Mayoral candidate William Thompson owns lizards and David Yassky, candidate for comptroller, owns guinea pigs.

In the Bronx Supreme Court lobby. Not one, but two piles, no witnesses:

Authorities were disgusted to find two piles of human waste on the carpet in the lobby of Bronx Supreme Court around noon.

. . .

The incident immediately became part of the rich courthouse lore, taking its place among colorful tales of a woman who set dozens of toilet paper rolls on fire, a woman who stood at the entrance for days holding a spear and shield, and the visitor who tried to smuggle in a parrot.

Now that the City appears moving towards regulating pedicabs — just weeks after a horrible pedicab accident on the Williamsburg Bridge — you kind of start to wonder whether the circumstances around the accident are a little fishy:

Although a law exists that prohibits pedicabs from traveling on bridges and in tunnels, the city does not enforce the ban because of a lawsuit challenging the law’s licensing provisions. The suit has been resolved, but the city must draft new rules and hold hearings before the law can be enforced.

Detectives from the 90th Precinct were investigating. No criminal charges had been filed by Wednesday evening.

Other pedicab operators said they did not understand why a pedicab would be operating so early in the morning, particularly in that neighborhood.

“This is a very unusual circumstance, a pedicab on that bridge at that time of the day,” said Peter Meitzler, who owns Manhattan Rickshaw in the West Village.

Because then he’d have to suck up to unions and other special interests in order to get elected:

Mayor Michael R. Bloomberg is sounding the alarm over New York City’s pension system these days, calling it “out of control.”

Costs have ballooned, he says, threatening to bankrupt the city. Municipal unions and lawmakers in Albany created the crisis, he suggests, and left the city holding the bag.

But interviews and budget records show that the Bloomberg administration itself is responsible for much of the growth in city pension costs over the last eight years, and has repeatedly missed opportunities to rein in the spending.

Since Mr. Bloomberg took office, city contributions to the pension system have jumped nearly five-fold to $6.3 billion, from $1.4 billion, and they now account for one out of every 10 dollars in the city’s budget.

A major reason: the mayor has given the city’s 300,000 workers generous pay increases, guaranteeing that they retire with bigger pensions, which are typically 50 percent of salary. Such raises force the city to make heftier payments to the pension system now.

Salary increases approved by Mr. Bloomberg are responsible for nearly 30 percent of the growth in city pension costs from the 2002 through 2008 fiscal years — about $1.2 billion, according to the administration’s Office of Management and Budget. That figure is projected to rise to $1.7 billion by next year. At the same time, the mayor has offered support for legislation, passed in Albany, that has made pensions even more lucrative for many workers, costing the city tens of millions of dollars.

Mr. Bloomberg presents himself as a model of financial restraint who has stood up to special interests, like unions, in order to hold down city spending — a claim that is at the heart of his bid for a third term.

. . . the idea that pedicab drivers are getting payola in the form of lap dances:

A Midtown strip club has made raunchy rickshaws out of the three-wheeled rides — and management is plying the three-wheeler drivers with free meals and private tours to help promote the hot spot.

In the latest move in its ongoing ad campaign, Rick’s Cabaret has outfitted at least 50 pedicabs with its posters.

Club owners have asked drivers to hand out free passes and are giving them firsthand knowledge of the club’s offerings.

“The drivers always ask when the next ‘orientation’ will be,” said a taxi driver.

And what’s more, it leaves open the issue of where exactly we are supposed to relieve ourselves:

Astoria Walk, an alleyway connecting the neighborhood’s busy commercial strip on 31st Street to a Key Food parking lot, was recently given a $300,000 makeover by city-based Jenel Management. The company cleaned up the site and now rents space to six vendors, who sell sunglasses, flowers and other products at their kiosks, City Councilman Peter Vallone Jr. (D−Astoria) said.

The walk is located between an AT&T store and a Subway chain restaurant on 31st Street.

“It’s been an eyesore and a nose-sore for as long as I can remember,” Vallone said of the alleyway. “People used it as a bathroom. It was graffiti-strewn and people dumped garbage there.”

But Jenel Management white-washed the walls of the strip, added a newly paved brick road and provided space for the colorful kiosks which now reside there. The management company is currently seeking more vendors for the site, Vallone said.

Wow, that’s really cool. Who knew you could do so much with a web-based mapping application? Technology is neat:

Google’s technological expertise helped turn New York City’s main visitor center from a place to collect brochures into an interactive hub for planning a day — or a week — in the city. But the related Web site — NYCGo — proved so popular that it crashed almost as soon as it was unveiled and continued to operate slowly through Wednesday afternoon.

Mayor Michael R. Bloomberg and other city officials showed off the Official NYC Information Center, at 810 Seventh Avenue and West 53rd Street in Midtown, on Wednesday morning. At a cost of $1.8 million in private financing, the center was outfitted with video tabletop touch-screens equipped with Google Maps that allow users to assemble itineraries.

Mr. Bloomberg emphasized that the center was not just for tourists. “By extending these new travel resources to our residents, we are giving New Yorkers the chance to more actively take advantage of the city’s diverse and exciting neighborhoods,” he said.

