I Hope Those Three Tons Hit Their Target

San Men must need more overtime or something:

Times Square revelers will greet the new year amid a blizzard of 7,000 pounds of confetti — three times the usual amount, event organizers said yesterday.

A hundred confetti-tossers will hurl the more than 3 tons of shredded paper from 11 buildings during a five-hour celebration leading up to midnight.

And this year, the party paper will be inscribed with such goodwill messages as “peace,” “celebrate” and “dance,” according to event coordinator Treb Heining.

“It’s inspirational,” Heining said of the celebration, which is sponsored by retailer Target.

Beginning at 7 p.m. a countdown at the top of each hour will prompt a 1,000-pound torrent of the flame-proof notes, called word-fetti. Fireworks will accompany the first five confetti drops leading up to the finale.

“It’s millions and millions and millions of separate pieces,” said Heining, of Newport Beach, Calif., who has been managing the Times Square confetti drops for 15 years.

. . .

Volunteers, working in supervised crews, are trained in the craft of paper-pitching to avoid an occupational hazard Heining calls confetti arm.

They also must shed any rings or watches to ensure that they don’t accidentally drop anything heavier than the paper they scoop out of 45-pound boxes.

“You don’t just pick up the box and dump it out, because there’s a possibility the box will fall,” Heining said. “You have to pick the confetti out, there’s really a special technique for throwing it that I can’t describe, but it’s all coordinated with the crew chiefs using the walkie-talkies.”

You know, while Wal-Mart has remained a perennial punching bag here (“‘Our people are crazy about bling,’ he said. ‘They aren’t crazy about Wal-Mart'”), Target makes out pretty well in this town . . .

Father, Sorry In Advance For Cursing, But What The Fuck Is Wrong With Some People?

Even if you don’t believe in hell, there should be a special place there for certain degenerates:

The morning heist in Flushing, Queens, yesterday seemed too bad to be true.

It happened at the Church of St. Mel during the 9 a.m. Christmas Mass, which was said in Italian. The parishioners had helped fill the safe in the sacristy with something north of $20,000, including money for needy children. The thieves, according to police and witness accounts, opened the safe, and lugged a heavy metal box with the money to a white sport utility vehicle with Vermont license plates.

There are, certainly, much more heinous offenses, especially considering that the collection in the safe consisted mostly of checks that could be stopped, and that the whole amount was insured. But the nerve shown by the thieves made it hard — especially for parishioners who had attended the church for decades — to imagine a worse transgression.

. . .

The Rev. Christopher J. Turczany, who was saying Mass at the time of the theft, still sounded shaken in an interview after the noon service. “They were very bold — not even scared,” said Father Turczany, who believes he saw one of the thieves about an hour before the robbery. That it happened on Christmas, he added, “is heartbreaking.”

. . .

[Father Turczany] said that about 8:30 a.m., as he was preparing for Mass, he saw a man in a striped gray winter hat — “full faced,” as he put it, with an olive complexion — wandering near a staircase close to the sacristy. Nearby was the safe, which contained church valuables, including money from collections and a gold chalice.

“He said, ‘I’m looking for a bathroom,'” Father Turczany said. “I told him, ‘Well, you’re going the wrong way.’ My suspicion was aroused.”

After directing the man, who he said weighed more than 200 pounds, to the bathroom, Father Turczany warned the sacristans, Nicholas Nangino, 19, and Christopher Urena, 20, to keep an eye out. Then he went into the sanctuary to start the Mass. “I spoke about the shepherds who came to see the newborn Christ,” he said.

Perhaps half an hour later, the sacristans, looking down a hallway, heard sounds and saw lights flickering on and off. Already on their guard, they went to investigate.

“It was a diversion,” Mr. Nangino said. “We find nothing downstairs. We find the safe open upstairs.”

It was unclear how someone had been able to open the safe. Father Turczany said that a lever on the safe was “in an open position — but locked,” without elaborating. The chalice was left behind, but a box, described by Father Turczany as a 2-foot cube and an “absolute heavy dead weight,” was gone.

The police said a witness, whom they would not identify, watched the men take the box to their car, a white Lincoln Navigator. The witness apparently asked them about the box, and the men said it was equipment used to install an elevator.

