It’s been a long 24 hours for Carl Paladino, who was getting into a pointed verbal argument with Post reporter Fred Dicker around this time yesterday. Since then, he and his team of advisers have spit-balled back and forth with the Post about who’s at fault , who deserves to be sued, and whose love child has been poked in the face with a camera. It’s all so confusing! So hard to keep track of! Thankfully, the Atlantic has broken it down to the original argument between Paladino and Dicker which started it all, and re-animated it in cuddly teddy bear form. Animated bear recreations really are the true opiates for the masses.

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Paladino vs. Dicker Re-Enacted in Cuddly Bear Form

Aaron Naparstek, Streetsblog founder, has a personal blog post about that Park Slope institution , The Park Slope Food Coop. The food coop, which has flirted with banning bottled water and Israeli food products , makes $40 million a year , but has frustrated/ surly workers and the finest in community fliers. Naparstek waxes on the work policies—”Let’s acknowledge that Park Slope-style socialism can also be a pain in the ass. If you miss a shift or two you’re doomed. My Food Coop membership status is in a nearly constant state of ‘alert’ or ‘suspension’ and I seem to spend most of the year digging out, paying back my debt to society with extra work shifts” ( he needs his shirt )—and his fellow coop members, like the one who “made two full-fledged business phone calls while very slowly and distractedly running my items through the bar code scanner.” But he saves the best for last: A flier of a woman in “a tattooed woman in a short, shiny dress and stiletto heels posing somewhat awkwardly in a messy looking room. Scrawled next to the photo, the flier read, ‘Dog thief and guilty of burglary.’” Another coop member appears to have added a note, “I hired a hooker and she stole my dog!!!! Waahhhh!!!”

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Park Slope Food Coop: Annoying People, Amazing Flyers

Not Cecilia Chang The former St. John’s dean who is accused of embezzling over $1 million from the school is facing new charges that she used scholarships to force students to work for her off-campus for the most menial of duties. We imagine this wasn’t as bad an indentured servitude as it was for Karla Giraldo, but maybe worse than what LeBron James got. Feds say that Cecilia Chang, 57, who had gotten very comfortable at Rikers Island lately, “expected [the students] to perform duties…for a period of twenty hours per week.” To keep them in line, she “notified the students by letter that their ‘grant may be terminated at any time’ by [Chang] if the recipient fails to perform his or her work duties.” Instead of school work, she had the scholarship students cook, clean, wash clothes, chauffeur herself and her son, and babysit for a friend’s child. One unfortunate student told the FBI he was was responsible for taking out the garbage and shoveling snow at her home. Chang, who worked as dean of St. John’s Center of Asian Studies for nearly 20 years, was responsible for choosing 15 students to give scholarships to each year. She was caught in 2009 after an internal probe revealed that she had spent nearly $1.3 million to pay for casino trips, lingerie from Victoria’s Secret and her son’s law school tuition.

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Ex-St John’s Dean Accused of Using Students As Slaves

Fred Dicker and Carl Paladino Carl Paladino warned a couple days ago that the gubernatorial race between himself and Andrew Cuomo was “going to get nastier.” And lo and behold, a couple adulterous claims and journalist altercations later, we now have ourselves a regular Nostradamadino. But despite his own forewarnings, last night’s incident with Post reporter Fred Dicker seems to have riled up the already riled up candidate. In a ranty statement defending Paladino today, official campaign bull dog Michael Caputo tore into Dicker and the Post. And in the aftermath of the incident, Paladino may file trespassing charges against a team of Post photographers who took “close-range” shots of his love child. In the screed , Caputo claims that the Post “put Carl Paladino’s daughter in harm’s way, susceptible to kidnapping or sexual predators,” singling out Dicker, who he said “has demonstrated his bias in this campaign from the beginning.” The Post’s editor-in-chief Col Allen shot back what did you expect : Paladino “should not be surprised by the media’s interest in his families, as he has invited public scrutiny of his personal life by running for governor and speaking openly about his mistress and love child.” Burn. According to the Buffalo News , the whole mess truly got underway last Friday, when Paladino received a call that a photographer, videographer and reporter from the Post were on the lawn of his ex-mistresses house (those pesky Post photogs! ). He hastily had an off-the-record conversation with reporters, telling them to back off, or he would cut off access to his campaign. On Sunday, he was told photographers were back, and snooping around the mail as well. “We tried to deal with this like gentlemen,” Caputo said, referring to the off-the-record conversation. Paladino is now threatening to sue. Allan rejected the notion that it was Post reporters at his house: ” We can only assume Mr. Caputo is confusing our photographer with someone else . Mr. Caputo should check his facts before making charges against Post personnel.” Caputo and Team Paladino responded in turn: ” Fred Dicker is responsible for assigning the photographer to take photos of Carl’s 10 year old daughter and I have that on confirmation of two Post employees . I asked Fred to confirm that last night; he lied to my face.” As for Paladino’s current whereabouts, Caputo couldn’t help but get his attack-dog on: “Carl has returned to Buffalo to console his upset daughter. The Post photographers are gone. But will Mr. Dicker, who has no children, publish the photos? That is Carl’s main concern .”