The city’s tourism-promotion arm, NYC & Company, also officially unveiled a revamped Web site, linked to Travelocity’s reservations system, so that prospective visitors can immediately purchase airline tickets or hotel rooms.

Apparently NYC & Company gets 40% of its financing — and the obvious official stamp of approval — from the city. So it seems not kind of but actually really fishy that the Maps section of the site features the “7 Karaoke Bars Worth Singing About”, for example, with detailed directions how to get to each one. If I were a competing karaoke bar owner, I’d be pissed. Or a hotelier. Or a restauranteur. Or the proprietor of an “environmentally conscious watering hole” that wasn’t picked by the site’s editors. Or anyone who could benefit from the use of taxpayer money to stir up business.

The first rule of graft is never being improbably flashy with your loot:

An NYC Transit supervisor allegedly “living large” with luxury cars and five flat-screen televisions in her house is suspected of looting the cash-strapped agency with a bogus billing and kickback scheme, the Daily News has learned.

The MTA inspector general and the Brooklyn district attorney’s office are investigating whether Jacqueline Jackson, 50, inflated bills submitted by a Brooklyn company and then shared in the ill-gotten gains, law enforcement sources said.

The scope of the suspected fraud isn’t yet known but the early signs are alarming, sources said.

NYC Transit is believed to have used the company, AJI Records Retrieval, to do pre-trial tasks for at least a decade, paying the firm about $1.5 million, sources said.

. . .

Jackson earned $83,000 a year as director of legal support for the tort division in NYC Transit’s legal department.

Yet, Jackson had a flat-screen television in just about every room — including the bathroom — of her two-story brick house on E. 46th St. in the Flatlands section of Brooklyn, a source said.

She also had five or so fur coats in her closets, according to the source.

Outside, a Mercedes-Benz S430 luxury sedan was in the driveway. Jackson also drives a Lincoln Navigator.

. . .

“She’s living large,” one of Jackson’s neighbors said. “Inside the house is so beautiful.”

More than three years ago the mayor was running for reelection. Now it’s starting again. Maybe that’s the link:

The mysterious sweet smell that swept over parts of the city more than three years ago returned on Monday night.

The city’s 311 information line was flooded with callers reporting the smell of maple syrup, or something like it, wafting across several neighborhoods, a spokesman for the Office of Emergency Management said.

Nearly all of the calls — 35 in just a few hours — came from areas in Manhattan, the spokesman said, although one caller reported smelling the sweet scent across the East River in Queens.

Department of Environmental Protection agency investigators were searching for the source of the smell late Monday night and early Tuesday morning, the agency’s spokesman said.

For more on the mysterious, still unexplained Smell of 2005: The Sweet Smell Of Maple Doughnuts, Or Perhaps Eggos, Smell Returns? Mysterious Smell Comes, Goes And Leaves No Clues In Its Wake, Sweet Syrupy Smell, I Wish I Knew How To Quit You!.

Wow, the much maligned “Superblock” of the 1960s gets landmark designation in Greenwich Village:

Three towers that have dominated the Greenwich Village skyline for 40 years were given historic landmark status yesterday — a move that will make it harder for the property owner, New York University, to expand on the site.

More democracy, not less:

Setting up a showdown over one of the most divisive issues in recent political memory, Speaker Christine C. Quinn announced Tuesday that the City Council would vote Thursday on Mayor Michael R. Bloomberg’s plan to revise the term limits law so he can pursue four more years in office.

Supporters of the change said the move reflected Mr. Bloomberg’s and Ms. Quinn’s confidence that they have gathered the 26 Council votes needed to pass the legislation.

There are also signs that public opinion is tilting against the change, and privately some allies of Ms. Quinn say she is anxious, if not desperate, to hold the vote before an advertising campaign opposing the change takes hold.

“If it’s not on Thursday, they’re in trouble,” said one council member who supports the bill, speaking on condition of anonymity so as not to upset the mayor or the speaker.

30 Democratic City Councilmembers revealed some of what they are thinking regarding the mayor’s plan to permanently raise the number of terms via a Council vote. Time for a roll call:

At the meeting, many council members expressed support for changing term limits, which would force dozens of them from office next year, but said they were deeply uncomfortable doing so themselves because New Yorkers had voted for it twice.

Several lashed out at Mr. Bloomberg, saying that the mayor and his wealthy friends had orchestrated a campaign to rewrite the law without consulting with council members, according to those in attendance, who described the meeting on condition on anonymity for fear of offending colleagues.

“This one billionaire is now controlling our government, like a dictator,” Councilwoman Darlene Mealy, who represents Brooklyn, said during the meeting, colleagues said. Ms. Mealy did not return phone calls after the meeting.

Normally, “like a dictator” is an offensive rhetorical overreach. Not in this context!

Roll call — Lewis Fidler comes out in favor of self-serving legislation to extend his Council career:

But several members argued that even if the method of changing the law was unsavory, they remained philosophically opposed to a two-term limit and would act to change it.

