New Yorkers Are Also Thought To Have A Keen Sense Of Faux Modesty And Are Expert At Exuding A Convincing Yet Hollow Self-Effacing Manner*

I still want “Cliff Lee” to become a verb for screwing over New York City, or at least being cooler than cool, or perhaps even shorthand for something along the lines of spurning better deals and “sacrificing” tens of millions while still receiving a $100 million-plus contract, but this Ed Koch observation deserves more mental space:

Lee, the prized pitcher who helped the Texas Rangers reach their first World Series, snubbed New York. He turned down the Yankees to join the Philadelphia Phillies, and though he is not the first player to reject the Yankees, the circumstances left some wondering whether he does not think highly of New York. The Phillies offered him less money, a minimum of five years and $120 million, than the Yankees, who dangled seven years and $148 million.

New York, the city of yes, has always had trouble dealing with no.

. . .

“New Yorkers are thought to be very tough and thick-skinned,” former Mayor Edward I. Koch said Tuesday. “Just the contrary: we are very thin-skinned. We don’t like to be insulted.

“Most people who live in New York weren’t born here. They come from every country in the world, so they bring with them their own traditions. And one of the traditions is being thin-skinned.”

*We can call it “Woody Allenism.”

He Still Has A Long Way To Go Before We Have Coca-Cola Flowing Out Of The City’s Fountains . . .

. . . but that doesn’t mean a mayor can’t dream, or at least see himself as the very reason that God made mayors:

Mayor Bloomberg’s ego got the best of him Sunday when he confessed he wants to be remembered as “the greatest mayor ever.”

The confession from Hizzoner, who usually says he hopes his eventual successor will do a better job than he has done, came as he once again denied any interest in [redacted so as not to play into any headline- or attention-grabbing ulterior motive].

“I’ve got a great job. I want to go out being, having a reputation as a very good, maybe the greatest mayor ever,” he said on NBC’s “Meet the Press.”

Short of that, we’ll always treasure him as the greatest food additive-banning, third term-stealing, subway-to-nowhere building, congestion pricing-dreaming, lawn furniture-on-Broadway-placing mayor — maybe of all time.

Backdooring Underhanded Low-Life Stealing High Entrance-Exit Turnstiles

Also, a great way to balance any tenuous budget:

Most subway riders can quickly navigate through a revolving-door, ceiling-to-floor turnstile. It’s a simple enough maneuver: Swipe the MetroCard, step straight ahead, push the bars forward.

. . .

But the cagelike contraptions can bamboozle less experienced travelers into paying the $2.25 fare twice — an apparently unintended consequence of the design that doesn’t seem to trouble the Metropolitan Transportation Authority.

“These are the biggest robbers down here,” one transit worker said as he repaired a high entrance-exit turnstile, or HEET, in the Union Square station.

So If The People Actually Writing The Summonses Think Of Them As “Quotas,” Then That’s What They Are, Right?

Some police officers are pushing back at ticket writing performance goals, er, quotas:

Tensions over tickets have reached a boiling point at a Brooklyn precinct where officers are considering a day-long summons boycott.

“We’ve talked about it,” said one police source familiar with the possible slowdown in the 79th Precinct in Bedford-Stuyvesant. “Nobody feels this is right, asking us to write summonses just to meet a quota.”

It Wouldn’t Be The First Time Someone Being Offered A Job Was Lied To . . .

Then again, perhaps this is some Jedi PR mind shit to make us more sympathetic toward Cathie Black. If so, it’s working:

The New York Times reported on Friday that Mr. Bloomberg had originally tried but failed to persuade Geoffrey Canada, the Harlem education leader, to take the job.

Ms. Black suggested the report did not jibe with what Mr. Bloomberg had told her in October, when he invited Ms. Black to the offices of his foundation to offer her the chancellor’s position.

“What he said to me is, ‘You’re the first person I’ve offered this job to,'” Ms. Black said on Fox 5’s “Good Day New York.”

. . .

In the interview on Friday, Ms. Black said she was unsure whether Mr. Bloomberg knew that she lacked graduate degrees when he offered her the position. “I don’t know that for a fact,” Ms. Black said. “I assume he had done his homework — as he should have.”