Greetings, Pub Quiz Year Enders…

Overwhelmed by Year In Reviews?  Best Of?  Worst Of? 
Even worse, the prognostications for the coming year?  And worst of
all, the coming year's predicted Year In Review for stuff that hasn't
happened yet — more Shecky Green than Nostradamus.

Even worse, we get a double-dose: Year in Review and Decade in Review.

This ain't no disco, and it ain't my call to make.  The best of the year, best of the decade, is whatever you say it is.

This little summation is just stuff that makes me smile or sticks in my craw — sometimes at the same time.

And what, exactly, is a craw?  It's the crop of a bird or an
animal, or an animal's stomach.  And, idiomatically, the place where
really annoying stuff goes and sticks.  And doesn't come out — not
with the wash, not with scholastic remediation, and not with the
healing qualities Time is supposed to be so good at.

2009…the last year of this terrible decade.  We should've known
it would be bad — any decade that lends itself to the spectacle known
as New Year's Eve Spectacles was bound to go off the rails.

yes, yes…it's a new year AND you can see us!

And it did.  Spectacularly at the outset and grindingly for the rest of the way.  The '00s were mostly the dark days of the Bush era.  Really, really dark.  At the end, the disappointment (thus far) of the Obama administration's
hold-hands-circle.  Dude, you were elected with a huge mandate — end
wars and give everyone health coverage and encourage queer rights and
all the other stuff we talked about!

Also, people now say "dude" more than ever.

Hard to believe this is the same decade as 9/11 and the big tsunami and the end of Buffy The Vampire Slayer.

Since he's still in office, it's sadly not hard at all to believe Michael Bloomberg
is mayor.  It's cruel to wake from the nightmare of W and still be in
Bloomy's New York — like a sci-fi plot where the character opens her
eyes only to discover by the next ad break that she's still in a
terrifying dream.

Assuming he doesn't buy his way into a fourth term, we'll
discover that we can't even afford to leave the Bloomberg's frightful
nightmare — sky-high rents, box-stores, wrecked subway and school
systems, deference to the wealthy, trite initiatives that ignore the
city's real problems.

If Bloomberg's such a "good businessman," how come the city's in
such bad shape financially?  And no, you can't give his alleged
business acumen credit when times were good but, now that times are
bad, blame events somehow beyond the mayor's control.

There were bright spots — political movements and new politicians
that could bend the steel bar enough to make a difference, bands and
movies and t.v. shows we loved, medical advances (though, good luck
paying for them), and technology that has us at the crossroads — this
way, radical new possibilities to improve our quality of life; that
way, a planet so self-absorbedly addicted to Twitter and celebritydom that when we finally look up and see the giant asteroid about to destroy Earth, we won't have time to use all 140 characters to scream.

Of course, humans being humans, it'll be somewhere in the middle. 
It always is.  We somehow always recover from doing terrible things to
one-another.  The worst things possible — genocide, torture, t.v. shows about the Kardashian sibblings — and still we continue.

What we do to each other is one thing.  What we're doing to the
planet…that's another story.  There's a desperate push to name the
'00s.  Could be hard, because we can't even agree on the prosaic
numerical nickname — Zeroes? Aughts? Pre-Teens?.  Still, I nominate
this clunker: The We've Known We're Killing Our Planet And
Destroying Humanity One Hummer Meat-Cattle-Raising Acre Rampant Western
Consumer Thirst Slaked But Not Enough By Emerging Factory States At A
Time And We Can't Get Our Shit Together To Save The Only Home We've Got
Decade.  It's not as catchy as the Me Decade, but at least it's too long for a tweet — and that's a start.

Upon further review, how about the Toxic Decade.  "A lie
told often enough becomes the truth," so the insidious insist.  These
last ten years, lies didn't even have to be said that often before we
caved in and took them at face value.

Michael Bloomberg, China's quest to satisfy Western urges, the Kardashians, Bruce Ratner and Jay-Z, W & His Number 1, Enron — the forefront of the Toxic Decade.  An incomplete list.

We've fought our way through the Toxic Decade.  That says a lot.  We allowed it to become this toxic.  That says a lot more.

The obvious retort here is "Dude, every
decade's been toxic."  True — nuclear proliferation, world wars,
depressions greater than this one, bubonic plagues (that's a lot of
decades ago, but still…).  What makes this last one so toxic is that
by now, we should know better.  Know better than to wage stupid wars,
pollute the planet, build superblock projects and give wealthy
developers public money to destroy neighborhoods, allow fiscal
corruption to run rampant, piss off the world with hubris and
arrogance, and pull cover after cover over our head instead of letting
the warm sunshine of resistance heat us up.

Fact — fighting the power is more fun than DVDing another season of America's Next Top Model.

So onward to 2010.  My one moment of Nostradamual prognostication:

Things are gonna change…

* * * * * * * *

…starting with the best way to celebrate New Year's Eve this Thursday evening:

The Rocky Sullivan's Pub Quiz Quizzin' New Year's Eve Extravaganza!

Here's today's screed from Scott Turner, the quizmaster at Rocky Sullivan's in Red Hook brought to you by Miss Wit, the t-shirt queen of Red Hook. Greetings Pub Quiz Holiday Bargain Hunters…

Doorbusters.

Doorbusters!

Doorbusters!!!!!

DOORBUSTERS!!!!!

DOORBUSTERS!!!!!

DOORBUSTERS!!!!!

DOORBUSTERS!!!!!

DOORBUSTERS!!!!!

It's the worst concept, construct, idiom, catchphrase, buzzword and social ideology ever.

Well, not worse than genocide.

But close.

That's the descriptive being deployed for all the Black Friday/Cyber Monday sales, deals and enticements this holiday shopping season.

Now, I like the season's trappings.  The trees, lights, excitement.  Until they start admitting that Jesus was,
at heart, a socialist, I won't spend much time on the guy's birthday. 
That, and his actual birthing being sometime in the spring.  That's the
shepherds watching over their flocks is really part of the story. 
(That's when the lambies are born.)  December 25th didn't even come
into play until 325 CE, in Rome — and that was only because the Romans needed a holiday to counter the winter solstice soirees all over the empire.

Digression concluded.  The joviality this time of year is fun.  But
goodness, is it concurrently depressing.  The amount of money spent on
gifts, for starters.  What's the absolutely unmeasurable percentage of
gifts bought because someone has to, not wants to?  The frenzy to shop,
score big deals, line up in the early morning gloom to be first inside
a big box store before the Thanksgiving meal is even digested.

Last year it was so bad Jdimytai Damour, a security guard at WalMart's Valley Stream, Long Island
location, was killed in the stampede for savings. Shoppers pushed their
way past the dying Damour, and store officials let them.  Sadly, Damour
was a footnote the moment he died — the bigger story being the
hand-wringing over sales figures in the debris of last year's fiscal
meltdown.

Jdimytai Damour, and doorbusting for real

And now we have "doorbusters."

Whatever one's view of the holiday season, this can't be the right call.

"Doorbusters"
conjurs chaos, fury, consumer madness and physical violence.  How
comforting the phrase must be for Jdimytai Damour's family and
friends.  I get corporations, box stores and the media embracing such a
counter-holidays formulation.  That's the nature of the myriad beasts.

But us?  It'd be nice to slow down and breathe.  There should be a sign: No Running On The Edge Of The Shopping Pool.

With doorbusting taking root this holiday season,  I feel like this this guy:

Bob Marley once sang "If you are the big, big tree/We are the small axe/Ready to cut you down." Real good David and Goliath stuff. 
I like being a small axe, but for the holidays, I like cozying up with
my sad little tree, calling some friends over, and giving it a boost.

Giving us all a boost.

…without a single door busted.

Here he is: Scott Turner, Thursday night quizmeister at Rocky Sullivan's in Red Hook, bringing you his latest and greatest thoughts and observations. This feature is brought to you by Miss Wit, Red Hook's t-shirt entrepreneur extraordinaire.

Greetings Pub Quiz Gaze Averters…

Did you see the Leonids meteor shower this morning?  Neither did I!

But
I have in the past, and it's beyond cool.  This year's was supposed to
be particularly fabulous.  But I forgot.  Plus, hard to see a meteor
shower here in New York City.  Then again, for most cramped New Yorkers, getting to the regular shower is a task.

Light pollution, astronomers call it.  I'm more likely to call it "not running into things at night."  Gothamites have to plan out a Leonid experience.  Can't just step outside the bar, look up and say "that sky's crazy!  Or maybe it's that 9%-alcohol beer from Quebec…"  Actually, that you can say.  And many of us do.

Regardless, it's a wacky thing, these Leonids.  The earth passes through particles left from a passing comet, Temple-Tuttle.  (Tuttle discovered the comet a few weeks after Temple, but the International Comet Monikerization Agency awarded joint custody.  Also, Tuttle-Temple is just on the other side of the Silly Line for scientists who, it is well known, hate joy and mirth.)

So, it's not so much that meteors fall on our heads.  Rather, we
put our heads down and charge, like a fullback, straight into the
meteors.  Every year.  Center-of-the-universe way that we think, it
seems like the meteors are showering down from the constellation Leo. 
Hence, Leonids.  By the way, I think instead of calling human progeny
"children," "kids," "offspring" or "insufferable life-altering
parent-culture-inculcating whiners," we should just call the little
ones "nids."

Here are two views of this week's Leonid shower:

what did people do before digital technology?!

Here's another view from Niagara Falls.  Apparently, the Leonids were joined last night by the Spermonids, a lesser known meteor shower from the passing Jolie-Suleman Comet.

The meteors that form terrifying End Of Days
fire in the skies are actually particulate matter — dust, really. 
Sometimes I get bummed about stuff, and I think about very cool things
to snap me out of it.  One of those things is that meteor showers look
like the Earth is under attack from flaming-rock-throwing outer-space aliens, but it's just dust on fire!

Other cool things that pull me out of deep-blue funks are: Esa Tikkanen, the t.v. show Firefly, Petula Clark, the great Curt Flood
and that black guitar of mine that's never out-of-reach.  You should
know this, in case you stumble across me in one of those moods. 
Consider this my Quizmaster's Medic-Alert e-male bracelet.

the black guitar?  It's identity is a closely guarded secret — unless you make it to the next RebelMart show.

Here's
another statistic so mind blowing it can't help but cheer us all up:
the average person's DNA strand, if stretched out, is long enough to
reach across the diameter of our solar system.

Fantastic!!

There you have it.  Dust particles from
space and DNA strands brightening our world tonight.  All without the
help of Esa Tikkanen, Firefly, Petula Clark and the great Curt Flood.

Or the black guitar.

This greeting is late because I screwed up and didn't put it up yesterday. But hope you'll still stop in at Rocky Sullivan's in Red Hook for the pub quiz tonight. As always Miss Wit, t-shirt queen is sponsoring this post. Greetings, Pub Quiz Walk Five Hundred Milers…

Okay, any mention of a walkathon is gonna elicit a Proclaimers reference.  Or Nancy Sinatra.  Some things are automatic, like crying at the end of Old Yeller or that gag reflex whenever another Mike for Mayor ad comes on the t.v.

It won't be 500 miles, but two-and-a-quarter miles.  It's the fifth annual Develop Don't Destroy Brooklyn Walkathon, colloquially named Walk Don't Destroy 5.

I'm walking in it this year.  You know the drill — Ratner, lousy development project, sixteen skyscrapers, a basketball arena, a Russian oligarch
team owner, billions of taxpayer dollars wasted, no appreciable numbers
of affordable housing or newly-created jobs, overwhelming traffic,
exploitation of Brooklyn Dodger mythology, environmental and
health concerns, blighted wasteland created by Ratner and not time,
lack of democratic process, eminent domain abuse.

Wow..that's the shortest I've ever summed it up.

Stopping
Ratner's boondoggle and replacing it with a project that makes sense
for the surrounding communities.  This is a crucial time — the project
will either proceed after New Year's 2010 or it'll be a goner.

Whether you've followed this from afar or heard me talk about it up close, you know what's at stake.  DDDB's legal bill are hefty.  Along with dozens of other community groups, DDDB has been fighting the Atlantic Yards for six years.  Six years. 

The Walkathon is what DDDB does to keep going.  Walkathons…bake
sales…benefit concerts…the passing of many hats…small checks from
concerned citizens.  DDDB has never had the hundreds of millions of
private and government money available to Forest City Ratner for their endless p.r. assault.   The money raised at this year's Walkathon goes to DDDB's legal fight.

These are tough times.  Too many people and groups have their hands
out.  This is mine, on behalf of DDDB.  If you can help out, either by
sponsoring my walk or heading to DDDB's website and signing up to walk yourself, that would be grand.  You can get more info on the issues there as well.

That's the spiel.  I don't make it lightly.

Also, there's this:  a week from Friday, on October 16th, the legendary 1970s London punk rockers
The Spunk Lads will be playing Freddy's Bar & Backroom.  They're
all living in Brooklyn now, and support DDDB's fight against the
Atlantic Yards.  According to the Lads' lead singer Nick Knickers, "wot if they'd
tried this in Camden?  I'd bloody well fall over effin' basketball fans
and condo buggers and end up with me 'ead in bandages.  Bloody
'orrible, that!"

Sez it all.

The Spunk Lads will be headlining DDDB's Pre-Walkathon Party.  Also on the
bill are the John Sharples Band, comedian Pat O'Shea, Judy Gorman,
Steve Espinola and Neil deMause.  Starts at 8 in the evening.

You never know when it'll be the last chance to see the world's most
exciting band, still at it over thirty years after they single-handedly
— well, eight hands between them — birthed the London punk scene. 
Little is remembered of their early days, but much is enjoyed when they
play shows today — rare as that is.  'Loos are wrecked as well.  Call in the American Standard people…it'll be a busy night in Brooklyn.

Don't miss it.  You've been warned.

Back to our regularly-scheduled Quizmail screed next week.

The Quizman Cometh and this week's greeting is all about football. This Thursday he does the pub quz at at Rocky Sullivan's. And don't miss Scott Turner's solo show at Freddy's on Friday at 9 p.m. Miss Wit, as always, is the sponsor of this post.

Greetings Pub Quiz Tough GalGuys…

Macho aggressiveness rarely
serves a good purpose.  Bad enough when it's on the playground, in a
barroom or the bedroom.  When it's culturally endemic, it's even worse.

But when it's the height of hypocrisy, that's really ludicrous.  As in, what's the point.

Across
this country of ours, there's no more pointlessly macho realm than
sports.  Across the sports landscape, there's no more pointlessly macho
realm than American football.  And apparently, across the manifest
destiny of the nation's collective gridiron, there's no more
pointlessly macho realm than the first couple of weeks of the NFL season?

¿Por que?

It seems that the behemoths of the NFL —
men who often tip the scales at 325, 350, 375 pounds, giant specimens
of testosterone intentionally jiggered to run wild, the
standard-bearers of all that is ferocious, mighty, colossal and
God-bestowed in the mightiest nation on the planet — have a weakness
that makes Achilles' heel seem a tiny scratch by comparison.

Yes, these men who growl, scream, punch teammates' shoulders and
decimate opponents' various bones, muscles and sinewy parts, who taunt
and trash-talk and spit on sportsmanship lest the slightest fissure of
humanity costs them the game, and who insultingly misappropriate war
imagery for their weekly athletic endeavors…

…cannot stand sunlight.

More to the point, many NFL home
teams have started the season wearing white uniforms.  Traditionally,
the home team wears a dark color at home — the Giants, royal blue
jerseys; the Jets, dark green.  And so on.

But apparently all the conditioning, all the weekend-warrior chants, all the macho hegemony of the NFL isn't enough.

Tough Texas's Texans?  White as the driven snow.

The man-eating Bengals, including macho trash-talker supreme Chad Ochocinco? White like Liberace.  Apparently, the extra couple of sunlight degrees is frightening, but not Great-White-in-Rhode-Island open flames.

Panthers so black they can sneak up on you with all of nature's stealth and end your life in a heartbeat?  Pale shades in Florida.

The Ravens?  The Ravens, of Poe's dark mysticism and linebacker Ray Lewis' murder charges?  Even the Ravens
wore white tops.  Apparently, though, black isn't the death-knell it's
made out to be — the Ravens wore black helmets, pants, socks,  shoes
and gloves.  Macho sure is selective when it wants to be.

And in week two, seven days further from summer's sunny death rays, even the New York Jets wore white because the life-giving ball of gas out beyond Mercury was just too scary.

With domed stadiums, Field Turf and
state-of-the-art drainage systems, NFL players rarely end up with dirty
uniforms these days.  The NFL won't even play its championship game,
the Super Bowl, in a cold-weather city.  The league used to bill key games as the Irresistible Force Versus The Immovable Object.  Now it's The Irresista– wait, Coach, it's too hot, can we wear white?

Hey, look.  I don't really care.  If NFL players wanna pound their
chests and scream every time the receiver they're guarding drops the
ball, be my guest.  If they wanna equate running a football with being
stationed for a year in mountains of Afghanistan, go crazy.

But I don't wanna hear they're members of some über-ferocious fraternity, the toughest of the tough, John Wayne cut with Sun Tzu.  Not if they insist on wearing white jerseys on a sunny September afternoon.

