The New York Times is “considering” charging people to view its website. The nerve of them:

N.Y. Times publisher Arthur Sulzberger Jr. was quoted in the article as saying: “It gets to the issue of how comfortable are we training a generation of readers to get quality information for free. That is troubling.”

No! How would we be able to poke fun at the Sunday Styles section? Give them grief over that saccharine Metropolitan Diary feature? First the MTA bans photography, now the Times wants to charge us. The golden era of the internet may be over!

Then again, if, say, the New York Post wants to pick up the slack (permalinks, please!), I wouldn’t be opposed. Guaranteed web traffic — not to mention a great way to justify all those goddamn pop-ups!

Of course, the Daily News already offers free access with permanently linked stories. They may be the one to look towards.

Yes, “Immigrant Street Poetry.” Ugh. The Times details “The Grate Amrican Dreem”:

This may be the age of Internet pop-ups and text-message marketing, but lots of businesses - especially small businesses - still do most of their advertising with old-fashioned low-tech signs. And just as the eyes are said to be windows to the soul, these storefront signs - which often come with fractured grammar and mysterious spelling - can be portals on a great city that is regenerating itself with a flood of new immigrants.

The signs are there to lure customers, of course, but they can do much more. Four out of 10 current New Yorkers were born in a foreign country, more than at any other time since the 1920’s, and many have gone immediately into business. Their signs can form a style all their own, and style, as E. B. White, a passionate New Yorker at heart, once observed, is sometimes nothing but “sheer luck, like getting across the street.”

With such luck, the errors in usage add unintended meaning, like the East Side pizzeria that for a long time listed “1 litter” bottles of soda on its menu. So many one-liter bottles end up as litter that such a change might be appropriate.

Which is a long-winded way of saying, all you all can’t spell for shit but you’re loveable just the same!

But as usual, our hard-working, slightly less literate bretheren have the last laugh:

One pizzeria on 41st Street has spaguetti with clam sause, and a lunch cart on Lexington Avenue and 46th Street helps out-of-towners by spelling knish “kanish.”

“People tell me it’s wrong and I told my brother-in-law, who is the owner, but he doesn’t want to change it,” said Wael Ahmed, 39, an Egyptian immigrant who works at the stand with kanish and chees steak on the menu. “Sometimes people on the street also tell me it’s wrong, but I tell them it doesn’t matter because we don’t sell knish anymore.”

To crudely paraphrase New York City uber-Historian Ken Jackson, history is for losers — step off, Times!

Sounds like the 100th New Year’s Eve in Times Square went well — at least according to the Times, which was on hand to sketch a scene full of sawhorses, dropped balls, flashed abdomens and the occasional transvestite:

Last night, 100 years after the first organized New Year’s celebration in Times Square, close to 1 million people crowded Times Square to welcome 2005.

The weather was unusual. The temperature at midnight was 50 degrees, and there was no rain, sleet or snow, just showers of confetti.

At midnight, with blizzards of plastic rainbow confetti erupting from the tops of skyscrapers, police officers lit cigars and flipped open their cellphones to call loved ones. Couples kissed, and on the main stage, Mayor Michael R. Bloomberg and Secretary of State Colin Powell, who pressed a button that dropped the ball, locked arms and swayed awkwardly to Frank Sinatra’s version of “New York, New York.”

The lines of police barriers overtook car lanes, becoming a maze that corralled an unexpectedly large number of revelers - one officer said there appeared to be more than 750,000 there to watch the ball drop.

Old-timers grumbled, recalling the years when sawhorses were fewer and when onlookers were allowed to flood Times Square without having to leave lanes open for satellite trucks and V.I.P.’s whom nobody recognized.

Or years when it was so cold that only the truly courageous proved themselves by enduring five hours crushed between barriers like ice cubes in a metal tray.

Cue hapless tourists:

Among those on hand was David Pepsny, a carpenter, who found himself crushed into a crowd that had mushroomed suddenly at Eighth Avenue and 49th Street about 5 p.m.

After an 11-hour drive from his hometown, Ashland, Ohio, Mr. Pepsny and two friends had arrived in what they thought was New York City. Actually, they were in Jersey City, but just a short while later, they reached their destination, the Ramada Inn at Kennedy Airport.

