Ah, New Yawk City.

First, there’s this:

Nothing beats the New York Daily News headline here: “Her agony of de-feet!” Ah, puns.

Anyway, Brooklyn woman Kate Wilson is fighting a $50 summons she got for putting her injured leg up on the subway seats next to her. During rush hour, this would be a different issue, but Wilson insists there were empty seats all over the car. Also, her leg really hurt.

As one cop began to write her a summons for obstructing seating, Wilson tried to reason with the officers and told them she ran 4 miles through Prospect Park the day before.

It’s unclear if Wilson cares about the fine, or is just concerned with the principle of the matter. Either way, she did her best to talk her way out of the summons — and failed.

“I asked them if they had bigger fish to fry,” she recalled. “The police officer said, ‘Yeah, but we’re frying this one now.’ ”

Wilson, who works as an administrative assistant in the city, said she finally just bit her lip.

“It was a waste of resources,” she said. “I can’t help but believe this is happening to other people, but nobody comes forward.”

There’s a lot of this kind of thing going around under the auspices of the Bloomberg Administration, whose first priority seems to be to wrest every dime posible from the grip of the New York resident-at-large through penalties, fines, taxes, permit fees, etc.

Personally, I think any cop who would enforce a law such as that described in the above linked article under those circumstances (an almost empty subway car in which the “victim” is interfering with no one by putting her foot up) would be well suited to serve a more totalitarian regime, such as that of Fidel, or maybe Chavez. Such fascistic policemen certainly don’t belong in a free country, but I suppose that’s just one gal’s opinion.

************

Recently, a friend and I, out for dinner in Manhattan, were strolling past Carnegie Hall and, near a corner, we espied a homeless person bundled beneath a heavy coat and a hat against the cold with a large cup in front of him/her for “donations”.

The figure was so pitiful, I couldn’t help but drop a ten dollar bill into the cup.

As we walked on, my friend remarked that between the hat and coat, we couldn’t even see the homeless person underneath, and amused by a sudden thought whose zaniness probably comes from too many years, on and off, of exposure to Seth’s peculiar sense of humor.

“There’s a way we could make a pile of easy money,” I quipped, “we could buy a whole bunch of hats and large baggy coats at a thrift store and set them up around Manhattan, to look just like our undomiciled friend back there, each with a “homeless & hungry” sign and a cup in front of it. Passersby will assume there’s a needy person underneath each one and put money in the cups, and all we’d have to do is go around periodically and collect the money from each cup!”

************

And then there’s this one from the N.Y. Post:

It’s the job that keeps on giving.

Area longshoremen — including as many as 10 relatives of the late Vincent “The Chin” Gigante — pocket huge bonuses on top of their already overtime-bloated paychecks, according to Waterfront Commission records.

Those bonuses are guaranteed by union contracts — and were as high as $20,000 per worker last year, the commission said.

Ralph Gigante — The Chin’s highly paid dockworker nephew — somehow scored a deal with his employer to get an annual bonus worth 8 percent of his previous year’s gross pay, according to his testimony to the commission in 2010.

Not bad for a guy who — in another back-door dream deal reported by The Post yesterday — is paid pretty much 24 hours a day, seven days a week, all year long.

Gigante, whose hourly rate is $36, made $406,659 in 2011, including bonuses.

He’s not the only Gigante getting paid handsomely to work on the New York waterfront, which receives billions in public money for infrastructure upgrades from the Port Authority.

Nice work if you can get it.

….Included in that number is Robert Fyfe, one of The Chin’s sons-in-law.

Like Ralph Gigante — one of the highest-paid employees at the port — Fyfe is a union shop steward, according to testimony in commission hearings.

Fyfe’s wife — The Chin’s daughter — Yolanda insisted to The Post her husband makes an honest living.

“Like everyone else, we are living paycheck to paycheck,” she said. “It’s not like we have any connection to anything.”

Right, of course.

There are similar stories on an almost regular basis of such “quite fortunate” individuals in New York in a wide variety of areas in both the public and private sectors.

Paycheck to paycheck, honest living, heh heh heh…