Some have argued "what's wrong with gaining an advantage."  Nothing. 
But most of football's advantage-gaining techniques — good scouting,
conditioning regimens, play calling, fast-thinking — aren't based on
tough-guy falsities. 

In other words, if football players weren't so obsessed with macho posturing, this little advantage wouldn't matter a whit

I'm not advocating for some pure versions of machismo.  For starters,
we know what happens when "pure" and "human development" meld.  All I'm
saying is that it's another indicator that men playing sports —
because of their own vanity and  fans' demands that they act a certain
way for our entertainment — are fatuous, flatulent and somewhat full
of it.

Not just football, of course.  Hockey fights…that's another
measure of wild-eyed male fury coddled by unwritten rules preventing
anything that might actually expose the participants to things
wild-eyed or furious.

You'd think that if these angry men on silver blades were that pissed-off
at their co-combatants, they'd kick each other in the nether regions,
shove heads through rink glass, use those blades in ghastly ways.

But they don't…there are parameters, something along the lines of
Gentleman's Rules, that limit the violence of a hockey fight.

"hey, don't go too rough, okay?"  "yeah, sure…"

"Real
men" who call themselves "real men" never are.  The insecurities that
urge them to define themselves as "real" sink them from the get go.

American sports, particularly football, are filled to the brim with
"real men" — on the field, in the stands, parked on sofas across this
great land of ours. 

Here's the skinny:  the Real Man can be found somewhere out there in the mysterious ether of the Legendary Unknowns — Bigfoot, the Loch Ness Monster and a contrite, compassionate Michael Bloomberg.

Scott Turner, whose weekly Greetings From Scott Turner missives are a favorite on OTBKB, is playing a solo show, under the banner of RebelMart, at Freddy's (corner of Dean Street and 6th Avenue) this Friday at 9 p.m.

The music is one-person/one-guitar punk folk reggae
Irish songs about the surety of love and the lack-of-surety about
politics…or maybe it's the other way around.

No RebelMart websites to direct people to.  This one's like the old
days — you get a worthwhile tip that, head down to the club to check
it out, and make the call there.

Here he is again, Scott Turner, graphic designer and pub quizman at Rocky Sullivan's. with his opinion about just about a lot of things, the death of Jim Carroll, today's election and what he thinks about SHoP's design for Ratner's Atlantic Yards project. Scott's weekly post is brought to you by Miss Wit, the t-shirt queen of Red Hook

Greetings Pub Quiz All Rebels Rockers…

A lot to plow through here.  We'll do it with a laser-like surgical precision.

Okay…we won't.  That's never gonna happen here.

Let's start with an end — Jim Carroll, RIP.  The author of the seminal junkie LES tome The Basketball Diaries
was where it was at in the late '70s/early '80s.  Dopey bloggers and
obit desk scribes will try to contort a lead paragraph out of Carroll's
punk-rock hit "People Who Died."  Good luck with that.  Carroll
avoided twisty contortions during a life full of them.  He was
straight-forward, straight-ahead, and crafted a harrowing tale that
sounded like it was your best friend from long ago calling and saying
"hey, I've gotta tell you about all this stuff I've been through." 
Like Michael Patrick MacDonald's All Souls and Easter Rising, The Basketball Diaries
cut through the romantic crap of young lives running off the rails and
told the truth.  Truth being a currency always in short supply…then,
now, always.

Jim Carroll — one of the few poet/punkrawkers that didn't blow

* * * * * * * *

Today, Tuesday the 15th, is Primary Day.  If you're a Dem in NYC, here're our suggestions:
Mayor: Tony Avella
Public Advocate: Norman Siegel
Comptroller: nobody
33rd District City Council, Brooklyn: Ken Diamondstone or Ken Baer
35th District City Council, Brooklyn: Letitia James
36th District City Council, Brooklyn: Mark Winston Griffith
39th District City Council, Brooklyn: Josh Skaller

There're
races all over the city.  These are the ones I know.  Get thee to a
polling place, Dems among you!  And remember, New York City has voting
machines that tabulated the Most Valuable Warrior race in the early days of Valhalla — the Norse afterworld, not the Westchester bedroom
community.  You know what?  They're clunky, metallic and really, really
yesteryear — but they mostly work fine, and they're not made by
Diebold.

These machines remember those halcyon days when "chad" meant an African country.

When
I was a kid, it was fun going in with my mom, pulling the huge lever
once to close the curtain, and again to register the vote.  The big
stop/go lights atop the booth letting everyone know if the booth was
occupied or empty — though the open or closed curtain did the same
trick.  The little tabs that register votes and the enamel-painted Xs
that appear make each vote feel weighty, substantive and, goldurnit,
righteous.  And this coming from a fella who, now a grumpy ol'
curmudgeon, sees but limited possibilities in the current electoral
system in this city (Mayor Richie Rich buying the election) and the country (a two-party is closer to a one-party state than it is to true democracy).

Still, these big ol' clunkers scratching the gym floors in schools
across the city are cool.  If you're a Dem, take one for a test-drive
today.

* * * * * * * *

When you're back home, feeling
fine about participating in our city's democratic process, acquire by
your normal modern-day music-acquisition procedures the new Michael Franti & Spearhead album All Rebel Rockers.

Holy crow, is this thing good.  Franti joins Green Day's Billy Joe Armstrong
in getting a very simple fact — new president, okay, but all the old
battles still need to be waged.  In fact, the battles are getting
tougher with ginned-up tea-bag Becktallions chafing under the loss of
the entitlements they've enjoyed — or been told they were enjoying by
the people who really were — these last three centuries.

All that's fine, but discussing it on a record album is wearying if
you can't dance to it one minute, make-out to it the next.  Franti and
Spearhead have that all covered.  Yes, the hit single "Say Hey, I Love
You" is either (check one) joyous or annoying, depending on your frame
of mind.  But the best, catchiest, infectious hit singles all are.  So
there's that.  Too bad this hot sunshine summer hit was released in
time to gain steam in the autumn leaves.  That's why record companies
are going the way of the dinosaur.

Anyway, treat yourself to a post-election treat — All Rebel Rockers.  It'll be playing in the background at the Rocky Sullivan's Pub Quiz this Thursday evening.

Pump ya fist say yeah get down I love you roots rock all purpose all slogan all soul all day and all night…


* * * * * * * *

Okay.

If someone kept hitting you in the face, you wouldn't just stand there and take it. Right?

Right?!

Okay. Then why is Brooklyn taking it on the chin time and again from Bruce Ratner?

The
latest palooka jabs come via the Atlantic Yards arena's new designs.
Ratner's newest "make me look credible" dupes are the boutique
architecture firm (translation: designing for buildings you and I will
never see the inside of) SHoP. The spelling alone tells you they're way
more edgy and smart than you, dude.

Here's what they came up with:

…complete
with the annoying, self-absorbed architectspeak that spilled out
alongside the drawings. We'll spare you the myriad pretentiousness. A
little dab'll do you with this stuff:

The
building consists of three separate but woven bands. The first engages
the ground where the weathered steel exterior rises and lowers to
create a sense of visual transparency, transitioning into a grand civic
gesture the cantilevers out into a spectacular canopy at the corner of
Atlantic and Flatbush Avenues.

What, nothing about SHoP's designs curing AIDS and getting pigs'a'flyin'? How genuine and low-key.

It gets worse. SHoP's Gregg Pasquarelli talks about his tasteless partnership with Bruce Ratner in a Q&A with the New York Observer.

The
folded arms intersect with the surrounding community in a laticework of
form, function and grand civic integrationary protoformism

Pasquarelli:
"I like Bruce. He’s very intense. He’s very smart, and he’s dealing
with a lot of things at one time, but I know his heart is really in
making a fabulous design."

His heart is in beating back
community opposition, steamrolling residents, gag orders on people he
does business with, filching $726 million in public money for the
Atlantic Yards project, abusing eminent domain, exploiting peoples'
fears about affordable housing and jobs, and distorting Brooklyn's past
and future as a way to do business.

Fabulous designs? Only as a
residual effect…the moldy, collapsed cherry sliding off the top of a
melted sundae no one wants anymore.  Simply fabulous.

Pasquarelli,
on the basic task given SHoP by Ratner: "So where the steel was set—we
didn’t want to start redesigning all the steel, so take the steel where
it is, and just make some really precise small changes and see what you
can do to push the building into the next realm of architecture."

In
other words, this is the same building as the universally-panned
"airplane hangar" offered by Ellerbe Becket a few months ago. Some in
the media (Curbed.com) are taking this as a breathtakingly wonderful new design. It's not. It is, as DDDB's Daniel Goldstein put it, "lipstick on a corrupt pig, window-dressing on a boondoggle.”

Pasquarelli, on signing on to a controversial project: "We gave serious consideration as to whether we wanted to do it."

Yeah,
not so much. If you had, you would've said "no." SHoP is a hot firm in
architectural circles. Whatever the cost of the chaos and hits to
SHoP's reputation (see Gehry,
Frank, Atlantic Yards, face, egg-on), Ratner was able to pay it. Which,
by the way, proves again that Ratner can throw money around when he
wants, then claim poverty when he needs.

SHoP has become part of the problem, checking their community ethics at the bank-vault door.

Pasquarelli,
continuing his rationale for taking the job: "And I think the thing
that convinced us was, after speaking with Bruce, we were convinced he
really wanted to make a great building."

Gawd, you guys
are simps. Or do you just like that cozy feeling of stumbling through
life with blinders on. Ratner is using SHoP the same way he used Frank
Gehry — to gain some credible traction for the Atlantic Yards project.
Ratner's track record is clear and predictable — horrible, crass junk
architecture when there's no opposition, and promises of great civic
landmarkable beauty when hackles are raised. Ratner's been building
big edifices for decades, devoid of humanity and beauty. Only when the
wagons need circling, and mallchitecture won't do, does he pluck a
Gehry, SHoP or Renzo Piano off the shelf, the latter for Ratner's weak collaboration with The New York TImes
that's more notable for the number of people who've climbed the outside
of it than it's contributions to the New York City skyline.

For all of SHoP's tender
musings on community, form and the integration of the two, they've
hitched their trendy little wagon to a corporation, Forest City Ratner,
that if you believe SHoP's p.r., is the polar opposite of everything
they stand for. Publicly, at least.

They say
lawyers make the best liars because it's part of the job. In New York,
the same can be said for architects. At least those working for Bruce
Ratner.

SHoP
reimagines Brooklyn — no traffic, street-side parking on Flatbush, an
apparently thirty-foot tall arena, and in the words of Field of Scheme's Neil deMause, the new miracle of "vaportecture" in the background

Pasquarelli,
completing his self-conscious justification for taking the job: "And
even knowing that the project was going to have its critics no matter
what we designed, we felt like it’s our role as New Yorkers to try to
make it as good as we could."

No, Gregg, your role as New Yorkers is to think of New York, not yourselves, your employer and his shareholders.
New York is hurting right now. The economy blows. Bloomberg, the master
capitalist, has failed at maneuvering the city through the Free Market
Rapids — instead, plowing his energy and the city's finances into
stadiums for the Mets, Yankees and Nets instead of the schools,
low-income housing and infrastructure.  Never mind failed undertakings like the city's Olympic bid and the Jets' West Side Stadium.

You're aiding and
abetting a project that will harm, not hurt, New York City. You like to
use the word "protoform," the architect's edgy way of saying "the
original design." Ratner's Atlantic Yards is a 21st-century protoform
for abusing the people of this city.

You should think about revisiting what your "role as New Yorkers" is.

Pasquarelli,
on the superblock nature of the Atlantic Yards project: "Over a site
that has that much transportation infrastructure, I think it’s the only
ethical, rational, sustainable thing to do to put density, and
sometimes density requires some superblocks."

The only
"ethical" thing to do is build an urban model that has been dismissed
as an outmoded 1960s model of warehousing people in often dehumanizing
conditions? I bet ol' Gregg and his SHoP cohorts dont' live in
particularly "dense" housing tracts.

"That much transportation
infrastructure" shows how little time SHoP's spent in that part of
Brooklyn. The Atlantic/Pacific station is already at peak
capacity, long past a massive rehab project without any plans to accommodate Ratner's sixteen-skyscraper superblock.

And those are the lowlights of the New York Observer interview.
Pasquarelli also went on to criticize "zoning spread" for limiting his
creativity. For a guy this modern, young and edgy, he sure sounds like
Ratner — old, cantankerous, selfish — a steamroller who won't listen
to anyone not squarely in his corner.

Come to think of it, with a world view like that, SHoP and Ratner are made for each other.

* * * * * * * *

Many have made "separated at birth" comparisons to SHoP's new Atlantic Yards arena designs.

Us too:

the George Foreman Grill

a Cylon from Battlestar Galactica

clammy

hip-hop baseball cap style

bike helmet architecture

a Cylon raider from the original Battlestar Galactica show

a baleen whale

…and finally, a correction to SHoPs idealistic, mindless traffic'll-just-zoom-on-by" rendering by Michael D.D. White:

Here's this week's greetings from pub quizmeister at Rocky Sullivans. He is also a graphic designer with a company called Superba Graphics.  He never told me that I just figured it out. So we might as well give credit where credit is due. This missive is brought to you, as always, by Miss Wit, the t-shirt queen of Red Hook. Check out her designs they're really FUN.

Greetings Pub Quiz Head Shakers…

Whoa!  If we'd had a devastatingly hot summer here in Brooklyn,
this past week's quivery convergence of weirdness would make sense.  I
guess it does, since none of this stuff happened in Brooklyn.

• A reality t.v. show dude, one Ryan Jenkins, murders his ex-wife, one Jasmine Fiore. 
  Cuts off her fingers and pulls out Fiore's teeth to make i.d.'ing her
  harder.  Authorities i.d. her anyway…by her breast-implant serial
  numbers.  Jenkins bolts to Canada, is checked into the Thunderbird Motel (you can picture the flickering neon sign) by a mystery woman, and hangs himself with his belt in a closet — very David Carradine.

• The British government, via the Scottish sort-of government, releases the Lockerbie bombing
  mastermind.  Intensifying storm-clouds of controversy say that it was a
  hostage exchange for oil.  Gosh.  What government would do something
  that insane for oil?

• The Nymets baseball squadron continues to find new,
  astonishing ways to snatch defeat from the jaws of victory.  Yesterday,
  they lose on an unassisted triple-play that ends the game — on the
  second time in major-league history that's happened.

• Two companies — one British, the other U.S. of A.-ish — are in a jurisprudential battle to the death over who has the exclusive rights to manufacture and sell Michael Jackson hairpieces.  The British company got its start with those white wigs so popular in the UK court system and in movies about the Declaration of Independence.

• Mayor for Life Bloomberg, on his weekly radio show,
  pshaws criticism of the pharmaceutical industry by saying "Last time I
  checked, pharmaceutical companies don't make a lot of
  money. Their executives don't make
  a lot of money."  Bloomberg backpedals almost immediately, saying, in
  effect well, I dagnabbit, I guess they do!  Bloomie's disconnect from everyone less wealthy than he jumps to the fore once again.

• India’s
  rupee hits a one-week
  high as a worldwide rally in stocks and commodities adds to
  optimism a global economic recovery is gathering pace, according to
  this morning's media reports.  There's nothing undulatingly odd about
  this — I just know none of us have paid close enough attention to the
  rupee lately.

• Mikka Shardai Cline, 23, of Waco, TX, and her sister try to take a soccer
  ball from a 13-year-old boy in a wheelchair outside of a Dallas hospital.
  In the
  struggle to get the ball, she punches the boy in the head.  No — it
  gets worse.  the boy has a medical halo screwed into his skull. 
  According to police, that's exactly where Cline's punch lands on the
  boy, causing searing pain. Cline has been charged with child abuse.

• The best selling football jersey at NFL.com is…of course…Michael Vick's new Philadelphia Eagles jersey.

• And finally, from the AFP news service: "A Saudi businessman has purchased what is being described by the
  Canadian seller as the world's most expensive adult novelty item — a
  solid 18-carat gold penis enlarger worth nearly 50,000 dollars. X4
  Labs, a Canadian manufacturer of medical devices, received the
  unorthodox request and recruited a Montreal custom
  jeweler to help with
  its design and construction. "This male health accessory is the
  most expensive traction device ever produced and will likely become a
  historical benchmark for the adult novelty industry," the company said
  in a statement.   His glitzy new penis enlarger, however, is being
  encrusted at his request with 40 diamonds and several rubies and is to
  be delivered by armored car in October, said Rick Oh,
  X4 Labs co-owner.  Saudi law bans the import of adult sex toys, but the
  company insists its product is a US government-certified medical device.

[not an accurate depiction — ed.]

So there — nothing gripping, nothing mind-blowing…just the rich
pageant of eccentricity and the little bonmots it's dropped in our lap
over the last week.  Quiz-fodder?  Sure!  The fuel the March of Time runs on?  Absolutely.

Once again Scott Turner brings us his weekly missive brought to you by Miss Wit, the t-shirt queen of Red Hook. This one has some contains some very disturbing photos of dogs brutalized during dog fights. Scott runs the pub quiz at Rocky Sullivan's every Thursday night.

Greetings Pub Quiz Hans Christian Ørsted fans…

There's a lot going on this week.

