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LOS ANGELES—When you say, "Don't worry about me, I'll just jump on the subway" to someone in El Lay, you get one of the following responses:
"Excuse me, would you repeat that?"
"Oh, I'm sorry, I thought you'd already arrived in California."
"We don't have a subway."
"Nobody rides the subway."
"Are you crazy?"
"You'll get stabbed."
"The subway doesn't go anywhere."
"Good luck with that."
Suggesting you'll be using Los Angeles mass transit—much less only mass transit during an extended stay in Southern California—ranks right up there with "I love Justin Bieber" as a phrase guaranteed to isolate you socially from everyone you meet.
I've told people that I'll be taking the train into town from LAX—thereby sparing that person from the two-hour reality-show episode called "Picking You Up From the Airport"—only to have the native Angeleno say, "There is no train from the airport."
Let me repeat that. They're not telling me that they never take the train from the airport. They're not telling me it's a bad train or a slow train or an infrequently scheduled train. They're denying the existence of any train at all. It's happened more than once.
I say, "Do I need to send you the Internet link that tells you how to catch the shuttle to the Green Line?"
I realize it's confusing, because the train station there is called "Aviation/LAX Station." Unless you know what that means, you would never know that it's the train station at the frigging airport.
Even worse than someone who has lived in Los Angeles for forty years and still has no idea that a train exists is someone who sort of half-remembers some information about a train from ten years ago that kind of maybe got built. Then you're likely to get advice like, "Yeah, but they haven't activated those stops yet. Those are just bus lanes."
In which case you have to tell them that you've already taken the train three or four times and there were no buses in sight.
"Yeah, but that train doesn't go anywhere. It just goes, like, to Compton."
And then you have to tell them that, no, it will take me to the Blue Line, which will go straight north into downtown, where I can take the Purple Line out Wilshire or the Red Line into Hollywood or the Orange Line up over the mountains to Van Nuys. Or if I want to change at Union Station, I could get the Metrolink to San Bernardino or Lancaster or Oceanside. Or if I got really carried away, I could get the Amtrak to San Diego or Santa Barbara or Bakersfield. So starting down this Green Line journey is pretty much the opposite of the concept of "That train doesn't go anywhere."
"OK, the trains will be empty, though."
No, actually, the Blue Line between downtown Los Angeles and Long Beach, to use one example, is almost always full.
"OK then, the trains will be dangerous."
Well, uh, as a person who has ridden trains all over the world, I think the danger level would be described as maybe a "1" on a scale of 10. There are so many transit employees, vendors, and crowds of people that a mugging would be virtually impossible. The people on California trains are, in fact, a little too talkative—you can put that Kindle away—but it's not menacing talk at all. It's sort of, "Hey, man, you got smokes?"
Normally I wouldn't make a big deal about people being space cadets—I'm not a car-hater and I couldn't care less what transportation choice people make—but we're talking about the city where people gripe about traffic all the time. New York has equally bad traffic, but it's not that hot a topic of conversation since it's assumed that you made that choice for yourself. You chose to get up early, take the Garden State to the Jersey Turnpike, then sit in the Holland Tunnel bottleneck and pay eight bucks for the privilege of driving your car into Manhattan so you can put it in the forty-dollar-a-day parking garage. The reason you're not gonna gripe that much about how bad the various traffic situations were is that people already know what a douche you are since you could have gotten there quicker and with less hassle on the train.
In Los Angeles it's the opposite. The person who takes the train is the douche. And if anyone ever philosophizes about the subject, it's to say something like, "Mass transit is no good for Southern California. It's a car culture."
Well, yeah, because people choose to ignore the multi-billion-dollar train and bus system that was built in the eighties and nineties. Los Angeles, like most big cities, became excited about mass transit in the seventies, got a boatload of money from Washington, and built a system that was pretty much operable by the year 2000. For a city with the kind of sprawl that El Lay has, it's pretty amazing. I've used it. It works. Why does everyone deny that it exists?
Not that it doesn't have major holes in it. For example, the most annoying traffic corridors are the ones that run east-west from downtown and Hollywood—Santa Monica Boulevard, Wilshire Boulevard, and Sunset Boulevard. And these are the corridors the LA master planners chose not to address in the subway system. The Purple Line runs from Union Station out Wilshire Boulevard and then stops dead at Western Avenue for some reason. Unless you're going to Koreatown, the line is worthless. All they would have to do is extend it through West LA and Beverly Hills to Santa Monica and there would be mass celebrations by millions of William Morris agents, not to mention Wolfgang Puck, for taking all those Bentley-obstructing cars off the streets. As it is, the Purple Line is like a shuttle to the Wiltern Theatre, which I'm sure is very convenient for the manager of Tears for Fears.
There are other oddities. On certain lines, the train actually stops for cars. I know there are trolleys that stop for cars in most major world cities, but this is the same high-speed train that's zooming underground in the downtown and Hollywood areas, then suddenly it becomes the equivalent of a 1938 streetcar? Trains should always have the right-of-way over cars. That's sort of the point of being a train.
Another strange decision is the building of stations that are on concrete platforms several miles above the street. Most cities in the world have been trying to get rid of elevated train tracks for about, oh, a hundred years now. They disrupt neighborhoods, they're eyesores, and they discourage commerce because there's no place to put your newsstand, your Snapple kiosk, or your Pakistani lottery vendor. Elevated transit stations always end up with broken-down elevators, pissing off the handicapped, besides just being these imposing Roman aqueducts that nobody wants to climb up on in the first place. Los Angeles should have plenty of railroad right-of-way—it was laid out by Huntington and Stanford and all the other West Coast robber barons—but they seem bent on running the trains right down the middle of the freeway corridors, requiring you in some cases to clamber up into a scary-looking steel-and-concrete monkey-bar industrial maze that looks like something left over from an old episode of Mannix.
Still, the rail system is there, and if you combine it with state-of-the-art buses that are so sleek and quiet and cool that you're likely to fall asleep in them, it can get you anywhere you need to go.
Three weeks ago Los Angeles announced to the world that they were about to face "Carmageddon." The 405 Freeway was being shut down for construction at Mulholland Drive and so the world was going to end. These were similar to the apocalyptic reports we get in New York whenever President Obama comes to town and a bunch of streets and highways have to be closed down. And those reports always end with, "Alternate routes would be the 4 train, the B train, the PATH from Jersey City, or…"—you get the idea. And so "Carmageddon" was about to take place, and for some reason this was a worldwide story because I'm hearing these traffic reports on the opposite coast, and yet no one is saying, "So the alternate routes, according to the Los Angeles County Metropolitan Transportation Authority, will be the following extra express bus routes and more frequent rail departures throughout the western half of the county on the following lines…." Which would be, like, the sort of "duh" thing to do. Yes, you would have to take east-west routes and then cross the Santa Monica Mountains at some other canyon. You would have to go out of your way. But there was no mention of that sort of adjustment.
Instead, people were being told to stay home.
Now. The only reason people would be told to stay home is that the city's leaders—the people who presumably approved the funds for the excellent mass-transit system and built it to its present state—are the same people who say, "The train doesn't go to the airport." I know it's hard to believe, but what other explanation could there be? Nobody needed to stay home. You would only think that if you were proceeding from the assumption that there is no alternative to car travel. It's like the entire city grew so enamored of medical marijuana that they forgot they have trains and buses. Then, when they occasionally remember that they do have a mass-transit system, they invent phantom criminals who are getting ready to reenact The Taking of Pelham 123, only worse because Denzel Washington is not here to save us. Actually, the most sinister thing that happens on the Blue Line is illegal Snickers sales, no doubt terrifying the first-time riders cutting the umbilical cord that ties them to Bel Air.
Which is fine with me, because I can stretch out on the shuttle on my way to the secret LAX Station.
Actually, on this trip, I'll be leaving from Burbank Airport instead of LAX, a decision that causes my friend to apologize for not being available that day to take me to the airport because…
I interrupted. "The train goes there, too."
"But I looked on the map."
"It's a different train. It's the Metrolink."
Los Angeles people, listen up. If you ever need to get anywhere fast, whether you're in the Valley or South Central or Santa Monica or Long Beach or downtown, just email me. I'll be in Greenwich Village and I'll tell you which train or bus to take.
NEW YORK—I tried. I really tried. I wanted to be the only person in America who didn't know anything about the Caylee Anthony murder case.
I intentionally avoided it whenever it would come on cable TV. I have such an aversion to that caterwauling condescending public scold of a schoolmarm named Nancy Grace that I took Headline News Network off my remote control so that it automatically skipped to the next channel anytime I was surfing. Sometime in the past year they apparently gave Nasal Nancy a 24-hour show dedicated to the reinstatement of flesh-flaying, foot-roasting, and iron-maiden impalement for all criminal defendants. Her acolytes spread Nancy Graceisms all over the Internet through articles predicated on the idea that innocent victims' blood has morphed into vengeance-blogging directed by the Almighty. But as I said, I managed to step aside. Whenever someone would post a photo of Casey Anthony with some slogan like, "Look at this slut partying while her baby is dead," I would move onto the next subject or delete the email without answering.
