The New York Press‘ 50 Most Loathsome New Yorkers list is out. At number 12, the New Yorker’s Adam Gopnik easily makes the cut. Inclusions go from the obvious (Bill O’Reilly, 29; Mayor Bloomberg, 1; Alex Rodriguez, 50) to the refreshingly counterintiutive (Eliot Spitzer, 35). And which STD-spreading Interpol bassist checks in at number 15? Click the link to find out!

The New Yorker notes a disturbing trend in pest activity — bedbugs:

Life is, like, so unfair sometimes. Case in point: Alexis Swerdloff and her friends Laura Perciasepe, Avni Bhatia, and Anna Arkin-Gallagher, a quartet of eye-on-the-main-chance nouvelles Yale graduates who late last summer set up housekeeping in the East Village, in a four-bedroom apartment that they really, really liked, but then realized that they liked a lot less when, not long after they moved in, all were viciously assaulted by bedbugs. According to Andy Linares, the proprietor of the Bug Off Pest Control Center, in Washington Heights, which he describes as the largest supplier of pest-control products in the city, New York is witnessing “without a doubt, a dramatic increase in bedbug activity. We hadn’t seen bedbugs in New York in sixty years. Then, all of a sudden, bingo. Who’da thunk it?” Whatever satisfaction Alexis and her roommates might have derived from having caught the wave of an interesting new trend was offset by the heart-of-darkness horror of it. That’s how they felt, anyway, after the fourth or fifth visit from the exterminator, a redundancy necessitated by the fact that, as Alexis explained the other day, “the bedbugs kept not going away.”

Because of where they like to hang out, the case can be made that bedbugs might actually be worse than mice or cockroaches; you feel sorry for writer Mark Singer’s prissy protagonists:

When the first symptoms appeared, last September—small, itchy pink welts, mostly on the arms and legs—the four women thought they had a mosquito problem. A bit of online research established that the welts matched bedbug bites. The good news—other than the illusory good news that the landlord was dispatching an exterminator—was that bedbugs are not a disease vector and therefore not a public-health risk. The bad news, which quickly revealed itself, was that if you’re twenty-two years old and you’re paying (O.K., so maybe you’re getting some help from Mom and Dad) Manhattan rent, bedbugs can easily drive you insane. Cockroach-colored, and when full grown about the size of an apple seed, a bedbug sucks blood through a mosquito-like proboscis after injecting an anesthetic that keeps the sleeping victim from reacting before the meal gets under way. Bedbugs are not, strictly speaking, parasites, because unlike, God forbid, lice or crabs, they can survive away from their host. Basically, they eat and then crawl into a tuft in the mattress or upholstery, or under the rug or the molding, or maybe into your clothes or your furniture, and sleep it off until the next time they’re hungry. When they’re not feeding or dozing, adult bedbugs evidently enjoy having sex.

. . .

As it happened, all four roommates had parents who lived in the city. “So, on days when the exterminator had visited and we couldn’t sleep in the apartment, we could all go home to our parents,” Alexis said. “But then our parents didn’t want to let us in the door. My mother was afraid I would bring them into her apartment and she’d have problems with her co-op board. I’d have to come in the back door and take off all my clothing and put it in a plastic bag in the kitchen. She’d leave a change of clothes for me there, but first she’d make me take a shower.”

And the long-term trends are not favorable:

So, what’s the reality and what’s the prognosis?

“It’s an emerging crisis,” [Mr. Linares] said. “So you have to have a plan of attack to reverse the trend. I have the sense that this year—2005—is going to be a determining year. This summer, we’re going to hit a plateau. You look at the number of complaints, the number of professionals reaching out to me for the training. I think after this year it will probably stabilize. What we’ll end up with is a continuing battle in certain enclaves. Bedbug eradication is not for every pest-control professional, because it does require a great deal of skill, patience, and attention to detail. And it requires that you charge an above-average fee. It’s still not up there with roaches and rodents—in New York, that’ll always be the bread and butter—but bedbugs is a nice niche.”

R.W. Apple, Jr. eating lunch with the Barnum & Bailey Circus. Only in New York, Kids, Only in New York:

Shortly after I talked with Mr. [chief animal trainer Sacha] Houcke, I came across a copy of “Center Ring Circus Cuisine,” a cookbook published in 1979, which shows that European circus traditions were alive in the Ringling show of that era. It contains a Wiener schnitzel recipe from a Czech aerialist, one for sauerbraten from a German wardrobe mistress, one for toad-in-the-hole from an English chimpanzee trainer and one for moussaka from a Bulgarian teeterboard specialist.

Ever the feinschmecker, Mr. Houcke buys Starbucks beans from Colombia and grinds them himself in his quarters. He drinks one big cup each morning.

When he came to America five years ago, he recalled, he gorged on steaks the size of which he had never seen before. “I was a fiend,” he said, for places like Blade’s Prime Chophouse in Fort Worth - “you don’t even have to press hard on your knife to cut the beef there” - and Sonny Williams’ Steak Room in Little Rock, Ark., and the Golden Ox in Kansas City, Mo. - “a place that you’ve absolutely got to get to.”

Now Mr. Houcke looks for cozy, quiet places with good food, searching on the Internet or following friends’ tips. “Noise spoils my dinner,” he said. Often he eats with musicians from the circus band, and when he comes across a good place, he goes back. One great favorite is the Park Bistro, where he ordered snails followed by skate in a port wine sauce the day we ate together, then sampled my hanger steak.

God help me if I ever let news of my botched penile enlargement surgery make it into the Post:

Bigger isn’t better for Eric Neuberger, who says his New York doctor botched his penile enhancement to the point that he’s now nearly impotent.

Before the January 2001 surgery, Neuberger “could engage in intercourse approximately 30 to 50 times a month, and after the surgery, he was only able to engage in intercourse once a month,” his malpractice suit charges.

