When Richard Nixon Was President. The First Term.

People who were alive then are now planning their retirements. They're checking their 401-ks and wondering if Bitcoin and gold will keep them in the sunshine in a few years. Or they are already retired. They pay attention to the markets and wonder if they should call those people who have ads on TV who will guide them in the process of financial planning. They might be called Boomers by their children.

I've always admired the people who write the Jeopardy clues. If these people lived in another era, say like the 1940s, I imagine the OSS would be recruiting them to be spies or intelligence analysts to help defeat the Axis powers. They'd be in the book Book and Dagger.

The crafting of the Final Jeopardy clues is always especially clever. Consider the one from this past Thursday under the category of Super Bowl History.

Realizing that there have now been 58 (LVIII) Super Bowls, that's a lot of history to cover. If a historian were to put pen to paper on that one it would be at least two volumes. If Robert Caro lives long enough he might take the job after he finally finishes telling us what Lyndon Johnson ate in 1967.

If you can spot it, there is always a helpful clue in the Final Jeopardy question that helps anchor the clue to a place, time, or person. Consider:

It's the only team to play in the Super Bowl before Neil Armstrong's moon walk that has not been back to the big game since.

The Neil Armstrong reference anchors the clue to the year 1969, when none of the contestants were even born. I always read the clue in the morning from the NYT and see how I'd do. This one was a slam dunk for me.

One contestant answered the New York Giants; another The Cleveland Browns. The third answered Houston. None of the contestants were from New York, being from Memphis, Illinois and Texas. 

It's a great clue that might have found the right answer if someone was from New York. As for myself, when I read it I immediately knew it was the New York Jets who were in what was an NFL-AFL Championship game in the third year they played in that format in January 1969. Not only was I alive then, I remember watching the game

It's the famous game where the Jets were 17-point underdogs against the Baltimore Colts, only to see the Jets quarterback Joe Namath and his team play the game of their lives, upsetting the Colts 16-7. Joe Namath boldly predicted they'd win. Who believed him?

I'm not a hard-core football fan, professional or college. But I am aware of how the New York teams are doing and do take in some TV viewing.

I've only ever been to one New York Giants game in person at the Meadowlands when Craig Morton was their quarterback. I think they lost to the Cincinnati Bengals.

I've been to a few more Jet games. When the AFL started, the New York franchise was the New York Titans, and they played on Friday nights at the Polo Grounds in Upper Manhattan. My father took me to a game in what I'm guessing was the early 60s. I don't know who they played, or even if they won. The Polo Grounds was at the end of its existence, a dark place full of girders

Shea Stadium was built around the time of the 1964 World's Fair and was close to our home in Flushing. I remember some Friday night games there when the half time show was a contest between three women to see who could empty out a refrigerator into a shopping cart the fastest, racing along rubber mats placed on the field.. I kid you not. Or, half time could be a drum and bugle corps from Brooklyn showing off how they could spin fake rifles.

Anyone who is aware of the Jets knows they are a team steeped in futility. They have had numerous owners, countless coaches and a massive rotation of players. Someone has put a serious hex on that club.

You read that the Boston Red Sox, Chicago Cubs and Cleveland Indians were cursed, but the Jets have set a new standard for ineptness and being haunted. Alert the Vatican. They need a exorcism.

I had the biggest laugh when they got Aaron Rodgers as their quarterback who was going to lead them to the promised land. In 2023 as he ran out on the field for the first, highly anticipated game, carrying Old Glory as if he were Custer and he was going to annihilate some Indians, and then fell in a heap after the first set of plays with an injury that put hm out for the season, I said to myself what more proof do they need that they're never, ever going to win squat?

The beginning of the 2024 season optimism ran high again for the Jets. A health Rodgers was going to do it in 2024 2025 and take them to the Super Bowl. At 4-10 for this season so far the only way they're going to the Super Bowl is if they have tickets. Can they just forfeit the remaining games and show mercy to their fans, a group of masochists if ever there was one. Those people need intensive counseling.

I'd love to see a sports reporter like Jason Gay of the Wall Street Journal pick up on the Jeopardy clue of last Thursday and do a column on the history of the Jets. Perhaps his lede could go:

Gas is 34¢ a gallon, Robert Caro is just thinking about writing about Lyndon Johnson, Richard Nixon is in his first term, and the Jets are in their only Super Bowl. What year is it?

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The Booster Seat

Listen my children
    and take a look,
That once upon a time
   there was a telephone book.
It had tissue thin pages
   and was paper bound,
Names, numbers, addresses
   inside were found.

Since everything reminds me of something else, it is no wonder that when my wife bought our
14-month-old grandson a booster seat that I immediately thought of the Manhattan telephone book. What, you wouldn't?

You have to be of a very certain age to remember telephone books. Every borough in NYC got theirs delivered, by a special delivery guy pulling a customized cart for stacking them, to every phone customer.

Somehow at the family flower shop in Manhattan we managed to get a phone book for every borough. We did this so we could call the intended reciepient of a flower delivery to ask if they were going to be home so we could make a delivery. Manhattan's phone book was by far the thickest; Staten Island's was the thinest.

I think Manhattan's was even thicker than Brooklyn's, despite I think Brooklyn having the larger population. Or, in the 1950s, that might not have been the case. No matter.

We kept the phone books in a bookcase near the telephone in the back of the store. Since this is where I did my homework, I was often staring at these books. I came away with the indelible observation that the word MANHATTAN when capitalized is composed entirely of letters with straight lines.

Also, each book contained the names of only a few, very few people I knew. I sort of marveled at that. I didn't know most of the people in those books. I might have been strange, and certainly have remained so.

Anyway, the booster seat remined me of meals at my grandmother's dining room table, probably birthday parties for my older cousin, when I was propped up with the Manhatttan—White, or Yellow Pages— beneath my butt. These were the thickest of all the city's phone books.

The pictured booster seat seen at the top of this posting is about the thickness of one of those Manhattan directories.

Matthew has outfrown his comfort zone of eating in the family heirloom, vintage wooden high chair; my high chair, and before that my older cousin's high chair from the 1940s, restored—again—for a new generation.

Matthew has gotten so used to eating at the special daycare tables they have where the kids fit into a cutout in a counter, that he's no longer interested in a childish high chair. He wants a seat at the table.

But in the 1950s no one was selling booster seats, Or, if they were, no one in the family bought one. And why would they when a handy phone book did the job?

Show up at a table and you weren't very big yet, someone would take a phone book down from the top of some piece of furniture and plop it under your butt. It's funny, but at home I don't remember sitting on a phone book. Maybe because the Queens directory didn't do the trick.

Phone books were even found in phone booths, another bygone piece of street furniture. You might be able to find someone's number in there, along with their address, if someone hadn't ripped the page out. You could call information, for free, but they wouldn't give you the address, only the phone number, which always struck me as strange but that's the way it was.

