From Reuters via CNN:

There’s apparently this whack-job filmmaker named Bart Sibrel, who’s made a bunch of documentaries claiming that Apollo 11 was a big fraud executed in a television studio.

So Sibrel gets Buzz Aldrin (you know, the second guy to walk on the moon) to come to a Beverly Hills hotel on some pretext or another to do an interview. Aldrin gets there, and

Sibrel, 37, has admitted to ambushing Aldrin at the hotel and shoving a Bible at him so that he could swear he really made the second walk on the moon on July 20, 1969….

The filmmaker has made television documentaries and films debunking the Apollo 11 voyage, saying it never left earth — a conspiracy theory that some critics maintain gives conspiracy theory a bad name….

The police spokesman added that witnesses have come forward stating that they saw Sibrel aggressively poke Aldrin with a Bible and that Sibrel had lured Aldrin to the hotel under false pretenses so that he could interview him.

Aldrin, 72, did what anyone would want to do: he socked him in the jaw. The police are investigating, but from the tone of their comments, Sibrel better not count on any charges getting filed.

 

OK, I’m about done with September 11 stuff. There’s a reason that Jews say Kaddish only for a year. Then I’ll move on to the usual inanity.

Just two more pointers.

New York, like many states, runs a passel of gambling games. (A metro columnist for the Albany Times-Union — Barney something-or-other — used to refer to the state as “My Mother the Bookie.”) Among them is a twice-daily numbers racket. Last night’s number came up 9-1-1. There were 14,878 winners, splitting nearly $5 million. A more normal payout, for the afternoon number of 8-3-3, paid 892 people $185,000.

And last night, David Letterman had former president Bill Clinton as a guest. “Apparently,” Dave said during the monologue, “he’s never seen the program.” This program is why I’m such a big fan of Letterman’s. The show was serious, analytical, respectful, and fascinating. Dave likes to pretend he’s dumb, but when he’s not ogling starlets’ breasts it’s clear that there’s an excellent brain ticking behind the glasses.

I kind of wish both guys had acknowledged the Beast in the Corner, though. Letterman’s been beating up on Clinton — in some really personal terms — for more than 200 shows a year for around 10 years. Each monologue has four to six jokes. Let’s say half of them are about Clinton. That’s a low estimate of 5,000 jokes (200x10x5/2). Some of them must have stung. It might have been nice to have Clinton say something like, “Don’t y’all miss me?” or for Dave to get to say, “Hey, y’know, it’s just business. No disrespect meant.”

As it was, the closest they got was when Clinton came out to the strains of “Harlem Nocturne.” The guys chatted for a minute about how Clinton’s gotten back to playing the saxophone, and Clinton used the word “blow.” The audience kind of gasped and tittered and started to laugh, but Clinton just kept on talking, his face not registering a thing. I’d hate to play poker against this guy.

Someone I would like to play poker against is W. I caught the end of his interview with Scott Pelley on 60 Minutes II, the two of them sitting in the Oval Office. Bush has the contemporary politician’s annyoning habit of answering questions with The Message. But Pelley did lay a glove on him, when he asked about all the anti-invasion talk coming from people who might reasonably be considered his father’s proxies — heavyweights like Brent Scowcroft. When the question was being asked, W started blinking very fast. His tone didn’t change, his face didn’t change, the angle of his head didn’t change, and his answer didn’t change. But his eyelids were playing the merengue. Didn’t like the question, not one bit, and I bet there have been some entertaining phone conversations between son and dad over the last couple of months.

OK, so that’s three items. Apply for a refund. I’m done now — or as done as I ever am.

 

Maybe I’m nuts, or maybe it’s just that I was able to drag myself away from the Tube for most of the day, but I found a lot of the memorials of the day pretty tasteful and restrained.

Yep, I’m surprised, too.

My main beef goes with the territory: live TV featuring anchors who feel the need to improve upon silence. What TV I did catch sent me surfing through digital cable-land, on a Diogenese-like search for an anchor who either wasn’t a blithering idiot or who didn’t fatally confuse political credulity for patriotism. If you were plugged in all day, I could well imagine that your opinion of today differs from mine.

Much of the observances were Just Right. I can do without the reflexive branding of the dead as “heros,” so the so-called Circle of Heros in the Pit grated — though the stagecraft and imagery of the service was lovely. The roll call was perfect, and the NYSE’s holding off on the opening of trading until it was finished was remarkably tasteful.

