Joe Queenan is my kind of Yankee-hater.

Enough about me for a while. It's time to engage in one of my favorite pastimes: name dropping.

Joe Queenan is a friend of a friend. I've conversed with him on several occasions, at said friend's birthday parties. He seems an all around fine fellow, despite being a Republican. Joe once wrote that anyone under 35 who isn't a Democrat has no heart, and anyone over that age who isn't a Republican has no brain, or something to that effect. Needless to say we disagree on that point. Anyway, one matter on which we heartily agree is this: we both loathe the New York Yankees. In his essay, "Keep Your Team Out of My Book", published in last Thursday's New York Times, Joe tells of putting down David Benioff's novel, City of Theives, despite good recommendations.

“City of Thieves,” set during the Nazi siege of Leningrad, is about a Russian teenager who will be shot by Stalin’s police unless he tracks down a dozen eggs to be used in baking a wedding cake for a colonel’s daughter. Since cannibalism has already broken out in the city, eggs are clearly going to be hard to come by. So, as I opened to the first page, I was primed for a rip-­roaring adventure.

But almost immediately the whole exercise was ruined. The narrator, the young boy’s grandson, reveals on Page 2 that after the war, his grandfather came to America and became a “devout” New York Yankees fan. I found this revelation crushing. The idea that someone who had escaped the siege of Leningrad would then voluntarily join the evil empire in the Bronx struck me as repellent. So I set the book aside and donated it to my library. Maybe some Yankees fan would enjoy it. I sure as hell wouldn’t.

Joe goes on to note that (like me) he has no problem with "homegrown" Yankee fans, though he adds (again with my concurrence), "Yankees fans born in Queens or Brooklyn, it goes without saying, are Iscariots." (A particularly egregious example of the latter, in my view, though perhaps not Joe's, he being a Republican, is one Rudolph Giuliani.) What Joe, who grew up in a housing project in Philadelphia, in his words a "fiendishly inbred sports town", can't stand is "the kind of parvenu, out-of-town front-runner who becomes a 'die-hard' Yankees fan without any moral, cultural, ethnic, genetic or geographical connection with the team."

Returning to City of Theives, Joe writes:

[I]t is simply unconscionable that a survivor of the siege would become a Yankees fan. Stalin would have been a Yankees fan. There’s a guy who loved to gang up on the weak and defenseless. There’s a front-runner if there ever was one.

In the Grand Central Food Hall

In the Grand Central Food Hall,
I'm sampling wild boar salami
while Jon Corneal asks the musical question:
"Do you know how it feels to be lonesome?"
I'm in love with the modern world.

Allen Ginsberg and Peter Orlovsky take a tugboat ride.

This short, silent film was made in 1969, when Allen Ginsberg and his partner and fellow poet Peter Orlovsky were invited to ride on the trial run of the newly built tugboat Elsbeth. Ginsberg became friends with the tug's builder, Latham Smith, while observing the boat's construction. There's more about this in the current New Yorker.

More morning walk photos: Brooklyn, Brooklyn Bridge and Lower Manhattan

Cadman Plaza Park, Brooklyn.


Looking north from Brooklyn Bridge pedestrian and bike path toward Foley Square, Manhattan (McKim, Mead & White's 1914 Municipal Building at left; Cass Gilbert's 1936 U.S. Courthouse, with tower of St. Andrew's Roman Catholic Church in foreground, at center; Gruzen & Partners' 1973 NYC Police Headquarters at right). Oh, yes. Cherry blossoms, too.


Cactus and hyacinths, Manhattan entrance to Brooklyn Bridge.


Racing yachts, North Cove, Battery Park City, Manhattan.


City Hall Park, Manhattan. More cherry blossoms.


Building under construction, lower Manhattan, seen looking south from Brooklyn Bridge.


Tug approaching Brooklyn Bridge.


North entrance to Brooklyn Heights Promenade. Yet more cherry blossoms, and some forsythia.

Mets win opener; Yanks lose theirs--can we stop the season now?

Oh, wait, the Braves and Phils both won, too. Why must life be so complicated?

Last night we were visiting friends. After dinner, we watched the first four and a half innings of the Yanks-Red Sox game. I had already pretty much written off this season in advance, and as the Yank batters kept pounding Beckett, my gloom seemed confirmed. My Bay State born wife argued that the Sox never do anything until the seventh inning, but in the top of the fifth our host, a fellow Yankee-hater, declared the game over, and we switched to the NCAA women's basketball semifinal between Connecticut and Baylor, a game made exciting only because our host had the Huskies* giving 24 points, and his son had the other side of the bet. We left before the half, and this morning, listening to WQXR on the clock radio, I learned that the son won the bet, as UConn's margin of victory was a mere twenty. More surprising, to me, was that the Sox had rallied to a 9-7 win over the Bronx Bullies, though my wife said, "Of course. I only worry when they get ahead early."

