Some weeks, star power takes a backseat to firepower. Julia Roberts, Elton John, and Phil Collins all got shut out of Tony nominations, and the CBS Evening News surged into second place for the first time in years without Katie even being there yet, but the out-of-state gun dealers who starred in Mayor Bloomberg’s high-caliber version of Punk’d became sudden celebrities. After they were videotaped selling a gun to an undercover cop without a permit (another cop, posing as the officer’s “husband,” had a permit and signed for the purchase), they seemed perplexed by their sudden fame. “Now, if two people had come into the store and one looked over and said, ‘John, I’m illegal to buy a gun, so will you buy a gun for me?’ I would not do that,” declared Harold Webster Babcock. A new poll showed GOP gubernatorial leading man William Weld running second to Eliot Spitzer. Unfortunately, the same poll has Spitzer outgunning him by a whopping 49 points. But perhaps long-term job prospects were looking up for the onetime wannabe ambassador to Mexico: The White House reopened diplomatic ties with Muammar Qaddafi’s Libya, and the president floated the idea of signing a peace treaty with North Korea (a delicate bit of negotiating that could be aided by Weld’s patrician manners and zest for tippling). A study showed that the subways today are more crowded than they’ve been since another Republican unpopular in the Big Apple, Richard Nixon, was in office; this may or may not be related to the influx of cops searching for tiny guns disguised as cell phones. No reports of weapons masquerading as iPods surfaced, though the opening of the 24-hour Apple Store Fifth Avenue does allow for late-night repairs of those Nano-weapons against subway boredom. Bill Clinton, the man whose 24-hour star power sold 2.2 million copies of his 1,008-page autobiography (clearing innumerable forests in the process), announced a deal for another volume—coincidentally the day after his publisher declared it would start using ten times as much recycled paper in its books.

Related:

• Archive: “Intelligencer”
• Articles by Mark Adams
• Table of Contents: May 29, 2006 issue of New York | Subscribe!