Film Neige

If you're watching a miniseries whose credits are filled with names that end in "dóttir," "sson," "sen," "mann," "arson," and "arsson," then you're watching something produced in Iceland, and it's probably dark and snowing. A lot of snow. Sideways, wind whipped snow. It's also so cold you put the miniseries on pause and go for a sweater to wear while watching. 

There's Film Noir, and there's the Icelandic version, Film Neige (snow). Such is the latest miniseries I've landed on, "Trapped," courtesy of Amazon Prime, an Icelandic police tale of a dismembered body coming out of the water at the same time a massive ferry pulls into town, an isolated village in northeast Iceland. Someone on the ferry did this, right? Well, yes. Maybe. 

The police chief is a teddy bear of a man named Andri, huge and thick with beard and hair, who is not supposed to investigate. The National police squad from Reykjavik is expected to fly into town and take over the investigation. Or, at least they'll get there when the storm passes. The only thing that passes are the days, so Andri and the two other members of the  police force start snooping around.

Andri is like so many who are in command in these police procedurals, recently divorced, or about to be divorced. Housing is so tight in the town that he lives with his two kids while his ex sleeps with her boyfriend in another bedroom. In fact, his mother and father are in the same house. It's All in the Family Icelandic style.

It is so cold and snowy that there appear to be only a few scenes where people are indoors without their coats on. Pavement is barely ever seen as blacktop. Vehicles are always driving through some kind of blizzard, illuminating the snowfall with their headlights. There's a good bit of skidding on crunchy snow, and fishtailing.

The ferry is absolutely huge, and of course is made to stay in town while a Danish warrant is issued for Andri to search the boat. The captain of course is hiding something, and it's likely his human trafficking/smuggling operation because something goes wrong and two Nigerian women, sisters, are found freezing in an abandoned house, having escaped from their handler, who himself has met a certain fate.

Two Nigerians certainly standout in white Iceland, but they quickly learn how to build a snowman with the help of the husband of the female member of the police force, whose house they wind up staying at while things can be sorted.

The body that was recovered is just a large frozen torso, no head, arms or legs. It looks like an extra large sack of frozen potatoes. Identification is made impossible until the forensic team can get there. There is no suitable refrigerated morgue to keep the body, so the huge freezer of a fish company is used.

And then the body goes missing. That's right. Gone. Taken from the fish place. The first, obvious suspect is the smuggling handler, but he ends up dead with no frozen body in sight. Andri is having a tough time, and still the team from Reykjavik can't get there yet due to the weather. It's enough to make Andri wonder why he became a cop.

It's a small town, but the rate of murder and death in this 10 episode Season 1 is astounding. It's enough to significantly lower the population count. The rate at least matches what you find in a routine Midsomer Murders mystery when DCI Tom Barnaby can barely sit down between hovering over corpses.

Like any good miniseries these days there are a lot of subplots. There's a suspicious fire in a fish processing plant at the outset, talk of Chinese investors sinking beaucoup bucks into building a state of the art port to take advantage of new shipping routes made possible by melting ice, official corruption, and some human trafficking of women from Nigeria sold into prostitution. It's enough to make you never want to go to Iceland.

But, within the generous 10 episodes, the police chief Andri  gets his burly arms around all of it. The other good news is that we don't have to stick around and wait for him to write his report. It's got to be a doozie.

http://www.onofframp.blogspot.com

Commonplace Book, Chapter 4

It is time to once again disgorge some more of the collected quotes and outtakes that have been accumulated before there were efforts to write these postings.

I always loved the sentiment of E. L. Doctorow that was quoted in the obituary for Joseph Heller, "They say fiction can't change anything, but it can certainly organize a generation's consciousness."

That's as good as good as W. H. Auden's 1939 elegy on the death of William Butler Yeats, "poetry makes nothing happen." One great poet saying of another great poet that their work makes nothing happen. Yes, if nothing is building buildings or laying railroad track, then he's right. But we know poetry organizes one's consciousness. And that's not nothing,

*************************************

Lorne Welch, a crack British glider pilot and yachtsman who played parts in two of the most storied escapes by Allied prisoners during World War II, died on May 15 at his home in Farnham, England. He was 81.

As a prisoner at Colditz, the 700-room Saxon castle the Nazis used to hold incorrigible escape artists, he helped design a two-man glider with a 32-foot wingspan that was to be launched by a catapult powered by a five-floor drop of a concrete-filled bathtub.  It was never tested because the prisoners were liberated by American troops before an attempt could be made.

--Robert McG. Thomas, Jr. NYT Obituary, June 8, 1998

**************************************

Politicians, public buildings and whores all gain respectability if they last long enough.

--John Huston’s character in the movie Chinatown, as said to Jake Gaddis, the private detective played by Jack Nicholson

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Joseph Heller, the author of “Catch-22," the darkly comic 1961 novel whose title became a universal metaphor not only for the insanity of war but also for the madness of life itself, died on Sunday night at his home in East Hampton, N.Y.  He was 76.

The novelist E. L. Doctorow told The Associated Press yesterday, “When ‘Catch-22’ came out people were saying, ‘Well, World War II wasn’t like this.’  But when we got tangled up in Vietnam, it became a sort of text for the consciousness of that time. They say fiction can’t change anything, but it can certainly organize a generation’s consciousness.”

--Richard Severo & Herbert Mitgang, NYT Obituary, December 14, 1999

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Jewelers are nervous.  Sequin and rhinestone manufacturers despair.  Cher, the 56-year-old pop singer, who has made it her mission to reflect more light than the mirrors of the Hubble Space Telescope, is on her farewell tour, which appeared at Madison Square Garden on Wednesday and Thursday.  “How sparkly am I?” she asked the crowd on Thursday night.

--Jon Pareles, music review, NYT, June 29, 2002

*************************************

Apparently, Anna Kournikova flirts with maturity, too.

