New York, New York
RCCTP Update – 11/13/07
Wednesday, November 14th, 2007The new pictures are up. Today – the Swarovski star, an office-eye view, and men sweeping pine needles!
Fun for the whole family…
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And by “day,” he means “night”
Monday, November 12th, 2007I took special care to setup the photoblog so that I could post pictures to it without being at my home PC. I remembered to bring the camera, and oh yes – I took the pictures. But alas, there are no devices in the office that can transfer an image from an SD memory card to a PC for uploading.
And so, the daily pictures will post sometime between 9pm and 12AM each evening. Those suffering from anticipation can rest assured that after today, they will still have a picture to see each morning – it’ll just be day old news. Like a newspaper.
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The 2007 Rockefeller Center Christmas Tree – The Photoblog!
Saturday, November 10th, 2007OK, I’m trying something new here at I Should Be Sleeping – a photoblog. Every weekday between November 8 and November 28, I will take at least one picture of the Rockefeller Center Christmas Tree (which stands in front of 30 Rockefeller Plaza in New York – just across the street from my office at 50 Rockefeller Plaza), and post it to this page. Click back there every day to follow the arrival, hoisting, decorating, and finally, lighting of the most famous Christmas Tree in the World.
While I’m at it, some background: This year’s Rockefeller Center Christmas Tree was planted in 1947 in Shelton, Connecticut by the first owner of Joseph and Judy Rivnyak’s house on Soundview Avenue. It was cut down with a handsaw on November 7th, loaded onto a flatbed truck, and transported into New York City. Four of the past nine Rockefeller Center Christmas Trees have come from Connecticut.
The tree is 84 feet tall and 48 feet in diameter at its base. It is estimated that by the time it is taken down, more than a billion people will have seen the tree, either live or on television. Or, of course, on the Internet.
If you’d like to fall into this last category, remember to click on the Rockefeller Center Christmas Tree Photoblog each day for an update!
Categories: New York, New York | 1 Comment »
Hopstop.com
Thursday, October 11th, 2007Someone at work just pointed me to Hopstop.com. For those who live in & around the New York metropolitan area, this is a very cool site. It’s like Mapquest or Google Maps, but it includes the New York buses, commuter rail lines, and subways.
So, for instance, I need to go from midtown (Rockefeller Plaza) to the Upper East Side tonight for a charity function. The map it generated is to teh right. Notice the break in the trip where you get on the subway and then get off at a new location? With the more common mapping tools, it would assume you were driving/walking, and take you across the streets for that distance.
The site also specifies the estimated time the trip will take (including estimated timings for each stop on the subway), so you can leave the right amount of travel time ahead of your trip.
I know this only useful for a specific niche of people/purposes, but it does what it sets out to do very well.
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Taxi!
Tuesday, September 18th, 2007
Live from Rockefeller Center…it’s a burning taxi cab! Well, at this point, a burnt taxi cab.
I was at lunch when it happened, but I’m told flames started shooting out from under the hood, and the cabbie just stopped the car, got out of the cab and watched it burn. He got his 15 minutes of fame talking to news reporters, etc. on the scene.
When I got back from lunch, the remaining melted hunk of metal, glass and plastic was sitting in the street, surrounded by two firetrucks, several firemen, and about two dozen tourists, all taking pictures of the wreckage (gotta love Rockefeller Center…). This picture was taken from my office window in 50 Rockefeller Plaza, as a forklift took the cab away.
Another colleague has pictures of the actual fire, but needs to send them to me from his home account tonight. When I get them, I’ll post them here.
UPDATE: More pictures here. (Hat tip: Gothamist)
UPDATE #2: Three more pictures from my colleague, Joe Woods. Click to see the larger versions:
Categories: New York, New York | 1 Comment »
9/11/07
Tuesday, September 11th, 2007
It has become a tradition of mine to post my thoughts about September 11, 2001 on its anniversary each year (2002, 2003, 2005, 2006). This year is different in several ways.
