Plant life and matching furniture blooms on rooftops across Tribeca and lower Manhattan. [Jwilly's Flickr]

More on the rogue cop that violently pushed a Critical Mass cyclist off his bike: the Daily News says he's a 22-year-old rookie named Patrick Pogan; the Post says he's been on the job for just three weeks. Pogan's father, a former NYPD detective, told the News, "You gotta do what you gotta do to make an arrest." Update: Smoking Gun has some of the cop's fanciful testimony. Excerpt after the jump:Basically Pogan states that the cyclist, Christopher Long, was weaving his bike in and out of the lane and disrupting traffic. (He may or may not have been, as we can't see that part in the video.) But the next part is really good: the cop (listed below as the deponent) claims that the cyclist drove into him purposely, causing the cop to fall and suffer cuts and bruises.

Last Friday's Critical Mass bike ride in Times Square featured random violence from the city's men in blue—a cop shoved a guy off his bike, hard, for no reason at all. Luckily, it was captured on on video. Riding your bike is legal asshole, so WTF is up with beating on cyclists? City Room reports that the unidentified officer was put on "modified assignment" while they investigate; the AP says they also took away his badge and gun for now. (He should be fired.) Meanwhile, Gothamist reports that the cyclist was arrested and held in jail while being charged with assault. (Click for the enraging video.)

We're not sure if the following Craigslist ad for a nanny is real or a spoof. On one hand, it's not quite over-the-top enough to be fake. On the other hand: "This job is very nontraditional in the sense that my kids are older and still need someone to "parent" them 24/7. My oldest son will be starting his first year at Columbia in the fall and will not be around much, but, will probably still need support. Picking up his dry cleaning, if he needs anything for his apartment, scheduling doctor appointments, anything to help him and his daily life run smoothly"?! (You'll also be "interfacing with" the family's assistants.)

Hey, did we know that some neighborhoods have corner stores, which sell foodstuffs? The Bodega Party in a Box is a tool from the Neighbors Project, which is "is a growing movement of a generation of people living in cities who want to connect with their diverse neighbors to improve the neighborhood for everyone." OK, let's withhold judgment until we take a look inside Pandora's bodega-box, shall we?

The main branch of the New York Public Library has been re-named after Stephen A. Schwarzman. He's the CEO of private equity group Blackstone, as well as a Jew. Is that the reason why a powerful gentile told Vanity Fair that the new name was "It is an act of the worst kind of buffoonery. Schwarzman is horrid." Well, the dude did give $100 million to the library, but it was named after him at their request. WASPs have been confiding in secret to VF writer Jamie Johnson (the young oil heir whose documentary about the rich, Born Rich, pissed off his brethren) about their outrage. Not surprisingly, some powerful WASPS are secret anti-Semites!

Today, New York plays a little game to make you feel like a moron. What if you had had $100,000 to invest in 1998? Well, you would probably still be a rich person now, but bear with them. They offer a number of examples of investments you could've made instead of spending all your time getting wasted and listening to the New Radicals (was it really that long ago!). Sure, they include a couple ringers that woulda lost you money (theglobe.com stock! A BMW!), but otherwise it's a rich catalog of things you were too poor to afford then that now you are all the poorer for not having bought. 3,300 shares of Apple! A townhouse just about anywhere in New York! Gold! Investments they missed, after the jump.

We hear that Barney's, the high-end Madison Avenue department store, actually has someone on staff whose job it is to be the store pooper scooper, cleaning up after all the little purse-dogs that the veryveryvery important ladies who lunch bring in... As the saying goes, the stagehands have the best view in the house, et cetera.

In the L Magazine's most recent "Money" issue, Adam Bonislawski makes the point that striving to become a middle-class New Yorker is a.) hard, and b.) perhaps not worth the effort, "like swimming the English Channel or climbing Everest without oxygen, or translating the Bible into LOLcats." Sounds familiar!

White financiers are all flooding up to the Waldorf Astoria this morning for the opening of today's Dow Jones Private Equity Analyst confab! The topics and the attendees are undeniably sexy; Paul Gigot, the WSJ's editorial page editor, Hamilton James, president of Blackstone Group, and, most of all, David Rubenstein, the reformed liberal, capitalism evangelist, Bush family friend and co-founder of private equity firm the Carlyle Group, who is not to be confused with uber-publicist Howard Rubenstein. And for some reason, New York's poor people are going to show up and protest the intricate system of tax breaks and benefits that help the rich amass more capital.

For her Yale senior project, financial aid student Aurora Nichols took pictures of three months' worth of her mundane purchases and displayed them alongside her classmates' abstract paintings. This prompted quite a bit of attention for Aurora on campus, including a profile in the Hartford Courant in which Aurora revealed some less-than-flattering assessments of class dynamics at her alma mater. Then, on the autoadmit message boards, the richies tore her a new one.

The New York Post has once again rejected their mandate and chosen a bunch of well-groomed professionals for their weddings section, leaving us speechless and a little nostalgic for humbler days. If these trends keep up, Ad Hoc might be headed for the guillotine. That said, there are a few gems in today's batch of lovers—most notably, a dude named Albino who manages that delicious Peruvian place on 5th Avenue in Park Slope; also a couple who met on Nerve.com.

From the May 2007 Anthropologie catalog, page 4.

Each Monday, Intern Alexis uses a rigorous scale to rank the happy pair-bonds cemented in the Times wedding announcements. But surely, the Times can't contain all the nuptial bliss to be experienced in the metro area. Ergo, the Post's weddings section, where the couples require a more flexible scale that can take into consideration differences in, say, life experience. And body type.

Each Monday, Intern Alexis uses a rigorous scale to rank the happy pair-bonds cemented in the Times wedding announcements. But surely, the Times can't contain all the nuptial bliss to be experienced in the metro area. Ergo, the Post's weddings section, where the couples require a more flexible scale that can take into consideration differences in, say, life experience, and body type.

Each Monday, Intern Alexis uses a rigorous, super-scientific scale to rank the happy pair-bonds cemented in the previous weekend's Times wedding announcements. But surely, the Times can't contain all the nuptial bliss to be experienced in the metro area. Ergo, the Post's new weddings section! As one might suspect, though, Post couples don't quite lend themselves to the same sort of, well, systematicity as the Times crowd. It's almost like there are real Americans living amongst us in New York! Thus, a more flexible scale is in order—one which takes into consideration differences in, say, life experience. And body type.

"The entire point of living in Connecticut or Westchester is to limit your exposure to people who are from Long Island and New Jersey," said one magazine editor who has been commuting from Westport, Conn., through Grand Central for over a decade. "That's why we live there, it's why we wear natural fabrics, and it's why we don't stucco our homes. Granted, there are a lot of people in Westport and Darien who grew up on the island and vowed to end all the ridicule by buying a first home here, but these are the people who wear Nicole Miller and practically strive out loud. As far as we're concerned, Long Island might as well be Barbados—fine for a vacation, but year-round is so not going to happen."