Catch A Rising Star

The group photo that accompanied the obit on Rick Newman, the founding  owner of the comedy club Catch a Rising star, is to me as iconic as the one taken decades ago from he backyard of Café Nicholson in New York's Greenwich Village that shows Gore Vidal and Tennessee Williams at an afternoon lunch. There are other artistic folks captured in the photo taken a few years after WW II.

We now have the passing of Rick Newman, 81, whose comedy club Catch a Rising Star was the springboard for so many singers and comedians. In the photo, left to right are Joe Piscopo, David Brenner, Pat Benatar, Richard Belzer, Robin Williams, Neil Geraldo, and Rick Newman.

These people are in their prime, and enjoying their popularity. Richard Belzer has just passed away, and of course Robin Williams passed away several years ago, having committed suicide.

To lose Williams to suicide is the polar opposite of what we associate with someone who was I think the funniest comedian I ever listened to. I still shake my head that he committed suicide. But drugs and medication, coming in and out of them leaves the mind in an altered state and in no position to see things as funny and positive. The dark side of being funny.

Williams is almost smiling. The other are having a riotous time, but Williams has to stand still for the photo, and standing still is not something he's used to.

Watching Williams again on the Johnny Carson show via You Tube, or anywhere else is, to behold a true comic genius whose mind moved faster than a cyclotron.  And team him up alongside his idol Jonathan Winters, and your sides will hurt from laughing, His appearance on the stage of the Metropolitan Opera house is beyond belief.

In the obit for Newman there is mention of an appearance by Williams at the club that went an hour and ten minutes. It was a Springsteen concert. It was never going to end. Just three years before, Williams was only on for a ten minute stint.

Photos like the Café Nicholson and Catch a Rising Star remind me of the documentary I once watched about the people left at Life magazine and the home movie of the office life they enjoyed that was part of the documentary, as they talked of the final closing down of Life magazine. It was sad to listen to people recall when they were kings and queens of the print media mountain, but were now putting the key in the door on the way out. 

In my posting of June 8, 2010 I liken the Café Nicholson photo to a "key race," a race track handicapping angle that recognizes future winners that come out of one race. The photo proved to be a key race photo for my blog, because I made postings on August 3, 2012 and August 9, 2016, using the photo to write of he passing of Gore Vidal and eventually even the owner of  Café Nicholson, Johnny Nicholson.

It's what photos do. They bring back memories. They create nostalgia. I never went to Catch A Rising Star. That part of New York's entertainment offerings was not something I took part in. I did listen to and laugh when the pictured comedians appeared in other venues, but not ones that required me to leave the house and pay a cover charge.

Thomas Wolfe wrote of the majesty of the old Penn Station in New York City, saying, "few buildings are vast enough to hold the sound of time."

A small photo can hold time as well.

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Raquel Welch

It's taken me a few days to put together all the thoughts I have about Raquel Welch. When she passed away at 82 the other day I didn't think there was enough to write about. But after watching some of the video clips on #raquel more thoughts occurred.

There is one clip when she appears on the Dick Cavett show, coming out in a knit, figure hugging minidress that shows all the physical attributes. She's talking about a film she just completed, perhaps Bedazzled where she has a small part playing a devilish temptress. If nothing else, she was always well casted to her attributes.

Dick is sitting with a guest who initially I can't place. It's definitely sometime in the '60s, and the guest, a female, is sitting there in a multi-colored outfit with hair all over the place, smoking a cigarette in a long holder. There's nothing that tells you who the guest is, but after watching a few minutes of the clip it's plain to see it's Janis Joplin, the rock singer who pretty much never got past being a kid before she passed away at the age of 27 in 1970.

When I look at the cover of her LP Pearl I remind myself how much of a kid she really was when she was huge. She's still got a baby face underneath all the feathers and multi-colored hair.

Dick changes his seat next to Janis and moves to the center seat to let Raquel sit to his left as she crosses her legs. Raquel is commenting on some premier she was at where she's being pulled in all directions for someone's attention. Janis adds her experiences with idolatry.

Dick, as usual, displays his wit, as dry as Nebraska wheat in the sun. Dick went to Yale, so his diction is nearly as precise as William F. Buckley Jr. without the tongue rolls and pen clicks.

Dick's talk show was not set behind a desk. Initially it was only on the USA network, and was pretty much unavailable to the average viewer, since cable was not yet in NYC outside of Manhattan. Cable came to the "outer boroughs" only in the early '80s.