Today, as a vouchsafe for my sanity, I resolved not to watch the Mets game. Around mid afternoon, as I was coming in from an errand, I heard game noise on the doorman's radio. "Any score?" I asked, with some trepidation. "Two to one", he said. "Two to one who?" "Mets", he replied. "What inning?" "Top of the sixth." Great, I thought, that lead will evaporate soon enough. Had I the courage to turn on my TV when I got back to my apartment, I would have seen the Mets score four in the bottom of the sixth, then add another in the seventh and cruise to a 7-1 victory over the Marlins.

Alas, one game does not a season make. (Note to Twif: you've already accused me of sounding like a Cubs fan. BTW, the Cubs were on the losing end of their opener with the Braves. Atlanta scored two touchdowns, with one missed PAT, and a field goal, while Chicago could manage only a FG and a safety.)

Update: Duke edges Butler in the NCAA men's basketball final, thereby adding evidence for the theory that "Same old, same old" usually applies in sports.

4.6 update: UConn continues its stranglehold on the women's NCAA championship, but Stanford gives them a run for it, just as Butler did Duke in the mens' tourney. Meanwhile, the Yanks even their series with Boston. My wife could have called this one, as the Sox scored first, and led by 3-1 going into the fifth. The final was 6-4 Yanks.

4.7 update: Twif explains the mascot thing. It's just a bad pun: UConn Huskies, geddit?

Yanks win again, and Mets lose in ten. Sanity, alas, is returning to the baseball universe. Time to concentrate on other things.
__________
*Ohio is the Buckeye State, and Ohio State's teams are the Buckeyes. Connecticut is the Nutmeg State. Why aren't Uconn's teams called the Nutmegs? I mean, what do huskies have to do with Connecticut, anyway?

Someone from Tehran just visited this blog.

The web search term was, "please bang my wife."

John Lennon recites Kerouac, and more on Walt Whitman and the Beats

Dr. John Lennon, Assistant Professor of English at St. Francis College, Brooklyn, reads the 241st Chorus of Jack Kerouac's Mexico City Blues in Greenwich Village on March 28, 2010. Across the street is the former site of Cafe Bohemia, a jazz club where Kerouac, among many other luminaries, was a frequent customer.



The story of how Charlie Parker, subject of the 241st Chorus, made Cafe Bohemia a successful jazz spot despite never playing there, is told here.



John's performance marked the close of a two day conference on the topic "Walt Whitman and the Beats", presented by St. Francis College. The first day included eight panel discussions among which twenty four scholars presented papers on topics relevant to both the poetry of Whitman and the literature of the Beats a century later. The keynote address was given by noted Beat Generation scholar Ann Charters, who built her talk around Allen Ginsberg's "A Supermarket in California", a part of which is:

I saw you, Walt Whitman, childless, lonely old grubber, poking
among the meats in the refrigerator and eyeing the grocery boys.
I heard you asking questions of each: Who killed the pork chops? What price bananas? Are you my Angel?
I wandered in and out of the brilliant stacks of cans following you, and followed in my imagination by the store detective.
We strode down the open corridors together in our solitary fancy tasting artichokes, possessing every frozen delicacy, and never passing the cashier.

The following day there were two walking tours. The first was of "Whitman's Brooklyn", of which, unfortunately, little physical evidence remains. The tour was led by Greg Trupiano, Artistic Director of The Walt Whitman Project, shown in the photo above standing next to Whitman Close, the townhouse development that replaced the building that housed the Rome brothers' print shop, where Whitman labored over typesetting to produce the first edition of Leaves of Grass. Greg is holding up a booklet about the print shop. Photos of this area before it was leveled to provide space for the townhouses and adjacent high rises are here; as you scroll down through the photos, beginning with the fourth photo you will find a building with a red sign on which is "restaurant" in white letters. This was the building that housed the Rome print shop.

Following the Whitman tour, your correspondent and others took the subway to Manhattan to explore landmarks of Beat Generation history in Greenwich Village. Fortunately, thanks in part to the efforts of Jane Jacobs, many of these have survived, although in some instances in different guises.



We gathered next to the Minetta Tavern, where William S. Burroughs would treat his less affluent friends, Ginsberg and Kerouac, to dinner.



