Over the Edge

A friend of mine on one of my mailing lists alerted me to this item, which shows either that toy designers don't always think things through or that kids are endlessly inventive.

On the face of it, it's a Harry Potter Quidditch broom.  It makes noises. It also, well...

This toy was #1 on my daughter's Christmas list... It wasn't until after she opened her gift and started playing with it that I realized that the toy may offer a more than sensational experience. The broomstick has cute sound effects and ***VIBRATES*** when they put it between their legs to fly. Come on---what were the creators of this toy thinking? She'll keep playing with the Nimbus 2000, but with the batteries removed.

One might think this was a dirty-minded parent, except:

When my 12 year old daughter asked for this for her birthday, I kind of wondered if she was too old for it, but she seems to LOVE it. Her friends love it too! They play for hours in her bedroom with this great toy. They really seem to like the special effects it offers (the sound effects and vibrating). My oldest daughter (17) really likes it too! I reccomend this for all children.

It would not be the first time that someone was having a little fun with Amazon reviews, of course. But these have the ring of authenticity somehow....

For a couple of months after September 11, the odor of destruction hung over my neighborhood, directly across the East River and downwind from the World Trade Center. Just a couple of weeks ago, NASA released this picture of the smoke plume that resulted from the fire and collapse.

The top of the photo is true north; Over the Edge Headquarters is immediately to the south of the Trade Center site, and in the path of the plume.

I'm still trying to decide how to deal with/what to do on the anniversary.

Many of you know that I watched the second plane hit the South Tower. I wrote this piece for the following day's Fort Worth Star-Telegram, which ran it with minor changes. There's a word or two I'd change, but I'm letting it stand as an example of deadline writing.

Some people think there's too much emphasis on the anniversary of the September 11 attack. I understand entirely. I'm not at all certain how much if any TV I'll be able to stomach on the day itself, though I'm quite impressed with the quality of what I've seen thus far. 9/11 is a local story to me, very nearly a neighborhood story. So while I probably won't immerse myself in coverage, I do care about what goes on. 

The inverse-square law of news -- that interest in an event decreases by the square of the distance between the event and the reader/viewer -- declares that you'll care less about what goes on this Wednesday than I do. Fair enough. Here's a pretty complete list of goings-on around town, and here's a very complete list. Hey -- it's a big city with lots of people and lots of different ways of coping.

But if you've read this far, let's pretend that you'll care about a couple of observations.

Starting at about 1 am Wednesday, five bagpipe corps will march from the furthest corner of each borough to Ground Zero. Here are the routes, and here's a map of them. To give you a sense of scale, it's about 15 miles from the remotest corners of Queens and the Bronx to Ground Zero, which is a long morning's walk, especially if you're blowing on a bagpipe. The Brooklyn procession will pass about four blocks from OTE Headquarters. I may hear it, but given the hour -- 7 am maybe -- I certainly won't see it. And I suspect that a solemn bagpipe procession marching through Times Square at dawn will be more than a little moving.

A local orthodox synagogue is holding its regular morning service on the Brooklyn Promenade at 7:45 am, with the expectation of ending at 8:46, when the first plane hit. They'll start the service by blowing a shofar -- a traditional means of sounding an alarm. But I wonder if anyone at B'nai Abraham has remembered that when Joshua's army conquered Jericho, the Bible says it brought the walls of the city down solely by marching around the city and blowing on shofars. Given the nature of last year's attack, I wonder if something more a propos couldn't be found. Not that they've asked me, of course. As my wife, the lovely and curious Olivia, frequently says, one problem with the world is that it doesn't ask our opinion nearly enough.

September 11 is only part of the agita in New York City this week. The U.N. General Assembly gets to work this week, which requires significant parts of the East 40s to be shut down unexpectedly. Don't even try to hang out around the Waldorf Astoria. Happens every year; the East Side population of very mean looking beefy guys wearing lapel pins and talking into their jacket sleeves jumps in September. The confluence of September 11 and the General Assembly session should make for some interesting diplomacy that we'll never hear about.