Neuberger said his new limitations forced him to drop out of school — and even hurt his musical ability. His suit did not elaborate.

But the doctor, Robert Barron, suggests that Neuberger simply “injured himself during sex.”

Hurt his musical ability? Who is this guy, R. Kelly?

The Post is burying the lede here, though — we finally might have found someone enrolled in a co-ed naked basket weaving course! And here I just assumed those T-shirts were a joke.

Years from now, anthropologists and social historians will find this all a little odd:

It would be hard to conceive of a better criminal target than the iPod. Those white cords snaking down from listeners’ ears into the recesses of their jackets signify an instant status symbol, hundreds of dollars worth of merchandise and a mark who may be blissfully unaware of his or her surroundings.

. . .

But a recent spike in subway felonies, reported in The Daily News yesterday, has been driven by an increase in iPod thefts, the police said. As of Sunday, there had been 304 robberies in the transit system citywide this year, up 24 percent from the same period last year, the police said. Grand larcenies are up 10 percent, with 462 so far this year. Over all, transit crimes are up 16 percent.

It is impossible to say how many of those robberies were iPod thefts, but they were a major factor, the police said.

“IPods are definitely part of the newest items to be stolen and appear to be driving the recent spike in subway robberies,” said Paul J. Browne, the Police Department’s deputy commissioner for public information.

Rarely have the iPod thefts involved physical assault, he said, adding that the thieves and their victims tended to be teenagers. Late last year, Stuyvesant High School students were targets in a series of iPod muggings, one of which took place in the Chambers Street subway station near the school in Lower Manhattan.

Mr. Browne said the police have been sending teams consisting of a sergeant and eight officers into the subway this month, both in response to the increase in felonies and out of caution near the anniversary of the Madrid train bombing, on March 11.

The current rash of iPod thefts resembles that of 8 Ball Jackets a few years ago. They were singled out because they were an expensive status symbol. But the difference is that iPods are easier to conceal once they are stolen, and can be sold online easily and anonymously.

Despite the thefts, though, few subway riders seem to be changing their habits, and may be feeling even safer since the little white wires seem to be everywhere.

“It was a concern when I first got it,” said Adriana Arcia, 29, a publicist for Major League Baseball, whose iPod contains around 3,700 songs. “But I live in Williamsburg, and on the L train everybody has one.”

Models posing as wife beaters are suing to have their images taken down:

If you see Christopher Dorm, Triple Edwards, Daniel Royer or Javier Velarde around town, chances are you’ll recognize them as wife-beaters.

They’re not - they’re actually male models who posed in a domestic violence ad campaign in 2002.

They were told the ads would be up for five weeks, but some are still on display - leading to a $4 million suit demanding that the city take all the posters down.

The ads showed each of the men with captions such as “Employee of the Month. Soccer Coach. Wife Beater” or “Successful Executive. Devoted Churchgoer. Abusive Husband.”

And just as life can imitate Seinfeld or Law & Order, the Daily News makes the case that it also can imitate Friends. Say it ain’t so!

The lawsuit is reminiscent of a “Friends” episode that has the character Joey pose as someone with VD for a public health campaign, leading his family and potential dates to think he has the disease.

And like an episode of a television sitcom, the quartet’s friends and acquaintances “believed they had been arrested for domestic violence or were otherwise actual ‘women beaters,’” according to court papers. “In the advertisements, which appear in several different languages and which are deliberately unflattering, each plaintiff is displayed behind bars with a sullen expression and is described as a domestic abuser,” the suit says.

Saturday’s story in the Times about the picky doormen at Chelsea’s Marquee club had one of the best ledes in recent memory:

The German guy with the mullet never had a chance.

Of course it didn’t help that his female companion seemed to think an aggressive display of cleavage might neutralize her urgent need for orthodontia.

Wass Stevens considered the couple for just a moment before muttering, “Let me crush ‘em,” out of the corner of his mouth.

As the doorman at Marquee, the model-and-celebrity-magnet of the moment in Chelsea, Mr. Stevens had already dashed the party plans of several hundred people who swamped the sidewalk on this cruel, cold winter night. When it came to the German tourists, Mr. Stevens approached the task with evident relish.

There’s something about this whole milieu that makes you side with the doormen against the masses:

After two decades on the ropes of New York City clubs, Mr. Stevens has become a skilled alchemist prized for his ability to gauge and mix a room. Too many Europeans can be stultifying, too much testosterone can ruin the vibe, and too many women can create a different sort of tension. “Women come to clubs to be desired, adored and taken care of,” Mr. Stevens said. “If you go over 70 percent, the women start getting catty and competitive.”

There is no surefire way of making the cut. Packs of men are almost always turned away, and Mr. Stevens seems to frown on women of limited height. “My father always taught me that there are winners and losers in this world,” he said. “My job is to make sure this place is full of winners.” Standards, of course, vary depending on the night, and are more stringent on weekends.

By midnight on a recent Friday, several dozen shivering people were lined up awaiting judgment, smoking incessantly and to trying to mask their anxiety. On the wrong side of the velvet rope, milling about with agitation, the recently rejected worked their cellphones, trying to reach people they imagined might be able to spin some magic on their behalf.

Then there were the big spenders, cocky businessmen who stepped up to the rope with impressive wads of cash. Although they readily accept clothing, designer footwear and tips from patrons already on the inside, the doormen are forbidden to accept entry bribes. Still, over the course of the evening, at least a half-dozen people indiscreetly proffered amounts as high as $500.

When Mr. Stevens ignored a man who held out a brick of bills, the man, a Chinese-born tech entrepreneur who gave only his first name, Simon, upped the ante to what he claimed was $1,000. “Confucius said that everyone has his price,” he explained, counting out the money for all to see.

Mr. Stevens countered with his own axiom: “Flashing a pile of cash is a complete and total admission that you don’t belong here.” Defeated, Simon got back into his BMW and drove away.