One Beat landmark rendered unrecognizable is Fugazzi's, now remade into "Kudo Beans", partly obscured in the photo above by the marquee of the International Film Center. It was immortalized in Ginsberg's Howl:

...who sank all night in submarine light of Bickford's floated out and sat through the stale beer afternoon in desolate Fugazzi's, listening to the crack of doom on the hydrogen jukebox...

This is the door to the brownstone house in which the poet, playwright and political activist Amiri Baraka, then known as LeRoi Jones, lived for a time in the 1950s. Standing next to the door is Fiona Anderson, of Kings College London, who, the previous day, read her paper "A trail of drift and debris: Traces of Whitman in the correspondence art of Ray Johnson", and thereby introduced me to an artist associated with the Beats with whom I was previously unfamiliar (see clip below).





The tour concluded with Dr. Lennon's reading of the 241st Chorus of Mexico City Blues, but at the beginning (unfortunately, he was well into it before I had the sense to think of video) Dr. Thomas Bierowski, Assistant Professor of English at Alvernia University, treated us to a recitation of the 228th Chorus, which concludes:

Praised be the embrace of soft sleep
--the valor of angels in valleys
of hell on earth below--
Praised be the Non ending--
Praised be the lights of earth-man--
Praised be the watchers--
Praised be my fellow man
For dwelling in milk

The New York Times' Homeric nod.

This just in from the Gray Lady:

President Obama and his Russian counterpart, President Dmitri A. Medvedev, have broken through a logjam in their arms control negotiations and expect to sign a new treaty slashing American and Russian nuclear arsenals in Prague next month, officials from both nations said Wednesday.

Russia and the U.S. both maintain nuclear arsenals in Prague? Does Vaclav Klaus know about this?

Scenes from a morning walk.

Lady Liberty versus the smog monster. Shot from the Brooklyn Bridge while walking toward Manhattan.


Greenwich and Murray streets, lower Manhattan. All of these buildings are of recent (post 1990) construction. On the left is an apartment building. The tall structure in the background is the new Goldman Sachs headquarters, designed by Henry Cobb of Pei Cobb Freed & Partners, now nearing completion.


Heather growing on the Irish Hunger Memorial. In the background are apartment buildings in Battery Park City.


Willows next to the Museum of Jewish Heritage. The main building, to the left, is hexagonal in reference to the six pointed Star of David and in remembrance of the six million Jews who died in the Holocaust. To the right is the newer Morgenthau Wing. Both were designed by Kevin Roche John Dinkeloo and Associates LLC.


This shot was taken facing north from the edge of the World Trade Center site. The small plaza was created after the area was devastated by the collapse of the towers. In the center is Jeff Koons' sculpture "Balloon Flower (Red)". A video of the artist discussing his work is here.


On my return leg toward Brooklyn, a tugboat passed under the Bridge.

The Wolfe Tones, "My Heart is in Ireland"

From dmcpromotions:

The legendary Wolfe Tones performing My Heart Is In Ireland at the openair Siamsa Cois Laoi, Cork, in 1986. Over 40,000 fans bouncing to the Tones!

Balder returns.

Just over two years ago, I spotted the self-unloading bulk cargo ship Balder going seaward on the East River. A few days ago I glanced through a window in my apartment and saw something large and bright orange coming through the channel between Governors Island and lower Manhattan toward the East River entrance. I grabbed my camera and went across the street to the Brooklyn Heights Promenade, where I got this shot of Balder, fully loaded and headed to a berth at the Brooklyn Navy Yard.

I get occasional visits to this blog off web searches for Balder. A few days before I took this photo, I got such a hit from somewhere in Quebec. There are several ships, including Balder, Atlantic Superior, and Alice Oldendorff, that have hauled crushed stone from Canada to the Navy Yard.

Mets win spring training opener.

What's more, they beat the Braves, a traditional nemesis. Nevertheless, there had to be an injury-related worm in the apple, as pitcher Elmer Dessens is removed after a line drive hits his knee.

So, what does this mean in the great scheme of things? In the immortal words of Mr. Natural, "Don't mean shee-it." Remember, they won the spring training opener last year.

Remembering some 1960s pop music: Dave Clark Five, Gale Garnett, We Five.