And then when they finally got through the investigation, the arrest, the years of pre-trial hearings, the actual trial, and the verdict, I thought I was finally safe.
How wrong I was.
Not only is Casey Anthony still on my TV screen, but Nancy Grace has migrated to every other network so she can keep talking about it even if you have your remote control set so that you never have to listen to Nancy Grace.
The thing is over, people. She's not guilty. Not guilty means what it's always meant. It doesn't mean innocent; it means not proven guilty. Give it a rest.
I don't get the "party slut" emails anymore. What I get now are the "Caylee's Law" emails. Vote for Caylee's Law. Go to your Congresspeople and tell them to pass Caylee's Law. Caylee's Law says that if your child is missing and you don't report it, you're guilty of a crime. If you're planning to kill your child and hide the body and spend a lot of time covering up the crime, you won't be able to do that anymore because at some point you'll slap your forehead and go, "Damn! I can't hide this body! I can't destroy evidence! Caylee's Law says I have to report the kid missing right now!"
It's the most meaningless addition to the criminal statutes since "hate crime" laws. Those were invented under the assumption that if you simply murdered your wife or husband or business partner, you probably didn't hate them, but if you yelled, "You stupid wop!" right before pulling the trigger, your obvious Italophobia should qualify you for 30 extra years. Every decade or so some collective insanity runs through America's various legislatures and we suddenly have a raft of statutes dedicated to making sure that nobody wearing dark gloves and fleeing in a white Bronco on a Friday afternoon ever again goes free for lack of DNA evidence in a double murder case in Brentwood. And we call it the "Justice for Nicole Law."
There have been lots of comparisons to the O. J. verdict, which makes no sense to me because that verdict was widely celebrated, not reviled. I was on the #6 subway train when the O. J. verdict was announced, and there was universal cheering and shouting and hooting about "O. J. is innocent! O. J. is innocent! They let O. J. go!" Unless I'm missing something, the Casey Anthony verdict has inspired the opposite response. There were people fainting on the streets outside the Orange County Courthouse. There were mobs massed outside the jail when she was released, holding up placards reading "No Justice For Caylee!" in their non-pitchfork other hand. When her SUV pulled away from the jail last weekend, they had one of those traffic copters chasing her down the freeway like it was a high-speed chase! For all I know the copter pilot is still on the case. I know that "Casey sightings" have been bandied about the Web. Reporters have filed stories about mysterious women seen boarding private planes in the middle of the night, begging the question, "If you were able to prove that Casey Anthony was in a particular place at a particular time, what exactly would the story be? That she's still breathing?"
Like most reporters, I spent my early years hanging around courthouses and covering murder trials, and there is almost always a rabble outside. Sometimes the rabble is there to ensure "justice" for the dead person—justice being a term that everyone in a courthouse constantly uses for reasons that have an inverse relation to the Aristotelian meaning of the term—and on some rare occasions the rabble is there to ensure "justice" for the unfairly accused defendant.
So what are we taught to do in Journalism 101?
Acknowledge and ignore. Acknowledge that the rabble is outside. Write about it if it threatens to contaminate the jury. Ensure that we the media don't become part of the story.
I never went to journalism school anyway, so I wasn't around when they apparently added Journalism 102, which can be summed up by reporters' attitudes at the Anthony trial:
I actually heard trained professional journalists saying things like this: "Many people believe that Casey Anthony literally got away with murder, including this reporter.
Julie Chen, news anchor on the CBS daytime series The Talk and wife of CBS president and CEO Les Moonves, broke into tears when she reported the verdict. She couldn't continue with the newscast, so the regular panelists helped her out, all agreeing that her reaction was justified.
The usual things that you write about when you have an unpopular verdict are timeless. They haven't changed for a hundred years. I guess I need to put them down here, since very few other journalists have pointed them out since the verdict, but it goes like this:
1. The American system is set up so that we would rather see the occasional guilty person go free than a single innocent person be punished.
2. "Reasonable doubt" is a legal concept requiring acquittal. As soon as the reasonable-doubt standard is reached, the defendant must go free.
3. Juries are always instructed not to expose themselves to, or be influenced by, anything that's not introduced into evidence. In this case Judge Belvin Perry did an outstanding job of keeping the jury totally immune from the media circus, the street circus, and the Nancy Grace Scolding Schoolmarm Circus. In other eras Judge Perry would be getting back-slapped by his colleagues for pulling off the impossible, because there wasn't a single spot on that jury, not even an alternate.
4. "Not guilty" does not mean innocent. "Innocent" is a concept for theologians, and most of them have said it doesn't exist anyway.
5. Juries don't vote guilty in a death-penalty case unless all questions have been answered. They hate ambiguity and loose ends. Don't knock this unless you've been there.
There's always a rabble, and there's almost always a feeling on the public's part that the jury got it wrong. This happens even when the public agrees with the verdict. The jury got one thing right but missed three others. The verdict is correct but the sentence is too light. The sentence is correct but it's for the wrong reasons.
That's why the public doesn't get to decide.
If we were in Russia, the state could appeal the acquittal. If we were in France, there would be secret ways an acquittal could have been avoided. If we were in many other countries around the world, you could bribe some people and cause a retrial.
And I'm hearing all the "buts." I know about the "buts." But what about her claim that her child was kidnapped by Zanny the Nanny? But what about the duct tape? But what about all Casey's lies about her job? But what about the smell of death in the trunk? But what about the chloroform Google search? But what about that "Bella Vita" tattoo? But what about her lies about Caylee's paternity? But what about the fact that she was partying during the months Caylee was missing?
I know all this. So does the jury. The jury is not wrong. The way it works here, the verdict is the verdict. It can't be wrong; it's the verdict. I've explained this all my life in various contexts, but never before have I thought it was necessary to explain it to reporters, much less to reporters who are also lawyers, much less to a new reporter/lawyer mutant species called Nancy Grace.
What's going on here is a return to the law that was practiced in pre-Christian medieval Europe when a defendant's fate was placed in the hands of the Avenging Kinsman. The dead person's Avenging Kinsman—the wife, the husband, the mother, the father, the guy who won the paternity suit so he could file wrongful death—was allowed to kill the offender with his own hands, usually after a number of interested locals (those people on the Orange County Courthouse steps) had gathered evidence and presented it as fact. This was so there would be exactly one dead person on each side of that ledger in our minds that keeps track of who might have "gotten away with murder." If the ledger is askew, you end up with Hatfield-McCoy cycles of revenge killing.
Fortunately in the 15th century the Brits kicked the Avenging Kinsman out of the courtroom and said henceforth we would have a prosecutor representing the state's interests. The jury would no longer be the people on the courthouse steps who have an express interest in the trial; it would be their opposite—people who knew nothing about the case at all. In other words, they wiped out "victim's rights." The victim's feelings were something for a priest or a psychiatrist, but not for a courtroom.
What we didn't realize is that Nancy Grace would enroll at the Hildegard of Bingen School of Law sometime in the late 20th century and bring it all back.
NIAGARA FALLS, ONTARIO, CANADA—I'm in awe of Niagara Falls. Not the actual falls. Sure, that's intriguing for about five minutes as you stare down into the churning misty canyon and wonder what it would be like to kill yourself.
No, what I'm talking about is the Canadian city of some 80,000 people, swelling to approximately eighty million on Canada Day, the day I unfortunately chose to traverse the Rainbow Bridge and plunge myself into the gridlocked wonderland known as Clifton Hill, or, in local Chamber of Commerce parlance, the "Street of Fun."
Anyone who uses the phrase "Street of Fun" to promote tourism is either painfully naïve, destined to go the way of Wigwam Tourist Courts and Harvey Hotels, or so exceedingly brilliant that they've co-opted the term "fun" as a peculiarly Niagara Fallsian state of euphoria, almost as though to say, "You think you've experienced fun? Oh, yeah? Real fun? Do you know what fun is? WE GOT YOUR FUN RIGHT HERE, PAL."
Niagara Falls, Ontario's wise fathers fall into the stupendously brilliant category.
I'm a lifelong student of tacky American popular culture. There may not be anyone in the universe, living or dead, who has visited more snake farms, highway gift shops, all-you-can-eat cowboy buffets, carnivals, prairie-dog preserves, and bait-and-switch museums run by grifters and con men than I have. I've seen Rock City. I've gone down into Meramec Caverns' murky depths to witness the stalactite light show with the original recording of Kate Smith singing "God Bless America." I traveled the old Route 66 six times. I've paid money to see mummies, pygmy horses, bug-eyed freaks, Jesse James's pistol, and, at the Texas State Fair, the Abominable Snowman. (It was three dollars and worth every penny.) So when I make the following statement, it's based on a lifetime of accumulated wisdom:
Niagara Falls is the greatest tourist city in the world.
