​There's lucky, and then there's not so lucky. While unloading his family's minivan after a trip to Great Adventure yesterday, Long Islander Phil Colacioppo ended up the victim of a lighting strike from last night's crazy storm. Which is pretty damn unlucky -- your chance of being struck by lightning is something like one in three quarters of a million each year.

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​Happy Thursday. We wish you a glorious tax/census/free-coffee-from-Starbucks (with reusable travel mug) day.

For those productive folks who have already done their taxes and censuses, fear not! Amuse/disturb yourselves with the following:

• God help us, Tea Partiers are educated. This new New York Times/CBS News poll is a revelatory must-read. Key tidbits: Tea Partiers believe their views reflect 84 percent of Americans, only 2 percent have supported the movement by giving money, and they get most of their information from TV Glenn Beck. Also: Sarah Palin is not qualified to be president.

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​In case you were living under a rock (or outside, with a healthy application of spf, we hope) this weekend, we've consolidated a handy list of what the past two days had to offer. Fear the office water cooler no longer! Read on for what's on the lips of all the popular kids:

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​Usually assailants of prominent politicians, if they do not achieve Lee Harvey Oswald lethal status, disappear into obscurity and/or the criminal justice system and are not again heard from. But the man accused of taking a swing at former Massachusetts Governor and GOP Presidential candidate Mitt Romney this week turns out already to have some small claim to fame: He is Sky Blu of the Grammy-nominated dance music combo LMFAO, now touring with the Black Eyed Peas.

Sky Blu tells TMZ that Romney started the quasi-altercation.

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A pajama-clad Manhattan woman who jumped from the Brooklyn Bridge on Saturday is recovering from hypothermia in Bellevue today after Police Department divers jumped from a helicopter and pulled her out of the East River. The Times has an interview with the divers

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The Arbeit Macht Frei (Work will make you free) sign over the gates of the Auschwitz-Birkenau nazi concentration camp in Poland was stolen last week. The sign has already been replaced by a replica, but museum authorities are concerned that that thieves may have been Holocaust deniers who hope to discredit the authenticity of the camp by pointing out the replacement sign. The timing of the theft may be connected to last week's decision by Germany to pay half the cost of restoring the camp's buildings.

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A Brooklyn man who illegally took over a city-owned lower Manhattan lot and charged a fee for parking in it in September was caught when DNA on a soda can he left behind was matched to his sample on a registered sex-offender database. Steven Pappas was charged with felony third-degree burglary and misdemeanor second-degree criminal impersonation. He's currently on parole for the first-degree sexual abuse that landed him on the sex offender registry to begin with. It's not the only time Pappas has tried this. He was arrested in September for illegally charging drivers to park at an abandoned construction site on Maiden Lane.

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The Village People are threatening to sue british "Naked Chef" Jamie Oliver, who is promoting a series of shows set in the US on Britain's Channel 4 with commercials in which he dresses like, well, the Village People to the tune of a Village People song.

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An eighteen-year-old man in Orange County is charged with multiple counts of misconduct with an animal after a surveillance camera caught him having sex with the horses at the Goshen Historic Track. Workers at the track suspect that Erick Rivera, or someone, has been doing that since they started finding horses immobilized in their stalls in the morning back in July.

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In the latest edition of the tri-state area's ongoing epic compulsion to use Jersey Shore as an excuse to display its ugliest regional class issues to the world, Paul Mulshine of the Newark Star-Ledger would like New Yorkers to know that we're trash, and Jersey kids are so classy they're practically from California, only, you know, beachier.

Tom Brokaw and his wife Meredith were involved in a three-car collision in the Bronx which left one woman dead on Friday. Suejas Estrada of the Bronx swerved to avoid a coil of cable on the Bruckner and forced a mail truck in the next lane into the path of Brokaw's car. Suejas was thrown from her car and fell 40 feet from the elevated Bruckner to the Hunts Point street below. Police don't know yet if Estrada, who was speeding, was wearing her seatbelt. The driver of the mail truck was slightly injured. The Brokaws are fine. No-one seems to know what happened to the cable.

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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."

The Obama administration is suggesting a voluntary ban on lobbyists serving on 915 Federal Advisory Committees which consult with federal agencies on government policy. The lobbyists, one of whom helped write the legislation which created the Committees when he was a Republican Senate staffer, are not happy about that. They say that no-one else but them understands how the government works. That may actually be the point.

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​Volunteers of America's 109-year-old Sidewalk Santa program is taking place online for the second year this christmas. The non-profit VOA says they can't afford to pay and administer the formerly homeless men who traditionally dressed as Santa Claus and rang bells by chimney-shaped donation boxes outside stores.

Sidewalk Santa proceeds provide food vouchers for families with hardships, homebound elderly and people living with serious illnesses, You can donate directly to the food voucher program here.

Happily, we avoided post-Thanksgiving Wal-Mart deaths on Long Island this year, but we did get a fire.

According to Newsday, 2,000 shoppers and employees were evacuated from the WalMart on Old Country Road in Westbury today after a worker discovered christmas wrapping and ornaments stored in the greenhouse on fire. No-one was injured, but the store will remain closed until the fire alarm system can be reset.

According to Assistant Chief Patrick Cody of the Westbury Fire Department, the store sustained between $10 and $25 thousand dollars in damage.