Until September 11, by the way, there was an exit off the southbound FDR Drive for "49th Street UN Garage." After the 11th, the second part of the exit sign was blocked off; if you want to park in the UN Garage (which under any circumstance was restricted), someone supposedly will tell you what exit to take.

Will I myself be out on the Promenade again this year? Dunno. I'll certainly be out there at some point on Wednesday, if only because I usually am. I'll let you know what I see.

If you're interested in electoral politics on the national and state levels -- and I scarcely need to remind you that we're deep into Political Season -- you should know that ABC News's The Note is the best daily briefing on the net. Comprehensive and even-handed though by no means impartial. Proof positive (for those who doubt) that national reporters aren't just haircuts.

You may need to register, but it's worth it.

And as an old reporting hand, I love a good Daybook, and The Note's excels.

I was talking with a mutual friend just this weekend about how we hadn't seen anything new from Clay Shirky in a while. His latest essay popped up the very next day -- lucid as always from one of the best thinkers about online culture.

If you were a broadcast media outlet thinking about community building, here are five things you would think about:

1. Audiences are built. Communities grow.
2. Communities face a tradeoff between size and focus.
3. Participation matters more than quality.
4. You may own the software, but the community owns itself.
5. The community will want to build. Help it, or at least let it.

 

A report this morning from my wife, Olivia:

It is very eerie.

The world really has changed.

For almost all of my professional life, I have worked within a few blocks of Foley Square, in downtown Manhattan. Sixteen years. Today, just after 9:00 a.m., I came out of the subway and heard the sound of bagpipes playing Amazing Grace. Because of the way the wind was blowing around the square on this pleasant late summer morning, it took a moment to locate the source of the sound. But then I saw that a group of pipers was standing near the Court of International Trade. Rehearsing, I suppose.

In the time I have been in this neighborhood, there has been a great deal of construction. A new federal courthouse on Pearl Street. Another new federal building on Broadway. Foley Square itself has been repaved and a new fountain (waterless, in the face of low rainfall) dominates the landscape. The Tweed Courthouse is renovated and gleaming. Ten years after a fire on Worth Street, a new building is finally taking shape.

But nothing has so changed the neighborhood as the respose to terrorism. Traffic barricades on Duane Street at Broadway. Locked gates around City Hall Park. Metal detectors in the lobby of 80 Centre Street and court officers in bullet-proof vests standing outside. Paralegal prosecutorial personnel required to pass through the metal detectors in the courthouses.

And bagpipes in Foley Square.

Try to follow this. If you're an elected official from Florida, it's OK -- I'll write slowly.

Today is Primary Day in Florida (as it is in New York). Among those running is Katherine Harris, the Secretary of State who figured so prominently in the theft of the last Presidential election. This is the same Katherine Harris who was in charge of state election law yet who professed to be unaware of the requirement that officeholders who are running for new positions resign their old offices. This is the same Katherine Harris is running today for a Republican House nomination.

One would think that in Florida, if nowhere else, the state would take pains to run a smooth election. Nope. Janet Reno, who is running for the gubernatorial nomination, couldn't vote this morning; it seems that a bunch of polling places around the state weren't ready when the polls were to open at 7 a.m.

Seems to me that if Ms. Harris was so keen to hang onto her job supervising elections, at least she could have actually done the job she was getting paid for until she was forced to quit.

My family was just out at the Brooklyn Promenade for a memorial service, standing more or less where I was a year ago when the second plane hit the tower. I'll have more later, but I wanted to serve up these couple of images right away:

Last October, I drove my very pregnant wife to Connecticut for a medical appointment. As we reached the middle of the Bronx Whitestone Bridge, traffic slowed to a stop, as it frequently does. So we're sitting in traffic, the bridge bouncing slightly under us, as suspension bridges do under load, when a passenger jet crossed from east to west, moving right to left across my field of vision.

For the life of me, I couldn't remember if that plane was supposed to be there or if my family had pinned itself to a bulls-eye.

When I got my pulse under control, I realized that the plane was making a final approach to LaGuardia Airport. I've been on a ton of planes making that very approach, but I can't say that I was ever particularly aware of it. Since The Eleventh, I find that I want to know fairly urgently that any aircraft I see in the sky is supposed to be where it is.