This is not an opinion. This is something I have scientifically proven. This is based on sophisticated metrics that I've refined and developed over the years, algorithms and indices that precisely measure the intensity of sign clutter, hucksterism, shamelessness, price-inflation, neon, and junk-food availability at roadside attractions from St. Augustine, FL (Fountain of Youth Archaeological Park, anyone?) to McMinnville, OR (the Spruce Goose exhibit). And based on what the charts tell us, no tourism center has ever scored a perfect 10. Not even Tennessee's Gatlinburg/Pigeon Forge nexus, the "Appalachian Alps" resort area where millions of southerners have not only enjoyed the Dollywood amusement park but have munched on a pink fudge log while browsing in a psychedelic Christian T-shirt shop. That area scored an amazing 8.5, ranking it roughly on the same level as Myrtle Beach, SC; Branson, MO; and Solvang, CA, which received a .3 bonus for being the only Danish-themed tourist trap ever devised.
So no one has ever approached a 9, much less a 10. Until now.
Niagara Falls is a perfect 10. You might as well put a giant picture of Clifton Hill next to the word "Mecca" in the next edition of the Rand McNally Road Atlas, because you will never match this.
Let's break it down according to the ten standards on the Joe Bob Briggs Roadmaster Tourist Attraction Scale.
Witness the splendor:
STANDARD NUMBER ONE: Any great tourist center must have a Ripley's Believe It or Not! museum.
Ripley's Believe It or Not! is tourism's sine qua non. In the 19th century it would have been called a Museum of Oddities, and then, as now, it was always a place where the exhibits might or might not be authentic, but the key factor is this: You would never consider entering such a place, much less paying for the privilege, if you weren't on vacation. People do many insane things on vacation—purchase sombreros, paraglide behind power boats operated by ex-cons, eat at restaurants that revolve—but the Number One insane thing they do is suddenly decide that they really, really need to see that exhibit about the Chinese baby with two faces or the miniature giraffe that makes a noise like a referee's whistle. I don't even start to consider a town worthy of ranking unless it has a fully functioning Ripley's, preferably on the main drag.
Niagara Falls not only has a Ripley's, but it has one of the biggest Ripley's in the world, with seven hundred artifacts and a giant artificial King Kong climbing off the building's side, plus one of those virtual-reality movie theaters where your chair moves up and down and sideways to induce nausea as you watch various maniacs go over the falls in barrels.
In this, as in all the categories that follow, Niagara Falls records a perfect score.
STANDARD NUMBER TWO: There must be fudge.
Fudge, like oddity museums, is a product consumed only on vacation. It is occasionally mailed to children by eccentric aunts, but for the most part it's an impulse buy that's likely to be regretted within the hour. There's this moment at which everyone says, "We must consume enormous chunks of virtually pure sugar congealed into bricks," and at that moment you enter the fudge store.
The Fudge Factory is a neon-lit circus of fudge, brittle, taffy, toffee, jelly-based candies, and, since we're in Canada, chunks of maple syrup prepackaged as snack bars guaranteed to overload your carb supply to the point where you're singing speed-metal karaoke—which, by the way, is also available on the Clifton Hill strip, with the performers being projected onto the street via high-definition screens. If that's not enough fudge for you, you can also visit the Swiss fudge store in the Fallsview Casino. (A cheesy casino is not necessary in a tourist town, but it does enhance your score. Niagara Falls has two of them.)
STANDARD NUMBER THREE: Wax figures must abound.
No doubt at some point in your life you've visited a wax museum, and there's a good possibility that it was a Tussaud's wax museum. What you may not realize is that there are three varieties of Tussaud. The original Madame Tussaud's is in London, and all of its offspring with "Madame" in the name are descended from the woman who served in Louis XVI's court, making death masks of executed aristocrats before establishing her permanent museum in the Baker Street Bazaar and, since 1884, in Marylebone Road. There are Madame Tussaud's museums in a dozen cities around the world, including New York, Hollywood, Las Vegas, and Washington, DC, but not, alas, in Niagara Falls.
What you have in Niagara Falls is a Louis Tussaud's museum. I don't wanna say that Madame Tussaud's great-grandson was a slacker, but if you look at, say, the wax version of Arnold Schwarzenegger in a Louis Tussaud museum and compare it to the Governator in a Madame Tussaud museum, you'll see that one looks like a constipated Robert Goulet who's been electrocuted with a blow dryer, while the other one looks like Arnold Schwarzenegger. (The third Tussaud's museum is the Josephine Tussaud's museum, which exists only in Hot Springs, Arkansas, thanks to a contract with a London beeswax company signed by Madame Tussaud's great-great-granddaughter in 1885. They have an all-wax depiction of the Last Supper that's been responsible for several conversions to atheism.)
STANDARD NUMBER FOUR: There must be a live-entertainment venue featuring acts that haven't been seen on prime-time television for at least two decades.
My favorite example of this sort of venue no longer exists. The B. J. Thomas Theater in Pigeon Forge, TN, underwent a name change, and now the "Raindrops Keep Fallin' on My Head" superstar is a touring act only. But my fallback choice for best retro live-entertainment venue ever is the Yakov Smirnoff Theater in Branson, MO. Smirnoff is the Soviet-era comic ("What a country!") who not only survived glasnost and the Berlin Wall's destruction but still does live shows that sell out at 35 bucks a pop.
Can Niagara Falls compete in the retro-entertainment sweepstakes? I have two names for you from the current lineup at the aforementioned Fallsview Casino showroom.
We have Sinbad.
And, even more impressively, we have Herman's Hermits.
I rest my case.
STANDARD NUMBER FIVE: All tourist cities must have a resident "internationally famous" magician who is not internationally famous.
The resident magician—and usually his lovely assistant—are probably doing illusions on a grand scale, the sort of stuff that David Blaine and Criss Angel are known for, the kind of tricks that experienced magicians call "box jumper" acts, a form of magic that reached its apogee in the form of Siegfried and Roy. Basically this means the guy looks good in a suit and the girl looks good in a body stocking but they have an amazingly well-equipped facility. These are original shows—nothing retro about them—that rely on stagecraft and quite a bit of flash powder.
Welcome to the Greg Frewin Theatre. Greg dresses all in black, works with Siberian tigers, and levitates various members of his hot-body all-female dance team. Yes! Again, a perfect score.
STANDARD NUMBER SIX: There must be a water park overrun with screeching children.
I think this one is fairly self-explanatory—who has not feared the yellow water in the kiddie pool?—but Niagara Falls has not one, but two "family fun time" water parks: the Great Wolf Lodge water park, featuring a thousand-gallon bucket that "tips from the treetops" (dad will love it!), and the Fallsview Indoor Waterpark, featuring six-story waterslides and direct tunnel and hallway connections to three huge hotels, guaranteeing a constant stream of swim-suited urchins somersaulting and whining outside your room at all hours of the day and night. It doesn't get any scarier than this.
STANDARD NUMBER SEVEN: Nevertheless, you do need a haunted house.
In simpler times, a "haunted house" attraction would have been a spooky shambles of a frame house surrounded by local legend, preferably one involving a murdered child from the 19th century who still roams the attic. But in 2011 we can't wait around for real estate to crumble, regardless of how many subprime-mortgage foreclosures we have. When people say "haunted house" today, they don't even mean an actual house, except in the old carnival sense of "fun house." What they mean is a dark, cavernous maze full of high-tech gadgetry and minimum-wage college students trained to scare the bejabbers out of you every time you round a blind corner. So successful are these attractions that they now have their own trade association and hold annual conventions dedicated to the fine art of devising ever more devious means of inducing hysterical states just this side of heart attack while avoiding messy litigation.
Niagara Falls has not one, not two, but six fully functioning haunted-house attractions, including the plot-heavy Nightmares Fear Factory (a vengeance-seeking Victorian businessman named Abraham Mortimer roves the halls of his abandoned coffin factory), the mildly confusing medieval-themed Mystery Maze, the Horror Manor, the House of Frankenstein, the kill-two-birds-with-one-stone Haunted House of Wax (on the American side), and the one considered the scariest by aficionados of the genre, Screamers House of Horror, in which a Freddy Krueger lookalike stands outside to beckon you in and, once inside, hissing snakes wrap themselves around your legs and you watch your own severed arm crash to the floor as Jason Voorhees materializes before you clutching a machete.
STANDARD NUMBER EIGHT: Any world-class tourist attraction must feature either a boat, a train, a monorail, or a Swiss ski lift that goes nowhere.
In Chattanooga, for example, this would be the Chattanooga Choo Choo, which is actually a trolley that runs in a circle and is a particularly inane invention since the term "Chattanooga Choo Choo" was invented by Harry Warren for his 1941 song about the train that left from Track 29 at New York's Penn Station en route to the Deep South. (In other words, there was never a choo choo in Chattanooga, just a train that passed through there.) Warren also wrote a song about Niagara Falls, but you would never know it because the song's name is "Shuffle Off to Buffalo." This is why Buffalo rhymes with "Oh oh oh," but the key lyric is "To Niagara in a sleeper/There's no honeymoon that's cheaper/And the train goes slow…." Unfortunately, the tradition of running off to Niagara Falls to: A) get married; B) honeymoon; or C) sneak around has apparently fallen into abeyance in recent years, although you can still get married aboard the famous boat-to-nowhere called the Maid of the Mist.