Lewis A. Fidler, a councilman from Brooklyn, said he told the group that “this is about whether term limits are good government or bad government. I think it’s bad government.”

Roll call — John Liu, finally understanding the difference between good grandstanding and bad:

According to those in the room, roughly eight members spoke in favor of the legislation revising the law to three terms; eight spoke against it; and four asked questions that did not reveal their position.

Queens Councilman John C. Liu, who has emerged as a leader in the effort to stop the mayor’s plan, gave what many considered the most moving speech. As he recounted after the meeting, he told his colleagues, “I came into government with a pretty cynical attitude, but over the last six years I came to believe in the system. But in one fell swoop, what has happened here has decimated my belief in that system.”

Roll call — Robert Jackson, expanding on his personal philosophy of representative government and principles:

Robert Jackson, a Manhattan councilman, offered a rousing defense of the legislation under consideration, saying he has always opposed term limits and would not let public opinion sway him. “Even if 80 percent of my constituents are in favor of the death penalty, I wouldn’t vote for it,” he said. “The same is true for term limits. It’s a matter of principle.”

The issue of the back-door referendum:

A few members, like David I. Weprin, of Queens, questioned why Mr. Bloomberg did not attempt to change term limits through a public referendum.

But Peter F. Vallone Jr., of Queens, said that a referendum would cost millions of dollars to organize, a cost the city should not bear while the economy is faltering.

Solution — have the mayor bankroll a special election. It would be “altruistic” . . .

Roll call — Domenic Recchia, on the subject of “ample opportunity” to voice opinions:

After the meeting, Councilman Domenic M. Recchia Jr. of Brooklyn, who said he favors the extension, explained: “A lot of us council members feel that passing it through legislation is giving ample opportunity to the voters of the city to voice their opinions.”

He added: “If the voters don’t like their council member, they can vote him out of office. And if they don’t like the mayor, they can get rid of him too.”

And, finally, contra Joyce Purnick, evidence that billionaire term limit-hater Ronald S. Lauder may not be in on the plan after all:

As the Council debated, Mr. Bloomberg’s aides scrambled to shore up the support of Mr. Lauder, the term limits advocate and cosmetics heir.

After agreeing last week to support a third term for Mr. Bloomberg, Mr. Lauder vowed on Sunday night to fight the mayor’s plan to permanently change the limits to three terms from two, calling it a “terrible mistake.”

Last week, Mr. Lauder privately agreed to support a one-time change of the law to three terms, to allow Mr. Bloomberg to seek re-election in the middle of an economic crisis. But he was angry to learn that the mayor was pushing for a permanent change of the law.

Mr. Bloomberg’s staff argued that there were two reasons a permanent change was preferable: It was less likely to face legal challenge and would appeal to more City Council members. When Mr. Bloomberg learned of Mr. Lauder’s frustration, he and his aides suggested a deal in which Mr. Lauder would sit on a 2010 charter commission committee, which would have the authority to change the law back to a two-term limit. In return, Mr. Lauder would agree to not fight the mayor’s plans to alter the law.

But Mr. Lauder, after appearing to back such a deal, balked on Sunday night, people familiar with the matter said. His reversal left City Hall staff members confused, as one said, and flustered.

The Times’ David Carr goes local and explains how the city’s major editorial boards slid into the tank for the mayor:

Mr. Bloomberg said that he understood the situation and did not take the people’s verdict lightly. “But as newspaper editorialists and others have pointed out,” he said, “the current law denies voters the right to choose who to vote for — at a time when our economy is in turmoil and the Council is a democratically elected representative body.”

It is no coincidence that Mr. Bloomberg cited voices from the city’s opinion leaders. With a fiscal crisis at hand, the business leaders of New York has already held a private referendum and decided who the next mayor should be. So in spite of his rather breathtaking grab for another term, there will be no opprobrium forthcoming from the editorial pages of the city’s newspapers.

Before Mr. Bloomberg took this controversial step — remember when Rudolph W. Giuliani got clobbered for seeking three more months in office after Sept. 11? — he made the rounds and locked up the support of the editorial pages of The New York Post, The New York Times and The Daily News, three city newspapers not known for moving in lock step.

. . .

To set the stage, the mayor had spent the last month making plain his interest in staying put at City Hall. He did not post a Web site or drop items in various blogs, but instead called Howard J. Rubenstein, a master of the city’s power grid. Meetings were set up with the owners of the daily newspapers, as well as with potential opponents and the city’s corporate overlords.

It was a gambit that would not have been out of place in the 1970s — or the 1870s, for that matter. This being a Bloomberg administration, there were no smoke-filled rooms, but there was definitely the sense that issues of civic moment were being handled in private environs.

“The only thing that my clients have been talking about for the past few weeks is the fiscal dilemma that this city is facing,” said Mr. Rubenstein, the public relations mogul who helped broker a deal in 1975 involving Abraham D. Beame, then mayor of the city, and Governor Hugh L. Carey back when the feds told the city to more or less drop dead.

“I did step up because I want to see the city survive and prosper,” Mr. Rubenstein said, “and I think we all agree that he is the person who we would like to see leading us through this crisis.”