I don't always get satisfaction. Last night, at around 9 pm, we heard a long low roar from a flyover. It sounded more like what I'd imagine a B-52 would sound like than an F-16, but that's utterly uninformed. And at 8:55 this morning, in the midst of memorial vigil on the Brooklyn Promenade, a big military helicopter flew in from the south, swung east and banked over the Brooklyn shore, then swung back west and landed at the Wall Street Heliport. I thought the timing for low-flying aircraft in that part of the world might have been better.

The Promenade was crowded today. The morning prayers of Congregation B'nai Abraham, scheduled to end at the moment the first plane hit, attracted more people than I'd thought it would -- and drew about a half-dozen photographers (many of whom were shooting digitally). One young man was davening not from a siddur but from a Palm 100. There are more things in heaven and earth, Horatio, than are dreamt of in your philosophy...

I wrote the other day about the appropriateness of blowing the shofar to mark the moments of impact. I was wrong; it was perfect. The blasts were not the stylized 1-3-7-1 of the holidays. The blasts were visceral, mournful, angry -- like the best of Judaism, a call both to memory and to action.

Maybe I'm nuts, or maybe it's just that I was able to drag myself away from the Tube for most of the day, but I found a lot of the memorials of the day pretty tasteful and restrained.

Yep, I'm surprised, too.

My main beef goes with the territory: live TV featuring anchors who feel the need to improve upon silence. What TV I did catch sent me surfing through digital cable-land, on a Diogenese-like search for an anchor who either wasn't a blithering idiot or who didn't fatally confuse political credulity for patriotism. If you were plugged in all day, I could well imagine that your opinion of today differs from mine.

Much of the observances were Just Right. I can do without the reflexive branding of the dead as "heros," so the so-called Circle of Heros in the Pit grated -- though the stagecraft and imagery of the service was lovely. The roll call was perfect, and the NYSE's holding off on the opening of trading until it was finished was remarkably tasteful.

And I appreciate Mayor Bloomberg's ban on any speechifying except for classics; it sure cut down on demagoguery and campaigning. But I've got to agree with Garry Wills here: are there really no speechwriters who we trust to hit the right note?

The visual of W and his wife going hand-in-hand, making the long walk alone down the ramp into the Pit, was excellent. So was his willingness to spend so very much time with the families, signing autographs, posing for pictures, and pausing for conversation. (His speech later was not so great, in that flat delivery he's got that could suck the poetry even out of Peggy Noonan's best. I hope he does better at the U.N. tomorrow; I'm certain that a case can and should be made against Iraq, but he hasn't made it yet.)

New York itself has gotten back to its normal charming chaos. I found myself in the unaccustomed environs of the Columbus Circle CompUSA not long after noon, and emerged to discover 8th Avenue blocked off by police, fire and emergency vehicles. Seems the wind had picked up suddenly with the falling temperature, and a piece of scaffolding blew off the AOL Time Warner construction project and hit someone on the street below. Just another day.

And tonight, there was an interfaith multicultural anti-war memorial service on the Promenade. The march that preceded it was led by someone banging a drum and singing the most marshal version of Amazing Grace I've ever heard...

OK, I'm about done with September 11 stuff. There's a reason that Jews say Kaddish only for a year. Then I'll move on to the usual inanity.

Just two more pointers.

New York, like many states, runs a passel of gambling games. (A metro columnist for the Albany Times-Union -- Barney something-or-other -- used to refer to the state as "My Mother the Bookie.") Among them is a twice-daily numbers racket. Last night's number came up 9-1-1. There were 14,878 winners, splitting nearly $5 million. A more normal payout, for the afternoon number of 8-3-3, paid 892 people $185,000.

And last night, David Letterman had former president Bill Clinton as a guest. "Apparently," Dave said during the monologue, "he's never seen the program." This program is why I'm such a big fan of Letterman's. The show was serious, analytical, respectful, and fascinating. Dave likes to pretend he's dumb, but when he's not ogling starlets' breasts it's clear that there's an excellent brain ticking behind the glasses.