Confucious said, “Flashing a pile of cash is a complete and total admission that you don’t belong here.” Brilliant . . .

After the sweet rush of irony abates, the news that the Department of Education released a test preparation guide filled with typos and errors seems just pathetic:

City education officials were forced to recall test preparation materials for math exams late Wednesday after discovering that they were rife with errors, including basic arithmetic mistakes.

The materials were intended for math students in grades 3 through 7, but the faulty information - at least 18 errors - was found before it reached classrooms. The testing guides were e-mailed late Wednesday to regional instructional specialists, math coaches and local instructional superintendents and recalled a few hours later.

Some answers in the guide were wrong. Other questions suffered from odd wording, the incorrect notation of exponents and sloppy diagrams. Besides the math mistakes, there were problems with grammar and spelling. For instance, the word “fourth” was misspelled on the cover of the fourth-grade manual.

The department’s fact checker reportedly was reprimanded and a letter placed in that person’s personnel file.

Not unjustified grandstanding to follow:

Several math coaches and teachers who had seen the test preparation manuals yesterday notified Randi Weingarten, the president of the United Federation of Teachers. Ms. Weingarten seemed outraged.

“Tweed has no problem with excessively criticizing teachers for failing to meet its picayune mandates,” Ms. Weingarten said, referring to the Department of Education by the name for its headquarters, the Tweed Courthouse. “But then it produces a test prep manual riddled with errors and misspellings. The hypocrisy is stunning. They could avoid embarrassing things like this if they were more collegial and shared these documents with us, instead of running things in a top-down management style that does not welcome or want input.”

Can’t resist checking in with the Post on this issue:

If thousands of city students flunk their math and reading exams this year, they’ll know whom to blame.

Whom to blame? Showoffs! I expect more from the Post.

Seriously, though, this is inexcusable:

An algebraic equation in the booklet for seventh-grade teachers uses variables, to ask, in essence, what 15+10 equals — but gives the correct answer as 24. In fact, 25 is not even among the four multiple-choice answers.

The moral of this week’s New York Press feature about the man that attempted an Election Day takeover of Governor’s Island, Jolly Roger in tow, is not that he highlighted possible security flaws, not that he should be reprimanded for diverting precious counterterrorism resources during a heightened threat level and not even the Press’ pronouncement that David Nash “may be the last honest revolutionary patriot the country has left.” The real moral here is that had Saturday Night Live not dismissed out of hand a perfectly reasonable idea for an Al Sharpton comedy sketch, all this hubbub could have been averted:

The original notion . . . began with a comedy sketch [Nash had] written and mailed to Al Sharpton in 2003, hoping Sharpton would perform it while hosting Saturday Night Live. In the sketch, Sharpton leads a flotilla of sailboats and yachts across the harbor to Governors Island, where he plants a pirate flag in the sand and claims the island for slave-reparation purposes.

“The idea evolved from that. When nobody else did it, I decided that I had to do it.” At the time, Nash was making his second presidential bid under the Blue Tulip banner and looking to get his ideas a little exposure.

“It took a little while to plan the swim over,” he said. “It’s pretty dangerous out there in the harbor. I was worried about the currents sweeping me away from the island, and having to tie off to a buoy or something…I had to study the tide charts and the currents to see how risky it would be. It finally took a lot of just deciding to do it.”

In the wee hours of Nov. 2, David Nash, in a full wetsuit and black camouflage facepaint, entered the chill waters off Brooklyn, and made the roughly 800-yard swim.

Shortly before seven o’clock that morning, workmen couldn’t help but notice the trespasser on the beach—the one who was hoisting an enormous blue skull-and-crossbones flag. The skull had a neat bullet hole between its two red eyes, and the legend “Blue Tulip Party” had been embroidered beneath it. The workmen, figuring this sort of thing was a bit out of their jurisdiction, called the NYPD.

And the real tragedy — the worst thing about this story — is that the SNL episode with Al Sharpton sucked!

The concept of “killing time” is — or at least should be — anathema in such a city, but sometimes its residents have no choice. After several apparently related/apparently unrelated (depending on who is speaking) recent subway mishaps (or if you’re writing headlines for a tabloid, “snafus,” as in “subway snafus”), even the subway-riding Mayor is venting about the subway’s troubles.

Lest the obvious answer seem too obvious — Read the newspaper! Read the Times, even! — the Times gets into the heads of New Yorkers to discover how they kill their time:

A barometer of just how bad the recent subway delays have been can be found in Sacha Newley’s reading habits. Mr. Newley, a painter from the Upper West Side, has certain books that he reserves only for subway reading. Two months ago, around the time the delays began, he picked up his latest: “Moby-Dick.” He’s now on Chapter 107.

A great book, Mr. Newley said, but a paltry coping technique when faced with the angst of a serious delay, when a quick hop underground turns into an interminable wait on an ever-crowding platform with no more information than an occasional belch from the loudspeaker. He and hundreds of thousands of other passengers have found themselves in that very situation over the past two months, forced by an epidemic of power failures and track fires to count the tiles, reread Us Weekly, stare forlornly into the abyss or debate whether to give it up and take a cab.

There are two things wrong with this next passage:

. . . [W]hen one is still standing on a platform and already 10 minutes late to work, it does not really matter whether the recent delays are just a run of bad luck or the first rumblings of total breakdown. The iPod might work well as a distraction, just as the Rubik’s cube did 20 years ago. But more than anything, waiting is a mind game.

“I’m planning my wedding,” said Whitney Burrell, 30, a medical student who lives on the Upper East Side. “I think about everything that could go wrong. Every permutation that could go wrong. The photographer doesn’t show up. The hairstylist doesn’t show up.”

When she snaps out of it, Ms. Burrell said, it isn’t so bad to be standing on a subway platform. Anyway, it’s a way to pass the time.

