CELEBRITY SEATINGS

September 26, 2006 -- PARIS Hilton's haunches or Jessica Biel's butt? City women are flocking to plastic surgeons in search of a booty befitting their favorite starlet.

At one new Upper East Side clinic, posterior patients can request a specific celebrity's backside. Popular requests include Eva Longoria, Lindsay Lohan, Jessica Simpson, Paris Hilton and Jessica Biel. Noticeably absent from the list is a certain Bronx-born booty bombshell, Jennifer Lopez.

The new rear to bear is smaller, tighter and "more refined," according to Dr. Brad Jacobs, who's unveiling his "Star Butts" clinic today in his office.

AROUND NYC...AROD

A ROD spotted his with his wfe talking a nice walk up Madison Ave after coming out of Barneys department store. He gave me a bad hand shake ( very weak)...lol

THIS BEAUTIFUL FACE HAS A LOTTA OPTIONS

September 28, 2006 -- THE Daughter of The Donald may be come the Face of the Fifth Avenue jewel - Tiffany. Talk is Ivanka Trump might do more than Breakfast at Tiffany. Might do lunches, teas, cocktail parties and walkabouts. Might travel around for them. Decorate their ads. Being discussed now is that Tiffany could give this brainy, beautiful young lady the title "Spokesperson."

SIGHTINGS..in NYC

SKELETAL Kate Bosworth declining to eat and only sipping iced coffee while her friends ate lunch at Les Halles . . . "SOPRANOS" star Michael Imperioli buying a "Godfather" Xbox game and the movie "Someone to Watch Over Me" in the DVD department at J&R Music and Computer World . . . HEIDI Klum eating Strip House's 24-layer chocolate cake, which she had delivered to the set while she taped the final episode of "Project Runway."

MODEL MAYHEM

IMG is raiding the ranks at Elite Models. Social beauty Amanda Hearst just ankled Elite, her longtime agency, for the glamorous halls of IMG Models. Monique Pillard, who founded Elite's celebrity division, also left last week. We hear IMG head Ivan Bart is also making a strong play for another Elite client, Lauren Bush, who insiders say will soon be joining her pal Hearst at IMG. Hearst - and presumably Bush - are joining a roster of supermodels including Kate Moss, Gisele Bundchen and Daria Werbowy.

ELLEN'S NEW GUY

ELLEN Barkin was shattered when her ex, Ron Perelman, filed for divorce early this year, but she has already moved on. The sultry star, 52, who's selling all the "bad karma" jewels Perelman gave her at Christie's later this year, has for several months been dating former model Johnny Zander, 35, since she started filming "Ocean's Thirteen" in L.A. and Las Vegas. Zander is mostly known in L.A. as the onetime door Nazi at Teddy's. An insider said, "Ellen was never dating George [Clooney] - those rumors were ridiculous and leaked for p.r. purposes." Barkin's rep said, "She couldn't possibly have time for that. She hasn't finished dating the cast of 'Ocean's Thirteen' yet."

Mets: Pedro still the 1

ATLANTA - Mets officials expressed full confidence that Pedro Martinez would have a successful outing tonight, then start Game 1 of the division series next Tuesday or Wednesday at Shea. But they've started to make contingencies just in case.

Orlando Hernandez is on target to start the division series opener over Tom Glavine if Martinez can't make the Mets' first postseason pitch since 2000.

Martinez offered few words yesterday. But the ace, scheduled for his final regular-season start today, got right to the point.

Asked if he felt well enough to take the mound at Turner Field, Martinez replied: "Good enough."

Asked if his calf was at all an issue, he replied: "A little bit."

Asked his goal for the matchup with the Braves, he said: "Health," then getting philosophical added: "Health - it's a beautiful thing."

And with that, Martinez left his locker.

Despite suggestions on Monday that Martinez could be pushed back from Game 1 of the division series, all signs point to the ace opening the Mets' postseason on the Shea mound. That is, barring a health setback tonight.

"If he's healthy, I would say that he's going to get the ball," Willie Randolph said.

Tonight is expected to be Martinez's third and final regular-season start since returning from a right-calf injury that sidelined him for a month.

He was driven to tears in Pittsburgh in his first game back off the DL, when he lasted only three innings and allowed four runs and six hits while tossing 68 pitches against the Pirates.

Then, six days ago at Shea, Martinez breezed through four no-hit innings, but the Marlins scored four runs against him in the fifth. He tossed 87 pitches, but his fastball mostly settled in the 83-84 mph range because he was hesitant to go full throttle on the calf before the postseason, especially since it stiffened in his final inning.