I remember when Cavett emerged from behind the scenes as a joke writer for Jack Parr and others and was on the Johnny Carson show one night. He told the story of his being taken as a Midwestern rube when he arrived in New York and someone sold him what was described to him as a priceless Van Gogh drawing. Dick admitted that it turned out to be one of the few drawings Van Gogh did with a ball point pen.

Of curse he told of his adjustment to Yale, when he thought taking a astronomy course would be an easy A because he figured all you had to do was look through a telescope. He later found out how much the course required a solid knowledge of advanced math and physics. It was not an easy A. He did manage to graduate, however.

There is another appearance of Raquel coming out onto the Cavett show some years later where she is dressed in what is anything but a plain knit mini-dress. She emerges in an elaborate gown designed to show off every pert of her body, in a stop traffic outfit, but with taste. Dick has all he can do to stop staring.

When Raquel passed away and I read her NYT obit I was waiting to read about how she started as a billboard girl on The Hollywood Palace, a mid-'60s variety show. No mention. No mention of how she was big in European modeling circles before the doeskin outfit in One Million Years B.C.

The photo at the top shows a smiling Raquel handing the host Victor Borge the billboard cards for the next act on a November 1964 show.  I was in high school then, and when you're a teen-age male in 1964 you don't forget someone who looked like Raquel. I informed the NYT obit editor, William McDonald, they missed it.

Raquel was not Marilyn Monroe, despite being considered a "sex symbol." Marilyn had  passed away in 1962 and is till revered. When Hugh Hefner of Playboy passed away he had his ashes placed in the mausoleum next to Marilyn's ashes.

Raquel didn't sing happy birthday to a president of the United States in Madison Square Garden and wasn't married to a  legendary playwright Arthur Miller, or a legendary ballplayer, Joe DiMaggio. Lyndon Johnson was not likely to act like JFK, at least not as publicly. Elton John is not going to compose an elegy to Raquel's passing, like Candle in the Wind. But Raquel lived a far longer life than Marilyn's suicide shortened life.

I never knew Raquel was of South American descent, with a Bolivian father, but considering her features, the Spanish side comes through. Certainly it did in her name, Jo-Raquel Tejada.

I had forgotten the Broadway stage appearances and critical praise in Woman of the Year. She could sing, dance and passably act, the old triple threat of needed talent, unlike what goes for celebrity status these days if you're a Kardashian, famous for being famous, if you even believe that.

I'm no longer 15 as I was in 1964. I was born at the back end of the '40s. But they're starting to call my class when I realize I'm reading obits about people born at the start of the '40s, like Raquel and baseball's Tim McCarver.

How many more miles to go before I sleep?

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The Deceivers

Maybe it's because my last paying job was in health insurance fraud detection, or maybe it's because I always somewhat marveled at forgers and counterfeiters, that I found the recent book review in the WSJ of Tony Tetro's confessions as a master art forger fascinating on many levels.

The daily WSJ book reviews are great. There are always in the same spot, one page from the last page in the first section. they are always the same length, and are seldom about novels, but rather general interest books on business, science, religion, history and biographies of people you never heard of.

I don't know when my interest in forgers and counterfeiters started, but I distinctly remember when I was a kid I used to get mail from the U.S. Government Printing office listing their publications for sale. I must have ordered one on counterfeiting, probably issued by the Treasury Department. In it I read of a guy who painstakingly drew a decent looking $100 bill, put it on the bar and ordered a drink. The bartender told him to wait, he didn't have enough change yet. While waiting, the bill got wet on the bar and the ink started to run. Uh-oh, trouble. He never got his change, but was rather met by law enforcement.

I've never forgotten that story, and now later in life as I'm older, I wonder if it really happened, or if it was just the U.S. Treasury and Secret Service spinning a good one to would-be, youthful counterfeiters who liked to draw that they we're going to get you. You can't fool Uncle Sam. No matter. I still love the story.

So I forged ahead into Friday's WSJ book review, Con/Artist by Tony Tetro, reviewed by Moira Hodgson with the catchy headline, Forging Ahead. 

Holy cow. It's an autobiography by a guy who is still with us, and who apparently was considered one of the great art forgers of all time until he was brought down, did a little jail time, (very little) and now has to produce art under his signature rather than that of a famous artist's signature, but not before he grew quite rite rich doing what he was doing, oftentimes with the wink-wink of art galleries that just said, give us more.

The book review just about tells us Tony's book is almost a how-to book on creating art forgeries. Well, you do have to be able to draw first, and that's not a talent most of us possess.