In the span of 15 minutes, she went from surprising everyone at a news conference with a show of introspection after her first-round loss at Wimbledon today to a display of divalike behavior in front of the BBC cameras.

There was little sympathy for Kournikova, who has a history of petulant behavior in front of fans and with her peers.  She is famous for once dismissing a teenage boy’s shout of “I love you!” with a glare and the line: “You can’t afford me.”

--Selena Roberts, NYT, June 25, 2002

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Julius J. Epstein, a screenwriter of sharp, sardonic dialogue who won an Academy award for the script of “Casablanca,” died here [Los Angeles] on Saturday. He was 91.

Mr. Epstein liked to tell stories with a pinch of irony, a twist of self-deprecation.  For example, he and his brother could not think of a plausible reason that Rick Blaine, the character played by Humphrey Bogart in “Casablanca,” could not return to America and had to remain in Casablanca. So they came up with brilliant dialogue to disguise that fact:

Louis Renault, the police chief played by Claude Rains, asks, “I’ve often speculated on why you don’t return to America. Did you abscond with the church funds?  Did you run off with the senator’s wife? I’d like to think you killed a man. It’s the romantic in me.”

  Rick: “It was a combination of all three.”

  Renault: “And what in heaven’s name brought you to Casablanca?”

  Rick: “My health. I came to Casablanca for the waters.”

  Renault: “What waters?  We’re in the desert.”

  Rick: “I was misinformed.”

--Aljean Harmetz, NYT Obituary, January 1, 2001

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The New York City subway system has 468 stations, which can be thought of, for the purposes of this column, as a country unto themselves. As in any country, there are backwaters, stations so sleepy that you can almost hear the theme from “High Chaparral” playing on the empty platforms.

These stations don’t even have human attendants on the weekends; they are staffed only by MetroCard machines and the forbidding full-body turnstiles that resemble egg slicers.

--Randy Kennedy, Tunnel Vision column, NYT, December 19, 2000

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The fuel of boxing is controversy—after all, what are matches, not to speak of rematches, made of anyway?  It goes back to at least Pindar, who composed soaring odes to the boxing brawls in the ancient Greek Olympiad, some of which were surely, as the saying goes, manipulated.  The peculiar fascination continued through the centuries, to Saturday night, when, by the estimation of a thick majority of spectators, Lennox Lewis clearly won the unified heavyweight championship of this planet, but the three judges awarded him a measly draw with Evander Holyfield. Ah, but such is the essential charm of boxing—the sleaziness of it all. And thus the fuel for controversy. There is simply no fuel like an old fuel.

Every time we learn from the experts that boxing is dead, that there is no longer a James Fig, or a John L. Sullivan, or a Jack Dempsey, or a Joe Louis, or a Muhammad Ali, there rises from the gym of worn boxing shoes, tattered gloves, tape, headgear, mouthpieces and cigar butts, another fight in which we can’t wait to see what happens, who wins, who gets robbed.

It is a kind of burlesque, and in that sense one is reminded of something Ann Corio said.  Corio, once the most famous of burlesque strippers who died in her 80's earlier this month, had been asked to describe the art of undressing artistically. “Always keep your pants on,” she said.  “It brings the boys back hoping next time you’ll take them off.”

--Ira Berkow, Sports of the Times column, Boxing’s Beautiful Black Eye,

March 12, 1999

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NYC Sanitation

Corey Kilgannon of the NYT (@coreykilgannon) has once again proved to be a muse for someone who hasn't lived within the border of NYC for 28 years, but who can never forget having lived there for 43 years. An elephant never forgets.

Apparently the snow removal in NYC from the recent storm went well. If it hadn't, then the Acting Commissioner, Edward Grayson, wouldn't have received a piece of praise from a newspaper that has always had trouble finding  that there are four boroughs (counties) attached to Manhattan by what, 21 bridges and tunnels, but still endure the designation as "the outer boroughs." The Sulzbergers don't want to know what my wife (da Bronx) calls the paper. It's not flattering. And I hear it every time I pick the paper up. And usually agree with her.

But 45 years of marriage can't change my readership habits, so I got a kick out of Mr. Kilgannon's piece about Mr. Grayson's rise from someone who took the civil service test at 18 to someone who is now the commissioner, since Kathryn Garcia (yes, a woman) has left the job after 6 years in order to run for mayor. There are openings at the top in city government. It's an equal opportunity employer.

Mr. Grayson's mother and father both worked for the Department of Sanitation, and he grew up in Middle Village, a section of modest homes in Queens that are owned by multi-generational families.

The story about Mr. Grayson's third grade teacher who poo-pooed his answer that his goal when he grew up was to become a "garbage man" rings familiar. I have a friend who is now 76 and living in Simi Valley, California who grew up in Brooklyn who was discouraged by his parents from taking the civil service for Sanitation. Bob saw the goal of a pension after x years as a reasonable inducement to employment. He was already big and strong and liked to lift weights, so why not? Didn't happen. 

In high school one of the electives that we could take was Electrical something or other. The teacher, a pill of a guy named LeSeur, like the canned peas, chastised us why were in the class when we could be  apprentices in the electrician's union and eventually make beaucoup bucks. He obviously was jealous of a blue-collar wage that was probably paying more than the teacher's union and required a college degree. He was a bitter guy.

It is a nifty piece about Mr. Grayson and how he actually rehearsed his charges back in October for what could be the need to remove snow once it got here. Weather is highly unpredictable, and there has been many a storm that has left a lot of people pissed off at weak efforts to remove the white stuff.

I've seen photos of Mr. Kilgannon and seen him appear on a CNN interview about the bar in Staten Island, Mac's, that's flouted the order to close so I can guess Mr. Kilgannon's age. So when he recounts the tale of the 2010 storm that embarrassed Mayor Bloomberg I laugh somewhat, because the most famous failure to removed snow was in 1969 when young Mayor Lindsay was in charge and didn't even know Queens was an "Outer Borough."