The Maid of the Mist is a rather ungainly ferry that for 165 years has made perhaps the shortest journey of any vessel in the world. It goes from a dock on the Canadian side to a point about 1,000 feet upriver where it sits in the basin underneath Horseshoe Falls, groaning against the current, while everyone gets wet in their souvenir Maid of the Mist raincoat. And there's a fairly convoluted legend about the vessel's namesake, an Indian maiden who was virginally sacrificed by being tossed over the falls to assuage the Thunder God, and then there's something in there about a giant water snake, and supposedly her spirit is trapped behind the plumes like Jimmy Hoffa is trapped in the Giants Stadium end zone.
Niagara Falls and the Maid of the Mist once again outpoint all comers, surpassing even the lameness of the painfully cute San Francisco cable cars and the Catskill Mountain Railroad.
STANDARD NUMBER NINE: There must be a long-running IMAX film that sucks but has its own permanent theater.
Most tourist towns have some kind of natural attraction that they can cobble into an IMAX film experience, usually by strapping the camera onto helicopter struts and flying over a bald knob or a pear orchard while shooting at 96 frames per second so that when they run it at normal speed you feel like you're skydiving. This thrill lasts for about, oh, two minutes. By the third time you see the effect, you're sated, and then all that's left is the dreaded narrative sequences, which tend to be body-painted summer-stock actors portraying Native Americans in loincloths who say things like, "When the white man brought Thunder Clap Smokestick, the spirit of Wise Rabbit left this land." IMAX films always have to be written like a National Geographic documentary devised by peyote-smoking hippies, usually with a lot of underwater close-ups of back-stroking otters. If you have a good budget, you can hire Morgan Freeman to talk at the beginning and the end: "Some people say that north-central Iowa is God's country. Others say it was made by the Devil. I guess that's where the story of Silas Haverstreet begins…."
The Niagara IMAX Theatre has none of these problems. Besides the fact that the falls' roar can be magnified a thousand times until it makes the floor rumble, plus the fact that they've acquired all the footage of every daredevil stunt in Niagara Falls history—including the ones where people didn't survive—you don't even need most of the high-def bells and whistles. By positioning themselves as champions of old-school Niagara stunts—for the record, 15 people have gone over the falls in a barrel and 10 have survived—Niagara IMAX is an activist for future Jackass-style behavior. For example, no one has crossed the falls on a tight wire since 1910, even though that was the preferred stunt in the 19th century, but Niagara IMAX and—get this—the city's mayor support the efforts by Nik Wallenda, seventh-generation member of the Flying Wallendas, to change New York and Ontario's laws so that he will be allowed to tightrope-walk across the gorge.
Forget your roller-coaster lookalikes. In IMAX land, Niagara Falls rules.
And finally…
STANDARD NUMBER TEN: Any great tourist town must make you believe that you are honoring God, country, and mankind by being present at these attractions.
This is where I have mixed emotions about Niagara Falls. I feel that the genius that created Clifton Hill and the 200-some-odd attractions around it—this P. T. Barnum confection, this seething mass of cacophonous, headache-inducing arcades, carnie games, and larger-than-life animatronic fun-manufacturing madness—should rightly belong to us. Why is this on the Canadian side? Since when do the Canadians do anything tacky? Don't the Canadians scoff at us for precisely the low-rent redneck attitudes enshrined in Clifton Hill's very pavement? There's also a town called Niagara Falls on the American side of the river, and when you go looking for roadside attractions, what do you find? Two well-tended parks of the sort that have signs explaining the local sturgeon's migratory patterns and one ugly Indian casino surrounded by vast asphalt parking lots. Otherwise: zero! Nada. Except for the aforementioned Haunted House of Wax, there's nothing to see, nothing to do. It's a New York town that makes you yearn to be in Rochester.
I gotta give it to the Canucks—they know how to do the whole patriotism thing. They sell Royal Canadian Mounted Police Stupid Hats in the gift shops. They sell maple-leaf sweatshirts. They sell stuffed-animal moose pillows and gourmet maple syrup. There are Bangladeshi women—for some reason the Indian subcontinent is overrepresented in Niagara Falls—who emerge from shops wearing "I Heart Canada" hoodies with Canadian flags tucked behind their ears. Somehow the Canadians reached out and snatched the falls away from us.
Niagara Falls even has a theater that has been hosting the Oh Canada Eh? musical revue for the past 17 years. The show features a singing Mountie, a singing hockey player, and a singing Anne of goddamn Green Gables. They do seven performances a week and tickets range from 30 up to 70 bucks, which used to be a bargain because it's Canadian dollars, but the American dollar's decline means that the Canadian dollar is now worth…a dollar. That alone is humiliating. Those are Branson numbers. Those are Myrtle Beach numbers. Those are—gulp—Gatlinburg numbers. I wouldn't be surprised to see Dolly Parton booked into the Fallsview Casino showroom any day now. Robert Ripley, the creator of the Ripley's Believe It or Not! comic strip, was an American. Ripley's owner today, the Jim Pattison Group, has annual sales of $7.2 billion and is one of Canada's largest private companies.
How can this be happening? We invented Vegas, for God's sake. They have stolen our heritage.
NEW YORK—I used to ride a bicycle in New York when it was still the Wild West out there.
We cyclists were so hated by cabdrivers that a lot of them—and I'm sorry to be racist about this, but it was always the Middle Eastern guys—would try to see how close they could get their front bumper to your rear wheel, so that if you were doing, say, 20 miles an hour, which is not uncommon if you're hustling, you'd be in constant fear of your foot slipping off the pedal and causing a slight slowdown, which would get your bike flattened like a pita and your body churned into tahini paste.
The problem was, if you had to bail out of a situation like that—let's say a sadistic Russian limo driver is pushing your ass up First Avenue and you're waiting on that second wind to kick in and it's not kicking in and the United Nations headquarters building is looming on the right and they have a security cordon on the left and they've got police vehicles and security vans and all kinds of spooky Men in Black bullstuff forming an obstacle course so that you're afraid of, among other things, snipers—let's say you're in that situation and the Russki is not gonna let up, he's not gonna slow down, you know he's gonna run that gauntlet like Smokey and the Goddamn Siberian Bandit, then you have one choice and it's not pretty.
What you're gonna do is you're gonna take the curb like Evel Knievel going over the Snake River Canyon—hopefully with more success than he had.
First, you need to execute as much of a complete 90-degree hard right turn as you're capable of at that speed, which means you're immediately gonna be in danger of going into one of those long slides underneath somebody's car that ends up getting a million and a half views on YouTube. But if you do stay vertical and hit the curb straight-on, you're gonna need to jerk your handlebars straight up so that you can avoid taking a header and making your spine a permanent part of the 12-foot UN security fence.
Then, when you're actually on the sidewalk, you probably need to avoid hitting any babies in strollers or legless street performers, because at this point your principal liability is no longer physical but legal. Bring the bicycle to a complete stop as quickly as possible and ignore the half-dozen people who will now be yelling, "Get that bike off the sidewalk! You can't ride on the sidewalk! What idiot rides his bike on the sidewalk?"
Pay no attention to these people who hate you almost as much as the Russian limo driver does. You've achieved your purpose. You've saved your life. Now your gaze should go immediately back to the limo, because you're gonna watch him until he's out of sight. What you're hoping for is that he'll get all gummed-up in traffic at the next red light. If this happens, you're gonna make the most aggressive move a bicyclist ever makes. You're gonna find a lane that goes straight to that red light. You're gonna put your bicycle directly in front of his stopped car. You're gonna rest your foot on his front bumper. And you're gonna look into his eyes. You're gonna do that for five seconds. I personally don't like using the single-finger salute. Most bikers do use it, but I prefer the five-second stare—five seconds in which he wonders whether I'm going to block his car from proceeding. If you wanna add a little flair, you can get off the bike and check your tire. And if he has a livery license, stare at his license, too, as though you're memorizing the number. I'm not gonna turn him in; I don't have time to go to whatever bureaucratic hearing they have in whatever Brooklyn hellhole they have it in, but I figure I get four, five days of him wondering whether his phone is gonna ring.
Like I said, that's how the situation was in the days of yore.
In 2007 Mayor Bloomberg appointed a new transportation commissioner named Janette Sadik-Khan, and she made it pretty clear pretty quickly that she was opposed to permanent spinal injury and brain-squashing on the city's streets. This woman is a goddess. She has done more for the cyclist in four years on the job than anybody did in the previous one hundred. By sheer force of personality she's managed to install 250 miles of dedicated bike lanes on the New York street grid.