“Our hotel lady was kind of laughing at us,” Mr. Pepsny said.

. . .

Another Ohioan, Nate Thobaben, a West Point cadet, lifted his shirt and flashed his abdomen at young women nearby.

Mr. Thobaben, 19, said he was only trying to cool off.

“It’s really warm, but then again I’m from Ohio and we already got 10 inches of snow in one night,” he said.

Of course, it’s not a Times article without noting how the other half lives:

Ringing in the year in Times Square was not for everyone.

Miss Trixie, a transsexual who said she was an actress between jobs, was on Avenue of the Americas in Greenwich Village talking about how she had been sober for 49 days and was determined to make it 50. She said she was returning to Brooklyn as soon as she finished hustling for small change.

“Old people and old places,” she said about Times Square, a veneer of 5 o’clock shadow showing through her made-up face. “People and places you want to stay away from.

“My goal in 2005 is to be a productive citizen in society working for some establishment in New York City.”

She rattled the coins in her Taco Bell cup as people walked by.

On an E train to Parsons Boulevard, in Queens, with a few hours left in 2004, Gerardo Rivas, 29, pulled off his royal blue jacket and settled onto a bench seat.

Mr. Rivas, who moved to New York from Mexico four years ago, was going home to his apartment to spend New Year’s Eve with his wife and two children.

His youngest, a boy, was born in 2004. Mr. Rivas, who said he was grateful for his new life in the city, gave him an American name: Steve.

Mr. Rivas said he was also staying home to get a good night’s sleep before going to work in the morning. His goal in 2005 was to provide more for his family.

Then the train pulled away from 50th Street, pulling him toward the new year.

And with that, we give thanks for what we have and look forward to a happy, healthy and productive new year.

In honor of our visitors from the so-called “flyover states” (and because no one else is around), the Times op-ed board extols the virtues of tailgating:

The proposal for a $1.4 billion Jets football stadium on the Far West Side of Manhattan has many flaws, which we’ve enumerated on other occasions. Now the Times sports columnist Dave Anderson has added another. The new stadium would offer mostly garage parking, and would thus interfere with a pastime that a lot of fans find more enjoyable than watching the Jets themselves: tailgating.

On two recent Sundays, Mr. Anderson toured the vast concrete parking lots surrounding Giants Stadium in New Jersey’s Meadowlands, and conducted an admittedly random and unscientific poll of about 150 tailgating fans.

The results were clear: 80 fans wanted to stay where they were, 55 would attend games at a stadium on Long Island or in Queens (like Shea, where the Jets once played, and where fans could keep tailgating). Only 15 preferred a stadium in the city.

Proximity to one’s home was a factor, but the most important reason to oppose the stadium plan was the feeling that a Manhattan stadium would not just trifle with the tailgating tradition, but pretty much destroy it. The Jets, who say they have conducted polls in which the “West Side came out on top,” insist that fans will be able to gather on the streets and at local bars and restaurants.

But that’s not tailgating. Tailgating is acres of S.U.V.’s and pickups, grills and trestle tables groaning under mounds of chicken and ribs and burgers, tents to keep out the rain and the cold, and R.V.’s to house the TV for watching another game.

“Your team can’t always be great,” Mr. Anderson quoted one fan as saying, “but the tailgating is.”

Story by story, bit by bit, those effete elitists at the Times are dismantling the myth of the working man. “Tough Guys, Shapely Eyebrows”:

In a quiet revolution sweeping the blue-collar precincts of metropolitan New York, mechanics, firemen and construction workers - most of them insistently heterosexual - are unapologetically doting on their eyebrows. Inspired by “Queer Eye for the Straight Guy” and the well-coiffed rap artists on BET, cowed by tweezers-wielding girlfriends and goaded by wisecracking co-workers, they are plucking and waxing as never before. And they don’t lie about it.

“Eyebrows were the last frontier,” said Louis DeJesus, a hair stylist whose Bronx salon, International Nails and Beauty, started seeing an influx of men about two years ago. “Everyone’s doing it now. And once a guy starts doing it, he gets addicted.”