Many of us boomers think of the 1960s as the acme of pop music. Several genres had their origin, and sometimes their demise, in that decade: Motown, Philly and Memphis Stax/Volt soul; surf; Phil Spector's "wall of sound"; British invasion (itself consisting of several sub-genres such as Merseybeat, the Oxford sound, and various R&B influenced styles: London--think the Rolling Stones; Newcastle--think the Animals; and Belfast--think Them and Van Morrison); folk rock; San Francisco psychedelia; and even an early sort of disco exemplified by Joey Dee and the Starliters. In this post, I've collected a few of the perhaps less enduringly famous remnants of that decade which I nevertheless remember fondly. Some of these are grainy black and white videos with less than perfect sound, but I hope you can enjoy them.

The Dave Clark Five, "Glad All Over" and "Bits and Pieces":
During 1964 and '65, this group--unusual in being named for their drummer--rivaled the Beatles and Stones in popularity. The British Pathé news clip above introduces the band and shows "live" (lip-synched) performances of their first two hits: "Glad All Over" and "Bits and Pieces".

Gale Garnett, "We'll Sing in the Sunshine":

The radio soundtrack for my first term at the University of South Florida in the fall of 1964 prominently included this song, along with Manfed Mann's "Doo Wah Diddy Diddy", Gene Pitney's "It Hurts to Be in Love", and "She's Not There" by the Zombies. Gale was later an occasional visitor to the Lion's Head, but I never met her.

We Five, "You Were on My Mind":

We Five were not quite a one hit wonder; after "You Were on My Mind" a later recording, now forgotten, made it to 31 on the pop charts. "You Were on My Mind", written by Sylvia Fricker Tyson of Ian and Sylvia, reached number three on the Billboard "Hot 100" in August of 1965. Much of its success, and that of the subsequent album, can be attributed to the style and vocal range of their lead singer, Beverly Bivens. She has been compared to, among others, Fairport Convention's first female singer, Judy Dyble.

Baseball (yawn!) is happening again.

For some years now, the words "pitchers and catchers report" have, for me, been a tonic in bleak February. Not so this year. I'm a Mets fan, and what I've learned to expect from the Mets is MOTS (More Of The Same). "The same", of course, is disappointment, compounded of anemic hitting, porous defense, inconsistent pitching, and, mostly, a DL that, as the season progresses, comes to resemble a casualty roster from Anzio. This year, with spring training just starting, Carlos Beltran is out until at least May following surgery and ace starter Johan Santana is coming off surgery, though evidently looking good in his first bullpen session. The acquisition of Jason Bay adds a good hitter to the outfield, but one who is (the Mets really need this) prone to injury. For a wrap-up of the Mets' offseason, it's hard to beat Jon Lewin's Mets Hot Stove Roundup: the Pilot Light is Out. (Jon asks readers to buy him a coffee on PayPal. I don't have a PayPal account, but if Jon should have occasion to visit Brooklyn Heights, I'll be glad to treat him to some of Lassen & Hennigs' premium joe.)

If there's any reason for hope, it's that the Mets don't have, to invoke a well-worn phrase, the burden of expectations. I'm keeping my expectations low: a few days ago, I posted as my Facebook status that I was rooting for them to finish no lower than third in the NL East. The more I think about it, though, the more I'm convinced I should be happy if, once again, they can finish ahead of the Nats.

Update: Twif (a.k.a. Ethel, as in "Stop torturing me,..."), who either is as hostile to capitalization as e.e. cummings or has the same difficulty with the shift key as Don Marquis' archy, says: "hey, don't forget that the phillies went out and got roy halladay."

Dale Hawkins, 1936-2010

LaVern Baker, Chuck Berry, Johnny Cash, Bo Diddley, Don and Phil Everly, Bill Haley, Buddy Holly, Jerry Lee Lewis, Roy Orbison, Carl Perkins, Elvis Presley, Ritchie Valens: these are the stars of the first generation of rock and roll. Today only Chuck, the Everlys and (improbably) Jerry Lee survive. There were others of that cohort who didn't achieve the same degree of fame but nevertheless influenced the history of rock. Among these were Charlie Gracie, Janis Martin, Big Joe Turner, Link Wray, and Dale Hawkins. With the death of Dale Hawkins last Saturday, Charlie Gracie is the only survivor of these five.

The clip above, from Dale's own YouTube channel, shows him performing a tribute to Bo Diddley, backed on guitar by James Burton, who has played with, among others, Elvis and Marshall Chapman.

Thanks to Michael Simmons for giving me the following Hawkins quote; his advice to aspiring rockers: "Study the masters, man. . . . Grab the roots and see how it evolved and know what's real."