Mr. Grayson's mom and dad remember this, as does anyone who lived in Queens at the time and who is not dead or shuffling through the halls of a nursing home waiting for lunch. The February storm that dumped 14" in the borough, and really throughout the city, was not met with a plow for days! Days. As in multiple 24 hour periods.

The story came out later that the street Ralph Bunche lived on in Forest Hills, or Kew Gardens got plowed. Bunche was a U.N. mediator and Nobel Peace Prize winner in 1950 for his efforts in Palestine. He was obviously a VIP, so his street got plowed. Where it lead him to would be another story, because of course he couldn't go any further without walking.

So our street, 41st Avenue didn't get plowed, but it did get dug out to some degree by the neighbors and my father. 41st Avenue at the corner connected to Murray Street, which didn't get plowed, despite the firehouse that was half a block south.

And the fire trucks were needed later that evening when our upstairs tenant fell asleep on the coach and started a fire while his wife was visiting the neighbors. I ran to the firehouse in my stocking feet because I wasn't satisfied that the pull box on the corner was working fast enough

The trucks could not get in front of the house, but were of course able to run water from a hydrant nearby. No one was hurt, but the damage was extensive.

The suburbs were always considered to have more reliable snow removal than the city, which was always a bit hit or miss, but never as bad as the 1969 winter. Floral Park, a Queens/Nassau community that straddles the border could always count on having one side of the border street be more passable than the other. Guess which one?

Mayor Lindsay is long passed away. But hardly forgotten.

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The Shot

I want to be on TV. And it seems the surest way to do that these days is to get a Corona virus vaccination.

I mean, who haven't we seen with a sleeve rolled up and a mask on being jabbed with a needle? You have to be at least a septuagenarian like myself to remember the polio vaccinations in the '50s. Different disease, but just as scary. Kids were being placed in iron lungs, legs developed deformities. There was a fear of being in crowds, or pools.

No need to recount the Salk vaccine that became available and was used to inoculate children everywhere. Our local elementary school is named after Jonas Salk.  What I didn't remember as a kid was that the vaccine had a rocky start due to tainted product coming out of one lab. Instead of immunizing kids, the vaccine was giving kids the polio. There were deaths and a recall. But the bad batches were quickly identified, and the mass vaccinations continued.

I have a vivid memory of all the kids in my school being lined up in the gym and given the shot. At P.S. 22 in Flushing there were several lines that lead to a nurse and maybe a doctor who administered the shot. And one of those nurses improbably was my mother.

She was a nurse in the Army. And before that she was a nurse at St. Charles hospital in Aurora, Illinois where she went to nursing school. I don't know the year she entered the service, but women weren't drafted. She was born in 1918, so she was at least in her 20s when she became a 2nd Lieutenant.

She never served overseas, but was assigned to Thayer General Hospital in Nashville, where she met my father, a Tech-Sergeant, who for some reason was shipped back from Guam because of some injury suffered in a typhoon.

He was in the Corps of Engineers and made maps from reconnaissance photos. How you get shipped literally halfway around the world is something only the Army could explain. While in the hospital my father told me they removed his pilonidal cyst, a vestigial part of the lower spine, the tailbone, that was done by the Army surgeons pretty much as surgical target practice.

No one these days gets their pilonidial cyst removed. When I mentioned my father's experience to Bobby G., one of the Assembled who is a retired surgeon who did two years at Fort Monmouth in service to his country in the Vietnam Era, and arranged all the poker games he could with the junior officers, he told me that a pilonidial cyst was called "jeep rider's disease."

From the above photo, you can understand how riding in an Army jeep might be aggravating to your tailbone. "Doctor, what do you recommend?" "We should operate if we're not busy. We need the practice."

So, despite the no-fraternization rules that were supposed to be in effect between women officers and enlisted men, my parents were married before the war ended.

I go through this rather long story because after the war ended and my mother was discharged, she never worked outside the home. Prior to being in the Army she was a licensed R.N. in Illinois, but nowhere else but the Army.

Along comes 1954, 1955 and the polio epidemic and mass vaccinations, and my guess is they need volunteers to help administer the shot. How my mother applied or was selected was something I never knew. But think about this. People were needed They said they had a certain background and they were allowed to proceed. There was no New York license. There was no background check. She hadn't been a nurse for probably 10 years, but there she was giving injections.

If you wonder why people became fearful of injections, you only have to look at what was then a hypodermic needle. A large syringe that held multiple doses; a needle that was I don't know what gauge, but looked like something you'd buy at a hardware store or a gas station to inflate a tire. Did kids cry? You betcha.

I don't remember if I cried, but I got the shot, and at some point later I got the booster shot in the pediatrician's office. The rest is history.

So, here we are in 2020 and mass vaccinations are planned. Voluntary or not. Needles and syringes are different these days, and more sanitary. They are not reused, or sharpened with emery cloth, as described in Wikipedia.

Of course the '50s can't compare mediawise with 2020. The difference is inter-planetary, astronomical.  We are in the visual, tell-all-confessional-age. If someone of even slight notoriety gets the vaccination, they tell you. And tell you, and tell you. And record it, of course.

So, FOMO sets in, and if and when it comes time and I schedule an appointment at my CVS, I want visual proof I got the vaccine. I know they give you a card that tells all you've been vaccinated, but I want visual proof, just like a video of Joe DiMaggio singing baseball bats, or just like my photo with Santa at Macy's department store. 

Look Ma, it's 2021. I got the shot.

http://www.onoframp.blogspot.com

The Hagertys

Yesterday was Wednesday, and aside from meaning that it is Prince Spaghetti Day in Boston's North End, it also means the Food section appears in the NYT.

