The trust that controls Hershey Foods has decided not to sell after all. (I’m pretty sure I’ve written about this before, but Radio’s not great about providing an index of past posts.)

Most of the voting stock in Hershey is held by a charitable trust that runs an extremely well-funded school for orphans in the city of Hershey, PA. Hershey, besides being the corporate home, is also sort of a chocolate theme park. An eerie and amazing place, really.

A few months ago, the trust decided that it ought to be more diversified, and announced that it wanted to sell its stake in the company. A chocolate storm ensued (well, not chocolate, but you get the idea) with officials at the local, state, and national levels indicating that any sale — particularly to European interests such as Nestle and Cadbury Schwepps — would be examined most closely. It’s not just the company, you see. Everyone was afraid that the chocolate plant, and the economy of central Pennsylvania, would be closed. (Read the last few grafs to see how the 2002 election factored into the mix.)

Last last night, despite a $12.5 billion offer from Wrigley that it was about to accept, the trust decided to hell with it and took the company off the market.

If you want to know more about the super-secretive chocolate industry, I strongly recommend you seek out and read The Emperors of Chocolate.

 

Now that all this dot-com bubble is behind us, the Bear Stearns brokerage is ordering its employees out of chinos and back into suits. To help, the ever-helpful Brooks Brothers store across the street is staying open late and giving Bear Stearns’s employees a 20 percent discount.

A couple of observations:

1. Business must be bad indeed. If there was money sloshing around the joint, the company would be encouraging employees to shop at the much-higher-toned Paul Stuart store around the corner.
   
2. Gotta love the fact that Brooks Brothers’s business model isn’t entirely unlike Bear Stearns. Market goes up or market goes down, the brokerage gets paid on the trade. And whether the memo says casual or dress-up, Brooks gets paid whenever anyone shifts gears.

 

Bill and Melinda Gates announce the birth of their third child, Phoebe Adele Gates.

… and we all know that Microsoft doesn’t get it right until version 3.0, right?

Congratulations, and welcome to the world, Pheebs. How do you feel about older men — say, nine months older?

 

The American Prospect carries an informed piece about the perceived anti-war and anti-Bush tilt of the New York Times under new editor Howell Raines. The Prospect — a left-of-center magazine — makes the interesting point that the conservative pundits who roast what they see as the Times’s agenda haven’t actually spent much time working in the daily media, and therefore don’t understand how ad hoc coverage decisions really are.

The bug in the Prospect’s ointment is that a publication’s Editor doesn’t need to have a heavy hand on the spike to direct coverage. Quite the contrary; coverage can be steered in many less-visible ways — like hiring the “right” people.

But based on my own experience, the Prospect gets it right, and backs up its thesis with some actual quotes from some actual reporters on the Times. From the article:

To generalize, conservative pundits assume that establishment media such as the Times are partisan because that’s how their own journalists are expected to operate. They believe Howell Raines runs The New York Times the way they know Wes Pruden runs The Washington Times.

 

Fascinating but frustrating piece in Fortune about the business side of the multinational corporation popularly known as Rolling Stones. Fascinating because of the detail presented. Frustrating because of the juicy stuff they choose not to talk about — like who gets how much of what.

My favorite part was Keith Richards talking about international tax policy. Yes, really.

And the reported missed a good beat by not asking about the Net and piracy. While new and smaller bands can profitably use the Net as a promotional tool, a backlist-heavy band like the Stones makes a ton of money off performance rights, which makes them especially vulnerable to file sharing.

 

The Register reports that after an exhaustive search, Microsoft Research has found the first known use of an “emoticon,” those smiley things like this: : – )

Given the transient nature of so much online content, it’s actually a pretty impressive feat of archeology.

It turns out that, unless prior art can be demonstrated, emoticon usage was first proposed exactly 20 years ago next week.

 

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.