Some weeks, it's impossible not to feel the love. Christian conservative Pat Robertson embraced gay-friendly divorcé Rudy Giuliani. Rudy stood by former police commissioner Bernard Kerik, though it didn't stop a grand jury from indicting Kerik for tax evasion and conspiracy. Most-eligible bachelor Mike Bloomberg inspired Newsweek to run a mash note about his presidential prospects on its cover, while the Post refused to believe the mayor wasn't pining for Eliot Spitzer's job, even after he declared, "I categorically will not run for governor."

Hillarymania ebbed in New Hampshire in the wake of her driver's-license gaffe; new polls showed her lead over Barack Obama shrinking from 23 percent to a mere 10. Paparazzi hunted Paul McCartney in the Hamptons, hoping to catch him making out with his new squeeze, a member of the MTA board. Striking writers Tina Fey and Seth Myers walked picket lines at Rockefeller Center and Silvercup Studios; a Boston priest was busted for stalking ex-SNL scribe Conan O'Brien. Alec Baldwin phoned in to WNYC to complain about the Upper West Side's filth and preponderance of "bars and kind of mid-priced restaurants."

A machete-proficient Queens bodega owner hacked off the finger of an armed would-be robber. "Broker to the stars" Linda Stein's 26-year-old assistant, Natavia Lowery, was arrested for her murder; apparently Stein "just kept yelling at her." The city handed out its first grades to public schools, and nearly 150 got D's and F's. Buyers at a Sotheby's auction took a pass on B-level works by Picasso and Van Gogh. Developers knocked down a pre–Civil War warehouse on Pearl Street to make room for another luxury building. A Web designer who missed a connection with a rosy-cheeked cutie on the 5 train posted a Web page looking for the "woman of my dreams" — and landed a date with her just 48 hours later. But a few billion dollars of write-downs on Wall Street, and a few discouraging words from Fed chief Ben Bernanke, and our long fling with the bull market appears in jeopardy.—Mark Adams