The first is obvious: the vision of commuters working on Rubik’s cubes while waiting out a track fire is just not plausible — though if I were working on a 1980s period piece, I might be tempted to put the image into the script. (Side note: is Times writer Campbell Robertson really equating the satisfaction one gets from an iPod to the passing distraction of a Rubik’s cube? Has he never used an iPod? Does he forget what a waste of time Rubik’s cubes were? Perhaps he’s a Rubik’s cube champion — though a cursory Google check suggests not.)

The second thing wrong with the paragraph is that even being trapped on a train for hours — in the dark — could be preferable to planning a wedding. Poor comparison. Please go back to the field to collect another quote!

But maybe the reason you rarely hear folks in New York talk about “killing time” is because they have a euphemisms for it — “existential aspects,” being “zenlike,” “zoning out”:

The feeling of helplessness, which prompted one young man on the F train to muse on the subway’s “existential aspect,” is a recurring theme brought up by frustrated commuters.

“It’s the subway system,” said Connie Robinson, 27, a house manager at Studio 54. “There’s nothing you can do about it.”

Though Ms. Robinson, who lives in the Bronx, said she had been seriously delayed at least once a week in the past few months, she said a Zenlike approach was the only way to cope.

“If you don’t have a book you don’t have a choice but to zone out,” she said.

And the Times becomes the new Rubik’s cube, we discover that, as perverse as it seems, even New Yorkers kill time.

Unpacking the story about the school teacher who was caught cheating on his state certification exam won’t be easy, but we’ll give it try. There are so many interesting angles, it’s hard to decide where to go first:

A Bronx teacher who repeatedly flunked his state certification exam paid a formerly homeless man with a developmental disorder $2 to take the test for him, authorities said yesterday.

Two dollars? That right there says it all! Or does it? The inverted pyramid format can’t express the complexity of this story! We must read on:

The illegal stand-in - who looks nothing like teacher Wayne Brightly - not only passed the high-stakes test, he scored so much better than the teacher had previously that the state knew something was wrong, officials said.

Yet more intrigue to follow:

“I was pressured into it. He threatened me,” the bogus test-taker Rubin Leitner told the Daily News yesterday after Special Schools Investigator Richard Condon revealed the scam.

“I gave him my all,” said Leitner, 58, who suffers from Asperger’s syndrome, a disorder similar to autism. “He gave me what he thought I was worth.”

Inverted pyramid, abort! Compelling Narrative must take over — there’s simply too much richness:

Brightly, 38, a teacher at one of the city’s worst schools, Middle School 142, allegedly concocted the plot to swap identities with Leitner last summer. If he failed the state exam again, Brightly risked losing his $59,000-a-year job.

“I’m tired of taking this test and failing,” Brightly told Leitner, according to Condon’s probe. “I want you to help me.”

Now that the inverted pyramid has been abandoned, let’s let details fill themselves in:

Along with being much smarter than Brightly, Leitner is 20 years older. He also is white and overweight while Brightly is black and thin. Yet none of those glaring differences apparently worried Brightly.

“He said no one would ever know,” Leitner said outside the Brownsville, Brooklyn, building he has called home since briefly living on the streets.

The two men met years ago at Brooklyn College where Leitner earned bachelor’s and master’s degrees in history in the late 1970s, and Brightly got a bachelor’s degree in 1992. After meeting in the alumni office, Leitner began tutoring the teacher as he struggled to pass the state exam, officials said.

But the relationship took a bizarre turn just weeks before the test last July, authorities said.

“He got tired of flunking it,” said Leitner. “That was the thing that sparked this desperate act.”

The devastating conclusion:

Brightly allegedly helped Leitner obtain a counterfeit state identification card that showed Leitner’s photo with Brightly’s name. Using the bogus ID, the pair conned city educrats into issuing Leitner a school ID card to use on test day, authorities said.

On July 17, Brightly allegedly picked up Leitner at his home and drove him to Edward R. Murrow High School in Brooklyn, where the test was given. The teacher allegedly came back after the test was over and drove Leitner back home, officials said.

After the exam, the state began investigating Brightly’s passing score. He sent Leitner to meet with officials, and Leitner claimed to be Brightly - but the ruse failed, authorities said.

When The News went to Brightly’s Mount Vernon home yesterday, a man who strongly resembled him insisted Leitner took the test on his own. The man, who appeared to be in his late 30s, denied being Brightly - saying he was the teacher’s son.

Brightly has been charged with coercion, falsifying business records and other crimes. He has been taken out of his Baychester classroom pending the outcome of the case.

About 19,000 teachers across the state take the certification exam each year and roughly 95% pass. Teachers are required to be certified - but the city has a temporary waiver from the state because the Education Department has not been able to find enough qualified instructors.

All of the hallmarks of a perfect NYC tabloid story are here: a bad educator in a failing school turns dumb criminal and overreaches both by recruiting — and, the injustice, underpaying — a guy who aroused suspicions not because he’s fatter and whiter but because he cheated too well. The mind reels!

I’m not sure the Post is even able to take it all in:

A ne’er-do-well Bronx teacher who twice failed the state teacher-certification exam has been charged with roping his mentally unstable tutor into taking the test for him, officials said yesterday.

Meanwhile, the Times tries its best to tackle the narrative nut:

One was a 37-year-old middle school teacher who could not manage to pass the state teacher certification exam in social studies, his field. The other was a 58-year-old former homeless man with a master’s degree but no steady work, making ends meet through odd jobs - like tutoring the history teacher for the exam. One, the working teacher, was tall and black; the other was short and white.

No one can do it! This story is uninvertible!

The Times pokes around the Fulton Fish Market as it gets ready to close and move up to Hunts Point. The term “fishmonger” is bandied about liberally.

We’ve noted the Post’s proclivity to print pat points about the weather. Now it’s time for the Times to wax poetic about that same topic: “The Calendar Says Spring and You Expect Sunshine and Flowers?”. Someone on West 43rd Street is satisfying his literary leanings. Relevant excerpts to follow.