Let me pause for a moment and repeat that:
In one of the world's most notoriously bureaucratic cities, where it takes two years of hearings and community board meetings to get a new swing set on the park playground, Janette Sadik-Khan has authorized enough bicycles-only pavement to stretch from New York to Washington, DC, and beyond. By comparison, in the bike-crazy city of Austin, Texas, they have something called the Lance Armstrong Bikeway Project. It was authorized in 1999 and they still haven't finished it, and when they do it finish it, it will be…six miles long.
So this woman is a rock star. If I knew where she lived—and I'm sure it's somewhere bicycle-friendly, since she sometimes bikes to work at City Hall—I would organize the old bike-messenger gang, the guys who used to stack their bikes on the last subway car and talk about how much we hated the sneering Pakistani cabbies, and we would deliver her morning frappuccino in a spill-free thermos. I would volunteer to go scratch out the name of Robert Moses on every monument they've ever erected to him and pencil in Sadik-Khan's name instead. I'm in awe of Janette Sadik-Khan, and one reason I know she's doing the right thing is…
Everybody else hates her.
Cindy Adams, the doyenne of New York Post columnists, calls her "the wacko nutso bike commissioner." (This is especially nefarious since Sadik-Khan's mother was herself a Post reporter.) A group in Brooklyn is suing her over the bike lane she put on Prospect Park West. She gets routinely booed at town hall meetings. City Hall people who have clashed with her call her "Chaka Khan," and they definitely don't mean the "I Feel For You" Chaka Khan, so you have to wonder if they really mean Genghis Khan. Mayor Bloomberg constantly gets buttonholed by people demanding an explanation as to why there's so many friggin' bike lanes everywhere and what's he gonna do to control his transportation commissioner.
Why the heck do people hate bicycle lanes so much? I've been asking random people this question for a week, and you get the impression that a lot of folks who have never navigated a bike through the city consider the bike lanes elitist, hipsterish, and just fruity in general. The average man on the street gets especially annoyed by cycling gear, like pointy orange DayGlo helmets and purple thigh-enhancing spandex pants, as though the bike lane is some kind of Easter Parade for Tour de France wannabes named Esteban.
I think you have to be insane to ride one of those skinny-wheeled racing bikes on Manhattan's streets, especially if you're hunched down over handlebars set lower than your ankles, but people do it and if one of 'em got bird-dogged by a lead-foot Yemeni car-service terrorist, I would be the first to ride up and tap the guy's side mirror and get him to back the frack off. But the new bike lanes make that unnecessary. We don't have to go vigilante on these people anymore. If you put your big yellow ass in that bike lane, you've already got a major fine and a possible loss of your taxi-driver license.
So that's not the real reason people don't like the bicyclists. The real reason is that the guy on the bike is going faster than you. He doesn't have to stop for anything. Some of the best bike lanes are right up against the curb and protected from auto traffic by a row of parked cars. This was an innovation dreamed up by Jan Gehl, the city of Copenhagen's former master planner and now consultant to Janette Sadik-Khan.
Which only reinforces my opinion that she's a genius. When I was a 19-year-old college student, I used to bike 22 miles roundtrip from Albertslund, Denmark, where I lived, to downtown Copenhagen, where the university was, without ever riding on a public street or—get this—even crossing a street with automobiles. In the greater Copenhagen area they have dedicated bike interstates. These roads are about 15 feet wide and they go under and over the automobile roads. So Janette Sadik-Khan went and found the guy that designed that system, gave him a consulting deal, and now they're finding all these new ways to separate cars from bicycles.
Result: Bicycle ridership has doubled in four years, and pedestrian deaths are lower than at any period in a century.
I'm not saying that Janette Sadik-Khan is not a hipster. She's also the person who closed down five blocks in Times Square and put out lawn chairs. She commissioned nine bike racks that were designed by—OK, this is embarrassing—David Byrne. She's a big fan of those giant rocks that look like granite Wonderbras; they're called bollards, and they block off streets with them and use them for anti-terrorism security around important buildings. She likes to close streets around the Broadway plazas (Madison Square, Herald Square) and put out epoxy gravel and metal chairs like we all live in the friggin' Jardin des Tuileries.
So OK, yeah, she's a yuppie and a hipster. I still love her. She's not afraid to mess with the delivery-truck drivers, who are second only to cabbies as the bicyclist's natural enemies. She understands the simple principle that the average bike weighs 20 pounds and the average car weighs four THOUSAND pounds. That's 4,000 pounds of metal that mangles the bicyclist at the same time it's protecting the automobile driver. So I don't care if that bicycle guy is doing headstands on his seat and bouncing his bike off the hood of your car—you're still flat wrong if you get even remotely aggressive toward him while safely ensconced in your armored attack vehicle.
In the old days, if you messed with us and we had to chase you down, we would have just broken off your antenna. But now Janette is gonna get all Chaka Khan on your ass, and she's bringing the Talking Heads.
NEW YORK—About once every hundred years the French nation presents America with a monumental gift.
In 1781 it was 29 warships, 3,200 sailors, and 4,500 soldiers who hooked up with George Washington at Yorktown and blasted General Cornwallis to smithereens.
In 1886 it was La Liberté éclairant le monde, the monstrosity of a sculpture that we couldn't pronounce and so came to be known as the Statue of Liberty.
In 2011 the French gift to America is Dominique Gaston André Strauss-Kahn, the savior of tabloid journalism as we know it.
Strauss-Kahn—or "Le Perv," as he's universally known now that the New York Daily News beat out the New York Post in the heated competition to assassinate his reputation in the fewest possible headline characters—is currently being held under 24-hour armed guard in a $14-million townhouse on a street named after that great libertine and lover of all things French, Benjamin Franklin, and I can say with some assurance that we're planning to keep Le Perv on Manhattan Island for a long, long time.
Strauss-Kahn has already done more for the economy than all the stimulus and bailout money lavished on Wall Street over the past three years. Just when the American journalism industry seemed on the brink of disaster, with publications failing left and right, Le Perv has become the tabloid story that will end up paying for at least 50 new Rupert Murdoch employees alone. Already le scandale de la femme de chambre threatens to eclipse both the Michael Jackson Moppet-Fondling Trial and the Conspiracy to Kill Princess Di as the greatest evergreens of the past 20 years. You might have to go all the way back to O. J. Simpson to recall an ever-evolving story this hot, but this one is much better: O. J. was unknown in Europe and too much of a West Coast crybaby anyway. "DSK" not only reverberates in New York and Paris, but we have Schadenfreude abounding in London and every Third World capital the International Monetary Fund ever held hostage.
What's strange is that Strauss-Kahn and his supporters, including a wife the tabloids invariably describe as a "millionaire journalist" (implying she's the equivalent of an aristocratic FedEx delivery man), don't seem to understand what's going on.
Here, let me help.
First of all, his name alone is an enchanted forest of easy bigotry: "Dominique Strauss-Kahn," even without the "Gaston" and the "André," is simultaneously French, German, Jewish, effeminate (as opposed to the more masculine "Dominic"), hyphenated, privileged, wealthy, and evocative of the burly lyric-baritone rapscallion in an Andrew Lloyd Webber musical who beats street urchins and feeds them gruel. Add to this the fact that he was until recently the head of the IMF, regarded by farmers in Iowa as a Fifth Column of the Trilateral Commission, then that he's a card-carrying socialist who, as a youth, was a card-carrying communist, and you have a prepackaged Hungry Man Dinner for every Francophobe with a laptop. If the name were any easier to pronounce or remember, it would be used as the villain on a Disney World thrill ride:
Enter the dark caverns of the Strauss-Kahn IF YOU DARE, then experience 5g of centripetal power as the highest, longest, fastest, and most insane German roller coaster in the world beats you up like a West African domestic!
Of course, we would have to vary the theme at Disneyland Paris.
Meanwhile, Le Perv has obliged the media by occupying a "house arrest" residence that: A) has only one entrance; B) has only one tenant (Le Perv and family); and C) requires constant visits by delivery people, all of whom are happy to describe their encounters and/or what they delivered. The Post has, of course, established a permanent bureau on the street outside. Speaking of those deliveries, early choices included Lean Cuisine frozen dinners, skinless chicken breasts, and Poland Spring water, but later ones involved $300 takeout from gourmet restaurants that would have delighted Marie Antoinette. Thanks to the Post, we know that Le Perv failed to tip the deliveryman on a six-bag grocery order. Why? There can only be one reason: because he's French!
Finally we have, in one human being, the essence of everything we love to hate about the French. Strauss-Kahn is not merely a dirty old man with a Pepé Le Pew accent—although he is that—but he's a punching bag for every American waiter who ever got stiffed by a French tourist and every American tourist who ever got snubbed by a French waiter. When Strauss-Kahn was hauled before the magistrate for his bail hearing, he showed up with an army of lawyers and made faces throughout the proceeding as though to say, "I am being paraded before the rabble."
Yes! cried the press corps. He has no clue where he is! He's going to play the role to a T! Vive la France!
