In a week in which a freak twister whipped through Brooklyn, downing trees and smashing cars, everything seemed like it was spinning, starting with the MTA PR department after the same tornado-producing storm washed out the subway system. (They blamed the city’s clogged drains.) Thrice-married adulterer Rudy Giuliani talked in circles when asked if he considers himself a “traditional Catholic”; his daughter Caroline sent heads whirling by linking to a Barack Obama booster site on her Facebook page. Team Obama played down reports that its candidate had pulled a 180 by backing out of a fund-raiser at midtown’s extremely Caucasian Harmonie Club. Mayor Bloomberg, who quit the Harmonie before running for mayor, was called for jury duty downtown and didn’t seem too upset about being blackballed from an asbestos case.

Nightstick-twirling traffic cops were busted writing bogus parking tickets to cover up their laziness. The man accused of strangling his girlfriend in her NYU apartment was caught in an Upper West Side supermarket after he tried to slit his wrists. Six Hasidic fishermen lost in a fog off Long Island thanked G-d after being rescued. The Times dropped one and a half inches and announced plans to shed TimesSelect, and the Post was left to break the story that some city women opted to go commando even on National Underwear Day. An air passenger en route to La Guardia snuck a marmoset through security and onto his flight by employing the old monkey-in-the-hat trick.

Yankees fans went ape on Atlanta Braves slugger Chipper Jones after he wondered whether in the future people might suspect A-Rod of using steroids. And a 21-year-old Mets fan from Queens on his way to Australia stopped over in San Francisco and contorted his body just enough to catch Barry Bonds’s 756th-home-run ball. Meanwhile, the stock market’s whirlwind romance with 14,000 ended abruptly with a 387-point drop on Thursday — and it finished the week not knowing which way was up. —Mark Adams