• The
  White House is completely punking out — and I mean wussy to the Nth
  degree — on this health care reform thing.  Message sent — if you
  lie, cheat, disrupt, squelch discourse, exaggerate, exploit fears and
  those most at risk, you can stop the Obama administration dead in its
  tracks.  What is it about reforming this country's torn-and-tattered
  health-care system that turns Democrats to jelly?  I mean, even more so
  than their normal gelatinous state?
• This was Google's doodle last week.  It honors Hans Christian
  Ørsted, a scientist whose experiments with wires, nails, clocks and
  conductors proved…um…something about electrified, uh, thingies
  doing…er… something scientific.  Was I the only one that took a
  look at this, gulped, and thought Hans Christian Ørsted was the Father
  of the Improvised Explosive Device?

Yikes.  That's all, just…yikes.

• In a stunning
  development, hot weather has finally arrived in time for the end of
  summer.  It's a stretch of 90-degree days, the fans are on,
  air-conditioners are dripping on pedestrians, and the local newscasts
  have a lead story.  We took our goddaughter, Nina Rose, to Coney Island on Sunday, where she tilt-a-whirled and spinning-dragoned in Deno's
  Wonder Wheel Park and won a little yellow dog at the
  shoot-water-in-a-clown's-mouth-and-pop-the-balloon game.
• Best Coney moment for me that didn't have to do with Nina Rose
  having a blast at Coney Island?  At the balloon-popper game, Nina's mom
  Fran puts down two-bucks twice, taking the barker's "only need two
  players to win!" at face value.  I'm thinking this guy's not doing much
  business, I'll play too.  I pull out my wallet, the barker looks at me
  and says "no, man, save your money.  Your girl's gonna get her
  doggie."  Other best moment: From atop the Wonder Wheel, the beach was pretty full —
  endless colors of beach umbrellas.  It wasn't the classic crowds of
  yesteryear, but pretty close.

And now let us move on to this one other thing, this one head-spinner soul-twisting heart-rending thing…

Michael Vick getting to play football again.

Now, I have my ideas, as do all of you.  But who better to talk to you about this desperate issue than…a dog?

Two dogs, actually.  The dogs I live with, Sirius Madra Dubh and Daisy Tikkanen. 
They've asked if you could pen this week's Quizmail.  Not from inside a
pen.  They just wanna pen it, as peoples say.  So sure, S&T, go for
it.  Don't forget to use the spell check, and don't give me the "ohhhh,
where'd our opposable thumbs go?!" I'm not falling for that any more.

Sirius and Tikkanen, your Canine Opiniers

Hi.  We're Sirius and Tikkanen, and we're dogs.

This Michael Vick thing blows.

No one asked the Dog Community what we think about Vick getting to play football again.  They should've.  It's kinda personal for us.

Our
deal is that we look for the best in people.  By people, we mean
"human" people.  Often, we find those best things we're looking for. 
Sometimes, not so much.

Vick is one of those sad cases where the worst we fear in humans actually comes true.

Look…there's
gonna
be some obvious stuff here.  A) You've already heard a lot about
Michael Vick, and B) we're dogs — obvious is our forte.  But hearing a
lot of peoples' opinions since the news broke about Vick signing with
the Philadelphia Eagles, it's kinda shocking how little of the points against Vick are obvious.

And what kind of name is that?  Eagles?!  it should be the Philadelphia Beagles, right?  Right.

The Eagles, the NFL, the Humane Society, Reebok, ESPN
and God (represented by Vick's "mentor" Tony Dungy) all got together
and decided to endorse brutality, torture and murder of dogs.

We didn't know any of these dogs — like most of you don't actually know anyone who died on 9/11.  But it affected you big time, right?  Some of NYC's older dogs still remember how upset their peoples were that day.

How do you think we feel every time we hear about a dog-fighting
ring.  Vick's was big news, 'cause usually, dog-fighting isn't news at
all.  Or at least never makes the news.

It's
important to remember — Vick's shocking treatment of dogs wasn't a
sudden crime of passion, a
quick-acting moment of insanity that changed lives forever.  Like
drinking out of a toilet or eating a nice pair of shoes.  This went
on for years.  Vick and others started the operation in 2001 — before
either of us were even puppies — and the
infamous Bad Newz Kennels opened a year later.  Vick had been
brutalizing dogs for five years — five years — before he was caught.

We can't understand why Michael Vick thought this was fun…

When he got caught, Vick did what bullies who're used to getting
away with murder do.  He lied.  To authorities, the media, the NFL, and
the Falcons, who'd signed him to a $130 million deal.  Rather than
accept responsibility, he blamed family members for the horror facility
on his Surrey County, Virginia property.

Lying — something else we dogs don't understand.

Vick was a very good player, we're told.  It got him all the things
he could have ever dreamed about.  Y'know, dreams are funny —
sometimes we're asleep and our legs just start moving, 'cause in a
dream we're chasing a rabbit but the rabbit's purple and riding a
bicycle and singing Patti Page and there's a biscuit — there's always a biscuit, and — wait, never mind, you didn't hear that from us, okay?

Why do people have to be so tough and bullying?  That stuff doesn't
impress us, except when it scares us.  Just spend time with us, feed
us, give us fresh water, play with us, and let us share in a pack
together.

To this day, Vick still
maintains he doesn't know why he did it.  Which means one of three
things — Vick's kinda stupid, dishonest or well-coached.  Dogs can't fathom any of this.  Honestly and love…that, we get.

On 60 Minutes last week, Vick said he cried when he went to
prison.  What about, he was asked.   "What I did, you know, being away
from my family, letting so many
people down. I let myself down, not being out on the football field,
being in a prison bed, in a prison bunk, writing letters home, you
know."

Leslie Stahl, Morley Safer, Bob Simon?  Naw, let's go off-campus and get a Fox Sports guy to interview Vick

Not so much crying over the dogs, then.  That's really sad.

His
well-coached
press conference was like a silent dog whistle — pitch perfect for all
the people Vick needs on his side.  The football establishment.  The
vast majority of Americans who
like us dogs well enough but don't value our lives as much as
they value humans'.  A media unwilling to challenge Vick since he was
reading from the
right script and acting all contrite.  Pitch-perfect contrition, as our
Scott M.X. said yesterday.  Even
the Humane Society, who somehow thinks their new spokesperson Vick is
on their side for any reason other than his football career.

like a deer caught in the headlights.  At least the headlights are quicker…

HSUSA's
Wayne Pacelle says "If we just punish Mike indefinitely and don't pivot
to this problem in the communities, where kids are victimizing these
dogs…we will not be doing our job."

We dogs get confused a lot.  Sometimes people sound like they're
saying "blah blah blah Tikkanen blah blah blah blah blah Sirius blah
Tikkanen."  But we're good at context.  That helps us figure stuff
out.  There's some very bad context here, and what we've figured out
about Wayne Pacelle is that he's, what's the really bad word for that
awful way peoples sometimes think about other peoples?  Right, racist. 
Otherwise, what does Pacelle mean when he says "communities"?  Which
"communities" are we talking about,
Wayne?  Black communities?  Poor communities?  All communities?  Dog
communities?  Is this somehow our fault?  Is this one of those "code"
words humans use when they're too embarrassed to say what they really
mean?  Second, it's not just kids — the awful thing is that adults run
dog-fighting rings.  It's not some youthful indiscretion where taking
away allowances can set things straight.  (Of course, the NFL is giving
Vick back his allowance, so maybe Purcelle and the NFL are working off
the same playbook.)

what if it were this cheery, happy pooch, Wayne?

And third, how, exactly, does having Michael Vick on Team Humane
"pivot this back" to where the problem exists?  Are hardened, callous
dog-fighting operators gonna listen to Michael Vick and give up the
terrible, mean things they're doing?  There's so much you humans do and
think about that contributes to animal cruelty.  It seems like Vick
doesn't have much to say that humans who make us fight will listen to.

Ruh-roh…even Vick won't chase that ball.  Even Vick says it's not okay to blame it on "community."

No, the sad thing here is that Michael Vick needs the Humane
Society far more than the Humane Society needs Michael Vick.

Oh, and Wayne?  Thanks, but we're gonna find another group to fight for us. PETA, maybe, or the SPCA or hundreds of others.  They're not as confused as you.

By the way, the NFL
prevented animal rights organizations and individuals from attending
Vick's press conference at the Eagles practice facility.  So much for
reaching out. 

Helen Kennedy, in yesterday's Daily News, describes
Vick's
back-to-football strategy as "treading the well-worn path to career
revival."  She's right!.  As long as there's an NFL paycheck waiting
only for Vick to act nice, Vick will go where his handlers tell him. 
He'll gently pretend to whip himself and keep repeating children, I did a terrible thing, a terrible thing. 
Michael
Vick forced dogs to fight each other — and made the calls over who
lived and who died — it for too long.  Five years of electrocuting,
drowning, hanging, shooting dogs at the end of short, sad, painful
lives
being forced to fight, starved, put into breeding machines called rape
racks, and chained outside weather good and bad.

a veteran of the dog-fighting arena

Oh…and
Vick found God.  Not Dog…but
God.  It's not quite a pawlindromes and– what?  It's "palindrome," not
"pawlindrome?"  Wow, learn something new every day.  Like yesterday. 
We learned that grapefruit taste terrible.  Who knew?

Going all God is the biggest biscuit of the well-worn path to career
revival.  But would that be the All Things Great And Small/All
Things Bright and Beautiful God, or the "lemme throw Pol Pot and Hurricane Katrina at humanity to see how they handle it" God?  Or some other God
custom molded for Michael Vick's Days of Resurgence?

This week, Vick's supporters have been saying "he's done
his time, paid his debt to society, has the right to earn a living, and
deserves a second chance."

Well…that
sounds like people who keep saying "bad dog, bad dog, bad dog" over and
over 'til it loses all meaning and we just ignore it.  'Cause, if you
don't give us a good reason to stop eating yummy stuff off the
sidewalk, we will.  You guys keep smoking and driving drunk.  For
humans and dogs, its hard to stop the dopey stuff.

Let's paw away at these one by one…

He's Done His Time: 
Well, yeah, because Vick was allowed to cop a newspaper-on-the-nose
plea
for the so-many terrible things he did.   I know you call it The Big
House, not The Dog House.  But just  eighteen months?  What kind of
message is that, for peoples or dogs?  The sanctity of life we all
claim to
hold so dear only matters if it's humans.   Society is always
reflected by the penalties we inflict on wrong-doers.  When people used
to wantonly torture and execute, it proved what terrible creatures
you could be.  Now that money means more than protecting animals, that
proves how peoples still have a lot to learn.  And a long way to go. 
Hey…we'll walk with you, if that'll help.  We will.

There's no such thing as a bad dog.  Not sure the same rule applies to peoples, as much as we love you.

He's Paid His Debt To Society.  Again, not too terribly a
big debt.   "But
he lost all that money."  Well, truth be told, he should have.  Money
means nothing to us, but since peoples love it so much, maybe this'll
teach Vick a lesson.  You know, none of those hundreds of millions of
dollars are part of the "debt being paid to society."  It's simply
money the Atlanta
Falcons' owners doesn't have to shell out to Michael Vick.  There will
be ghosts haunting Michael Vick.  We'll see if its the ghosts of the
dogs he hurt or the very big moneybags he's lost.

Here's
a secret.  Dogs all have ghosts.  We're too kind to haunt Michael
Vick.  Haunting — not our thing, even for Vick.  We just hang around,
usually to make sure the people we lived with and who treated us nicely
are okay.

He Has The Right To Earn A Living.  No, he doesn't, actually.  He
has the right to try.  In fact, there are millions of convicted,
released, and rehabilitated felons in this country who don't have the
right to certain jobs, and those they do, have a hard time getting
hired for.  Probably not to many peoples would care about this particular felon if he weren't Michael Vick.

A right the Founding Fathers forgot to include…

Everyone Deserves A Second Chance:  This is the worst.  Not
because we disagree.  It's nice when peoples give dogs a second chance,
especially with adoptions from shelters.  The difference, of course, is
that dogs didn't do anything except be born.  There's nothing bad about
putting paw after paw on this earth.  Now, Michael Vick…he did some
very bad things.

This is the worst because it's such an easy, un-thinking, callous
and lazy thing that  Vick supporters have been tossing around, like
scraps off the table that even we won't scarf up off the floor.  Here
are four reasons why this is bad, this "second-chance" stuff…

1)
Some peoples do such bad things, they just don't deserve a second
chance.  At the very least, they don't deserve to be an sports
superstar again.  If by second chance, you mean Vick
should try and earn an honest living in a box factory or as a hospital
orderly, sure.  Maybe spend the rest of his life working in an animal
rescue shelter.  That'd be okay.

2) The countless dogs who died in the Bad Newz Kennels didn't get a
second chance.  In fact, never mind Vick's dog-fighting operation —
look at all the pooches and kitties and the other creatures that go
into shelters and never come out alive, just because no humans stepped
up and said "here, share our home with us, will you?"  (Of course we will!!)  It'd be nice if all living things got the same number of second chances, right?

3)
Vick's "second chance" defense has been given a decidedly Christian
religious tone by Vick's born-again rhetoric, his mentor Tony Dungy's
heavy Christianity, and football's serious depencency on pre-, mid- and post-game prayer.

4) Those peoples against Vick getting second chances in football or riches are being painted as
horrible peoples who don't endorse the charity of second chances.  Supporting a dog killer, you're being kind.  Speaking about
against him?  You're being cruel and inhumane.  Wow, guess Vick's supporters should know.  Grrrrrrrrr.

The NFL has had a run of athletes killing,
maiming, shooting and destroying lives.  Ultimately, they always get a
second chance.  Some say it proves the NFL's
compassion.  What it does is protect the NFL.  Ultimately, that's what
matters here.  Michael Vick's dog-fighting reflected badly on the NFL. 
If the appearance of a Vick rehabilitation can stick, it makes the NFL look good.  They could
care less about the victims of all of those NFL players' who've hurt people off the field —
a woman killed by a drunk NFLer, a club employee paralyzed by a macho
NFLer, club patrons nearly shot by a gun-toting NFLer.

Whatever NFL commissioner Roger Goodell says, by welcoming Vick
back, the league has made it easier, not harder, for dog-fighting rings
to continue in this country.  It wasn't such a bad thing, Goodell has declared about Vick's treatment of dogs.  We're okay with a guy like that playing in our league.

"Hey, all you dog-lovers…CAN IT!"  NFL Commissioner Roger Goodell

The
money machine that is the NFL, ESPN, the media and the football jersey
companies has been too powerful for dogs and peoples who have our backs to go up against.

It's bad seeing all the comments from "dog owners" and "dog lovers" who
think Vick's return to the gridiron is okay.  It makes our bellies hurt.  Would
they feel that way if Vick had done it to their dog?  Dog-fighting rings often do it to somebody's dog, stolen from yards or houses.

It'd be a lot healthier and honest if all parties concerned said,
simply, "we can make a lot of money if Michael Vick comes back to the
NFL.  Shut up and take it.  It's America, and we rehabilitate
scoundrels not because it's good for people but because it's good for
business."

It's
unsettling when humans get mad at each other and talk that way.  It's
scarier even than thunder.  But at least everyone would be clear.

The NFL, showing its concern for animals

But hey, a script's a script, and they're using an old one for Michael
Vick.  Scripts are never real.  They exist only to serve a purpose.

That purpose?  The telling of a story that benefits whoever paid for the script.

How do you think the script would read if Michael Vick wrote it himself.

How would it read if dogs could write?

Wait…we can!  Give us some time — we'll come up with a script that helps everybody.

'Cause that's what dogs do — help everybody.  Cats think we're simps for still loving humans.  Maybe.  But we do.

love and paws in our time,

Sirius & Tikkanen

Scott Turner's greeting arrived late this week. But don't be late for his pub quiz tonight at Rocky Sullivan's. Late or not, we are always happy to hear the news from Red Hook's quiz master. This missive is brought to you by the Red Hook tee shirt woman, Miss Wit.

Greetings, Pub Quiz Riegelmann Walkers…

It's summertime.  Not that you needed the notification.  The Summer of '09
continues to be weird.  June, a washout.  July, wanting to be summery
but not able to commit — like your paramour not being able to say
those three magic words.  And now, August — hot, sticky, hazy…but
not quite getting there.  Not quite the summer of legends, of Do The Right Thing's
hottest day of the year's descent into madness
with a cause, of pavement-melting, tempers-flaring,
humidity-complaining everpresent sweating lore.

By the way — in fact, two By The Ways:

1) Spike Lee's Mookie wears a Jackie Robinson jersey in Do The Right Thing. 
Cool.  Except it's really a modern day Los Angeles Dodgers jersey with
Robinson's name and number.  Robinson wore flannel, not doubleknit, and
he never played in a jersey with his name on the back.  Spike Lee knows
that.  Point made, if excessively and lacking nuance.

2) In searching for Do The Right Thing images, one of the
searches was "Do The Right Thing riot."  On page 4, about that point
when Google searches start to seriously break down, I got this image
for "Do The Right Thing riot":

The brutal images of Brooklyn's racial, class and national tensions — aw, he's adorable!

Still, I did catch one whiff of summer today.  No, not garbage piling up
near Green-Wood Cemetery or any of the city's other summersmeller
bummers.  No, this was a good'un.

Creosote.

It's the best
summer smell ever.  Better than sea salt, Coppertone, cotton candy,
spilled beer at the ballpark, strawberries and charcoal briquettes.

