Keep it Secure

Once again, a Tweet from the NYT reporter Corey Kilgannon (@CoreyKilgannon) has been my muse.

I don't know exactly where Mr. Kilgannon lives, but I have a feeling from other Tweets that it is somewhere in upper Manhattan. Doesn't matter. He walks around the city. And of course if you have a smartphone, you have a camera. He might use a "real" camera, but there is a decreasing need to carry one around. 

Mr. Kilgannon shares the above photo of someone who has secured their outdoor Halloween skeleton decoration to their stoop railing with a bicycle lock and a padlock. Good thinking.

With a little imagination, you might think the skeleton belongs to the escape artist Harry Houdini, as if he failed decades ago to get out of the restraints he put himself in, thus decaying away to what you see today. A somewhat gruesome fate.

The point is, you have to secure things you put outside in New York. I've seen significantly large stone planters in front of apartment houses with a chain around them, securing the planter to a railing. You would need a forklift to make off with the pot, but since anything's possible, better safe than sorry.

Bikes of course are secured to parking sign posts, sometimes elaborately securing the front and back wheels. Sometimes if space is an issue, the owner removes the front wheel and secures it with the back wheel. The owner sometime takes one of the wheels with them. Who wants a bike you can't ride away on?

I once read of people in Manhasset who have expensive bonsai plants in their yards who have taken to cabling them to fences. Apparently, there has been a rash of bonsai thefts.

Stores near Penn Station that cater to tourists put luggage outside their store fronts secured with a cable through the handles to prevent a piece being walked off with. If shoes are displayed, only one of the pair is on outdoor display. If you want to score with a left and right, you have to settle for a pair that won't match, much less probably not fit.

Years ago when we had the family shop on 18th Street and 3rd Avenue, the Bowery guys who might wander above 14th Street would scoop up some geraniums and head for the nearest gin mill to try and convince the bartender into a trade for a shot of something. Anything.

It wasn't hard to catch up to these guys and convince them that the plants didn't belong to them. That task always fell to me. I don't know how many geraniums I saved from being bar-room barter.

New York's not necessarily an outright tough place, but you do have to secure what's yours, even if it's a skeleton.

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I Am an Old Paint

A long time ago I remember my favorite columnist, Russell Baker, wrote a column on how he found himself catching up on the news by pulling out recently discarded newspapers when he was painting, using them either as improvised drop cloths or surfaces to clean brushes on by stroking the brush back and forth to remove excess paint before trying to really get them clean with water or mineral spirits.

As he spread the newspaper pages out he found himself drawn to reading, or re-reading some of the stories. Some he had missed, and some were actually funny now that a week or so had passed since Election Day and the results were in and certified. So and so who looked like a slam dunk didn't win, or the underdog indeed finished like a beaten dog.

Re-reading the papers can slow up the paint project, but you can gain some new knowledge. As I have embarked recently on painting the shed, I hadn't realized that an Italian man won the 100 meter dash at the 2020 Olympics, of course recently held in 2021 in Tokyo due to the Covid-19 pandemic. I also didn't know there are 10,000 shades of white paint. I recently read someone developed the whitest white paint. Maybe that now means there are 10,001 shades of white paint.

I try and read the WSJ A-Hed pieces, and even if I've fallen behind on keeping up with the print editions I get delivered, I try and isolate the A-Hed pieces for must reading later

Thus, I was surprised, but happy, to be spreading newspaper pages out to clean brushes when I came across one of the WSJ inimitable A-Hed pieces by Melissa Korn, "Cotton Balls, Snowflake or Static? Decision Seems Make-or-Break. Proliferation of nearly identical shades of white paint stupefies home decorators." that I had clearly missed.

Ms Korn points out what the lockdown DIYs have discovered about painting anything around the home or apartment—there are A LOT of colors to choose from. 