Townes van Zandt, "Rake"

Townes van Zandt (1944-1997) had a voice and a lyric pen I'll always miss. The clip above (courtesy of lapislazuli42) was, according to its caption, made at a "private concert" at a Holiday Inn in Houston, in 1988. I think this must have been done late at night, following a gig, or perhaps after a long day's travel. His voice sounds a little weary, but that fits the song perfectly.

The splendor that was steam: Nickel Plate and Pere Marquette Berkshires in action.

To get the full effect of this video, double click twice to bring it to full screen size, and crank up the volume.

Because I was born on the leading edge of the baby boom, I was able to witness what train buffs, among whom I count myself, call the "transition period", during which steam still supplied a significant portion of motive power on railroads. My childhood memories include Union Pacific's enormous Big Boy and Challenger articulated locomotives pulling seemingly endless blocks of bright yellow-orange refrigerator cars over Sherman Hill in Wyoming, streamlined steamers on high-speed passenger runs on British Railways, and the Pennsylvania Railroad's formidable array of steam power on both freight and passenger trains that thundered past my mother's home town, Tyrone, Pennsylvania.

So I was delighted to find this short (ten minutes) video of two locomotives from the last years of steam (both built in the late '40s or early '50s) that have been preserved in working order, pulling a train of restored transition era freight cars, running on the tracks of the Great Lakes Central Railroad across the flat farmland of central Michigan. Both are of the "Berkshire", or 2-8-4, type, with two (one on each side) forward small "pilot" wheels; eight large, powered driving wheels; and four small trailing wheels under the large firebox. They are of virtually identical design, having been built for railroads under common ownership, that followed parallel routes. The Nickel Plate, officially the New York, Chicago & St. Louis (it got its nickname because it was a high-speed route with top quality trackage, built entirely for cash), followed the southern shore of Lake Erie from Buffalo across Ohio to Chicago. The Pere Marquette, named for a French priest and explorer, followed the most direct route from Buffalo to Detroit, across southern Ontario to the north of Lake Erie. Today, these roads are under different ownership. Nickel Plate is part of Norfolk Southern, one of the two great surviving rail systems in the eastern U.S., while Pere Marquette is part of its rival, CSX.

This video is by Lerro Productions and JoMiFu. Thanks to silverprint2002 of NYC Maritime for the link.

The song of the hour.

The great Satchmo, who would have loved tonight's Super Bowl result.

Update: Someone commented on this post, in Chinese. Using Babel Fish, I got the following translation:

The human must cherish hoped that only then the live joy, the day only will then cross substantially, meaningful, will have the vitality, will have the confidence.

Seems on point to me.

Lower Manhattan architectural contrasts, redux.

In my almost daily walks across the Brooklyn Bridge and back I've found time to admire the examples of various architectural styles represented among the skyscrapers of lower Manhattan (see this earlier post). In the photo above, taken from the Bridge, the American International Building casts its shadow on One Chase Manhattan Plaza. American International, designed by the architectural firm Clinton & Russell, Holton & George, was completed in 1932 for the petroleum and utilities conglomerate Cities Service, and was later sold to the now-distressed insurance giant AIG. It is a fine example of the art deco skyscraper style that came to dominate the New York City skyline (other well known examples being the Chrysler, Empire State, and General Electric buildings in midtown Manhattan) during the 1920s and 30s. There are some very good photos of details of the building here.

One Chase was designed by Gordon Bunshaft of the firm Skidmore, Owings & Merrill. Bunshaft and SOM were influential in making the international style of architecture dominant in post World War Two New York office building design. One Chase was completed in 1961 to serve as the headquarters of Chase Manhattan Bank, now merged into JPMorgan Chase. When I first settled in New York in the early 1970s, the law firm with which I was associated had its offices in One Chase. From a distance, the building has a light, almost lace-like appearance. I found, however, when I first approached it, that the huge load-bearing exterior columns on the north and south facades give it a massive, almost forbidding aspect.

Other buildings prominent in this photo are 60 Wall Street, the building with a truncated pyramidal roof immediately to the left of the American International Building, and 180 Maiden Lane, the building sheathed in green-tinted glass immediately to the left of 60 Wall. These buildings, both completed in the 1980s, exemplify very different architectural styles. 60 Wall is in the style sometimes called "postmodern", which reacted to the austerity of the international style by incorporating decorative elements evocative of neoclassicism or art deco. 80 Maiden Lane is in what could be said to be a direct offshoot of the international style, in which the rectangular box form was forsaken in favor of structures with walls meeting at acute or obtuse angles, and beveled edges, giving the impression, as one commentator put it years ago, of buildings produced by machine tools.

Is civilization a product of intoxication?

