Except for the inconvenient facts that prostitution is often about sex slavery and it is very rarely a victimless crime, Eliot Spitzer might still be governor and Sean Bell might still be alive — since, after all, the reason undercover cops were there was for a prostitution sting — and we wouldn’t have to endure a big, lousy, tragic conclusion to the case:

A Queens judge on Friday acquitted three detectives charged in the shooting of Sean Bell, who died on his wedding day in a hail of 50 police bullets. He said that prosecutors had failed to prove their case and that wounded friends of the slain man had given testimony that he did not believe.

. . .

The detectives, all but obscured behind a human wall of courthouse officers, finally seemed to exhale deeply, even crumple, with relief. Detective Oliver — who reloaded his gun to fire a total of 31 shots and helped catapult the shooting from tragic mistake to a symbol, for many, of police abuse of force and poor training — closed his eyes and cried.

Except for a few scuffles outside the Queens Criminal Court building and shouted displays of disbelief and outrage, the day passed peacefully amid calls for calm delivered by the mayor, the police commissioner and other officials.

One more example this year makes it a trend, and we can pitch it to the editors of the Magazine . . .

Bloomberg is smart, too smart, and he knows it:

Can the Bloomberg administration convince thousands of low-achieving students that succeeding in school is actually, well, cool?

It wants to try. The city is planning an intensive campaign that would use cellphones to help motivate students, most of them minorities and from poor families, in two dozen schools. The pilot program will include mentoring and incentives for high performance, like free concerts and sporting events and free minutes and ring tones for their phones. Every student in each of the schools will be given a cellphone.

The effort, officials said, will use text messages — drawn up by an advertising agency and sent over the phones — that promote achievement.

That said, anyone who refers to this as “rebranding school” deserves all the low achievement they get:

The plan, designed by Roland G. Fryer, a Harvard University economist who is overseeing the school system’s program of paying students who do well on tests, was approved by Mayor Michael R. Bloomberg last week. Details about how much will be spent and where the money will come from are still to be worked out, Education Department officials said.

Mr. Klein said he expected several companies to donate discounted phone service and tickets to events. A former president of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People will help supervise the project.

Mr. Klein said the effort was spurred in part by the results from focus groups performed by market research firms for the Education Department. That research found that black and Latino students from some of the city’s most hard-pressed neighborhoods had a difficult time understanding that doing well in school can provide tangible long-term benefits.

Dr. Fryer approached five advertising agencies in September and asked them to come up with plans to “rebrand” academic achievement. Although it is not clear which of the plans education officials will choose, Dr. Fryer is enthusiastic about one that tries to make poor teenagers aware that academic success can lead to jobs that pay enough to support a middle- or upper-middle-class way of life.

Broadway producers look for that lucrative tween market, which obviously has more cash than it knows what to do with:

For Broadway producers, 10-year-old Jamie Carroll looks like an ideal theatergoer: she downloads scores off of iTunes, is a fervent proselytizer when she likes something and has lots of friends, two of whom she brought along to a recent Saturday matinee of “Legally Blonde.” “A lot of my friends say it’s the best musical they’ve ever seen,” she said.

Maybe. But Jamie’s father and her 14-year-old brother would not join them, considering the show too girly. Even her mother, Tacey Carroll, was only present as a chaperon: “This is a little more for them,” she said, echoing several other mothers at the theater, one of whom even dropped off her young charges and went shopping.

And that’s the rub for Broadway producers, for whom teenage and tween girls have become the demographic of the moment, wooed by marketing campaigns and featured as central characters in a flurry of shows in development, including “13,” about a teenager from New York who is transplanted to Indiana; “Princesses,” which is basically “High School Musical” meets “Gossip Girl”; and a musical adaptation of the movie “Clueless.”

Increasingly, though, some worry that the sugar-and-spice enthusiasm may be misplaced, because while teenagers and tweens may be helpful in creating a hit, they are far from enough to ensure one. For that, you still need grown-ups — lots of paying grown-ups — to want to come to a show.

*Just kidding, Mr. Mamet! We can’t wait for that Duran Duran thing to end to see your next play staged!

This should be profitable, right? Or not:

All 277 underground stations in the subway system are to be wired for cellphone use, the Metropolitan Transportation Authority announced yesterday.

But riders may have to talk fast, because the subway tunnels will not be wired, out of consideration for riders who do not want to be stuck in a subway car full of chattering cellphone users.

The company that won the right to wire the stations, Transit Wireless, will pay New York City Transit a minimum of $46.8 million over 10 years, the agency said. The company will also pay the full cost of building the wireless network in the underground stations, estimated at $150 million to $200 million.

Under the agreement, cellphone providers would pay the company a fee to carry their signals on the network.

