As you'll recall, the MTA's gratuitous, financially unsound, and arguably strike-encouraging holiday-season ride-for-a-buck special left some riders with odd balances remaining on their Metrocards. A cantankerous pal was left with a single buck; we with $13. At first, we didn't know it was possible to add non-round amounts to a 'Card, but you quickly disabused us of that notion. So we hightailed it to our local IND stop, at which we further proved our stupidity and, without going into an explanation, left the station with a balance of $33.40, which was far worse than the $13 we entered with.

One of the more intriguing ads we've seen recently on Craigslist was sent to us today:

We pointed out earlier today that it must suck a little bit to work at the Times today, unless you're Sulzberger or Robinson or Nisenholtz or one of the few other bigshots who got tens or hundreds of thousands of dollars in free stock.

It wasn't on Romenesko. We didn't see anything in "Off the Record." David Carr has yet to file a charming column on how his lovable teenagers reacted to the news, and Keith Kelly has applied no nickname. And yet it's apparently true:

It must suck when your company announces several hundred layoffs over the last few months. It must suck when your company cancels its discount-stock-purchase program. It must suck when your expense accounts are tightened, when hiring freezes are instituted, and when you learn you'll be getting a smaller bonus than you'd hoped. And it must really suck the most when these things have happened and then you wake up one morning, as New York Times employees did today, to learn from the Observer that your company nevertheless handed out a few million bucks' worth of stock to a half-dozen or so top corporate managers.

How had we never noticed the "Other Amounts" button before?

An always cantankerous (but also frequently correct) friend emails this morning with a cantankerous but correct dilemma:

Sure, the year's Dow gains were wiped out yesterday, but things could have been much worse for investors: Adam Corolla could have gaveled the market closed.

While the MTA and TWU kick one another in the shins and the rest of New York does its frozen crawl into work, we're happy to report that at least one union has settled its contract issues. The Associated Press and the News Media Guild has tentatively come to an agreement on new contracts, which would raise salaries and eliminate a mere 100 positions in the technical workforce. You win some, you lose some.

• Bush summoned Sulzberger and Keller to Washington earlier this month in a last-ditch attempt to get them not to run the domestic-spying story, reports Jon Alter. [Newsweek]
• And, says Greg Mitchell, as the Times's handling of the domestic-spying story increasingly seems to be another major management fuckup at the paper, George W. Bush proves he is the true Teflon president. [E&P]
• Bigtime journalists aren't paid enough, argues Slate's Daniel Gross, who, charmingly, hasn't yet realized that of course we'll never make enough to live like real human beings anywhere in New York City. [Slate]
• Redesigned TV Guide, which now looks basically nothing like TV Guide, is doing great numbers. But they may not be great enough. [WWD]
• Carl Icahn, who hasn't been happy with Time Warner management in a while, ain't at all happy with the proposed TW-Google deal. [NYP]
• Radar published what might have been the best sentence of magazine writing this year: "In 2004, a man playing Pluto was run over and killed by a 'princess float' in the Share a Dream Come True parade at Disney World's Magic Kingdom." Plus Peter Carlson's other "wild and wacky" magazine moments from 2005. [WP]

Buried in the Metro section, yesterday's Times finally noticed something odd: Apparently it's kind of hard to afford to live in New York these days if you're not a hedge-fund manager, and so the city is starting to lose some of its vaunted "creative class." We were busy trying to figure out under what definition this was news when we noticed an interesting — and newsworthy, even — fact near the end of the article:

In this week's installment of Alex K.'s Amazing Adventures of the Ladies Who Lunch, our fearless reporter goes fur shopping. At first, she's put off by the idea — apparently she's got a dog she rather likes — but, naturally, the ridiculously expensive decadence grows on her.

In 2000, AOL chief Steve Case conned an eager-to-be-conned Gerald Levin into selling Time Warner to AOL. TWX was trading at about $45 the day before the deal closed, in January 2001. Friday the stock closed at about $18. In the 33 months AOL Time Warner existed, $200 billion of shareholder value disappeared, although in that first post-merger year alone, Case cashed about $100 million in AOL Time Warner stock. Isn't it nice that he, too, now thinks the merger should be undone?

For those of you looking to fluff up your income with some solid spending cash, Craigslist has a gem for you:

The National Law Journal reports today that the new top hourly rate charged by a U.S. lawyer is an even grand. Of course, that's for a 70-year-old firm chairman and former attorney general, a series of credentials we're unlikely to ever have after our name.

Here's a Christmas-season tale to warm your otherwise black and withered heart. From today's News:

In this week's issue of New York, there's a stunning exposé on the dark underbelly of Manhattan real estate. We'd no idea, but apparently all sorts of people have these strange things called "roommates." Crazy, right?!

At a glance, the 12-month stock chart for the New York Times Company:

New York City developers (and beloved local crackheads) William L. and Arthur W. Zeckendorf have agreed to pay $430 per square foot for the rights to the "unused" air at 60th Street and Park Avenue, located above the Christ Church and the Grolier Club (sorry, church-goers — you weren't really using that air anyhow). The Zeckendorfs plan to then transfer their air slightly to the west on 60th Street, where they'll then be able to bypass zoning laws and build a 35-story apartment tower.

The Daily News reports the sad finding that more and more New Yorker are finding it difficult to afford the food they need. Particularly troubling are these facts: