We Are All Exurban Now

Helicopters are flying overhead this morning searching for a coyote on the loose in Central Park:

An “adventurous” coyote that has roamed Central Park for four days shook off pursuers with dart guns and eluded capture last night.

Park officers and cops cornered the coyote — only the second spotted in the park in seven years — in the 4-acre Hallett Nature Center about 5 p.m. But it leaped over a fence and vanished.

“The wily coyote escaped,” said Parks Commissioner Adrian Benepe.

As NYPD aviation units flew overhead, park enforcement control officers hunted the tawny creature, which left a pile of feathers from its last meal in the preserve.

Benepe believes the coyote, which weighs about 60 pounds and resembles a lean German shepherd, came from Westchester County or the Bronx, either swimming across the Spuyten Duyvil Creek or crossing a bridge.

“It’s very unusual to have them in Manhattan. They have to be particularly adventurous,” he said.

Central Park hasn’t seen a coyote since April 1, 1999, when one was nabbed near The Pierre hotel on Fifth Ave.

Detective, His Story Checks Out

The Daily News further researches animal hides in drumming, making the case that the percussionist who contracted anthrax probably did get it from goat skin, as the experts first were saying:

Local West African drum makers say making drums with animal hides is a tradition that dates back hundreds of years.

People involved in the trade prefer to use goat skin from their home countries, ideally from a female animal. The skin is sun-dried, shaved and sometimes bleached for esthetic purposes.

“You can buy the goat skin in New York, but the goat in New York is too fatty, too thick,” said Ibrahima Diokhane, who owns Keur Djembe, a popular drum store in Gowanus, Brooklyn. “But the goat in Senegal is thinner, and the butcher there cuts it right.”

Diokhane, a native of Dakar, Senegal, either brings his hides in a suitcase or ships them in a container.

The World Health Organization notes that industrial anthrax tends to afflict those employed in the processing of bones, hides, wool and other animal products.

Westchester Amnesiac Found In Chicago

An amnesiac who left behind his family in August has been found living as a homeless man in Chicago, apparently unaware of his former life back in New York:

Raymond Power Jr. stepped out of his life some time on Aug. 1, 2005, the last day he awoke in Westchester County as a lawyer and New Rochelle resident, a 57-year-old husband and father of two, a Boy Scout leader and churchgoer.

Within two days, he had stumbled into a new, uncertain and evidently unwanted life: as a homeless man in Chicago who could remember nothing of his former existence but for a semblance of his name: Jay Tower.

Earlier this week, Mr. Power, who is apparently suffering from a severe case of amnesia, was found after a homeless friend discovered his picture on “America’s Most Wanted” Web site.

His wife, Jane, and the couple’s two children, 11 and 17, were overjoyed. But as he undergoes tests at a Chicago hospital before his return, they are bracing for what comes next.

“He doesn’t know who we are,” said Mrs. Power, his wife of 30 years, who has spoken with him on the phone. “He said, ‘Do I have children?’ and I said, ‘Yes, you have two children.’ Our prayers have been answered but yet they are very sad that he doesn’t know who they are and also very scared.”

In a telephone interview, Mrs. Power said that her husband, a Vietnam War veteran, had been treated for depression since the terror attacks of Sept. 11, both with medication and counseling.

Mr. Power walked between the two towers 15 minutes before the first plane hit, she said, but was on board a subway bound for the Bronx when the attack took place. She believes that Sept. 11 dredged up painful memories of Vietnam.

I Wonder Where They Are Now . . . D’oh!

Please don’t insert that obnoxious Simpsons laugh here:

The pudgy-faced Brooklyn teacher charged with fondling three 10-year-old schoolgirls is the real-life model for the school-bully character of Dolph on “The Simpsons,” it was revealed yesterday.

Matt Groening, creator of the smash Fox show, patterned the stringy-haired thug who terrorizes Bart Simpson after Dolph Timmerman, who was his classmate at Lincoln HS in Portland, Ore.

Timmerman, 51, now a teacher at PS 123 in Bushwick, was busted Tuesday for allegedly touching the buttocks of one girl in a classroom as she bent over, as well as two other girls in the hallway of the school on Irving Avenue.

The $43,000-a-year teacher, who has been placed on administrative duty away from kids, was arraigned on six counts of sexual abuse and child endangerment yesterday and released without bail.

On “The Simpsons,” the dour-pussed, brown-haired Dolph, who is usually hunched over, and two other kids, Jimbo and Kearney, continually bully Bart at school. Dolph’s pastimes include breathing in the fumes at the One Hour Photo shop. He has worked as a Kamp Krusty counselor and at Springfield Paper and Printing, as part of the “Lackeys of Tomorrow” program.

Groening could not be reached for comment, but in past interviews he has said that while he borrowed Timmerman’s first name for Dolph, the real-life Timmerman is nothing like the holy terror on the show.

“[He’s] a really cool guy,” Groening once said.

There are no plans to cut Dolph’s character out of future shows or edit him from past ones.

“Our Dolph is just Dolph,” said “Simpsons” spokeswoman Antonia Coffman. “He has nothing to do with this man or with the show. And our Dolph doesn’t have a last name.”

See also: The Simpsons Archive: The Exploits of Jimbo, Dolph and Kearney.

The Cost Of Air

A dissident group of an elite society of bibilophiles is protesting that the cost of air above their Upper East Side club is too low. I swear to god that’s what the story is:

So rich was the price negotiated for some 86,000 square feet of air over the Grolier Club and Christ Church at Park Avenue and East 60th Street — $430 a square foot — that the magazine Business 2.0 listed the sale as one of “the 101 dumbest moments in business” last year.

But several members of the Grolier, an elite society of bibliophiles, now say the price for their portion, at least — about $6.9 million — was too low.

The club stands between the church, at 520 Park Avenue, and two tenement buildings owned by the sibling developers Arthur W. and William L. Zeckendorf. The developers plan to knock down the tenements and, using the air rights, put up a 35-story apartment building whose top floors will have views of Central Park.

Some Grolier members say their club deserves a higher price for its ether than the church is receiving because its 16,000 feet remain pivotal to the deal. So now they want the club to pull out. It is a dispute that has split the normally docile precincts of the club, even bringing tears amid heated accusations of conflicts of interest at one uncharacteristically raucous meeting.

Without the club’s air rights, the Zeckendorfs and their partners would almost certainly have to scale back their plans for a luxury high-rise building next door.

See also: They Sell . . . Air? (November 30, 2005)