And if Tony doesn't bear the strongest resemblance to Sir. Richard Burton, then I'm Liz Taylor. Looks like that and the patter to  go with it, it's no wonder Tony was so good at what he did.

If anyone remembers the show White Collar, you had the Neil Cafferty character played by Matt Bomer who becomes an F.B.I. agent after getting caught and is forgiven for his con artist, counterfeiting and art forgeries if he'll help the F.B.I. Neil is good. We see him baking oil paintings, creating one-of-kind sculptures, and in general being able to fool even the experts, all while working for the F.B.I. in sting operations. To catch a thief, employ a thief.

The theme holds: art forgers do not do serious time. In Tony Tetro's second trial after the first one ended in a hung jury and ruined Tony financially with legal costs, Tony pleads nolo contendere and receives a sentence of 200 hours of community service and is ordered to paint a mural  on a public building. He also has to create prototypes for safety murals as well as getting five year's probation. He was released from jail in 1994.

But what nearly knocked me off the coach was the part in the book review that as a youth Tony picked up a copy of Clifford Irving's book "Fake" about an earlier extraordinaire art forger Elmyr de Hory, and decided that was for him.

I remember when Clifford Irving died in 2018 and wondered who amongst the living might remember his role in the fake will of Howard Hughes. It was a sensational hoax, turned into a movie, turned into a book by Irving on the hoax itself.

In Irving's obit it is speculated that Clifford, after doing the book, "Fake," on the famous forger de Hory, Irving started to think that creating a fake might be for him. He couldn't paint, but he could write.

I have no way of knowing if Ms. Hodgson is aware of Clifford Irving's massive hoodwinking of the publishing world and the media at large. (No Twitter account to ask her.) 

Although an author herself, she doesn't insert anything in her book review text that hints at the massive irony of Tetro taking up his craft after reading Irving's book on another art forger who seems to have inspired Irving to launch his con.

Elmyr de Hory was a Hungarian art forger who eluded the authorities for decades. Even after being caught he only did two months in prison, never being charged with art forgery since the Spainish courts could not prove he committed a crime on their soil. He was released in 1968

So we have the strangest chain reaction of deception being set off by a biography of an art forger by an author who himself later forged a will of a reclusive billionaire Howard Hughes and pulled the wool over everyone's eyes, who himself served as a mentor for another art forger, Tony Tetro. It's enough to make you think we need a vaccine to prevent the spread.

Fake news. Fake stories. Fake Money. Fake art. Fakers. (Congressman George Santos, anyone?) One thing I can say, I can never remember any of the experts on The Antiques Road Show ever using the four-letter word "fake."

They tell the person who brought the object in that it's a reproduction, or not an original. Easy let down.

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Was It the Job Description?

Mukarram Jeh with Princess Ersa in 1967

It's not often a ruler with a title longer than a freight train rolling through Reno at 3 A.M. passes away, but it seems like it just happened.

As I always said, obituaries are informative, like finding out what a nizam is and that India is big enough to told an area the size of Italy. Who knew?

But  the fact remains that Mukarram Jah, who once held the title of what couldn't be placed on an ordinary business card: the Rustam of the Age, the Aristotle of the Times, .the Ruler of the Kingdom, the Conqueror of Dominions, the Regulator of the Realm, the Victor in Battles and the Leader of the Armies, has now passed away at 97, an age that puts his birth in another era, the 1930s world of post- WW I.  It was a very different world. He held more titles than a shelf in the library.

His grandfather was Osman Ali Khan who saw a way to increase the authority of the royalty when Mustafa Kemal Ataturk the founder of modern Turkey overthrew the Ottoman caliph Abdul Mejid. and the grandfather helped the Mejid family. When Osman Ali Khan's two sons married the deposed caliph's daughter and niece, a union between "the mightiest houses of Islam were united" according to the Washington Post at the time.

Osman Ali Khan favored the grandson, Mukarram, as a successor, passing over his eldest son. ("Dad never liked me.") The ex-caliph Abdul Mejid named the still-in-grade-school Mukarram as the next nizam. It almost sounds like the cast from a Bob Hope and Bing Crosby Road movie.

In 1967 Mukarram was crowned the nizam of Hyderabad. India won its independence from Britain in 1947 and invaded the region of Hyderabad. Mukarram's grandfather admitted defeat and the state of Hyderabad was dissolved.

The Indian government however allowed the grandfather to retain his title, but he basically ruled over an imaginary realm. When Mukarram was named nizam he inherited a government of 14,700 people, including 3,000 bodyguards, and 42 concubines. Some jobs were simply to dust the chandeliers. He later discovered there were 4,000 people of the royal purse who simply did not exist.

