At all times is Times Square telling us something. The connection of streets is like a sentence, and the large signs are evidence of a brain working at higher consciousness. Statistics claim that over 350,000 people pass through the neighborhood each day - more foot-traffic than Port Authority Bus Terminal, but less than Penn Station.

For instance, the best spot for electric outdoor advertising, anywhere on earth, is the Times Tower. In 1904, this building on 42nd Street & Broadway was where “all the news that’s fit to print” was made. Today, One Times Sq is vacant but for Walgreen’s, which itself used to be a place in the neighborhood you could sit at the counter and have a milkshake and smoke a cigarette.

The two biggest ads on the north face – the prime face – are for Budweiser and Chevrolet. They want us to drink and drive, especially on New Year’s Eve, when the most numerous of world-citizens gawk at the building.

Budweiser got the Belgian bailout (at least a nod to New York’s original Walloon colonists in the mid-1600s), so its lights have no trouble shining (as they did briefly at Obama’s Beer Summit - the president drank Bud Light). But Chevrolet is on welfare these days, and the delinquency of its energy bill is made a spectacle at the crossroads of the world. Meanwhile, the Virgin Mega Store on 7 Avenue shut down business last month, but its lights still shine on.

When so much signature is clumped together in such commercial flux, the spectator can certainly do much worse than read it, and allow the recognition of grand suggestivity about the human universe. But what tourists do more than shop is take pictures.

Up the Stem btwn 46th & 47th, The Gap is selling the idea of jeans on the spot where the old Howard Johnson’s got recently torn down. One might find fine fantasy in 1969, since it shows up on the adjacent billboard advertising the Recession, a plug for past years similarly hit. Such juxtaposition should only advance the economic-downturn-chic with which Gap Co. now hopes to present itself.

The spectator is also invited to “Lucy’s Legacy,” she the world’s most prime ancestor. The Gap could have just as meaningfully employed the Lucy exhibit’s slogan: “Her story is Your story.” And her bones were in fact discovered in the Ethiopian scrublands of the Afar “Depression”. . .

Sometimes, the jumbotrons in Times Square are in need of tech support. . . .