In a week chockablock with wrong turns, perhaps none was more explicitly errant than that taken by Russian semi-supermodel Tatyana Simanava, who while cruising along at 50 miles per hour through an unfashionable district of Brooklyn opened the wrong door when leaving the bathroom of the RV in which she was traveling—the one that exited directly to the Gowanus Expressway asphalt. Hers was a happier fate than that of the 218-pound black bear who took a misguided detour into Irvington, New Jersey, on Tuesday, and was shot dead in a suburban backyard. Governor George Pataki, whose dreams of the presidency have yet to be killed off, saw his approval rating drop to 30 percent. The ever-competitive President Bush, whose own rating hit a record-low 31 percent, immediately sought to push his number down into the twenties by ramming through another tax cut for the rich, nominating a resoundingly unpopular domestic spymaster, General Michael Hayden, to head the CIA, and by appearing to be genuinely shocked that a personal letter from Iranian president Mahmoud Ahmadinejad included no offer to abandon his nuclear-weapons program. (Ahmadinejad also managed to beat Bush at one of his favorite games, saddling his fellow potentate with the most excellent nickname “Your Excellency.”) Morale in the Yankee clubhouse took a turn for the worse when New York’s own potentate, George Steinbrenner, said he was “upset” at Alex Rodriguez’s performance. (A-Rod turned the other cheek and responded with a home run against the Red Sox.) The WTC Memorial Foundation, which took a wrong turn a ways back, froze fund-raising. Rupert Murdoch pooh-poohed the idea that he was taking a turn to the left by hosting a fund-raiser for Senator Hillary Clinton, saying, “It’s no big deal.” Hillary, who’s clearly taken a turn to the right recently, called the conservative media mogul “my constituent.” Abe Rosenthal, the cantankerous former editor of the Times, who died last week, moved ever rightward in his later years. But in the multi-section, something-for-everyone omnipaper he created, his obituary was on the front page.

Related:

• Archive: “It Happened Last Week”
• Articles by Mark Adams
• Table of Contents: May 22, 2006 issue of New York | Subscribe!