Jury Pool

Can a New York newspaper be accused of contaminating a potential jury pool?

It's a question I'm sure no one is asking anyone. No talking heads will discuss the NYT sending their reporter-at-large, Sarah Lyall on a sumptuous trip to Turkey with a photographer to bring back the visuals on what the alleged Mayor Adam Adams upgrades actually look like to those of us who sit next to people who take their shoes off and trim their toenails on flights while being offered packaged pretzels.

Sarah Lyall is the reporter who got the assignment to take the 10-hour flight to Istanbul via Turkish Airlines in their business class. She also got to spend a night in the Bentley Suite at the St. Regis hotel Eric Adams is said to have vastly underpaid for this stay.

The accompanying photographs—and there are many—show the over-the-top luxury Adams would have enjoyed on his flight, and his stay in a suite that usually goes for $2,500 a night (not the most expensive in the place, mind you) but one in which it is alleged he paid $300 for. Maybe that was the Turkish version of co-pay.

The photos are stunning. Missing from Ms. Lyall's reporting is the thread count on the sheets, but to her credit she does provide a full picture of being bathed in luxury.

She also irresistibly tells us that the Turkish lounge at JFK has the not-to-believed Wi-Fi password of...wait for it...TKNYADAMS.

Being the inquisitive reporter, Ms. Lyall finds out from the staff that this is due to the company that runs the Wi-Fi is headed by someone named Adams. If you go back to that lounge today, my bet is the password has been changed.

Ms. Lyall recognizes the need for transparency, and of course fully discloses what the NYT paid for the trip. Her r/t air fare was $9,236.90, while the photographer Clark Hodgin's air fare was considerably cheaper since the travel secretary at the NYT didn't act fast enough and he had to fly economy with a r/t price of $2,289.90. The guess is that Mr. Hodgin got his own room, but the venue and price is not disclosed.

Surely that can't be the total tab. Transportation to and from the  airport, meals, bar bill and gratuities would have to be added in. The NYT doesn't spend any money to send a reporter to cover Saratoga races, but will do its best to ladle the goods on Adams. They must feel betrayed for endorsing him for mayor, to now seeing fit to write a huge editorial suggesting he resign. Fame and approval is fleeting.

I have some experience with being called for jury duty for federal court, as well as testifying in a health care fraud case that I worked on with the Southern District's AUSA and the F.B.I., as did many, many others.

In federal court the judge questions the prospective jurors in that I guess is the voir dire process. When the Adams trial comes up,—and it will come up—I can imagine the judge asking the prospective jurors taken from the Southern District (Manhattan/New York, Bronx, Westchester, Rockland, Orange, Dutchess, and Sullivan Counties) if they've read any pre-trial stories about the case.

There's no chance that living in Nassau County (the Eastern District) and being 75 that I would qualify to be a prospective juror. But if I were asked the question, and wanted out big time, I would make sure I believed Eric Adams beneffited from upgrades that looked like what the NYT paid for its reporter-at-large and photographer. How dare Adams do all that while I'm next to a toenail clipper and eating packaged pretzels. (No peanuts. Everybody on the flight is allergic to peanuts but me.)

My experience in seeing a federal case being assembled against the doctor who was found guilty and did 7+ years in prison, but who has since passed away, is that the Feds assemble a preponderance amount of evidence. If you're not found guilty in federal court, you are amongst the few.

The beauty of the Sarah Lyall story is that it is online with all the color photos. There is even a 12 -second video of the hidden champagne cooler tucked into the couch that opens with the press of a button to offer two flutes, and a bottle of chilled, to just the right temperature, of champagne.

Only an overpaid talking head or journalist will try and tell you the outcome to all this. Wherever it's headed, Eric Adams must have had a good time.

http://www.onofframp.blogspot.com

Stainless Steel

We know Elon Musk grew up obsessed with sci-fi comics. He even looks a bit sci-fi. Satellites, Space-X rockets, colonizing Mars, electric cars, he is a walking, breathing future.

And with this, the stainless steel Tesla truck has finally hit the road. A futuristic, automotive gladiator, nearly bullet proof, scratch and dent proof. But not smudge and dirt proof. Aye, there's the rub. What do you rub on it to keep it clean?

Again, the WSJ treats us to an A-Hed piece that outlines the various products and advice owners have been giving each other over the best products to use to keep that baby gleaming.

And a new baby it is. The headline and sub-heading for the piece by Ben Glickman goes: 

The Toughest Part About Owning A Tesla Cypertruck? Cleaning It. 