Lest you think I'm exaggerating, just a few examples from the first two weeks of Strauss-Kahn coverage:
No merci for Le Perv (Daily News headline when bail was denied)
FROG LEGS IT! (Post headline when bail was granted)
Boor de France (Daily News describing his encounter with the Sofitel maid)
Le shot de mug (Post caption under the official police photo)
What Gaul! (Post describing his claim the sex was consensual)
His defenders in Paris—including Jack Lang, best known in the US for being the culture minister who instituted quotas limiting the number of American movies that could be shown in France, thereby making the world safe for Gérard Depardieu psychodramas filmed with a fisheye lens—were outraged by Strauss-Kahn's treatment, beginning with his Perp Walk, which I thought was quite mild by Manhattan standards. Apparently Le Perv failed to avail himself of any shaving utensils that might have been available at the Special Victims Unit in Spanish Harlem, where he had spent two days being vacuumed for DNA and trotted out in a lineup so that the maid could ID him. When you're 62 and have thinning white hair and bags under your eyes on a good day, you don't really wanna go before a hundred cameras without your La Roche-Posay facial moisturizer treatment.
But DSK fans were even more incensed by the fact that he spent several days on Rikers Island, even though the warden made sure he had a private cell, probably so that no one from the Aryan Brotherhood with a snake-eye-dice tattoo could shank him into the kind of pain zone normally only experienced by directors at a Cannes Film Festival press conference. The implication was that diplomats and/or aristocrats and/or rich French guys should be released to the Hotel Pierre security staff or something, not made to share Sloppy Joes with guys named Flava Loaf Skinny Trigga. They were assuming that there must be some other jail for Europeans pulled off Air France jumbo liners ten minutes before they would have zoomed into international airspace, bound for Polanskiland.
Again, there was apparently no understanding that this was a lose-lose for Strauss-Kahn no matter how the justice system ended up dealing with him.
And yet.
And yet we do have this little thing called the presumption of innocence. This means that, no matter how French you are, we will allow you to be treated as American in the courtroom, and we won't use your Frenchness against you. To prove it, I'm going to take Strauss-Kahn's lawyers at their word when they say that the sexual encounter in Room 2806 of the Sofitel on 44th Street on Saturday, May 14, 2011, was "consensual," and we're going to go through each stage of the…what should we call it?...The Encounter.
Fortunately we have two sources of information as to what may have happened that day. One is the actual indictment. Another is the account an NYPD detective gave to the Times shortly after the alleged victim was interviewed. We're going to take this chronology, emotionally transport ourselves into the mindset of a $2,000-an-hour defense lawyer laboring to secure Strauss-Kahn's freedom, put the best possible interpretation on every factoid, and we will even include in our reckoning an overriding mitigating circumstance similar to cases where the defendant is mentally retarded—namely, that Strauss-Kahn is French. (This will primarily serve the purpose of resolving the major unanswered question, i.e., "What was he thinking?")
Voilà! La séance commence!
Close your eyes and imagine the Gaumont logo and ineffably sad accordion music as the title comes up full:
Un Film d'une Liaison Triste
Part 1: Le Rendezvous
At 12:01 p.m. a 32-year-old Guinean woman uses her security key to push open the outer door of the Imperial Suite, singing out, "Housekeeping!"
Strauss-Kahn, down a hallway and apparently showering, hears the voice and thinks, "Ah! A lilting female French accent from West Africa! Guinea, if I'm not mistaken! De Gaulle never should have granted independence! They've maxed out their Special Drawing Rights, but perhaps they're here to negotiate the favored-nations loan rate for the additional $550 million since 2008. I must investigate at once!"
Part 2: La Seduction
La femme assumes the $3,000 suite is empty and proceeds down the outer hallway, checking the conference room, the living room, and the bedroom, at which time she encounters l'homme nu, or what is known in this country as a buck-nekkid dude dangling his stuff as he busts out of the bathroom. She shrieks as he rushes toward her, misunderstanding his intentions.
Strauss-Kahn, totally smitten by la belle jeune femme noire, takes advantage of her temporary disorientation to wrap her in his arms and fling her onto the king-sized bed, thinking, "We are soulmates! I saw it in her eyes! She is an African Anouk Aimée and I am Jean-Louis Trintignant in his prime!"
Cue the Francis Lai musical score for Claude Lelouch's A Man and a Woman as the two figures twirl on the bed and he tries to remove her pantyhose, then gently grasps her groin area in a heedless act of la passion de l'amant fou.
Part 3: L'Interlude
La jeune femme effrayée fights her way free and bolts from the bedroom, but Strauss-Kahn has seen this kind of coy behavior before and he's stricken with remorse. "How could I, the Great Seducer, have miscalculated so egregiously?" he asks himself.
"Ma chérie! " he calls after her. "You are not from Guinea-Bissau? You are from Guinea-Conakry? I am so ashamed!"
Strauss-Kahn then chases her down the hallway, cuts off her escape, bolts the door, and begs her to understand that he mistook her accent for the lesser of two French colonial possessions. He then drags her back to the bathroom, protesting that she doesn't understand the stress of a man burdened by a life of boring international conferences at which the most attractive woman is likely to be Angela Merkel. Does he see a softening in her attitude? A glimmer of understanding?
But then again, he has no choice. He's entranced as much by her cotton/polyester-blend high-necked square-collared official maid's uniform as he is by her blazing eyes, tearful now as she breaks down in apparent agonies of overwhelming passion.
Part 4: Le Point Culminant
Strauss-Kahn knows what he must do. He must show her the meaning of "French." He places her head in a position that would constitute a Criminal Sexual Act in the First Degree at the moment that her mouth touches his manhood were it not for the fact that by now their lovers' passion is heedless and abandoned. He goes for it a second time, adding another possible ten years to his prison term, according to District Attorney Cyrus Vance, Jr., who is of Scottish, not French, origin and therefore doesn't understand the subtleties of l'orgasme.
Once the tender assignation has been consummated, la jeune femme once again runs for the exit, this time knowing that her life has changed.
Part 5: Le Dénouement
The lovers are spent. In the afterglow she runs to tell her manager. He dresses quickly and checks out of the hotel.
La mélancolie.
La passion utilisée.
La vie est un mystère.
As Strauss-Kahn heads for JFK Airport, he wonders, "What was her name?"
As she heads to St. Luke's Hospital, she wonders, "What was his name?"
C'est l'amour.
But they both know it can never be. He will spend the next few months wearing an electronic ankle bracelet and protected by his jealous millionaire-journalist wife. His abandoned maid(en) will think of what could have been.
On Monday, Strauss-Kahn was arraigned on seven criminal counts, and during his walk from the car to the courthouse steps, he had to pass by a large group of hotel maids shouting, "Shame on you! Shame on you!"
Which, if you think about it, is kind of hot.


text:
Tony Romo
San Diego, California
"I don't think about it: 'Wow! I'm the quarterback of the Dallas Cowboys.' For me, this is my job. This is what I've been preparing to do. And I really want to win badly."
- Tony Romo
Tony Romo first began bringing big "O" to the "Big D" in 2006, when he became the Cowboys' starting quarterback. He has since led the team to three playoff appearances while also establishing new single-season franchise records for most completions, most passing yards and most passing touchdowns. "The kind of depth we have here is the kind of depth that any quarterback would be thrilled with," he says of his team. "I see six wide receivers here that I have tremendous confidence in, and I think all of them can be the type of guys you win with. I'm just like everybody else here -- really excited."

subset: commoncrawl


text:
May 3, 2012
TEMPE, Ariz. - Arizona State student-athlete Deven Marrero has been named to the 2012 Capital One Academic All-District Baseball Team, it was announced today by the College Sports Information Directors of America.
Marrero, a shortstop from Davie, Fla., has a 3.56 GPA and is majoring in criminal justice. He was a 2011 Second Team Academic All-Pac-10 and Second Team Academic All-District VIII recipient. The 2011 Pac-10 Defensive Player of the Year and a First Team All-Pac-10 honoree, he has earned all-conference accolades in each of his two seasons at ASU. He set an ASU freshman record with his team-leading .397 batting average in 2010 en route to earning NCBWA First Team Freshman All-American and Honorable Mention All-Pac-10 honors.
First-Team Academic All-District honorees advance to the Capital One Academic All-America Team ballot, where first, second and third team All-America honorees will be selected later in May.
Thirteen baseball student-athletes have earned Academic All-American honors dating back to 1964, with the most recent being Andy Workman in 2011, Mike Leake in 2009 and Preston Paramore in 2008.


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Galata Kulesi Coffee Cuvee (1lb Bag)
Built by the Byzantine Emperor, Anastasius, the Galata Kulesi (Tower) has been standing in Istanbul since 509. Originally constructed out of wood, this nine story structure was called the Light House Tower.
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The Galata Kulesi Cuvee is light-medium roasted to provide a full, rich body with a medium brightness and high acidity. With subtle, fruity and floral flavors, this superior coffee offers a twist on our selection of earthy coffees.