Thankfully, no one paint store offers all 10,001 shades of white. Ms Korn tells us "Benjamin Moore offers a collection of 152 of the 'most requested off-white colors...' Behr's website lists 167 white options. PPG, which owns the Glidden line, has 315 at Home Depot." Thank goodness for small favors.

I have probably been painting home surfaces inside and out since I was 10. I'm now 72 and still wield a brush or roller when needed. I watched and helped my father suffer through painting ceilings in the 1950s with a brush, since no one told him about 9 inch rollers.

And then when he caught on with a roller, he didn't know about using a pole to attach the roller handle to and work from the floor to paint a ceiling, rather than climbing up and down on a ladder that had to be constantly moved. The learning curve in my house was huge.

But that's how I learned; watching the learning curve unfold until now I have to say I've been a state-of-the-art house painter for decades.

The only white surfaces in our house are the ceilings. And they are painted unfailingly with "ceiling white" paint. No swatch selections. Just however many gallons of ceiling white that I need. Door and baseboard trim is just white, perhaps "semi-gloss, linen white." I do not get paralyzed by the choices, as the people described in the A-Hed piece do. But then again, they are making rookie mistakes.

There is a great scene in the Cary Grant, Myrna Loy movie "Mr. Blandings Builds his Dream House" where Myrna tells the contractor that she wants a shade of green for maybe the sewing room of the still being constructed house to be matched to the green found on a can of peas at the A.& P. (A now long defunct supermarket.)

She goes on and on to the contractor about yellows and reds that can be found on other cans and in nature. The contractor listens politely, removes the cigar from his mouth, and when Myrna is out of earshot tells his assistant: "green, yellow, red." Case closed. 

Think of what choices she could have presented the contractor with if she was armed with all the shades on display now. The movie would need an intermission.

My father hit on the off-white fad in the late 50s when he saw that the apartments being built in NYC were using plasterboard painted white rather than the outgoing method of building walls with a wood lath and plaster combination. Plastering as a building trades skill was going the way of prefabricated gypsum board nailed to studs and finished off with tape and a white spackle, painted over with a sort of cheap whitewash. The resulting color was decidedly off-white, yours to do what you want with.

As a kid, I remember the advertising taken out by the plasterers' union on the Third Avenue buses that rolled past the flower shop that boldly told you to KEEP NEW YORK PLASTERED. Some took this to have a double meaning. On Third Avenue, there were plenty of bars to get started on that endeavor.

Thus, every room in our house in Flushing was painted using an off-white shade. It seemed then there was only one off-white, so the selection process was easy. My father came home with gallons of off-white paint and rolled away.

The conniptions the people described in Ms. Korn's piece have at choosing a color are comically—at least to me. But they do ring true. My daughter Susan and her husband Greg have recently bought a home and I think there were at least 5 color swatches on the dining room wall before they decided on the color they finally used. It looks nice. And that they only worked from 5 choices is admirable.

I like the couple that now laugh at themselves over their protracted indecision in choosing a color for the bathroom. Ms. Korn tells us "the two have been married for 12 years and laugh about the absurdity of their indecision. Ms. Ahmed joked online that the two choices were 'as different as day and seconds later that day.'"

My advice to anyone choosing a color is to think fast, choose, and live with it. It won't kill you. Now picking out wallpaper, that's a whole other story. Bring a change of clothes when you start to go over all those sample books.

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Magnetic Attraction

If anything, I'm amazed that I'm not amazed at anything anymore. Take magnet fishing, which seems to be the latest pandemic lockdown activity that is apparently taking off like Jeff Bezos.

I've heard of how many bikes they fish out of Amsterdam's canals, but magnet fishing goes beyond that. For the price of a strong magnet attached to a rope and dropped into a body of water, Europeans, and now Americans are enjoying pulling things out of the water that attach themselves to the magnet.

There is very rarely anything of monetary value that gets hauled out. The WSJ today does one of their inimitable A-Hed pieces by Ian Lovett on the pursuit of happiness that has evolved since the lockdowns caused by Covid-19 have taken populations away from their usual recreational ones and pushed them into new ones.