In mid-September, after a year of talking on and off, Mr. Bloomberg and Rupert Murdoch, who owns The New York Post, met for dinner at an Italian restaurant on the Upper East Side and sealed a deal. Arthur Sulzberger Jr., publisher of The New York Times, had two breakfasts with the mayor, and although no specific commitments were made, an understanding was reached.

Mortimer B. Zuckerman, owner of The Daily News, said he had no trouble throwing his support behind Mr. Bloomberg. He said there had been no cabal, no conspiracy, just three newspaper publishers all arriving at the same conclusion at a critical juncture in the life of the city.

“Suggesting that the publishers can decide who the next mayor is is a little like being a 90-year-old named in a paternity suit,” Mr. Zuckerman said on the phone. “I only wish we had that kind of power. I think he has been a remarkable mayor, we face tremendous challenges as a city right now, and it’s clear that he is the person for the job.”

No need for referendum, by the way:

Council Speaker Christine Quinn disclosed Thursday that the mayor’s bill will request a permanent extension of term limits instead of a one-time waiver.

The question of whether to extend term limits permanently to three four-year terms from two — rather than just once for Bloomberg and other incumbents — is one of the most contentious aspects of the controversial move.

“As I understand the mayor’s bill, it is a bill that would permanently change term limits from eight years to 12 years,” said Quinn in a seeming slip.

. . . rewriting the law like you’re the Hugo Chavez of the Northeast is something different. And that press conference still doesn’t really provide a reason why this is a good idea:

Mayor Michael R. Bloomberg announced on Thursday that he would abandon his earlier opposition to changing the term limits law and seek a third term as mayor, arguing that the economic crisis buffeting the nation called for continuity in municipal leadership.

“The good news is that we have planned for a slowdown in New York, but we may well be on the verge of a meltdown,” Mr. Bloomberg said, “and it’s up to us to rise to the occasion.”

He added that a third term “is a challenge I want to take on for the people of New York.”

At a noontime news conference at City Hall, the mayor did not detail how the law, which voters have twice approved through referendums, would be overhauled.

“Should the City Council vote to amend term limits, I plan to ask New Yorkers to look at my record of independent leadership and then decide if I’ve earned another term,” he said. “As always, it will be up to the people to decide, not me.”

The mayor maintained he was still a supporter of term limits. “You’re not taking away term limits,” he said. “You’re simply going from two terms to three terms.”

So if next November the economy is in better shape, we can expect that you won’t run? Is that a promise?

No, not this mayor. “The Mayor’s Dangerous Idea” was the title of a Times editorial in 2001 that argued against Giuliani’s idea to extend his term three months to deal with the aftermath of Sept. 11:

Mayor Rudolph Giuliani wants to extend his current term of office into 2002, postponing the inauguration of a new mayor for several months. This is a terrible idea. Neither New York City nor the nation has ever postponed the transfer of power because the public was convinced it could not get along without the current incumbent. The very concept goes against the most basic of American convictions, that we live in a nation governed by rule of law.

To suggest that the city would be incapable of getting along without Mr. Giuliani after the end of the year undermines New York’s sense of self-sufficiency and normality, which the mayor himself has worked so hard to restore. While Mr. Giuliani has been a great leader during this crisis, the truth is that no one is indispensable. George Washington understood that when he rejected repeated attempts to keep him in office indefinitely. Washington was followed in the presidency by a long line of successors, some of them distinctly mediocre. But the country went on, because people put their faith in the democratic process and not in the strength of any one individual.

Mr. Giuliani has asked his three possible successors to agree to postpone the next inauguration and let him stay on for a few more months to continue his work on the city’s recovery. He and his supporters are holding out the threat that if the mayor is not given his wish, they will mount an attempt to repeal the term limits law so he can run for re-election in November. They argue that he needs just a few extra months to finish the most critical work in the wake of an enormous disaster. But one critical task after another is going to crop up for the foreseeable future. And history suggests that the worst time to change the election rules is right before an election, in a time of crisis.

. . .

Mr. Giuliani already has the ability to make sure the transfer of power is smooth. The mayor should begin working immediately to bring his potential successors up to speed. When he leaves office Jan. 1, he should urge key members of his own administration to stay on to finish the work they are doing if his successor wishes them to stay. The best way for Mr. Giuliani to help New York City after Jan. 1 is not by retaining power but by giving it up in the most generous way possible.

All of which is interesting given the Times’ editorial this morning endorsing Bloomberg’s proposal to temporarily overturn term limits to allow himself and all members of the City Council a chance to run for a third term:

The bedrock of American democracy is the voters’ right to choose. Though well intentioned, New York City’s term limits law severely limits that right, which is why this page has opposed term limits from the outset. The law is particularly unappealing now because it is structured in a way that would deny New Yorkers — at a time when the city’s economy is under great stress — the right to decide for themselves whether an effective and popular mayor should stay in office.