The chief restaurant critic, Pete Wells, with little to do  in New York City due to the pandemic and wholesale restaurant closings, chose to write about a restaurant reviewer from Grand Forks, North Dakota, Marilyn Hagerty. If you can't eat out, review the reviewer, no matter how far away she lives.

Wasn't she the one who became a bit of a sensation years ago (guess how many?) for writing a review on The Olive Garden restaurant in Grand Forks? Yes, the very one.

I'm not all that savvy about newspaper bylines, but Mr. Well's story doesn't have a location attached to it. I'll take than to mean that his editors didn't fork over the expense money for him to actually go to Grand Forks and interview Ms. Hagerty. They did send a photographer from the Midwest bureau though, so we are treated to several photos in what is a delightful story about a 94-year-old woman who has been living alone since her husband passed away in 1997. 

Jack Hagerty was her editor at The Grand Forks Herald. Marilyn is once again retired from the paper, but does still submits three stories a week and gets paid the freelance rate. She says they're afraid to get rid of her. 

When I came across the Pete Wells story I had to jog my memory and check if I hadn't written about Ms. Hagerty when she came to New York and reviewed a dirty water frank. I had. It was in 2012! And  also in that year, James Hagerty, an obituary writer for the WSJ, revealed in an A-Hed piece that Marilyn is his Mom. I wrote about James's obits in the WSJ in 2018.  Journalism obviously runs in the family.

Ms. Hagerty is still writing restaurant reviews about the eateries in Grand Forks, North Dakota and East Grand Forks, Minnesota, another city across the Red River.

From my own experience of visiting my Midwest relatives in Illinois, I always got a kick of how easily you'd see license plates from Wisconsin and Indiana, border states. Water doesn't enter the picture that often, so it doesn't separate states and lead to bridges with prohibitive tolls financing mosaic tiles in subway stations. There is a West New York, in New Jersey, and it is across the Hudson River, but few from Manhattan are ever going to cross the Hudson to go to dinner in New Jersey. It ain't happening. It's not practical.

Once a week Marilyn is still devoting one of her three weekly columns to restaurant reviews, although now they are about the quality of the takeout meal rather than the actual indoor dining experience. The pandemic is everywhere, and North Dakota and Minnesota are no exception.

Her son convinced her to stop going to places that were still serving indoors because not many people were wearing masks, even if she was. She has revisited the Olive Garden in Grand Forks and written about their shrimp scampi, takeout style. She concluded things seem to taste better when you could eat them at the restaurant, as in pre-pandemic days. 

One of the photos in the Pete Wells story shows Ms. Hagerty getting into her car with her Olive Garden takeout. So at 94 she's still able to drive her own car. Her son says she is still writing reviews in order to keep sane, not to generate income. She refuses "to be an old person." 

Marilyn seems very much like the fellow they interviewed in England who was one of the first people to get the Corona virus vaccine. At 91 he was grousing about the lack of parking near the hospital. But he quite gleefully remarked at 91 he was too old to die. "What would be the point now?"

That reminded me of something the sportswriter Red Smith said about finally making it to a New York newspaper and being able to write about the Yankees. "It takes a long time to learn where the press box is at Yankee Stadium is, so why waste it?"

Looking back at the exchange Ms. Hagerty had with the NYT reporter when she sampled a dirty water frank she expressed hope that after 2012 she would be able to come back to New York and review the Olive Garden in Times Square.

She's going to have to wait. We all are.

http://www.onofframp.blogspot.com

I'll Take Manhattan

Manhattan is not a particularly difficult place to get around. The numbered streets and avenues lend a very logical pattern to finding places. Lower Manhattan is a welter of named streets, and the West Village can turn even the seasoned New Yorker around (West 10th Street crosses West 4th Street; what's up with that?) but aside from these wrenches in the grid, a Manhattan address is very easy to understand.

Ms. Becky Cooper has produced an innovative gem of a book, 'Mapping Manhattan: A Love (Sometimes Hate) Story in Maps by 75 New Yorkers,' when as part of a project for her degree in literature at Harvard, she handed out blank maps of Manhattan and asked if the recipients would fill them in with what parts of their lives they can attribute to various Manhattan locations. Sort of a biography over topography.

She started at the top of Manhattan and handed out her blank maps with instructions and self-addressed stamped envelopes for their return. Her goal was to put a book together of the most representative of the memories. The result is a richly illustrated collection of 75 responses.

In a TED-X talk Ms. Cooper explains that being from Queens she has always had trouble finding her way around the city. She gets lost easily. This surprises me, because she went to high school in Manhattan. She caught my attention with that statement and the fact that she admitted going to my high school in Manhattan, Stuyvesant.

In my era, (class of '66) Stuyvesant was an all-male, specialized high school, one of the so-called elite public schools that required taking an entrance exam. This is still true, but it has been co-ed for decades now.

When I heard of Ms. Cooper I emailed a classmate of mine that I still keep in touch with and remarked that Becky is an example of the type of person we didn't get to go to school with: a smart female.

Ms. Cooper seemed to me to have traces of Asian features, and being from Queens and a recent Stuyvesant grad I theorized she probably was Asian, and quite possibly from Flushing, the largest Asian community in the city. Couple this with the fact that 70% of all students at Stuyvesant these days, male and female are Asian, my conjecture was strong.

Turns out I was absolutely right since in the introduction she explains her ethnic origins as being from Russian and Chinese ancestors. Quite a combination. Even providing more depth to that is when in another book she just wrote, 'We Keep the Dead Close' (more on that later) she reveals her great-uncle was a hit man for the Chinese Mafia. Every family has a bad guy to some degree, but quite honestly, I can't top that one.