Exhibit A) The Surreal Hook, taking the form of a man dressed in a carrot suit:

Of all the possible signs that spring had, in fact, arrived in New York yesterday, a 5-foot-2-inch carrot strolling down Broadway at midday was a pretty hopeful one.

But not even the carrot could convince itself that yesterday, the official first day of spring, even remotely resembled springtime.

“It’s not spring yet,” the carrot declared indignantly. The carrot was inhabited by Venancio Meza, 45, of Sunset Park, Brooklyn, who was distributing fliers for a health food restaurant. A chilly drizzle fell, and the temperature hovered around 40 degrees.

Exhibit B) The Grand Observation on All of Human Existence:

Somewhere in the human body, there is a mechanism that runs on a blend of hope and self-delusion and makes people believe that on the morning of the vernal equinox, the world around them will suddenly bloom. Even if the forecasters predict rain and cold - as they did in advance of yesterday - that little mechanism continues to crank away.

In other words, spring hopes: eternal.

So yesterday, New York residents and tourists alike were once again reminded of the century-old observation by the clergyman and author Henry Van Dyke: “The first day of spring is one thing, and the first spring day is another.”

And finally, Dashed Hopes in a Gritty Milieu:

At Coney Island, where Astroland reopened yesterday, the sky and water were a solid sheet of gray, and the Boardwalk was all but abandoned.

Those who showed up at the park were obviously driven by a deep commitment to the pursuit of thrills.

Britney McCollough, 18, and Kyle Huneycutt, 21, two college students from Orlando, Fla., were determined to wring whatever fun they could out of a soggy Astroland, and rode several of the rides, including the Cyclone roller coaster.

“On the Cyclone, we froze our faces off,” Ms. McCollough said in an enthusiastic way that suggested that freezing one’s face off is a good and exciting thing.

Bill Hoffmann, come home, all is forgiven!

The Village Voice notes the irony in the possibility that CBGB will be forced out by a homeless-services organization:

Word that the legendary club CBGB is in danger of getting priced out of its Bowery hole-in-the-wall by a possible $20,000-per-month rent hike roiled the rock world last month.

But the irony is that the greedy landlord poised to uproot CB’s is not some condo-crazed speculator but the Bowery Residents’ Committee—a 34-year-old homeless-services agency.

Gentrified by the homeless? Now there’s a twist.

I’m interested in Michael Strahan’s marital troubles like not at all, but it should be noted that the Post really came through this morning with the headline “The ‘Sack’ King” after they pored through the salacious details from the defensive end’s divorce proceedings and reported on his “repeated trysts” with other women.

Uncovering a wild new social trend, the Daily News profiles gold diggers (their term, not ours) in a shocking — shocking! — piece this morning profiling underpaid middle-class exiles looking to keep up the lifestyle to which they’re accustomed. The Daily News acts as if gold digging is a bad thing:

And although the label “gold digger” is an ugly one, Erica doesn’t mind.

“It’s more acceptable, indeed even expected, for a woman to want a man with money. It’s a consumer-based society - the biggest house, the fastest car, the most extravagant vacations,” she says. “This is a culture that revels in excess and hardly ever advocates moderation on any level, and we all buy into it.”

Fat, sloppy “to be sure paragraph” to follow:

The trend is nothing new (and perhaps not surprising in the face of a burgeoning luxury market and glossy magazines that advertise just how well the other half lives). The difference now is that for many young, educated women, dating rich doesn’t have as much to do with social standing and security as it does with experiencing the finer things in life. Women like Sarah even see scoring free dinners at fancy restaurants and gifts like an Hermes scarf (which she promptly sold on eBay) as engaging in a reverse feminism, of sorts.

My Inner Daily News says they’re pretty pathetic, but my Inner Class War is jealous they use eBay so intelligently. And they claim they don’t even have to sleep with them.

You want to scream: Dandies, Trust-Funders, the Idle Rich — wake up, you’re being used! The Daily News salves that impulse:

But while some men seem comfortable playing sugar daddy, others, like Alex Valerio, a 26-year-old in fashion marketing who divides his time between New York and Paris, say that they like to keep their cash under wraps.

Valerio, whose parents own a pure-bred Arabian horse farm and an international housewares company, recently ended a six-month relationship after he began to feel that his girlfriend was using him for his dough.

“We’d travel everywhere together, and I’d buy her gifts,” he explains. “But I began to realize that she didn’t like me, so much as she liked the life I could provide her with.”

He promptly dropped the girl, and now waits several months into a relationship before revealing that he’s got so much money that he doesn’t have to work at all. He says he wants to find someone who’s in love with him.

But many gold diggers say that just because they want a guy who’s wealthy doesn’t mean that they don’t want a happy, meaningful relationship, too.

“You can have it all,” says Sarah.

You know what — these guys deserve it. Are they that stupid to think someone can’t tell that one doesn’t have to work? What do you do, fake like you work? (Film Script Idea, activate: form of, light romantic comedy about a sugar daddy who fakes like he works; agents can contact us at info -at- bridgeandtunnelclub.com.)

Before we became preoccupied with the world’s most recent existential threats, the thing that really got our goat were ATM fees. I never got it — by becoming more efficient and saving on overhead and labor costs, banks somehow felt it was reasonable to then turn around and charge their customers more. Suffice it to say, this was bullshit.

Now we hear that as competition among banks locally heats up, Commerce Bank has announced that it will offer reimbursements to its customers for fees incurred while using other banks’ machines, (having already eliminated ATM fees for non-customers):

At worst, customers making a withdrawal from another bank’s machine get hit twice. The bank that operates the machine charges them $1 or more for the service, and their own bank charges the same for their infidelity. That can amount to a 15% premium for a $20 withdrawal. [Commerce chairman Vernon] Hill said these fees always top consumers’ list of complaints.

