Tomorrow is Independence Day, and in honor of this annual celebration of our great country, we'd like to take a minute to talk about our great city. See, there's a rumor going around that New York is different from the rest of the country. That it's fey and dirty and full of rich people and sinners and Europeans and that New Yorkers are patronizing and unfriendly and think "amber waves of grain" is something served at the Tasting Room. And it is just false.

Okay. It's a little true. But in many other ways, New York is just as American as apple pie, peach cobbler, and the DMV. Especially when it comes to the Fourth of July. This year, as Americans across the land trot out in their Keds or whatever to see the fireworks, we will be, too. We'll be having our barbecue and going into our own version of a backyard where we sometimes play football.

And so, in a gesture of solidarity with our hearty brethren across the nation, we're taking it upon ourselves to dispel the rumors of New York's superiority complex, by giving you a little mini-presentation we like to call "New York: It's Just Like America!" After you've clicked through, we're sure you'll see it our way.

When Port Authority executive director Chris Ward presented Governor Paterson with his report on the sorry state of World Trade Center reconstruction last week, he proposed the appointment of a "traffic cop" to ride herd on the many agencies and companies involved in the project. Just whom might he be thinking of for the gig? "I get the feeling Ward recommended Ward, like Dick Cheney heading the vice-presidential selection committee," says a downtown community watchdog who regularly works with the Port Authority. Ward, a longtime development official who holds a master's in theology from Harvard, might just see himself as the perfect savior for the project, if he was just given the power to do so. Others echoed the idea, citing Ward's experience with construction, his credibility with bureaucracy and unions, and general likeability. "I've now met him several times, and on each occasion, I'm more impressed," says a manager who's been working in the pit since 2002. "He will get this done, if anyone can." Indeed, his scathing report may have been his opening gambit. "Every couple of years," says someone close to a downtown developer, "everyone gets scared, and we move forward." A PA spokesperson didn't return calls. — Alec Appelbaum

Best Week Ever blog beat us to the punch for our regular "guess the Post headline" game about the late-night meetings that A-Rod and Madonna have been having in her Central Park West apartment. Their predictions include "JUSTIFY MY GLOVE," "A-ROD-ICA," "TAKE A BOW, A-ROD," "ROD OF LIGHT," and "LIKE A PLAYER." They're all pretty genius ("Rod of Light"? That would be the best Christian-rock song ever!). We have our own suggestions:

• DRESS YOU UP IN MY GLOVE
• STRAY-ROD STRIKE TWO
• YANKEE CANOODLE
• UPPER BREAST SIDE
• HUMAN NATURE
• MADGE'S MARRIAGE ON BORDERLINE
• WHAT IT FEELS LIKE FOR THE GUY

What do you guys think? You're always so good at this. You know, we'd really just be happy with a plain and simple: " MADONNA – IT'S GREAT TO HAVE YOU BACK."

Madonna Sleeping With Alex Rodriguez??? Get Your Pun Headlines Ready… [Best Week Ever]

When New Yorkers talk about a weight problem, they’re more likely to be discussing underfed models at Fashion Week than anyone above a size 14. Between trans-fat bans, tiny apartments, and Anna Wintour, ours is not a city that caters to the overweight. “It’s why I work in New Jersey,” said Rose Inciano, 29, a Lower East Side native who weights over 400 pounds. “The PATH trains are less crowded. In the city, I feel like I’m always bumping into people or slowing them down.”

But one can only commute to Jersey for so long, which is why Inciano joined more than 500 people Saturday to audition for season seven of NBC’s weight-loss reality show, The Biggest Loser, at the NBC Experience Store in Rockefeller Center. (Note to NBC: Next year, for sensitivity’s sake, please reconsider staging the auditions directly behind the rock-candy wall and past the five-tiered carousels of chocolate-covered Pop Rocks and bulk sweets.)

We’ll admit it. We totally love ABC’s The Bachelorette. There’s just something about watching 25 guys bow down before a hot, assertive woman that stirs our inner feminist. And of the final four bachelors, one in particular, Graham Bunn, caught our attention — he's a Manhattanite. Plus, he comes off as moody, prone to jealousy, commitment-phobic, and emotionally stunted, just like every guy we’ve dated in this town. How could you not root for him? Alas, Bachelorette DeAnna sent him home for his inability to talk about his feelings. Jada Yuan caught up with Graham to find out what happened the night he was dismissed, and whether he's free now to date the rest of us.

A recent City Council–funded study found that 3,800 young people are on the streets every night in New York City, a disproportionate number of them lesbian, gay, bisexual, or transgender (LGBT). But they're not all headed for lives of unpaid voguing! With Gay Pride weekend upon us, it felt right to recap a recent event at which current and former residents of Green Chimneys (which serves LGBT youth) and other, non-LGBT-specific shelters met with top executives at places like MTV and Atlantic Records to learn how to network their way into the entertainment industry.