Partly for this reason, and partly to extend their own political careers, a majority of City Council members are thinking about amending the city law to allow elected officials to serve three consecutive terms instead of two. That would permit Mayor Michael Bloomberg to run again in 2009 and could also prolong the service of council members and other senior elected officials. Mr. Bloomberg, who is expected to announce on Thursday that he will seek a third term if he can, likes the idea a lot.

We do, too. But we would go further and ask the Council to abolish term limits altogether — not to serve any individual’s political career but to serve the larger cause of democracy.

Which really is to say, we’re not serious about this at all. Think back to the large outpouring of support for Giuliani after Sept. 11 — “mayor for life” and all that. Does the Times editorial board really — no, seriously, really — think Bloomberg has more good will right now than Giuliani did after Sept. 11?

It makes a lot of people uncomfortable to legislatively rewrite a law that voters have twice approved at the ballot box — in 1993 and 1996. It makes us uncomfortable, too, and we previously took the position that any change should be left to the voters. But we have concluded now that changing the law legislatively does not make us nearly as uncomfortable as keeping it. It is within the rights of the Council, itself an elected body, to do so.

Term limits are seductive, promising relief from mediocre, self-perpetuating incumbents and gridlocked legislatures. They are also profoundly undemocratic, arbitrarily denying voters the ability to choose between good politicians and bad, especially in a city like New York with a strong public campaign-financing system, while automatically removing public servants of proven ability who are at a productive point in their careers.

But again — who exactly — exactly who — is agitating for a change? Is this something families discuss over dinner, expressing fear that their elected representative who is right in the middle of a productive point in his career won’t have had enough time to fulfill his legacy? Or is this coming from the people who would truly be affected by term limits, which is to say, the mayor and the City Council?

The City Council members who want to change the law are not alone. A survey in The Times last month found that at least two dozen local governments are suffering buyer’s remorse about the term limits they adopted, mostly in the 1990s. One common complaint is that they force politicians to focus on small-bore projects that can be achieved quickly rather than visionary ideas. The constant churning also diminishes accountability in governmental institutions like the City Council.

See, elected officials in governments everywhere are unhappy that they only have a limited time in office! As much as I’m excited to let council members explore visionary ideas, I have a feeling New York City will somehow survive.

Then there’s the up-is-down argument that this is actually more democratic:

Most places that are trying to relax term limits are likely to do so via the ballot box, with several referendums due in November. There is a chance that a vote on the issue could be organized early next year in New York in conjunction with special elections to the City Council. But such elections do not attract many voters. In the end, a vote by the Council is probably the most democratic way to address the matter.

And if you don’t like it, vote the bums out:

It is worth repeating: This is a rule that needs to be abolished. If the voters don’t like the result, they can register their views at the polls.

Good idea. It almost makes you want to hope that Bloomberg, despite the millions he will spend, will go down horribly next November.

Ultimately, you have to wonder who is so excited about a third Bloomberg term? The Times’ report clarifies:

With his decision, Mr. Bloomberg is overruling the advice of his top three assistants at City Hall — Deputy Mayors Edward Skyler, Patricia E. Harris and Kevin Sheekey –who have expressed opposition to a third term.

Those aides have told the mayor — at times forcefully — that any campaign to challenge the term-limits law would look like an end run around voters, and could sully his legacy as a reform-minded outsider. Others have told the mayor that they may not remain for a full third term.

In the business community, however, the idea of a Bloomberg third term is popular. At charity balls and on golf courses, executives like the financier Steven Rattner, the developer Jerry I. Speyer and the media mogul Rupert Murdoch have encouraged him to seek a third term.

Got that? Wall Street, a developer and Rupert Murdoch. Given what has happened this past month, do you really want to trust those guys?

Figures:

Efforts by the Bloomberg administration to add accountability to the public school system have included moving quickly to shut down schools deemed beyond repair, and rewarding those that make significant progress on standardized tests. Those initiatives seemed to collide last week, when teachers and principals at five of the failed schools earned cash bonuses for their successes.

The Department of Education explained the apparent contradiction in its judgments largely as a question of short-term versus long-term goals. Students at the five schools — four of which closed last spring, the fifth scheduled to close in 2010 — consistently lagged far behind their peers citywide on state math and reading tests, often with less than 20 percent meeting state standards. But during the 2007-8 school year, each of the schools met the improvement targets set by the Education Department on their report cards, making them eligible for performance bonuses of about $3,000 per teacher and $7,000 for principals.

Taken with mercury fears, it could mean the end of sushi. Will pork belly be next? Time will tell:

Many New York sushi restaurants and seafood markets are playing a game of bait and switch, say two high school students turned high-tech sleuths.

In a tale of teenagers, sushi and science, Kate Stoeckle and Louisa Strauss, who graduated this year from the Trinity School in Manhattan, took on a freelance science project in which they checked 60 samples of seafood using a simplified genetic fingerprinting technique to see whether the fish New Yorkers buy is what they think they are getting.

They found that one-fourth of the fish samples with identifiable DNA were mislabeled. A piece of sushi sold as the luxury treat white tuna turned out to be Mozambique tilapia, a much cheaper fish that is often raised by farming. Roe supposedly from flying fish was actually from smelt. Seven of nine samples that were called red snapper were mislabeled, and they turned out to be anything from Atlantic cod to Acadian redfish, an endangered species.