I kind of wish both guys had acknowledged the Beast in the Corner, though. Letterman's been beating up on Clinton -- in some really personal terms -- for more than 200 shows a year for around 10 years. Each monologue has four to six jokes. Let's say half of them are about Clinton. That's a low estimate of 5,000 jokes (200x10x5/2). Some of them must have stung. It might have been nice to have Clinton say something like, "Don't y'all miss me?" or for Dave to get to say, "Hey, y'know, it's just business. No disrespect meant."

As it was, the closest they got was when Clinton came out to the strains of "Harlem Nocturne." The guys chatted for a minute about how Clinton's gotten back to playing the saxophone, and Clinton used the word "blow." The audience kind of gasped and tittered and started to laugh, but Clinton just kept on talking, his face not registering a thing. I'd hate to play poker against this guy.

Someone I would like to play poker against is W. I caught the end of his interview with Scott Pelley on 60 Minutes II, the two of them sitting in the Oval Office. Bush has the contemporary politician's annyoning habit of answering questions with The Message. But Pelley did lay a glove on him, when he asked about all the anti-invasion talk coming from people who might reasonably be considered his father's proxies -- heavyweights like Brent Scowcroft. When the question was being asked, W started blinking very fast. His tone didn't change, his face didn't change, the angle of his head didn't change, and his answer didn't change. But his eyelids were playing the merengue. Didn't like the question, not one bit, and I bet there have been some entertaining phone conversations between son and dad over the last couple of months.

OK, so that's three items. Apply for a refund. I'm done now -- or as done as I ever am.

From Reuters via CNN:

There's apparently this whack-job filmmaker named Bart Sibrel, who's made a bunch of documentaries claiming that Apollo 11 was a big fraud executed in a television studio.

So Sibrel gets Buzz Aldrin (you know, the second guy to walk on the moon) to come to a Beverly Hills hotel on some pretext or another to do an interview. Aldrin gets there, and

Sibrel, 37, has admitted to ambushing Aldrin at the hotel and shoving a Bible at him so that he could swear he really made the second walk on the moon on July 20, 1969....

The filmmaker has made television documentaries and films debunking the Apollo 11 voyage, saying it never left earth -- a conspiracy theory that some critics maintain gives conspiracy theory a bad name....

The police spokesman added that witnesses have come forward stating that they saw Sibrel aggressively poke Aldrin with a Bible and that Sibrel had lured Aldrin to the hotel under false pretenses so that he could interview him.

Aldrin, 72, did what anyone would want to do: he socked him in the jaw. The police are investigating, but from the tone of their comments, Sibrel better not count on any charges getting filed.

The Register reports that after an exhaustive search, Microsoft Research has found the first known use of an "emoticon," those smiley things like this: : - )

Given the transient nature of so much online content, it's actually a pretty impressive feat of archeology.

It turns out that, unless prior art can be demonstrated, emoticon usage was first proposed exactly 20 years ago next week.

Fascinating but frustrating piece in Fortune about the business side of the multinational corporation popularly known as Rolling Stones. Fascinating because of the detail presented. Frustrating because of the juicy stuff they choose not to talk about -- like who gets how much of what.

My favorite part was Keith Richards talking about international tax policy. Yes, really.

And the reported missed a good beat by not asking about the Net and piracy. While new and smaller bands can profitably use the Net as a promotional tool, a backlist-heavy band like the Stones makes a ton of money off performance rights, which makes them especially vulnerable to file sharing.

The American Prospect carries an informed piece about the perceived anti-war and anti-Bush tilt of the New York Times under new editor Howell Raines. The Prospect -- a left-of-center magazine -- makes the interesting point that the conservative pundits who roast what they see as the Times's agenda haven't actually spent much time working in the daily media, and therefore don't understand how ad hoc coverage decisions really are.

The bug in the Prospect's ointment is that a publication's Editor doesn't need to have a heavy hand on the spike to direct coverage. Quite the contrary; coverage can be steered in many less-visible ways -- like hiring the "right" people.