The Internet has of course changed everything. Now you can look up a number on your phone, which seems logical, but it is really quite an advancement. But now you'll have to buy a booster seat and you can't rely on the phone company to provide one. Sitting on a cell phone will only hide it and make your butt vibrate if someone calls it, not give you a boost at the table. Not advised.

Now if only the person I'm calling would pick up and not let it go to voicemail.

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Harlem 1958

Every time I see this photo I think it is not iconic, that very much overused word. Like the raising of the flag by the Marines on Mount Suribachi after the battle of Iwo Jima, and the sailor kissing the nurse in Times Square on V-J Day: It is historic.

And every time I see it I think Louis Armstrong is sitting on the curb in the lower right. No. That's Count Basie, holding his hat. Jonathan Kane, the son of Art Kane who took the photo, explains that one of the little boys seated on the curb kept running off with the Count's hat. Count Basie grew weary of chasing the kid and retrieving his hat, that he grew tired of the chase and needed a rest—now holding his hat more securely—and just sat down on the curb.

The historic photo is the subject of a piece by Hank Shteamer in last Thursday's NYT Arts section. A huge, front page reproduction of the photo graces the headline: 58 Jazz Luminaries Assembled for This Photo. One Remains. The front page jumps to a nicely laid out to a full, two page spread of photos and text.

The one remaining musician from the photo is Sonny Rollins, the saxophone player who is now 91. Anyone who has listened to jazz can easily name some of those who are not in the photo besides Louis Armstrong: Dave Brubeck, Miles Davis, Ahmad Jamal, Bill Evens, Duke Ellington. There are many more, but that doesn't diminish the historic quality of the photo.

I don't know how Art Kane got the assembled to show up that hot day in August 1958 at 10 o'clock in the morning. I read that one of the musicians got there and grumbled, "so this is the other 10 o'clock," musicians being more accustomed to late nights and early mornings before sunrise.

The absence of those you might expect to be in the photo could have been due to touring, being out-of-town, or just outright sleepiness. Mr. Shteamer tells us of a commemorative book celebrating the 60th-anniversary of the photo that might have a narrative about the assembly.

For myself, I started to be a fan of jazz in high school in the mid 1960s. I kept the radio on in the back of the family flower shop set to whatever channel that broadcast Del Shields and Billy Taylor.

My growing LP record collection did not include the Beatles or the Rolling Stones. I bought Dave Brubeck, Sonny Rollins, Stan Getz, Oliver Nelson, Ahmad Jamal, Bill Evans, Blue Mitchell... For singers I was a Frank Sinatra and Tony Bennett fan.

When I got to be of drinking age in 1967 I went to The Village Gate and the Top of the Gate to see Ahmad Jamal and Bill Evans. For some reason I didn't explore 52nd Street, which at the time still retained some of its music night clubs. For me, recordings is how I absorbed the music.

I waited too long to see Stan Getz at Fat Tuesday's in what had been Joe King's German American Rathskeller in Scheffel Hall at 190 Third Avenue, down the block  from the flower shop at 206 Third Avenue. Stan passed away, and so did Fat Tuesday's. I always regretted that.

I did renew seeing Ahmad Jamal at The Iridium, I think in 2003; and Monty Alexander at Birdland in 2009. I'd like to get out more to Birdland and see some more artists beyond Tierney Sutton and Jane Monheit.

Time is fleeting.

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My Entry for Overlooked No More

Overlooked No More is an occasional NYT obituary page feature that offers lengthy tribute obituaries about historical figures who didn't come close to making the cut for recognition of their life when they passed away. Most of these subjects lived and died quite a while ago.

The subjects are usually women, who historically have been greatly ignored, but there are men who get the treatment of what might be called an obituary of reparations.

Last year the Times produced a collection of these obituaries in a book called...Overlooked No More. I got it for Christmas. The editors at the Times solicit ideas for subjects. So far I've submitted four, I think, all deceptive, felonious people who I love to read about. So far the Times hasn't picked up on one of my nominations. But I'm not discouraged. Here is another one.

I sometimes wonder if there  is a Higher Power that creates what look like coincidences in my life, but are really intendedly steered events. No Matter. We live on a Möbius strip.

Take a recent NYT obituary on Victor Brombert, a scholar who kept his Army past a secret who has just passed away at 101. In the largest photo accompanying the obit we see Mr. Brombert sitting at a desk in his office in Princeton University in 1985, in a setting that is what you'd expect to see a professor of comparative literature sitting in: paper strewn desk, shelves of books, a lamp and a window, while wearing an ascot. If his jacket were on we'd no doubt see elbow patches. No pipe in sight, however.

But that's the 1985 Brombert. During WW II he was one of the "Ritchie Boys" a collection of men— and women—who were selected from academia, science and literature who were trained as soldiers and spies to populate the O.S.S., the forerunner of the C.I.A. to provide needed intelligence on the Axis powers, overseas and abroad.  

William Donovan started the O.S.S. recognizing that the U.S. didn't have a mature intelligence service like the European countries. Donovan recruited people who had language skills and academic rigor to work with Allied resistance cells to provide even the smallest piece of information about the enemy.

Victor, who at 19 came to the United States with his family via Berlin, Russia and France, was a perfect candidate for being a Ritchie Boy, so named after Camp Ritchie, the training came in Ritchie, Maryland. Victor could speak 5 languages, a definite asset for overseas work.

Donovan had people working out of embassies in neutral countries acquiring books, pamphlets,  academic papers, anything that might be used as knowledge. There was a woman, Adele Kibre who was in Stockholm who scoured the libraries and rare book stores, microfilming the papers and sending it back to Washington for analysis.

The activities of this group of people is captured in Elyse Graham's recent book, Book and Dagger. No published piece of paper was too insignificant. Telephone directories, newspapers, and dry as dust books on railroads provided valuable information to the Allies that aided in planning military operations. Books titled, The Universal Directory of Railway Officials and The Railway Year Book 1936 were intelligence gold.

Victor landed on a Normandy beach on D-Day. He made his way into France and even got to see where he once lived. He was a Master Sergeant. He might have been reading and photographing serial numbers from disabled German tanks. This gave the Allies information on where the Germans were in making tanks. Just like the railroad books gave insight to the rail routes and the shortage of locomotives in Germany.

Colorful characters abound in Book and Dagger. There is Sherman Kent, who was already a history professor at Yale who was one of those who reported directly to Donovan and organized the departments that became part of the O.S.S.

Sherman was colorful because his language was colorful, full of swearing and off-color references that kept his colleagues at Yale entertained. In Book and Dagger he is quoted as disdainfully remarking that

a foreign regime's attempt at a cover-up was like "gathering piss with a rake."

Surely a guy like this got an interesting obit. Well, no. Not in 1986 when he passed away. The NYT obit is a small, unbylined piece that is only 9 paragraphs, single column, extending down maybe a third of the page, no photo. In 1986 obituaries didn't expose the everyday sides of a subject. They weren't the art form they today.