Commerce has never charged customers for using another bank’s machine. That’s not a first: Washington Mutual stopped two years ago.

But reimbursing its customers for fees charged by rival banks puts Commerce on uncharted ground. It’s no small commitment: Commerce customers paid $40 million in ATM fees to other banks last year.

A publicity ploy? I’ll gladly participate in spreading the word. The other banks must be shamed into abandoning their extortionate fees!

The Post notes that the the preschool admissions process is more competitive than Harvard’s admissions process, with 15 applicants for each spot compared to Harvard’s 11:

Manhattan toddlers have a harder time winning acceptance to private preschools than students have trying to get into Harvard.

An average of 15 applicants vied for every spot in about 200 preschools in Manhattan, said consultant Amanda Uhry, founder of Manhattan Private School Advisors.

Harvard had 11 students competing for each of its approximately 2,030 slots.

Thousands of New York parents received notice last week that their children had been rejected or put on a waiting list for preschool.

“It is a very punitive process,” said Roxandra Antoniadis, admissions director at St. Hilda’s & St. Hugh’s, on the Upper West Side.

“Think of how educated New York City parents are, how sophisticated, how accomplished their children are,” she said. “When they don’t get in, it is horrible for them.”

. . .

Brick Church School, on the Upper East Side, had over 300 applicants for 53 spots, director Lydia Spinelli said. Next year, its annual tuition will range from $12,000 for half a day to $15,400 for 4- and 5-year-olds.

Uhry, the consultant, advises her clients to try 12 to 14 schools. Parents then may have to wait in lines for applications, take tours, write essays, have their toddlers tested and observed at play or even interviewed, and secure letters of recommendation from friends and family members.

Adult shops are making a comeback in the Times Square area:

Ten years after Mayor Rudolph W. Giuliani declared war on Times Square’s X-rated peep shows, strip joints and video stores, shops selling sexually explicit materials have slowly begun to creep back into the area, adroitly exploiting loopholes in the law - and property-owners’ demand for high-paying tenants - to stage their comeback.

. . .

The areas that have seen the biggest resurgence are on Eighth Avenue near the Port Authority Bus Terminal and on 37th and 39th Streets near the Avenue of the Americas, where the number of sex shops has tripled, to 18 from 6, in a year and a half. North of 42nd Street, the increase has been smaller, with only three of the 17 stores in the area opening since 2003.

Part of the growth owes to the agility with which store owners have learned to comply with city zoning regulations adopted in the mid-1990’s to keep them out of residential neighborhoods and away from schools and churches.

But development officials and local business owners say that another factor has been the shops’ willingness to pay well above market rents.

“There’s a disparity between what the porn guys will pay and what the market will bear,” said Tom Tompkins, president of the Times Square Alliance. “And it tends not to be the bigger landlords. It’s a guy who owns a three-story building, and the apartments above are rent-stabilized, so the great majority of his return on the building comes from the ground-floor retail.”

It’s easy to get around the city’s formerly tough zoning laws, which were watered down after court challenges:

Today, any store with at least 60 percent non-X-rated merchandise is not technically considered an “adult entertainment” business under the law.

“If they stock their shelves with enough copies of ‘Bambi,’ they can come within compliance,” said John Feinblatt, the city’s criminal justice coordinator.

Since stores that obey the 60/40 rule are not subject to the rules restricting sex-related businesses, they are free not only to open but to cluster-that is, open near each other - making the law a “close to impossible thing to enforce,” Mr. Feinblatt said.

Perhaps the biggest such cluster is on Eighth Avenue, where business was brisk on a recent Friday afternoon.

“There’s one,” said Bill Daley, slyly nudging his elbow toward a middle-aged man in a jacket and tie who, just seconds earlier, had darted into a doorway marked with a movie poster for “The Bourne Supremacy” but beyond which were visible titles of a saucier variety.

Mr. Daley sighed grimly. “People always think it’s the creeps and bums who go to these stores,” he said. “But if you go there after lunch or after work, you’ll see all these guys in suits. It’s usually family guys who stop on their way home.”

When writing a film script, feel free not to cleave too much to your own life, especially when writing about crime. The Post elaborates:

An ex-NYPD cop accused of moonlighting as a mob hit man wrote and acted in a movie that might now be seen as a confession.

In Lou Eppolito’s straight-to-video flick “Turn of Faith,” the cop character gives his gangster pals tips on a police investigation.

The main character in the 2003 movie is dirty cop Joey De Carlo. De Carlo’s best friend Bobby is a mob thug killer the cop is investigating as part of a probe of a mobbed-up union. De Carlo, played by ex-boxer Ray “Boom Boom” Mancini, is the kind of cop who helps Bobby beat a guy in an alley, buries incriminating tapes, and tips off a local crime boss named Big Philly — portrayed by Charles Durning — about everything police are doing to the union he controls.

In addition to having penned the screenplay, the porcine Eppolito himself plays a corrupt union boss in the movie.

Lively critical commentary ensues:

The plot line is pretty routine for a mob flick, as the tough-guy dialogue, which includes, “Get your f- - -ing hands off me, f- - -face!”— and that’s a priest talking.

But what’s striking about Eppolito’s script is that this it isn’t a corrupt-cop movie. It’s a hero-cop movie. We’re supposed to admire Joey’s loyalty because he sticks up for his friends, including Big Philly, who was once like a father to him, even if he is a murderer.

Only after Big Philly orders Joey’s buddy Bobby killed does the cop want him brought down.

The movie’s climactic speech is this beauty, delivered by Joey -—”I want out. Sixteen years I’ve given to this job. Sixteen years I’ve banged my head against the wall trying to be a good cop, trying to be an honest cop, and for what? We all know how it’s gonna turn out.”

It seems not to occur to Eppolito that a cop who leaks police information to the mob is anything but a good cop.