. . .

From the immigrant enclaves of Queens to the minimalls of Long Island, modest salons that once catered to women find themselves inundated by primping, preening men, most of them young working-class guys who tend to spend their weekends at dance clubs. Even the Gotti brothers, the ones with their own reality television show, have embraced a minimalist approach to facial hair.

Carol Cedeno, a manicurist at Tom’s Scissorhands, a salon in Paterson, N.J., has seen the trend. “A lot of the guys used to be embarrassed, but now they just walk in and say it proudly: ‘I want my eyebrows done,’ ” she said, noting that her salon offers a wax job for $5. “Sometimes their eyebrows end up looking more dainty than their girlfriends’.”

When he first started tweezing last year, Al Bernal, a 31-year-old auto mechanic from Newark, said his friends called his sexuality into question. “They said I looked, you know, gay,” said Mr. Bernal, whose style is maintained by his fiancée. “Of course, these days they do it, too, and they love it because they get a lot more attention from chicks.”

Unintentionally adopting a look that got its start in gay clubs, Mr. Bernal and his friends - who once aspired to the roughneck street thug look - have also discovered the allure of the year-round tan, the shaved chest and the eye-catching clubbing outfit. Diamond studs are in. Flashy gold chains are out. Guys, without even a pause, call it “the pretty-boy look.”

Robbie Wootton, the owner of Spirit, a Chelsea nightclub that caters to the bridge-and-tunnel set on Saturday nights, says the transformation has been stunning. “Never mind the eyebrows,” he said. “These guys shave their whole bodies, even their arms. If you bump up against them in the early morning you can feel the stubble growing back. It’s like rubbing sandpaper.”

The Times, doing a fancy-pants version of that Jay Leno “Jay Walking” thing, asks subway riders what the cryptic quotes in the subway station under Bryant Park mean. Hilarity ensues:

In the subway there is a riddle disguised as a declaration. It is engraved in gray stone on a wall of the station at 42nd Street and Avenue of the Americas, atop a staircase to the platform where the B, the D, the F and the V rumble by.

“Nature must not win the game,” the inscription reads, “but she cannot lose.” Each day the words float briefly before thousands of eyes. A few riders pause to ponder them as they go on their way, perhaps seeking a clue in the backdrop, a mosaic of what look like berry-bearing vines creeping through and eating away at the gray stone.

The simple-sounding sentence, the inscription says, was written by Carl G. Jung, the psychologist and mythographer. What does it signify? And what is it doing in the subway?

Who knows? Not Joe Noto.

“Honestly, I couldn’t tell you what it means,” Mr. Noto, an electrician on his way home to Dyker Heights, Brooklyn, said the other day. Many other riders refused even to entertain the question.

Of course, this is New York, so no Jay Walking here:

But two recent afternoons spent conducting a semi-random survey turned up a fair share of subterranean philosophers intrigued by the cryptic pronouncement, which has been on the wall since 2002. Was it meant as a reassurance or a warning? Is it a good thing if nature wins, or a bad thing?

A police officer patrolling the station, Officer Russell King of Transit District 1, which includes the 42nd Street station, has worked enough slow shifts to have had time to chew over Jung’s words. “It seems like he’s an urbanite,” Officer King said. “It seems like we as a people in this city have to overcome everything to live.” But, he added, there’s a twist: we are part of nature, so if we defeat nature, we defeat ourselves. “It’s like a double negative, a Catch-22,” he said. “If we win, we lose.” Officer King’s partner on patrol, Wayne Steele, picked up the riff. “No matter what,” said Officer Steele, a beefy man with a prominent mustache, “nature’s going to win.”

Some people tried to break the sentence into its parts.

“‘Nature must not win,’” repeated an unassuming man in a blue-and-red windbreaker, who said he was a designer of women’s accessories and volunteered only his first name, Emilio, and his home country, Ecuador. “So man - man could win?” Emilio asked. “I think nature is bigger than man. At first glance, it makes me think two things. One is the grabs for a global empire - the power of the big corporations trying to run the world.”

A southbound F train pulled in and Emilio got on. “But beyond the greed itself,” he continued, “unless the people can make decisions in the world, it’s much easier to do just a few people’s interests.”