First, I’m not in New York. Due to an important business trip, I won’t be in or near New York City on the anniversary of the attacks, and will likely not see much (if any) of the annual memorial service at Ground Zero. Intellectually, I know it doesn’t matter much at all; I’ve never gone to Ground Zero for the ceremonies, or even taken time off of work to watch them on television.
The closest I’ve come to a personal memorial has been to try and do something nice for a New York Police Officer on 9/11. In 2002, an officer was on line in front of me at a pizza place and I insisted on buying him his dinner. In 2004, while stuck in traffic approaching the Lincoln Tunnel on a hot 9/11 afternoon, I offered to buy the cop directing traffic a drink from a nearby street vendor (he politely refused). This year, as in other years, I won’t come into contact with any of New York’s Finest, but they’ll be in my thoughts.
Also new this year: my wife and I told my older son, Avery, about the attacks this weekend. He was 18 months old when they happened, but he’s seven now and has just begun second grade. We figured there was a pretty good chance that either a teacher or fellow student would mention it today, and we wanted him to hear about it from us, rather than from someone else.
I have to say, he took it very well. When I told him that 3,000 people died, he looked scared, but recovered very quickly and began asking questions: Did the buildings hit other buildings when they fell down? Did the bad men who hijacked the airplanes die too? Why would anyone do something that they knew would kill them? Why would anyone think that God would like it if they killed people? We answered all his questions as best we could, and then he said, “Can I go now?” and ran back upstairs to play with his brother.
I suspect he’ll have more questions in the coming days, weeks, or even years. That’s okay – I’ve been preparing myself to answer them for six years now, and while it made me nervous to bring it up (more nervous than it made him to hear it), I felt well prepared to answer his questions and to reassure him from his fears.
Finally, a few words about Osama Bin Laden’s latest video. I have to say, I thought he was dead. That’s not to say I thought we killed him, mind you. I thought that years of running and hiding, given his poor health to begin with, had taken its toll, that he’d died of natural causes, and that Al Qaeda had covered it up in order to claim his ability to avoid capture as an ever-present victory over the United States.
I was also found some of the things he said fascinating. For instance:
“All praise is due to Allah, who built the heavens and earth in justice, and created man as a favor and grace from Him. And from His ways is that the days rotate between the people, and from His Law is retaliation in kind: an eye for an eye, a tooth for a tooth and the killer is killed.”
It’s revealing that he reads that ancient proverb as one of retaliation. James Lileks points out Dennis Prager’s thoughts:
It’s not about retaliation. It’s not an injunction to do unto others for the sake of vengeance. The message is proportionality. An eye for an eye, not two. A tooth for a tooth, not a mouthful.
The fact that Bin Laden sees it as a command to exact revenge on his enemies shows you the specific way in which his mind is severely twisted. Here’s more:
“There are two solutions for stopping [the Global War on Terror]. The first is from our side, and it is to continue to escalate the killing and fighting against you. This is our duty, and our brothers are carrying it out, and I ask Allah to grant them resolve and victory.”
To reiterate: the best thing he can do to stop the war is to continue killing and fighting against us. The second solution, by the way, is for all of us to convert to Islam.
Bin Laden’s message is rife with our most public complaints about the Bush administration: negative public opinion polling, corporate influence on government policy, the Democrats’ unwillingness to halt war funding, civilian deaths in Afghanistan and Iraq, the federal deficit, high taxes, global warming, and even the recent difficulties in the home mortgage market. Consistent with his reading of “an eye for an eye,” he sees these problems as a rationale for abandoning the democratic way of life, and embracing Islam. Our government has wronged us, he reasons, so out of revenge, we should wrong our government by running toward Islam. If we do so:
“It will also achieve your desire to stop the war as a consequence, because as soon as the warmongering owners of the major corporations realize that you have lost confidence in your democratic system and begun to search for an alternative, and that this alternative is Islam, they will run after you to please you and achieve what you want to steer you away from Islam. So your true compliance with Islam will deprive them of the opportunity to defraud the peoples and take their money under numerous pretexts, like arms deals and so on.”