Okay, another By The Way: briquettes are commonly thought to be a
tag-team invention of Henry Ford and Thomas Edison, and they ended up
with a patent.  Seems the real inventor was Reading, PA's very own
Ellsworth B.A. Zwoyer.  But Ford and Edison get the credit.  It's
always like that.  For example, I invented the word "yo."  But do I get
credit for it.  Nope.

Creosote.  It's the black paste used to treat and waterproof
railroad ties and, more germane to the issue at hand, boardwalks.  A seashore amusement park with a the
triple-threat of boardwalks, kiddie train rides and old wooden roller
coast — that's Creosote Heaven.

Finding pix of creosote being applied to, well, anything…harder than you'd think.  Provided you would ever have thought about it.

It used to be everywhere.  As the temperatures skyrocketed each
year, it seemed that new coats of creosote were slathered on everything
from Your House to The Beach.  Not just boardwalks, roller coasters and
railroad ties, but telephone poles, highway barriers, bridge
stanchions, signposts.  A sunny day with a slight breeze meant creosote
everywhere.

Creosote everywhere.  By the way…I'm not as old as these photos.

Creosote's
no longer a harbinger or comforting reminder of summer.  One reason is
that, with the march of Time and it's sometime's misguided partner,
Progress, coating wood products in a coal-tar gook is a bit looked down
on.

Mr. Creosote…giving cancer-causing agents a bad rep since 1983.

There's really not much more to say about creosote.  Well, one
thing.  Many years ago, I wrote record reviews and opinion pieces (i.e.
"rants," just like this one) for a local fanzine.  I did it under the
name Creosote Connolly.  The editor, a young skatepunk, had no idea what creosote was.  Rather he made the determination that I'd mistyped my own nomme-de-colère.  The issue arrives, smelling of the print shop it'd just come from, with my pieces credited to…wait for it…Cresoto Connolly.

How he'd figured I'd meant to have a first name "Cresoto" is beyond me.  Big Bend National Park in Texas has a small area called Cresoto Flat.  That, and a mischristened fanzine writer named Cresoto Connolly, are the only traces of cresotosity on Planet Earth.

Unless there are others.

But I don't think so.

Oh, and By the Way, one more thing:

You can no longer take the IKEA ferry to Pub Quiz — or to Rocky's, or to Red Hook
— for free.  One of IKEA's many promises — exchanged like chits for
Red Hook's blessing for IKEA's rather large blue-and-yellow retail
operation with its Red Rockers' "China" video flags flying out front — was free transportation.

More specifically, let us build, and you can ride our busses and
ferry for free, as much as you want, whenver you want.  It's a courtesy.

Promises
from big businesses have a decidedly evaporative effect.  IKEA is now
charging $5 each way if you're not a shopper.  "“We cannot continue [as
a] commuter service for those who are not Ikea customers,” said manager
Mike Baker in The Brooklyn Paper.

Except for the part where you promised Red Hook you would.

No matter how far you get from the shore, broken promises can still be seen

It's not New York Water Taxi's fault.  They're just doing what IKEA's paying them to do.

This also isn't about Quizzers losing
the free ride.  It's about a promise IKEA made to every resident of Red
Hook, one with a simple premise.  You let us in, we'll repay your
kindness.

Payment of kindness hereby withdrawn.

Times are tough.  No lie.  But it's precisely now, when times are
tough, that you stick with a promise.  Especially one built on trust. 
Hopefully, IKEA will reconsider.  The Red Hook location is rumored to
be one of IKEA's top-performing stores in North America.  Forgetting ethics, you'd think the cash registers' constant clanging would be enough to keep a promise.

Put it this way.  The ligonberries are tasting a kinda bitter these days.

And no amount of creosote can cover IKEA's odiferous change of heart.

Once again a missive from Scott Turner, who runs the pub quiz at Rocky Sullivan's, graces this blog. As always, these greetings are brought to you by the Red Hook t-shirt queen, Miss Wit.

Greetings, Pub Quiz Appalachian Trail and Argentinian Explorers…

There
are a lot of comets flying through our sky.  They don't trail tails
made of ice particles and dust, but rather tales made of vibrant
emotions and dark matter.

Hence, this week's Pageant of Short-Shrifted Wonderments…

Frank McCourt died this week.  He was a great writer and a better teacher, and he gave life and dignity to a lot of peoples' least favorite Irish city, Limerick.  (Frank did nothing, though, to stop the preponderance of "there once was a sailor from Nantucket" giggles.  And that includes last week's Rocky Sullivan's Pub Quiz — see below.)  Gave a lot of life to that other Irish city, New York.  His three books — Angela's Ashes, 'Tis and Teacher Man — was a triptych that didn't just talk to us, it talked with
us.  Frank McCourt was a man who inspired kids one on one, enthralled
pub patrons circled around him, and reached readers in 30 languages.

Frank McCourt, who outlived a lot of people before writing Angela's Ashes

Mayor Bloomberg whined this week.  The most recent tantrum from His Holiness is a broken promise from Albany lawmakers
that they'd vote for his city schools/mayoral control law before
breaking for the summer.  They didn't — because of the mayor's
wealthy. entitled bullying, because under Bloomberg city school
teachers have been coerced into teach-to-test formulas rather than
actually teaching, and because Albany is a dysfunctional hornets nest
of idiots.  Not all of them, but a lot –including the ones actually
holding sway up there.

The whining reached a fever pitch when Bloomberg stamped his feet and yelled at Governor Paterson
to use state troopers to bring everyone back to Albany.  To effect
democracy?  To serve the people?  To vote on a wide-ranging collection
of bills and laws?  No, no and no.  Just to vote on Bloomberg's mayoral
control bill. 

The mayor produced a letter signed by top Dems saying they'd
have a vote.  You know what, Mike?  You're the king of broken
promises.  Ask parents, union workers, poor people, parks advocates,
hospitals, small-business owners — all the people you vowed to side
with and instead have left in the lurch these last seven years.

Hey, minions, remind me again — who's this chick?!

Certainly everyone fighting overdevlopment in this city — Atlantic Yards, the West Side Stadium, new Yankee Stadium, new Shea Stadium, Greenpoint/Williamsburg rezoning, Coney Island, Columbia expansion, 4th Avenue Brooklyn upzoning, Willets Point and a thousand other points of darkness.  We have an East River's worth of broken promises from you.

You have a letter with a broken promise?  Boo frakkin' hoo.

The North of Ireland blew its lid this week.  Well, in the Ardoyne neighborhood of Belfast, anyway.  The still contentious issue of Orange parades wreaked havoc. In Ardoyne and dozens of other places, the Orange Order and its offshoots march through nationalist Irish
neighborhoods.  When this happens, there's no way around the
triumphalism and taunting the marches inflict of local residents.  The
six northern counties still have sectarian issues, no-go zones, "peace
walls" that divide communities, mistrust and a political vacuum that
the British government refuses to address.  Downing Street's
intransigence in Ireland makes the gang in Albany look like the
pinnacle of responsibility, progressiveness and accomplishment.

The Ardoyne anger, and one of the reasons they're angry.  It goes beyond bullyboy bands.

Walter Cronkite
also died this week.  He was great.  Cronkite came from a time before
focus groups, marketing consultants and newscasters who spent more time
on their hair than the story.  He spoke out against Vietnam when it was hard to.  He showed emotion when handed the flash bulletin of JFK's death, and giddiness when the Eagle landed on the moon.

Cronkite was "America's Most Trusted Man."  (Apparently, trustworthy women weren't even on the radar for the polling company back then.)  Diane and
I talked about this last night.  We challenged each other to come up
with someone today we thought qualified for this colossal honorific. 
We couldn't.  Not a one.

Uncle Walter lookin' mightee trustworthy, announcing a president's death, on the radio

Henry Louis Gates got arrested this week.  Gates is the director of the W. E. B. Du Bois Institute for African and African American Research at Harvard University.  He'd just returned from China.  He and his driver were trying to force open the jammed front door.  Big, nice yellow wooden house in Cambridge.  A neighbor — Gates' neighbor
— saw two Black men trying to break into the house.  Cops are called,
arrive, and arrest Gates even after he'd proved he lives there.  Cops'
reason for the arrest?  Uppityness, apparently. 

The charges have since been dropped.  The cops?  Maybe they were
doing their job, and maybe they weren't.  The neighbors?  Not exactly Welcome Waggon mettle.  The Cambridge police and Henry Louis Gates' neighbors didn't get the memo about the glories of post-Obama America because no such memo exists, and there's no one to send it just yet.

the more things change…

Finally, there's a meeting in Brooklyn tonight.  It's about Bruce Ratner's Atlantic Yards
project.  Yes, that thing, which still lurks and still needs to be put
down.  Ostensibly it's an informational meeting for the community.  Come see Bruce's latest designs!  Come learn why this time — no, really, THIS time it's gonna be great for Brooklyn!  Ratner's people will be there, as will officials from government agencies aiding and abetting Ratner.

Of course, the community won't be allowed to actually speak
with these people — all questions must be submitted in writing before
the meeting starts.  Pretty neighborly, huh?  It's like Ratner lives
next door to Henry Louis Gates.  Look — if Atlantic Yards isn't
stopped, if something better isn't built there, then Ratner's gonna be
every one of our neighbors.

Join Brooklyn Community Boards 2, 6 & 8 at an Informational Meeting to hear
an updated presentation on proposed modifications to the Atlantic Yards Development
General Project Plan. At this meeting proposed modifications to the plan will
be presented by representatives for the New York State Empire Development Corporation
and Forest City Ratner Companies. Following the presentation there will be an
opportunity for questions (to be submitted in writing) and answers.

If you wanna ask questions, I suggest you do it with actual human talking.  Works better than index cards.

All of these comets colliding.  It's been that kind of week.  Maybe next week I'll take John Yearley's advice and submit for your approval all the things I like about today's baseball.  John thinks I can't do it.  I think I can.

It's only one comet, and its tail will be bright and effervescent.

Once again we have the pleasure of one of Scott Turner's missives.
Ostensibly an opportunity to promote his Thursday night pub quiz at Rocky Sullivan's in Red Hook, Turner always manages to communicate so much more. As always, Greetings from Scott Turner is brought to you by Miss Wit, Red Hook's t-shirt queen.

It's very early Wednesday morning, and once again the American League has defeated the National League in baseball's All-Star Game.  Its alternate moniker, charmingly filched from Shakespeare, used to be The Midsummer Night's Classic — back when it actually was.

Since the '70s, though, baseball's mismanagement of most things
baseball has reduced the game to a desperate, shrill, uninspired mess
of mismatched uniforms (cool) and misconstrued priorities (exceedingly
uncool).

The All-Star Game was born in Chicago, in 1933. When
baseball had two truly separate leagues, the All-Star Game was a fierce
affair — league pride actually a) existed and b) fueled the energy of
the yearly contest.  Players played to win.  But under current
commissioner and former Milwaukee used-car salesman Bud Selig,
the All-Star Game has lost its way.  So bad had it become that Selig
was forced to halt the game with the score tied a few years ago. 

Selig's solution for the recent All-Star morass was to award
home-field advantage to the league whose team won the game.  The
American League's no-longer-just-recent dominance means that AL teams
always have an edge in the World Series.  The last time they lost the
All-Star Game was in 1996, halfway through the Clinton administration. 
In a recent poll, fans let Selig know it's a dopey idea.  Bud Selig has
never met a contrivance he's confused for innovation, fans' powerless
tolerance for genuine excitement.

Last night's game, though, went much further into the frenetic
pursuit of relevancy..  Baseball's in a tough spot — steroid scandals,
new stadiums with empty expensive seats beamed everywhere on
television, and continued competition from thousands of other pastimes
besides the National one.

What does baseball do?  They hype a campaign linking baseball with community service called "This Is Beyond Baseball." 
By urging fans to go "beyond baseball" and do good deeds, they're
insisting that baseball is the pass-Go/Collect $200 starting point of
all good deeds.

According to MLB.com, "it began with the thunderous hooves of the famous Budweiser Clydesdales
roaring around the full perimeter warning track starting at the
right-field foul pole. Then came the introduction of the All-Stars
Among Us, the individuals who drew more than 750,000 votes by fans as
those most deserving of representing their local MLB clubs due to a
singular act of public service and generosity."

Drink to the Heroes!

In other words, a blatant Budweiser plug in a stadium named for the Anheiser-Busch
company featuring people representing not themselves, their campaigns
or communities, but the baseball teams they live closest too.  Driving
home the point, they took the field not in their own clothing or shirts
and jackets of the organizations their hard work has created — but
officially-licensed team jerseys.

A video showing the five living U.S. presidents and a few plucky Americans doing things like driving cancer kids to far away chemo sessions said it loud and clear: charity, kindness and community are uniquely American. 

"As a sport," President Obama opines in the pre-game video, "baseball has always embodied
the values that make America great. … Together, let's strive to make
America a model for other nations. And in the meantime, enjoy the game."

Model American tosses one in the dirt…

Jingoism
has a new face — we no longer police the world.  Now, we moralize it. 
Well, we did that before, in grand geopolitical broadsides.  Now,
though, even random acts of kindness have been franchised by the
stars-and-stripes.

What did baseball itself think of its hugfest?  "Over the top. Unbelievable," said Tim Brosnan, Major League Baseball's
executive vice president of business. "It was overwhelming. You saw
history.

"No major sport has ever taken its biggest marketing platform and
dedicated it to the 30 people in local communities. This is the first
major sport to do it, and we did it with the cooperation of the
president of the United States."

If a little humility goes a long way, we probably pull up short of the goal on an absolutely zero dollop.

During last night's interminable pre-game ceremonies, baseball might as well have channelled Sally Field and screamed "you like me, you really like me!!"

Which
are community heroes, and which are simply baseball heroes.  If the
lines are blurred, baseball has you right where it wants you.

Look…it's
great that there are so many people in this country putting others
before themselves.  They knit caps for cancer patients…raise money
for cerebral palsy research…customize care packages for soldiers far
away.  That's great, wonderful.

What's not so wonderful is Major League Baseball exploiting
these good people to sell its product.  It's not enough to simply honor
them.  They have to constantly, insistently, crassly tie them to
synergistic orgies of beer sponsors, weekly magazines, military
flyovers, and the money-printing merchandise of each and every MLB team.

In
fact, how much easier would these 30 peoples lives be if their cities
hadn't collectively squandered tens of billions of dollars on the
teams' stadiums over the years.  Or if people had money to donate
instead of spending hundreds of dollars each time their family makes it
to a major-league game?

Baseball teams — and certainly other sports' clubs (see Ratner, Nets, p.r. expenditures, Brooklyn)
have learned to spend a little to rip-off a lot.  In this case, an
on-line contest, thirty baseball jerseys, some local donations and
contributions — that's all it takes to open the public coffers
whenever Bud Selig's people need a helping hand.

It's The New Midsummer Night's Classic, custom-designed and logo-adorned for the age we live in.

Here's this week's missive from Scott Turner, who runs the Thursday night Pub Quiz at Rocky Sullivan's. Sorry he wasn't on the blog last week. For some reason, Yahoo wouldn't let his email through. We're glad he's back And thanks to our sponsor, Miss Wit,  the Red Hook t-shirt queen.

Greetings Pub Quiz Dance Floor Denizens…

Before getting into the week's business, here's this, from the Rocky Sullivan's staff:

We will be holding a benefit this Friday July 10th  at 7pm at Rocky's. 
Heather and Ariel our neighbors across the street tragically lost their
first born son Gabriel Neshamah last week after being delivered on his
due date but sadly not taking a breath.  We are holding a benefit to
raise money for baby Gabriel's burial.  We will be asking a suggested
$25 donation.  People who cannot make Friday can always leave a
donation in an envelope with the bar staff marked Gabriel.

Thanks in advance for your support.

Rocky's
neighbors and patrons are the reason we're still there.  If you can
bring something extra this Thursday for Gabriel's journey, that'd be
great.

* * * * * * * *

A few weeks ago I reconnected with my best friend from 1972.  Most people have best friends that last lifetimes.  I have Whit and Diane and the Skyline Five.  I'm lucky, and no, you can't force me to choose a single Best Friend.

In 1972, entering 7th Grade at Eastview Junior High in White Plains, I quickly made friends with Ray Schieber.  He'd moved to White Plains from Chicago. 
We found each other through obsessive sports fandom and, well, little
else.  We made up games throughout the school year, created new
baseball teams and leagues for them to play in, took each other on in
various baseball board games, plotted all sorts of shortcuts home from
school either to his folks' or my mom's apartment.

Ray's mom was wonderfully welcoming, his dad taciturn and
methodical in his reading of the Saturday night early edition of Sunday
Daily News, and his older sister put up with us, rarely successfully in hers or our minds.

Once we discovered ancient animal bones on the grassy slope leading
from the football field to the back of the bowling alley — ancient
until the science teacher we brought them to, Mr. Cutler, let
us down easy by saying "well, they might be dinosaurs, but more likely
it's one of the neighborhood cats."  On further review, maybe they
weren't the biggest oldest or oddest bones every unearthed.

There was a third friend, Scott Robeson.  Our triumvirate coursed through films, photography, sports, current events, Hi-C, bologna sandwiches, slices at the Italian Pavilion on Mamaroneck Avenue.  We made it through the school year with little to no sense that life was anything but friendship and collecting NFL Player Stamps at the local Sunoco.

