New Yorkers are used to feeling things rumble underground. It’s not usually the ground itself.

At about a quarter to 7 this morning, a 5.1-Richter earthquake hit about 15 miles south of Plattsburgh — near the Canadian border and roughly 400 miles north of here. Even at that distance, many around here claim to have felt it. Not us, even though we were (mostly) awake.

Low-grade earthquakes in the high 1s are not all that rare in the East; there’s even a noted seismological research center — the Lamont Doherty Earth Observatory in a geologically significant location just across the Hudson River from New York City. But as Californians know, 5.1 is a serious quake, and this one caused some significant road damage, though no apparent serious injury or loss of life.

I’ve been through an earthquake. One morning some years ago, I was standing in the office of the Editor-in-Chief of MacUser magazine, on the 17th floor of an office building in Foster City, California, a southern suburb of San Francisco built on landfill. He’d just offered me a job, and as we shook hands, the building did a darling little mambo. “Just the wind,” the editor said. Ummm, I don’t think so. I’ve been in office buildings in the wind, and that’s not what it felt like. When other editors started running around, it was plain that something untoward had just happened. Someone in the art department, yelled, “The scanner says 5.4!” (Why do art departments always have police scanners?) I caught the 2:10 flight home — the airport apparently didn’t even miss a beat — and didn’t take the job.

As it happens, New York is badly prepared for a significant quake. A seismic building code went into effect in 1995, but the report cited in the previous link notes that a 5.0 quake under Manhattan would cause about $660 million dollars worth of damage to property and business interruption. A 6.0 quake (10 times larger) would cause $8.8 billion of damage; a 7.0 quake — catastrophic by any measure — would cause $48 billion in property damage. From a Princeton University study titled Earthquake Loss Estimation Study for the New York City Area:

Again, although New York City is a region with low seismic hazard (infrequent damaging earthquakes), it actually has high seismic risk, which result from concentrations of buildings and infrastructure built according to no seismic codes or provisions (however, several taller buildings are designed for strong wind loads, providing resistance to horizontal loads). Considering the area龝 historic seismicity, population density, and the condition of the infrastructure and building stock, it is clear that even a moderate earthquake will have considerable consequences in terms of public safety and economic impact.

“A columnist is either in the heating or lighting business. You can heat things up or shed some light — I fancy myself doing the lighting,” — Tom Friedman, columnist for the New York Times.

An excellent interview from Editor & Publisher magazine with perhaps the best columnist working right now. Think Friedman can figure out the Middle East? Think again.

Sometimes it’s hard to know who to root for.

Roger Friedman at Fox News has a wonderfully reported piece today on the financial travails of Michael Jackson. There’s a fair amount of detailed information about how Jackson has for years been mortgaging this piece of property to pay off that loan, and so forth.

The most interesting stuff at the bottom. Jackson, apparently, got a loan from Sony Music. A big loan. It was secured with the Beatles’s song catalog. Sony is also Jackson’s record company. There are rumors going around that Sony has been laggard in promoting Jackson’s latest record — to the point of not releasing singles from it — in hopes that the record will do so badly that the company will be able to foreclose on the song catalog. The Beatles catalog is worth about $200 million.

Paul McCartney has publically been expressing his frustration that he doesn’t own his own music anymore; he had tried to buy it back the last time it was on the market, only to be outbid by Jackson. He must be fit to be tied over this last development. John Lennon, on the other hand, is probably laughing, wherever he is.

The Yahoo! Yodeler is suing. Says they’ve been using his voice for years without permission, and only paid him about $500 for the initial session.

I wonder if it was paid as a voiceover session or a music session….

Maybe Microsoft is trying to persuade people that they’re not so smart after all…

Some of you probably know that the Microsoft anti-trust trial is still dragging on. There isn’t quite enough room here to go into the whys and wherefores of the current proceeding (and it’s late and I’m tired), but each side is getting 19 witnesses to persuade a judge just how much dinner Microsoft should be sent to bed without.

Microsoft’s first witness was Jerry Sanders, the CEO of Advanced Micro Devices, the No. 2 chip maker. During his testimony, it emerged that he was testifying at the direct request of Bill Gates, that it was the second favor Gates had ever asked of him — and the fourth time in 33 years in the business that the two had spoken. It further emerged that Sanders, who was testifying in opposition to punitive remedies requested by nine states, didn’t actually know what he was testifying against; he was taking Gates’s word for it.

Moreover, it came out that Sanders currently has a request before Microsoft that the software company include support for AMD’s new microprocessor architecture. I’m certain that Microsoft would have judged AMD’s case on its merits even if Sanders couldn’t have made himself available to testify. Don’t you think so?

The Sun Rises

It’s not every day that a new daily hits New York City. Hell, it’s not even every decade. The last one was New York Newsday, a laudable attempt to extend Long Island westward; it took a decade (and the sale of its parent company) for the suburban interloper to get beaten back.

Now comes the resurrected Sun, courtesy of Lord Conrad Black, a Canadian press baron with British monarchist pretentions. Black has been looking for a New York foothold for several years; he made a run at buying the Daily News and the liberal-ish weekly The Observer. But even Newsday was a tabloid, though a tabloid of a very high journalistic order. The Sun is a broadsheet; no one can remember the last broadsheet launch in New York.

The Sun is led on the editorial side by Seth Lipsky and Ira Stoll. Lipsky was a big deal at the Wall Street Journal, founding its Asian edition. He and Stoll met while working at at The Forward, of all places. The Forward has quite a history of its own: the Yiddish daily was founded in 1897, and now comes out every week in separate English and Yiddish editions. The masthead lists Lipsky as Founding Editor; quite an accomplishment at the dawn of the 21st century for a newspaper that started in the late 19th.

The Sun makes no bones about being a conservative counterbalance to The Times. The question (aside from the fundamental one of how these guys think they can survive) is just how far to the right the Sun will be. A website run by Stoll, www.smartertimes.com, has for the last year or so provided whiny and picky objections to The Times’ coverage. There is a long tradition of liberal Republicanism in New York, best represented by the late Sen. Jacob Javits and the late Gov. Nelson Rockefeller. That both lions of the political philosophy can be referred to as “late” is one indication that it’s in trouble; that Republicanism these days seems to be represented by Sens. Tom DeLay and Mitch McConnell closes the argument.

OK, so what about the paper itself? The inaugural issue, Tuesday April 16th, was not encouraging.

It’s a seven-column design with spot color. Pretty good color — way better than what the Daily News had for years, until they learned how their presses work. The design is quite crowded; not a lot of white space, but more than legible. The whole thing was 18 pages, and included two junior-page ads from friends and family of the top editors. Such kvelling. Not too impressive. The back page ad was for the Wall Street Journal.

The paper, on its first day, was way feature-heavy. The front page included an interview with Lech Walesa, who spoke at a local college and who made absolutely no news. On the
other hand, the piece was written by Peggy Noonan — reason enough for a V1N1 to front it. Other fronted stories included a hookless news analysis about Sen. Clinton’s need to appeal to all branches of the Democratic Party, the legal fight over wine distrbution in New York, an interview of a leader of the Iraqi opposition, a pic of the pro-Israel rally in WA, an interview with Mayor Bloomberg, a eulogy for the metal-covered Rolodex (what?), and a piece about the state Assembly bringing up rent control a year before it has to.

Wire stories were from AP, Bloomberg, and the Daily Telegraph.

Several stories looked very much like news, but read like (at best) analysis, and not good analysis, either.

The interview with Bloomberg was entertaining. The questioner floated the idea of a private company building the Second Avenue Subway. The mayor sputtered for a while, and then said, “What are you smoking?” That was the title of the lead editorial, explaining why the owners are bothering with the whole enterprise. Given Bloomberg’s reluctant starring role in a current NORML ad campaign, I bet the mayor wishes he had another turn of phrase.

Business coverage was nearly nonexistent. Sports was light. No TV listings. An opera review. Long leaden history of the old Sun.

Super-easy crossword — Daily News/TV Guide quality. To their credit, they carried the solution to the Sun’s last puzzle: Jan 4, 1950. I didn’t have time to get to the library to check the microfilm.

The second day was much better. Bloomberg’s budget zero-ing out the construction budget for charter schools, a good AP story about the Middle East, the news that recycled glass in the city isn’t actually recycled, the possibility of a Brooklyn state senator switching to the Republican Party (particularly important as the Legislature passes redistricting), and a nice roundup of two elections that augur the future of liberal Republicanism. Another story covered a new book with a new theory of who turned in Anne Frank and family. The main picture was of a shirtless Brooklyn Borough President and Vulgarian Marty Markowitz kicking off a badly needed borough-wide diet. Can’t say that I want to see a nekkid Markowitz with my corn flakes, but that may be the exact idea.

Four corrections, two of them for omitted cutlines, one for a misspelling.

A full-page public service ad with serious type formatting problems. Someone didn’t check the Quark file….

You won’t feel informed about the world by reading the Sun. But you may very well learn something new about New York City.

It’s good to see the Sun again.

Maybe they just need more Jews…

The California Department of Fish and Game has decided to shoot fish in a barrel. Sort of. Better than poisoning the reservoir.

“There won’t be fish flying through the air, said spokesman Steve Martarano, but “it’ll still have pretty good bang for the buck.”

Reporters live for datelines like this, from the Wall Street Journal of Monday April 15 (I’d put the URL here, but it requires a paid subscription.):

INTERCOURSE, Pa. — James Spangler pulled up to the door of a prosperous Amish home one recent Friday night as dusk settled over the rolling hills of Lancaster County. The 57-year-old insurance agent expected to pick up a fat deposit check, and he wasn’t disappointed.

Seems that the Amish are weathering the economic downturn quite nicely, thank you, with most of their wealth in ever-appreciating real estate. (And, for some reason, it feels necessary to remind you of stories a few years back about an Amish cocaine ring allied with the Pagans motorcycle gang. Stoltzfus, it seems, is not an uncommon last name in that part of the world.)

You know the prayer: “Lord, preserve me from my friends. My enemies I can handle.”

It’s not like Napster didn’t have enough troubles of its own. Now founders and investors are squabbling over the likely carcass.

The New York Times has a story today about how the X-10 Nanny-Cam — widely advertised in a  universally despised “pop-under” web page — can broadcast its image far beyond the boundaries of your home. Encrypting the image and thereby protecting the privacy of camera owners would easily be possible, but it would create a significantly more expensive product.

There are any number of reasons why this is a depressing story, most of them obvious. What particularly galls me is that the customers most likely to be attracted by the product are the precise ones who are least likely to either understand the problem or be able to fix it.

And by the way, in New York State, where there’s a law governing video surveillance, the contention that interception of a video image is allowed by law is, um, questionable. My wife, who knows a thing or five about wiretapping law, says things may not be quite so cut and dried. Casual/accidental interception, like picking up radio waves in your braces, is one thing; purposeful interception could be quite another. The airways are public, so you shouldn’t really expect much privacy for anything you send over them. (This is why cordless phones should be — but frequently aren’t — encrypted.) It is, after all, called “broadcasting.”