Mr. Kent's involvement with the founding of the C.I.A. is well noted. There is one quote that describes his passion about intelligence and keeping secrets that when he returned to Yale after the war he told President Truman that security was so lax in the Government that he intended to turn his Yale students loose and discover 95% of the nation's secrets through periodicals and daily newspapers. After all, that's what he and his colleagues did during the war in Europe.

I haven't yet finished reading Book and Dagger but I've already come across a person who in my opinion is worthy of an Overlooked No More obit, a safecracker G.B. "Sadie" Cohen who was a Lower East Side locksmith who had a store that was just a front for his consulting work on masterminding robberies. If Sherlock Holmes was a Consulting Detective, Sadie was a Consulting Thief.

Sadie was well-known to the NYC police of the time. And when he wasn't doing a stretch in Sing Sing, the state prison in Ossining, New York, he was called upon to do some covert work for the department opening safes when the real owner wasn't there. For this work, some indictments were overlooked.

The O.S.S. needed the contents of a safe in the Spanish Embassy in Washington examined. Spain was a neutral country during the war but like all neutral countries they leaned both ways. Countries like Spain were full of spies and full of German information.

Elyse Graham's book is full of attribution for her sources. The story surround Sadie comes from a memoir by Donald Downes, The Scarlet Thread.     

Downes was a writer recruited for O.S.S. work after a meeting at the Yale Club in NYC. in 1941. Yale seems to run through the O.S.S. and C.I.A. veins.  One of his assignments was to find a way into the safe at the Spanish Embassy in Washington D.C.

Being a writer, Downes knew a guy—who doesn't know a guy?—a major in Army counterintelligence who was once a NYPD detective in the Police Bomb Squad— who knew a guy—a safecracker who ran a locksmith shop on New York's Lower East Side that was actually a front for his more lucrative sideline of providing consulting work on robberies. After all, you can only make so much from making keys for people and opening their doors when they're locked out. G.B. "Sadie" Cohen had an idea, and came highly recommended.

 

The major told Downes there's, "not a safe Sadie can't open." We use him when he's not in Sing Sing, holding back some pending charges." 

Sadie is straight out of the safecracker character Doc played by Sam Jaffe in the 1950 movie Asphalt Jungle. For all I know, Doc might have been based on Sadie.

Like many resident of New York's Lower East Side, Sadie was a Jewish immigrant who spoke heavily accented English. On entering the shop with Downes, described as a "junk heap" by Downes, Sadie asks the major, who he knows quite well from being arrested, "Val lootenant, how's bombs? Vat can I do for you?"

The situation is laid out, and Sadie is quick to absorb the details for the caper. You get someone on the inside, a woman, who hides a gilder's hammer in "her woman's national bank, her bosom." She goes to the safe and breaks the dial. When they call to get the safe fixed, Sadie tells them he goes in the repairman's place and makes the needed key to open the safe. 

At this point in the story, Sadie should be immediately enshrined in the poetic hall of fame for referring to a woman's bosom as her "national bank."  Needless to say, The O.S.S. gets what it wants.

And what does Sadie want? He's insulted at the offer of money. "Paid? You've come into my place and insult me. Don't I have two nephews in the Army? Ain't I an American a much as you? Aren't you ashamed? Pay me? You can't even tank me. Even a ticket to Vashington you can't buy me, or a Coca-Cola."

As Ms. Graham tells us, Sadie was a criminal, but he wasn't a Nazi. And that's how the war was won.

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Where Fugitives Dine

"Take it on the arches" has a whole new meaning. It sounds like dialog from a Humphrey Bogart movie written by Raymond Chandler or Dashiell Hammett, meaning to scram, flee, run away. And scram is what the suspect in the shooting of United Health Care's CEO Brian Thompson did, hiding behind his surgical mask until a customer in an Altoona McDonald's restaurant recognized his partially hidden face sitting in the back of the restaurant on Monday morning looking at his laptop at 9:44 A.M.

The customer, described as an "elderly fellow", had a McDonald's employee call 911. Altoona police soon descended on the man who got nervous when asked if he had recently been to New York City. And that is the point at which the fugitive from the shooting became embodied as a person of interest whose name was revealed to be Luigi Mangione, a 26-year-old University of Pennsylvania graduate with an MSE and a BSE in Computer Science.

It's been quite a Monday. The Daniel Penny/Jordan Neely subway choke-hold trial had just been concluded with the defendant Penny found not guilty of criminally negligent homicide. The trail is over and the jury went home. As did Mr. Penny.

Of course a new Manhattan jury will be needed probably in the latter part of 2025, or early 2026 when Mt. Mangione comes to trail on whatever charges the Manhattan DA presents. The wheels of justice just keep spinning.

McDonald's seems to be a place where fugitives are found. They don't hole up in a cabin in snowy Sierra Nevada, smoking, playing solitaire, drinking scotch and waiting for the heat to die down. They settle in with an Egg McMuffin with cars whizzing by.

In one of their many updates the NYT points out that the suspect Frank R. James, who threw smoke bombs into a subway car and shot and wounded 10 people was apprehended fairly quickly at a Manhattan McDonald's.

With Luigi Mangione brought into custody while sitting at a McDonald's in Altoona, Pennsylvania you might think McDonald's pr people might add something to their slogan: "Billions Served, Several Apprehended."

There was a $10,000 reward offered by NYC police, and $50,000 reward offered by the F.B.I. It is hoped that the man who made the identification and the worker who called it in will actually get the reward and not see it evaporate in some legally worded technicality.

Mr. Mangione's picture was everywhere. Well, only one grainy full facial picture of him checking into a hostel on Manhattan's Upper West side when he pulled his surgical mask down—but still had his hood up— when the cute female clerk asked to see his whole face as he was flirting with her a bit.

Like safe cracker Sam Jaffe's character Doc who gets captured in the 1950 movie 'Asphalt Jungle' because he lingers too long to stare at Marilyn Monroe's character, Mr. Mangione might have just been done in because of a pretty face.

The microscopic examination of Mr. Mangione's life is only just beginning. As Luigi sat there in McDonald's, what plans did he have for the rest of the day that went out the window as the police approached him? Was he thinking of buying Christmas gifts? Supposedly he had $10,000 in cash on him, as well as a manifesto that might explain his thinking.

The thinking of the Unabomber, Ted Kaczynski, is cited in things Mr. Mangione wrote. Ted Kaczynski evaded capture for 17 years as he mailed explosive letters and packages around the United States. Kaczynski lived like a hermit in an isolated Montana cabin. Using the mail to deliver his bombs made it possible to charge him with Federal crimes. Ted passed  away in Federal prison in 2023 at 81 years old after being captured in 1996. Will Mr. Mangione face Federal charges over the gun possession?