"I'm not going to be looking for him to throw 90 mph (tonight) or looking for him to strike a certain amount of guys out - just that he gets through his work healthy and we'll see how he feels the next day or two after that into the week," Randolph said.

Both manager and pitcher said that Martinez could be pushed back if he was unhealthy, but Randolph insisted that was a hypothetical, since he expects his ace to be fine. "Anything's a possibility," Randolph said. "Does it really make sense to speculate on stuff like that? Then it gets out that I said that. Then it puts it in other people's minds that it's a possibility. Right now Pedro is going to pitch (tonight). I'm confident he's going to pitch in the playoffs for us. Let's wait and see."

Queens man faces year in jail for YouTube prank

He's not a cop, he just plays one on YouTube.

Now a 21-year-old Queens man busted for "Web thugging" - impersonating a police officer, scaring a teen and then posting the "stop" on YouTube - faces up to a year in jail.

Gazi Abura was one of three men who allegedly stopped a 16-year-old high school student as he was running on a darkened Queens street in July.

The frightened teen was hauled up against a car, questioned about a robbery and then had his identification flashed for all the world to see, prosecutors said.

"Why'd you try to run on us?" the wide-eyed student is asked as he is ordered to keep his hands on a car hood by three "cops" in the video posted on the popular Web site's "Crack Cops DVD" feature.

"You thought we were going to jump you?" mocks one of the alleged officers during the profanity-laced video as another laughs in the background.

Investigators heard about the video and found the victim, who said he believed the men who stopped him were real cops, sources said.

Detectives used the video to nab Abura, a part-time auto mechanic who insisted the video "was all set up and everybody was in on it," according to a statement he gave at his Astoria home, prosecutors said.

Cops still put Abura in a lineup, and he was identified by the victim, prosecutors said.

"His alleged actions not only damage the reputation of our police officers ... but potentially could have resulted in injury to the victim or even himself," Queens District Attorney Richard Brown said.

Defense lawyer Damien Brown suggested the victim may be embarrassed and is lying about his involvement.

Abura, who's out on $15,000 bail on an alleged 2005 robbery, was charged with criminal impersonation, coercion and unlawful imprisonment.

He was ordered held last night on $3,500 bail.

Gotti jury stuck

John A. (Junior) Gotti was close yesterday to hitting a mobster's legal version of a trifecta as he appeared to be on the verge of his third mistrial.

The Manhattan jury deliberating his fate said it was hung on the racketeering indictment against the mob scion - giving Gotti some hope that the feds would fail again to put him back behind bars.

"We have been unable to reach a unanimous decision on all counts," the weary deliberators wrote in a note shortly after noon. "Thus, we feel we are deadlocked."

The only charge the panel said it could agree on was Gotti's role in the 1992 kidnapping of Curtis Sliwa, although jurors didn't say whether they found him guilty or not.

It was the panel's sixth day behind closed doors in Manhattan Federal Court, and Gotti's lawyers immediately pressed Judge Shira Scheindlin to declare a mistrial.

Defense attorney Charles Carnesi said it was clear jurors had made up their minds and it was futile to send them back for more deliberations.

"They came in and indicated they're deadlocked," Carnesi told Scheindlin. "They're not coming out here asking for readbacks [of testimony]."

But Scheindlin, who presided over two previous Gotti trials that ended with hung juries, ordered the haggard panel back to deliberate. She told them, "I know it's been long, but there's still no hurry."

The judge also reminded the seven women and five men that if they didn't come up with a verdict, prosecutors were likely to bring the case a fourth time and their job would be left to another panel.

New Look at ‘Mona Lisa’ Yields Some New Secrets

Photographs taken with invisible infrared light and a special infrared camera suggest that at least one of the details was hiding in plain sight, the scientists and conservators said.

The sitter in the Louvre Museum’s 16th-century masterpiece, believed to be Lisa Gherardini, the wife of a Florentine silk merchant, was originally painted wearing a large transparent overdress made from gauze, they said. Under normal light, part of the garment is visible on the right-hand side of the painting, but appears simply to be part of the background.

“You can see it when you know what you’re looking for,” said Bruno Mottin, a curator in the research department of the Center of Research and Restoration of the Museums of France, known as C2RMF. He spoke at a news conference with researchers from the National Research Council of Canada.

Mr. Mottin said such transparent robes were worn by expecting or nursing mothers in 16th-century Italy. The robe’s reappearance in the “Mona Lisa” would dovetail with scholarly research indicating that the painting might have been commissioned to commemorate the birth of Lisa Gherardini’s third child.

The imaging also shows, although less clearly, that some of the sitter’s hair was rolled into a small bun and tucked under a tiny bonnet with an attached veil. (The images are too cloudy to be reproduced on newsprint.)