Seems not to occur, indeed. Two thumbs down!

After two years of “market research, focus groups and on-the-street interviews,”, Bed-Stuy Boosters have settled on a slogan befitting the Brooklyn neighborhood:

Bedford-Stuyvesant will no longer be known as the gritty “Do or Die” section of Brooklyn — from now on, it’s “Bed-Stuy and Proud of It.”

Yes, two years . . .

If you were lucky enough to catch the news coverage last night, you would have been treated to harrowing live footage of a dog evading cops and drivers on the Major Deegan. We saw him get clipped by a car, but for a while there, it was hilarious. Newscasts took several minutes out of their schedule to follow the breaking news, which was better than O.J., in my opinion.

The Times picks up the story:

A runaway poodle named Snoopy found fame yesterday afternoon when he was spotted negotiating traffic on the Major Deegan Expressway near Yankee Stadium.

Helicopter news cameras beamed nail-biting images of Snoopy dodging cars and police officers approaching him. One officer braved a retaliatory nip, scooped him up and stuffed him into a squad car.

You might be wondering whose dog this was; the Times tracked him down:

Officials refused to turn the dog over to Ken Baez, a truck driver, who showed up to claim the 6-year-old mixed poodle. Mr. Baez said that his mother-in-law, Altagracia Santana, is in the Dominican Republic and that he and his wife, Elosia, had been caring for Snoopy when he escaped.

He had watched Snoopy’s adventures unfold on television. “We were looking all day and we went to take a rest,” Mr. Baez said. “That’s when we saw him on TV.”

Workers at the [American Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Animals in Manhattan, where the dog was taken] said they were concerned that, his ordeal notwithstanding, the mixed-breed poodle appeared unkempt. and they wanted to make sure he was receiving proper care. Gail Buchwald, a vice president, said Snoopy was given a mild sedative.

. . .

The Baezes said they had been trying to find Snoopy since 2:30 p.m., when he bolted from their apartment at 150th Street and Macomb Avenue, where he had been staying while his owner was away.

Somehow, Snoopy made his way from there to the Major Deegan, where he was finally grabbed at 5:55 p.m.

Mr. Baez’s nephew, Jose, 15, said Snoopy, whom he described as an enthusiast of jumping and licking, didn’t know any tricks, at least until he developed his escape routine.

He added: “I was going crazy because the dog was on the highway. They were like, he was neglected, but he wasn’t. Everybody knows that dog.”

The observation deck on the 70th floor of 30 Rockefeller Plaza will be reopened to the public for the first time since 1986. Although it’s not as high up as the Empire State Building, one of its draws will be advance ticket sales.

Empire State Building officials sounded unconcerned:

The Empire State Building observation deck, 200 feet higher and $1 cheaper, drew about 3.5 million visitors last year. Lydia A. Ruth, the director of public relations for the building, welcomed the prospect of a reopened observation roof at Rockefeller Center.

“It will be a great place to view the Empire State Building,” she said.

Despite its admission fee ($14), it should be fun to go up there:

Never as heavily trafficked as the Empire State observatory, the Rockefeller Center rooftop felt more like a sanctuary than a tourist attraction. Its lower elevation also gave visitors the appealing sense of being suspended among the pinnacles of the skyline, rather than above them.

The reopening appears to be slated for the fall.

Two former NYPD detectives were arrested by federal agents for basically working as mafia foot soldiers. Words like “stunning,” “shocking” and “disgraceful” are bandied about as well as the suggestion that they may be “the two most disgraceful police officers in history.” Skip the Law & Order script — I’m guessing this will become an entire movie.

And for your life-art imitation nexus, know that one of the cops became an actor specializing in tough guys. It doesn’t seem unusual, either (though to be fair, he eventually beat the rap).

I pick on Bill Hoffmann only because I’m totally jealous of his slacker lifestyle. Another weather story from the finest weather beat writer in the country:

Down in the dumps as our unusually harsh winter drags on and on?

You’re not alone — New York is smack in the middle of the cold-weather blahs, with the lack of sunlight, endless snowstorms and brutal temperatures making lots of folks depressed.

It’s called seasonal affective disorder (SAD) and is caused by a biochemical imbalance in the brain due to the shortening of daylight hours and the lack of sunlight in winter.

“People are affected by a prolonged winter season — ice, snow, slush, long and horrible commutes — and they suffer from multiple problems,” said Dr. Charles Goodstein, a psychiatrist at NYU Medical Center.

Things get particularly bad in the weeks before spring.

“The winter is dragging on, we no longer have pro football games to watch, we’re homebound, we can’t get our aggressions out,” Goodstein said.

Meanwhile, more snow is expected tomorrow morning. It will mix with or change to rain by afternoon, with highs expected to be around 40.

The forecast for Saturday isn’t much better, with cloudy skies and a 30 percent chance of light snow.

But, as the good doctor says, banish those wintry thoughts from your mind and remember: Spring officially starts a week from Sunday.

(I know, I know — he does other stories, too . . . but allow me this one lifestyle fantasy.)

If wine is not cheese (we’re still waiting to hear about that case, by the way!) then ground peanuts are absolutely not crack. Or at least not very convincing crack:

An undercover cop making a drug buy in Manhattan was knifed last night by teenage thugs who tried to pass off ground peanuts as crack cocaine, police said.

The detective, who wasn’t identified because of the nature of his assignment, was stabbed three times with a folding knife - twice in the chest and once in the abdomen, officials said. He was in stable condition at St. Luke’s Hospital in Morningside Heights last night.

The suspected stabber, Beljhuly Feliz, 18, who neighbors say has a history of bogus drug deals, was immediately collared by backup officers covertly watching the transaction in a lobby at the upper West Side’s Amsterdam Houses about 8 p.m. Feliz, who has previous weapon and graffiti arrests on his record, was charged with attempted murder.