It was as if he became mayor of NYC and found out there weren't just people working from home, there weren't any people working. It was worse than what in modern parlance is called Lu-Lu's (in lieu of) jobs, jobs that pay but you don't have to show up for in person. In Mukarram's case, there weren't even 4,00 people anywhere. Come on down.

Mukarram found like any reform mayor of NYC, he wasn't liked. Fired employees adopted membership in Communist labor unions. His own father and aunt sued him for what they felt was a greater share of the wealth, a wealth so large that in 1935 it was estimated to be $250 million in gold and $2 billion in precious stones ($48 bullion in today's money) Much more than Donald Trump.

Not easy being a royal. The number of litigants to the fortune was in the thousands, all descendants of the seven prior nizams. And we thought the Kennedys had a large family.

In the early '70s Mukarram visited Australia, fell in love with the land and the people, and bought acreage to raise sheep.

This wasn't Robert Mitchum in the movie The Sundowners. Mukarram bought a half million acres in Western Australia, on the coast and inland to raise sheep. He met a 27 year-old secretary and got married. Again. It might have also been the beer that attracted him. Pale India? He loved Australia because he said, "there are miles and miles of open country and not a bloody Indian in sight." Well, things change, don't they?

Helen Simmons, the secretary he married, supposedly had a partying lifestyle, and she passed away from AIDS in 1989. The Australians grew tired of him, so he liquidated his holdings in the 1990s. Things weren't going well.

What goes around comes around. He came back to Turkey and visited India where he still had numerous properties. At his son's wedding he reunited with his first wife, Princess Esra, and she literally got old the house in order, now a museum. Seen on the right he sits barefoot in Hyderabad, looking every bit of what you'd expect an older sword swinging sultan to look like, nearly bald, with a white drooping mustache.

Imagine being around so long and from so rich a background that Mukarram would tell stories of his grandfather who would place a white handkerchief on the shoulder of a woman on the palace grounds and tell her they were going to sleep together that night.

A man from a different era. How times change.

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Jeopardy Fame

How cool is it they made a September 2022 Jeopardy clue about you despite being a carnivorous quadruped with extremely sharp teeth who lives outdoors, is not particularly sociable, is meaner than a junkyard dog, and considers other animals they can kill their Happy Meal? Well, if you're in L.A. you have superstar status, even if you are a puma with the rap handle name of P-22.

Yes, Virginia, out in the largest, westernmost state that my oldest daughter likes to call "the land of the fruits and nuts" they adore the resilience of their pumas, so much so that they sell tickets to honor their passing. Where else on earth could such affection flow?

In one of those terrific A-Hed pieces in Monday's Wall Street Journal we learn of such an adored predator, P-22, given that name because he was the 22nd subject in a study of pumas and was so well known that the people who conceive those Jeopardy clues thought enough of his notoriety that they made a $1,200 clue about him. And the contestant knew the answer!

I detect a bit of West Coast bias here, but then again, I also detect an East Coast bias sometimes when the clue is New York centric. That's what happens when we have a bi-coastal population that keeps getting on and off transcontinental aircraft.

I've got to say I never heard of P-22. My NYC elementary school in Flushing, Queens was PS-22, standing for public school. The school is still there, but in a what I'll consider a new building that's probably over 55 years old now. The old one, the one I went to, was heated by coal and had separate archway entrances for BOYS and GIRLS when classes were not co-ed. They were co-ed when I went there in the '50s. I have a picture of the old building here in my home office, a lovely brick building on landscaped grounds.

The A-Hed piece by Alicia A. Caldwell has one of those attention-getting snappy headlines: "Los Angeles salutes 'Brad Pitt' of Lions."

Turns out that once upon a time a mountain lion, "tawny muscled puma," P-22 as he became to be known, "somehow traversed 10 lanes of hellish California to take up residence in Griffith Park, an urban oasis in the Hollywood Hills and above the trendy Los Feliz neighborhood." I liken this to taking up residence in Central Park overlooking Bergdorf Goodman's.

P-22 sightings were to be cherished. He's taken on an identity all his own, such that U.S. Rep. Adam Schiff, who is from the L.A. area, has proposed a P-22 stamp and called him a "celebrity neighbor, the occasional troublemaker and beloved mascot for our city." This is a man wanting to run for Senate to take Diane Feinstein's seat. Land of the fruits and nuts indeed..