The social media platforms of TikTok and YouTube are the Super Spreaders as you might expect. No vaccinations needed there. Just access to the Internet.

Some localities around the globe are frowning on the practice, since the "fishermen" just leave their catch on the dry land they were standing on, usually creating a pile of wet, rusting, slimy junk that just needs to be hauled off by the garbageman.

To me, the most interesting items retrieved are guns. One can imagine a cold case getting solved now that the weapon has been found. So-and so will now get arrested now that the weapon is traced. Or, at least that's the fantasy.

Safes are another item that create intrigue. Have they already been opened? Emptied? Still full of passports and soggy cash because the perps were not good enough to get them open? How big are these safes? The article doesn't say, but even a small safe can hold some mighty valuable things. 

When they finally found the fugitive Whitey Bulger they found $800,000 stuffed in the walls of his condo. Given that this was an outlier haul, and on dry land, it is probably unreasonable to expect to find a watery safe stuffed with anywhere near as much money, but one can dream. Magnet fishing is the stuff dreams are made of.

Bikes and shopping carts are the most prosaic of the items retrieved—and the least interesting, unless of course there's a bike that can be attributed to Lance Armstrong that has traces of banned steroids. But he's old news these days anyway.

Unexploded ordnance from WWII has been found, and even a toilet, although you wouldn't expect a toilet to have enough metal on it to attract a magnet. But there you have it.

And while a briefcase filled with old vegetables doesn't quite exactly remind me of my father's briefcase, it does make me think of the memories I have of what he kept in his—unopened mail.

As with a toilet, you wouldn't expect a briefcase to throw off enough of a magnetic detectable field, but I guess the clasps and perhaps the handle bracket were enough to create attachment to a magnet.

As for my father's briefcase, it was a solid, square-cornered one from the 60s and 70s, long before adult males started using backpacks and L.L. Bean bags. He traveled back and forth from Washington D.C. to NYC nearly every week of the year, and aside from the room he needed to carry the quart of scotch that he treated himself to as he rode the rails, he carried the mail—his mail, unopened and unimportant mail. He carried unopened junk mail.

He was a terrific procrastinator, and that extended to his mail. He also had trouble throwing anything out. He looked at his mail, but that which wasn't important enough was left unopened and carried back and forth with him until he was basically carrying several pounds of unopened junk mail.

It was never apparent to me how much junk mail he was giving round trips to Washington until he retired and was admitted to a hospital. It was then the briefcase lay in one place and was up to me to go through it at his request to "see what I've got in there."

Massive amounts of ads and junk mail, offers for all kinds of financial, credit card  deals, and most notable, swatches of cloth from Haband, the folks who made men's pants that you could order through the mail.

This is decades before online shopping. HABAND FOR MEN offered samples of different fabrics and colors that you could make a wardrobe from. At least the pants. There may have been other items offered, but it was always the offer to stitch you a pair—or several pairs—of pants to your specifications that I remember most.

My father never ordered any pants through the mail, preferring instead to buy used suits from a tailor on 18th Street, just west of the flower shop, Witt and Panatella, a few doors down from Pete's Tavern. My father came of age during the Depression, so new was not something he was used to. Our house was furnished with used furniture throughout. The only new piece I can remember was a couch he and mother once bought that was a Castro convertible. No one was putting those out on the curb.

Magnet fishing I'm sure is not here to stay. There are those who go fish fishing who catch and release what they catch, not bothering to keep what they caught. No cleaning, cooking and eating it. Just hanging out, hauling a catch in, and unhooking it and releasing it back in the water.

The only difference with those kinds of fisherman and magnet fishermen is that Magnet fisherman don't throw their catch back in the water.

This has to at least make the environmentalists happy.

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The Loss

They all lose eventually. Teams, race horses, boxers, individual competitors of all sorts. You can probably count on two hands the number that have gone into the night undefeated. They are few and far between.