“That is not surprising,” Mr. Mottin said. “The bonnet was usually worn by women in the 16th century.”

More generally, the researchers said they realized that centuries of grime had obscured some elements of the painting.

MS releases emergency IE fix

Microsoft has broken its normal release schedule to publish a security patch to address a critical vulnerability in Internet Explorer that has become the target of widespread hacking attacks.

A security bug in the Vector Markup Language (VML) component of IE has been used to infect users visiting specific pornographic, or other maliciously constructed, websites. Security firms report the increased prevalence of mass mailing lures that attempts to direct surfers to web sites hosting VML exploit code, using tricks including claims that users have received a Yahoo! Greeting Card.

Nokia Open Studio New York 2006

I posted some initial impressions of the Nokia N95 and wanted to post my report on the complete Open Studio event. I paid for my own ticket to get to the event held in an historic armory in downtown New York. I checked in as press and then had some breakfast snacks and chatted wit people like Howard Chui. Nokia had a huge stage setup and we then moved over into this area for the press briefings. We learned about the N95, N75, and much more that I'll chat about a bit below in each section. We were given a nice Nokia Bluetooth headset, the 800 model, and were loaned a Nokia N80 Internet Edition to try out during the event with the opportunity to purchase it at a reduced price. I used the device for a couple hours, but like my N91 better so I returned it before I left.

There is something about the American cell phone user that has most of us desiring to use a clamshell form factor device. This isn't the case in many other parts of the world where candy bar form factor devices are more popular. Nokia is now launching a competitor to devices like the Motorola RAZR with the Nokia N75. The Nokia N75 has a 2 megapixel camera, flip open clamshell form factor, flat keypad, and high resolution 2.4 inch display. It runs S60 3rd Edition so it has all the powerful Nseries functions we see in all the other devices. My wife would absolutely love this phone and I understand that it is supposed to be available initially in the US during the fourth quarter of 2006, which means I may have just found her Christmas gift.

"i'M A PC" ....IS REALLY A MAC USER !!!

I’m a PC’ guy John Hodgman really an Apple Mac user

Monday, September 25, 2006 - 07:48 AM EDT



"John Hodgman is a very intelligent man," Mike Miliard reports for The Phoenix.

Miliard reports, "He is also a very strange man. His book, The Areas of My Expertise (which has just been released in paperback by Riverhead), is an omnibus compendium of probable falsehoods. According to the dust jacket, the arenas of his know-how are centered primarily on 'matters historical; matters literary; matters cryptozoological; hobo matters; food, drink, and cheese (a kind of food); squirrels and lobsters and eels; haircuts; utopia; what will happen in the future; and most other subjects.' Tom Perotta gets it just about right when he calls Hodgman 'witty, urbane, and completely out to lunch.'"

Miliard reports, "In addition to being the author of this mock almanack, chock-a-block with “strange facts and odd-ities of the bizarre,” and curator of his own semi-regular academic sermons, the Little Gray Book Lectures, Hodgman is also a contributor to the New York Times Magazine, McSweeney’s, This American Life, Paris Review, and The Daily Show. He is also a “former professional literary agent.” And, of course, he is a PC. (Not really, but he plays one on TV, opposite a Mac.) In advance of his reading at Brookline Booksmith on September 27, we managed to wangle 20 minutes of his time to talk about hoboes, mole men, eels, chupacabras, his hometown of Brookline, and his sudden widespread fame."

Symantec Report Sees More Safari Bugs

Symantec's latest Internet Security Threat Report, which has been coming out twice a year since 2002, shows a dozen bugs found for Apple's Safari Web browser during the first six months of 2006, up from six bugs uncovered in the second half of 2005. In contrast, Mozilla open source browser bugs jumped from 17 to 47, and Internet Explorer bugs increased from 25 to 38.

"There is no safe browser," Vincent Weafer, senior director with Symantec Security Response, told Macworld UK. He noted that 3Com and Verisign are among the companies paying for information about browser exploits, which is part of the reason for an increase in bugs overall. In addition, there is a "growing black market for exploits."

Marc Maiffret, chief technology officer with eEye Digital Security, added: "Everyone has realised that targeting the applications on the desktop is a better way to break into businesses and consumers and steal things than server flaws."

Symantec's report also found that Apple is taking longer to patch Safari bugs: five days, on average, in the first half of 2006, compared to zero days in the last six months of 2005. In the same comparison, Microsoft decreased its patch development time from 25 days to 10. Mozilla bugs were patched within a day of being disclosed from January through June of this year, while Opera took two days to patch its browser flaws.