I've long considered the moderate consumption of alcohol to be a useful, if not essential, adjunct to civilized life. According to this Der Spiegel article, however, booze may have been, if not the mother, at least the midwife of civilization. Among the interesting recent anthropological discoveries: beer may have been invented in what is now Iran, where having a tipple today can get you a flogging.

Note the comment by reader "hxie", who observes that "[i]n the days before mechanised agriculture in Europe beer supplied a large proportion of the sustenance required for physical labour during the harvest."

Thanks to Michael Simmons for the tip: I owe you a beer the next time you're in New York (or I'm in L.A.).

My SOTU trivial observation.

The President had to make do with having his head flanked by Joe Biden and Nancy Pelosi. Governor McDonnell, giving the Republican response, had the advantage of hand-picking his audience and his camera angle, which had him bracketed by an African-American woman and an Asian-American man. In both instances, the male member of the flanking pair nodded affirmatively almost incessantly. How soon will we see a Biden bobblehead on the market?

Update: No need to wait, sez the ever-alert Twif. There already is one (but get your order in fast; they've sold like hotcakes and there's, as of this writing, just one left).

It seems I'll have to watch the Super Bowl, after all.

I've never been much of an NFL fan. As I've explained before, I came of sports fan age in Florida long before there were Bucs or Jaguars, or even Dolphins. Back in the 1950s and '60s, the college game was the Real Deal. I took an occasional interest in pro ball; for a while, I was a fan of the Baltimore Colts because my dad and I had watched their star running back, Lenny Moore, when he played for the Eglin Air Force Base Eagles. (For a time, I thought the horseshoe design on the Colts' helmet was a "U" for Unitas.) Still, I was always more interested in the fortunes of the Florida Gators and Florida State Seminoles. Having no connection to either school, I rooted for both, but usually rooted for State when they played Florida because of my weakness for underdogs. This later changed when Bobby Bowden built the 'Noles into a superpower; my algorithm then was to back whichever team had the best shot at post-season glory.

After moving to New York, and having read Fred Exley's A Fan's Notes, I declared myself a Giants fan. In 1976, however, the Tampa Bay Bucs came on the scene, tempting me with old hometown loyalty. I went to the Lion's Head to watch them play the Giants, who had just forsaken the City to play in their new stadium in the New Jersey meadowlands. I arrived, checked the score on the TV, and said to Tommy the bartender, "Looks like my home town team isn't doing so hot." "Yeah," Tommy said, "Jersey's beating 'em."

After that, my interest in baseball began to eclipse that in football, though I still followed the college game. I would watch the Super Bowl, usually rooting for whichever team was rated the underdog. I did root for the Giants in 1986, when they beat the Broncos in Super Bowl XXI. However, in 1990, when they played the Bills in XXV, I secretly (since I watched the game at the apartment of a Giants fan) rooted for Buffalo because of their underdog status and my (some would say perverse) liking for the Queen City of the Niagara Frontier.

This year I was impressed by the Saints, and thought it would be a good thing for poor New Orleans, another city I love, to get a championship. Then along came the Jets, rising from mid-season near disaster to defeat the Colts, I team I have loathed since Robert Irsay deliberately sabotaged the franchise in Baltimore, then shipped the team's equipment out of town under cover of night. I thought the Bengals would prove the Jets' nemesis, but against all conventional wisdom they won two games from them, both decisively. It seemed too much to hope they could pull off a fourth miracle, and it was.

Had the Vikings won the NFC crown, I'd have sat out this year's Super Bowl, but Brees and company came through, so I'll cast my lot with them.

Haiti: special needs.

I've been dilatory in posting about the disaster in Haiti, not out of lack of concern, but because I believed I had nothing of value to add by way of blogging, as opposed to contributing, which I did through Episcopal Relief and Development, an organization I know to be trustworthy and effective. I made my contribution in memory of my friend Charles A. McCrann, who was in his office on the hundredth floor of One World Trade Center when the first plane hit on September 11, 2001. He left a lovely Haitian American wife and two children.

My Brooklyn Heights Blog colleague T.K. Small posted this comment on BHB:

This afternoon I spent some time creating my own fund-raising campaign for contributions to the Haitian relief efforts. Specifically, it concerns me that people with disabilities are at the absolute bottom level of society and, even under the best of conditions, experience unimaginable poverty.

Through some research I was able to find an organization which has expertise and a track record of providing relief to people with disabilities. Based upon the recommendation of a personal friend of the legitimacy of the organization, I made a contribution. But still I wanted to know more and called the organizer to get a better sense of what they were doing. Very quickly I realized that this is a credible initiative. The organization is called:

Portlight Strategies, Inc.
2043 Maybank Highway
Charleston, SC 294
http://www.portlight.org

My Frayfriend Hipparchia also posted this on her blog.