But based on my own experience, the Prospect gets it right, and backs up its thesis with some actual quotes from some actual reporters on the Times. From the article:

To generalize, conservative pundits assume that establishment media such as the Times are partisan because that's how their own journalists are expected to operate. They believe Howell Raines runs The New York Times the way they know Wes Pruden runs The Washington Times.

Bill and Melinda Gates announce the birth of their third child, Phoebe Adele Gates.

... and we all know that Microsoft doesn't get it right until version 3.0, right?

Congratulations, and welcome to the world, Pheebs. How do you feel about older men -- say, nine months older?

Now that all this dot-com bubble is behind us, the Bear Stearns brokerage is ordering its employees out of chinos and back into suits. To help, the ever-helpful Brooks Brothers store across the street is staying open late and giving Bear Stearns's employees a 20 percent discount.

A couple of observations:

1. Business must be bad indeed. If there was money sloshing around the joint, the company would be encouraging employees to shop at the much-higher-toned Paul Stuart store around the corner.
   
2. Gotta love the fact that Brooks Brothers's business model isn't entirely unlike Bear Stearns. Market goes up or market goes down, the brokerage gets paid on the trade. And whether the memo says casual or dress-up, Brooks gets paid whenever anyone shifts gears.

The trust that controls Hershey Foods has decided not to sell after all. (I'm pretty sure I've written about this before, but Radio's not great about providing an index of past posts.)

Most of the voting stock in Hershey is held by a charitable trust that runs an extremely well-funded school for orphans in the city of Hershey, PA. Hershey, besides being the corporate home, is also sort of a chocolate theme park. An eerie and amazing place, really.

A few months ago, the trust decided that it ought to be more diversified, and announced that it wanted to sell its stake in the company. A chocolate storm ensued (well, not chocolate, but you get the idea) with officials at the local, state, and national levels indicating that any sale -- particularly to European interests such as Nestle and Cadbury Schwepps -- would be examined most closely. It's not just the company, you see. Everyone was afraid that the chocolate plant, and the economy of central Pennsylvania, would be closed. (Read the last few grafs to see how the 2002 election factored into the mix.)

Last last night, despite a $12.5 billion offer from Wrigley that it was about to accept, the trust decided to hell with it and took the company off the market.

If you want to know more about the super-secretive chocolate industry, I strongly recommend you seek out and read The Emperors of Chocolate.

I'm hesitant to even touch this subject because I know it's far more complex than I want to deal with. Suffice to say that everyone agrees (or at least gives lip service to the idea) that breast milk is the preferred food for infants. The reality is somewhat different.

There's an interesting story in today's NYTimes about the maker of Similac formula putting its logo on 300,000 copies of a book from the American Academy of Pediatrics. The book, which will be distributed free to new mothers, advocates breast-feeding.

"For those of us who wrote the book, this is thievery," said Dr. Lawrence M. Gartner, the former chairman of the University of Chicago's pediatrics department and chairman of the academy's executive committee on breast-feeding. "The impression that people have when they see the book is that Ross is a supporter. This corrupts efforts to promote breast-feeding."

It turns out that this sort of thing is not unusual. Drug companies routinely put their logos of stuff that they give away to interested parties; the practice even extends to medical textbooks.

The World Health Organization and the pediatrics academy both have a policy that discourages hospitals from giving free samples of formula as going-away gifts to new moms. The policy is almost universally ignored.

There are three big players in the world of baby formula:

• Ross, a division of Abbott Laboratores, makes Similac


• Mead Johnson, a division of Bristol-Meyers Squibb, makes Enfamil


• Nestle makes Carnation Good Start

Breast-feeding advocates aren't wild about any of them, but Nestle -- probably because of its global reach and strong presence in under-developed nations -- appears to have attracted particular wrath, including a long-running boycott.

From ABCNews's excellent daily political briefing, The Note (registration may be required):

Roll Call 's Henry reported yesterday, "Exercising his civic duty in Tuesday's Democratic primary for governor, [Sen. Bill] Kerry [D-MA] showed up at a Boston polling place at 7 a.m. ÷ only to find people milling about because the machines weren't working. An aide tells HOH that Kerry slipped on his eyeglasses, spent the next 15 minutes reading the manual for the voting machines and fixed the problem. With order restored, the crowd started clapping."