As odd and unkempt as Ted Kaczynski was, I always got a kick out of a waitress in the diner near the cabin who told authorities that yes, Ted did come in there, but that they got a lot of people who appeared odder than Ted in there.

In contrast, Mr. Mangione is clean cut, and until only recently, never out of touch with people and employers. He was social. He apparently suffered a fair amount of back pain and had spinal fusion surgery.

The weapon allegedly used was found in Mr. Mangione's possession. It was not a veterinarian handgun, but was a so-called 9 mm "ghost weapon" fashioned from a 3-D printer. A silencer was also found. No less deadly.

At the outset from the raw surveillance footage that showed the shooting outside the New York Hilton on December 4, a professional hit was theorized. All the trappings of a mob rubout were there.

But then shell casings were found to carry a message, "Deny", "Delay", "Defend" words from the title of a 2010 book on abuses of the health care industry. This was not a mob hit. It was something else. 

Mob hits don't produce the perpetrators. I can't remember ever reading about the apprehension of a  trigger man after a crime family head like Paul Castellano is left as a lump on Third Avenue while headed for a meal at Sparks Steak House on 46th Street. Or Joey Gallo is left not breathing after a late night meal on his birthday at Umberto's Little Italy Clam House.

What did Mr. Mangione accomplish other than creating a vacancy at the top of United Health Care? Premiums are not going down, and denials will lot likely abate. Sure, CEO photos are disappearing from websites, but that's cosmetic. Congress is said to want to look at the health insurance industry. Again.

My own life was basically spent working for a major health insurer, that at the time was not a for-profit entity. By financial measures I remember it was reported that around 92% of the premiums collected went back out in claim reimbursements. The percentage now is quite a bit lower, perhaps as low as 82%.

Mr. Mangione is in custody with no bail. And business is left as usual.

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The Most Photographed Unidentified Man

I can offer no clues as to the identity of the gunman who executed United Health Care's CEO Brian Thompson early Wednesday morning. I can only follow the details as they become public. And the release of the details add to the anticipation of capture—or just prolonged frustration at an inability to apprehend. Figures of manhunts can evade identification and capture for an indeterminate amount of time. Although Ted Kaczynski wasn't photographed mailing letter bombs, it took 17 years before he was captured. A lot less for Son of Sam.  

The latest release is of two images of the suspect as he is in a cab, and likely leaving a cab on Wednesday morning after the shooting. Who knew you could get photographed so well from the viewpoint of a cab? It's eerie.

The other detail to emerge is the type of weapon used, as not yet reported recovered. Apparently it is a 9 mm gun used by veterinarians to put down animals. The long barrel makes it look like a silencer, but it is a noise suppressor so not to scare the other animals in the vicinity.

CNN reports that a law enforcement source told them after recovering the Peak Design backpack from Central Park on Friday, police examined it at a forensic lab in Queens. Inside, they found Monopoly money. It was not immediately clear if other items were in the backpack, officials said. Lakes in the park are being searched by police SCUBA teams.

Monopoly money? Is that from a McDonald's Happy Meal? It is certainly going to be interesting to see where all this goes.

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The Morning News

It is said of NYC that it is the city that never sleeps. The city might never sleep, meaning there's always someone up, but people do go to sleep. And upon waking up on Wednesday the morning news wasn't only about the Gowanus Parkway merge into the BQE, or the wait at the George Washington Bridge, Lincoln and Holland tunnels, but that the CEO of United Health Care, Brian Thompson,  had been gunned down at 6:44 A.M. and killed in front of the New York Hilton on 54th Street and Sixth Avenue while entering the hotel for an investors' meeting

Historically, New York City has seen its share of Mob rub outs in public places, but not for a good while now. The '70s saw so many hits that you had to wonder who was left still breathing in organized crime. There certainly were openings at the top.

You have to go back a long way to remember the rub out of Albert Anastasia in a barber's chair in the Park Sheraton Hotel in 1957, not far from the Midtown Hilton. What a mess.

It's a city that never sleeps, and a city that is always under surveillance. There is grainy camera footage of the gunman pointing his handgun at the back of Mr. Thompson, leaving him crumbled in from of the New York Hilton.

Supposedly the gun jammed, but the gunman unjammed it and kept shooting. Shell casings recovered from the scene had the words, "Delay,  "Deny" and "Defend", the title of a 2010 book by Jay M. Feinman about the practice within the healthcare industry of denying coverage of claims in order to increase corporate profits.

United Healthcare is the largest health insurer in the nation, also one that has run afoul of the law even before Mr. Thompson. One of his predecessors, CEO Dr. William McGuire, a pulmonologist, was brought down by a scandal involving repricing the company's stock options. It was big news then, and there was similar stock manipulation news on Mr. Thompson's horizon.  There seems to be a bit of corporate culture there.

On the heels of this shooting of a healthcare executive, I heard a news story on Friday morning that Anthem BlueCross and BlueShield was abandoning their plans to make patients pay for the anesthesia time that runs past the cook book expected time. The policy was due to go into effect in February 2025, but apparently someone thought twice about it with a crumpled CEO corpse laying in front of a NYC Midtown hotel. 

Anesthesia reimbursement is based on the elapsed time of the procedure, stated in 15 minute units. One hour is 4 units. Added to the units is a Basic Anesthesia Value (BAV). The two numbers are added together and multiplied by a dollar coefficient to determine the reimbursement.

A lot of health care policies hold the patient harmless for any gap in the reimbursement and the total charge. Anthem's plan was to not hold the patient harmless regardless of coverage when the elapsed time went past the anticipated elapsed time.

Thus, if your open heart surgery drifts past the expected elapsed time because of a stubborn blood vessel, then the patient is on the hook for the unreimbursed time. As if you have a chance to pop up and tell the surgeons to stop, or hurry up because this is going to cost them money than they have. Ridiculous. Who thinks of these things? 

At this writing, Wednesday's gunman is still at large, and assumed to have taken a bus back out of the city from the George Washington Bridge bus terminal. The gunman has been traced to getting off a bus originating in Atlanta that made 6-7 stops along the East Coast before getting to New York. The news has been unfolding like a Netflix miniseries release.

The City never sleeps, and it never stops taking images of all that goes on. In the surveillance photo of the shooting, and the gunman's movements before the shooting, he is always wearing a face covering, except the above photo taken when he checked into an Upper West Side hostel days before the shooting.

In that photo it was revealed he pulled the face covering down when the female clerk at the hostel asked to see his face because he was flirting with her. It's going to be interesting if that exposure is going to be key to brining him down.

Anyone who watches enough old movies will remember the Teutonic accented safe cracker, Doc, played by Sam Jaffe who is caught because he stopped too long to star at Marilyn Monroe in the 1950 movie 'Asphalt Jungle.' Undone by pretty face.

The gunman is seen in surveillance footage leaving the scene of the crime on what is reported to be an e-bike, making for Central Park, emerging on the  West Side and taking a cab to the George Washington Bridge bus station and taking a bus out of the city.