All this occurred during Mass, causing some confusion. As Father Turczany, standing at the altar, prepared to deliver the final blessing, an usher frantically signaled him.

The box contained cash and checks from the last four collections, between $20,000 and $30,000, though Father Turczany said it had not been counted. Some of the money was earmarked for church expenses, while the rest was intended for poor children in Brooklyn and Queens.

Follow The Money

The controversial proposed alcohol ban on commuter trains gets more sinister:

The MTA board member leading the charge to ban the sale of booze on commuter rail platforms and trains works for a law firm that represents several of the restaurants and bars at Penn Station that would stand to benefit from the prohibition.

Long Island Rail Road bartenders, who fear their jobs are on the line, say it was only after Mitchell Pally was hired three months ago to handle “government relations” at the Weber Law Group, a Melville-based firm, that talk of the prohibition began.

“We’ve all been wondering where this whole thing came from, and when we checked the company’s Web site, we thought we may have our answer,” said one LIRR bar-cart attendant, who asked not to be identified.

The Weber Law Group lists restaurant-franchise giant Riese Restaurants as one of its clients.

Riese, whose Penn Station restaurants include TGI Friday’s and Houlihan’s, would likely see a spike in beer and liquor sales if the railroad stopped selling booze to passengers.

“There’s no question this would be good for business,” CEO Dennis Riese said. “But just a little.”

. . .

Pally said he brought the issue to the table because, as public policy, “it did not make sense” for the state to serve as bartender to customers who get in their cars when they arrive at their home station.

“I have been here [at Weber] three months and I don’t discuss my MTA activities with anybody,” Pally said.

Andrew Albert, a non-voting MTA board member, said he would need more information, but thought Pally’s employer could represent a conflict of interest in this matter. “It does not sound good,” he said.

Meanwhile, the unions that represent service attendants, along with the commuters who say they have a right to a drink on their train ride home, are stepping up their campaigns against the proposed ban.

Ninth Street’s Not Big Enough For The Both Of Us

On second thought, since it’s Park Slope, it probably is:

Two exes each own a pastry shop: one is the shop they built together, Delices de Paris, and the other is the just-opened patisserie on Seventh Avenue that will be called Zana Café.

Owner Rosana Rosa opened the cute shop without her ex-husband, Michael Martin — with whom she opened Delices de Paris during happier times six years ago.

At her new joint, she sells French-Italian pastries and European products — just like Delices de Paris. And her walls are painted happy yellow — just like Delices de Paris.

No wonder Martin hung a sign in his front window (inset) telling his customers that he has nothing to do with his ex’s new shop — despite how much it looks like Delices de Paris.

“They are completely different products,” he said. “She used the same [paint] to mislead the customers and make them think that the two shops are related.”

. . .

Rosa also said she has nothing to be ashamed of: “I built Delices de Paris with my own hands. When we began, there was no place in Park Slope to get a chocolate croissant, now you have Colson Patisserie on Sixth Avenue and everyone is doing the French thing.”

What about her ex-husband’s sign on his door?

“Well you know divorce is tough, it is complicated,” she explained. “Some people never get over it.”

How About A Niketown With Sweatshops Above?

The only problem with 1 Times Square is that there isn’t much in the way of natural light:

It’s the most famous building in the world on New Year’s Eve, but it’s also the emptiest — so the owners of 1 Times Square, where the ball comes down, are making a daring offer:

Rent the vacant, three-story store at the bottom for $4.5 million a year and they’ll throw in 19 floors of empty offices for free.

“You rent the retail, you basically get the building upstairs for free,” said Newmark Knight Frank real-estate broker Jeffrey Roseman, who represents the owners.

The 23-story tower, originally built for The New York Times in 1904, has not housed any office tenants for years. The base was home to a Time Warner studio store until it closed in 2001.

Ever since then, owners Jamestown and Sherwood Equities have made up to $30 million a year renting the building’s exteriors to giant electronic displays and painted ads.

Retailers have balked at the location in the middle of an island between Broadway and Seventh Avenue at 43rd Street, even as the area around it thrives.

. . .

The upper floors are small, and the interior is in disrepair. And they don’t offer much in the way of views — nearly all the windows are covered by signs.