And of course it happened when I was on vacation. Matt Amodio's run as Jeopardy champion ended Monday, October 11. And I didn't know until I was sitting in my wife's cousin's living room on Tuesday, October 12 and the show came on at 7:30 in Centerville, Massachusetts. Matt was not amongst those introduced as that night's contestants. He was history.

Vacation started on Saturday October 9th as we checked into the Hyannis Harbor Hotel in Hyannis,  Massachusetts. We've been staying there for the last several years on our annual trip to the Cape to sightsee, shop, and see my wife's cousin and her family.

It seems the latest trend in bed making for some hotels is to arrange as many pillows as they can on the bed for decoration and function. In this case there were eight! pillows stacked in an wedge arrangement that let you see every pillow.

And every time I see this I think there are probably three school-age brothers in Uruguay who go to bed at night sharing a soccer ball as a pillow. My sense of entitlement kicks in, but doesn't last long. Not when I figure that the number of pillows relates to the room rate. Sort of like the $$$ signs posted on the Web for restaurant reviews and how much an average meal might cost.

Thankfully, I had the foresight to program the recording of Jeopardy back home, knowing that we enter a bit of self-imposed blackout from news when we vacation. So when the lights went up on Tuesday's Jeopardy and the contestants were introduced and Matt Amodio was not among them, I knew there had been an upset. 

Warner Wolfe used to cry, "Let's go to the video tape," as part of his sportscast. So I knew I'd be going to my DVR recording on Monday's coup when we got back home.

Matt Amodio

Matt, as champion gets to kick off the selection, and naturally went to a $1,000 clue. Matt's strategy, and that of one of his predecessor champion James Holzauer, is to try and build a nest egg and then make as big a bet as you can if you get the Daily Double option, hoping to build an even bigger nest egg.

The strategy of going for the highest denomination has the effect of building a war chest if you answer correctly, but also of taking the high dollar amounts off the board from the other contestants if you flub the answer. There is one less high dollar choice left for the others to try and build a nest egg for their pursuit of the Daily Double. It's a smart, aggressive, competitive way to play.

Matt gets off to a bit of stuttering start, but quickly regained momentum and had his usual comfortable lead after the first round; $9,800. to Jessica's $2,400 to Jonathan's $400. All the makings of another Amodio steam rolling job were there.

Jessica Stephens

Definitely a reversal of fortune by the end of the second round. Matt keeps winning the buzzer battle, but starts missing the answers, four in quick succession. He's looking a bit tense, and perhaps distracted. He's in new waters.

Jonathan gets both Daily Doubles, back-to-back, but only answers the second one correctly, and only after making very conservative bets of $2,000 and $3,000 bets. At the end of the Double Round, when the dust settles and the buzzers are put down, Matt is in third place with only $10,600 to Jessica's $14,400 to Jonathan's $14,600. 

Matt is hardly in his usual can't lose position. He doesn't have more than two times the amount of money of either of the other contestants. If this were a horse race, it would be three of them across the track inside the sixteenth pole (less than 110 yards to go). It's anybody's race.

Final Jeopardy category: Countries of the World.

Nazi Germany annexed the nation and divided it into regions of the Alps and the Danube; the Allies later divided it into 4 sectors.

Having watched the Joseph Cotten, Orson Welles movie The Third Man several times, I was certain the answer was Austria. Matt bet smartly with $5,000, which would make him the winner if the others failed to answer correctly, and he nailed the answer. But Matt's answer of Poland was an absolute dud. You start to feel Matt's going to lose.

With a correct answer and Jonathan faltering, Jessica will win with the right bet and the right answer. With the right bet and the right answer Jonathan will win no matter what Jessica does. It's going to be a photo finish.

Jessica bets all but a dollar. Double her money will not exceed double Jonathan's money. She does her best with a $14,399 bet and a correct answer, Austria, giving her $28,799. 

Jonathan basically needs to bet it all and get the answer right to finish ahead of Jessica. He answers Austria. He bets it all, and therefore finishes with $29,200 and becomes the New Jeopardy Champion.