I would think at that point this guy has got a round trip ticket to somewhere, unless he risks being seen buying a ticket after the shooting. It is not known if the e-bike was taken from someone. If so, someone didn't get their bagels delivered on time that morning. Another crime.

His handgun was identified, but not recovered. His somewhat designer, upscale backpack was also identified, but eventually found in a wooded area of Central Park. A water bottle he bought at Starbucks was found at the crime scene with unusable, smudged fingerprints. A cell phone was recovered at the scene. Details from that have not yet been revealed.

Perpetrators are identified and caught because of tiny details left behind: DNA, a smile, a missing license plate, a parking ticket, a published treatise. Something will be key to finding the gunman.

In a book review I just read in the WSJ about a book on letter bombers, it is revealed that in 1919 radical Galleanists sent some 30 letter bombs to U.S. politicians. The Galleanists were followers of an Italian anarchist, Luigi Galleani, and one form of perpetuating their terror was to craft letter bombs.

In the book, 'Murder by Mail', by Mitchell P. Roth and Mahmut Cengiz, and reviewed by Bryan Burroughs, a raft of intended letters never got there because they wound up in a pile in the post office marked for Insufficient Postage.

It seems the Galleanists didn't bother to present the mail to a postal clerk who might have weighed the letters and affixed the correct postage, but rather just winged what they thought was enough postage to effect the delivery. I guess not.

There will always be something.

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Traveling in Different Circles

A few hours with newspapers yesterday once again drove home the point that there are those whose lives are decidedly different from mine. I won't say better, but I will say different.   

The always informative WSJ A-Hed piece from Wednesday basically tells us that you can own a dinosaur skeleton. Legally.  Not cheaply, for sure. But a fully assembled, full size—not a kit—dinosaur that is 80% original bones. 

I'm not a dinosaur aficionado, but I do however know that the ones you see in museums are not the bones from a singular dinosaur. They are authentic to the species of dinosaur, but might have been assembled from different excavations, and certainly different bodies..

It is somewhat like whole Perdue chickens. I once read that the giblets stuffed in one of those dead birds are not necessarily the giblets from that bird. The production line in DelMarVa is such that giblets and the rest of a bird are separated, then put into any other bird that comes along. Personally, I don't eat the giblets, and don't care which bird they came from. The cat doesn't care either. 

The A-Hed piece is an eye-opener into what can be bought, and what a windfall dinosaur auctions are worth to auction houses like Sotheby's. My understanding is that there is a 25% premium added to the hammer price, in effect the auction house's commission. 

The record-setting price paid for the above skeleton was $44.6 million, auctioned at Sotheby's on July 17, 2024. A 25% commission would top out at a little over $11 million. That's a lot of lettuce to the auction house for hiring some movers and using the freight elevator. Nice work if you can get it. And then I'll assume there's NYC sales tax. The mayor's smiling. He's always smiling.

Initially the buyer wasn't identified, but the WSJ tells it was a hedge fund guy, Ken Griffin, not a household name to me, but then again, I'm not in what would be his circle of friends.

If there is a buyer, there must be a seller in the equation. Not identified. I wonder if the Neiman-Marcus holiday catalog lists fossils for sale. Apparently it's become quite the trophy to have amongst celebrities. Names dropped are Russell Crowe, Leonardo DiCaprio and Nicholas Cage.

I must admit, I've yet to see one of those glossy real estate inserts that come with the weekend papers that show off a high floor Tribeca condo with floor-to-ceiling windows (who cleans those windows on the outside?) overlooking New York Harbor with a dinosaur skeleton tucked away in the corner next to the tripod mounted telescope. Usually it's a grand piano. 

The A-Hed piece tells us of excavations taking place on farmers' land in South Dakota that offer a cut of any proceeds to the owners of the land. 

The Journal's piece tells us Mr. Griffin has donated more that $300 million to museums since 2018, and says he plans to lend the Stegosaurus to a U.S. museum. You can bet there's a tax angle in there somewhere.

The other piece of evidence that I'm not in an A-list circle was driven home when I read the obituary for J. Stanley Pottinger, 84, Official Who Figured Out the Identity of 'Deep Throat.'

No, not Linda Lovelace, but the mole who was feeding Bob Woodward vital Watergate information in a parking garage in the mid-70s. Those old enough to remember the '70s will know that Bob Woodward's and Carl Bernstein's pieces in the Washington Post are part of newspaper legend. The story eventually lead to the resignation of President Nixon in 1974.

The mole was a Deputy Director of the F.B.I., W. Mark Felt, who passed away in 2008. Mr. Pottinger was a Department of Justice lawyer who was present when Mr. Felt was being questioned in a grand jury proceeding  From Felt's hesitant response and body language after being asked if he was 'Deep Throat', Mr. Pottinger correctly surmised Mr. Felt was 'Deep Throat.'

But it isn't the 'Deep Throat' that caught my muse in the obituary, it was Mr. Pottinger's dating love life in NYC in the 1980s after he was a lawyer in private practice and running a boutique investment firm that made a fortune trading in New England real estate before it went bust in 1987.

But when he was riding high on returns, he was squiring around the city A-list women like Gloria Steinem (the 'It' girl who came to New York to write), newscaster Connie Chung, and Kathy Lee Gifford, presumably before Kathy Lee married New York football legend Frank Gifford and became a morning show fixture with Regis Philbin.

Where do these people meet? Hanging out at Elaine's when it was open? Who gets to buy J-Lo a drink in between marriages? Certainly not me.

Sure he was a good looking guy, Harvard Law and all, which certainly help ensure the circles he would travel in. And at the time, rich, which always helps. Seen in the photo accompanying the obit Mr. Pottinger is next to Gloria Steinem, with whom it is described he had a romantic affair with for years. Also in the photo is Phil Donahue and his wife Marlo Thomas. It's obviously a formal affair by the way they're dressed, which gives me a clue why I'm never in a circle like that. The only time I've ever been in a tux (rented) has been when I was in a wedding—and not even my own.

And what is it with that affectation of using a single letter as your first name, "J." He was born John Stanley Pottinger. What's wrong with John? Maybe since he was in the Justice department he was riffing off the boss, J. Edgar Hoover, whose first name was also John.

This whole thing about circles people travel in has been an observation of mine for a while now. How did Tiger Woods meet the skier Leslie Vonn? There are lots of hookups like that that make me wonder.

But the biggest one of late has been how did a nonagenarian (93) billionaire media mogul like Rupert Murdoch get to marry a sexagenarian (67) retired Russian molecular biologist, Elena Zhukova?  Did Rupert use an exclusive dating site?

From their wedding photo taken at Rupert's vineyard estate in California it looks as if Elena's got her hands full with trying to hold the towering Rupert up. What keeps this guy going, this being his 5th marriage?

I'll have what he's having.

