Dumb & Dumber?

Who exactly rents something for $50,000 a month? Jim Carrey, that’s who:

Soon Jim Carrey will be hamming it up all over the Upper West Side. A source says he’s renting a four-bedroom, five-bath penthouse across from Lincoln Center. The actor, who’ll be paying $45,000 a month on a one-year lease, is due in town to shoot A Little Game Without Consequence, a remake of a French film that reunites him with his Mask co-star, Cameron Diaz. The apartment — which has a 2,000-square-foot living room, seven terraces, and views of the Statue of Liberty and the George Washington Bridge (eternal sunshine not guaranteed) — is listed for $11.8 million with Corcoran’s Carrie Chiang.

At 15 percent of a year’s rent — I gather brokers still get that kind of commission in Manhattan — that puts the fee at $81,000. Nice work if you can get it. (Then again, thank goodness Carrey didn’t star in What About Bob? . . . Carrie Chiang should at least buy Brian Carter a beer!)

And did anyone collect his last three pay stubs? Forty times $45,000 is $1.8 million a year, but I guess he’s good for it. Even without a guarantor.

If It Looks Like A Perot And Sounds Like A Perot, It Must Be A Perot

Even though he has no plans to run, everybody he meets around the country wants him to run, and his advisers want him to run but he has no plans to run, “at least not yet”:

Deputy Mayor Kevin Sheekey noted the mayor has raised his national profile during a slew of trips around the country — and now he wants Hizzoner to reconsider his vow not to run.

“I hope he changes his mind,” said Sheekey, a key player in both of Bloomberg’s mayoral campaigns.

“Are his views going to change? I don’t know. Time will tell.”

. . .

So far this year, Bloomberg has traveled to Washington eight times as well as making two trips to Chicago and visits to Atlanta, Baltimore and Philadelphia.

And the mayor is headed to Boston on Thursday for yet another event in his crusade against illegal guns.

Sheekey said the flurry of recent trips is not designed to be the groundwork for a White House bid. “It’s not the intent, at least not yet,” he said.

. . .

Asked about the mayor’s recent travel, George Arzt, a Democratic political consultant who served as press secretary to former Mayor Ed Koch, said it’s clear “there is a tasting of the presidency.”

“Despite his announcements that he’s not interested in running for President, it seems that there’s some sort of national agenda involved here,” Arzt said.

Falling Apples And Trees: The Perverse Warping Of The Manhattan Child

Like the Manhattan Cat — having spent its entire life indoors — exists in a peculiar alternate universe, the Manhattan Child is raised under similarly perverse conditions:

Adults are not the only ones who engage in real estate envy and suffer from lust when they see a well-proportioned classic six or a penthouse with wraparound terraces and an elevator that opens directly into the apartment. Children, once assumed to be oblivious to the nuances of real estate, now know what is prized and what is not, and often feel free to comment on what they observe.

. . .

Julie Friedman, a senior associate broker at Bellmarc, described clients who are the parents of three private-school children. They occupy “the very inner circle of the social life on the Upper West Side and live in a beautiful prewar condo that’s probably worth about $3 million,” Ms. Friedman said. But the couple, professionals whose apartment lacks a separate dining room, stopped arranging play dates several years ago after holding a birthday party for one of their children in their apartment.

“The kids must have been 7,” Ms. Friedman said. “One of the children said, ‘Why are you eating in the living room?’ So from that day on, rather than put their children in a position where perhaps they were being judged, there were no play dates at their home. Now she is looking for a splendid apartment on Central Park West so that her children will be comfortable entertaining.”

Rain, Sleet And Snow Are One Thing, But Stoops And Smells Are Quite Another

After earlier drawing the line at “smell,” apparently some Brooklyn mail carriers are also balking at “stoop”:

Neither snow, rain, nor gloom of night will stop letter carriers from completing their rounds. But brownstone stoops in Brooklyn? Well, that’s a different story.

The residents are complaining that mail carriers have been dumping letters by their garden gates rather than making their way up the brownstone steps.

Letters, catalogs, and magazines delivered to certain streets in Fort Greene and Clinton Hill have been rained upon, blown away, and destroyed. Some residents who filed official complaints with the postmaster found that their mail stopped coming around at all for several days.

Postal workers complain that trekking up the steps is treacherous business, especially in the ice and snow.

When the sidewalk mailbox belonging to Elizabeth Juviler, a real estate agent in Bedford-Stuyvesant, recently fell off, her attempts to replace it with a box inside her foyer failed because her letter carrier refused to use it.

“Our mailman said he didn’t climb stoops,” Ms. Juviler said.

. . .

As part of the move to phase out stoop service, when new residents move in to a brownstone they are not guaranteed mail delivery to the top of the stoop, according to a customer service agent at the Postal Service.

Definitive Proof That, Until 1957 At Least, God Was A Giants Fan

The man who claims to have taken the only photographic evidence of Bobby Thomson’s “Shot Heard ‘Round The World” reveals his inspiration:

Rudy Mancuso is 85 and lives alone in a rental apartment on the Lower East Side. He uses a cane and moves slowly. But 55 years ago, on Oct. 3, 1951, Mr. Mancuso had the split-second timing to snap a photograph of one of the great moments in sports: “The shot heard ’round the world.”

The photograph of the home run hit by Bobby Thomson of the New York Giants in the ninth inning at the Polo Grounds to steal the National League pennant from the Brooklyn Dodgers and set off pandemonium in New York became iconic — Thomson swinging the bat, the ball sailing above the Dodgers pitcher Ralph Branca as it soared out of the park.

. . .

In 1951, [Mancuso] and the rest of New York were riveted by the three-game series between the Giants and the Dodgers to decide who would play the Yankees in the World Series.

By the third and decisive game, Mr. Mancuso said, he had received an authoritative and specific photo assignment.

“God told me Bobby was going to win it with a homer in the ninth,” he said. “There’s no doubt. I was chosen to take that picture.”

On Oct. 3, 1951, Mr. Mancuso said, he rode the subway to the Polo Grounds carrying a Busch camera he had bought for $300 to use for wedding portraits. His ticket put him in the upper level directly behind the press box. He had only brought two exposures with him and used the first one early on, taking a snapshot of the Yankee right fielder Hank Bauer, who was sitting nearby.

Mr. Mancuso set the camera on top of the press box until the bottom of the ninth when Thomson came to bat.

“Like I said, I knew it was going to happen, so I pulled the paper strip out that protected the exposure and put the focus on the furthest it would go. I put the focus on infinity.”

“I heard the crack of the bat and snapped the picture,” said Mr. Mancuso who made a batch of prints and said he took one to The New York World-Telegram and Sun the next day.

“They took it inside and then came back out and said: ‘We can’t use it. It’s old news,'” he recalled. “I think they took a picture of it and it got spread around, because it got to be all over the place. I should have copyrighted it.”