SOROS BUYS FARM; EBBERS

Bernie Ebbers spent his last night of freedom doing what he loved best - making deals, in this case with titan George Soros, who bought one the biggest working farms in the U.S. from the disgraced corporate titan.

Ebbers, 65 and ailing from heart disease and other complications, reports to prison today, where he's slated to serve a 25-year sentence for engineering the largest fraud to hit corporate America, the $11 billion collapse of WorldCom.

Colleagues said Ebbers disappeared from the public eye in recent days, choosing to remain in solitude yesterday with his wife Christie behind the draped windows at their relatively modest, three-bedroom home in suburban Jackson, Miss.

"It's an evening of reflection for them," said Bill Brandt, a restructuring expert helping Ebbers sell off his assets ahead of prison.

At one point shortly before dusk, Ebbers, chomping a cigar and dressed in jeans and a blue golf shirt, opened his front door to chase an Associated Press reporter from his porch.

It's likely that Ebbers could serve his time at a federal prison nearby in Yazoo, Miss. - a minimum security facility with little or no fencing, where low-risk inmates sleep in bunk beds in cubicle rooms.

YAHOO! TO CLOSE FOR

SUNNYVALE, Calif. - Yahoo! plans to close its U.S. offices during the final week of the year, a cost-cutting measure that will require most of the Internet icon's 10,500 workers to use their vacation time if they want to be paid for the time off.

It will mark the first time in Yahoo!'s 11-year history that its U.S. employees have been required to burn up vacation time during the week between Christmas and New Year's - a traditionally slow period for most businesses outside the retailing and hospitality industries.

"Taking a little time off during a work week when so many of our partners and advertisers are also closed is the prudent thing for Yahoo! to do," Libby Sartain, the company's senior vice president for human resources, wrote in a Sept. 21 e-mail posted on Valleywag.com, an online site devoted to Silicon Valley gossip.

Contacted yesterday, Yahoo! spokeswoman Joanna Stevens confirmed the e-mail's authenticity as well as the company's closure plans. "This will make sure everyone has time to recharge their batteries," Stevens said.

HOME-WRECKED

As home prices across the nation dropped more than they have in a decade, the often-sizzling New York real estate market is bracing for a chill.

The median price for a home in the United States fell to $225,000 - down 1.7 percent from August of last year, according to figures released yesterday by the National Association of Realtors - the first time in 111/2 years the market has had a year-over-year decline.

In New York City, where the median price for a home at the end of June was $474,000, a steeper drop in home values is expected.

"Higher-priced markets are seeing larger declines," Lawrence Yun, an economist with the National Association of Realtors told The Post. "People just cannot afford them because they've risen so much in places like New York."

Already, local real estate brokers say, the glittering new condo developments springing up around the city are seeing a sales slowdown, and are considering shifting gears to become rental towers.

The nation's slumping housing prices reflect the pace of existing home sales that fell for the fifth-straight month in August, slipping 0.5 percent to a seasonally adjusted annual rate of 6.3 million units.

"Price drops are very unusual," said Yun. "Nevertheless we have been anticipating the softness in prices and for prices to actually turn negative given the significant run-up in inventory."

New York prices could go down about 5 percent from a year ago, Yun said, adding the slump will continue until the spring or summer.

TEMPTING FATE....GET HONEST MEL

MEL Gibson is doing his best to stay sober - but he's playing with fire by hanging out in bars. The star who last month was caught driving drunk in Malibu and making anti-Semitic slurs to the arresting officer was at an Austin, Texas, watering hole called the Side Bar Friday night. Gibson played pool until 2:30 a.m., but, our spy says, "was only drinking water" and not hitting on the local women as he did before his Malibu bust. Gibson's rep said, "Sounds like Mel."

WE HEAR,...in NY

THAT Elizabeth Hurley and Moet CEO Frederic Cumenal will celebrate the 120th anniversaries of the Statue of Liberty and Moet White Star Champagne on Liberty Island Thursday night. Moet has hired helicopters, private ferries and yachts to bring guests to and from the event . . . THAT dashing Post reporter Clemente Lisi and Daily News scribe Kathleen Lucadamo got married at City Hall last Friday, then walked over the Brooklyn Bridge with their families and friends to celebrate at Noodle Pudding in Brooklyn Heights.

DAD BUTTS IN

- JESSICA Simpson's new movie could have a bad ending. The beleaguered singer was psyched to start work on "Blonde Ambition," produced by "Malcolm in the Middle" star Justin Berfield. But Berfield was heard over the weekend complaining about the excessive demands her father, Joe, is making - and that they might endanger Simpson's role in the flick. A rep for Simpson said, "Well, Joe is a producer in the movie, too, so that would be weird." A rep for Berfield said, "Yes, his company is producing the movie."