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Pull Tabs and Screw Caps

I just caught up to a WSJ A-Hed piece from October 5/6, 2024. When the stack of newspapers gets too deep on the couch to do a full deep dive, and my wife starts to complain,  I sort of cull the papers into the sections that have obituaries, A-Hed pieces and book reviews. That way, I know I won't miss anything I'm really interested in that I might get an idea to write about. Pre- and post-election analysis have little value a month later. And I know who won the World Series.

It is nice to read about annoying regulations that we haven't yet adopted. The EU has mandated that starting July 3, 2024 single-use plastic bottles must be outfitted with tethered (attached) screw caps. Thus, when you open the bottle, the cap remains attached to the top of the bottle and gets in the way of your drinking the contents. This is annoying.

A BBC Breakfast news show did a whole segment early in 2024 about this rule. The U.K. is not part of the EU and therefore doesn't have to abide by the ruling. But the distributors of single-use bottles are attaching the caps no matter where they are sold in Europe. This leads to funny videos of people  showing their frustration at trying to drink from a bottle with the cap bobbing up and down under their nose.  You can see from the above photo that drinking straight from the bottle could be annoying.

Of course concerns about the environment are what are driving this regulation. Too much plastic that doesn't get recycled. Or does it?

No breakfast news show would be complete without a couch of experts to weigh in on the problem. One of the two women in the YouTube video tells us she's from Manchester, and that plastic caps and bottles, although both being plastic, do not get recycled together. Thus, although the U.K. doesn't have to adopt the EU regulation, there is no gain to have the cap attached other than keeping it from perhaps becoming litter. Manchester recycling can't absorb the two types of plastic of the cap and bottle at the came time. You learn something every day.

Cutting down on litter is the usual reason given for enacting recycling measures. The A-Hed piece shows bags supposedly filled with plastic bottle caps.  It is hard to believe that the caps have been culled from otherwise recycled bottles, unless they're from Manchester and were separated from being screwed back on empty recycled bottles.

An inventive use of the multi-colored caps was put to use in Stockport, Merseyway, U.K. where a giant mural was made from just screw caps. Perhaps our own MTA in this country could cut down on the money they spend on decorative tiles and use bottle caps instead. Just a thought.

You probably have to be over 40 to remember when in this country the anti-litter brigade got the distributors of canned beverages to eliminate the pull tab that was completely removed from the can to having it remain attached to the can.

If the consumer didn't slide the pull tab (ring) back into the can it became a candidate for being carelessly discarded. The elimination of discarded pull tabs from beaches made the people with metal detectors very happy. They were tired of all the false positive beeps when their search for coins and jewelry only yield a pull tab.

Of course I remember when the cans of my childhood had to be punctured with a can opener (thus the name). The can opener was a triangular shaped pointed tool that required the consumer to punch two holes in the top of the can. A small hole was needed to allow air to enter the can, and a larger hole was punched to allow the consumer to drink from the hole.

I remember when this can opener was referred to by my father's neighbor as they opened their Saturday beers in the backyard as the "church key." As a kid I never understood the reference, but later in life I've come to think the can opener—when opening beer cans—was getting them into heaven.

In the '50s, bottles had a 2¢ deposit. Large Coke and beer bottles were 5¢. Cans had no deposit. Discarded cans were a litter problem. I remember empty lots in Flushing that had many discarded beer cans, usually Rheingold, presumably left by teenagers.

EU member nations have to abide by EU rules. In one of those French police procedurals that I've been watching, I notice the STOP signs in France really do say STOP. Pourquoi? Why not ARRÊT, stop in French?

No, EU, headquartered in Brussels, Belgium rules. This of course creates a good deal of resentment that people in various European countries are being ruled by people in Belgium. C'est la vie.

Here's to hoping tethered caps don't become mandatory in the United States. This country disagrees on too many things already.

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Look It Up if You Can

There was something I heard on Jeopardy the other day as a clue/answer but couldn't remember it.  For some reason it came to me while eating dinner on Saturday night: Phone books in Iceland are arranged alphabetically by first name. I kid you not. Ken Jennings and the research staff told us so the other night. I don't remember how that came out as a clue, but it did. Another something learned from Jeopardy.

The Icelanders use the first name first because the last name is basically their father's first name followed by -son-or dottir [daughter].

The phone book may contain the occupation of the person listed to add some distinction in finding a desired listing.

We of course alphabetize names by last name, first name, middle initial. The ASCII (American Standard Code for Information Interchange) It is a code where each individual bit represents a unique character. Whenever you're sorting something on your computer the computer is using the ASCII code to effect the alphabetization.

That of course doesn't seem to be how Leonard Maltin's Movie and Video guides were assembled. These books have become obsolete due to the IMDB (Internet Movie Data Base) listings on the Web, so therefore easily accessed on your phone.

Being an Old School person who rarely uses their phone for anything other than making calls, I still have two of Maltin's editions: a 2000 and 2014 edition.

I still consult the books, but am hugely frustrated when the movie's name contains a space or a punctuation mark. The title Let No Man Write My Epitaph  should follow Let Freedom Ring, but instead appears many listings after Lethal Weapon. Two pages after. Whatever sorting they use, they do not recognize the space (which does have an ASCII value—32) and render Let No Man to be Letnoman follow Lethal; letn comes after leth in their scheme. The value 32 precedes any ASCII value for a letter. (A is 65; small a 97). But, who fights with Maltin's unique alphabetizing these day, right?

There are a coterie of people in Nepal who all have Sherpa as their last name. I have no idea how their phone book is arranged. The youngster who just completed a climb on all of the 14 8,000+ meter peaks is Nima Rinji Sherpa. Sherpa is an ethnic group. All Sherpas are not directly related.

I've set my bathroom iPod to playback all listings alphabetically by artist. Since the iPod does not have a last name, first name format, the playback is strictly by the first name of the artist, or group. Frank Sinatra comes through with the Fs.

It is an interesting was to listen to the downloaded library.

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November 22, 1963

It is not a so-called milestone anniversary, but it is now 61 years ago that President Kennedy was assassinated in Dallas, Texas.

I wouldn't ordinarily write about this, but the calendar this year for November is the same calendar that was in 1963. November 22nd was on a Friday, and Thanksgiving was the following week. I don't know how often calendars repeat themselves as to the days of the week. Maybe it's something like every 7 years or so.

Anyone of a certain age can tell you where they were when they heard the news of the events in Dallas, and what followed. And likewise the same people who are still breathing will tell you where they were they were on 9/11.

I wrote about the 60th anniversary last year, and how at a high school reunion the members of my class year all asked one another, or answered the question, "were you in school that day?"

I asked a friend of mine, Johnny M., who is older than I am, where was he. He told me he was in South Carolina at Army basic training and they had just come in from the rifle range when the news hit. Anyone alive today and old enough to remember the day will tell you exactly what they were doing.