What may be most impressive about the experiment is the ease with which the students accomplished it. Although the testing technique is at the forefront of research, the fact that anyone can take advantage of it by sending samples off to a laboratory meant the kind of investigative tools once restricted to Ph.D.’s and crime labs can move into the hands of curious diners and amateur scientists everywhere.

The project began, appropriately, over dinner about a year ago. Ms. Stoeckle’s father, Mark, is a scientist and early proponent of the use of DNA bar coding, a technique that greatly simplifies the process of identifying species. Instead of sequencing the entire genome, bar coders — who have been developing their field only since 2003 — examine a single gene. Dr. Stoeckle’s specialty is birds, and he admits that he tends to talk shop at the dinner table.

One evening at a sushi restaurant, Ms. Stoeckle recalled asking her father, “Could you bar code sushi?”

Dr. Stoeckle replied, “Yeah, I think you could — and if you did that, I think you’d be the first ones.”

Ms. Stoeckle, who is now 19, was intrigued. She enlisted Ms. Strauss, who is now 18.

Their field technique was simple, Ms. Stoeckle said. “We ate a lot of sushi.”

Or, as Dr. Stoeckle put it, “It involved shopping and eating, in which they were already fluent.”

They hit 4 restaurants and 10 grocery stores in Manhattan. Once the samples were home, whether in doggie bags or shopping bags, they cut away a small piece and preserved it in alcohol. They sent those off to the University of Guelph in Ontario, where the Barcode of Life Database project began. A graduate student there, Eugene Wong, works on the Fish Barcode of Life (dubbed, inevitably, Fish-BOL) and agreed to do the genetic analysis. He compared the teenagers’ samples with the global library of 30,562 bar codes representing nearly 5,500 fish species. (Commercial labs will also perform the analysis for a fee.)

Three hundred dollars’ worth of meals later, the young researchers had their data back from Guelph: 2 of the 4 restaurants and 6 of the 10 grocery stores had sold mislabeled fish.

. . . I’m pretty sure people would avoid them:

A survey of subway toilets found that nearly all the loos in Brooklyn, Queens and Manhattan stations were either locked or so poorly stocked and maintained that they were virtually unusable.

The review — by Brooklyn Assemblyman Dov Hikind — of 18 restrooms in three boroughs found 10 were locked and four of the open restrooms lacked toilet paper.

Only two, on Roosevelt Island and the Church Avenue F train station, were stocked and open — but the latter was being used by transit workers in an area inaccessible to straphangers, according to Hikind’s report.

. . .

But given the conditions of some bathrooms, riders may want to keep their distance. An assessor actually walked in on “two men engaged in sexual activity” during one bathroom evaluation, the report said.

The bad old days return to the South Street Seaport:

A mystery odor wafting through the seaport’s residential neighborhood for the past few weeks has restaurants reeling, homeowners gagging and tourists left holding their noses.

“It’s disgusting — like rotten fish left out on a sidewalk for a year,” said Venanzio Pasubio, 33, owner of ll Brigante, a restaurant on Front Street.

With the Fulton Fish Market long gone, theories abound on the origin of the odor. Some think it’s illegal dumping; others point fingers at the Waterfalls art project; one person insists that it’s the preserved corpses on display at “Bodies, the Exhibition” nearby.

. . .

Locals describe the smell as “dead rat,” “stinky cheese” and “raw sewage.”

“We’re supposed to be up and coming and trendy,” said resident Ellen Murphy. “Now we just smell like fish.”

The Post brought in smell scientist Dr. Avery Gilbert, author of “What the Nose Knows,” to investigate.

“Yes that is fish,” he said about the elusive smell. “But it’s also yeasty, like bread.”

He said the culprit is most likely “amines,” which is the fish-like smell of “proteins breaking down.”

Location Scout: South Street Seaport.

As a matter of fact, I do:

A Bronx City Councilwoman earmarked thousands of taxpayer dollars for a tenants association in her former apartment building — an association residents say doesn’t exist.

Councilwoman Maria Baez, a Democrat representing the Fordham and Kingsbridge sections, allocated $7,500 of her Fiscal Year 2008 discretionary funds to the 2401 Davidson Avenue Tenants Association, a group supposedly located in the six-story building she called home until 2005.

The building is also the registered headquarters for her campaign committee, “Friends of Maria Baez,” and home to her campaign treasurer, Nilda Velazquez, who lives in Baez’s former apartment.

But the building’s superintendent and more than a dozen residents interviewed at the 60-unit building said there is no tenants association.

“There’s no association here,” said Elias Guerra, the super.

The regular postal carrier said she couldn’t remember ever delivering a piece of mail to any tenants organization in the building.

Some residents remembered a now-disbanded organization — which last met four years ago.

“We don’t have one anymore,” said Vicky Reyes, listed as the treasurer of the defunct tenants group on an old flier. She said Baez was a member when she lived there.

Reyes said the association dissolved after the former president left several years ago, and hadn’t been active for about four years. She wasn’t aware of anyone trying to revive it.

