(Pic from my visit last year aboard the U.S.S. JFK.)

Whenever an American over the age of 30 tells me he's never been to New York, I look at him like he's got three heads. Now, I know not everyone's a big-city guy, but we're talking about the world's most influential city of the 20th Century.

Wouldn't you be curious to see what the fuss is about?

Would these same people, if they lived within a three-hour flight to Paris, never visit there, either?

I don't get it.

Our brave servicemen came to town for last month's annual Fleet Week festivities, and a 39-year-old Navy guy told he it was his first trip to NYC. Having a travel resumé that included visits to 25 countries, he rated New Yorkers as the friendliest people he'd ever encountered. Sadly, he also said that he always thought a trip to New York came with a risk of being "mugged or killed."

A guy protecting our country had such a wrong impression about its most populous city, thinking it was a mean, dangerous place. Wow.

Two recent reports dispel those myths (though random crime and rude behavior can never be eradicated in a metro area of 22 million), and it's my pleasure to pimp them.

• FBI Ranks NYC America's Safest Big City ... Again — This comes as no surprise to me. There's nowhere I feel safer than on streets that are populated into the early morning every night. Compare that to when I walked the main streets of Lucerne, Switzerland, at midnight on a Monday and didn't see a car or person for minutes. I was freaking out.

• Readers Digest Poll: New Yorkers Are Polite? You Bet — In a politeness test of 36 cities in 35 countries — weighing such criteria as salespeople saying "thank you" and strangers helping to pick up a dropped folder of papers — New York ranked numero uno. Almost without fail, when I ask tourists what they think of New York, they say the people are much nicer than expected. It's an altogether uplifting and saddening conversation.

Other New York Links:

• Women Have Seen It All on Subway, Unwillingly — OK, not everyone here is a saint. Gropers and flashers abound. Unfortunately, they're all guys.

• Scruffy Duffy's Dress Code — My favorite Times Square-area sports bar puts the kibosh on tilted caps, jeans shorts and wife-beaters, saying "Perhaps you are not a thug. Okay, then you are an idiot for trying to emulate one."

• SeamlessWeb — Enter your zip code and find a wide range of restaurants that take delivery orders through this site. Set your tip and pay by credit card. Works great.

• 42nd Street Just Ain't What It Used To Be — Gothamist's write-up on Forgotten-NY's compelling photo feature on the lost 42nd Street.

• He's Clinging to his Clunker — Inwood resident Harry Ettling gains notoriety by driving a 1982 Honda Civic that can only be described as a piece of shit.

• Shops of Dirty Horror — An Upper East Side Rite Aid — which failed six straight sanitary inspections — distinguishes itself as the dirtiest store in the city, thanks to "such problems as hundreds of mouse droppings and food gnawed by rodents." Yum!