If you've already given, thanks. If not, please do.

Norovirus or no, Queen Victoria arrives.

Cunard's newest cruiser, the 90,000 grt Queen Victoria, as I saw her this morning from the Brooklyn Heights Promenade, passing Governors Island and the Statue of Liberty en route to the cruise ship terminal on Manhattan's West Side.

News reports were that the ship might be denied permission to dock here because some passengers had been infected with norovirus, which causes gastrointestinal distress and nausea. Evidently, the crew and medical personnel on the ship were able to contain the outbreak before it reached a level sufficient to justify such action. Several other cruise ships have had similar problems recently.

Photos of Queen Victoria docked during her maiden visit to New York two years ago are here

Addendum: Was it all the fault of H.R.H. the Duchess of Cornwall? Perhaps she could use some bottle-smashing lessons.

The universe: spatially and temporally.

In The Restaurant at the End of the Universe, the second volume of Douglas Adams's Hitchhiker series, Zaphod Beeblebrox, as punishment for his theft of the Heart of Gold spaceship, is put into the Total Perspective Vortex, supposedly the most fiendish torture device ever made:

When you are put into the Vortex you are given just one momentary glimpse of the entire unimaginable infinity of creation, and somewhere in it a tiny little mark, a microscopic dot on a microscopic dot, which says, "You are here."

Zaphod is able to survive the Vortex with his sanity intact because his ego is robust enough to conclude that the "You are here" marker means that he is the most important thing in the universe, the whole vastness of which was made specially for him.

The American Museum of Natural History has produced a video that, while not having the intended impact of the Vortex, nevertheless gives a sense of the immensity of the known universe (double click twice on the video to bring it to full screen size for maximal effect):


As the text on the video notes, our view of the known universe has a temporal as well as a spatial dimension. Because light travels at a finite speed, light from distant objects reaches us some time after it originated. When we look at Alpha Centauri, the nearest star, we are seeing it as it was about four and a half years ago. As we've developed more powerful telescopes, we've expanded our temporal as well as our spatial horizon, looking farther and farther back in time. Below is an image taken by the Hubble Space Telescope, in which the circled objects are the most distant galaxies yet detected.

As detailed in this NASA web page, the faint galaxies in this image are about 13 billion light years away, which means we are seeing them as they were six to eight hundred million years after the Big Bang.

Thanks to Geoff Abrams for forwarding the AMNH video.

Let the Art Institute of Chicago help you with your resolutions.

I'm not one for resolutions. As my wife sometimes says (usually as I'm pouring my ill-advised second helping of Cognac): "You have the willpower of a gnat." Nevertheless, I'm glad to see as distinguished an organization as the Art Institute coming to the aid of those who wish to start the new year, indeed decade, off in good form. As a guide to what should be resolved against (or, according to one of my Facebook friends, in favor of), the Institute has mounted an exhibit of paintings and sculptures illustrating the Seven Deadly Sins, beginning with Lust (see Titian's Danaë--possibly the first-ever recipient of a golden shower--above). For those of you not willing to brave a trip to Chicago in the winter (my friend Marian Saska can give you the chilling details of the winter of 1979 there), the guide to the complete exhibit, with images of the art works, can be seen on-line here.

New year's shout-outs.

Brooklyn Bridge pedestrian and bike path, January 1, 2010

I've made it my practice, on New Year's Day, to thank my readers, and to recognize those who have given this blog help and support during the previous year. As always, my biggest source of new readers has been Brooklyn Heights Blog, now part of the Brooklyn Bugle empire. So, once again, my hat's off to Homer Fink and the rest of my BHB colleagues. Other blogs that have been helpful sources of traffic are Age of Reason, artandsoul, Bed-Stuy Blog, Growing Tomatoes from Seed, Instaputz, Forgotten NY, Fucked in Park Slope, Luna Park Gazette, newyorkshitty, Notes from a Transitional Fossil, Nurse Ratched's Place, Only the Blog Knows Brooklyn, Rumproast, This Page Intentionally Left Blank, and tugster: a waterblog, so thanks, respectively, to Thomas Paine; Cindy Jacobs; The Changeling; Switters; ts; Kevin Walsh; Erica; Rob Lenihan; Miss Heather; Archaeopteryx; Mother Jones, RN; Louise Crawford; Kevin K; Twif; and Will Van Dorp. Other loyal readers and commenters include Tom and Polly Beason, Brooklyn Beat, Ted Burke, catnapping, Melanie Hope Greenberg, Susan Houx, Isonomist, Keifus, The Lone Beader, Joe Louzonis, Joe Martini, Maria McGarry, Marian Saska, Schadenfreude, Michael Simmons, Sometimes Saintly Nick, Mike and Bonnie Starling, Lisa Swan, and Allan and Marcia Tremmel. If I've overlooked you, please let me know and I will add you to the roll.