Velazquez declined comment through family members.

Staffers at Baez’s Bronx district office told a Post reporter, “You’re not welcome here.”

Baez accused The Post of harassing her staff members, and said she only allowed constituent business to be conducted in her office.

She declined to answer specific questions about the tenants group.

“I will not allow anyone to assassinate my character as a Latina woman,” she said.

She added that the organizations she funds are “good organizations” that “provide important services for the community.”

Before the $7,500 could be paid to the tenants association, the council yanked the funding during the vetting process, council spokeswoman Maria Alvarado told the Post. She would not say when or why the funding was nixed.

Earlier: Budget Cuts Run Deep; Administration Even Asks City Council Members To Curtail Funding Of Phantom Community Groups.

Crazed ex? Pissed off creditor? No one knows:

Residents of a block in Boerum Hill have known for months that rogue urinators were defiling their street, but they never had the proof to convince local police of a scatological conspiracy on Dean Street — until now.

A two-liter container of human urine, complete with syringes bobbing in the waste, was found Sunday morning between Bond and Nevins streets — and the repulsive find was finally enough to prove to cops that residents were being tormented by micturating hellions and not merely dogs with overactive bladders.

“It’s absolutely gross,” said Joseph Samulski, who had the misfortune of finding the container on his front steps. “I don’t even know how you could accumulate that much urine.”

But on the brighter side, “It was the first time we were able to establish what we’ve been saying on our block — that someone has been pouring urine on cars.”

. . .

The pissing match broke out on the day of the block party last September, when several people emerged from their homes near the Nevins Street end of the block to encounter an overpowering stench of liquid waste on the street and in one man’s pickup truck.

Since then, that pickup truck has been showered at least two other times.

“Thankfully, whenever it happened, my truck needed a good washing anyway,” said good sport Kevin McGowan.

Because the press officer hasn’t been around that long anyway and reporters will write whatever you tell them:

It was near freezing outside, but Parks Commissioner Adrian Benepe wore swim trunks and sandals yesterday to the opening of the first indoor public pool built in the city in more than 40 years.

At 110,000 square feet, the Flushing Meadows Corona Park Aquatic Center in Queens is the largest recreational center ever built in a city park.

The facility cost $66.3 million and features three Olympic-sized pools, including one diving pool.

And when they say that it’s “the first indoor public pool built in the city in more than 40 years” what they mean is the first indoor pool not counting the one that opened back in 2004.

It’s actually more like a matchbook by the toilet than anything “fancy” like Chanel No. 5:

It’s the bureaucratic equivalent of trying to cover up bad body odor with Chanel No. 5.

For more than a year, residents of one Brooklyn neighborhood have been complaining about a stomach-churning smell wafting from the site of a former sewer pipe project.

The city’s response? Tossing nylon socks filled with pine deodorizer into the catch basins.

That hasn’t stanched the stench. In fact, locals say the scent of raw sewage is even more noticeable now.

“I think that adding the pine made the existing smell even more potent,” said Aaron Green, 27, one of the Bay Ridge residents who is sick of the stink.

The stink has been hovering over a stretch of Fort Hamilton Parkway between Marine Ave. and 99th St.

The odor cropped up in the summer of 2006 after the completion of a $6.9 million project to combine the underground sewer pipes there, residents say.

As complaints mounted, the community board notified the city Department of Environmental Protection, which began dumping piney perfume onto the site.

Lost in the discussion about the mysterious, still-unexplained one million new residents is that the number includes a previously overlooked army of 300,000 new seniors, making New York City the nation’s top retirement destination:

The city’s elderly population is projected to jump 44 percent by 2030, which means there will be roughly 1.35 million senior citizens comprising 20 percent of the city population. That includes roughly one-third of the projected additional 1 million New Yorkers the Bloomberg administration expects here then. That surge motivated the PlaNYC initiative to address issues such as the environment, energy and the city’s aging infrastructure — but not so much its aging population.

The City Council yesterday announced that the New York Academy of Medicine will receive $125,000 to develop a blueprint to prepare the city for its aging population. It’s expected by April.

“Our focus has been on the cost of care and biomedical research,” said academy president Jo Ivey Boufford. “This deals with prevention — how people can be as healthy as they can be, as long as they can. . . . We’re creating a blueprint for investment over a number of years and policy action over a number of years.”

The Advance makes the situation sound that much more dire:

With New York City’s population expected to boom, adding nearly 1 million more residents by 2030, demographers predict that the number of elderly dwellers will increase by 300,000.

. . .

“There’s been much discussion and planning, appropriately so, about what the future of New York City will look like in 2030,” Ms. Quinn said in respect of Mayor Michael Bloomberg’s environmental agenda to combat global warming. “But one of the things we’ve not yet looked at is the reality that by 2030, there will be 300,000 additional senior citizens in New York City.”

If only they asked, a consultant would have told them how it looked:

City Council members spending thousands in taxpayer dollars to buy new garbage cans bearing their names should think twice about the stink such a move might make, branding and political image consultants say.

