The Brother Giving Color in N.H.

My brother Patrick is up in Manchester, NH covering the primary for The Newport Daily News.

Corvids Flying

Ken Layne & The Corvids debut album "Fought Down" seems to be flying off the shelves. Their sales rank at amazon.com was 489,396 a few days ago. Today it is 430.

Help get that ranking looking better while treating yourself to some brilliant rocking, whiskey sweet "alt country" music.

You can also order the disc of hearty purty music at CD Baby.

Happy New Monkey Year

Thanks to old pal Amy Langfield I didn't forget to note that the monkey eclipsed the ram in prestige today in the new Lunar year.

Report from The Culture War

Writer and former New York City firefighter Dennis Smith has a fine opinion piece in the Daily News today questioning the choice for the September 11th memorial at the World Trade Center site.

In all the commentary on the design, I have not seen one article that could be called a rave. Everyone has an objection, or at least a reservation, about the square pools surrounded by trees. It is minimalist architecture that is supposed to inspire Americans for generations to come. In fact, it is pulp architecture that, like pulp fiction, is a secondary thing.

Posted by Jim at 05:11 PM

Shocking Con Ed Behavior

Be careful where you walk on New York City sidewalks.

On Friday:

Moments before she was electrocuted on a snowy East Village street, Jodie Lane paused to gush about her beloved dogs...Seconds later, Lane's dogs - Reilly, a chow-lab mix, and Meeko, a husky mix - stepped onto a metal-trimmed cable cover atop a shorted-out wire on 11th St. near First Ave. After trying to save her injured canines, the 30-year-old Columbia University Ph.D. candidate slipped and fell onto the electrified cover, killing her a block from the apartment she shared with her boyfriend.

And Yesterday...

Four blocks from where a woman was shocked to death by a charged Con Ed grate cover, pedestrians were forced yesterday to sidestep a frayed electrical cable running across a sidewalk. And despite calls from residents, police, the Fire Department and the Daily News, Con Ed did not send anyone to the scene for 11 hours. When workers finally showed up, they simply determined that the cable was not a hazard and approved the makeshift covering firefighters had laid over it.

Columnist Michael Daly ripped Con Ed yesterday with a round-up of similar shocking incidents over more than a quarter century. Since I can't make a lasting link to the piece, here it is.

It's a jolt when tragedy repeats itself


Twenty-seven years have passed since Nancy Whitehead walked with her 2-year-old daughter and the family's new husky down a slushy stretch of Convent Ave. Whitehead suddenly felt a tingling through her Frye boots. The dog that was her daughter's second birthday present howled and broke away, its hair on end.
"The dog rolled over and died," Whitehead recalled yesterday of the January 1977 incident. "Fortunately, my daughter was in my arms."

Later, somebody touched a light bulb to the pavement. The bulb lit up considerably brighter than the dim ones over at Con Ed.

"It is highly questionable that the sidewalk was responsible for the dog's death," a utility spokesman said at the time, although "some voltage" had been recorded and a feeder cable was found to have been corroded "by melting ice, snow and salt."

A year later, a German shepherd suffered a similar fate on Neptune Ave. in Brooklyn. Con Ed paid the burial expenses, but it was still just a dog.

Con Ed had neither issued a public alert nor posted warning signs in December of 1989, when Charlotte Chorot-Bernard walked her terrier over a snow-dusted manhole cover on St. Nicholas Place uptown.

"He went straight up in the air," Chorot-Bernard recalled yesterday. "He did it twice."

Chorot-Bernard felt two jolts through the metal leash. The dog lay dead when Con Ed arrived.

"In the beginning, Con Ed said it wasn't their manhole," Chorot-Bernard remembered.

The cops and firefighters pointed out a certain detail.

"On the manhole it says 'Consolidated Edison,'" Chorot-Bernard said.

But, again it was just a dog. Con Ed assured Chorot-Bernard she herself had been in no danger.

"They were saying it could never happen to a human being because we have on shoes," she recalled.