Tagged, and followed, P-22 is thought to have been the recent killer of two chihuahuas, as well as having thought to have been the killer of a koala bear who escaped from a zoo in 2016.. This attack on the dogs was seen as a sign of other illnesses and his inability to bring down larger prey. P-22 was euthanized on December 17 at age 12.

Like any famous person, P-22 was celebrated last Saturday at a sold-out "P-22 Celebration of Life" at the Greek Theater. The venue seats 5,000 and those who couldn't get tickets (who was in charge of that?) could go to any one of 11 Los Angeles public libraries that were getting a live stream telecast for a watch party. That cat was famous.

New York City might be on the verge of a wildlife creature becoming a fabric of the city as well. There's a fairly rare owl that's gotten out of a vandalized Central Park zoo enclosure and has been sitting in treetops, posing for the long lens of bird watchers.

Flaco is a Eurasian Eagle Owl, no doubt called that because of its 6½' wingspan. There is worry about what Flaco will get to eat because birds in captivity lose their natural instincts to go find food for themselves. They're used to cage service. The concern is Flaco will starve not knowing where to get food.

It will be interesting if Flaco lives long enough to gain mythic status in the city that never sleeps. If only he can realize that no one will miss a pigeon or two if devoured everyday. Flaco, anything for you.  

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Oops!

Once again, @coreykilgannon has proved to be the muse for another posting, this one about a tractor trailer hitting an overpass on the Hutchinson River Parkway in Westchester County, coming apart causing a fuel spill plus a spill of the truck's cargo, 42,000 pounds of French fries. Who gets 42,000 pounds of French fries all at once, assuming there was only one company they were being delivered to: a MacDonald's/Burger King refrigerated warehouse? The truck was coming from Maine, where of course potatoes are a big export of the state.

I don't know if it's just in the New York area where you find roads labeled parkways. Do they exist in other parts of the country? Parkways in New York have notoriously low overpasses, such that tractor trailers cannot squeeze under them. Parkways were designed to be roads of leisure when they were built, inviting a drive through the country for the weekend motorist. They were meant to be bucolic, for cars, and cars not traveling very fast at that. They generally have a lot of curves to discourage speeding.

The driver of the ill-fated tractor trailer above was from Tennessee, using a non-commercial GPS that guided him onto the parkway and its destiny with an overpass it couldn't travel under without shearing  off the top of the truck off. It's a somewhat common accident in the New York area. There are sufficient signs warning that no commercial traffic should get on the road, but the best laid plans and warnings can go unnoticed.

Despite the moronic remarks of the U.S. Transportation Secretary, Pete Buttigieg, New York does not have "racist roads." The remark stems from the belief that Robert Moses built the Southern State Parkway connecting Queens with Nassau County and a gateway to Jones Beach with low overpasses to purposely keep buses, and therefore Blacks, from getting to Jones Beach from New York City.

The truth is, Moses and his designers did what they did to keep the great unwashed out of the suburbs, and the great unwashed were whites, as well as Blacks and Hispanics who were used to going to NYC beaches, principally Coney Island and the Rockaways by subway from fouling up the atmosphere in Nassau County. It was feared they would descend onto the beach in an armada of buses since they didn't own cars. Well, that certainly changed.

When Moses was NYC Parks Commissioner and he got rid of the sheep in Sheep Meadow and grew a nice lawn, he posted signs that there was to be no walking on the grass: STAY OFF THE GRASS. When Tom Hoving became Parks Commissioner under Mayor Lindsay he invited everyone into the park and allowed concerts, etc. Moses built a lot of projects for the public, but he didn't particularly like the public. He liked projects.

Aside from the accident, a larger question remains. Who gets 42,000 pounds of French fries? Delivered to just one address? 42,000 pounds of anything in one place seems remarkable. It reminds me of the Harry Chapin song about the truck that slipped its gears in Scranton, Pennsylvania and dumped 30,000 pounds of bananas onto the pavement. Name of the song? 30.000 Pounds of Bananas. Who gets 30,000 pounds of bananas?

Think of the scene in the movie Goodfellas, I think, where the driver goes into the diner, leaves the keys to the rig in the ignition, and purposely has the truck hijacked by an organized crime crew. What if they goofed up and targeted a truckload of bananas and French fries? It can't always be electronics. They'd be the Gang that Couldn't Steal Straight.

And since one thing always reminds me of another, and I mentioned Robert Moses, I think of the seminal book on his life by Robert Caro before he got hung up on Lyndon Johnson. When the NYT reporter Emma Fitzsimmons joined the staff, fresh from Texas, and took Metro mass transit as her beat, she was handed a copy of Caro's The Power Broker to learn how New York got the way it is.

I just finished watching the Nova documentary of London's Super Tunnel, the building of their 26! miles of new subway line with 10! new stations, connecting Heathrow Airport seamlessly to other branches of what the Londoners call The Tube. The Underground.

Started in 2009 with Boris Johnson, the then mayor of London, the project was expected to cost $20 billion. It finished in 2023, a year behind schedule and $5 billion over budget. It's called The Elizabeth Line, and the Queen, in one of her nearly last public appearances, drew back the drape on the sign, launching the service.

It is a remarkable tale of engineering that in addition to the tracks, tunnels and stations, gave the Brits a new fleet of state-of-art high-speed trains and cars. 70 trains, 700 new cars, all built in the country.

All going through the system at the expected rate of 24 trains per hour! There really is another rain right behind this one.

Despite being over budget, consider what they got, vs. what we get for our money.

The 2nd Avenue subway, traveling a paltry two miles in Manhattan cost $4.45 billion. In case you're bad at math that's $4 billion, $450 million, making it the most expensive rail project in the world.

Consider the recently opened East Side Access that allows LIRR trains into Grand Central Terminal at 46th Street and Madison Avenue. It cost $12 billion and is really one station. 

It seems in New York, we just don't always get the Everyday Low Price.

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Can You Break This for Me?

There was once a time that a $100 bill was as good as having no money. A little less so the $50 bill but the reaction was generally the same; no one really ever wants to believe if you're handling them one of those bills that you haven't just rolled it off your basement printing press.

Isn't there a great Gregory Peck 1954 movie, Man with A Million, about him being an American serviceman in postwar England stuck trying to live off a $1 million pound note? There was some kind of bet between some old guys that giving someone a $1 million pound note was as good as making them destitute. The movie was apparently based on a Mark Twain story, The Million Pound Bank Note. 

What is money anyway other than something I seem to only have just enough of, while others are wallowing in it. It is a conceit invented by man so that someone comes out ahead. I'm nowhere near being in the 1%. The only 1% I'd be in is percentage of making par when I swung a golf club.

Hard to be awake these days and not hear something about the debt ceiling of the U.S. Government, i.e. how much money the government owes everybody who it ever loaned it money. I don't really know how much the country owes, but the word trillion is getting traction when sums of money are being bandied about.

Do you know how many zeroes there are in a trillion? (a dozen). Do you know that a trillion is a thousand billions, and that a billion is a thousand millions? Do you know how long it takes to pay off debt like that?

Consider the ad for the guy who tells us on TV that he owes $15,000 in credit card debt. Hardly puts him up there with Uncle Sam, but he goes on to tell us that if he pays it off at the monthly minimum it will take him 150 years!

The ad if of course for debt consolidation, a hoped for one-time loan of money at x percentage that will wipe out his credit card debt. Of course, since there is no free lunch, the credit card debt is replaced by owing someone else the money, but at perhaps less than loan shark rates.

I've never been anywhere near a course on economics. Whatever I know about money and economic theory is what I read in the papers and what I might now and then digest with a rather dull book on the subject. I know that England's John Maynard Keynes is famous for being at the Bretton Woods conference in New Hampshire in 1944. There are Keynesian economists and there are others. They are a species.

There is a mythical debt ceiling. The top level of debt that the U.S. Government can be in. There are clarion calls to raise it—again, as it has always been raised again and again.

The government needs more money to pay its bills. Don't we all? The Democrats are on the side of raising it, the Republicans are on the side of raising it, but, with some provisos about not adding to it so quickly. Spending curbs.

Thrust into this quandary is the U.S. Secretary of the Treasury, Janet Yellen, who is warning that without the debt ceiling being raised there will be no money to hand out. The gravy train, the entitlement programs, the salaries will not be paid. Default on debt obligations will happen, and trust in government will erode. All bad things.

Into this dilemma solutions are offered: The Trillion Dollar Coin. Friday's NYT carries a piece on the first page of the Business section by Alan Rappeport, "Can a Trillion Dollar Coin Break the Gridlock?" where he outlines the idea behind the Trillion Dollar Coin.

Huh? There are serious people who are advancing the solution that the Secretary of the Treasury issue a trillion dollar platinum coin, deposit it in the Federal Reserve, and start to make the country whole.

Apparently there was some legislation written not all that long ago that allows the Treasure Secretary to mint money. "There was 1997 legislation that Congress passed to help make the U.S. Mint make more money from bullion sales and gave the Treasury secretary the broad discretion to mint platinum coins of any denomination. That power, proponents of the idea say, gives the secretary a way to keep fulfilling the nation's financial obligations even if the government's ability to keep borrowing has been frozen."

