​This year the State Liquor Board's deadline for bars to request after-hours authorization for New Year's Eve has come and gone, and only 165 bars applied. 394 had applied by deadline last year.

The Times thinks bar owners didn't know the deadline had been moved up, but that's like saying they didn't know they could be fined for serving minors or for cleaning highball glasses with their shirt-tails. We prefer the simpler explanation: they don't think it's worth staying open late because, with the economy in the crapper, people will be celebrating New Year's at home or out of paper bags in the street. (Also, that legit after-hours thing is for toffs, clubbers, and people who want to eat breakfast drunk at Balthazar. You want to drink till dawn, go someplace where they don't look too particular about the law, if you know what we mean, and tip heavy. We suggest this place. Bring your PBA Card!)

Other bad signs for New York on New Year's Eve:

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DATE: Sunday, Nov. 29, 2009, 8:52 p.m. 
LOCATION: 737 Southern Blvd., The Bronx

A 25-year-old man was found shot to death outside his home in the Bronx Sunday evening. Kenny Martinez, of Southern Blvd., had been struck repeatedly in the chest. He was taken to Lincoln Hospital, where he was declared dead. No arrests so far.

Know anything about this case? Drop us a line at grayman@villagevoice.com.

​"Tiger Woods having an alleged affair?" asks the Examiner. OK, we'll be the first to say it. Tiger Woods is having an alleged affair! But is he having an actual affair? Questions remain. The Orange County Register has "Tiger Woods Mistress Pictures & Joe Namath's Dog," presumably not in the same shot.

"If Tiger Woods hit the windshield when he smashed up his Cadillac Escalade," updates the Orlando Sentinel, "...he didn't do so hard enough to break the glass." So where'd he get the lacerations? Doctors want medical records, hint at domestic violence. If he were a football player, this would be amusing, but he's a golfer -- they're the sensitive poets of sport. Arnie's Army was actually a team of bodyguards. Look it up!

All right, lets switch to deepthink: the Times sees "A Wedge [ha!] Between Woods and the Public." Various experts advise Woods and the media. Our two cents: cooperate with police, and announce you are a gay American. That always throws them off.

Finally, "Elin Nordegren Tiger's Wife Fake Nude Photos." Ah: closure.

​The local economy is so bad it's eating into train ridership. MTA's figure, recently reported down 4 percent, appears to be leveling out, and MTA even holds out hope that it's not as bad as it looked. But things are worse in Staten Island. The 14-mile Staten Island Railway is on pace for a 6.6 percent ridership drop -- this despite such innovations as the Early Departure "Get-a-Way" schedule during the Thanksgiving weekend. The drop is attributed to unemployment, but we suspect the recent introduction of turnstiles at Tompkinsville, preventing those who had been so inclined to get out there and evade paying their fare, may have something to do with it.

​

Academia -- that's where all the money is, kids. Fast Company has some photos of the Julliard School's lavish new facilities at Alice Tully Hall. Cost: $325 million.

Grady Sizemore nude, everybody! You won't catch us posting this, alas, as the Indians have put out an APB, saying the photos are stolen and were intended only for some lucky lady.

Rightwingers now have a board game. Not "Clue," obviously, but "Obozo's America." And it's not at all racist: players "Draw from a stack of Welfare Benefit Cards. Get extra cash from Saturday Night crimes: Gambling, Armed Robbery, Drugs, and Prostitution. Play the lottery and the horses. Get your live-in a job on the Government Cakewalk." Game squares include: "Improper Racial Balance, Pay $400," "Allege Cop Brutality, Go Back on Welfare," and "Spend Day in Pool Hall, Lose $100." Also, each players starts with "30 Out-of-Wedlock Children." Ha, ha! We learned about this, naturally, from the Christian News Wire.

Non-partisan funny: Fake MTA Twitter feed. "It's like an 8 million person inside joke," says one of the publishing industry types who devised it. This is Saddam Hussein Speaking. Petraeus shrugged?

The whistleblower who revealed unsafe conditions at the Deutsche Bank worksite is now unable to find a job.

Tom Tomorrow is tweeting about his adventures recovering a stolen car. "NYPD had efficiently ticketed the car all winter, though had not noticed it was on a stolen car list."

​Apparently you cheap bastards didn't shop hard enough to move the needle this weekend -- or shopped not well but too wisely, scarfing up bargains when America needed grotesque impulse purchases to pull out of its economic nosedive. The National Retail Foundation says more shoppers spent less: "average spending over the weekend dropped to $343.31 per person from $372.57 a year ago," so despite busier streets, totoal spend was around $41.2 billion -- virtually unchanged from last year.

So now it's all about Cyber Monday. Shop from your job! Management experts like Dr. Claire Simmers of St. Joseph's University are telling your boss to be cool about it...

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​Tiger Woods is not the only athlete whose unfortunate behavior is in the news today. Serena Williams has received her penalty from the Grand Slam administration for threatening to shove her balls down a line judge's throat at her September U.S. Open debacle: an $82,000 fine, and probation through 2011. Williams, winner of 2,107 championships, is expected to console herself with an exfoliating rub of thousand-dollar bills.

Meanwhile Brigham Young University quarterback Max Hall is apologizing, or rather "apologizing", for the comments with which he celebrated the Cougars' overtime victory over Utah Saturday. "I don't like Utah. In fact, I hate them," said Hall after the game. " I hate their program, their fans. I hate everything."

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​Sofia Barbushack, 87, was last seen at London Terrace on West 23rd Street at around 9:30 last night. She's 5'0" and weighs 105 pounds.

If you have information as to her whereabouts, NYPD asks you to contact 1-800-577-TIPS(8477), www.nypdcrimestoppers.com, or text 274637 (CRIMES), then enter TIP577.

Update: Barbushack has been found in good condition.

​There are dramatically dueling macro and micro takes on the state of crime in the city this morning.

The big picture, of course, comes from the Times which reports that, despite growing local poverty and economic woes, crime stats are still trending lower. "Murder, considered the bellwether crime, is down by nearly 13 percent so far this year, to 413 through Nov. 22, compared with 473 in the same period last year," writes the Times' Al Baker. "Rape, robbery, burglary, grand larceny and car theft are also on the decline."

The close-up look is in the pages of the Daily News which reports that bodies are piling up in the streets of Staten Island where a deadly gang war has claimed four young lives in the past month.

"The victims - all affiliated with the notorious Bloods - were shot as tensions mount between gang members from New Brighton and others from Port Richmond and Mariners Harbor," write The News' Wil Cruz and Rocco Parascandola.

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The New York Times reports today that charter schools are sometimes in conflict with their public-school hosts, particularly as regards space, on which some P.S. personnel and parents think they get shafted: at Middle School 126 in Williamsburg, for example, access to the school library is granted to charter students "most of the day," while the school librarian "is expected to travel to individual classrooms to teach the public students library skills."

This is a rare perspective. Charter advocates point to the success rates of these private-public entities (though some dispute their conclusions), but usually don't much concern themselves with the students left out of them -- whether by parental abstention or because they've been "lotteried-out" -- even under charter-friendly administrations like New York's.

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