Archive for October, 2006
A Really Bad Week for the Yankees
Thursday, October 12th, 2006First, there was the embarrasing meltdown against the Detroit Tigers that took the Yankees’ baseball season from successful to disasterous in the space of 72 hours. Then, the media circus about whether or not Joe Torre would remain as Yankee manager and whether or not All-Star and former MVP, Alex Rodriguez, would remain the Yankee third baseman. Finally, everything seemed to settle down so that New Yorkers could look in on the Mets, who swept their first round playoff series despite several key injuries. Then, this: Cory Lidle, a recently acquired pitcher from the Philadelphia Phillies, crashed his private plane into an Upper East Side apartment building.
First, the city went through an eerie deja vu experience, watching pictures and video that came way too close to the memories of September 11, 2001. The various federal agencies deemed it an accident almost immediately, but took precautionary measures – scrambling fighter jets over several major U.S. cities. A couple of hours later, relief. It was just an accident. Then, a different kind of horror – we all know the guy who was killed. He was a Yankee. A recent acquisition, so not a beloved sports hero to be sure, but a Yankee nonetheless. Just a month ago, he told a New York Times reporter about how safe his plane was:
“The whole plane has a parachute on it,” Lidle said. “Ninety-nine percent of pilots that go up never have engine failure, and the 1 percent that do usually land it. But if you’re up in the air and something goes wrong, you pull that parachute, and the whole plane goes down slowly.”
Obviously, whatever went wrong here didn’t allow him enough time to deploy the chute.
I’m sure the Boys in the Bronx are looking forward to a quiet, unexciting winter. They certainly seem to deserve it…
Categories: Sports Talk | Comments Off on A Really Bad Week for the Yankees
Music to Work By…
Wednesday, October 11th, 2006My employer, Bank of America, is offering free online equity trades to qualified customers. Great.
We’re handing out snappy looking T-shirts with a big $0 on the front on the streets of New York. Terrific.
We’ve rented a bunch of double-decker tour buses and a combo band to sit on the upper level of each one and play snappy music to go along with the snappy T-shirts. Cool.
We’ve parked one of these tour buses on 50th Street & Rockefeller Plaza, where lots of people can walk by, hear the music, get a T-Shirt, and eventually sign up for the service. Ingenious.
Here’s the downside: 50th & Rockefeller puts the bus right outside my office window, which means I’ve been listening to snappy music for the last couple of hours with no end in sight, AND I don’t even get a T-Shirt!!!
Grrrrrr……..
Categories: New York, New York, Random Acts of Blogging | 1 Comment »
How People Found Me – September Edition
Sunday, October 8th, 2006Here are the most interesting Google searches that caused people to link to my site. I think I forgot to do this last month, so to make it up to everyone, this one has categories. Don’t get used to this kind of service…
Politics:
clinton bashes bush (1 / 2,620,000)
[My blog post is result #1. gop.com’s is result #2, and FOXNews.com is result #3. Gotta love the Google…]
Random Queries:
serious hoopage (1 / 150)
bill maher kids drawings (1 / 291,000)
the great pizza challenge (5 / 5,970,000)
semantic dating (5 / 4,360,000)
why was 2005 hurricane season so bad (6 / 4,440,000)
[Because clearly, I’m the one you’d ask, right?]
liberty de vito no longer with billy joel (10 / 21,100)
billy joel disc reviews (16 / 900,000)
john stewart musharraf blog (40 / 233,000)
People Actually Looking for Me:
brian greenberg bank of america (1 / 774,000)
brian greenberg lehman (1 / 227,000)
[Good to see my new employer draws more hits than my old employer, even if most of them still aren’t me…]
brian greenberg vice president and senior technology manager global markets back office technology bank of america (1 / 88,500)
[OK, this guy REALLY wanted to find me. Actually, to be fair, it looks like he typed in everything on my business card]
Celebrity Look-Alike Queries:
jim carrey look alike (14 / 114,000)
jake gyllenhaal look alike (18 / 79,300)
jay leno frontal face image (1 / 35,200)
selma hayek look alike (19 / 72,200)
[No, not me – my wife]
emmy rossum look alike (1 / 19,900)
[Sadly, not my wife – me…]
hindi celeb look alike (1 / 66,200)
[Unbelievably, still me…]
Categories: Blogging about Blogs | Comments Off on How People Found Me – September Edition
Hastert’s Folly: Foley’s e-mails from last year
Sunday, October 8th, 2006Here are the e-mails that Congressman Foley sent to a congressional page back in 2005 (as reported by the Stop Sex Predators blog). These are the mails that Dennis Hastert alledgedly saw and didn’t react strongly enough to.
I gotta say, the text of these seems so innocuous as to suggest that there must be more, otherwise why would the Republicans be warning pages to stay away from Foley? The closest thing to inappropriate is “How are you weathering the hurricane? Are you safe? Send me a pic of you as well…” and that’s only creepy because “send me a picture” is read through the “child molester” lens. Absent other information, I can easily see how this could be read as “You had a hurricane in your hometown – send me a picture so I can see the damage/make sure you’re OK.” Not a particularly normal thing to ask for, but certainly not worthy of decisive action, right?
If this is really all there was a year ago, I can see why Hastert is refusing to step down. The Democrats are pushing the “he knew about it a year ago” line, and letting people assume “it” is the talk of masturbation, removing clothing, etc. that’s included in the instant messages, when really “it” is “what do you want for your birthday?” and “send me a picture.”
As I say, the fact that Hastert went as far as contacting the boy’s parents (who asked that it be kept quiet) and had other pages warned to watch out for Foley is the real smoking gun here, suggesting that there are either more e-mails, or that Hastert had other ways of knowing what a creep Foley was. ‘Cause the e-mails on their own just ain’t cutting it (at least not for me…)
Categories: Political Rantings | 1 Comment »
Yet another Foley question
Friday, October 6th, 2006I haven’t posted anything about the entire Foley mess, since I’ve been commenting on both John Scalzi’s and Jason Bennion’s blog on the subject.
Short summary of my comments thus far: the guy is a scary, disgusting creep. He deserves to lose his job, and he deserves the public ridicule he’s getting now, and the continued ridicule he’ll get for the rest of his career/life. Similarly, anyone who knew about this and chose to leave children in a dangerous situation for their own professional gain (be they Republican leaders looking to hold on to a House Seat, Democrats looking for an “October surprise”” or members of the media waiting for the story to be “big news”), deserves the same fate.
So assuming just about everyone agrees with the above, I have a question. I’m fairly confident that I won’t get a straight answer to my question, and I certainly have no shot of finding it on the usual news/web filters, since the topic is saturated with the scandal itself. But I’ll throw it out there anyway:
As leader of the committee that protects children against online predators, etc., did Mark Foley do a good job? In other words, despite the disgusting revelations, did he pass good laws to protect kids? Did he increase detection and/or prosecution of people who prey on kids? Did he increase the penalties of those were were caught? |
Don’t get me wrong here: I’m not suggesting for a second that he should keep his job, regardless of how he’s performed in it. A guy like this simply cannot be allowed to hold public office, particularly that office, given the obvious conflicts of interest. And even if he has done a good job, surely we can find someone else who’s equally competent, and not a child predator as well.
I ask the question more to find out if his personal failings led him to go easy on these people and if, by doing so, he harmed more kids than just the congressional pages we’re talking about now.
Anyone?
Categories: Political Rantings | 2 Comments »