And I appreciate Mayor Bloomberg’s ban on any speechifying except for classics; it sure cut down on demagoguery and campaigning. But I’ve got to agree with Garry Wills here: are there really no speechwriters who we trust to hit the right note?

The visual of W and his wife going hand-in-hand, making the long walk alone down the ramp into the Pit, was excellent. So was his willingness to spend so very much time with the families, signing autographs, posing for pictures, and pausing for conversation. (His speech later was not so great, in that flat delivery he’s got that could suck the poetry even out of Peggy Noonan’s best. I hope he does better at the U.N. tomorrow; I’m certain that a case can and should be made against Iraq, but he hasn’t made it yet.)

New York itself has gotten back to its normal charming chaos. I found myself in the unaccustomed environs of the Columbus Circle CompUSA not long after noon, and emerged to discover 8th Avenue blocked off by police, fire and emergency vehicles. Seems the wind had picked up suddenly with the falling temperature, and a piece of scaffolding blew off the AOL Time Warner construction project and hit someone on the street below. Just another day.

And tonight, there was an interfaith multicultural anti-war memorial service on the Promenade. The march that preceded it was led by someone banging a drum and singing the most marshal version of Amazing Grace I’ve ever heard…

 

Last October, I drove my very pregnant wife to Connecticut for a medical appointment. As we reached the middle of the Bronx Whitestone Bridge, traffic slowed to a stop, as it frequently does. So we’re sitting in traffic, the bridge bouncing slightly under us, as suspension bridges do under load, when a passenger jet crossed from east to west, moving right to left across my field of vision.

For the life of me, I couldn’t remember if that plane was supposed to be there or if my family had pinned itself to a bulls-eye.

When I got my pulse under control, I realized that the plane was making a final approach to LaGuardia Airport. I’ve been on a ton of planes making that very approach, but I can’t say that I was ever particularly aware of it. Since The Eleventh, I find that I want to know fairly urgently that any aircraft I see in the sky is supposed to be where it is.

I don’t always get satisfaction. Last night, at around 9 pm, we heard a long low roar from a flyover. It sounded more like what I’d imagine a B-52 would sound like than an F-16, but that’s utterly uninformed. And at 8:55 this morning, in the midst of memorial vigil on the Brooklyn Promenade, a big military helicopter flew in from the south, swung east and banked over the Brooklyn shore, then swung back west and landed at the Wall Street Heliport. I thought the timing for low-flying aircraft in that part of the world might have been better.

The Promenade was crowded today. The morning prayers of Congregation B’nai Abraham, scheduled to end at the moment the first plane hit, attracted more people than I’d thought it would — and drew about a half-dozen photographers (many of whom were shooting digitally). One young man was davening not from a siddur but from a Palm 100. There are more things in heaven and earth, Horatio, than are dreamt of in your philosophy…

I wrote the other day about the appropriateness of blowing the shofar to mark the moments of impact. I was wrong; it was perfect. The blasts were not the stylized 1-3-7-1 of the holidays. The blasts were visceral, mournful, angry — like the best of Judaism, a call both to memory and to action.

 

My family was just out at the Brooklyn Promenade for a memorial service, standing more or less where I was a year ago when the second plane hit the tower. I’ll have more later, but I wanted to serve up these couple of images right away:

Try to follow this. If you’re an elected official from Florida, it’s OK — I’ll write slowly.

Today is Primary Day in Florida (as it is in New York). Among those running is Katherine Harris, the Secretary of State who figured so prominently in the theft of the last Presidential election. This is the same Katherine Harris who was in charge of state election law yet who professed to be unaware of the requirement that officeholders who are running for new positions resign their old offices. This is the same Katherine Harris is running today for a Republican House nomination.

One would think that in Florida, if nowhere else, the state would take pains to run a smooth election. Nope. Janet Reno, who is running for the gubernatorial nomination, couldn’t vote this morning; it seems that a bunch of polling places around the state weren’t ready when the polls were to open at 7 a.m.

Seems to me that if Ms. Harris was so keen to hang onto her job supervising elections, at least she could have actually done the job she was getting paid for until she was forced to quit.

 

A report this morning from my wife, Olivia:

 

It is very eerie.

The world really has changed.

For almost all of my professional life, I have worked within a few blocks of Foley Square, in downtown Manhattan. Sixteen years. Today, just after 9:00 a.m., I came out of the subway and heard the sound of bagpipes playing Amazing Grace. Because of the way the wind was blowing around the square on this pleasant late summer morning, it took a moment to locate the source of the sound. But then I saw that a group of pipers was standing near the Court of International Trade. Rehearsing, I suppose.