For myself, I was in a high school class on 15th Street at Stuyvesant High School when the announcement came over the PA system to dismiss at around 2:20. There was no reason given and I'm sure the teachers knew nothing at that point as well.

As students, our thinking was that it was connected with the spontaneous rally that sprung up in front  of the building before classes that morning. The following day was to be the football match with Stuyvesant's rival DeWitt Clinton high school.

Clinton at that time was in the Bronx, but it stared on 10th Avenue in the 50s. My uncle George went there when he went to high school. I think the building is now John Jay College for criminology. Needless to say, the game was never played.

The American Football League (The AFL was yet merged with the NFL) cancelled their games. The NHL, NBA and significantly the NFL played their games. The NFL commissioner Pete Rozelle made the decision to play because he stated: "It has been a tradition in sports for athletes to perform in times of great personal tragedy. Football was Mr. Kennedy's game. He thrived on competition." Not all the NFL owners agreed with Rozelle, but they were obligated to play.

I remember being in the family flower shop when the owner of the hair dressing salon in the same building came in stunned, and told us that Kennedy had been shot. We seldom had the radio on and we did not have a TV in the shop. I don't remember when my father got to the shop from his day job at the Brooklyn Navy Yard.

I was home in Flushing on Saturday morning when the phone rang and my father told me Lee Harvey Oswald had been killed. "What?" My father had already gone to the shop that morning.

My guess is I stayed at home in Flushing and didn't go to the shop that weekend. My guess is there wasn't much business anyway. I just remember it was a very long weekend, with not much on TV news  that didn't constantly repeat itself. The country was numb.

In 2024, 1963 seems like more than a lifetime ago. I think of it as being so much in the past as I think my parents felt about WW ll.

To no surprise, no one mentioned or wrote about Friday being the 61st anniversary of the assassination. It is not a milestone year, and most people may not even remember the day of the week, or even the date. They just know it happened in 1963.

The years just keep rolling by.

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December 13, 1946

Is it possible I played as a kid with someone who was born in 1946? Yes, when you're born in 1949 and that person is only 25 months older than you.

In a typical chain reaction of thought that was kicked off by reading a recent story about Keen's Steakhouse in the NYT, I once again came to dwell on my childhood friend George A. Trampler, the only child of our upstairs tenants when I was growing up in Flushing, NY.

I've often thought about George and the particular circumstances of how he passed away at 22 in 1969 from encephalitis contracted at Fort Dix, NJ during his Army training. But this time I went a little further. I Googled if those kinds of cases were common to Fort Dix. It turns out they were on several occasions.

George and his mother and father and his paternal grandfather moved into our upstairs apartment in our two-family home in Flushing some time in the 1950s. I really don't remember exactly when, other than it was the winter

George was an only child like myself, and we came fast friends that first winter playing outside in the snow. He went to the local Catholic elementary school, St. Andrew of Avellino, where eventually my girls started their education.

I remember George talking of his Latin homework in high school, conjugating verbs in Latin and reading Cicero. Might have even been in elementary school. I went to P.S. 22 around the corner, and Latin is what was on pennies.

George and his grandfather slept in the same bedroom. His grandfather, whose name I don't remember, it might have also been George like George's father, had been a concert pianist of some regard. I don't know how they got a grand piano in the upstairs living room on the second floor. I never remember it being moved in, or out, when they left some time in the early '60s.

The grandfather's playing could be heard downstair in our place. Nothing intrusive, but my mother always said he was playing "finger exercises." There were stacks of sheet music all over the piano when I played with George upstairs.

George didn't play baseball or touch football in the street with the rest of boys on the block, but he and I were always playing at his place, usually Monopoly. The Tramplers were big Monopoly players and would leave unfinished games out to be finished later.

George and I played so much Monopoly that I memorialized a picture of a board showing the tokens we always chose. The game in the '50s came with wooden tokens, before the metal pieces came to be used. I always took the orange piece; he the adjacent white piece.

Together he and I devised an extension of the board to be added alongside St. Mark's Place as a detour. We identified property names, created deeds and amounts. You came back to the standard board at the Electric Utility property.

We didn't play with a $500 bill to be scooped up if you landed on FREE PARKING. That was unknown to us.

George never came downstairs to play at my place. I don't know why that was. My mother was not social with too many people on the block. George's mother may have kept a tight rein on where he went.

George got into taking home movies. He saved his allowance money and bought a Bell & Howell movie camera, light bar, screen, and splicing unit. (Not all at once.) How'd I love to see those movies again. Not going to happen. 

I don't remember when the Tramplers moved out. I know I was too upset to join my folks in saying goodbye. As it went, that would have been the last time seeing my friend.

This whole rekindled memory was touched off my a recent NYT story on Kean's Steak House on West 36th Street. I've eaten there twice, and I knew of its connection to the Lambs Club, but not fully.

It seems Keens Steakhouse was started by Albert Keen in 1885, a theater producer who ran the Lambs Club, a hangout for theatrical folk. And the Lambs Club is where the Tramplers come in.

George's father, also named George, was a manager at the Lambs Club at 130 West 44th Street. The Club has since moved to 3 West 51st Street. There is a very upscale restaurant named Lambs on West 44th Street.

The father was a tall, distinguished, good looking man who my father said must be playing the horses, since the $125 in rent was often paid with a $100 bill, common to racetracks, then and now.

The Tramplers were good tenants, and were never behind in any rent, which I'm sure, knowing my father, was going for way below the market rate.

The upstairs apartment was equal to our downstair apartment in size, having two bedrooms an enclosed porch, one full bath, living room, kitchen and dining room. There was plenty of sunlight that came into the upstairs apartment.

The kitchen however was never modernized. My father did little to upgrade things. Our downstairs kitchen had a cupboard, cabinets, Formica counters and a kitchen table wedged between the stove and the refrigerator that you had to pull out to sit at. Upstairs, there were no cabinets, only a small counter, table and the same cupboard like we had.

Eventually, my father installed separate oil heating units in the cellar for each apartment, with the proviso that the Tramplers paid for their own fuel. They were happy to do so in lieu of any rent increase. Oil was very cheap then, maybe 11¢ a gallon. 

The separate burners eliminated the enormous, inefficient oil burner that was installed to heat both levels after the coal furnace was replaced. Before I was born, coal was chuted through cellar windows by the driveway into a bin. My parents initially were shoveling coal into the furnace with shovels. We still had the long-handled coal shovels and used them for shoveling snow.

The Tramplers moved out when the father got a job managing a country club in Riverside, Connecticut. The only contact we ever had after they moved was when we heard that the son, George, had passed away from encephalitis at Fort Dix, where the story went he was undergoing R.O.T.C. training.

George had gone to the local Catholic high school, Holy Cross in Flushing, and then Fordham University to study business. Digging into this a bit I can't reconcile the R.O.T.C. bit and passing away at 22, buried in Long Island National Cemetery in Farmingdale, NY with a headstone at says PVT ARMY.

