25 Minutes . . .

. . . or, the time it takes to administer communion at Yankee Stadium:

Communion to the 57,100 faithful went blessedly quick.

For the crowd at Pope Benedict XVI’s Mass at Yankee Stadium, participating in Communion — a highlight of the ceremony — posed a logistical nightmare.

To handle the crowd, however, the Archdiocese of New York dispatched 500 priests into the stands to distribute the blessed wafers, meaning more than enough priests for every section of the Stadium.

The distribution took less than 25 minutes. Worshippers in each small section were signaled to go down, row by row, to receive the host from the priest nearest them.

Though Benedict didn’t hand out each wafer — which after blessed is believed to represent the body of Christ — the pope did distribute Communion to the approximate 100 VIPs assembled on the field.

Among those receiving from the pope were Gov. Paterson.

Location Scout: Yankee Stadium.

Freedom Tower Mockup Passes Extreme Tests

Of course you can’t fly a plane into it during a test, but that probably won’t ever happen again:

One World Trade Center has not yet emerged from below ground, but its facade has already survived earthquakes, hurricanes and an explosion that shook the earth a quarter-mile away.

In recent months, two full-size mock-ups of a few floors of the glass and aluminum facade have been built and tested. One is outside Los Angeles, in Ontario, Calif. The other was at a site in central New Mexico that can be reached only over dirt roads in four-wheel-drive vehicles.

At 1,368 feet, with 23 acres of glass-clad surface area, 1 World Trade Center will be subject to tremendous natural forces. The building, also known as the Freedom Tower (at a symbolic 1,776 feet, when its mast is counted), will be the tallest in New York City and as the skyscraping phoenix on the site of ground zero, it may be the target of terrorist attacks, too.

The Port Authority of New York and New Jersey, which is building 1 World Trade Center, and Skidmore, Owings & Merrill, which designed it, said both mock-ups performed well. The facade, called a curtain wall, is being made by Benson Industries of Portland, Ore. The engineering firm Weidlinger Associates is the consultant in blast-resistant design.

“Physical testing is a confirmation that curtain-wall contractors are in fact meeting performance requirements,” said Carl Galioto, a Skidmore partner. “Full fabrication of the curtain wall cannot begin until the mock-up specimen passes these tests.”

. . .

The first mock-up was subjected to a blast test in Socorro, N.M., at the Energetic Materials Research and Testing Center, a division of the New Mexico Institute of Mining and Technology. Because details might arm a prospective attacker — providing information like how much force the curtain wall is designed to withstand — officials would say almost nothing about the test of this mock-up.

“The simple answer is, yes, it passed,” said John McCullough, the project executive for the Port Authority.

I Don’t Understand — When Else Are You Supposed To Plan A Trip?

Fortunately, no word yet on staring blankly into space, hungover:

It’s official: Surfing the web while at work is enough to get you fired, at least in New York.

A Manhattan court ruled this month to uphold a decision by New York City’s schools chancellor, Joel Klein, to fire an employee in 2006 for excessive web browsing.

The employee, Toquir Choudhri, was an associate education analyst employed by the Department of Education’s Division of Human Resources. After he had been warned about too much web surfing, an internal audit caught Mr. Choudhri visiting over 300 Web sites in six days, with court papers citing examples such as lonelyplanet.com, chinaadviser.com, escapeartist.com, and islandsun.com.

An administrative court had previously recommended a mere reprimand of Mr. Choudhri in 2006, citing the fact that “the Internet has become the modern equivalent of a telephone or a daily newspaper.” Mr. Klein disagreed, choosing to fire the employee instead.

It Could Be Some Jackass Throwing Junk Off The Top Of His Roof . . . Then Again . . .

If you’re out and about Monday night:

A football-size chunk was the biggest detectable piece of a malfunctioning spy satellite smashed to smithereens by a Navy missile, but there remains a small chance that dangerous pieces could still fall to Earth, a Pentagon general said yesterday.

If it follows the orbit, the debris field would pass over the city on Monday at 11:37 p.m. on a northwest-to-southeast track, according to heavens-above.com.

I Fought The Laws Of Physics . . . And Kicked Its Ass!

In case you ever find yourself free falling 47 stories on window-washer scaffolding, know that there are steps you can take to survive:

By all accounts, Alcides Moreno should have died instantly, as did his brother and fellow window washer, Edgar.

Though neither dismisses the merciful hand of God, a physics expert and the critical-care physician who treated Moreno agree he was saved by a fortunate chain of events.

Brian Schwartz, professor of physics at the Graduate Center of City University of New York, theorizes that the scaffolding beneath Moreno created enough wind resistance to slow his free-fall speed from 100 mph to 50 mph.

That would be enough to make it seem more like an eight-story fall, which is still enough to kill most people.

Schwartz also speculates Moreno was lying flat on the scaffold platform and it probably hit the ground with a corner first, which would further reduce the impact.