So, after 38 consecutive wins, second to Ken Jennings, and with $1,518,601 won, third behind Ken Jennings and James Holzhauer, Matt's reign is over.

If Ken, James and Matt were thoroughbreds they would be worth a lot at stud and we'd we seeing their offspring compete within four years. But it works quite a bit differently for us humans. But with Jeopardy's continued popularity there is the chance that a contestant's offspring can qualify for the show and perhaps have as big a winning streak as dads Ken, James and Matt.

And how about Jonathan? Is he a one-hit wonder? Apparently not. He's come through four more times, therefore capping off a perfect week.

Streak champions like Ken, James and Matt don't come around often. But when they do, the rest of the world starts to pay attention, not just the Jeopardy fans. It becomes almost like Joe DiMaggio's hitting streak. Non-baseball fans start asking, "Did he hit one today?" vs. did the Yankees win?

Jonathan Fisher

Go Jonathan, catch them if you can.

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The Saloonkeeper

If you follow the tribute obits in the NYT you already know they cover a wide variety of people and their current or former occupations. If you're insecure, you might read them and feel you never accomplished anything. Of course that's not true. For one, you're still alive to read them.  

Between yesterday and today the occupations of the deceased have ranged from a global-minded chief of Merrill Lynch, 82; a baseball lifer who won the 1948 title with Cleveland, 100; A salsa musician, 81; an announcer on The Letterman Show, 78; a Carnegie Hall backstage comforter, 71; and an inventive microwave guru, 86. But not one saloonkeeper, although a legendary one has passed away.

Jimmy Neary, 91, owner of Neary's Pub on East 57th Street near First Avenue, has passed away. Jimmy was well known and hosted celebrities, and non-celebrities of all stripes at his bar and restaurant. He was the subject of newspaper stories and documentaries. He was basically the Irish Toots Shor, although I haven't read anyone compare him to Toots.

It was one such story a few years ago that I read about Jimmy that told us he was from Tubbercurry, Co. Sligo. Ireland. My wife's father, Patrick Brennan, was from Tubbercurry as well. Although it was unlikely that Patrick knew Jimmy, being born in 1904 and having passed away in 1980, my wife and I took in a meal at Neary's after a Carnegie Hall concert, hoping to at least share a story about a common background.

Unfortunately, Jimmy wasn't there at the time, having taken in a late afternoon nap back at the apartment. Even by the time we left, Jimmy still hadn't come back to the restaurant. Having never gone back, we never did get to meet him.

I will never forget when I was making the funeral arrangements at F.X. McKeon funeral home in the Bronx for Patrick the care I took to have a death notice printed in the Daily News that recounted that he was from Tubbercurry, Co. Sligo, Ireland. Tubbercurry is not easy to spell.

I must have gotten things right in the death notice, because one afternoon when it was just my wife and I at the funeral home, an elderly couple came by to pay their respects. Neither my wife or I knew them. They were complete strangers, but they were originally from Ireland and read about Patrick's passing and that he was from Sligo.

They said some nice things and asked about my wife's mother. We explained she was still back at the apartment and would be there in the evening.  When they asked what part of Ireland Helen came from, they were visibly distressed to hear my wife tell them that she was from Liverpool, England. She was English.

The thought of an English/Irish marital union unnerved them. They politely withdrew and went down the hall to view another deceased they didn't know, but one I'm sure they were hoping had a more total Irish background.

I learned of Jimmy Neary's passing through a Tweet by the NYT reporter Corey Kilgannon (@coreykilgannon) who posted a link to the obit by the Irish Central (@irishcentral). It's a great obit and carries with it a video of Jimmy waltzing gracefully with his daughter Una to the Tennessee Walt at the restaurant. Una's day job is being a compliance officer and partner at Goldman Sachs and waitressing at the restaurant in the evenings.