There's a lot I'll leave out just now — from the endless eccentric
but harmless adventures Ray, Scott and I went on through to the smart,
covert and brilliant way Ray tracked me down.  He and his mom are
upstate, he's a brilliant and so-far unrecognized artist.  And Scott is
a super in a building in Manhattan who several years ago made the papers when he foiled a mugging attempt.

Why the one-year friendship?  At the end of the school year, my mom
and her new husband dropped the bomb — we'd be moving to North
Carolina at summer's end.  That kinda sucked.  I missed Ray and Scott
and for years we stayed in touch, until we didn't.  We took separate
paths, but they were always joined way back there in 1972.

Ray loaned me the Eastview yearbook from our one year together,
'72-73.  Here's our class photo.  Since homeroom was with a shop
teacher, there are only boys in this photo:


Scott Robeson (top row, far right); Scott M.X. Turner, Ray Schieber (bottom row, last two right)

One more thing.  Do you recognize the kid sitting, far left?  It's David Sanger, the New York Times' Pulitzer Prize winning Washington correspondent.  Back in seventh grade, David was that worst blending of personality disorders — a Mets fan with the arrogance of a Yankees fan.  That's messed up.  Because I was a catcher in little league, I'd taken a shine to Johnny Bench, my generation's greatest catcher.  (That's still true, by the way.)

David razzed me every chance he could.  He was churlish and
annoying and the kill-switch that even kids know to throw when they've
gone to far, David either chose not to throw it or never had one
installed.  I remember on several occasions really wanting to clock
him, but I never did.

That's right.  At least a good half dozen times, I nearly punched out a future Pulitzer Prize winner.

A future Pulitzer Prize winner who deserved it.

Sure, he's won a couple of Pulitzers.  Bet he has fancy seats at Tarp Field, too.

I'm glad Ray found me.  I'll pull out the old Sports Illustrated Baseball game (1972 edition) and we'll see who's still got it.

Here's the latest from our man in Red Hook, Scott Turner. Did I forget about you last week? Huge apologies to the quizmaster over at Rocky Sullivans. And did I mention, Scott Turner's column is sponsored by Miss Wit, maker of groovy t-shirts.

Greetings Pub Quiz Straphanger Renegotiation Combine…

On the first day of summer, which was also Father's Day this year, Google ran this cruel, taunting, graphic above their search-box:

No matter your start-date for summer — the societal Memorial Day Weekend or the scientific June 21st — this was supposed to be an oft-repeated tableau by now.

Instead, we've gotten a steady diet of this:

It's been so bad that they were squeegeeing putting greens at the U.S. Open out on Long Island.

I know the faithful at Bethpage Black were stressing something fierce.  Golf with squeegees.  What is  the world coming to?

Well, in Brooklyn it's coming to this: Bruce Ratner is really broke.  Or really arrogant.  I'm going with both.  Normally, you'd beat up a big shot with those two things. 

The MTA?  It's using 'em to beat itself senseless.

The lessness of senses covers the unbelievable sweetheart deal Ratner has conned the MTA's Finance Committee into giving him. For the rail yards Ratner desperately needs to build the Atlantic Yards
project, the MTA now says he can pay taxpayers less, build less, and
take forever on both counts.  This comes at the same time Ratner's
lobbying for more tax breaks, tax-free bonds and direct subsidies.

…for a project that won't provide appreciable, if any, affordable apartments or newly-created jobs.

Ratner:
"Listen, I'm really attracted to your daughter, Brooklyn.  Yes, I have
beaten her, cheated on her, cleaned out her bank account, demolished
her self-image, driven away suitors who truly love and respect her, and
over the past five years lied, cajoled, exaggerated, broken promises,
taunted and abused her."

MTA: "Well, yes son.  You're a fine young man.  Listen, we'll cover
the cost of the wedding.  Run along, now, that pretty little thing's
making a fierce racket."

MTA Chair Dale Hermmerdinger (r.), who busied himself with his Blackberry during DDDB's Dan Goldstein's presentation before the MTA board this week.  A real people's man, that Dale…

I'm amused these days thinking about a remark someone made at Rocky's
a couple of months ago.  Things weren't going well for Bruce Ratner. 
Community opposition, the crashing economy and Ratner's own
incompetence had brought the Atlantic Yards project to a halt.  Hadn't
killed it, mind you, but halted it was.

Noticing my Develop Don't Destroy Brooklyn badge, a gentleman said "C'mon, man, whattya want?  The project's dead. You want his head on a pike, too?"

Only
if it would end the madness that is the Atlantic Yards project.  Once
and for all.  But Bruce Ratner, the zombie who doesn't know he's dead,
just keeps coming and keeps coming, so selfish and self-absorbed is
he.  And that's why the project's not packing the moving van for
Kaputsville.

Mr. Beg Borrow and Steal himself — life's easier without a sense of shame.

As
it stands, the MTA — the same one always threatening to cut subway and
bus routes, services, repairs and new capital projects — is feeling so
flush and happy that it's letting Bruce Ratner pay $20 million for a
property the MTA had originally valued at $214 million.

For a property that another developer offered $150 million for when Ratner was offering only $50.

For a property that currently has ten tracks and Ratner's design will leave a growing system with only seven.

For a property that Ratner will be allowed to pay off during the next twenty-two years as fare hikes jump and services get cut, so warns the same MTA honchos bending over backwards to accommodate Bruce.

Why do we stand for this?  Why do you?  Why do I?

Seriously.  It's never been legit to say "hey, I don't live
anywhere near where this is being built.  It won't affect me."  An
estimated $2 billion in taxpayer money being handed to Ratner says
otherwise.  So does the MTA's budget gap — or as the MTA's point
person on this mess, Gary Dellaverson calls it, "a mismatch of receipts."

Gary Dellaverson — smashing unions or smashing Brooklyn, it's all the same to him.

Other people in the world get super-duper loud when things go badly (see Iran,
elections, ruh-roh!!).  There's no comparing the fight against Atlantic
Yards to the fight for democracy in Iran, so relax, I'm not.

It'd be awfully swell, though, if straphangers just jumped the turnstiles en-masse
and said "you know, MTA, your service hasn't been so good, lately.  I'm
just re-negotiating my subway fare.  Just like Bruce Ratner did with
you.  You understand, right?"

The tireless, smart folks at both NoLandGrab and AtlanticYardsReport
make a good point: Ratner really frakkin' needs that rail yard.  The
MTA doesn't need jack from Ratner.  So how come it's Ratner whose
calling all the shots?

To quote Firefly's disturbed but prescient bounty hunter Jubal Early, "does that seem right to you?"

No…I didn't think so.  Me neither.

Jubal Early — fictional, but still asking the right questions

It gets better.  According to today's Reuters:

New York's Metropolitan
Transportation Authority proposed selling $600 million of
notes, its first short-term borrowing since the 1990s,
according to agency officials at a Monday finance committee
meeting.

The sale, if approved by the full board, would be
underwritten by Barclays.

The debt would be repaid by some of the state tax revenue
that the mass transit agency, the nation's biggest, shares in.
That money mainly is paid to the MTA in December. The notes
also would be backed by new taxes the state approved for the
MTA, including a tax on the payrolls of local employers.

To
review — the MTA, while letting Ratner screw them, is employing
cash-raising desperation measures not seen in twenty years. These
fast-and-sloppy measures are being funded by Barclays, the same former slave-trade and apartheid enablers who are paying Ratner $400 million to put their name on now-Gehryless Nets arena.  And the MTA would pay off their debt to Barclays by dipping into state tax revenue meant to help the MTA operate.

Barclays helps out an MTA destitute in part because Ratner is
stiffing it though he has plenty of money on the table from…wait for
it…Barclays.

Who's outraged by this?  A lot of New Yorkers, actually.  One of 'em is Queens Council member Tony Avella, the guy the Democrats should be uniting behind to run against Mayor Bloomberg this fall.  Avella's campaign released this late today:

The MTA today announced that Bruce Ratner, the developer of
the controversial Atlantic Yards project, will be allowed to defer $80
million of the $100 million total he has agreed to pay for the site.
The final installments will not be paid until 2031. The MTA board
members who will meet tomorrow to vote on the revised agreement were
given only 48 hours to review the complex documents.

photo by Tracy Collins

“It
only points out how this project should never have been approved in the
first place,” said Council Member and Mayoral candidate Tony Avella.
“It's time to kill this monster once and for all.”

“This project would tear the fabric of Brooklyn for many generations to come,” Avella said. “It must be stopped.”

Time to start talking re-negotiation, fellow straphangers.  Time to start talkin…

The latest from Scott Turner, Rocky Sullivan's quiz man and weekly OTBKB contributor.

Greetings, Pub Quiz Puzzlistas…

There's a lot going on, globally and locally.  David Carradine continues to be the tawdriest celebrity death since Bob Crane…the Brazilian navy is finding, then isn't finding, then is finding debris and people from the Air France crash…the Mets continue to suffer the ill-effects of wearing the color black and playing in a stadium that is everything but a baseball stadium…the final three episodes of Pushing Daisies are finally being aired — wonderful for new adventures of the Pie Maker and Dead Girl, sad that the show continues to be cancelled…and the great new Green Day album, 21st Century Breakdown.

this little corner of News of the Day…

Oh, and the Atlantic Yards project just keeps on sinking to new depths none of us could have imagined.  It's not finished — as one wag described it, Bruce Ratner is a zombie who doesn't know he's dead.  If you want more info, see below.

This week, feast your eyes and shortly thereafter your minds on these five items:

1) The Most Unsettling Cassette Tape Ever Released:

I have this cassette in my possession, and will be making the Grand Prize of a special flash-answer Quiz Mail contest in the next few weeks.  In the meantime, mull over the cascade of bewilderments:

• that's Lou Reed?!
• why does an Italian record label have a nondescript shamrock for its logo?
• is Tutto Tutto Tutto ("All All All") the best translation of "greatest hits"?
• Who is the mysterious "David" who seems to have owned this stunning edition?
• no…really…that's frakkin' Lou Reed?!!!

2) One of the best new blogsites in the Internet tubes is Puzzling New York.  The brainchild of Morgan Doninger, PNY is a Gotham-centric blast of quizzes, puzzles, riddles and brain-twisters geared toward Sporclists who want to dive deeper than listing the titles of every Julia Roberts movie.

Morgan's PNY picks up on an obvious construct — New York City
is so interesting, historical, nomenclatural and multi-layered that
it's the perfect endless font of fun facts and challenging
confoundments.  There are already five puzzles up, and more to come.

To this end, Rocky Sullivan's Pub Quiz is honored to have Morgan as this Thursday's Extra Special Guest Quizmaster. 
In this order, visit Puzzling New York and, on Thursday, come to
Rocky's to see the man, the puzzlarian, the legend in person — Morgan
Doninger.

3) Paul Lukas' and Kirsten Hively's wonderful research-project-cum-mystery-story-cum-museum-installation on the evasive, ghostly Candela Structures, the 1964 World's Fair's oddest remnants, is a must-see at The City Reliquary in Williamsburg, Brooklyn.

It's
one of those moments where the journey became the story.  In this case,
Paul and Kirsten's tireless pursuit of a simple quest — who designed
these little structures at the edge of the Flushing Marina.  The quest turned quixotic before finally striking paydirt at the elevenest of all hours.

The Candela Structures exhibit runs through June 28th.  Catch it while you can.

4) It's not every day that Rocky Sullivan's has a retired U.S. Army general come to speak about the Bush Administration's policies on torture — never mind comparing those abhorrent practices to the British government's disgraceful tactics against Irish republicans during the 30 years of war in the north of Ireland.

It's not every day, but it's one day — this Wednesday, June 10th.  The O'Donovan Rossa Society, which meets every second Wednesday of the month, presents Brigadier General (Ret.) James Cullen, speaking on State Terrorism, From Torture to Murder from Abu Ghraib to Castlereagh.   The talk begins at 7:30, free admission, and all are welcome and encouraged to attend.  Here's the press-release:

Brigadier General Ret. Cullen will discuss
lessons learned from the torture/enhanced
interrogation methods used in Iraq
and Guantánamo under the Bush Administration. He will draw parallels with the
experience of Iraqi detainees under Cheney/Rumsfeld policies and interrogation
methods used during the height of the recent conflict in Northern Ireland,
drawing out the lessons learned from the murder of Irish Human Rights Lawyer’s
Pat Finucane and Rosemary Nelson, both of whom died at the hands of state
sponsored death squads.

James Cullen was part of a group of retired Generals
and Admirals who lobbied all of the candidates during the 2008 Presidential
elections to put a halt to the use of torture in Iraq,
Afghanistan
and at Guantánamo. He was an invited guest in the Oval Office of the White
House when President Obama signed the executive orders to stop the use of
torture in January 2009. James P Cullen is a retired Brigadier General in the
United States Army Judge Advocate General's Corp, and last served as the Chief Judge
of the U.S. Army Court of Criminal Appeals. He has also served as
Secretary/Treasurer of the New York Construction Industry Disaster Relief Fund.
In 1980, Mr. Cullen became the founding president of the Brehon Law Society,
working closely with the late Paul O'Dwyer and other civil rights attorneys on
cases related to the conflict in Northern Ireland. He currently
heads the real estate and construction department of Anderson Kill and Olick,
and was the subject of a recent New York Times feature by Jim Dwyer on
January 29, 2009, entitled, “An Honor Guard Comes Out for Obama’s Ban on
Torture”.

5) Last, but certainly not least, a  message from Develop Don't Destroy Brooklyn:

Atlantic Yards is not dead, which is why we are holding Tuesday's meeting.

We look forward to seeing you there.

Once again, we present Scott Turner, Rocky Sullivan's quizmeister, and a Brooklyn writer/designer. As usual this post is brought to you by MissWit
, a Brooklyn t-shirt company.

Greetings Pub Quiz Three Day Weekenders…

A simple, precise, blunt observation this week:

Michael Bloomberg is short.

His
money-vomiting re-election campaign — already on pace to spend more
than the obscene $84 million Bloomberg spent  last election run dumped
— is doing everything it can to create the fallacy that Bloomberg is
taller than everyone else in New York City.

Oh, yeah, and this:  When Bloomberg took office, he was worth
something in the neighborhood of $4 billion.  Now, with the economy,
all the money he's given to charities, and the $160 he's lavished on
his first two campaigns, today the the poor fella's only worth…$12
billion

Yeesh…

Bloomberg's incessant and insufferably false t.v. ads are photographed to make our Napoleon
Mayor look taller than everyone else in frame.  Occasionally an actor
whose construction helmet slightly eclipses the mayor slips into the
shot.

"Who put a taller man next to me?!  Security to the Bullpen, Security to the Bullpen…"

It's a classic page from the Benign Dictator Image Control playbook.

Bloomberg once claimed to be 5' 10" tall.  Proportionately, that would make Wilt Chamberlain,
let's see, multiply by 12, carry the one and…right — seventy-five
feet tall.  In the other direction, reports peg the Mayor at 5-1,
,maybe 5-2.  Let's say it's 5' 6".

That means that every single actor in his ads are either shorter than 5' 6" or the angles are framed that way.

Or, in the Bloombergian Image Making Machine, there's not a single New Yorker taller than the mayor.

Go ahead.  Force yourself to watch the mayor's t.v. tripefests.  You'll see.

Look,
no one's expecting Bloomberg to tell the truth in his campaigning. 
Campaigns don't, and besides, the mayor certainly plays fast and loose
with truthiness when he governs for real.  It's just so stark to see
him revealing — and revelling — in his Napoleon Complex alternate
realities.

Is this a petty bone to pick?  Next to the city's affordability,
schools that only teach-to-test, infrastructure collapsing, big
developer coddling, my-way-or-the-highway arrogance, slow action on the
H1N1, jettisoning of basic democratic principles, favors for
political allies, institutional marginalization of political enemies,
and Bloomberg's utter disconnect with anyone less rich than him, yes, of course it's petty.

But it's also a clear indicator of who this man is, how he thinks, what's important to him, and what he allows on his watch.

the real world…

What are we supposed to make of a guy
who claims supreme-leader confidence to run New York City, but in fact
is so vain and insecure that everyone appearing in his ads must be made
to look the lesser next to him.

The emperor truly has no clothes.  If he did, his tailor would be constantly letting out the seams.

Here he is, Scott Turner, writer/designer and Rocky Sullivan's pub quizman with more analysis and agita about issues of interest to readers of OTBKB.

Greetings Pub Quiz Rabid Obstructionistas…

Wow.  This morning, the New York Daily News has really laid its Atlantic Yards cards on the table.  As usual, they're covering their crap hand with over-the-top bluffing.

In an editorial, the Daily News' board slammed "rabid obstructionists" for fighting Bruce Ratner's superblock project.  Apparently the News doesn't want you going to court if they don't like why you're
going to court.  Constitutional rights really get in the way when
they're someone else's bag, baby.  Those same rights could still delay
the Atlantic Yards project anywhere from months to years.  In the Daily News' worldview, the Voice of the People they like the best is no voice at all.

Anyway, who are these insidious obstructionist nogoodniks whose
foaming at the mouth is enough to coat a runway for an emergency
landing?

