Someone lost their job today

NYTimes: The United States Postal Service has issued a new stamp featuring the Statue of Liberty. Only the statue it features is not the one in the harbor, but the replica at the New York-New York casino in Las Vegas.

You might think that the post office would have just gone with the original, the one off the tip of Lower Manhattan that for 125 years has welcomed millions of New York’s huddled masses yearning to breathe free. Instead, they accidentally used the 14-year-old statue that presides over thousands of weary gamblers a week.

The post office, which had thought the Lady Liberty “forever” stamp featured the real thing, found out otherwise when a clever stamp collector who is also what one might call a superfan of the Statue of Liberty got suspicious and contacted Linn’s Stamp News, the essential read among philatelists.

But the post office is going with it.

“We still love the stamp design and would have selected this photograph anyway,” said Roy Betts, a spokesman. Mr. Betts did say, however, that the post office regrets the error and is “re-examining our processes to prevent this situation from happening in the future.”

The service selected the image from a photography service, and issued rolls of the stamp bearing the image in December. This month, it issued a sheet of 18 Lady Liberty and flag stamps. Information accompanying the original release of the stamp included a bit of history on the real Statue of Liberty. Las Vegas was never mentioned. The whole mess was exposed by the stamp magazine, which this week ran photographs of both statues.

To the average tourist, there are obvious differences. The Las Vegas statue is half the size of the real Statue of Liberty. And of course, they are in different cities. But it takes a real student of Lady Liberty to notice the contrasts in a stamp-size photo of her head. The hair is different. The replica’s eyes are much more sharply defined. A rectangular patch — a plaque, maybe? — is on the replica’s center spike.

The post office, while perhaps chagrined, is standing by the stamp but changing its informational material about it.

At the New York-New York casino, where a permanent Sept. 11 memorial is positioned in front of the fake New York Harbor in which the fake Statue of Liberty sits, there is nothing but pride.

“Everyone thought the post office was honoring just one great American institution when in reality they were honoring two — the Statue of Liberty and Las Vegas,” said Gordon Absher, spokesman for MGM Resorts International.

Meanwhile, back in the real New York, Edward I. Koch, who declared that the city was the center of the universe when he was mayor, offered some insight into what it all means: “It simply means the post office is doing a stupid thing.”

Reads like a movie plot: Just have Paul Giamatti play him

Advocate:Federal prosecutors said Thursday that Carl Kruger, the New York state senator charged in a $1 million corruption scandal, received help from people including an “intimate” partner, Manhattan gynecologist Michael Turano.

Kruger, who voted against the marriage equality bill in 2009, is one of eight men arrested in the complex influence-peddling scheme involving lobbyists and developers over the last five years.

The Brooklyn Paper reports that, “According to the FBI complaint filed in Manhattan Federal Court, people looking to gain Kruger’s help sent checks to Turano’s Olympian Strategic Development Corporation and Bassett Brokerage, a reference to the Mill Island street where Turano, his mother and brother have a the multi-million dollar waterfront home.”

Although Michael’s mother Dorothy had appeared to be the unmarried Kruger’s girlfriend, the complaint alleges that the Brooklyn Democrat had an “intimate relationship” with her son. Following his vote against the marriage equality bill two years ago, gay activists demonstrated outside the home of Kruger and accused him of hiding his gay identity.

According to the Brooklyn paper, “Intercepting phone messages, FBI agents learned that ‘Kruger was in nearly daily contact with Michael Turano’ and that the two men spoke to each other ‘in a manner that revealed that they relied on and supported one another.’ The clear suggestion is that Kruger and Michael Turano are romantically involved.”

It remains unclear whether Kruger will keep his seat, but on Thursday he was stripped of his role as the ranking member on the powerful senate finance committee.

Hot Slut Of The Day!

DListed: Elliott Timmons, the LifeStyles Condom Cupid who yesterday put New Yorkers in the mood for love by flaunting his red wings (and no, I don’t want to know how he earned those), fluffy chest balls and hard nips while handing out peen gloves for Valentine’s Day! The LifeStyles Condom Fairy was busy making bedroom calls, I guess, so he sent out his second cousin twice removed to flutter through the subway and streets to shoot condom arrows at suspecting and unsuspecting hos.

Gothamist says that the Condom Cupid handed out nearly 300 condoms in 3 hours. This must be a typo, because who doesn’t think of hot lube-y rubber sex when staring at the Condom Cupid struttin’ his fupa down the street? And where does LifeStyles buy uniforms for the Condom Cupid and Condom Fairy, because they dress exactly like my weekend weed man.

I hope all of you had a memorable VD that left your parts smelling like cum yogurt, pina colada lube, dried drops of Andre champagne and charred pubes (strangely enough, that’s probably what the Condom Cupid smells like). Or at least I hope you woke up with Russell Stover skid marks on your mouth and the cunt look you threw at stupid bitches buying flowers at the deli still firmly pressed on your face (strangely enough, that’s probably what the Condom Cupid looks like this morning).

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Gay sports exhibit in New York City

Outsports:

Thee Gay Center in New York is hosting a new exhibit featuring gay sports memorabilia called “We are the Champions.” The exhibit includes medals, jerseys, magazines, and even a copy of The Outsports Revolution. The exhibit kicked off Tuesday night featuring a conversation with former professional basketball players Sue Wicks and John Amaechi. The exhibit is sponsored by Out of Bounds and runs through Nov. 30. The exhibit looks really cool and I wish I was in New York to check it out, but you can see a couple more pics after the jump.

140-year-old hot dog was a hoax. I feel so betrayed. Someone hold me

MetroUK: The hot dog was believed to have been found encased in ice underneath Feltman’s Kitchen in The Bronx, surviving under there for 140 years.

Feltman’s Kitchen is a restaurant that used to be owned by the inventor of the ‘Coney Island hot dog’.

But the New York Post revealed that it was all a big prank organised by the History Project “to get publicity for their exhibition of real artefacts from Feltman’s site.”