Mayor Bloomberg thinks people need to stop complaining that it took so long for the police to get aspiring rapper/attention whore Raymond "CI Joe" Velasquez off that Times Square lamppost earlier this week. It wasn't "the world's worst thing," Bloomberg said on his weekly radio show today (listen here). more ›

Sherin Brown, 23, had a brilliant, money making idea when she saw a tractor-trailer knock over a light pole in Fort Greene on Friday. Immediately after the accident, she snuck under the pole, and told responders she had been pinned underneath when it fell. She was transported to Brooklyn Hospital Center to be treated for back and neck injuries. However, investigators checked out surveillance footage of the crash, which showed the perfectly healthy Brown sliding underneath the pole. She was arrested and is charged with a misdemeanor for falsely reporting an emergency. more ›

A judge ruled yesterday that embattled Brooklyn architect Robert Scarano Jr. can no longer file construction plans after he was caught "deliberately overbuilding" and making multiple false statements "so deceptive that they call to mind out-and-out fraud." The prolific builder—beloved by developers and reviled by community groups for manipulating zoning rules to construct taller and bulkier structures—will no longer be able submit documents to the Department of Buildings, "threatening, at least temporarily, his ability to work as an architect in the city," according to the Times. more ›

A small business owner in Brooklyn Heights took to the streets in April and taped an envelope filled with 15 business cards onto a Court Street lamppost. That is, of course, not legal... but it also doesn't seem quite right that the sanitation worker who fined her wrote out a separate summons for each card in the envelope! Now Susan Hager is fighting the fines, and she told the Brooklyn Paper, “It said I’ll be paying a minimum of $75 for each card, and I could ultimately pay up to $3,000 for the whole deal. I don’t mind paying $75, but $3,000?” more ›

Another sad story of pet electrocution comes out of Queens; ABC reports that Cecelia Sing's Siberian husky named Sebastian died on his Sunday night walk in Long Island City. A lamppost is believed to have shocked him with stray voltage (not an unfamiliar story).

"As soon as he got to the lamppost, he jumped and he dropped," she said. "And he starting shaking wildly, and I'm like, 'Go on. Get up, Sebastian, get up,' And he wouldn't move. And he just shook. And then, all of the sudden, he stopped shaking and he was dead. My dog was dead."