Drivers try Bar Keepers Friend, Windex, Costco baby wipes to battle smudges

There is Kevin Tieman of Buford Georgia, who admits that he has to keep the behemoth clean because, "you just feel like so many people are looking at the vehicle." It has to be ready for its closeup. He uses Costco's Kirkland-brand baby wipes to keep that showroom shine.

There isn't anything that comes into existence that doesn't have an unintended consequence. And the Tesla truck with its solid front apparently is a terrific bug catcher/killer. So much so that one owner estimated there were 3,000 annihilated critters on his truck's front. 

And of course, not feeling that estimate captured everything, the owner submitted a photo to ChatGPT, which returned an estimate of 4,600 no longer flying bugs stuck to the vehicle's front. Who says AI is overrated? War planes flew through flak; Tesla drives  through bugs.

There is no Tesla stainless steel truck in my future. That's not to say I haven't experienced, and continue to experience, tainted stainless steel.

At the family flower show, being part of the indentured teen-age help, cleaning things fell to me. Windows, inside and out, change the water in the vases, keep the floor clean, as well as the stainless steel refrigerator side panels. I had enough experience trying to keep that refrigerator clean to last a lifetime.

So when my wife wanted a new refrigerator, and smartly picked out the model seen here, I experienced PTSD when it arrived. I told her, "you keep this clean. Not me." It's bad enough that it won't hold the refrigerator magnets that we've collected, but it's impossible to keep that sucker free of smudges. But the model has enough selling points that smudges were not a deal breaker. So in it rolled.

And bless her heart, she does keep it free of smudges—on the front. I don't know what she bought that does the trick, but she said that Bar Keepers Friend is not a friend. 

We don't have small children, so little hands don't come in contact with the unit. The inside door edges get smudged easily, but true to my vow, I won't try and keep them clean. 

Like the truck, the refrigerator is a monster. It goes so far deep that we have to keep a back scratcher handy to retrieve items that might find their way all the way to the back. The unit is so big it never fills up keeping groceries refrigerated for only two people.

Personally, I've yet to see a Tesla truck on the street. My wife saw one down the block by the park. She didn't know what it was until I mentioned the A-Hed piece, showed her a picture, and asked her if Bar Keepers Friend is any good keeping stainless steel clean. (According to her, no.)

Her opinion of the vehicle? "It is ug-lee." Well, any vehicle that stains from water and needs the upkeep described in the story, has to be beautiful only in the eye of the owner.

http://www.onofframp.blogpsot.com

Vermont

Can a place still be a place if the place has no one living in it? Maybe it's an existential question, but Lewis, Vermont has a population of 0, and just because it exits on a map someone is going to play a concert there. Will you be there? 

Willie Nelson will tell you the town of his birthplace, Abbott, Texas has a constant population: as soon as a baby is born, a man leaves town. But what happened in Lewis, Vt.? The census taker didn't even live there. And if a baby was born there, it must have been in a moving ambulance and the birth was recorded in another town.

Lewis is a place mentioned in one of those inimitable A-Hed pieces by Betsy McKay in the WSJ, that tells of a pianist/composer who is embarking on a mission to give a concert in every one of Vermont's 252 communities. Vermont is considered the most rural of all states, not because it has the smallest population (it doesn't) but because its population lives in so many small communities. And there is no smaller community than Lewis.

David Feurzeig is a composer and pianist who has given performances all over the world. But now, the 59-year-old University of Vermont music professor has given up all that travel and taking his shoes off at airports for a goal of giving a performance in every one of Vermont's 252 communities, and that means Lewis, Vermont.

A piano is hardly as portable as say a guitar, or a violin. As such, David scouts out uprights and grand pianos at his proposed stops. This forces him to play on instruments that might need work, but he is hardly discouraged.

His plan for his Play Every Town project was to do this in 5 years, but that has now expanded to a 7 year goal. He started the project in 2022, and has so far played at 66 venues. In general, about a dozen to 145 people have turned out at each concert. He donates contributions at each concert to local environmental groups.

He customizes the playlist to match something about the locale he's playing in. "Steamboat Rag" got an airing in Fairlee where the first steamboat was launched. "Beets and Turnips" was tinkled out on an upright piano in Wardsboro to recognize where the state vegetable, the Gilfeather Turnip, was bred.

And lest you think Mr. Feurzeig is making these compositions up, you have only to search them out on iTunes and download any number of versions of these ditties played by various artists. I took a liking to "Steamboat Whistle", that toe-tapping number, complete with the sound effects of a steamboat whistle.  I expect to hear it next time my iPod gets played in the garage while woodworking in the winter. "Frog Legs Rag" is not bad either.

There are any number of links on the Internet to David Feurzeig and his music.  As you might expect, there are a lot of grey heads in his audience.

http://www.onofframp.blogspot.com

...(Something) is becoming more scarce

The title above is what appeared as a headline following a jump from a story recently in either The Wall Street Journal or The New York Times.