Linda Passante, the managing partner of a New York-based brand development agency, the Halo Group, said that if she were advising council members, she’d tell them to steer clear of promoting themselves on waste receptacles.

“I don’t subscribe to the idea that any publicity is good publicity,” she said. “If I’m walking by a garbage pail and I’m smelling garbage and seeing a name associated with it,” it wouldn’t leave “a positive impression.”

The CEO and founder of Political Capitol, Kathryn Mahoney, said the idea that politicians would mount their names on garbage cans has “that desperate, sort of used-car sale feel to it, as if they are doing everything they can” to get their name out there.

“It gives you that automatic, negative feeling,” Ms. Mahoney, who said she advises members of Congress, said. “It feels kind of slick. And that’s the last thing you want as a politician.”

The Department of Sanitation said 21 council members, two former members, and President Scott Stringer of Manhattan have spent about $811,914 in public funds to buy 2,025 garbage cans with their names on them.

Yet they claim there is demand for valet parking at JFK:

The Port Authority introduced valet parking last week as part of the agency’s efforts to make the city’s three airports more hospitable.

Customers can drop off their cars on Lefferts Boulevard just south of the Belt Parkway, and hop on the AirTrain.

The fee is $36 a day, a little steeper than the charge at the terminal parking lots and considerably more than the cost of long-term parking.

“We believe there is a demand for this,” said PA spokesman Marc LaVorgna.

The anecdotal evidence well established, DEP officials will perform a formal olfactory survey of Hunts Point:

The city’s Department of Environmental Protection has tapped an engineering consulting firm to conduct an odor survey of Hunts Point over four days starting tomorrow, with the public asked to be the bloodhounds — phoning in when they pick up the scent.

The purpose of the survey is to identify the odors prevalent in the Hunts Point area and establish their sources.

The new pungency patrol is part of a seven-page agreement City Councilwoman Maria del Carmen Arroyo (D-South Bronx) wrangled from the DEP as the price for dropping her opposition to an expansion and upgrade of the Hunts Point Wastewater Treatment Facility to be built in her district.

The $235 million project was approved by the City Council Monday by a 48-to-0 vote.

The Council approval of several land-use actions will allow the DEP to begin work, expected to take eight years, on four egg-shaped, 130-foot-high “digester” tanks, where bacteria will break down sludge into a bio-solid for use as compost and fertilizer.

Tomorrow, inspectors from the Malcolm Pirnie Inc. consulting firm will be in Hunts Point from 9 a.m. to 5 p.m., ready to track down odors called in by residents to a special hotline.

They’ll be back in the evenings from 5p.m. to 10 p.m. on the following Monday and Thursday, then again on Tuesday, Sept. 25.

. . .

The DEP has even offered a list of descriptors useful for characterizing odors under three broad categories:

“Almond-like” odors might be sweet, smoky, earthy, metallic, acidic, oily or like mothballs.

“Sulfidic” odors could be yeasty, fruity, putrid, fecal, buttery or honeylike.

“Alcohol-like” smells may be rubbery, sooty, coffee-like, chemical or like fried chicken.

Three sightings makes a trend:

Sunbathers found a shark on Staten Island’s South Beach yesterday — a dead, blue-eyed beastie no more than 2 feet long.

The silver-skinned, dorsal-finned sand shark was no man-eater, but it fascinated beach-goers who found it floating near the northernmost end of the beach.

Victoria Torello of Prince’s Bay and Maria Sciabica of Grasmere called the city Parks Department in order to save the shark from becoming poked at and picked apart by seagulls and curious beachfolk. Parks scooped the animal into a black plastic bag and took it away, most likely to be trashed or composted.

“We just felt bad for it,” said Ms. Sciabica. “It’s God’s creature.”

Sand sharks are fairly prevalent in the New York Bay, according to marine environmentalist Jim Scarcella of the Natural Resources Protective Association, who occasionally sees them pulled up on fishing lines off the Ocean Breeze pier.

“They’re becoming more and more common because of changes in the ecosystem,” he said, noting that the scavengers will slither into shallow waters when food becomes scarce further in.

“The good news,” he added, “is that they pose absolutely no risk to bathers or swimmers.”

Another 2-foot sand shark, a live one, washed up at Coney Island over Labor Day weekend, prompting a lifeguard there to rescue it from the blows of frightened swimmers and coax it back to sea.

A 5-foot thresher shark also scared beachgoers at Rockaway Beach in Queens that weekend: A greater threat, because the thresher is known to be more aggressive, Scarcella said.

Striking taxi drivers claim success so far:

The alliance’s organizer, Bhairavi Desai, said the action was a “resounding success,” adding that a vast majority of drivers stayed away from work.

“Look at the roads,” she told reporters.

Ed Ott, the executive director of the New York City Central Labor Council, an A.F.L.-C.I.O. umbrella group for the city’s unions, joined her at a news conference and said the strike was effective.

“If you can’t tell the difference between yesterday at Penn Station,” he said, “and today, you’re blind or you’re a tourist.”

If the mayor wants to get creative, he can perhaps play off of that theme during the press conference . . .