Nevertheless, 'Mapping Manhattan' is filled with personal memories etched onto the schematic of the island. Some are quite colorful, and some are from true celebrities. One is from Yoko Ono, who with no lingering bitterness, has simply written "MEMORY LANE" underlined in marker with a heart across the island.

A lot of people pointed out where they met their spouse, or even their spouses and then their divorces. Interesting to me is that few have anything pointed out above 110th Street. When I filled out the downloadable copy and mailed it, I realized that I too really had nothing above 90th Street, when I would start in Road Runner races. Lots below 59th Street, but little triple digits. Even the numerous flower deliveries I made didn't go above Mt. Sinai Hospital, basically then at 100th Street. (I now remember I could have added a dot at 137th Street to indicate my time spent at CUNY.)

I 'm not sure I have a favorite, but the one from Philippe Petit might qualify. Mr. Petit on the morning of August 7th 1974 had strung cable between the unfinished towers of the World Trade Center and walked across the tightrope, 110 stories in the air as people were starting their day at work.

I remember that day as being at work myself, but further uptown at 40th Street and 3rd Avenue. Mr. Petit sketched the two towers in red and drew a little line connecting them, remarking, "Walking (illegally) on a cable atop WTC!"

It's one of the few references to the WTC, other than my own that I submitted that indicated my surviving 9/11, coming down from the 29th floor from Tower One, finally emerging about 9:30 A.M. a bit dusty and wet, but unharmed.

I don't know how Ms. Cooper was able to get a blank map into the hands of Mr. Petit, but one of my subsequent favorite memories of him (he's still with us) is that several years ago he fell off a tightrope he was practicing on in his yard upstate. The wire was about three feet off the ground and I think he broke his foot. If you're going to screw up, that's the time to do it, when you're only three feet off the ground.

I only came to know of Ms. Cooper's 'Mapping Manhattan' book when I started to read her latest, 'We Keep the Dead Close,' a true crime story about the grisly murder of an anthropology grad student at Harvard, Jane Britton, in 1969—a crime that went unsolved until Ms. Coopers years-long efforts at trying to get police records as part of the Freedom of Information laws, acted as a catalyst for the law enforcement agencies to make one last ditch effort to process some DNA that could now be better analyzed than it could be in 1969.

The book is a testament to Ms. Cooper's pursuit, having heard of the crime when she was an undergrad at Harvard (not in anthropology).  There were several candidates for being solid suspects, all within the Anthropology Department. Along the way, the mistreatment of undergrads and grads and the pervasive culture of sexual and academic harassment is laid bare.  Perhaps because it's Harvard it sounds surprising, but it shouldn't.

Aside from the crime aspects of the investigation, there is a tremendous amount of knowledge that the reader gains about archaeology. It is hardly all Egyptian tombs, sand, heat and desert sites in Asia Minor. I would have never thought Labrador could be of interest, but it was to an expedition to find a certain kind of rock. And dangerous, since a student was lost, presumed killed in an accident when they fell off a cliff into the water. Or was it an accident?

At the time of Jane's murder, 1969, the '60s represented an era of flimsy security for all. Reading of the sieve-like access to Jane's off-campus residence, I was reminded of the famous 1963 NYC "Career Girl" murders of Janice Wylie and Emily Hoffert when the intruder gained access through a fire escape and an open window. On many levels, that case sent shock waves through law enforcement when the wrong person was found guilty and not exonerated for a few years until the true rapist and killer was caught.

Whether Ms. Cooper's successful being "on duty" when a 50-year-old crime is solved will lead to one of those 'Forensic Files' reenactments remains to be seen. Ms. Cooper's book just came out, but my guess there will be efforts to dramatize a grisly and long unsolved crime.

In the two Zoomed book presentations I watched, Ms. Cooper didn't indicate where her next effort might lie. The book's back flap tells us the Society of Investigative Reporting seems to have had a hand in helping Ms. Cooper pays her bills, since she left an enviable position at The New Yorker to devote full-time to her efforts. 

Something in neuroscience she vaguely answers. Ms. Cooper tweets, but doesn't answer Tweets—even complimentary ones. No problem. She probably doesn't need to.

Perhaps she'll next leave us with solving the source of the current pandemic and the world's reaction to it.  After all, that story has legs too.

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Fatberg, New York City

It wasn't a front page story, but it did get prominent display inside on page A4, a four-column spread, with photo of a story about NYC sewers by Corey Kilgannon (@coreykilgannon) that revealed how the waste water flowing through these treatment plants is being used to track the corona virus. Yes, sewers are useful in medicine.

Mr. Kilgannon wasn't being punished when he was being sent to these outposts in the city's infrastructure. It is a first rate story about what no one usually thinks about: where does the water go when I flush the toilet?

Turns out it can go to any one of 14 treatment plants within the five boroughs. There are eight public gold courses in NYC and 14 wastewater treatment plants. The ratio seems about right for 8.5 million residents and untold number of visitors.

There are even treatment plants in Manhattan, but no golf courses. The closest I ever heard of someone hitting a golf ball legally in Manhattan is when I read that Bob Hope and Bing Crosby used to spend their time between shows at the Paramount Theater in the '30s by going over to a driving range that was then under the Manhattan side of Queensboro bridge. I think Bob Hope described this activity in a book he wrote, 'Confessions of a Hooker.'

I love these New York infrastructure stories. When there was a horse show and rodeo held at Madison Square Garden I would get great joy out of telling people that the dirt they poured on the floor for these events was stored underneath the West Side Highway, an elevated roadway that is pretty much gone, with what is left being renamed the Joe DiMaggio highway.

Buildings need names, and sewer plants are no exception. Mr. Kilgannon tells of the Newton Creek, the Bowery Bay and the cutely named Owl's Head plant in Brooklyn, itself sounding like a quaint B&B in Vermont.

I'd love to know the origin of that name. The Bay Ridge plant is off the Belt Parkway and 68th Street, adjacent to Owl's Head Park. Was there once a street named Owl's Head nearby?