A 13-year-old boy, who residents say is nicknamed Lil’ Ray, was nabbed about 30 feet from the building. Charges against him were pending last night. A police source said the teens, who live at the complex, also tried to rob the detective.

The worst possible thing has happened for opponents of New York’s bid to host the 2012 Summer Olympics — France’s trade unions have gone on a one-day strike during the IOC’s visit there:

A widespread strike in France today brought chaos to public transport and ports, with the one-day action coming as members of the International Olympic Committee assessed the Parisian bid for the 2012 summer games.

The action saw the capital’s commuter trains and metro badly hit, while across France, 55 cities suffered varying degrees of disruption and air traffic was also affected. Calais was closed to ferries.

Railway and energy workers, teachers and post office staff were all taking action against job cuts and government plans to make the 35-hour working week more flexible.

The flamboyant French businessman PY Gerbeau, formerly in charge of London’s Millennium Dome, said the action threatened to ruin Paris’s bid to stage the 2012 games, although he remained optimistic that the city would win the race.

“Officially, the politically correct answer they are giving is it is fine, we are a democracy,” he told BBC Radio 4’s Today programme. “Unofficially, all my French friends are losing sleep over it. It is very typical of France, actually. In some ways, they were too arrogant to the IOC, and this time the unions can ruin the whole affair.”

A Long Island woman sells non-existent items on EBay, gets caught, faces jail:

A Long Island co-ed was busted yesterday for working her way through college allegedly by selling items on eBay that she didn’t own.

Investigators said Alexis Levine, 26, a C.W. Post student from Farmingdale, posted musical instruments, cellphones, computers and theme- park tickets on the In ternet auction site and collected more than $10,000 from buyers in the United States and Canada.

. . .

Treglia said Levine operated her scheme between last March and last August.

In one case, he said, Levine sold a Dell Inspiron laptop computer to a couple in Marion, La., for $680. The couple never received the computer — nor a refund.

In another case, he said, a Canadian man bought an Armstrong Open Hole flute for $121.75 but never received it.

In addition to the flute and the computer, Levine also “sold” clarinets, violas and tickets to Disney World.

She used several eBay user IDs to conduct business, including jennyrosemusic, italiansteakbeauty, floridababy64 and collectivepawnstuff.

But she had customers send checks or money orders to her home in Farmingdale, enabling detectives to track her down easily.

Levine had no comment after her arraignment except to say, “What are those TV cameras doing here? I don’t want to be on television.”

Would you buy something from someone who called themselves “italiansteakbeauty”? You know, I probably would!

Obligatory neighbor reaction:

[A] neighbor said, “She just seemed like a nice, quiet college girl, but you never know what people are up to. To be honest, I’m surprised. There are other ways to get through college.”

Like stripping, for example.

The city’s homeless census took place last night. In this week’s New Yorker, Ben McGrath looks at the control decoys in the city’s homeless census:

Dr. Kim Hopper, a medical anthropologist at the Nathan Kline Institute and the former president of the National Coalition for the Homeless, is the architect of what the city is calling the Shadow Count, and the man in charge of implementing its “plant-capture” method: you plant a known quantity of itinerant decoys among the street population at large, and see how many of them you can spot in a night’s worth of searching for actual homeless people; the percentage of decoys missed ought to resemble the percentage of the true population unaccounted for in your surveyors’ ledgers.

The guidelines for playing a homeless person:

Prospective decoys—Hopper wants a hundred and fifty—will be handed an instruction card shortly before heading out to assigned locations, at midnight, for three hours of role-playing. The card begins, “Your job is to pass for a homeless person on the street tonight. But you will be unusually stable, well-behaved, dressed for the weather, and approachable.” As props, Hopper recommends bringing along only a blanket and “a crummy hat.”

Booze? “Several people have asked if that’s O.K.,” Hopper said last week, in the midst of final preparations. “We had to develop some artful answer: ‘You’re employees of the research foundation for mental health; these are work hours for you and the usual rules apply.’ But if people feel like misbehaving in a civil fashion on their own, I can’t police them.”

Reading material? Hopper’s inclination was to say, “Yeah, whatever helps pass the time.” But one of his students asked if he could bring his homelessness textbook along. “That’s probably not the thing that ordinary homeless folks would be doing,” Hopper cautioned.

Then again, Hopper isn’t calling for total hobo impersonation. “We would like very much if the students saw this as a research study rather than an audition,” he said. “We don’t want people begging or accosting passersby, or whatever they think homeless people do when they’re out during the middle of the night.”

He’s saying what we’re thinking. “Head of the Crass”:

The head of the NYPD’s School Safety Division is under fire from school security officers who charge that he called elementary school parents “bitches” who “need to be body-slammed.”

In grievance letters to their union obtained by The Post, officers claim that Chief Gerald Nelson, an NYPD official, made the shocking remarks to 850 agents at a training session last month during the mid-winter break.

To be sure, it’s not entirely clear what he said — or whether the union is just trying to screw him over — but it seems like whatever it was probably falls somewhere in between the following:

The letters vary somewhat in their description of Nelson’s alleged comments.

Some state that he said unruly parents should be manhandled into submission, while others claim Nelson made the remarks as he commended an agent for showing restraint with out-of-control parents.

“Chief Nelson was asked a question about the lack of security in the . . . schools when the chief made a statement that the parents of the students are bitches and he gives us credit for not knocking these bitches down,” one agent wrote.

Another officer wrote that Nelson said elementary-school agents had the toughest job “because they had to deal with mothers in the elementary schools that are real bitches . . . [who] need to be body-slammed down to the ground, cuffed and arrested.”

Then there’s a third explanation:

NYPD spokesman Paul Browne, speaking on behalf of Nelson, said, the two-star chief “recalls congratulating a school safety agent for dealing with an unruly adult, but not in the language described in the letters. We are looking into the matter.”