The train stopped at 34th Street. Emilio got out. “Nature,” he said. “Who controls nature? Nature is God. It’s the fight between the power of man’s greed and the power of God. And when it comes to reality, it doesn’t matter how much money you have, you can’t control the world.” He disappeared through the turnstiles.

But just so you know, some riders — not unsmart ones, we! — told the Times that the installation just makes them feel stupid:

“I don’t like it,” said Martin Bernier, a transplanted Parisian who owns a wholesale bakery in Queens. “I don’t think it’s appropriate for people to see in the subway. Why do they put this here? Who is Carl Gustav Jung? I know who he is now because I made a small investigation. But it makes me feel ignorant.”

Mr. Bernier pointed out that the Jung installation was part of a much larger piece that proceeds down the long corridor to the Fifth Avenue exit and includes quotations from Ovid, the nursery rhyme “Jack and Jill,” and an obscure passage from “Finnegan’s Wake,” each being invaded from above by mosaics of golden tree roots and from below by mosaics of bedrock.

Sipping quickly from his coffee cup, Mr. Bernier, 52, led a reporter down the corridor. “Look at this,” he said. “James Joyce. He’s Irish, right?” The decay hinted at in the mosaics, Mr. Bernier said, assaulted the eye.

“I’m glad to talk about this,” Mr. Bernier confided, “because I was very disturbed by this corridor. I have an average education, and I feel frustrated. It made me feel like an idiot.”

Finally, for the record, an expert’s opinion:

Meredith Sabini, a Jungian psychologist who recently compiled a book of Jung’s writings on nature, “The Earth Has a Soul,” said the quotation referred to a struggle between the conscious and the unconscious, or “natural,” mind.

“Jung is saying we’re not supposed to follow instinct blindly,” Ms. Sabini said in a telephone interview from her office in California. “We’re supposed to have consciousness. But that doesn’t mean you’re supposed to kill nature. Because the unconscious is wisdom that has grown over the millions of years we have been Homo sapiens.”

The full quotation, from Jung’s “Alchemical Studies,” says: “Nature must not win the game, but she cannot lose. And whenever the conscious mind clings to hard and fast concepts and gets caught in its own rules and regulations - as is unavoidable and of the essence of civilized consciousness - nature pops up with her inescapable demands.”

Bonus Point: MTA’s Arts for Transit Pages (curiously, no “Under Bryant Park”).

Yesterday was the 2004 Macy’s Thanksgiving Day Parade, which we viewed from the tenth floor of Five Times Square.

The Times surveyed the scene from the street:

Soft mud squashed underfoot, idle breezes wafted into open windows, and an estimated 2.5 million spectators who lined up along Central Park West and Broadway basked in a 64-degree morning that felt more like early May than late November.

After all the hand-wringing that wind gusts might ground the giant, helium-inflated balloons, the parade turned into one of the most placid and postcard-perfect in years.

More of the postcard:

As usual, the Technicolor convoy began creeping through the Upper West Side around 9 a.m. and reached Herald Square around noon. It was led this year by a helmet-wearing Super Grover, the impish Sesame Street character.

Barbie characters sang, and Broadway actors plugged their musicals. Rock-faced marching-band leaders high-stepped by. Celebrities waved. Dancers grinned. Children in the Dakota apartment building pressed against the windows to get a better look.

Even more postcard:

Strangers took photos of one another, posed in front of giant floating turkeys. Kids played catch in the street, families planned afternoon football games, and a homeless man on 72nd Street sipped from a large Starbucks cup.

And last but certainly not least, the signature Times sociological longview:

The parade’s patriotic tone in the years after 9/11 had been subsumed by exultant commercialism.

The parade’s 59 balloons included M&M’s candies characters, Ronald McDonald and the game icon Mr. Monopoly. As they floated past, children waved and called out “SpongeBob!” and “Pikachu!” to get the balloons’ attention.

When less-commercial floats and generic turkey and elf balloons passed by, the crowds applauded politely, like parents at a mediocre piano recital.

In all, a day to remember!

Oh, and about that Pikachu thing: