I’m Not A Wife Beater But I Play One On . . .

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.

Stop That Mullet!

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 Irony

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 Hidden Moral Here

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!

iPods Are the New Rubik’s Cubes

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.