The meet-up was held by the Reciprocity Foundation, which shepherds such youths into creative-sector jobs. A few of the young networkers talked about where they'd been, where they hoped to go, and the likely difficulty of being an actor with a side job as an M.D.

Aneidy "Love" Merono, Green Chimneys resident

So you just went into the independent-living part of Green Chimneys?
You have your own keys and come in and out as you please, but you have to have a job and go to school. I study hospitality at Globe Institute of Technology.
Describe living at Green Chimneys.
Annoying. Hectic. But structured. I felt safe.
And you were living house to house for five years before that.
Three, four months. Once eight months with a lady from church who said, "Stay in my house and tell them I'm your godmother."

Some consider waterboarding torture. For others, it's "all in fun," says an assistant to the graffiti artist-painter Steve Powers a.k.a. Espo, who is looking for 50 lawyers to waterboard as part of an "experimental art event" this month somewhere in the city (probably Coney Island). "We felt like lawyers would yield an interesting result as they are most qualified to impartially describe the experience," said the assistant, who didn't want to be named. The mass waterboarding will be supervised by medical professionals and will not last more than five seconds. Other than that, it will be pretty authentic:

Volunteers will be strapped to a wooden board and have water poured over their face to simulate drowning.

Participants should look on it, Power's assistant says, "as an old-fashioned Coney Island–style ride" that "will hopefully settle the question of what waterboarding is like … whether it is torture or fun/crazy/scary." Hmmm. We suspect if you're a prisoner who is most definitely not having this done voluntarily, there's no way you'd see it as fun. But for everyone else? Well, it's pretty hot out. You do what you need to do to cool down. Full press release after the jump.

Steppin' Out columnist Chaunce Hayden reached out to us after news broke yesterday that he was being sued for $10 million by Lynsi Smigo, fiancée of radio host Gregg "Opie" Hughes. Hayden claims that he didn't do much to spread the word about a (in the end, fictional) sex tape between Smigo and MTV star Bam Margera beyond alerting "Page Six" to the tip. "Neither myself or any other employee of Steppin' Out magazine, published anything at anytime to suggest that Ms. Smigo was involved in a sex tape," Hayden wrote in an official statement he helpfully sent along. "In fact, I went as far as to print that Ms. Smigo was not involved in a sex tape despite what Page Six of the New York Post suggested." He said he told Bill Hoffman at "Page Six" that he hadn't seen a tape, but he had heard the story. In April, "Page Six" ran with it anyway. In the lawsuit, which was filed on Wednesday, Smigo's lawyers claim that Hayden did write a column about the sex tape, and that is part of their $10 million complaint. Chaunce forwarded us the article in question, and we've put it after the jump. All this "he said sex tape, she said sex tape" business is a little hard to follow, but it helps a little if you read the column. It's kind of like listening to a radio D.J., but on paper.

Earlier: Chaunce Hayden Could End Up Costing the ‘Post’ $10 Million

JPRESS: Okay, so can we talk about this entry on Anderson Cooper's blog about how he wants to tell Robert Mugabe "Enough is enough"?
CHRISTAL: What about it?
JPRESS: Let's start with the line: "We sit and we watch, that’s all it seems we’re able to do."
JPRESS: I think that I am over his sanctimoniousness.
CHRISTAL: Wait, wait, wait.
JPRESS: It was cute when he was new, when he was, like, earnest and furrowy because he CARED. But…
CHRISTAL: Are you turning against MANDERSON?
CHRISTAL: Our blimp-bicepted hero?
JPRESS: I think I may be out of love with him.
CHRISTAL: He who carries the fleshy white melons of the world on his shoulders?
JPRESS: First of all, remember, I am a girl, and he is…
JPRESS: You know
CHRISTAL: Short?

Oh God. We seem to have gotten a copy of former Gawker editor–recent Times Magazine cover subject–chronic-oversharer Emily Gould's book proposal, And the Heart Says, "Whatever." We're not going to pass judgment, not even about the title. We'll just tell you that it's a first-person "assortment of semi-cautionary tales," in the manner of Sloane Crosely's I Was Told There'd Be Cake (her description), with chapters organized around Emily's tattoos, and that while, Gould says, most of the stories "will have nothing to do with blogs or blog-fame's weirdness," about "60,000-65,000 words feels about right for the material." (Does that number apply to the blog material alone? Unclear.) "While nothing that has happened to me in and of itself has been that noteworthy: Lots of young people have lived in big cities, and have had an assortment of strange and ordinary jobs… there are some truths about doing these things and about writing about them online that haven't yet been expressed." Emphasis ours. We can't show you the whole thing — people are bidding so you'll be able to get it soon enough, and knowing Emily we suspect she might just scan it herself — but there's a small excerpt after the jump.