a Times reader come across a word like hagiography or antediluvian or peripatetic, especially before breakfast?

. . .

Some entries seem self-referential: it’s no coincidence that a list of obscure and difficult words includes abstruse and recondite, not to mention solipsistic. And while many of these words may look like a foreign language, some actually are: sui generis, bildungsroman and my old friend schadenfreude all make appearances. And some entries just seem baffling: how did we end up using louche 27 times?

Shameful confession: I have never driven a car and, ever-longer odds are now, never will. On summer holidays I sit beside my wife, trying to look like a man who had his license suspended for compulsive, if entertaining, speeding. How this came about is a long story, involving a life spent only in city blocks and city flats and city sneakers, not to mention a bad case of odd wiring and jumpy coordination.

The Greenway is especially well suited to bicyclists, who, if they are moderately fit and don’t blow a tire on a broken apricot-brandy bottle, can cover the entire distance in a single leisurely morning or afternoon. Biking the Manhattan shoreline turns the city inside out, and gives the cyclist firsthand answers to questions that often stump even lifelong residents, such as: are there any decent places in Manhattan to go rock climbing, and what the heck do they keep under the Henry Hudson Parkway? Perhaps you yourself rode the Greenway on a recent, spectacular Friday afternoon, beginning and ending at the Battery, where, when you started, a man wearing a broad-brimmed hat was baiting a fishhook with a half-dollar-size crab, which he had selected from a joint-compound bucket at his feet.

*Fuck the circumflex — pour it into my hand!

The posh Yale Club in Midtown is fast becoming a cheesy wedding hall, with old-money members complaining of steady invasions of crowds from such lowbrow places as The Bronx.

“It’s crappy,” said a woman who insisted The Post identify her only as “Mrs. Harrison DeSilver.”

“I just want to put my feet up here, but instead, weddings are being shipped down from The Bronx,” groused DeSilver, a member for 50 years.

“On the weekends, it just gets ridiculous.”

DeSilver said the majority of the weddings at the club seem to involve people from The Bronx.

Local lore has it that Budweiser is, or at one point famously was, the drink of choice in Breezy Point, a flyspeck of a beach community that sits at the western tip of the Rockaways. The talk is that Breezy Point’s ZIP code — 11697 — once had the highest per capita consumption of Budweiser in the world.

And so it was with bitterness, and resignation, that many Breezy Point locals met the news on Monday that Anheuser-Busch, the St. Louis-based maker of Budweiser, was to be sold to a Belgian company for $52 billion.

“I don’t like it, I don’t like it a bit,” Mr. Dooley said. Then he raised his empty glass, which the bartender, Tom Coady, promptly refilled.

Breezy Point is overwhelmingly Irish-American, with an official year-round population of 4,226, a figure that is estimated to more than double in the summer. It is also fiercely insular, a private community that is run as a cooperative with its own security force.

A reporter and a photographer, setting out to gauge local reaction to Anheuser-Busch’s sale on Monday, were intercepted by a security guard at the community’s tiny shopping plaza, escorted back to the bungalow that houses Breezy Point’s security headquarters (along with several boxes of Budweiser cans confiscated from local teenagers), and tersely told to leave town. Officials later relented, and gave the reporter and photographer the go-ahead, so long as they promised to leave within the hour.

One hour, as it turned out, proved to be enough time to capture at least a fleeting sense of the devoutness instilled in the people of Breezy Point: They are as committed to their favorite beer as they are to their privacy. They would continue drinking Bud, they said, so long as its price and taste stayed the same.

Tens of thousands of people flocked to Central Park on Saturday to cheer on not only their favorite, oft-ridiculed rock band, but their favorite, oft-ridiculed state: New Jersey.

They crossed the Hudson River from Jersey City, Franklin Township and other parts of New Jersey to attend a free concert by Bon Jovi, the rock group from the Garden State that once released an album titled, simply, “New Jersey.”

“I would say 98 percent of the state loves Bon Jovi,” said Cheryl Vergara, 33, an administrative assistant from Clifton, N.J., one of thousands of people in a line that stretched for about 15 blocks on Fifth Avenue alongside the park on Saturday afternoon as they waited for the entrance at East 72nd Street to open.

. . .

On Saturday, about two hours before the concert began, Mr. Bon Jovi, wearing sunglasses, and three of his bandmates sat on a bench outside their dressing room trailer and answered questions from reporters about scalpers (“We did what we could for our fans,” he said), their set list (“Nothing but hits, baby”) and the experience of playing Central Park.

“It feels fantastic,” Mr. Bon Jovi said. “It’s pretty rarefied air to play the Great Lawn.”

Making my first trip to the Jersey shore, rattling along the ol’ local North Jersey coast line, felt a bit like Conrad’s Heart of Darkness. I was journeying farther than civilization’s reach, in search of something mysterious, powerful, awe-inspiring. In short, I hoped to glimpse the mighty and legendary Guido.

Okay, forgive the melodrama, but my New York friends did a good job of hyping this stereotype. “Asshole Jersey folk are cheesy and rude,” they warned, adding that “they have a name for people like you too: Bennys.”

For a Londoner, this sounded all too familiar. Jersey translated to me as Essex. Always in London’s shadow, also by the coast and populated by shirtless lads who love to pound the daylights out of each other, Essex natives tend to be drunk off their heads on luminous-colored alcopops while dancing to some primal beat. To be avoided at all costs. This Jersey voyage promised to bring all of my cowardice flooding out. Thus, when I passed a pack of Guido-looking guys outside a summer house recently in Belmar, I quickened my pace and looked straight at the pavement. Except soon I was unsure of my bearings (I was looking for a place called Bar A), and these guys’ beer-strewn yard made me think they would know the location of virtually every bar on the Shore (they did), so I doubled back and approached with caution.

Within a few minutes, I was kicking back in a deck chair and shooting the breeze with beer in hand.

. . .

I also got to witness the famed (yet still inexplicable) pride. “Jersey’s great, I love Jersey,” one declared. And at that moment, I couldn’t help but agree. So as I said goodbye to my new Guido friends, I’d like to think I bid farewell to some lazy stereotypes as well.

Oh, what I would give for a stronger dollar . . .