My father-in-law always told us that Tubbercurry was full of Brennans, and that his bunch came from Station Road. My wife an I on a 1977 drive through Tubbercurry noticed several stores whose proprietors were named Brennan. We were a bit pressed for time, so we didn't try and stir up the lineage. Typical New Yorkers in a rush, I guess.

For the Irish, life on Earth is just a prelude to a good wake, and I'm sure one for Jimmy is on its way. And even though the tribute section of the Times has passed on writing an obit, Jimmy's children have filled us all in with three columns of an agate type death notice that doesn't come cheap.

Today and tomorrow there is a wake at Frank Campbell's, with a mass at 10 A.M. of Christian burial at St. Patrick's on Saturday.

With Jimmy's passing, there is one less saloonkeeper in New York City. There can't be many more left.

Note:

The NYT caught up to Jimmy's passing with a tribute obit published on October 12. Jimmy had passed away on October 1 at his home in Manhattan.

It's a great obit in that in the lede the writer Alex Vadukul avoids calling Neary's a "watering-hole" but rather a "canteen for the city's power brokers."

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The New Generation

I must have been tired when I first read the A-Hed piece in today's Wall Street Journal about the complaints the older mobsters have regarding the younger generation coming up. "Everything is on the phones with them." I just plain didn't see the immediate humor in the older Godfathers complaining about the Godsons and their constant use of wireless technology rather than taking a walk outside and whispering in someone's ear.

Anyone who has reached a certain age knows that there are full-sized humans who do things differently than they ever did. Just today, I happened to be in the city on the subway and was surrounded by people who had their heads down and were peering into their phones. Some were even talking into them. Facebook must have been back up.

It wasn't until the NYT reporter Corey Kilgannon (@coreykilgannon) retweeted an out take someone made from the story and commented that the younger mobsters reliance on wireless technology to deliver threatening messages has deviated greatly from plopping a dead fish wrapped in newspaper on the bar as their way of saying that future breaths were going to be taken underwater, but for a short time only.

Think of it. Where would a millennial mobster get a dead fish these days anyway? Online from Fresh Direct? Would it get delivered on time?  

The A-Hed piece even reveals that younger mobsters just plain don't kill others the way dad and Uncle Nutso did. "They certainly don't kill people like they used to," said Michael Gaeta, a former FBI agent who investigated organized crime for 12 years. "It attracts too much heat."

Too much heat and probably too many funerals to attend. And all those flowers. Who wants to show id to get all that Claritin these days to stem the tide of sneezing in the funeral homes?

Let's analyze a text from a young mobster to an union official that has become part of a court record.

"Hey [sic] this is the 2nd text, there isnt [sic] going to be a 3rd."

We can't tell if the phone's software created the ordinal numbers, or they were typed in on purpose, but their use is admirable. And no misspellings. The comma is missing after Hey, but commas are harder to understand than the tax code. And they ducked the apostrophe in isn't, choosing not to go to another panel of special characters, but no one knows how to use an apostrophe these days anyway. 

Aside from the younger generation's use of technology that wasn't widely available even 20 years ago, there is the matter of the organization of organized crime. They need consultants. 

The old guys who somehow were not eliminated in sweeping outplacement policy purges, just plain don't go off into a polyester tracksuit haven in Florida anymore and leave the youngsters in charge. There is no smooth transition of power. No succession plan.

One of the immediate contrasts between John Lindsay when he be came mayor of NYC after the three-term Mayor Robert Wagner was his immediate use of hiring consultants from the Rand Corporation to reorganize the massive city agencies that stretched across the five boroughs.

Whether anyone thinks things were improved is a matter for another story, but it sounds like Organized Crime needs some outside advice on how to run things.

It is not likely to happen, because what set of consultants wants a report with their name on it telling the five New York families how to run things? The columnist Jimmy Breslin would have done it for free, but he passed away.

Jimmy of course wrote the bestseller about the Boys from Brooklyn in The Gang That Couldn't Shoot Straight. It now sounds like aimed weaponry isn't their problem. They're the Gang That Can't Think Straight.

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