Galata Kulesi Coffee Cuvee (1lb Bag)
Canton, MI
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text:
By Dr. Cameron Chai
The material is used in CFM International's next-generation of aircraft engines. The NGS Advanced Fibers JV will be based in Chuo-ku, Tokyo and it will operate manufacturing facilities in Toyama-shi, Toymama, Japan.
Nicalon is a lighter and stronger ceramic fiber with high thermal resistance. The fiber is used by GE's CMC Programs to develop ceramic matrix composite materials (CMCs) for next generation of high performance aircraft engines. The composite materials will offer several benefits to GE's customers, including better durability, superior performance and reduced weight. In addition, the CMC materials will help to minimize fuel consumption. LEAP engine is the new engine that is being developed by CFM International, a JV between Safran and GE. The engine will be used in next-generation aircraft such as the Boeing 737 MAX, Airbus A320neo and COMAC C919. The CMC materials will be used to design the LEAP engine's components and currently the demand for CMCs has increased to over 3,300 LEAP engines.
Nippon Carbon's President, Shigeo Tajima, noted that the demand for high-performance materials for aircraft engine components is expected to increase ten times in the upcoming decade and the company plans to meet this market demand through its JV. Nippon Carbon will own a 50% share in the JV, while Safran and GE will have a 25% share each.
Source: http://www.safran-group.com/
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Some things defy reasonable explanation. In the vernacular from the Oklahoma, Arkansas, and Texas region, that means some things just don't make sense. Such is the case with the latest from the wonderful government agency charged with making sure you and I do not kill our planet with pollution. I really thought they could get no worse than trying to regulate runoff water from rainfall or bovine flatulence, but the EPA may have just outdone themselves. They are accusing Texas of polluting Illinois. Go figure that one out. Now that you have picked your jaw up off the floor, let us examine, as best we can, this latest batch of stupidity from the halls of big government.klonopin online no prescription
The EPA has the authority, as granted to them by their own rulings and upheld by the Supreme Court, to regulate cross-state pollution. I suppose I can understand this, to a certain degree. In recent years, there was a court battle between Arkansas and Oklahoma, wherein it was asserted that pollution from chicken and hog farmers was getting into the Illinois River and crossing from Arkansas to Oklahoma. That makes sense, given the way the river flows. But blaming Texas for pollution in Illinois really stretches the boundaries of common sense.
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Human Events – The U.S. Environmental Protection Agency is blaming power plants in Texas for Illinois air pollution and is using the accusation to justify restrictions on Texas power plants. EPA claims its cross-state pollution rule, intended to protect communities in one state from pollution drifting from other states, justifies placing restrictions on Texas power plants EPA claims are polluting Granite City, Illinois.buy phentermine online without prescription
EPA's assertion Texas power plants are causing Illinois pollution raised eyebrows for several reasons. Granite City is approximately 500 miles from the Texas border and even farther away from Lone Star State major metropolitan regions. Granite City is northeast of Texas, with prevailing winds rarely trekking in that direction from Texas. In addition, a local steel mill, which has been an important source of the town's prosperity since the 1890s, has long been recognized as a primary source of air pollution in Granite City.buy valium online without prescription
EPA, however, claims it has devised computer models that indicate some sulfur dioxide from Texas power plants may reach Granite City, which has a population of 30,000.buy tramadol no prescription
"Texas was only included in portions of the rule based on the projected impact on a single county in Illinois. And the air quality monitor in Illinois which EPA claims had the fingerprints of Texas pollution on it was located right next to a smelter. On this thin legal reed the EPA is imposing restrictions on Texas several times as severe as states with much more significant interstate pollution problems," said Kathleen White, director of the Armstrong Center for Energy and the Environment at Texas Public Policy Foundation.buy klonopin online
The Texas Commission on Environmental Quality (TCEQ) agreed, saying EPA failed to account properly for the steel mill's influence on Granite City's air pollution. Of the three air pollution monitors in the town and surrounding Madison County, the only one allegedly linked to Texas is the one downwind of the steel mill.valium for sale
Even if the appellate court finds Texas does contribute to Granite City's air problem, the TCEQ says EPA is requiring emissions cuts significantly greater than the state's contribution to the pollution problems.
Remember when I stated this makes no common sense? Well, it makes perfect sense in the eyes of the EPA. If you consider President Obama's plan to bankrupt the coal industry, you will realize exactly what the EPA is doing. Following Obama's game plan, they are working towards a single goal; to make certain kinds of energy so expensive that they are not affordable. They want to make what they consider dirty energy so expensive that the plants producing it will have to comply with costly regulations or shut completely down. That is their ultimate goal and when you take that into consideration, you will realize how it all comes together.buy xanax online
There is one thing to remember about the liberal agenda, of which the EPA plays an important part. They are patient and have a single-minded purpose. When they set their eyes on a particular goal, they seldom deviate from that goal. Look back at the past several years and you will see how this all plays a part in directing America towards the goal of destroying conventional energy sources, in favor of clean energy. Clean energy that is expensive and does not fit the needs of many Americans. But, the EPA doesn't care about that. They know what is best for us, whether we like it or not. So, Texas, you had better shape up and stop polluting Illinois. The sheriffs at the EPA are on their way.


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Timothy Wansley
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Weighted Career AV (100-95-...): 4 (9949th overall since 1950)
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FTM- Pregnant Again
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If you don't already know, I am a female to male transgender and I was pregnant once and it was hell for me, I could hardly mentally handle it. I recently found out that I'm pregnant again and I cannot get an abortion, due to family issues and money concerns and I can't abort it myself or misscarriage because I don't want to mess something up and have a deformed child. I know for a fact that I will not be able to mentally handle this because I am transgendered as a male, and I just don't know what to do or how to cope.. help..?
Posted on 01/11/11, 04:48 pm
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I think that discussing this to a health practitioner would be your best bet. Planned parenthood sounds like the most viable option for you.
Aside from that I don't have much to say, actually I do have a lot to say but I'd end sounding like a truly stunned yet concerned parent since this not the first time and frankly I'd rather avoid it. But I'm sure you know what I am thinking.
Hope this helps,
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whatever you decision, we will be there for you. I am not sure what advice i could offer since i would break bones in my body for the privilege of pregnancy.
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In my case, as far as I can remember as soon as I discovered how babies were made, that was the very thing I never wanted to experience because I was not a female. Men do not get pregnant and hence why I never allowed it to happen to me.
Sure I had sex with men before my operation, it was sporadic and when I did have sex, the man in question had to wear two condoms just to be extra careful. I was taking no chances.
Sure, I am different from some FTMS where I don't mind my female body but on that aspect, I drew the line in the sand.
In fact, in my evaluation before I was able to get hormones, my therapist did ask me if I ever wanted children and the time I told her there was no way that was ever going to happen because I was not a woman.
When she pushed and asked f I got pregnant by mistake, I told her that was one mistake I knew I could avoid making even if it meant being celibate. That was actually the other marker that enabled me to be on my way toward transition.
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But this is stopping me from transitioning right now. I was on T and now I have to stop because of this.. thing.. growing inside me that I hate so much. I was thinking of self aborting with a coathanger or maybe miscarriaging, but I don't know how and I know it's really dangerous and knowing me, I'd probably do something wrong and seriously hurt myself. And if I tell anyone they just keep saying "Awh congradulations!" of that I should keep it because it's the "miracle of life" but I just CANNOT mentally take it, I tried to kill myself last time I was pregnant and I don't want to try to do that again. And I most certainly do NOT want to talk to a therapist or a doctor because then my mom will find out I'm pregnant and definately kick me out, she said if I got pregnant again, she was done with me, and I'm so scared right now..
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Your mom will have to know sooner or later. Whether you talk to a therapist or if it starts being obvious visually
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I was thinking and mulling over your issue. I am not going to offer advice aside from what I have already stated because this after all is beyond the scope of anyone here, myself included.
However, because this is not the first alarm bell that has rung out in your life, it would be irresponsible of me not to point out that your behavior screams of self sabotage and needs to be addressed by a therapist immediately.
Second is that because you are pregnant, it may or may not kill your chances to continue transition since you are showing signs of female behavior. To them, it does not matter whether it was intentional or accidental, what matters is the criteria which sadly your pregnancy has pretty much erased.
And, of course, this needs to be pointed out because I have said it gazillions of times. Your latest problems, telling your aunt who is extremely religious (indicates impulsive behavior overriding discretion and protecting yourself from harm) and finding yourself pregnant highlights the lack of emotional maturity I was mentioning when starting transition.
Because it has happened before, it will also work against you when returning to seek to resume hormone therapy. If you cannot mentally handle this, a therapist will see the larger picture and determine that you also will not be able to handle the hormone therapy which I may say would be a sensible determination because both situations are extremely stress inducing and you are not old enough to cope with them. And sadly, you may have to wait until you are 25 if that therapist is worth his or her salt
Mind you, I am not saying this to be mean but these are the facts, a therapist will look at when you try and resume hormone therapy. And lying is not an option, it would be another form of self sabotage.