Kerry for President! Remember: 41 didn't even know what a bar-code scanner was....

More from The Note. You may well know that Arnold Schwarzenegger has become active in California Republican politics, no doubt horrifying his in-laws. The Note points to an L.A. Weekly item to the effect that Ah-nuld is testing the waters for a write-in campaign in November's gubernatorial election.

The Note debunks the report, but misses the obvious. A write-in? For S-c-h-w-a-r-z-e-n-e-g-g-e-r? Against candidates D-a-v-i-s and S-i-m-o-n? How accurate does the spelling need to be on a write-in ballot, anyway?

I could have told you this was coming. Gruner + Jahr, the publishing arm of the German media giant Bertelsman, repackaged the failing 127-year-old McCalls magazine around the actress and comedienne Rosie O'Donnell. Rosie -- host of a popular daytime chat show -- appeared to be pretty involved (or as involved as a daily talk show host can be) in setting the tone for a new-ish kind of women's magazine.

About a year in, Rosie ditches the TV show, comes out of the closet and seemingly stops taking her meds. She and G+J had some very public arguments about the direction of the magazine and the hiring of a new editor.

Finally, today, Rosie quit. The magazine, apparently, will fold. G+J, which entrusted a century-old title to her, is fit to be tied, and the vigor of its memo goes well beyond the "shocked, shocked" tone that one might have expected given the slow-motion nature of this crash.

[Later: the NYPost, whose coverage of the magazine industry is excellent, has this story about the folding. Must have been some morning. Note also the comments of Martin Walker, a highly clueful consultant who rarely speaks publicly.]

Giving McCalls to Rosie was a desperate move, tied to the popularity of someone in an industry evanescent by its very nature. That the arrangement blew up should not be a surprise to anyone.

Now the lawyers will get richer.

Ad Age magazine is reporting that pop singer Lance Bass, booted from the Russian crew of an upcoming space station mission when his sponsors didn't come up with the cash in time, is going after all. Corporate sponsors Radio Shack and, possibly, Pepsi have come into the deal.

I don't know about you, but I think it's beyond great that Radio Shack is sponsoring this. Who better to sponsor a geek dream but geek heaven itself? The only thing better would have been Fry's Electronics -- except that a lot of the parts for the Russian spacecraft probably already come from Fry's....

The Museum of Sex opens next week at Fifth Avenue and 27th Street. The Catholic League is already upset.

From the AP, via CNN:

WASHINGTON (AP) -- There are more differences between a chimpanzee and a human being than once believed, according to a new genetic study.

Back in 1952, composer John Cage wrote a piece of music called 4'33", which consisted of 4 minutes and 33 seconds of silence. Infrequently performed, it is nonetheless famous.

Far more recently, British songwriter (notice the semantic difference between "composer" and "songwriter") Simon Batt recorded an original song entitled A One Minute Silence on an album by his classical rock group The Planets. The song was, sure enough, a minute of silence. In what was probably a tribute, Batt credited the song to Batt/Cage.

That was probably a mistake. Cage's estate came after Batt for plagiarism. CNN says Batt wound up writing a six-figure check to the John Cage Trust.

From CNN:

Before the start of the court case, Batt had said: "Has the world gone mad? I'm prepared to do time rather than pay out. We are talking as much as ｣100,000 in copyright.

"Mine is a much better silent piece. I have been able to say in one minute what Cage could only say in four minutes and 33 seconds."

The kicker: the piece has been released as a single. Would that it crosses over to American radio...

Later: The New Yorker goes into a little more depth, much of it along the lines of Mark Johnson's comments to this post. The magazine expires links, but check this:

Batt ... has tweaked the Cage people further by registering hundreds of other silent compositions, ranging in length from one second to ten minutes. "I couldn't get four minutes and thirty-three seconds, obviously, but I got everything else," he said. He is proudest of two of his registered copyrights: four minutes and thirty-two seconds and four minutes and thirty-four seconds. "If there's ever a Cage performance where they come in a second shorter or longer, then it's mine," he said.