I heard the woman before I saw her, and I assumed her to be the type of sick commuter I judge the crap out of: Someone clearly too ill to be going to work (or really anywhere besides the doctor’s office or the kitchen for a glass of water) who believes herself and her responsibilities too important to avoid germing up whatever mass-transit system she favors with whatever virus or bacteria or fungus is responsible for the disgusting ailment she has clearly come down with.

And look: I’ve been there. It happens. Sometimes you’re out of sick days, sometimes you underestimate how sick you are, sometimes you’re so sick you’re not even thinking straight and you can’t consider any option besides going through your morning routine and getting on the subway feeling awful. Plus, who wants to waste sick days on days when you’re actually sick?

Anyway, I’m hardly a germophobe, but part of having MS means — at least as far as I understand it — if you wind up with some sort of serious illness or infection you could be totally f@#$ing screwed. Not definitely screwed, but it’s not something I’m aiming to gamble with. So I try my best to stay out of harm’s way, and when there’s some woman sneezing and wheezing and hacking in the subway station, I walk down the platform a bit to avoid ending up face-to-face with a coughing mess who could cripple me somehow.

Only this lady was hot on my heels as the train pulled in, and I couldn’t shake her even as I scooted along the side of the car to get to the farthest possible doors. From her array of sick-person noises it wasn’t hard to sense her veering right upon entrance, so I hooked left and proceeded to the middle of the car because I am a responsible commuter.

The train started moving and I unraveled my headphones while she continued with her ridiculous cacophony of grossness. Then, from her general region of the train car, came a commotion and a scattering of passengers.

“She got my suitcase!” said someone with a nasal voice.

Behind a three-deep shield of high-school kids in puffy jackets, I looked toward the woman. She wasn’t the self-important but irresponsible white-collar worker I expected, and it certainly didn’t seem like she was heading to an office. She was probably in her late 40s or early 50s, wearing a black knit hat sitting way off the top of her hat and a long green trenchcoat, and she looked for all the world like she had gotten on the subway specifically to menace people.

The people on the train soon provided her about a four-foot radius of personal space — unheard of on a crowded rush-hour subway. And she used all of it, pacing around, glowering at commuters, and mostly — and I don’t know if there are grown-up words for these actions so I’m just going to use what I called them in seventh grade — blowing snot-rockets and hocking loogies.

Everyone else huddled together as far from her as possible. People abandoned nearby seats and stood in the aisle — their chances of incurring her mucus-wrath lessened by the crowd; herding at its most beneficial.

The guy next to me craned to try to see over my head. He turned to his girlfriend, sitting down but with a much better angle on the woman.

“Yo, she spittin’ on n****s,” she said.

One of the high-school kids, a girl about 15, looked straight down. “I think she got me; I think she got me; I think she got me,” she muttered.

A friend assured her she was safe, then expressed some concern over the condition of his fitted cap.

The woman got off at 68th St., but nobody who was on the train for her spitting spree returned to the area they freed up for her. A couple people got on at the stop and must have wondered why everyone on the train was crushed toward the sides, leaving a big empty space in the middle for them to stand in.

Part of that was certainly inertia: The train’s going to fill up anyway, you’ve already moved once, and it’s just a hell of a lot of effort to move back even if you’re jammed up against a bunch of other people.

Part of it, I think, is a certain and likely misguided type of germophobia: No one wants to stand in the space where they saw the crazy phlegm lady spitting. But of course it’s every man for himself, so no one was going to tell the 68th St. people that they might be wallowing in her hepatitis B, either.

The terrifying thing is that for all we know that type of thing has just happened on every train we get on and we are perpetually the naive 68th St. passengers. I’ve seen people urinate on trains on multiple occasions. Hell, just a couple weeks ago I saw a man vomit up half of his soul on a Manhattan-bound 7 train.

Point is, don’t lick anything on the subway.

The best dollar slice in the city has arrived, and it’s at Percy’s — a cozy pizzeria at 190 Bleecker St., in Greenwich Village.

- Max Gross, N.Y. Post.

I haven’t had Percy’s yet, though it seems inevitable that I will at some point. It seems like the most common response to the burgeoning dollar-slice pizza craze is, “Hey, that’s a pretty good slice of pizza for a dollar,” or “wow, you know this really isn’t that bad.”

And it’s true: Most of the dollar (or 99-cent) pizza I’ve tried really isn’t that bad. Better than most national chain pizzas, though that isn’t saying much. Plus most of the places are open late, found in convenient locations, and serve the pizza hot and fast. And, of course, you can’t beat the value. It’s a near-meal or a very solid late-night drunken snack for a single dollar.