Hunter's Point in Queens was named that because decades ago it was a spot for hunting quail I believe, in the era when Queens was pretty rural and there were numerous farms in the borough. The Queensboro Bridge and the incorporation into NYC changed that, but it took time.

I think the sign is still there, telling us that the squat brick signal building along the LIRR tracks in Long Island City is named HAROLD. Why? Because once upon a time, before they renamed the streets in Queens and tried to use more numbers, Harold Street ended at the tracks. 

I grew up on 41st Avenue in Flushing, which before the renaming was Madison Avenue. I tell people I grew up on Madison Avenue.

The neighborhood butcher run by the Stimmel family was called Madison Meat Market. The building is still there on Barton Lane, hard by the LIRR Murray Hill Train Statin, and the gold leaf lettering just under the mansard roof is gone, as is the family and the butcher shop.

Mr. Kilgannon's piece basically tells us that even our poop can help in detecting the presence of the corona virus. If we are what we eat, we also revel ourselves when our excrement is examined under a microscope.

But it's not all wastewater. There are solids that are coming through. Mr. Kilgannon tells us the water "is strained for stray objects—which included a dead pigeon, a $20 bill and clumps of sanitary wipes."

Who gets the keep the $20 bill was not disclosed, but my guess is it's dried under some sort of ultraviolet light and used to buy Subway sandwiches for the staff for lunch. God money should never go to waste.

There was no mention of the problem with the sewers that London experienced in 2017 when a "fatberg" clogged the pipes. The link also takes you to no less than 5 stories on U.K. 'fatbergs."

Fatbergs are a coagulation of grease, sanitary wipes, condoms and tampons and just about anything else that doesn't dissolve in the water. They grow so large in size that there is  as story of an eight-man crew being assigned to breakup a clog that took three weeks to unclog. The fatberg was so large it reduced the sewage capacity to only 20%.

When my wife and I were first married and in our own home I noticed my wife was pouring the cooking grease down the sink in the house in Flushing. I nearly screamed, "What are  you doing?"

My wife grew up in apartments in the Bronx and the kitchen sink was the natural spot to dispose of grease. At least the way she was raised and observed. And I'm sure untold others in apartment houses. Everything that goes wrong is the landlord's problem, not yours.

Home ownership is different, and I explained that the grease will cause clogs. When it's liquefied it should be poured into a coffee can and then eventually discarded in the trash, or poured outside on the ground. (I know, that last part is probably now considered environmentally unsound.) It was bad enough that the sewer line was back pitched as it connected to the street, and there were three trees on the front lawn, one a giant pin oak, whose roots sought water and would work there way into the terra cotta drain pipes through the joints and eventually cause clogs on their own.

The Kilgannon reveals another aspect of New York City, the multi-generational employment at the same type pf job within families. Cops and firemen are the usual occupations thought of when you think multi-generational careers within the same family. That show I never watched, 'Blue Bloods' was all about a family of police officers.

But it is revealed that Mr. Kilgannon comes across a third generation sewer worker at one of the plants, who suffers the joke that sewer water runs in his veins.

The most famous NYC sewer worker would of course be the fictional Ed Norton from Jackie Gleason's 'The Honeymooners' series. Unless it comes on as a New Year's Day marathon, 'The Honeymooners' is slipping into ancient, unseen television.

Norton of course was Ralph Kramden's neighbor and sidekick who lived upstairs in that cold water flat on Chauncey Street, in the Canarsie section of Brooklyn.

Norton, played by Ed Norton always came downstairs and told Ralph, Jackie Gleason, how hard a day he had working in the sewer. Ralph always tried to top him with how hard it was to be a bus driver in Manhattan on he Madison Avenue route.

I don't know if there was ever an episode where Ed described taking on a fatberg, but in an episode of 'Younger' the boy friend Enzo (from Staten Island, of course), of the prim and proper coiffed clothes horse, publishing editor Diana Trout, is rescued from a fatberg that has him pinned in the sewer. His rescue of course makes the TV evening news. 

All of which goes to show you that NYC sewers are interesting, even if Orson Wells isn't running through them.

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The Pitchman

I didn't see the video link myself, but read about from a Tweet by @coreykilgannon, a NYT reporter who apparently has enough seniority and proven talent that the paper lets him roam around a bit and pick what he's going to write about. 

Thus, he gets to go to news conferences held by Mayor Big Bird, Bill de Blasio, and the tough-talking New York governor, Andrew Cuomo. Broadway is closed, but the one-man show is alive and playing in full view in New York.

Apparently the governor had played into the image for Dr. Anthony Fauci being "New York Tough." It's not hard to consider that Dr. Fauci fits that image, having been born in Brooklyn, and outwardly resembling anyone's memory of Phil Rizzuto, the Hall of Fame shortstop for the New York Yankees and long-time Yankee broadcaster who once proved his New York roots on the air by telling us he went to Richmond Hill High School and had the future mayor, Abe Beame, for an accounting teacher. I swear to God. No wonder Abe was comptroller first, then mayor. He learned and then taught black and red ink.

According to Mr. Kilgannon the video link with the Guv and the Doc went something like this:

Governor Cuomo had Fauci on video link and proposed doing an ad telling NYers the vaccine is safe. 

Guv: "You can be De Niro or Pacino. Which one do you want to be?" 

Fauci: "I don't want to hurt the feelings of the other."

Dr. Fauci's reply is a testament to how a man can be 79 years old and still be employed. The Governor of course is showing the kind of verbal style he favors: in your face, tough talk from people born in an outer borough where members of organized crime families live.

But what about Joe Namath? I mean, you win one Super Bowl in 51 years ago and you still have name recognition in New York! That's a testament to how big you were, even if it was 51 years ago and you held your index finger up as you trotted off the field after upsetting the Baltimore Colts and the oddsmakers in 1969.