. . .

Transit Wireless is a joint venture involving Nab Construction, Q-Wireless, Dianet Communications and Transit Technologies. Nab Construction and Transit Technologies have done other large-scale construction projects in the subway system, and Dianet has been involved in designing and installing cellphone antenna systems in buildings and airports. Q-Wireless makes software for wireless systems.

Transit officials said they chose Transit Wireless in part because it offered to pay more to the authority than the others. One bidder, American Tower, offered a total 10-year payment of $6.2 million. A consortium of the major cellphone providers, including Verizon Wireless and Sprint Nextel, offered a total payment over 10 years of just $40, according to a summary of the deal that will be provided to the authority’s board members. (A transit official said the figure was not a typo.)

Transit Wireless initially made an offer of $34.4 million, but it increased the offer during negotiations.

*Hey — four dollars a year could feed one of Sally Struthers’ peeps though, yes?

You can’t tell the Patsy’s without a scorecard:

Patsy’s Italian Restaurant on West 56th Street — Frank Sinatra’s favorite — asked a federal judge yesterday to stop a restaurant from opening in Syosset, Long Island. The reason for the request, according to a legal complaint filed in U.S. District Court in Brooklyn, is the “Patsy’s” sign above the new storefront.

If the dispute sounds familiar, it is because Patsy’s on 56th Street, which opened in 1944, guards its name as jealously as it would any family recipe. Earlier this year, it went to court to force a Staten Island restaurant doing business under the name Patsy’s to shut its doors.

Another Patsy’s, a pizzeria on 118th Street, which opened more than a decade before the 56th Street restaurant, feels the same way about its name. The pizzeria filed suit against a Patsy’s in Brooklyn, obliging the Brooklyn Patsy’s to change its name. The restaurant now does business as Grimaldi’s Pizzeria.

The 56th Street Patsy’s is known for its pasta; the 118th Street Patsy’s for its pizza. But the culinary interests of the two have overlapped at times, leading to a lawsuit over which establishment had the right to market marinara sauce under the name.

In light of the past cases, the suit over the Syosset restaurant hardly seems a surprise, though it does suggest that the 56th Street restaurant will guard its name against alleged impostors even beyond the five boroughs.

MTA officials instruct riders never to pull the emergency brake, leading some to wonder what exactly it’s there for:

In the event of an emergency, do not pull the emergency brake.

That’s the main advice offered by the MTA in the agency’s new evacuation instructions, being distributed at subway station booths and on commuter rail cars.

The message to wait for directions is now available in Chinese, Russian, Haitian Creole, Korean, Arabic and Urdu, as well as English and Spanish.

“Once the emergency-brake cord is pulled, the brakes have to be reset before the train can move again, which reduces the options for dealing with an emergency,” the instructions explain.

Expect mellifluously alliterative outrage from Al Sharpton after this “slip of the tongue”:

City Councilman David Yassky, locked in a racially charged congressional race, was all smiles yesterday as Mayor Bloomberg introduced him as “Congressman Yassky.”

Speaking at the first groundbreaking to come from last year’s Williamsburg-Greenpoint re-zoning, the mayor praised Yassky — but press secretary Stu Loeser insisted there was no endorsement, just “a slip of the tongue.”

In admitting he erred by focusing on the pension issue, is MTA Chairman Peter Kalikow being sincerely reflective or deviously manipulative? You be the judge:

The chairman of the Metropolitan Transportation Authority said yesterday that he had erred in making pension changes a central demand in contract negotiations with the city’s transit workers, a miscalculation that helped lead to a 60-hour subway and bus strike the week before Christmas.

The chairman, Peter S. Kalikow, did not take responsibility for provoking the strike, the city’s first since 1980, but he acknowledged misjudging the union’s hostility to his demands that future workers accept a higher retirement age or contribute more to their pensions than current workers do.

“I put out a proposal that I thought would be most palatable to the union, and it turns out I was wrong,” he said in an interview. Before the strike, Roger Toussaint, the president of Local 100 of the Transport Workers Union, had repeatedly said he would not accept a pension plan that did not treat future workers the same as current ones.

Mr. Kalikow, who was appointed by Gov. George E. Pataki in 2001, defended the settlement reached last week as fair. He said the union’s main concession — having workers for the first time pay part of their health-insurance premiums — was more valuable than the pension demands that were ultimately abandoned.

“It didn’t matter to me where I got the savings,” he said.

Is this Kalikow’s idea of “respect”? Is it meant to pull the wool over the eyes of the union? Is it more expensive for every union member to contribute towards their health insurance premiums than it would have been to have new employees contribute more towards their pensions? Could Kalikow be crazy in the way R. Kelly is crazy — like a fox? So many questions . . .