If an R.O.T.C. program is completed, and at 22 George was old enough and smart enough to have finished college, you get a commission in the Army as a 2nd Lieutenant.

George was born on Friday the 13th in 1946 and passed away on March 18, 1969. When we learned of George's passing it was sometime after he had died. We learned the parents passed away sometime after. 

George was the second of four boys I knew in the neighborhood who didn't make it such much past their 20s. One went to drugs, another to drugs after coming home from Vietnam. Another, an elementary school classmate of mine, went to an accident with a CO2 cartridge he was fiddling with for a science project that he punctured, that exploded and ripped him apart. I used to keep the Daily News story of his death in my wallet for the longest time.

If a young male in his 20s can keep living, he might make it to 75 and wonder where the time went.

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The Iceman

Before John Marley appeared in Love Story and Cat Ballou as the father of daughters played by Ali McGraw and Jane Fonda, and in The Godfather as a movie producer who wakes up in a blood soaked bed (he's a VERY sound sleeper apparently) with a horse's head, he was Garabet, a Greek in Turkey who makes money by chipping ice off a mountain in the 1963 Elia Kazan movie America, America. Having seen Marley in all those movies before ever seeing him in America, America, you're in for  a surprise when you see him in Kazan's autobiographical movie. Kazan was born in Turkey in 1909.

And lest you think that chipping ice off a mountain and selling it is an odd way to make money, you only have  to read the recent NYT obituary for Baltazar Ushca Tenesaca, 80, who kept Andean ice harvesting alive.

Before there were refrigerators there were ice boxes in kitchens. These boxes were cooled by large blocks of ice delivered by the ice man. The now long departed comedian Flip Wilson had a great narrative routine about the Ice Man and the horse who could climb stairs and talk, but only when it wanted to. 

It seems the horse was savvy enough to keep the fact that it could talk away from the owner, because if the owner/wagon driver knew the horse could talk in addition to climbing stairs and delivering the ice, the owner would want him to yell "Ice" as well. The horse wanted none of that added responsibility. This was a smart horse.

You do have to wonder how Mr. Ushca came to the attention of the NYT obituary desk. It is probably safe to safe that Andean ice harvesters were not sitting in a pre-written obit waiting for the subject to pass away. No matter. This subject almost passes the test of someone the late Robert McG. Thomas Jr. would have written about.

Baltazar had been chipping ice since the age of 15, from a glacier on Ecuador's highest peak, Mount Chimbarazo, a dormant volcano (thank goodness) with an elevation of 20,549 feet, the closest point on earth to the sun. Baltazar's father and brothers were in the business as well, but the brothers Juan and Gregorio left the family business a while ago.

The beauty of the online obit is that imbedded in it is a 2012 14 minute documentary link "El Último Hielero" or the "Last Ice Merchant."

Refrigerators and commercial ice have just about ended the business of harvesting ice from the glacier. Apparently though, all ice is not the same, with Chimborazo ice considered to be the testiest and the sweetest, full of vitamins for your bones.

Baltazar unloads two huge straw wrapped bundles and sells them in town, The merchant has been selling Chimborazo ice now for four generations. You do wish someone made the ice available for tasting beyond the town of Guano. Think of the price a 2nd Avenue bar would be able to charge for liquor cooled with Chimborazo ice.  

Watching the video you have to conclude that Baltazar was a very strong hombre. The glacier has been receding over the years, and the last time he took ice from it he had to climb to an elevation of 15,000 feet.

His lungs must have had the air capacity of jet turbines, because he walked up the mountain with his donkeys with no special equipment. He wove straw from the hillside into rope to fashion slings for carrying the ice down the mountain.

When the documentary was made, Baltazar was 67. He quit the business at 75 but didn't quit working. Not having a pension plan or a 401-K, he last worked at ground level herding cattle.

And just to prove that what doesn't kill you makes you stronger, Baltazar spent five years herding cattle, but met with death when he was trampled by a bull.

As Pete Hamill once said: life is the leading cause of death.

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Newspaper Osmosis

Members of Club dei 27 in Parma, Italy

I first thought I might be imagining things. Was the NYT adopting a front page, below the fold A-Hed-like piece feature for its front page, mimicking the WSJ?

The front page A-Hed piece is a time-honored feature of the WSJ. Its name derives from newspaperspeak about text framed with borders that resemble an A. I couldn't find a formal definition of A-Hed in the OED, but Google tells me it means headline, and is purposely misspelled by the WSJ to distinguish it from a top-of-the fold headline.

The A-Hed piece is so popular with WSJ readers that there is a collection of pieces in a book, Floating Above the Page. Not all that long ago Rupert Murdoch wanted to get rid of it for some reason. The staff revolted, (to say nothing of what the readers might have done) and it has never been discontinued that I know of. It is one of the first things I land on when picking up the WSJ, and it has given me many inspiration for blog postings. 

Lately, and I can't remember when I first started to think that the NYT might be trying out its own version of an A-Hed piece. While not framing it the same way, or stuffing it with sometimes truly groaning dad puns, they have definitely started to do something I haven't seen before.

How else can you explain a recent NYT front page piece, with a photo of a quadruped and the headline: The Mule Was a Menace. But He Wasn't a Mule. I kid you not. This is not a front page story about NATO and the Ukraine. 

Note: Mules and Donkeys are not biologically the same animal. But that's another story.

The NYT pieces (and I don't know what to call them) lack the utter levity and lightness of the WSJ pieces, but clearly someone at the editor's desk is changing something.

I think it was the story about the Verdi Club that got me thinking things might be changing over there on Eighth Avenue.

On November 4 the front page piece went with a headline and photo: To Join This Club a Member Must Die. And You Must Adore Verdi. Not quite the white smoke coming from the Vatican, but close. It was a true WSJ-like  A-Hed piece.

The WSJ has an A-Hed piece nearly every day, always front page and below the fold. The NYT version is not every day. I guess it depends how much other news the NYT needs to give front page status to.

Reading the WSJ can be fun, with its A-hed piece and its "Pepper...And Salt" cartoon on the editorial page. The NYT would seem to be trying to capture some fun of its own. It's not always easy to find fun in the NYT.

But consider some of the following recent front page pieces that have that A-Hed feel to them. This is not your grandfather's NYT.

Ohtani's Ruthian Feats Can't Coax Japanese Yankees Fans to Turn Dodger Blue

Paraguay Adores a Cartoon Mouse Named Mickey. Just Don't Bring Up Disney

Maps Show Landslide Risk in Alaska, but Some Aren't Interested

A Reminder You Can't Light Up Will Now Stay Lit All the Time

Dead Poet Talking: Polish Radio Experiment Bares Pitfalls of AI

Village So Spooky, Even Skeptics get the Jitters

In Tumultuous Times, More Readers Are Reaching  for Magical 'Healing Fiction' 

The paper is becoming fun to read.

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