I can't find the story amongst the newspapers I've read, and I've looked back several weeks. I don't even remember what it is that's become scarce, but I do remember thinking when I read the heading that it didn't sound right. Shouldn't it be ...(something) is becoming scarcer? 

Grammatically, doesn't it have something to do with superlatives? I remember a session in second grade—is that possible?—certainly before 5th grade—when the teacher outlined on what was then truly a blackboard in the 1950s, examples of comparisons and how word forms changed. For example, good, better, best; rare, rarer, rarest; not more rarer; scarce, scarcer, scarcest, not "more scarce."

Where can I get guidance on this? I have a hard copy of Benjamin Dreyer's Dreyer's English: An Utterly Correct Guide to Clarity and Style. As comprehensive as this book is, there is nothing in the index for "superlatives." So no, not there.

I have a hard copy edition of The Chicago Manual of Style: The 13th Edition of A Manual of Style Revised and Expanded. ( I didn't like the typeface of a more subsequent edition, so I'm not upgrading.) Nope, nothing in the index there either.

The New York Times Manual of Style and Usage? Nope. The Shorter OED doesn't even have a listing for scarcer, so I'm starting to wonder about myself.

How about my smaller dictionary, Webster's II New College Dictionary? scarce, scarcer, scarcest. Wonderful! I like this dictionary.

Will Google using AI formulate an answer?

I ask the question of Google: "Is 'more scarce' grammatically correct over scarcer?"

From Longman Dictionary of Contemporary Englishscarce1 /skeəs $ skers/ ●●○ adjective (comparative scarcer, superlative scarcest) 1 if something is scarce, there is not very much of it available Food was often scarce in the winter. There was fierce competition for the scarce resources.

Seems like my grammar school teacher would tells us "scarcer" is the correct comparative usage of scarce.

I ask ChatGPT the same question.

Yes, "more scarce" is grammatically correct, but it’s less common than "scarcer." Typically, "scarce" is considered a one-syllable adjective, so the comparative form "scarcer" is usually preferred. However, "more scarce" can be used for emphasis or stylistic reasons. It’s a matter of choice!

I should have known when I've come to realize and grudgingly accept that judgement/judgment can be spelled with or without the first e. It's not the 1950s. Nothing like having it both ways. My teacher would not be pleased.

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Frank E. Campbell

The investment advice sounds solid. "People that don't buy our stock just don't like money. It's the greatest investment I've ever seen. People are always going to die."

Imbedded in a great two page spread in this NYT Sunday Styles Section is a story by Alex Vadukul about the Frank E. Campbell funeral home, that any New Yorker worth the value of a fully loaded Metro Card will tell you, is the preferred mortuary/funeral home for NYC's well-known, and sometimes not so well known.

The quote, albeit from 1993, comes from Robert L. Waltrip, founder of Service Corporation International, a Texas-based conglomerate that went public in 1969 and that now operates 1,900 cemeteries and funeral homes, including Frank E. Campbell, Riverside Memorial Chapel, and Walter B. Cooke, marquee names in providing funeral services in New York City.

I've been getting the Sunday Times home delivered now from my usual Monday-Saturday carrier gratis, for some reason. I was about to email the carrier and tell them not to bother, since I long ago gave up on the Sunday Times (They don't even have a separate sports section anymore.) I get advance Sunday sections with Saturday's delivery. I don't really need anymore.

But today's Sunday edition brought me this wonderful two, full-page story about the history of the Frank E. Campbell funeral home, introduced by an absolutely priceless nearly full page 1926 photo on the first page of the Sunday Styles section. Hold off on the email.

I delivered many a floral funeral piece to Campbell's in my prior life as a delivery boy for the family flower shop in the 1960s. You used the service entrance, of course, and there in a room populated with several people at desks was an entire staff just placing death notices with NYC newspapers.

None of the deceased I ever delivered flowers for were famous. Th most famous one I ever delivered an  arrangement for wasn't to Campbell's, but to an Episcopal Church in Riverdale, the Bronx, Christ Church.

The name was famous by being former Mayor Fiorello LaGuardia's sister,  Gemma Gluck. Despite Gemma's and Fiorello's mother being Jewish, the pair were raised as Episcopalians.

The delivery was sometime in the '60s and I only learned of the relationship to the famous mayor through a woman who was in the church by the bier who asked me if I knew who she was. I didn't. I don't know who sent the flowers, and it struck me that there was no one was in the church but this woman and the deceased, someone for whom I would have expected to be receiving a bigger send-off given the fact that she was the sister of perhaps the most famous mayor in the city's history.