I don't know if Joe's commercial for a Medicare Advantage Plan from some insurer (the call is free) floods the shows you watch, but I'm seeing the guy in my sleep, gesturing with those hands that stuffed the ball so often into the bellies of his backfield mates and threw so many interceptions that you wondered if the guy was color blind and couldn't tell the difference in uniform colors on the field, telling me to call and make sure I'm getting all the benefits I'm entitled to. (Jesus, they do sound good.)

And since I'm of the age and demographic that Joe is pitching to, I would make the call if I wasn't so well insured already.

The Guv is obviously thinking in modern day video terms of what the Uncle Sam "I Want You" recruitment poster should look like when he wants us to get some shots in the arm and do our bit to save mankind and get that bar in Staten Island that's been unfairly closed, reopened. 

There was a deli in my Flushing neighborhood that once displayed a sign behind the counter that they wanted you to consider to be the 11th Commandment: Thou Shall Not Hassle. The deli was run by a young couple who seemed to have fallen out of a Volkswagen bus on the way back from Woodstock. They were so freaking slow to cut the cold cuts that they read your mind.

Unfortunately, some other candidates are not alive to make the vaccine presentation in all needed media outlets.

To keep the tough guy image going, James Gandolfini as Tony Soprano would be good be good if De Niro and Pacino balk at the idea. Alas, Jim is no longer with us.

And the actress who played Mother Nature all those years ago, Dena Dietrich, who threatened lightning, thunder and flood waters if we considered Chiffon fake butter (margarine) to be better than natural butter. "It's not nice to fool Mother Nature."

My choice for vaccine pitchman would be Dr. Jack Kervorkian, if only the assisted-suicide doc were himself still alive. "Why get whacked...listen to Dr, Jack..."

The Guv of course is being modest. He would be the perfect threatening pitchman for taking the vaccine, but only if Maria DeCotis gets to lip synch the Guv's warning, an offer no one should refuse (Get it?): "Give me the vaccine, or give me death."

Start making some phone calls.

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Those Childhood Traits

Those childhood traits can really stay with you. And what can be more fun than to see them in your own kids follow them into adulthood? And then tell them that you always knew something would come of them.

Take my youngest daughter Susan. She's still the youngest, but at 38 it can be agreed she's firmly in a youthful middle-age, and I'm an old man. It's all true.

At an early age she exhibited a desire for language to be precise. "Susan, could you please pass the butter?" "Sure." No movement. Pause "Okay, okay, would you please pass the butter?" "Sure." Butter is passed.

She was always driven up a wall whenever I suggested that something was "more or less..." "Well, what is it? More, or less?" Ambivalence was not acceptable. She'd certainly have trouble with quantum physics and Q bits when two opposite things can occupy the same space at the same time. But then again, we'd all have trouble with that.

My wife and I recognized she'd head into academics, and she did, becoming a Speech Language professor, right now at Hofstra, with a fairly newly minted Ph.D.  When she was an undergrad at Geneseo she took an interest in my desire to try and find out what were words called that were spelled the same, pronounced differently, and meant different things? They're not as common as you might think.

I'd make a list: tear/tear; wind/wind; read/read. I even made a colorful graphic display that I have framed, and that I made a gift to her that she hangs in her office. She's the one who chased down faculty at Geneseo and got the profs to come up with the word used to describe such words: homographs. I'm still adding to the list, but they come quite slowly now.

Being sensitive to language and I've read that there is a rule governing the use of "much" and "many." You wouldn't think there would be, but that's our complicated tongue.

Much apparently is used to describe something that is rather non-quantifiable, non-countable, "too much water," "too much sand," things like that.

Many is used when the object can be reasonably quantifiable; too many people in the room...too many oranges to buy.

It would seem to be a bit slippery. Too much to drink...too many drinks...drinking too much, or too many? Yikes.

So, when my word sensitive daughter helped me carry a rather large cedar planter I just built out of the garage and noticed what looked like a flaw in the construction, she remarked, "why the mistake there?"

I explained it was an error that I was aware of where the miter joints were not flush due to two thicknesses of the cedar planks. I explained I used some scraps I had in addition to the fresh supply we brought back from the lumber yard.

The variance in thickness threw off the bottom mitered trim, but I didn't care. In the spring it was eventually going to be positioned toward the back where it wouldn't be seen.

Susan went into some distinction between mistake and error. She soon sent me links explaining when to use which one. Jesus, really? 

The difference between error and mistake is in the context that they are used in. A mistake is usually accidental, you know it is wrong. Otherwise, an error is usually made do to lack of knowledge and is more formal than mistake. "Machines never make mistakes, but rather they make errors"

One wonders how the Republicans are describing the voting tallies. People made a lot of mistakes, or there were a lot of errors?

What about boo-boos? What are they? It is confusing.

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Commonplace Book, Chapter 3

Time for another installment. Will be leading off with a quote from someone from over 50 years ago, a memory I hold onto, along with Susan Piermont's two sons, Dave and Dennis, whose apartment I was over that Thanksgiving in 1967. They lived on West 55th Street, and since the brothers and I were over 18 at the time, we could legally drink in NYC. And we did, after dinner. I'm sure we also played pool as well at Broadway Billiards, long gone.

The father Sidney was alive then, as was his bachelor brother, Benny, a veteran of WW I. Both fellows contentedly fell asleep in their arm chairs after dinner. The reference to Campbell's is the famous funeral parlor on Madison Avenue that has been burying New Yorkers of means for decades. They still do.

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On our leaving the apartment to go drinking and play pool, the mother, gesturing to the sleeping fellows...

"I hope I don't have to call Campbell's twice tonight."

--November 1967.

