What, That’s Not Funny?

A costume-provocateur at a Brooklyn high school was removed from class yesterday for dressing as Hitler:

A student at a Brooklyn high school named for a prominent Jewish educator faced a blitzkrieg of trouble yesterday when he arrived dressed as Adolf Hitler for Halloween.

Walter Petryk, 16, insisted his masquerade was a lampoon of the Nazi dictator — but administrators at Leon M. Goldstein HS declared autumn for Hitler and detained Petryk as their “prisoner of war.”

The junior honors student, who grew a moustache for the occasion, was pulled out of his second-period English class and told to remove his beige coat bearing a red swastika armband or risk spending the day in the office.

You would think that people who had family who perished in the Holocaust would refrain from facile Hitler comparisons, but then there they are:

His mother and stepfather, who is Jewish and lost ancestors in the Nazi genocide, defended Petryk’s stance. They rebuffed pleas by the dean to advise their son to remove the costume so he could return to class.

“This is a matter of artistic free expression and a school not being stupid,” said his mother, Diane Petryk-Bloom, who picked her son up at school. “[The dean is] offended by a parody of Hitler — and he’s acting like Hitler.”

Then there’s the issue of “talk the talk/walk the walk”:

Petryk said he didn’t set out to push the envelope as Hitler. But he acknowledged that he made a decision to disguise himself as Charlie Chaplin with a bowler hat and cane on his way to school to avoid ruffling feathers on the street.

“I wasn’t going to get on the subway in a Hitler costume,” Petryk said.

Pussy!

It’s Sometimes Hard To Tell Which Borough Has The Most Douchebag Yobbos But Queens Seems To Be Gunning For The Lead

Queens is currently making a case for most yobbo borough. First an interracial couple was beaten in Astoria over the weekend:

The couple was leaving a friend’s house party in Astoria Saturday night heading for the subway station a few blocks away when they were accosted by an apparently drunk and unruly group yelling racial slurs outside a bar on 34th Street.

“We turn around and . . . all three of these guys are on him and I ran over to try and push them off and one of the guys punched me in my face, punched me in my head,” Tiffany said.

Eventually, someone called police and two people were arrested: 26-year-old Angelo Pisquariello and 16-year-old Antoinette Pisquariello. Gang assault and robbery are just some of the charges against them.

Today, there are reports of a group of Broad Channel yobbos assaulting a black police officer:

Four people were arrested in Queens yesterday when an egg-throwing incident turned into a melee with a small crowd hurling racial taunts at a black detective trying to arrest a white teen, authorities said.

The scuffle occurred on Cross Bay Boulevard and West 10th Road in Broad Channel at 4:30 p.m. when Patrick Rich, 17, allegedly tossed eggs at an unmarked police cruiser.

When the detective got out of the car and tried to arrest Rich, the teen jumped on his back to avoid being cuffed, witnesses said. Rich’s 44-year-old mother, Patricia, then intervened by shouting at the detective to stop.

At the same time, Nicholas Stack, 16, pushed the detective while Robert Glade, 22, shouted racial slurs at him, police said.

Take A Cab!

This bus driver should be praised as a guardian of public health, not singled out in the Post for his over-zealousness:

If you cough, you gotta get off!

That’s the philosophy of one city bus driver, according to a Wall Street banker who claims he was ejected for coughing.

Michael Goga says the germophobic driver of an X10 express bus to Staten Island yesterday became incensed right after Goga “just cleared my throat.”

“Sir, you coughed on my bus and you have to get off,” Goga says the driver told him. “I can’t have you get sick on this bus.”

When Goga refused, he says, the driver took the bus out of service and ordered all the passengers off in lower Manhattan. Goga then called cops to file a complaint.

The MTA contends the driver only attempted to forestall the rapid transit of germs by asking Goga to cover his mouth.

Aren’t They Just Income Tax Deductions Anyway? (No, I Mean The Kids Themselves)

Another year, another crop of Type A parents struggles with getting ahead in this competitive city:

Among some New York parent circles, it’s considered normal to spend $6,000 on a consultant to help toddlers get into private school.

The spending is spreading to public schools on the Upper West Side, where parents jostling for the seats in a few “it” schools are increasingly willing to drop hundreds or even thousands of dollars to get an advantage.

Maggie Ganias said she used to scoff at frantic pregnant New York City women applying to competitive private nursery schools before reaching their sixth month. She decided she would be sending her child to public school so she wouldn’t have to go through all that. When her son, Alexander, turned 4, she realized her mistake.

“I had always laughed at that cliché of parents in New York. But here I was just a public school mom and all these choices were in front of me,” she said. “It’s overwhelming.”

Faced with a staggering array of decisions and deadlines as her son prepared for his first day of kindergarten a year away, she did what a growing number of parents are doing each year: She turned to Robin Aronow.

Ms. Aronow is an elementary school admissions consultant who has created a niche by charging parents to help them apply for choice public schools. She is based on the Upper West Side, where public elementary school admissions are arguably the most competitive and complicated in the city. Autumn is Ms. Aronow’s peak season: Applications become available, and school tours and testing begin.

. . .

“I couldn’t have done this without her,” a mother of a 4-year-old, Brett Hill, who lives on the Upper West Side, said. “Friends call me crying, saying, ‘I don’t know what to do.’ They go to Robin’s seminar and they come back better and calmer.”

. . .

Ms. Aronow charges $50 a season to join the e-mail listserv, nearly $200 an hour for phone calls, or $2,000 for an annual all-inclusive package. She says she charges less than some of her competitors, who focus more on private schools. This year, she is also doing a pro-bono presentation at a nonprofit center for immigrants.

“Whatever it was, it was worth it,” Ms. Hill said of the costs of Ms. Aronow’s services. “It alleviated so much stress.”

See also: Manhattan Preschool Admissions More Competitive Than Harvard.

I’m A Patsy! They Just Picked Me Up Because I’m A Pasta Dish!

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.