No less a light than Paul Krugman, a Nobel prize winner in Economics in 2008 and NYT columnist to bluntly state: "mint the darn coin."

What would a trillion dollar coin look like? Who would be on the front and back of it? And how big would it be? At the current rate of $973 per troy ounce, a $1 trillion coin would weight 64,234,327 pounds. That's some change purse.

I have a feeling that there wouldn't really be a $1 trillion coin, just a virtual one. The problem then is would the Federal Reserve accept it? The answer is pretty much no. The Fed would have to borrow the money to pay the Treasury for the coin, therefore going into debt. Isn't the idea to get out debt, or is it to merely just keep financing it? There is a difference.

Janet Yellen feels the Fed wouldn't accept the coin. "The Fed is not required to accept it. There's no requirement on the part of the Fed."

I never heard of the $1 trillion dollar coin. But it plays into one of my wonderments about money. If a bunch of my septuagenarian and octogenarian friends got together and rented a small submarine with robotic arms from Home Depot (Rent Me For The Weekend) and found the sunken gold from the Spanish Armada that they're always talking about, wouldn't we in effect have something like the trillion dollar coin? We'd be rich, no?

Well, only if someone was willing to give us money, in any form, for the gold coins. If no one comes forward to buy our new found loot we're out the money we spent at Home Depot and the diving store.

I've often read about the money supply, M-1, the money in circulation and on deposit in bank and checking accounts. Shouldn't M-1 include buried treasure? The FASB (Financial Accounting Standards Board) probably says no.

Wasn't there a Las Vegas display of $1 million in $10,000 bills? Quick whose on the bill? (Salmon P. Chase) And what about the $100,000 bill? Who's on that? (Woodrow Wilson). Turns out the Vegas display is no longer. They hang artwork now. Trying getting change back on one of those bills at the grocery store. The dilemma Gregory Peck has with his $1 billion pound note.

And what about those guys who dove into the East River last month reacting to someone on a podcast that said there 50 tons of mammoth tusks dumped in to the East River? That would have to be worth something, no?

The 50 tons was said to be equal to a boxcar and was allegedly dumped by NYC's Museum of Natural History when they ran out of space. If those guys came up something other than spotting Citi bikes and a car down there, and came up with mammoth tusks, wouldn't they'd be rich? Well, maybe.

Yesterday's CBS morning news show did their piece of the East River expedition. Divers went down at least 60 times into water so opaque they said you can't see your hand in front of you. Apparently the river bed slopes from 20 feet down to 70 feet. No wonder, like Lake Superior that never "gives up her dead" in the song The Wreck of the Edmund Fitzgerald, the East River holds onto its past and its contents.

There were no mammoth tusks, so they guys were out the money they spent on renting the boat and the diving equipment.

The debt ceiling will I'm sure be raised. Money will be borrowed again to pay off the money that was already borrowed. There will never be a time that there will be no debt.

That is unless of course they figure out who to put on that $1 trillion platinum coin.

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Bam Bam

As usual, something always reminds me of something else, and it's happened again when @Coreykilgannon retweeted an image of a mortarless arch in Central Park, designed by Calvert Vaux and  Frederick Law Olmstead a scant 150 years ago. Impressive. No one can do that any more, can they?

Yes, they can. And a practitioner, no master of mortarless stone masonry can be found in Vermont (where else?) in the body of Thea Alvin, a women who was born to play with stone and not dolls. The NYT did a piece on her in 2013.

Thea inside her Venus Gate arch

 That Ms. Alvin is a master dry stone mason is no question. On   the left is a photo of her sitting inside Venus Gate, an arch she   constructed. It's not 150 years-old, but come back in a few   decades. 

 Thea grew up in the most eclectic of circumstances, and sports   a family biography that might be written by Jack Kerouac.   Michael Tortorello's NYT piece stitches true references to Jerry   Garcia, The Grateful Dead, LSD, a commune called the   Brotherhood of the Spirit founded in a treehouse, a father who did time in reform school and prison for teenage arson, raw bacon to cure the mumps and a mother who enjoyed a relationship with the Dead's lyricist, Robert Hunter. 

Thea worked with her father who was a mason. She says she learned how to mix mortar "really well." She hauled 72 pounds of bricks to him as he worked, and she has given names to her hammers, which she has three to four dozen of. One 7 pound hammer is named Bam Bam (The Flintstones, what else),

another 12 pound hammer, the Convincer.