But this was the mid-1960s and Fiorello had passed away in 1947. Given that, it started to be clearer why no one else was there. Fame is fleeting, and fame by association even more fleeting.

The lede to the story lists some of the many famous people for whom Frank Campbell's provided services. Jacqueline Kennedy Onassis's name leads the list. And while her burial arrangements were handled by Campbell's, she wasn't waked there.

Senator Ted Kennedy, Jackie's brother-in-law, made arrangements to have Jackie waked in her Fifth Avenue apartment so that swarms of mourners could be kept away. I remember the news stories of the time that portable embalming equipment was brought in, as well as a casket, all from Campbell's. The online version of the piece shows a photo of the casket being brought into the apartment building.  Privately invited mourners got to pay their respects by being allowed into the apartment. 

The front page of the Sunday Styles section is a treasure of a 1926 photo of what it looked like outside Campbell's when Rudolph Valentino was waked there.  Valentino was a silent screen heartthrob nicknamed The Sheik. His funeral brought out best in female fan hysteria.

In 1926 Campbell's was located on Broadway at West 66th Street. Look closely at the photo on the first page of the Sunday Styles section and you can see trolley tracks, streetcars and double decker buses. In the top left hand portion of the photo you can glimpse the 9th Avenue El, the first elevated line built in Manhattan. Eventually there was a 2nd Avenue, 3rd Avenue and 6th Avenue El. The 9th Avenue El was dismantled in 1940. 

The pictured El is at the intersection of 65th Street, 9th Avenue and Broadway, Broadway pretty much being  a north/south thoroughfare that cuts a swath through the length of Manhattan in what is the original cow path. It is a fantastic photo for any NYC nostalgic nut.

The only time I was ever in attendance at Campbell's for someone who had passed away was in 1968, when the father of two brothers I was very close to was waked at Campbell's in February. He was Jewish, and the services for him were held in a chapel at Campbell's.

One Thanksgiving I was over the brothers' apartment on West 55th Street for dinner when their mother quipped that when her two older gentlemen, her husband and his brother had drifted off to sleep after the meal, that she hoped she wasn't going to have to call Campbell's twice that evening. (She didn't have to.)

Given that the NYT has given what might be considered so much free advertising to Frank E. Campbell's, investment in the business of dying might be worth a look at.

http://www.onofframp.blogspot.com

Septembers (11 & 16)

The following memorializes the terrorist events of 9/11 at New York's World Trade Center and those of the executions at Empire Blue Cross and Blue Shield on the morning of 9/16 at 1440 Broadway, our temporary office space after losing our offices on 9/11.

The dates on the stones let you measure the time
Of the lives that lived in between.
The bracketed years reveal to the current
The joys and the troubles they've seen.

On any given day a person is born
You can record the date of their birth.
And on any given day a person can die
And you can record that they've left this earth.

And the morning we made our dusty descent,
An accomplishment undiminished,
We learned of the others and their bracketed date,
And our own, that remained unfinished.

So it is incredible to believe the end can be met
At the hands of someone we knew.
He put an end to life, he put an end to himself,
But he didn't put an end to you.
______________________________________________

September 16, 2002

Twenty-two years is not a so-called milestone anniversary, but no less memorable.

No one ever dies
Who lives in hearts
Left behind.

https://onofframp.blogspot.com/2023/01/september-16-2002.html

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#

Watching Jeopardy each night is a humbling experience. Aside from marveling at the correct answers to clues that I'm often convinced no one will know (and sometimes no one does know, except host Ken Jennings who has all the answers), I learn something I never expected. Did you know the symbol # has a formal name? I bet you didn't. Octothorpe.

An AI generated Google response tells us:

The formal word for the hashtag symbol is "octothorpe". The word "octo" refers to the eight points in the symbol, and "Thorpe" may come from the surname Thorpe. [Is that a wild guess?]

The hashtag symbol (#) has been referred to as the pound sign, crosshatch, and hash mark. The term "hash" may have originated from the phrase "hash mark".  [Wow, what are the chances of that?]

The hashtag was originally designed for categorizing posts on Twitter, but now it's commonly used to supplement or comment on text or images. [Whatever you say.]

It's a new Jeopardy season, so we're not made to look too stupid by the prosaic contestants who are first-timers. I don't remember the category, or the phrasing that involved "octothorpe" but the word was part of the clue. Hashtag was the answer.

I think it was the middle contestant, an active-duty Navy Lieutenant Commander, who correctly fielded the clue, and who who went on to win the mach. He'll be back tonight.

Thankfully, no automated message has never told anyone to hit the "octothorpe" sign when they are finished. Everyone would still be on phone looking for the right key to press. 

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