So the trend is welcome as long as it doesn’t have any affect on the real, non-dollar pizza places the city is famous for. True story: I skipped dinner one night while Christmas shopping and realized I was famished just as I was walking past the 99-cent pizza place in my neighborhood. I stopped in for a slice and ate it on my walk home, thinking all the things I always think about how it’s just not that bad and it’s such a good deal for 99 cents.

But I was still hungry when I finished, so I ducked into a regular-old three-dollar-slice pizzeria and got a second slice there. And then… oh, right: Pizza’s not supposed to be not that bad. Pizza — good pizza — is f@#$ing amazing. Every single aspect of the more expensive slice blew away its 99-cent counterpart: The sauce was tastier, the cheese stretchier and less rubbery, the crust crispier and more flavorful.

There are a hell of a lot of hungry people in this city and most of them rightfully want pizza. So ideally the local economy can support both the 99-cent slice places and the traditional pizzerias, since they both offer something valuable. They offer very different things, like Taco Bell and actual Mexican restaurants or McDonald’s and anyplace that serves burgers that isn’t McDonald’s. And though perhaps in the case of the pizzas the distinction is a little more subtle, there should be room on our streets and in our stomachs for both styles.

- Ike Davis, on Mets Hot Stove.

Well that’s just a cool quote. Also, I think “Pure Chaos” would be a cool nickname for someone, but probably not Ike Davis. Probably better for Murphy, actually.

I brought this up on the podcast last week but in case you don’t listen or didn’t make it to that hour: Willie Harris told Mets Weekly producer Joe Kraus, who sits right across from me in the office here, that Murphy knows more about hitting than anyone he has ever played with. Harris said he wants to be a manager someday, and he wants Murphy to be his hitting coach. So that’s… notable, I guess.

When we talk about the Citi Field walls coming in, the first players that come up are David Wright and Jason Bay — for obvious reasons. People seem to assume the walls will mean a couple extra easy homers for Ike Davis and Lucas Duda, but that those guys would hit them out anywhere. And Ruben Tejada and Josh Thole don’t have much power to speak of, so it’s hard to figure how the walls will really impact their onslaught of slapped singles.

Murphy gets lost in that discussion, I think. Part of that is that he hits left-handed, and the changes to the right-field side of the fence don’t seem as dramatic as those to the former Great Wall of Flushing. Plus, though Murphy has doubles power, he’s not a home-run hitter: He has all of 20 in 1030 Major League at-bats.

Do some of Murphy’s doubles become home runs with the new dimensions? Just based on his spray chart from TexasLeaguers.com, it doesn’t look like many of them do. And of course, the way defenders position themselves with the new walls affects which hits will fall in and which one-time doubles outfielders might now get to. But does Murphy — man of hitting science, impressor of Willie Harris — adjust somehow to try to hit for more power? Should he?

I suppose that’s something to ask him about come Spring Training. Which I suppose makes for a decent segue to this: I’m going to be in Port St. Lucie for a couple of weeks in early March. I’ve got some things I know I want to do already, but maybe there’s something Spring Training-related you want to know about that you don’t know about yet. I’ll probably ask this again, but use the following form for any suggestions you might have for Spring Training content you want to see:

I’m also struggling to determine if there’s something about this particular Hoyas club that makes them more likable than any I can remember, or if that’s just my mind playing tricks on me because they’re good and have not yet suffered the type of late-season collapse they’ve endure in most recent years.

But if there is something extra about them that I’m enjoying beyond just that they’re my alma mater’s basketball team and they’ve been steadily ranked among the top 20 teams in the nation for the past two month, I think Nicole Auerbach gets at it here: They seem particularly good at playing together.

Last year’s team graduated its two best players, guards Austin Freeman and Chris Wright. Freeman typically did most of his damage from the perimeter and Wright was more apt to slash and drive to the basket, though neither was so offensively limited. Both seemed streaky, both could take over games, and, as seniors, both were assertive.

Their departure left the team with merely three upperclassmen: senior guard Jason Clark, junior forward Hollis Thompson and senior center Henry Sims.

Clark is a 6’2″ third-year starter with arms that go down to his ankle. He’s strong on defense, he can shoot from anywhere and he makes layups in traffic. Thompson hits nearly half of his three-pointers and does a little bit of everything everywhere else. Neither seems wont to force the issue on offense.

Sims occasionally does, which is exceptionally weird to anyone who watched him play a brand of confused, tentative and often downright lousy basketball in sparing minutes the last few years. Something happened to Sims this offseason — a long talk with his mother, most say — and now he’s awesome. He bangs down jumpers from 18 feet and hits turnaround fadeaways over opposing seven-footers. And, like most Georgetown big men, he’s an excellent passer.