Ms. Alvin runs a sought after business building dry masonry works. She runs a summer workshop, and has been just about all over the world.

Pictured on the right is a cairn, "a beacon to travelers" she has in her front yard just off Route 100 in Morrisville, Vt, an even more than usual rural area in north central Vermont, near Stowe ski resort.

Thea is a woman I'd most like to meet, but I doubt I'll ever be getting to that section of Vermont.

Anyone who can work with a 12 pound hammer and carry 72 pounds of bricks has to be strong. Her grip alone must be vise-like.

I read a recent obituary of Gerrie Coetzee, a South African heavyweight fighter who just passed at 67. It was said that Gerrie's right hand could "punch a hole in a brick wall," having been reinforced so many times by fused bones from being broken so often.

I doubt Thea would take up boxing, but I wouldn't want to be caught by a right hook of hers.

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There Are Some Days the Paper Really is Worth $3.00

Newsstand prices of newspaper print editions can be prohibitive, especially if you're like me and haul three newspapers in every morning. Thankfully, home delivery affords steep discounts to newsstand prices. If I were to pay newsstand price for my daily NYT, WSJ and NY Post it would be $10, a hefty outlaw for f anyway, but prohibitive on a retiree. Online reading? Not exclusively for me.

Even adding up the home delivery prices, I'm probably paying upwards of $600 a year for the three print papers. On my demise, a forensic accounting analysis of my finances will probably lead the accountants to have no wonder how I outlived my money.

But until then, I live for the days I can sit down with a good read. And one was delivered yesterday by Michael Wilson, a NYT crime reporter who has written a gem of s piece regarding mammoth tusks in the East River.

Everyone loves a treasure hunt. It is the original found money. Robert Service wrote an epic poem decades ago that started off: "There are strange things done in the midnight sun by the men who moil for gold..." It was about Sam McGee from Tennessee who headed for Alaska and was never warm again. Well, at least not until he was cremated.

Now we have strange things done by the men who dive for gold, or at least something that can be turned into money, Bitcoin or real dollars. In this case, the treasure was expected to 50 tons of mammoth tusks, a haul that is the last thing you'd expect to be found in the Est River, but hey, someone said they were there.

And that was someone, Jim Reeves, on what apparently is a "massively popular podcast," The Joe Rogan Experience. Jim claimed that after reading an unpublished manuscript he can tell you there are 50 tons of mammoth tusks! down there, dumped by no less than the Museum of Natural History, the last organization you'd expect to be perpetrators of river pollution.

But hey, it's on the Internet, so it must be true. At 74 years-old I vastly underestimate how people are influenced by what they read, listen to and see on the Internet.

It's a winding story, but Mr. Wilson tells it well. It starts with the podcast by "The Joe Rogers Experience" and when it's done there are characters worthy of Damon Runyon bobbing around the East River in January. Baby it's cold in the water then.

Joe Scuba, Dirty Water Dan have left their homes in Georgia and New Jersey, hopped on board a surveying vessel named The Red Rogers out of Staten Island and dropped anchor off 65th Street.

Actually, two vessels made it to the spot alleged to have 50 tons of mammoth tusks! under the East River. One of the divers, Mr. Koehler—Scuba Jake to you—was supposedly drawn to the novelty of exploring the East River, "Not many people probably have been down to the bottom of the East River that are alive." No shit.

Watery East River as a Haystack

 I'm not going to spoil Mr. Wilson's story by giving up all the details   here. He did all the work, and it was considerable, tracing how even   the plausibility of mammoth remains might be in New York, let   alone 50 tons of it at the swirling waters off Hell Gate. Buried or   sunken treasure, matey, always exciting..

 There is enough to add that they did find concrete blocks, rebar,   tires, multiple Citi bikes and even a car, presumably one that would   be hard to start.

The concrete blocks might have something to do with anyone reaching the bottom of the East River who never lived to tell us about it. Concrete booties were really a favorite way the mob used to dispose of bodies of those who met the outplacement criteria. Remember the scene in the movie Billy Bathgate? I suppose, eventually lime became preferred to getting seasick with a stomach full of linguini and expresso coffee.

Bikes should be no surprise. I've heard that the canals in Amsterdam are full of bikes that have been disposed of by heaving them into the water. The car is a bit of a surprise. I'll assume it was stolen?

What did they find? I won't spoil it, but for my money it's just one more search that's failed to turn up either Jimmy Hoffa or Judge Crater. If it had, we would have heard about it. 

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