Why, people who've figured out that Ratner's innocuous Jobs Hoops & Housing is really Pink Slips, Blight and Lies.

People who, facing the backs government officials have
turned on them, did what the nation's stated ideals urges all of us to
do — protest, write, organize, fight, litigate, reach out, implore,
investigate, report, analyze.  The thing that was so popular in the
1770s, lobbing cannonballs at tyranny.  Of course, if democracy comes
too close to upsetting Michael Bloomberg's gilded applecarts,
standing up to tyranny is no longer a celebrated thing.  Citizenry
Speaking Out become Rabid Obstructionists.

Great ideas, folks — just keep 'em back in your times.  Thomas Paine, Malcolm X, Mother Jones

People who've done the simple math the News refuses
to do, shining light into restricted backrooms to see all of Ratner's
plans, not just the stage sets he wants us to see.  In the current
economic crisis, Atlantic Yards is hanging on by the skin of its teeth
to a fraying thread of nearly broke financial backers that's
papercliped to the world economy's teetering house of cards.

People who, regardless of their initial impressions, dug
beneath Ratner's glossy veneer and glimpsed something far uglier than
the emperor being naked: a bunch of little men with Napoleon complexes wearing Brooklyn Nets jerseys.

We're ALL Number One!  December 10, 2003

This is the kind of stuff one expects from civic cheerleaders like Marty Markowitz, Bertha Lewis, the ESDC and Mayor Bloomberg — "brutal weirdness," as Norman Oder
calls it..  Their job descriptions include the mandate stating "you
will be forced to pompously gesticulate in support of initiatives
favored by powerful interests, i.e. 'friends in high places.'  Do not
let ragged, outmoded constructs such as democracy, community or equality distract from this mandate."

Weirdly, of gravest concern to the Daily News' editorial board isn't the Atlantic Yards plan's:

• lack of affordable housing (there's no schedule or financing for it);
• lack
  of newly created jobs (Ratner's 2003 promise of 10,000 is now down to a
  several hundred and a job-creation cost 2 to 4 times above the city's
  average);
• lack of union construction jobs (one-tenth the original promise);
• lack
  of predicted cash benefits to the city (devoured by everything from the
  bad economy to shady PILOT financing that has repeatedly soaked
  taxpayers nationwide);
• the South-Bronx-in-the-70s conditions in the project's footprint (created only over the last five years by Ratner's scorched earth policies).

No…the News civic-minded editors are pissed that LeBron James won't be signing with the Nets.  It's good to see they've got their priorities straight.  Next week we can expect a News editorial critical of anti-war demonstrators because new Bob Hope-style reviews can't play in Basra.

Again, it's the Daily News' editorial board at issue here. 
They have, simply, given up on journalism's most basic tenets — to dig
out the facts, report them, and where opinion is voiced, base it on the
facts they've uncovered.  There is simply nothing factual to
substantiate the News' half-decade's worth of pie-in-the-sky boosterisms of the Atlantic Yards project.

Amazingly, some of the News' beat reporters and columnists have managed to do their job and look underneath Ratner's and Bloomberg's p.r. boulders.  The O'Keeffes, Gonzalezes, Lupicas, Sederstroms are just the current staffers who've stayed the journalist's course.

Of course, opinion is opinion, its beauty and conceit being its
inability to be pinned down.  That always gives the Opiner the upper
hand.

It'd be one thing if the Daily News wrote "gosh,
we'd sure feel groovy about the Nets coming to Brooklyn."  But they
don't leave it at that, instead conflating prognostications and fact in
a lazy, unethical and a slippery slope operation.  It traps everyone
who comes across it — the editors, the paper's readers, and most of
all the city the newspaper claims it's The Hometown Paper of.

"But Turner, what about Atlantic Yard opponents?  Don't they
do the same thing?"  On occasion, sure.  But the vast majority of
reporting, analysis, press releases, reports, blogs, and even opinion
pieces have been based on the Ratner's own numbers, the city's own
history of dealing with these projects,  and quotes from all the
parties involved.  What do opponents base their opposition on?  These
are numbers that again and again don't compute.  It just takes putting
them under the microscope.

That would be the microscope still gathering dust in the editorial rooms at the News, Post and New York Times — the last an actual business partner with Bruce Ratner.

The Atlantic Yards project has become Brooklyn's own Terry Schiavo
case.  The Atlantic Yards project is dead.  Of course, Ratner will
still try to build something, but those seductive, vast numbers of
newly-created jobs, affordable housing, union construction jobs,  and
the gleaming new city-within-a-city that would make Brooklyn into a
world-class destination — none of that was ever going to happen, and
now it never will.  The economy, community opposition, and Ratner's own
incompetence have seen to that.

Bruce Ratner..the making of a Destination.

Ironically,
the one Atlantic Yards component that Ratner is throwing all of his
dwindling fiscal and political capital into is the most frivolous of
all — the basketball arena.  It would create few jobs beyond part-time
low-paying slots, and provides no housing at all, never mind affordable
housing.  Remember, those are the things — jobs and housing — that
neatly bookended "hoops" in Ratner's
said-often-enough-it'll-become-fact mantra.

The jobs and housing are what attracted support from politicians,
the media, and a few lonely community groups (a couple of whom actually
existed before the project was uncorked).  Now those jobs and
apartments have mostly vanished, replaced with a basketball palace and
decades of economic studies showing that sports stadiums and arenas
don't benefit cities that pay for them.  Why on God's green
earth — such that it still is — are local politicians refusing to
pull the plug and start over with something that will work.

"Oh, c'mon, that'll take another decade."  It doesn't have to.  For
one, the genie's out of the bottle developing this area.  And two,
there are plans ready to go for the Atlantic Yards footprint.  City and
state government officials whose chief goal should be improving
Brooklynites' lives rather than greasing Bruce Ratner's skids should
refocus on why they were elected and paid by taxpayers.

Leaving Bloomberg's and former Governnor Pataki's hubris
behind, the process could be streamlined.  Despite these lean economic
times– and in some ways because of them — innovative planning and
building can still happen.  Many pieces are in place, but until Governor Paterson and Mayor Bloomberg shift gears away from the Atlantic Yards project,  those pieces could start to rot like FEMA's infamous unused trailers down by Gulf Coast.

The UNITY Plan — one of the pieces in the post-Ratner era.  Got it if you want it.

Ratner is not the only option.  It's insulting for Bloomberg and
others to insist he is.  Where's that civic pride, the fawning over all
talent here in New York?  That's the question to ask when Atlantic
Yards' developer is from Cleveland, the chief architect is from Los Angeles, the landscape architectis from Philadelphia, the chief construction management firm is also from Phily and the arena's naming-rights sugardaddy is from London.  Civic pride — merely a convenience filed away  in the stack of Bloomberg's skyscraper of fallacies and contrivances.

Of course, gosh, never mind all of that.  LeBron…we lost LeBron! 
Brooklyn looks headed for another dark age.  Housing, schools, jobs,
transit, health care, infrastructure…all of those pitfalls, we'll
survive.  We're Brooklynites.

But losing LeBron?  I dunno, man…that's tough.  At least that's what New York's Hometown Newspaper tells me.

One of my coping mechanisms?  My next band will be called The Rabid Obstructionists.

Whoa. Our cup runneth over with coverage of the new Mets stadium from our friend Scott Turner, writer, designer and Rocky Sullivan's Pub Quiz planner. As usual this post is sponsored by MissWit
, a Brooklyn tee-shirt company.

Greetings, Pub Quiz Carrie Prejean Society Members…

Meet the Mets, meet the Mets/Step right up and greet the Mets…

The opening lyrics to the New York Metropolitan Baseball Club's fight song, older than the club itself.

"You know" said Diane George, my wife, as the old tune reverberated through Citi Field, the Mets ridiculously overhyped and underwhelming mallpark, "you can't really step right up and meet the Mets anymore."

That, friends, is the last time you'll see that corporate stadium name used in this space.

In the Mets' two previous homes — the Polo Grounds and Shea Stadium
— anyone could meet the Mets.  Any ticket holder sitting anywhere
could journey down to the field level seats and watch batting practice,
try for autographs, crowd close to the dugouts, smell the freshly
watered turf, chase an errant batting practice ball fouled into the
stands, exchange a greeting with players from both teams, and in
general see what Major League Baseball is like up close.  When
batting practice was over, the batting cages were rolled away and the
announcement wafted through the stadium: "Batting practice is over. 
Please return to your seats."  Which everyone did.

In the Mets' new stadium, only the rich get to experience this
pre-game ritual.  Everyone else is invited "to watch batting practice
from your ticketed seat."

And that is pretty much all you need
to know about who the Mets covet and who they could care less about in
the new post-Shea Stadium era.

But this being the Rocky Sullivan's Pub Quiz Quizmail, and me being me, there's a lot more to prattle on about.  So strap yourself in…it's gonna be a bumpy ride.

I'm already on record as being really sore at the Mets about:

• the death of Shea;
• the hundreds of millions in taxpayer dollars that paid for the new stadium;
• the endless contrivances that make the new stadium feel more like a baseball theme-park mall than a place to watch baseball;
• the ugly alliance with Citi Corp;
• the clear embrace of rich fans at the expense of working-class fans;
• the vilification of business owners across the street in the Iron Triangle; and
• the obscenely expensive tickets;

In other words, the manyfold aspects of the Mets' nasty and soulless policy making lo these last several years.

The ballpark itself?  I didn't wanna be one of those foamy-mouthed protesters outside The Last Temptation of Christ.

Protester "THIS MOVIE IS SACRILEGIOUS!"
Interviewer: "How do you know?  Have you seen it?"
Protester: "NO!!! AND I'M NOT GONNA!!!
Inverviewer: "Then how do you know it's sacrilegious?"
Protester: "BECAUSE IT IS!!!"

Up
to this point, it's been fair play to critique the Mets' malfeasant
policies.  They've done so many bad things — culturally, politically,
fiscally.  But the ballpark itself had to wait until I saw it in person.

That happened this Sunday past.

Diane's from Pittsburgh, a diehard Buccos fan.  We took the opportunity to purchase a single pair of tickets to witness the Mets-Pirates clash.    $45 for two ducats on a Sunday afternoon in May somewhat well after the turn of the century.

It was a gorgeous day: sunny, crisp, maybe a little chilly when the
breeze turned to wind.  That's always been an issue out at Willets
Point.  Still, a really beautiful day.

…and the place was
several thousand seats short of full-to-the-brim.  It's a troubling
trend for the Mets — a sparkling brand-new "world class home of the
New York Mets" (their oft-repeated phrase), a beautiful mid-May weekend
afternoon, a team on a six-game winning streak, a metropolitan area of
18 million people and all the world's tourists coming to the Big Apple,
and the Mets couldn't fill a 45,000 seat venue.

It's gotta be more than simply "the economy."  But that's a good
place to start.  How many people are simply reticent to buy into what
is now a luxury item — a baseball game.

The Mets have diluted
the actual game, possibly past the final retrieval point.  A half-dozen
restaurant clubs patterned after business-class lounges at
airports..multiple food courts with endless varieties of trendy
cuisine…mall stores galore…kids games sequestered away from the
actual field…a never-ending procession of corporate promotional
tie-ins involving text-messaging, cell-phone-photo uploading, Pepsi Party Patrols and video-game contests.

So perhaps there were more fans in the house than it appeared. 
These days at major league stadiums, "in the house" doesn't guarantee
"in the seats."

Yankees owner George Steinbrenner,
at the height of his insufferable bully-boy arc, waxed malpoetically
about "putting fannies in the seats."  Nowadays, MLB owners don't care
about yours or my fanny, unless they're right next to the wallets in
our rear pockets.

The new Mets stadium was weirdly quiet on Sunday.   And this was on
a day when the home team created some excitement with an 8-4 win. 
Shea's ballpark buzz has gone missing.  Theories have been advanced:
fewer people total (57,000 capacity reduced to 45,000), fewer raucous
fans due to the paucity of affordable seats, fewer kids (see
affordable seats, paucity), the empty seats in the money-bags sections,
and the huge number of in-stadium opportunities to not watch the game
at all.  When there was cheering, it sounded more like an encore at the opera than the roar Shea used to generate.

It is believed that they're having the same problems at that new joint atop Macombs Dam Park in the Bronx.

Before
this gets to far on, there are some positives.   The new stadium is
obviously designed for baseball, not the multipurposes of so many
stadiums in the '60s (all gone now).   The Mets have made some efforts
at the whole thing being more "fan-friendly."  (Though replacing ushers
with polo-shirted "SECURITY" bruisers works surprisingly poorly as a
"fan-friendly" touch.)  And early in its first season, fans are excited
to see the new place.

But the new stadium is run through with misfires, miscalculations
and poorly executed strategies.  There's no way this place is a
"world-class home of the New York Mets."

For starters, what's
that mean, "world class"?  Can this new place host bullfights, sumo
tournaments and UN General Assembly meetings?  Is there an
international body that gives out "world class" accreditation?

If there's one new-stadium descriptive the Mets throw around like beads from a Mardi Gras
float, it's "intimacy."  The problem is that the Mets, their
announcers, the media and a lot of fans confuse "intimacy" with
"smaller," or "proximity."  Just because a venue isn't as big as its
predecessor or has fewer seats, doesn't make it more intimate.

Say you're having a drink at at bar.  A hottie the very next stool
over is also having a drink.  Just because you're inches apart doesn't
mean the two of you are intimate.  A lot more needs to happen before
"intimate" comes into play.  In fact, a lot of classic stadiums weren't
intimate at all — fans were a long ways from the action, or the joints
were simply functional and pedestrian, and nothing more.

In fact, the new edifice's biggest intimacy destroyer the Saturn-V
screeching of the new stadium's loudspeakers.  Good frakkin' grief! 
The Mets in 2009 are loathe to let fans simply take in the game. 
Advert after advert, before and during the games, fill every moment of
downtime.  Fans aren't trusted to absorb the game on our own. 
Baseball's a sport that lives and breaths nuance and subtlety.  That
makes for a lot of downtime.  At the post-Shea palace, that means
relentless ear-splitting at-bat music, Just For Men commercials, text-messaging contests and theme-songs for every conceivable situation.  An afternoon at the new Shea — or TARP Field, as my friend and fellow Spunk Lad John "Reggie Mental" Sharples calls it — is like watching a game in a subway station as the express train passes by.

Except louder.

By the way, if you don't like the new stadium's insidious corpo name, you can wear your displeasure by visiting No Mas — a Brooklyn tee-shirt company that follows our beloved MissWit
in the run for the sassy roses.  A percentage of the sales on this item
goes to local food banks.  I've been told that 700 of these babies have
flown off the shelves.  Good for the food banks, bad for Citi.

Much
has been made about all the food options at the new stadium.  I can't
report on it.  I'm a diabetic vegetarian with no interest in trendy
Manhattan restaurants like Shake Shack, and a recession-era  lack of
money to spend on them at a baseball game.  If a day at the ballpark
includes waiting in line for this, you'll love the Mets new home:

As for the shopping opportunities…well, that darned baseball game got in the way, and I never did make it to haute couture locations like,well, let's have the Mets website describe the Touch by Alyssa Milano Shop:

Ladies looking for a dash of fashion with their sports will find
themselves at the Touch by Alyssa Milano Shop. With everything from
tank tops and hoodies to jewelry and purses, Touch brings a feminine,
stylish approach to sports apparel inspired by actress and lifelong
baseball fan Alyssa Milano. Every item in the store sparkles, shines
and is sure to impress!

"whoever wants to know the hearts and minds of America had better learn Alyssa Milano" — Jacques Barzun

The Mets and the MTA have
come together to make every straphanger's arrival at the new stadium an
awe-inspiring epic vista.  The old approach from the subway to Shea:

…and the new, improved stadiumscape:

Goodness…Mets owners Fred and Jeff Wilpon and the MTA have really outdone themselves with this collaboration.

Once inside the new stadium's Jackie Robinson Rotunda
— named in honor of a desperate bid to deflect criticism over
corporate naming rights.  This sign is the last time anyone who can't
afford $400 tickets will be led to believe they have access to all
levels of the new stadium

Looking more like the Lincoln Memorial
than a baseball stadium, the Mets spoon feed fans with Robinson's
message.  The "Arbeit Macht Frei" placement of Robinson's
message…yeah, a little hamfisted.

At each and every game, fans are crazy to have their photo taken with a gargantuan plastic "42."

You can pose with baseball greats Roberto Clemente In Pittsburgh, Ernie Banks in Chicago, Stan Musial in St. Louis…

and in the Mets' Epcotian Jackie Robinson Rotunda…you get plastic numbers. If the Wilpons know anything, it's how to pay tribute to a great American.

lookin' good, Jackie Robinson's numbers, lookin' good!

Want to see Jackie Robinson himself?  The Mets have afforded him pride of place over there, um, somewhere…

The Mets are very excited about the new stadium's airy, open concourses…

As first reported in Paul Lukas's brilliant Uni Watch, the new stadium's Bottled Beer stands sell — wait for it…wait for it — canned beer.  YES!

As we head up to our upper-deck– er, "Promenade" seats, another set of gates to another exclusive ticketed-entry-only club fades into the distance…

After searching desperately for food I could afford, I finally found a stand offering something in my price range!

