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.

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!

Simply Uninvertible!

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!

“Gentrified by the Homeless”

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.