Two weeks later, Chorot-Bernard got a call from a woman on Central Park West whose dog had also been electrocuted. Chorot-Bernard was somehow not greatly comforted by Con Ed's assurances that humans were in no danger. She went about a city where signs routinely warn of wet paint and slippery floors, but never manholes that might be electrified.

"That drove me crazy for years, making sure not to walk on manholes," she said. "You have to watch every manhole."

Two years later, a carriage horse was electrocuted by stepping on a sodden Con Ed service box on E. 59th St. A witness remarked that a shock able to kill an animal that big could also kill a human. Con Ed suggested the horse's metal shoes made it particularly vulnerable.

The owner and the driver filed suit, charging that Con Ed permitted its cables to "become and remain in a broken, frayed, defective and dangerous condition ... so that electricity was allowed to escape and electrify the public roadway."

Con Ed settled with both parties, but continued to shrug off the danger. At least three more dogs had been fatally jolted by late December of 2000, when Stewart Lerman was walking his mixed breed on a snowy stretch of W. 13th St.

"She all of a sudden went out of her mind," Lerman recalled yesterday. "She was frothing at the mouth. She kept biting her own tail and chasing herself in a circle. She couldn't stop until I jumped on her and threw her in a snow embankment."

In the frenzy, the otherwise gentle dog bit Lerman in the face and he ended up at St. Vincent's Medical Center in Manhattan. His wife arrived and informed him of something that had escaped his notice as he turned down W. 13th St.

"She said somebody [had] put up a handwritten sign saying 'Beware of Electricity,'" Lerman recalled.

Not even a handwritten sign was on the block of E. 11th St. where Jodi Lane walked her two dogs on Friday. The dogs suddenly went as berserk as Lerman's had three years before.

Lane tried to intervene in this double frenzy and fell, losing that insulating protection of footwear that Con Ed insisted made humans safe. She was subjected to the same voltage that had been proven literally enough to kill a horse.

The news reached Lerman when his brother telephoned yesterday morning.

"He said, 'You're not going to believe it,'" Lerman recalled. "He was calling to say, 'See, it happened again.'"

Only this time, somebody had died.

"What a way to go," Lerman said. "This has got to stop."

Posted by Jim at 03:18 PM

Winter Fun & Death in Prospect Park

Californian Amy Langfield, now a citizen of Brooklyn, wonders if she and her family violated some sort of New York snow etiquette by enjoying some sledding in Prospect Park yesterday.

We had full reign of all the best hills - but were we supposed to let it get more packed with snow before sledding down? Or are we just that much tougher than the pansies in our neighborhood?

And in the same park yesterday the Daily News reports:

A thrill-seeker who ignored warning signs and ventured onto the thin ice covering Brooklyn's Prospect Park Lake yesterday screamed for help seconds before apparently drowning in the frigid water, police said.

Welfare Reform Act Injustice

Go out and get a copy of this month's Reason magazine to read the most important article Matt Welch has written in a long time.

It's about how innocent men's lives get ruined by states who are incentivized by the Welfare Reform Act to name fathers of welfare-receiving children & then take over the collection process from the "deadbeat dads," even if there is DNA evidence proving that the men never fathered the children they've never seen. Unless you are already familiar with this system, you literally will not believe the extent to which these poor guys (and I mean literally poor) are basically presumed guilty, and then systematically overwhelmed by the voracious state. And even if the Child Support people know they're not the father, they won't stop until the last dollar is collected, with interest.

Posted by Jim at 02:11 PM | Comments (1)

Ladies & Gents, Conor Marcel Reilly

Bloody Freezing

As we freeze our arses off here in the winter wonderland known as the New York Metro area Amy Langfield is thinking warm cartoonish thoughts.

First Day On The Job

FROM THE NY DAILY NEWS POLICE BUREAU:

It was much more than beginner's luck.

An off-duty rookie cop on his way home after his first day on patrol helped nab two illegal immigrants who tried to mug him inside a Harlem subway station, police said.

Posted by Jim at 12:45 PM

It's A Boy

Conor Marcel Reilly arrived in this world at 10:23 this morning London time. He is already a strapping young lad weighing in at 9 pounds and 15 ounces. Congratulations to his proud parents, my best friend Dave and his beautiful wife Dawn. All three are doing well after a long night. And we are all thrilled, excited and beyond happy this brilliant day.