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Paladino Threatens To Press Charges Against NY Posties

Nicole “Snooki” Polizzi is adding “published author” to her resume (way to go, Simon & Schuster). The publishing house announced yesterday that they will put out the Jersey Shore star’s novel—which, as the Daily News points out, is not a memoir despite being about “a girl looking for love on the boardwalk (one full of big hair, dark tans and fights galore).” As for what the reality starlet likes to read herself, she once told the NY Times that the only two books she’s read were Twilight and Dear John (suspect answers… we’d bet she only watched the movies). However, as you can see, it looks like she recently picked up a new book for her visits to the playground. An S&S editor asked, “Who better than Snooki to write a fun, sexy novel about a single girl looking for love on the Jersey Shore?” We’re guessing Snooki’s ghostwriter, probably. The novel is called A Shore Thing and will be hitting bookshelves on New Year’s Day, but you can get a taste of her (more short-form) writing style here .

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Snooki: Published Author

For nearly a month now, design journalist Liz Arnold has been chronicling the comings and going of a chap named Mark Phillips, who penciled, line by painstaking line, a replica of the late artist Sol LeWitt’s “Wall Drawing 1211″ in his bedroom. Using instructions about priming and wall-prep from gallery owner Paula Cooper, who represents LeWitt’s estate (and who cheerfully called the project “sort of theft” later on), Phillips embarked on a six-month-long endeavor accelerated only by his own obsession with never leaving a square unfinished. “That would bug me,” says Phillips, a freelance radio reporter and producer. “I wouldn’t be able to go to sleep with it facing me.” The result of his colored-pencil bonanza is this: “In the glow of the morning light, it becomes tones, not individual lines. It’s like a sunrise.” A lovely, poetic thought, indeed. Unfortunately— very unfortunately—Phillips may be moving due to a variety of reasons related to space and noise issues. If that happens, as New York renters know all too well, he’ll have to repaint the walls back. · First day of school! Homework for Homebodies [Homebodies] · Mark Phillips and his “Sol LeWitt” [Homebodies] · Instructions for installing a Sol LeWitt [Homebodies] · One last detail: Mark Phillips is moving [Homebodies] · Paula Cooper Gallery [official site]

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That’s Rather Lovely: Freelance Radio Producer Stencils Sol LeWitt Repro in Bedroom

Let’s say you are a vivacious young lawyer with an international background, multiple degrees and a healthy sense of ego. At the age of 29, you have worked in the Brooklyn DA’s office for a year as an assistant district attorney, and your star seems to be on the rise. Would you keep working as a prosecutor under DA Charles Hynes, the man you say inspired you to become a lawyer, or jeopardize everything by appearing on a second-rate reality TV show run by a megalomaniac who runs his business like a high powered car salesman? For former assistant Brooklyn district attorney Mahsa Saeidi-Azcuy , there was never really a choice. But could any of us truly resist the hokey charms of 15 minutes of fame on Donald Trump’s most Trumpy show, The Apprentice ? Saeidi-Azcuy took two months leave this summer to appear on the show, which just started airing this month. She resigned her position in the DA’s office Monday after “her newfound celebrity” had already proved a problem: “Obviously, how can I be in a courtroom now, at least while the show is airing?” Saeidi-Azcuy told NY Law Journal . The district attorney has a policy of not asking why people take time off; had Hynes known, the leave would not have been granted, according to office spokesman Jerry Schmetterer. In the tabloid publicity for the new season of The Apprentice , Saeidi-Azcuy is pigeon-holed as “the breadwinner,” because she is the sole income earner in her house. According to reports from the show, she sounds much more like “the yeller”: after the first episode of the show, Ivanka Trump, one of the show’s co-hosts, said, “Mahsa was brutal. I mean, [she was] just so excited to speak and to yell. I was shocked. She’s so unprofessional—her voice, her yelling…I think Mahsa has a terrible attitude.” According to NY Law , she was publicly applying for another position while on the show, despite already having her Brooklyn job; many of the other contestants on this years program are unemployed. But according to an interview with Iranian , maybe she really wants to get out of the lawyering game: “…but one thing that would be kind of a natural fit for me would be the Miss Universe competition. I grew up in my mom’s hair salon as a kid, I was surrounded by beauty. I have a beauty secrets group on Facebook.”

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Brooklyn ADA Quits To Fulfill Her Trumpy Dreams

Several manhole explosions occurred this morning near Joralemon Street and Columbia Place in Brooklyn Heights. “We had fire out of two transformer volts. We had fire out of a sewer grate on the corner. And we had a couple blown sewer covers,” Battalion Chief Bill Falkenmayer told WCBS 880 . It is the same area where manhole explosions occurred in January of this year, due to a private contractor hitting an electrical line. No injuries have been reported in today’s incident; during the previous explosion on Joralemon Street, at least one idealistic intern was the toy of cruel fate, which kicked him to the curb and broke his glasses in a frenzied sacrifice to the Gods of journalism.

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Manhole Explosions Reported in Brooklyn Heights

Roger Waters, former frontman for a little group called PINK FLOYD Roger Waters has responded to criticism from Abe Foxman at the Anti-Defamation League, which issued a statement earlier this week claiming that a video segment in Waters’s new live tour of The Wall is anti-Semitic. Amateur footage from a recent performance shows the Star of David being dropped from a B52 like bombs, along with other religious icons and corporate logos. On Facebook , Waters writes: Had Mr Foxman come to my show before passing judgement and commenting publicly he might, I hope, have held his peace, as there is no anti Semitism in “The Wall” show. The song to which he refers, “Goodbye Blue Sky,” describes how ordinary people, military and civilians alike, suffer trauma in the aftermath of war. The visuals that accompany the song show waves of B52 bombers dropping various symbols from bomb bays on a war ravaged landscape. The symbols are: in no particular order, a Crucifix, a Hammer and Sickle, a Star of David, A Crescent and Star, a Mercedes sign, a Dollar sign, and a Shell Oil sign. Mr Foxman’s concern was that potentially the juxtoposition of a Star of David and a Dollar sign might incite hatred of Jews. Contrary to Mr Foxman’s assertion, there are no hidden meanings in the order or juxtaposition of these symbols. The point I am trying to make in the song is that the bombardment we are all subject to by conflicting religious, political, and economic ideologies only encourages us to turn against one another, and I mourn the concommitant loss of life. In so far as The Wall has a political message it is to seek to illuminate our condition, and find new ways to encourage peace and understanding, particularly in the Middle East. Incidentally, being from England, I had never heard of the ADL until today, but I have googled them and I see from their mission statement of 1913 that their brief is not only to defend the Jewish people from defamation, but also, and I quote, ” to secure justice and fair treatment to all citizens alike and to put an end forever to unjust and unfair discrimination against and ridicule of any sect or body of citizens”. Perhaps we should all focus on that lofty ideal and stop cowering in our corners throwing stones at one another. In other news, one of Gothamist’s interns just asked us who Roger Waters is, and now we feel old and angry. Time to spin “Animals” and check the hell out for the rest of the day.

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Roger Waters Tells Abe Foxman to Stop Throwing Rocks

· Autumnal-inspired living room, sans kitsch [delight by design] · Block-printed Indian bedding by Virginia Johnson [decor8] · A stylish modern library is named Room of the Week [coco+kelley] · Gary, Elaine, and some polyhedron fun [Catalog Living] · Cool flatware shaped like hands [Design For Mankind] · Quite simply, “Me and these rooms are dating” [MFAMB] · A Brooklyn backyard, stylishly rehab’ed [Shelterpop]

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Linkage: Pretty Fall-Themed Decor; Hand-Shaped Forks; a Polyhedron