Coming dangerously close to an actual beautiful view of Flushing Bay, the Marina and it's odd Candela Structures,
and the charismatic whimsy of planes taking off and landing, the
Wilpons erected a massive advert board with scores and information that
only sporadically detract from the Budweiserian granduer.

Hey, how'd this bird get better seats than we had?

On the plus side…Pittsburgh Pirate LF Nyjer Morgan's excellent stirrup socks.

This was the seating situation during the first inning.  That's a lotta green seats costing the Wilpons a lotta green

What
kinda view do $20 tickets get you?  Well, sons and daughters, if you're
very lucky, you too can watch the Mets through a metal'n'glass balcony
thingy between you and home plate…and first base…and if you stop
leaning forward, the pitcher's mound.

And
while it was awfully nice for the Mets to place storm windows between
the action and the fans, it was harder to see through the constant
parade of fans…

.

Annie Reiser, Rocky Sullivan's Pub Quiz's Hollywood Guest Round
expert, has also taken in a game at the new stadium.  What'd you think,
Annie?  "Nice bathrooms," she replied.  And they are.  Of course, these
flushless Olympic torch-shaped commodes were really special.  Fans are
expected to only pee on the wall below the orange line.

…and here I am, happy to have spent the day in the Mets' new digs.

There you have it.  Enjoy the new stadium, Met fans.

After all…you paid for it.

Scott Turner, the writer, graphic designer and OTBKB contributor, who
organizes the pub quiz at Rocky Sullivan's in Red Hook has really
outdone himself this time.A list of his favorite music complete with
album covers. Cool

Greetings Pub Quiz Right And Wrong Reconfigurers…

It's
springtime, a really fine time of the year.  The thermies and heavy
coats are off on their closets-and-trunks summer vacations.  The
baseball season is underway in earnest.  This afternoon, Brooklyn is being buffeted by the brawniest of April showers.  We'll see just what May flowers these cats-and-dogs showers beget.

Springtime's a great time for music.  Summer's prolly the
best, the freedom days of no heavy clothes, harsh cold, or teachers'
dirty looks.  Music and summer are perfect comrades.  Remember, the
songs we'll remember the Summer of '09 by are almost ready to go.
 

But springtime, and all of that hope-springs-eternal hype.  Which,
honestly, it does, even when we know better.  Every baseball team
starts out tied for first, that crush looks even better this morning,
someone is said to have risen from the dead, and the city starts
hopping from excitement, not just to stay warm.

There are springtime record albums that have played roles — good or bad and never forgettable — in the many Aprils, Mays and Junes I've
been around .  There are some artists who just seem linked to certain
seasons, something ethereal in their sound or the mundanities of album
release dates.

I'm The Man, Joe Jackson
Beat Crazy, Joe Jackson
Blaze of Glory, Joe Jackson
Chieftains 5, The Chieftains
Fear of a Black Planet, Public Enemy
London Calling, The Clash
Sandinista, The Clash
Setting Sons, The Jam
This Day and Age, D. L. Byron
Get Happy, Elvis Costello & The Attractions
Escape Artist, Garland Jeffreys
Don't Call Me Buckwheat, Garland Jeffreys
John Cougar, John Cougar
LKJ In Dub, Linton Kwesi Johnson
Forces of Victory, Linton Kwesi Johnson
Waiting for Columbus, Little Feat
Survival, Bob Marley & the Wailers
Stranger In Town, Bob Seger & the Silver Bullet Band
Blue Sky Mining, Midnight Oil
Earth and Sun and Moon, Midnight Oil
Guero, Beck
That Summer soundtrack, Various Artists
Electric Version, The New Pornographers
Dirt, Silver & Gold, The Nitty Gritty Dirt Band
Gold, Ohio Players
Street Signs, Ozomatli
Downtown: The Greatest Hits of Petula Clark, Petula Clark
Regatta de Blanc, The Police
The Cars, The Cars
Live from Yugoslavia, The Anti-Nowhere League
Breakfast in America, Supertramp
MPLA, Tapper Zukie
Live and Dangerous, Thin Lizzy
Egypt, Youssou N'Dour
Manorisms, Wet Willie
Abbey Road, The Beatles

So pull up the deck chair, enjoy the later and later sunsets, pour yourself a Fresca (means "fresh" in Portuguese, Italian and Spanish), and pop one of these vinyl masterpieces on the turntable.

The latest lavishly illustrated missive from writer/graphic designer Scott Turner, who runs Rocky Sullivan's pub quiz on Thursday nights.

There's so much going on in the world these days.  So much that
even the kind of perfunctory three-item descriptive you'd normally find
in the previous sentence ("wars, recession, Britney Spears shagging her backup dancer") can never do justice to the colossal maelstrom of life's machinations.

That's why it's time to check in with America's Greatest Letters To The Editor page — the New York Daily News'.  Now, I'm not here to plug the Daily News.  The paper's only dependable sections are the sports pages' and their smart, progressive writers like Michael O'Keeffe and Filip Bondy, and the comics section, featuring Mutts, Doonesbuy, F-Minus, Get Fuzzy, Sherman's Lagoon and the wonderfully absurd Pearls Before Swine.  It's also fun watching Blondie try stay current, and Beetle Bailey, Gasoline Alley and Annie come off like your grumpy old uncle.

F-Minus

While "New York's Hometown Newspaper"
seems to covet the city it lives in, its out-of-touch editorial board
follows in the footsteps of the mayor it so loves. Hypocrisy and
double-standards are every day's soup de jour at the Daily News.  The News
will publish a bulldog special report on the state-government
corruption up in Albany, then run editorials supporting the most
inertial corruption monster in the city today, Bruce Ratner's Atlantic Yards fiasco.

By the way, here's what I don't get about the current state of the
Ratner's Folly: the Atlantic Yards project is hanging on by the skin of
its teeth…

…those cavity-filled chompers are desperately
clutching a thread fraying in dozens of places: Ratner's evaporating
finances, land-acquisition, community opposition, world economy, Nets stinkyness problems, and more importantly, the fiscal fragility of his allies — Barclays Bank, Grammercy Capital, New York City and State, Ratner's parent company in Cleveland, Nets partners, team sponsors, the MTA, etc., etc., etc…

…that fraying thread, of course, is tethered to the teetering house-of-cards that is America's
and the world's crumbling economies.  There's not a one of us who would
put our money into a project this unlikely to ever succeed.

skin of the teeth, hanging by a thread, house of cards — The Atlantic Yards Frightening Metaphor Index

Yet Michael Bloomberg, David Patterson, Sheldon Silver, Marty Markowitz and a phalanx of government agencies are still sticking with this Rube Goldberg contraption.  At least Goldberg's convoluted chaos machines worked and were harmless fun.  This thing in Brooklyn won't work and has already harmed the borough in ways too many to count.

plates full of empty plates…or else they'd get right on this Atlantic yards thing…

Circling back to Go!, the letters in the Daily News
cheer me up when I get overwhelmed with Atlantic Yards-grade
balderdash.  They're short, odd, persnickety, curmudgeonly bolts of
insistent prattle that have nothing to do with Ghana's gross-national-product figures or death-cage analyses of Keynesian economic constructs.

Voice of the People!

Here, then, are some of the best from the last few days.  The Daily News
calls its letters page Voice of the People, and its letter-writers
Voicers.  Remember, these pointed postulations are printed in their
entirety:

Hmmm…the FBI says that Fridays are the most popular day of the week for bank robberies.  It's time I became a Voicer and warned everyone

Once again a wild and crazy missive from our friend writer/designer Scott Turner who runs the pub quiz at Rocky Sullivan's every Thursday night (there's one tonight!).

Greetings, Pub Quiz Superlucky Charmers…

Happy day after St. Patrick's Day. 
This e-mail is late — could be the week's worth of St. Pat's revelry. 
It might be beyond my purview to divulge the exact reasons for this Quizmail's tardyness.

BONUS POINTS FLASH QUIZ:  If your team can answer this at tomorrow evening's Quiz, you earn five (5) points at the outset:

What city did this St. Patrick's Day decidedly lack-of-celebration take place in yesterday?

Now, wordiness…

It's not often one can predict a death in the family, but there's one coming up this Friday evening.

…and no, it's not another sad observance of Shea Stadium's
demise — which, unbelievably, keeps demising.  Earlier this week, the
littlest and last remaining Shea — the model that's sat in the Queens Museum of Art — was taken away. [The Queens Museum, by the way, resides in the former New York City Pavilion from the 1939 and 1964 World's Fairs — a building that also housed the UN in its early days.]

Nestled right where it was in real life, the little Shea could be spotted from the balconies that overlook the New York City Panorama, a scale model of every building, park, road and contour in the five boroughs.

space-age, schmace-age — contrivance is the new adventurousness

Much like census takings, the Panorama updates itself after lengthy intervals.  It's a big job, one can imagine.  The Giuliani/Bloomberg
orgy of big-developer steamrolling will only make this a tougher task
in the years to come.  That the Queens Museum of Art is selling naming
rights to each of these little models and even littler components
makesthe tough task sadder.  [How little can you buy naming rights
for?  According to the Daily News, for $50 you can name an apartment (!).  $250 gets you a single-family home, and for the moneybag set,  $10,000 lands you a landmarks.]

But the Museum wasted no time in removing little Shea.  You can hear Jeff Wilpon, the Mets'
owner's intemperate mercurial brattish son, berating his minions to
remove all vestiges of Shea from the city's consciousness.  To that
end, Mets officials were on hand for little Shea's removal.

But NO, this missive is not about Shea.

This death in the family comes this Friday evening, 9pm, on the Sci-Fi Channel.  (Which is renaming itself the SyFy Channel in a branding strategy known as the Treat Viewers Like Idiots Paradigm.)

Battlestar Galactica's last-ever episode.

What a frakkin' show.  Based only tangentially on the schlock-fi series from the '70s, BSG
revolutionized television, even if television doesn't know it yet. 
This has been a series filled with human frailty, the constant battle
of humanity vs. technology and the uneasy allliances we all make with
machines, the reaches both short and long of theology, and every
hot-button topic America's dealt with since the early '00s.

more popular than Jesus?  No…but it's a better story.

The acting has been stellar, from old hands Edward James Olmos and Mary McDonnell
to unknowns that are now firmly known.  The photography is cinematic, a
rare descriptive for a television show.  And the show has never fallen
off the razor's edge between making us watch uncomfortable things and
entertaining us.

The show's creator, Ronald D. Moore, has led us to humanity's cracks and fissures before — Deep Space Nine, Roswell and the extraordinary Depression-era carnival-troupe good vs.evil epic Carnivale.  BSG tops them all.

Rarer still is a multi-season
show ending right when it should.  Friday night we find out where the
last 39,000 humans came from, whether they can survive, and what it
really, really means to be human.

The
vast majority of television is junk, a somnambulant we willingly ingest
time and again.  But every so often in TV land, inexplicably, a fertile
field appears, planted with sustenance that challenges us and shakes
us.  It's a rare and good thing.

Over the past five years, Battlestar Galactica has left
viewers breathless.  That's alright.  It means we're breathing, a basic
physiology television overlords would prefer we forget forever.

What a frakkin' show…

Once again, we are blessed with Scott Turner's always stimulating missive. A graphic designer and writer, Scott runs the Pub Quiz at Rocky Sullivan's in Red Hook.

Greetings Falls Road Ramblers and Bogside Brigands…

It's the Green Season, for better and worse.

This is the better:

And this is the worse:

There's
pride, history, culture, revolution, passion, music, resilience,
literature, dance, heritage, innovation, and resistance.  It should all
be celebrated.  And at Rocky Sullivan's over the next several days, it will be.

But it's a weird St. Patrick's Day this year.  Eire feels like she's crumbling, like the last few years of bright-future vistas have collapsed in a wash of white-noise static.

For starters, here at home, comes Mayor Bloomberg's courting of the Irish-American vote.  His team has been distributing posters and buttons at all the St. Patrick's parades — Woodside, Staten Island, and assuredly the upcoming Park Slope and Manhattan parades.

At the Woodside parade, these placards and buttons were mostly carried by South Asian and Latino kids.  The Bloomberg campaign people are maybe missing the point of the Woodside parade's all-inclusive message.

That kind of exploitive disconnectivity is standard procedure
for Bloomberg.  From atop his enormous bonfire of vile machinations, he
said last week: 

"You know, the yelling and screaming about
the rich – we want rich
from around this country to move here. We love the rich people. People
say, 'Oh, well, you know, if the income were redistributed throughout
the system more fairly.' I don't know what fair means. You can argue
that if you make more money, you deserve more money. A very small
percentage of people do account for a big
part of our income.  The first rule of taxation is…you
can't tax too much those that can move."

In otherwords, if
you're too poor to move, Bloomberg will soak you.  If you're moneybags
material like our mayor, come and go as you like, but while you're
here, velvety-soft hugs will be hand-delivered to your doorman.

And who supports Mayor Mike's Hugs For the Rich mandate?  Why, the Very Rockish Deity himself, Bono.  At a street-renaming ceremony last week, Bono happily pinned an Irish for Mike Bloomberg button on his faux military coat.

If this is the alternative, let's live in a place where the streets have no names.

Bono's no stranger to linking his ego to despots.  He allied himself with Jesse Helms, North Carolina's unapologetic segregationist, back in 2001.  Before that, U2 ignored Kmart's awful track-record of sweat-shops and anti-union efforts to announce a tour in the chain's East Village location.  Bono goes out of his way to blame Irish Republicans for all of the troubles during The Troubles.  This from a Dubliner who hasn't been to Belfast as many times as I have, and who's band's operations are relocating to the Netherlands to avoid paying Irish taxes.  (Slate has the details.)

Back in the Auld Sod…

The fiscal bubble that has burst in the U.S. has exploded in Ireland.  The Celtic Tiger
was one of those first-time-ever national prosperities throughout the
world, and a lot of people bought into it — literally.  They thought
it would last forever.  Ask Japan how long yummy bubbles stay inflated.

In the North of Ireland, tensions are high after two British soldiers and a police officer were killed.  The Real IRA,  a group that broke away from the IRA's
embrace of the Irish peace process, claimed responsibility for the
attack on the soldiers.  A few days prior, the British announced that
the Special Reconnaissance Regiment, a shadowy surveillance unit that caused countless Irish republican deaths during the last forty years, was heading back Ulster to re-start their insidious counter-insurgency program.

Yes, that's really the Special Reconnaissance Regiment's emblem.  Who wouldn't be happy to have them back?

Hands are being rung over the deaths of these state "security"
members.  (As in many places, it was always more about securing the
state than people's daily lives.)  The war is over in Ireland but the
conflict remains.  The British government has created a dangerous
vacuum where everyone's looking over their shoulders — not at army
operations and paramilitary bombs, but at the frustrating lack of a
clear way forward.  Tony Blair and now Gordon Brown know
how oppressive it can be for skittish people who don't want war but
aren't offered peace.  They don't much seem to care how dangerous it
can be.

Is this just a plucked thread on Ireland's delicately-repaired
fabric, or something more grave?  The hype machine is pining for the
latter, but in 2009 the region has moved past war.  Still, as long as
Britain fills this slippery power vacuum with the fumes of a fogged-in
future, there'll be trouble.

The north of Ireland is among Britiain's last colonies.  It's time
they left Ireland for good.  Free of British rule, Ulster can face the
future.  It won't be easy.  Britain is a hobbling crutch for the
pro-British loyalist community and a target for the Irish independence republican community
— and Ireland is plunder-ready place for the British.  Free of the
crutch and the target, the six counties can get on with life — for the
first time looking forward and not over their shoulders.  Free of
colonialism just across the Irish Sea, the British can edge closer to being an ethical country.

Britain fading in the rear-view mirror — it's Ireland's only road forward.

Once again, Scott Tuner, a graphic desinger and writer, who runs the Pub Quiz at Rocky Sullivan's honors us with one of his magical missives.

Greetings, Pub Quiz Snowdrift Searchers…

The two most magic works in children's ears rang through New York City yesterday.

No, not "Pub Quiz!"

It was "SNOW DAY!"  A simple two-word reminder that no matter how
buried in the past, some things claw their way back to the present. 
They catch us be surprise before, gently, making us smile.

Of course, given our susceptibility to hype and dire-if-baseless
prognostications, Sunday evening's "one for the ages" snowstorm
rhetoric fell well short.  Officially, the city got eight inches of
snow.

It wasn't like the 1888 blizzard…

The run of big storms in the '60s…

…or the big supermamma in 1996":

The '96 storm was so bad Brooklyn's streets had to be excavated with steamshovels and earthmovers. 
Trucks drove back and forth to the East River, backing up to the
water's edge and dumping the snow into the watery currents.  It was the
only way to clear the streets.  This was no "wait 'til it melts"
operation.

"Official" snowfall measurements are taken in Central Park, by Central Park Zoo employees directed by the National Weather Service.  The measurements used to be taken at Belvedere Castle.

But Central Park is hardly the center of New York City.  That distinction goes to Bushwick, Brooklyn.  It's not surprising that New York's never-vanquished  Manhattancentricity continues
to base its meteorological standing on Central Park.  "But, the
National Weather Service's equipment was at Belvedere Castle!!"  Yeah,
but they moved to Brookhaven, NY in 1995.

It's high time we beamed NYC's stats to the world from the true
center of the city — Bushwick, Brooklyn.  Same with rainfall,
temperatures and sunrises and sunsets.