Here's To You, Corvids

Still listening to this wonderful new Corvids album over and over. Just has me smiling. And it has my brand new favorite Ken Layne song, Here's to You.

The Corvids Have Landed

After another day of working for the government I drove my old Chevy home in the flurries to find the mailbox empty again. Riding the lift up the flat didn’t move the soul either. It was just another Monday.

Then there resting against the door of the flat was this little box. And in the little box was the debut CD by Ken Layne and The Corvids.

What an amazing, purty, brilliant album Ken and the lads put together!

At the moment I am on about the forth listening. It is so good.

Here is what I wrote on Amazon about Fought Down.

Ken & The Corvids have put together a fine, little masterpiece here. Layne's writing, some times with the help of Welch, is well worth listening to closely as it rides the riffs and beat. He sings it right, rough and sweet. Axel is just pure and too damn good on his guitars. Coulter is having too much fun with it all behind the beat as is Solomon bouncing it along sweetly. And Matt Welch finishes off the fine combo with his backing vocals, mad enjoyable passion and special touch for the heart of it. The Corvids have put out one purty record everyone should hear.

Prague Business Journal Folds

Old pal Matt Welch, my former boss when he was Managing Editor of the Budapest Budapest Journal, told me tonight that the Prague Business Journal is no more. Always bloody sad.

Matt has more on this tale on the wonderful generation expat blog.

Back East

Some fun, interesting items coming out of some old haunts in the Balkans and Central Europe today:

Finally, Serbia's secret police agency launched its own web site. Guess Slobo wasn't cyber savvy enough to have his spies sporting a site online in his time.

And old pal Matt Welch made me home sick for New Year's Eve in Budapest with his brilliant belated notes about his December 31st.

Gulping down cheap & sweet champagne, even for a short while and mixed with better quality stuff, can lead to acute, projectile-style poisoning, for up to 20 hours. I did not know that.

Talk about drinking like a fish! A few Polish divers have gotten into some hot water for feeding champagne to a fresh water pike in a lake near Opole, Poland.

A Reporter Looks Back

Thanks to my father I didn't miss this fine piece by The Star Ledger's Bill Gordon looking back on his 37 years in newspapers. My favorite bits are about the old Newark Evening News where my father also worked.

My memory of the city room at the old Newark Evening News, which I left in 1966, was one of drab surroundings in which the hue and cry of reporters and editors pierced the din raised by teletype machines, ancient typewriters and telephones. It was a tableau seen through a gauze of cigarette smoke.

A Good Newsy Start to the New Year

Picking up the late edition of The New York Times on the first Sunday of the year and finding that the Times ran your fire picture four columns certainly makes you feel good about a fresh start with the new year. Some spot news freelance is a fine way to kick things off.

There is no link to the stand-alone photo but here is the picture that made page 24 today. A tanker truck carrying gas crashed and burned just next to the Meadowlands Sports Complex. There was little left of the truck and the driver was missing.

And old pal Mike Markowitz, a fine freelance writer, hit the business pages of Newsday today with a piece about gay rights in the work place.

Looks like 2004 could be a good year for freelance journalism.

The Coming Night

Just enjoying another dusk in Elizabeth before heading out into the night...

Dancing in the New Year in Budapest

Sure looks like many old pals had a blast danicing away the final minutes of 2003 at a fab buli in Budapest. Sorry I missed it. Or perhaps I was at a Budapest party that sort of looked like this once.

Pictures of the Day in the New Year

The list of new year resolutions is too long to list here. And I don't care to share most of it since I am doomed to fail on many of them. But do resolve to blog more. Write more here. And mostly, post more pictures here. So, here are a few snaps of the first day of 2004 from my trek to Hoboken from Manhattan. Look for at least one new picture a day here in the new year.

Many New Yorkers looked like this man above on the left on New Year's Day.

And some got themselves stuck in all sorts of odd places.

Happy New Year!