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With this next installment I can't help but notice out quotes from two people I miss most: Russell Baker and Robert McG. Thomas Jr. Baker of course was a two-time Pulitzer-winning columnist for the NYT who in his final column told us he's been trying to create a ballet of words in a phone booth with a 750 word column. How I wish he could have been around to guide us through President Trump, actually any president for that matter. There no doubt there would be more quotes to remember.

And McG. Thomas is the great obituary writer for the NYT who died far too soon, at 60 in 2000. At this point in my life it's beyond likelihood that I'll ever find myself in a journalism class, but I'd like to think his work makes it into someone's syllabus. McG. gave us the send off for the fellow who perfected kitty litter, Edward Lowe, as we know it today, and the Goat Man, Charles McCartney, who of course spent so much time with his goats in the school bus he lived in he couldn't possibly escape being called the Goat Man.

I remember reading the obit on the Goat Man one morning on the way into work in 1998. I was excited by it and insisted that the fellow who sat next to him give it a read. "You want me to read an obituary?" "Yeah, I do."

In the collection of McG.'s obituaries, "52McGs." there is a reprint of the NYT obituary that he earned when he passed away in January 2000. The obiturist, Michael T. Kaufman tracks McG's life from Shelbyville, Tenn. to joining the NYT as a copyboy in 1959, having flunked out of Yale due to his lifestyle decision to, as McG. described it, "to major in New York rather than anything academic."

What a way to put it. I would have never thought that's why I left two colleges and set out to work full-time at a health insurer that I stayed at for 43 years; attend every New York Ranger home game for 11 years with my season tickets; practically live at Madison Square Garden for other events like boxing and college basketball; shoot pool at various pool halls in Manhattan and Queens; drink fairly prodigious amounts of beer; go to Aqueduct and Belmont racetracks on a regular basis on Saturdays and other days off. Come to think of it, I'm not really given enough credit for still being alive at nearly 72. 

McG it seems liked the life he found in New York after a day's work at the NYT. At the end of the introduction to the book "52McGs," Thomas Mallon tells us:  

"He was a bon vivant," remembers Bill Brink, "who would literally grab people in the elevators or lobby to get them to go to dinner. We'd start out as a twosome and end up as five." At the restaurant "he'd put together the most eclectic table arrangements, pretty girls next to grizzled newspapermen."

How I'd love to have been scooped up and hauled off for dinner. I've been reading obituaries for decades, before and after McGill, and no one did it better than he did.

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For diplomatic Ruth, having Hilton home all day is like having a piano in the kitchen: “It’s beautiful, but it’s in the way.”

--John J. O’Connor, NYT, September 16, 1996, review of “Cosby” a new Bill Cosby television show.

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Too much of a good thing is wonderful.

--Mae West

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You live life looking forward, you understand life looking backward.”

--Soren Kierkegaard

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The best thing about the future is that it only comes one day at a time.

--Abraham Lincoln; used in an ad for American General Financial Group

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Sloan Simpson, the beautiful young fashion model who married New York’s handsome postwar Mayor, William O’Dwyer, divorced him after his sudden term as Ambassador to Mexico and then became a darling of the jet set as the ruler of Acapulco society, died yesterday at her home in Dallas.  She was 80.

Miss Simpson, who told friends she would never marry unless she found a man with wealth and a title, had her share of titled suitors and romances with wealthy men, but never found one with both qualifications.

--Robert McG. Thomas Jr., NYT Obituary, November 1996

She remained unmarried certainly because if she found a man with one quality, he lied about the other.

--Anonymous

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A prominent industrialist was kidnaped on Tuesday, and two men, at least one a career criminal, were arrested after payment of a $500,000 ransom and the springing of a trap by the police and the F.B.I.

They picked up the ransom and released Mr. Wais, unharmed, and with $20 for cab fare, at a busy intersection near Golden Gate Park.  As the kidnapers drove off, police officers in an unmarked car rammed their van and arrested Mr. Taylor and Mr. Robinson.

“They wanted a million dollars,” Mr. Wais told reporters.  “I didn’t have quite that much on me.”

--NYT, 1996

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I didn’t need to go to The Lion’s Head last Saturday night to remember that whisky-golden time.

I will be handed a menu in some restaurant and remember the night a man fell dead of a heart attack at the table beside me and someone asked the waitress, “What did he order?”

--Pete Hamill, NYT, October 18,1996, on his memories of  The Lion’s Head pub as it was about to close for good.

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But maybe the best way to revisit Dawn Powell’s New York would be to drop by Chumley’s, a former speak-easy with a still unmarked door, guzzle two or three gin martinis in quick succession, and rush out into the streets before the buzz wears off.  Any city can look magical when you’re bombed, as Powell, Gousha [her husband], and their friends were.  Considering how much alcohol they consumed, it’s amazing that Powell was so productive. It’s also fair to say that the city looks after drunks. If she’d moved to the country, like Jackson Pollack, she might well have run into a tree.

--Herbert Muschamp, NYT, December 4, 1998

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Since it is Christmas, a day on which nobody reads a newspaper anyhow, and since this is the last of these columns titled “Observer” which have been appearing in The Times since 1962, I shall take the otherwise inexcusable liberty of talking about me and newspapers.  I love them.

--Russell Baker, NYT, December 25, 1998, last Observer column

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The writer Tony Hiss, who spent two years shadowing Mr. Youngman for a New Yorker profile, once counted 80 jokes in 15 minutes; calculating that given the number of Mr. Youngman’s club dates and the size of his audiences during his 67-year career, he had produced 3.25 billion laughs, “and that’s not counting his work in elevators.”

--Robert McG. Thomas, Jr., NYT February 28, 1998, reporting on the memorial service.

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I have all the money I’ll ever need— if I die by four o’clock.

--Henny Youngman

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Accounting is the world’s second oldest profession.  It was invented to track the proceeds from that which was first.

--Anonymous

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