I’m getting into too many details here and I never intended that. The Hoyas also roll deep for the first time in a while, with an impressive freshman class led by Otto Porter and featuring a bunch of other dudes that seem to have at least one strong asset and one notable weakness, none of which probably matter much to you.

Point is, I’m pretty sure this Georgetown team actually is more fun to watch than previous incarnations. And I don’t mean to say they’re better for losing Wright and Freeman, their two best players, like how the Mets should traid David Wright because he’s unclutch or anything. But I think the departure of the assertive stars, the emergence of more passive ones and the influx of depth make the Hoyas more aesthetically interesting.

Which is to say: They pass the ball well, and frequently. Oh, and they play awesome defense. It’s enjoyable.

Unfortunately, Syracuse is good at everything except having its players pass their classes and being willing to stay in the Big East. Plus, given how hostile the Carrier Dome environment is to opposing fans, I could only imagine how difficult it must be to play a road game there. So this could suck.

Police gave Moreno a breath test and a field sobriety test and took the former Georgia star to a detox facility. He was charged with DUI, failing to have insurance and careless driving. He is scheduled to be arraigned March 2, court records state.

The personalized license plate on the car Moreno was driving read “SAUCED,” according to KDVR-31.

- Lindsay Jones, Denver Post.

Yikes. If you’re playing at home: Knowshon Moreno was speeding through a construction zone while driving drunk in an uninsured Bentley convertible with a license plate that says “SAUCED.”

No joke I can make here is going to top the actual news there. Derek Jeter gives out post-coital giftbaskets to women he sleeps with. Dick Cheney shot a guy in the face. The man’s name is Weiner and he tweeted his penis.

Via Shutdown Corner, via Ted Burke.

Right now, the best way that I can impact the world is through entertainment. One day, and that day will come, I can impact the world through politics. The great news is that I am American, therefore I can become President.

Even if I disagree with The Rock on every issue, I’ll probably still vote for The Rock just to do my part to push us toward the future prophesied in Idiocracy. Also because it’d be hilarious.

DO YOU SMELL WHAT THE ROCK IS VETOING?

Since Santana missed all of 2011 and appears unlikely to ever again be the pitcher the Mets paid for, and especially since due to circumstances unforeseen in 2008 Santana’s salary now accounts for more than 1/4 of the Mets’ total payroll, his contract looks like a pretty massive albatross in the Mets rebuilding/retooling/time-biding plans.

And again: No one’s saying Johan Santana’s not totally sweet, and no one is more psyched than me to see him pitching again at whatever capacity. We just can’t keep calling that deal “a steal” unless you mean it was some sort of art heist in which the Mets came away with some beautiful sculpture that looks awesome but takes up most of the room in their house and makes it difficult for them to add anything else to their collection.

Other Canadian Baseball Hall of Famers include actual Canadians like Larry Walker, Ferguson Jenkins and Kirk McCaskill, but also some with more tenuous connections to the nation, like Tommy Lasorda — who pitched for the Dodgers’ Triple-A team in Montreal for nine seasons — and the entire All-American Girls Professional Baseball League, which had 64 Canadians including the catcher Geena Davis’ character in A League of Their Own was “rumoured to be based on.”

There’s obviously a waiting period after a player retires before he can be inducted into the Canadian Baseball Hall of Fame. I can tell because Matt Stairs isn’t in yet even though they (presumably) already have a Matt Stairs Wing full of awesome Matt Stairs memorabilia, including jerseys from all 13 of his Major League stops, an empty beer can that is believed to be from his first-ever postgame Molson, the original scouting report on Stairs by Expos scout Bill MacKenzie*, and, of course, a whole bunch of hockey stuff.

The Matt Stairs Wing is right near the early Winnipeg Slugger prototypes, across from where the wax statue of Kelly Gruber stands and kitty corner from where the actual Kelly Gruber stands, just sort of hanging around admiring the Canadian baseball history, considering his small role in it and secretly hoping someone recognizes him even while he insists to his friends that he hopes no one recognizes him.

Come to think of it, I should probably get to the Canadian Baseball Hall of Fame this summer. Worth it for the trip down memory lane to those times when Jason Bay was pretty good.

*- Actual name of Expos scout that signed Matt Stairs. Canada!

It would be sweet if the Internet picked this up as a thing. It’s a Bacon Cheeseburger Burrito, and if I had eaten one within the past 10 years maybe I could tell you in more explicit terms why you should be demanding Taco Bell bring it back. But the Bacon Cheeseburger Burrito is at this point a mere whisper in the brilliant symphony of Taco Bell Stuff I’ve Eaten, something I might be able to identify with great focus but not something I can readily distinguish amid the thunderous rolls of the MexiMelt tympani and the bawdy glissando of the Gordita trombones.