In the time I have been in this neighborhood, there has been a great deal of construction. A new federal courthouse on Pearl Street. Another new federal building on Broadway. Foley Square itself has been repaved and a new fountain (waterless, in the face of low rainfall) dominates the landscape. The Tweed Courthouse is renovated and gleaming. Ten years after a fire on Worth Street, a new building is finally taking shape.

But nothing has so changed the neighborhood as the respose to terrorism. Traffic barricades on Duane Street at Broadway. Locked gates around City Hall Park. Metal detectors in the lobby of 80 Centre Street and court officers in bullet-proof vests standing outside. Paralegal prosecutorial personnel required to pass through the metal detectors in the courthouses.

And bagpipes in Foley Square.

 

I was talking with a mutual friend just this weekend about how we hadn’t seen anything new from Clay Shirky in a while. His latest essay popped up the very next day — lucid as always from one of the best thinkers about online culture.

If you were a broadcast media outlet thinking about community building, here are five things you would think about:

1. Audiences are built. Communities grow.
2. Communities face a tradeoff between size and focus.
3. Participation matters more than quality.
4. You may own the software, but the community owns itself.
5. The community will want to build. Help it, or at least let it.

 

If you’re interested in electoral politics on the national and state levels — and I scarcely need to remind you that we’re deep into Political Season — you should know that ABC News’s The Note is the best daily briefing on the net. Comprehensive and even-handed though by no means impartial. Proof positive (for those who doubt) that national reporters aren’t just haircuts.

You may need to register, but it’s worth it.

And as an old reporting hand, I love a good Daybook, and The Note’s excels.

 

Some people think there’s too much emphasis on the anniversary of the September 11 attack. I understand entirely. I’m not at all certain how much if any TV I’ll be able to stomach on the day itself, though I’m quite impressed with the quality of what I’ve seen thus far. 9/11 is a local story to me, very nearly a neighborhood story. So while I probably won’t immerse myself in coverage, I do care about what goes on. 

The inverse-square law of news — that interest in an event decreases by the square of the distance between the event and the reader/viewer — declares that you’ll care less about what goes on this Wednesday than I do. Fair enough. Here’s a pretty complete list of goings-on around town, and here’s a very complete list. Hey — it’s a big city with lots of people and lots of different ways of coping.

But if you’ve read this far, let’s pretend that you’ll care about a couple of observations.

Starting at about 1 am Wednesday, five bagpipe corps will march from the furthest corner of each borough to Ground Zero. Here are the routes, and here’s a map of them. To give you a sense of scale, it’s about 15 miles from the remotest corners of Queens and the Bronx to Ground Zero, which is a long morning’s walk, especially if you’re blowing on a bagpipe. The Brooklyn procession will pass about four blocks from OTE Headquarters. I may hear it, but given the hour — 7 am maybe — I certainly won’t see it. And I suspect that a solemn bagpipe procession marching through Times Square at dawn will be more than a little moving.

A local orthodox synagogue is holding its regular morning service on the Brooklyn Promenade at 7:45 am, with the expectation of ending at 8:46, when the first plane hit. They’ll start the service by blowing a shofar — a traditional means of sounding an alarm. But I wonder if anyone at B’nai Abraham has remembered that when Joshua’s army conquered Jericho, the Bible says it brought the walls of the city down solely by marching around the city and blowing on shofars. Given the nature of last year’s attack, I wonder if something more a propos couldn’t be found. Not that they’ve asked me, of course. As my wife, the lovely and curious Olivia, frequently says, one problem with the world is that it doesn’t ask our opinion nearly enough.

September 11 is only part of the agita in New York City this week. The U.N. General Assembly gets to work this week, which requires significant parts of the East 40s to be shut down unexpectedly. Don’t even try to hang out around the Waldorf Astoria. Happens every year; the East Side population of very mean looking beefy guys wearing lapel pins and talking into their jacket sleeves jumps in September. The confluence of September 11 and the General Assembly session should make for some interesting diplomacy that we’ll never hear about.

Until September 11, by the way, there was an exit off the southbound FDR Drive for “49th Street UN Garage.” After the 11th, the second part of the exit sign was blocked off; if you want to park in the UN Garage (which under any circumstance was restricted), someone supposedly will tell you what exit to take.

Will I myself be out on the Promenade again this year? Dunno. I’ll certainly be out there at some point on Wednesday, if only because I usually am. I’ll let you know what I see.