What Bin Laden doesn’t realize – what he’s never been able to realize – is that our constant carping signifies the strength in our system, not its weakness. We do not need to seek revenge against our government to change its policies. We need only make our disagreements public in a way that convinces the leadership (or the voters) to change direction. To one who has never known this freedom, our complaints may sound like desperate rage. And, as I’ve discussed on these pages before, perhaps we’ve been going about it in somewhat ineffective ways lately, reinforcing that idea.
In the end, though, the open debate of ideas is precisely what will allow us to persevere long after Bin Laden has sacrificed himself to gain “entrance into Paradise.” It is what truly makes us the greatest country in the history of the world.
God Bless America.
Categories: New York, New York, Political Rantings | Comments Off on 9/11/07
The Ghosts of 9/11 Return to NYC
Wednesday, July 18th, 2007
Some thoughts on today’s steam pipe explosion in New York City:
– It’s going to be an entire generation, maybe two, before people see an image like this and don’t think of 9/11. Especially in New York City. We can talk all we want, but in this regard, the terrorists won.
– People’s reactions are the same, even once they know it wasn’t an attack. People ran down long fights of stairs in office buildings. My mother called the house to make sure I was OK. I irrationally scanned through the pictures on the web, looking for people I might know.
– New York City firemen, some of whom responded to the 9/11 attacks, and most of whom know someone who died responding to them, still ran into the fray to secure the situation and help the citizens of New York. The bravery these men & women exhibit is beyond my comprehension.
– Finally, no matter what happens, someone will always stop to take a picture of it.
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Anyone have a $1,000 Pizza in Utah?
Saturday, March 17th, 2007OK, this one’s for my friends in Utah. A guy in New York City has created a pizza that he sells for $1,000:
Nino Selimaj, who runs six pizza restaurants in New York, on Wednesday unveiled his Luxury Pizza, a 12 inch (30 cms), thin crust topped with caviar, lobster, creme fraiche and chives. Cut into eight, it works out at $125 a slice.
Mr. Selimaj says it’s no publicity stunt – he did over a year of market research to determine demand, and has already sold one pizza. But here’s the money quote:
“But where better to experiment with pizza than in New York where people love their pizza,” he said.
Indeed…
Categories: New York, New York, The World Wide Weird | 1 Comment »
New York’s Subway Superman
Thursday, January 4th, 2007This is one of the coolest stories ever.
Basically, a 20-year-old film student, Cameron Hollopeter, had a seizure on a New York Subway platform and wound up falling off the platform and on to the tracks. Wesley Autrey, a 50-year-old father of two, who’s daughters were with him at the time, saw the train coming, and jumped onto the tracks after him, pinning him in the 21-inch space below the train. The conductor saw them, made an emergency stop, and turned off the power. By then, Mr. Autrey and Mr. Hollopeter were underneath the second car of the train. The train was so close to Mr. Autrey, that the ski cap he was wearing had a grease stain on it from the bottom of the train.
Mr. Autrey is being treated like the hero that he is. He’s been interviewed by all the major news programs, the mayor of New York called to thank him, Donald Trump gave him a check for $10,000, the film school that Mr. Hollopeter attends gave him $5,000, as well as $5,000 scholarships for each of his daugthers, and he’s received interview requests from David Letterman, Ellen DeGeneres and Charlie Rose. I’m sure there’s more where that came from, too.
Well done, Mr. Autrey. Well done, indeed!
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What Kind of Accent Do You Have?
Saturday, December 2nd, 2006Well, this is pretty impressive. 13 questions & no audio involved, and this thing not only figured out that I speak with a Northeast accent, but that I’m “from north Jersey, New York City, Connecticut or Rhode Island.”
| What American accent do you have?
Your Result: The Northeast
Judging by how you talk you are probably from north Jersey, New York City, Connecticut or Rhode Island. Chances are, if you are from New York City (and not those other places) people would probably be able to tell if they actually heard you speak. |
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| Philadelphia | |
| The Inland North | |
| The Midland | |
| The South | |
| Boston | |
| The West | |
| North Central | |
| What American accent do you have? Take More Quizzes |
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Categories: New York, New York, Random Acts of Blogging | 6 Comments »