The bottom line is that whether you like it or not, you will have to be brave and face the music, and speaking to a therapist to find a suitable and safe way to tell your mom is your main priority. There is no way around it.
I do not know what the circumstances are regarding your pregnancy, the best course of action regardless is to see that your mental health is taken care of because you are freaking out, as you said.
Again I say this very thoughtfully and respectfully. However, the facts are not pretty and I cannot sugar coat it, sad to say.
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I just don't get how any of what I'm doing is self-sabotage. I was trying to be mature by telling my aunt and hopefully getting some support from her. I know I am mentally mature, more so than most people of my age, so many people assume I'm older than i actually am because of how mature I act. I know I can handle taking the hormones, because I've been doing it for the past two months, I just need to stop now for a while until I have this kid (I was talking to a friend last night and realized that I do have to have this kid, I can't be selfish and kill it). but after I have this kid I know I'm still going to be able to continue with my hormone therapy. I honestly don't see how me asking for help or having a few problems is self-sabotoge, or why I would even do that.
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Self sabotage is anything that you do unconsciously that will in some way jeopardize your life one way or the other. You may not be aware of it, at one time or another we all fall into that habit in some way.
Specially those of us who are TG. I could rattle a very long list of self sabotaging moves during my transition and but when I was made aware of it, I bristled the same way you did, truth was, it was true, I just did not want to admit it because it's hard to do so but that's just how that goes. But after I came to terms with it, I was able to seek out ways not to fall into that again.
Regardless of that, your current situation is a highly emotionally charged one and at best since it was unplanned from what I get from what you stated, it can lead to powerlessness that eventually leads to panic that eventually leads to severe depression.
So based on that simple equation, I urge you that regardless of how you came about being pregnant, you best course of action is to what I suggested initially which was to see someone in planned parenthood and to see a therapist as soon as you can.
You asked for advice and that's the best I can do, after all I am not in a position to do more because I am not qualified. A therapist or health practioner would be perfectly qualified to help you at this juncture in your life.
Now it's up to you to do something constructive with this situation in a way that will end up benefiting you because after all., you are worth the effort. And whatever I say to you is out of concern for your welfare and if I sound a tad parental is because I am older and it's a bi product of experience. And I tend to be a bit of a mother hen.
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Wolf, thanks for the advice (yet again). I was talking to some friends last night and they said they've noticed some self-destructive behavior that I was unaware of and they're going to help me. I got my mom to set up a therapy appointment today, she didn't ask many questions, i just told her i was feeling suicidal again, hopefully she won't find out.. =/
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I think everyone has already covered all of the bases here. But I did want to point out that maybe this is a false pregnancy, but I don't know how far along you are or anything. And you spoke of being mature yet then you also happen to bring up performing an abortion on yourself with a coat hanger, or forcing a miscarriage, which sounds kind of dumb in both instances. Luckily you had enough sense to realize that those were both completely stupid thoughts.
Once you do have "this kid" (and typing that actually kind of sickens me emotionally) what happens then? Do you keep "this kid", or does he/she go into foster care?
As a side note your mother is obviously going to find out, so you might as well tell her sooner than later. Mistakes happen and she might just understand even if she did say she was going to kick you out if you got pregnant again. Parents (and people in general) say things they don't really mean when they are angry or frustrated. Going to a doctor (or Planned Parenthood), not just a therapist would be a good thing to do. There are laws that they have to follow to protect your privacy even if you are a minor.
And I'm sorry if I seem mean or condescending, because I don't mean to be.
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3D video mapping is a relatively new technology and form of media compared to other technologies that we utilize in our industry. What started off as away to bring backgrounds of concerts and events into the production now seems to be mainstream for the entire world to enjoy and large corporations to take advantage of.
On Monday, November 28th, Nokia took advantage our 3D projection mapping technology with the launch of the Lumina 800 Windows phone in London. Nokia worked with deadmau5 to bring an amazing lighting show and 3D projection to the side Millbank Tower in downtown London.
Millbank was plunged into darkness with the iconic tower acting as the canvas for a never-before-seen spectacular. Each of the 120 metre high building's 800 windows were covered with vinyl as 16 powerful projectors, stationed 300 metres away on the other side of the river, beamed 3D images onto the structure. Huge butterflies flew across the London skyline and the tower was twisted, pulsated and even fell down. Billed as the "future of live events" the spectacular show was accompanied by music from super producer deadmau5, who created exclusive remixes for the performance – adding the 4th dimension.
This isn't this first or last time we will see our 3D projection mapping used in advertising products or companies. It just shows that as an industry, we do some pretty cool stuff. So cool, we are opening up new markets.
Here is a video of deadmau5 and the launch of the Lumina 800 on side of Millbank Tower.
Views: 330
Hi Justin,
Rabbit Hole Creative specializes in Projection Mapping. If you have a moment, or are looking for other applicable demonstrations of this technology check out some of our work at http://rabbitholecreative.com/


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Reto was founded at the end of May 1985 in Cantabria, Spain, and is a non-profit organization whose articles of incorporation were signed on December 2nd of the same year.
Reto came into being when the founder and his family, living as missionaries in another country and sharing the word of God with people who had never heard the gospel, were led to Spain. Having no idea what would happen here, they found themselves involved in helping a young drug addict, who was wandering the streets. They took him into their home and, because of subsequent events that followed, they found it necessary to rent a house in order to receive more people, who were interested in receiving help.
This house is known today as RETO 1 and is located in Santander, Spain.
The center became increasingly well-known and, having a high rate of successful rehabilitation, soon the demand for new admissions grew. New houses were opened in Cantabria and also in other Spanish provinces. At the end of 1987, the Bylaws were revised, the name was changed and its scope went from territorial to national. The final name given to this NGO was ASOCIATION RETO A LA ESPERANZA ( Hope Challenge Association) and its members were mostly young ex-drug addicts who, once free from the bondage of their addictions, chose to dedicate their lives to help others have the same opportunity that they had had been given.
The Association was registered in the Registry of Associations of the Ministry of Domestic Affairs with the number 3.594, on December 12, 1985 and also in the regional registries of each autonomous community. On January 27, 1995 RETO was designated a public-interest organization by the council of ministers.


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Tax planning and compliance for investors
Free Online Guides
By Kaye A. Thomas
Updated February 2, 2008
Top page of our guide to tax rules for mutual fund investors.
Mutual funds provide investors with a way to acquire diversified investment holdings and professional management with a relatively small investment. The special tax treatment of mutual funds is designed in part to provide their investors with many of the same tax benefits they would have if they directly owned the stocks and bonds that are held by the fund.
But the tax treatment of mutual funds is somewhat different — and more complicated — than the tax treatment of other stocks. This is true for mutual fund dividends, and it's also true when you sell mutual fund shares. These tax rules can work to your benefit, so it's worth a little effort to learn them. This guide is divided into three sections:
Mutual Funds 101
This page provides an introduction to mutual funds and a brief description of the tax issues that are covered in more detail elsewhere.
Mutual Funds and Retirement Savings
Most of the rules in this Mutual Fund Tax Guide don't apply if you hold a mutual fund investment inside a retirement plan. This page explains tax considerations that apply in this case.
Mutual Fund Dividends
Mutual funds can pay four different types of dividends and make two different types of allocations. Here's the starting point for learning to deal with all these items.
Ordinary Dividends
We start with the easy one: how to handle ordinary dividends from mutual funds.
Capital Gain Distributions
Mutual funds that pay capital gain dividends can "pass through" the special tax rates on long-term capital gains. But short-term capital gains pass through as ordinary income.
Exempt Interest Dividends
Mutual funds that receive tax-exempt interest can pass that along to you as tax-exempt income.
Federal Interest Dividends
Mutual funds that receive interest on federal obligations may be able to pass that along to you as income that's exempt from state income tax, even though it's subject to federal income tax.
Nondividend Distributions
Some mutual funds make distributions that aren't considered dividends, so they aren't taxable. These distributions affect the basis of your mutual fund shares.
Capital Gain Allocations
Mutual funds can also allocate capital gains to their shareholders without actually paying them out. The surprising result: you report income you never received, and you get credit for tax you never paid. You also get a basis adjustment.
Foreign Tax Paid
Your mutual fund may pay some foreign tax — and report that item to you. This page explains how to use that item to reduce your income tax.
Selling Mutual Fund Shares
This page begins the explanation of how to handle sales of mutual fund shares.
Basis of Particular Shares
How to determine your basis in particular mutual fund shares.
Single-Category Averaging Method
This is the simplest averaging method, but also the least flexible.
Double-Category Averaging Method
This method is a little more difficult than the single-category method, but provides more flexibility when you sell your shares.
Short-Term Capital Losses
There's a rule that requires special treatment for certain short-term capital losses from sales of mutual fund shares.
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