How Was The Date? Let’s Just Say She Was A Little Trashy . . .

Lady, I hope you’re not wondering why you’re still single:

Debra Keneally is conducting an experiment that may make you pause before you buy your next bottle of water or cup of coffee. For two weeks, the 37-year-old Brooklynite is carrying around the trash she accumulates.

“It’s definitely getting in the way a little bit,” Keneally said yesterday, in her office at Frog Design Inc. where she’s a program manager.

She was on Day 5 and already had to switch to a larger bag to hold her discarded mail and catalogs, her plastic tomato and berry containers, clanking beer bottles, old shoe insoles, a box for new sneakers and more.

She is trying to be unobtrusive on the subway, putting the bag between her feet.

“I took the bag to Midsummer Night’s Swing at Lincoln Center, but then I left because it was too hot,” she said. “I took it on a date to Central Park.”

Keneally is following the rules of a project called “Trash Talk,” started in May by a woman in Austin, Texas, who works for the same global design consult. Another Frog Design employee in Seattle and one in Shanghai did the two-week garbage hauling stint before Keneally picked up her bag.

On The One Hand You Incur The Wrath Of George Steinbrenner While On The Other You Have The ATF — And I’m Pretty Sure Steinbrenner Is Still Less Armed Than The Feds

If you want to make money selling crap on eBay, hawk comic books, baseball tickets or even your wife’s Lladro, but whatever you do, please try to avoid trafficking in hazardous and potentially lethal chemicals:

Fears of home-grown terrorism shuddered through a large section of Staten Island last night when local and federal authorities uncovered about 3,000 pounds of potentially explosive chemicals stored in a Graniteville home and nearby storage facility.

Potassium nitrate, sulfur, mercury and peroxide were among the 21 different types of chemicals discovered during a raid of 199 Ada Drive, police said. Quantities ranged from 5 to 215 pounds, according to one law enforcement official speaking on the condition on anonymity.

The disturbing discovery led to the evacuation of more than 200 residents from 56 homes on Ada Drive, which is off Richmond Avenue bordering Baron Hirsch Cemetery.

At the nearby Public Storage Facility at 1107 Goethals Road North in Mariners Harbor, cops found 2,500 pounds of potassium nitrate, a component of gunpowder. The chemical, also known as saltpeter, is commercially used as fertilizer, cleaning solvent for septic tanks and meat preservative.

Investigators say Miguel Serrano, 57, the homeowner of 199 Ada Dr. who also was renting the storage space, had purchased the chemicals in bulk and was reselling them for a profit on the Internet.

It is believed that Serrano was also using some of the chemicals, including mercury and peroxide, to clean his pool.

He was charged with reckless endangerment; other charges are pending, police said.

“He was an unlicensed chemical salesman,” said one cop source with knowledge of the investigation. “He has no conscience. Who knows who he was selling to on the Internet?”

In This, The Most Competitive City In The World, Even Diving Around Like A Monkey For Tennis Balls Is Hard Job To Get

Becoming a U.S. Open ball person requires agility, speed, focus and most of all, a belief in oneself:

Making it to Center Court at the U.S. Open requires speed, agility, determination, and focus — that’s true for the likes of such top seeds as Andy Roddick and Venus Williams, and just as much so for the ball boys and ball girls who snatch out-of-play balls off the court.

At least, that’s what I learned yesterday when I tried out to be one at the 2007 U.S. Open.

I was number 263 of nearly 400 candidates vying for 75 rookie slots at this year’s Open. In two weeks, the outstanding among us would be invited back for a callback tryout and an interview. Some will go on to work during the Open’s qualifying rounds, and a select few would make it to the final draws.

. . .

I asked a girl standing next to me, Aishwerya Sharma, 12, how she felt. She said “confident.”

“I hope she will make it,” her mother, Hem Lata, told me. “She’s tall enough and mature.”

(By the way, is everyone planning on doing a first-person story about trying out this week?)

See also: U.S. Open at Flushing Meadows-Corona Park.

Is The Outerbridge Crossing Along The Eightfold Path?

You visit Staten Island for the love*, not just to avoid the Lincoln Tunnel:

They are walking 100 miles — from the Chinese consulate in Manhattan to the birthplace of American freedom in Philadelphia — to raise awareness and gain support for the movement to free Tibet from Chinese rule.

Yesterday, 26 members of the International Tibet Independence Movement walked through Staten Island with signs, T-shirts and Tibetan flags, as part of the “March for Tibet’s Independence.”

Jigme Norbu of Bloomington, Ind., noted the importance of the Independence Day arrival in The City of Brotherly Love as he walked on Hylan Boulevard through New Dorp yesterday. “When we arrive on July 4, it will be very symbolic,” he said.

The group hopes it can rally support to urge the Chinese government to grant Tibet its independence so one day it can celebrate its own day of freedom.

. . .

Upon beginning the march Wednesday, the group delivered a letter to the Chinese consulate urging the nation’s government to grant independence to Tibet, Southern Mongolia and Eastern Turkistan. “We’re trying to let the government in Beijing know they need to end the illegal occupation of Tibet,” said [International Tibet Independence Movement president Larry] Gerstein.

Gerstein is driving the support van, which will pick up the walkers at the end of each day and drive them to a church where they will spend the night, then next morning, return them to the spot where they ended their walk the previous day. They will be driven over bridges, such as the Outerbridge Crossing, that do not allow pedestrian access.

*Don’t forget to visit the Jacques Marchais Museum of Tibetan Art on your way to the bridge!

Yes, Daddy, It’s Positively Miserable And You Care Not A Whit!

If he’s done nothing else in office, Bloomberg has mastered the New York City Mayor-ism “Come on, it’s not so bad!” (Giuliani was good at it, too; done properly, the brushoff’s cadence drops down at “on” and crescendoes on the upside again with an annoyed, almost whiny “bad”). This after we find out that he goes to work around 7 a.m., long before anyone else is on the train:

Two days after transit officials announced that some subway lines are operating beyond 100 percent of capacity at peak hours, Mayor Bloomberg questioned the figures and said his own commute isn’t “that crowded.”

“I take the Lex line most days and it’s not that crowded,” the MetroCard-carrying mayor told several hundred people at a Crain’s New York Business breakfast forum in Midtown.

“So you stand next to people. Get real. This is New York. What’s wrong with that?” added Bloomberg.

Two of the lines that the mayor uses to get from his townhouse on East 79th Street to City Hall, the Nos. 4 and 6, were listed at 103 percent of capacity. The third line, the No. 5, came in at 102 percent.

That makes them the most packed in the system, along with the L line.

. . .

Aides said the mayor usually hops on the subway between 7 and 7:30 a.m. That might explain why he doesn’t experience the most intense crowding conditions. Transit surveys show that the passenger load is at its heaviest between 8 and 9 a.m.

A study from 2002 provided by the Straphangers Campaign found 19,348 passengers were carried from 86th Street and Lexington Avenue, one of the stops the mayor sometimes uses, between 7 and 8 a.m. The number swelled to 28,479 between 8 and 9 a.m.

(Actually they’re missing the best part of the Crain’s breakfast, which came when Hizzoner suggested — and didn’t sound like he was joking either — that Robert Caro should write his next great tome about Daniel Doctoroff . . . what masterbuilders these guys are!)