This year I'm giving a special "thank you" to Daniel Machalaba for spotting my post about the Amtrak Adirondack and quoting me in his Wall Street Journal article about baby boomers discovering rail travel, and to WSJ multimedia producer Beckey Bright for making the video that accompanies the on-line version of Dan's article.

"Amtrak Adirondack" (or variants thereof) continues to be one of the most popular web searches to lead to hits on my blog, along with Eisenhower Lock. This year, Fred Exley has also drawn many visits. Probably the biggest attraction in 2009, however, was my post about the Pierre Bonnard exhibit at the Met. A tip of the hat goes to Mark Crawford for sparking my interest in Bonnard. Another popular destination has been my post on jazz and the visual arts, which was inspired by Mike Sorgatz.

Sadly, 2009 saw the deaths of many people whom I knew or simply admired (these are listed in rough chronological order): Andrew Wyeth, Darlene Bailey, Stephen Bruton, Koko Taylor, Paul Hemphill, Walter Cronkite, Frank McCourt, Ted Kennedy, Bruce Wasserstein, and Liam Clancy. Farewell.

To all of you: my fondest wishes for a happy and prosperous new year.

The view on the last morning of 2009.

Here's the view from my window this morning, looking across Pierrepont Place toward Pierrepont Playground and Columbia Heights beyond.

The playground occupies the site on which formerly stood the Henry Pierrepont mansion, the rear of which is seen in the center of the turn-of-the 19th to 20th century photo at left. (The photo comes from this Brooklyn Heights Blog post.) The Pierrepont mansion was designed by Frederick A. Peterson, a German-born architect perhaps best known for the Cooper Union building in Manhattan. The mansion was demolished in 1946.

The building the edge of which is seen at the left of my photo at top, the rear of which can be seen toward the right in the old photo, is the Abiel Abbott Low mansion, designed by Richard Upjohn and completed in 1857. To its south (part of the rear visible at the right of the old photo) is its near mirror-image twin, also by Upjohn, the Alexander M. White mansion. Low and White were prominent merchants, Low in the China trade and White in furs. Low was the father of Seth Low who, at various times, served as Mayor of the City of Brooklyn, President of Columbia University, and Mayor of New York City.

"Once in Royal David's City"

My favorite carol, performed by the choir of King's College, Cambridge, as shown on the BBC "Carols from King's" series. Thanks to edders05 for the clip.

Your correspondent rides the Adirondack with Beckey Bright of the Wall Street Journal.

About six weeks ago I received a call from Daniel Machalaba, a freelance writer who sometimes writes on railway related topics. Dan said he was working on an article for the Wall Street Journal about retired baby boomers discovering or re-discovering rail travel. He had read my blog post about riding the Adirondack, which, he said, might be an ideal "starter train" for someone wanting to sample rail travel because its route is very scenic but also short compared to Amtrak's or VIA Canada's transcontinental routes. We talked for a while about my history as a railfan, having spent time in my childhood watching action on the four-track main of the Pennsylvania Railroad at my mother's hometown, Tyrone, Pennsylvania, and about my experiences riding the Adirondack from Penn Station up to Plattsburgh, New York and back on trips to visit my in-laws in Massena. He asked me about things that could be seen from the train, the quality of the service, and timeliness. Finally, he said he had what he thought was some good material for his article.

I heard from Dan again a couple of weeks ago. He said his article would be in the December 19 issue of the Journal, then, to my delight, added that his editor thought it would be good to have me interviewed while riding the Adirondack as far as Poughkeepsie, and to have the interview as a video to accompany Dan's article. So it was that, last Tuesday, I stood under the arrivals/departures board at Penn Station and was greeted there by Beckey Bright, who proved, in appearance and personality, perfectly to embody her name. Beckey did a superb job of editing the ensuing rambling discourse to include only those parts in which I managed to sound the least foolish. I have two regrets: first, that the views of the scenery are less than inspiring because of the weather, and second, that my voice couldn't be edited so as to make me sound a little less like Ben Stein.

You can read Dan's article here.