Always remember: Central Park…a misnomeratic moniker, if ever there were one.

Once again we are graced with the wit and wisdom of Scott Turner of Rocky Sullivan's in Red Hook.

Greetings, Pub Quiz Eloquence Peddlers…

We live in a vibrant, exciting, pulse-increasing, edge-of-oblivion era.  War, recession, globalization, an actual apology from Rupert Murdoch. 
Astonishing things cross our field-of-vision so fast we've had to make
full use of a tool that we can't possibly make full use of — talkin'
about you, Internet.

So why is it that athletes act dumber than fenceposts?

Why such a mean-spirited broadside in a week of storybook endings, from Slumdog Millionaire's OscarTM triumph to yet another Captain Sully sighting (at President Obama's Democrats Jump To Their Feet/Republicans Sit On Their Hands Fest)?

Devon Harris is why.  On Tuesday night, Harris, playing for Bruce Ratner's New Jersey Nets
(slogan — "Uh…Hello…We're, Er, Playing The Sport of Basketball If,
You Know, You'd Like To Stop By…") hit a miraculous last second shot
to beat the Philadelphia 76ers.  Okay, forget that Harris
couldn't possibly have received a pass, taken a few steps, deliberately
run into a 76er to draw a foul, get fouled by said 76er, attempt a
desperation shot, lose control of the ball, regain control of the ball,
and heave it half the length of the court in 1.8 seconds.  No surprise,
of course, to Brooklynites who've watched Ratner's Atlantic Yards debacle unfold in a  custom-designed Markowitzian phantasmagorical parallel universe.

Said Harris, "I infuse the bold aesthetics of Swan Lake with a Kierkegaardian predispositional radical embrace of C.L.R. James."

Anyway, Harris' shot goes in and the Nets win in stunning, dramatic
fashion.  Interviewed after the game, Harris had this to say: "It was a
wild shot. I
don't have that much to say about it."

Waxing equally eloquently was Harris' teammate Vince Carter: "That's impressive," said Carter. "I don't know if he ever in his life could do it again."

Yeah.  See, here's the thing.  In the immediate aftermath of
championship wins, record-setting performances, and legendary moments,
America's pro athletes unleash torrents of mumblymouth bromides.  It'd
be nice if Harris, who'd just created this year's best buzzer-beater
highlight, had something more to say about it than "I don't have that
much to say about it."

Well, no, he didn't, but could you imagine?

As
for Carter — really, Vince, you don't know if Harris ever in his life
could received a pass, taken a few steps, deliberately run into a 76er
to
draw a foul, get fouled by said 76er, start a half-court shot, lose
control of the ball, regain control of the ball, and heave it half the
length of the court in 1.8 seconds again?  Well, you're the NBA superstar — you should know.

"I
don't know what to say, man"…"I can't put it into words"…"Whooo!  I
just don't know…"  "I can't put it into words."  Grown men and women
paid handsomely to entertain us, and they don't know.  Yes,
adrenalinizing pinnacle-of-a-career moments can sap one's strength. 
But remove their tongue with surgical precision?

The sad fact is that in sports today, all we're left with is the
score.  The era of the Interesting Athlete is gone.  Nicknames like Mordecai "Three-Finger" Brown and Oil Can Boyd, are gone.

Eccentrics like Bill Lee, Dock Ellis, Turk Wendell, Dick Allen, Mark Fidrych, Esa Tikkanen, and the entire American Basketball Association, gone. 

Hard-shell bad-asses like Bob Gibson, Bill Russell, Jim Brown and Chuck Bednarik, gone. 

Politically-charged athletes like Curt Flood, Tommie Smith and John Carlos, Mahmoud Abdul-Rauf and Jim Bouton, gone.

We're left with blandishments like Devon Harris, Michael Phelps, Sidney Crosby, Tiger Woods, Eli Manning and,
well, entire rosters of entire leagues of entire sports.  I understand
why owners want it that way — compliant players are just plain easy to
deal with.

At the same time, I don't understand why owners want it that way. 
Wild eccentricity puts fans in the seats and gets them talking about
sports again — something we'll see less and less of as the recession
and Mets/Yankees ticket-price greed discourage more and more from caring.  The Bronx Zoo
Yankees of the '70s and the obnoxious, brawling Mets of the '80s are
legends in this town who reached beyond hardcore sports fans to bathe
in the greater ether of human existance.

We like indelible marks left on our souls.  All the better if
they're jagged, sharp and joltingly entertaining.  Even Captain Sully,
who I believe is scheduled to rescue a cat in our tree, rewire our
kitchen and cure AIDS later in the week, spoke out in favor of increasing pilots' salaries.

Athletes are told to shut up and play.  Why?  If they're
interesting or eccentric or both, let's hear it!  Sports is always
entertainment, but entertainment isn't always sports.  That means
entertainment wins!  Put that full scholarship and those longe nights
on the road to good use.  Spew wild, fascinating quotes all over the
bored beat writers covering your team!  Cause controversey!  Speak from
your heart!  Listen to your soul, not your team owner and agent!

Even just the truth.  That's enough.  Goodness knows truthtellers
in this new millenium are the biggest kooks out there.  Is that
possible, Modern American Athlete? To say it with relish, and let us relish what you say?

"I don't have that much to say about it."

Ugh…I thought you'd say that.

Two in one week from Scott Turner of Red Hook's Rocky's Sullivan's. This week I feel like OTBKB has a cool sports reporter: A-Rod yesterday, Shea today. Love it.

Greetings Pub Quiz Movie Snack Concealers…

Today  went out to Shea Stadium to see her last remaining structure come down — the ramps leading up to what was Section 5.  I got there too late…two hours too late.

That's okay.  Unlike most old stadiums in this country, the city's Department of Buildings
prohibition on massive implosions meant there'd be no
dead-stadium-walking ritual, no last sunset, no last moon, no last
dawn.  They'd bring it down one piece at a time.

Then, this last little bit was left standing for one more night.

The last night that wasn't supposed to be.

In his early days, Elvis Presley had a trick.  He'd file his
low E-string — the heaviest on a six-string guitar — down to within a
moment of breaking.  Then, it would go like this:

"LADIES AND GENTLEMEN…ELVIS PRESLEY!!!"…Elvis and his band (Scotty Moore, Bill Black and D.J. Fontana)
walk out on stage…the first number kicks in, the lights come up full
blast, and Elvis pounds away at his guitar…THWACK!!!  The low
E-string breaks, flies up into the spotlight, and looks like a killer's
scimitar dancing wildly to the first song's fury.

That's what the Shea demolition team did with the Section 5 ramps. 
They cut through 90 percent of the support beams and stepped aside.  A
last little tug sent the old gal's final piece slowly tilting toward
the new ballpark.  THWACK!!!  It hit the ground where the field level
seats used to be and, like any good implosion, kicked up a cloud of
dust that briefly obscured its still, lifeless hulk.

We should all go out kicking up dust…

Except
there were no bright lights, no explosion of change in the air, none of
a new era's earthshaking adrenaline.  Back in 1964, Shea was bright
lights/big city.  Now, 45 years later, she's left us like an elderly
aunt forced to fade away in an old folks home.

When I got there, four excavators, looking like rusty yellow
dinosaurs, were sorting through the wreckage — blue beams over here,
concrete chunks over there.  You could see that through the winter
gloom as the 7 train pulled into the Willets Point/No Longer Shea Stadium
station.  We stepped off the train and were hit with a weird, spectral
snow squall.  I walked through the snow's horizontal assault until I
reached the closest point on the construction zone perimeter.  The snow
turned to a nasty, spitting rain.  You couldn't ask for more funereal
weather.

The way up to the seats just right of home plate.  Ladder and fire extinguisher optional…

In that snow-turned-to-rain, I recounted all the reasons I
loved Shea — all of which I've told you about before.  A new one
formed as I took a few photos through the perimeter's chain-link
fence:  Shea was one of the last major-league ballparks to offer
freedom to watch a game the way we wanted to.

All the new fake-nostaliga ballparks — Detroit, Pittsburgh, Cleveland, Colorado, San Diego, Cincinnati, Philadelphia, Seattle, Houston, Arlington TX, Washington DC, Atlanta, Milwaukee, St. Louis, Arizona, Baltimore, and by everything their respective hype machines have disgorged, the stadiums for the Yankees and the Mets —
have comodified every moment, every angle, every bite to eat and
thought to cheer.  Mallparks, they are — a carefully-sequenced
progression of consultant-crafted contrivances.

Shea was a big ugly lug who mostly just let you watch the game.  In her last years, the Wilpons, having done for baseball owners what Ashlee Simpson did for rock'n'roll singers, began
a regimen of insufferable music, inane promotions, increasingly
blinding billboards and scoreboards and travesties like the Pepsi Party Patrol. 
Their message was clear — "well, yeah, there's a baseball game going
on — but don't let it distract you from the other stuff."

But for most of her life, Shea was big and open and mellow enough
to let us cheer wildly when the Mets did well, shake our heads when
they didn't (a far more common occurrence), and sit and enjoy a game on
our own terms.

This new place with its cheap-plastic stim-package-aided name won't
leave us a moment on our own.  It'll be like Epcot Center, where
"picture spots" tell you where to take a photo.

To enhance your Citi Field baseball experience, cheer when we tell you to.

Baseball
will survive, of course.  In the Spring of 2009, baseball fans examine
the state of the game in their hands: steroids, soulless pod-people
players, blood-from-stone owners, reporters terrified at losing their
clubhouse credentials (the Daily News' Michael O'Keeffe
is one of the few brave exceptions), tone-deafness of the baseball
establishment, hundred-dollar tickets and ten-dollar beers, and
contrived new venues ("a five-star hotel with a ballfield in the
middle" is how the Yankees see their new stadium).

Now would be a good time to watch the game elsewhere.  Prospect Park, minor-league parks far from the nation's big cities, hell, church picnics even.

Spring is coming.  The first sure sign isn't even baseball or the weather, but this Sunday's Academy Awards.  Easter, baseball and those first consistent 60 degree days.

Spring this year leaves New Yorkers just a smidgen less free
to ply their own emotions.  At least those who spend a few hours every
so often at Mets and Yankees.games.  We're all fighting our way through
this new Great Depression.  On that count, we're left to our own devices.

But out at the ballpark, a place where we've earned the occasional carefree summer afternoon or evening, that's where we we've lost the chance to go our own way.

For our own good, so say the Wilpons and the Steinbrenners.

As always we are are pleased to present the latest virtuosic email from Scott Turner of Red Hook's Rocky Sullivans. And don't forget the pub quiz is every Thursday night!

Greetings Pub Quiz Cinematistas…

How perfect is Alex Rodriguez for Mike Bloomberg's New York City?

Today's press conference at the New York Yankees' spring training facility — where the main stadium has a been narcissistically named after fading-fast team owner George Steinbrenner — was a primo illustration of how the rich, powerful and offensively clueless dominate the headlines around here.

Alex Rodriguez — and you'll never see him sporting the ESPN-commodified
"A-Rod" nickname here…except just now — spent the press conference
in full Bloombergian mode.  Alex Rodriguez lied.  Alex Rodriguez
exaggerated.  Alex Rodriguez obfuscated.  Alex Rodriguez prevaricated. 
Alex Rodriguez pretended to be forthcoming.  Alex Rodriguez refused to
answer tough questions.  Alex Rodriguez blamed others.  Alex Rodriguez
surrounded himself with props — not Bloomberg's usual lumpen mass of
public officials, firefighters or annointed-for-the-day "heroes" — but
rather, Yankee teammates who were being good soldiers.

"At the 5:37 mark, purse your lips and look contrite."

Most
of all, Alex Rodriguez did all this with the entitled distance of a man
wealthy beyond belief.  Money doesn't buy you happiness, never mind
love.  It does reinforce in empty vessels like Alex Rodriguez and Mike
Bloomberg the notion that they're impervious to everyone else's anger
and disappointment at their actions.  Same for Bernie Madoff, Rod Blagojevich, Eliot Spitzer, Chris Brown, the heads of the auto companies, and so many more.

In these terrible days of fiscal distress, warfare, disease and another endless season of American Idol,
Alex Rodgriguez doesn't count for much.  But here, in New York City,
he'll be the headline for the next six months.  I bet a few of those
headlines will include Mike Bloomberg's pontificatory, soulless and
trite condemnation of Rodriguez. 

"I offer you puppy dog eyes, a Yankee-color shirt, and a watch worth more than you.  Do you now love me?"

Bloomberg himself is flipping through City Hall's Tried And True
Cliches Handbook right now, looking for just the right bromides.  In
his unleaderly manner, Bloomberg will, at some point, gently chide
Rodriguez for letting down the children and setting a bad example. 
Bloomberg, who's treated Gotham's citizenry as pack mules to carry
billions of public dollars straight to America's wealthiest sports franchise, knows a thing or two about setting bad examples.

Mike Bloomberg and Alex Rodriguez run the same p.r. campaigns: find
a scapegoat….apologize in that non-apology way…blame "unavoidable"
circumstances…hire expensive crisis-management teams…fail miserably
at talking folksy to the little people…prevent the media from gaining
access to the truth…rig the game like an Atlantic City casino…and
above all else, spend more energy on denying the problem than fixing it.

Or not letting it happen in the first place.

"Don't worry…it's not an uproar if I don't do anything about it."

If
Bloomberg's such a great mayor and businessperson, how come this city's
in such bad shape on his watch?  If Rodriguez is such a great New York
Yankee, how come they haven't won a World Series on his watch? 
To hear either talk, it's everybody else's fault.  On the rare
occasions when they admit culpability, it was just, you know,
unavoidable.  Rodriguez used the "I was young and stupid" like he was
in a John Huges brat-pack movie.

At the end of the day, Alex Rodriguez, like Mike Bloomberg, acts
like nothing's too terribly wrong.  Not with his own life or anything
else in the malestrom of this new century's first untenable decade.

"…must…remember…to…mention…God…"

Do we, the populace of New York City,
deserve brigands like Bloomberg and Rodriguez?  The answer ranges from
"no" to "wouldn't wish them on our worst enemies."  But since both
Bloomberg and Rodriguez wrap themselves in societal bubble-wrap that
the rest of us, for bizarre reasons, refuse to step up and pop, we're
stuck with them.

Or, we could start poping those bubbles, one obfuscation at a time.

Every seems to enjoy these posts from Scott Turner of Rocky Sulilvan's in Red Hook. My thanks to Scott for letting me post them here:

Greetings Pub Quiz Winter's End Prognosticators…

By now you've heard the big news.  No, not President Obama's stimulus package and the Republicans' sore-loser obstructionism.  Not the Steelers' big Super Bowl win.  Not even Captain Sully's curing cancer, eliminating war and ushering in the New Golden Age of Peace and Enlightenment.

The big news is this:

Charles G. Hogg, or as he's rechristened once a year, Staten Island Chuck, went after Mayor Bloomberg at yesterday's Groundhog Day event.

New York City has a psychopathic need to one-up everyone else.  To that end, every second day of February the city yanks a groundhog out of a box constructed out of Currier & Ives cozy.  It's not enough to let Punxutawney, PA have the limelight once a year.  Just like New York had to one-up Boston on the marathon thing, Telluride and Cannes on the film festival thing, and New Jersey on the Nets thing — er, maybe not that last one.

Yesterday, there were glitches in the groundhog photo op.  Chuck
wouldn't come out for his closeup.  The mayor resorted to his usual
tactic — shameless bribery — to coerce Chuck into doing what he
wanted by repeatedly dangling a yummy corncob in front of Chuck.

"Christine Quinn always falls for this…"

This was supposed to make Chuck comply with the mayor's agenda.  Hey, it worked on the City Council members who voted for Bloomberg's monarchistic term-limits bill.  How hard could a groundhog be?

Hard,
it turns out.  Chuck kept grabbing the corncob and retreating back into
his prop home.  Finally, Bloomberg's taunting got Chuck got so fed up
he bit the mayor.  But good, too.

Biting the hand that just cut 15% from the Staten Island Zoo's budget

His Highness finally got his paws on Chuck, and disdainfully held
him at arm's length.  Bloomberg looked as comfortable with Chuck as he
does the average New Yorker.

"Don't I own someone who can hold this thing for me?"

Because Bloomberg is an inherently funny man, his remarks on The Bite Heard 'Round Barrett Park ranged from "given the heightened response against terrorism, and clearly in this
case a terrorist rodent who could very well have been trained by Al Qaeda in Afghanistan, I'm not at liberty to say any more than that" to "if the district attorney wants to press charges, I leave
it to the Staten Island District Attorney to do so."

Oh…and to further trump Punxutawney Phil,
who emerged to sunny weather, a shadow, and the prognostication of six
more weeks of winter, the mayoral-biting — er, weather-predicting
ceremony on Staten Island insisted that spring will arrive early this
year.

Mayor Bloomberg usually gets it wrong, be it the disastrous Atlantic Yards,
his teach-for-tests school system or a bullied groundhog's weather
forecast.  His Honor's usual cowardice forces others to get it wrong
for him — yesterday's fall guy was Chuck.

I'm looking out the windows here at Pub Quiz Actual to see what the mayor's early spring looks like, and as usual, Bloomberg's lack of awareness doesn't disappoint: