The AP (via CNN) reports that the FDA has approved a new wheelchair, called the iBOT, that can climb stairs. The story talks about how the device relies on gyroscopes, and how it’s being sold by a division of Johnson & Johnson.

Not until the 15th graf does the story mention that the wheelchair was invented by the highly regarded medical inventor Dean Kamen, who put most of the iBOT technology into the Segway scooter — which is something that maybe a lot of readers might have heard about.

Me, I’d have found some way to work the Segway into the lede. But then, I don’t work for the AP.

I was all set to gloat a lot about the fact that Gallagher, Larry Flynt, Gary Coleman, and Ahhhnold are running for governor of California. Then I remembered that I live in the state where recent senatorial candidates included Al “Grandpa Munster” Lewis and parking garage magnate/certified nutball Abe Hirschfeld, and where Norman Mailer, William F. Buckley, Al Sharpton and Gore Vidal all ran for mayor.

Suddenly, it doesn’t seem like all the loose screws have rolled west after all…

Sometimes, you can go months without synchronicity. Then it bites you on the ass.

Bryant Park is a picturesque park in Midtown, behind the New York Public Library’s main branch and the site of one of the better-known free Wi-Fi zone. There’s a lovely carousel there, and they show free movies on Monday nights during the summer.

For a little while, there’s been an experiment whereby they put hawks in Bryant Park to help control the pigeon population. But the other day, one of the hawks made the perfectly understandable error of mistaking a chihuahua for a rat, and tried to make off with it.

The hawk lost his job. (Were it up to me, I’d have given him a bonus, but once again, the true problem about this city is that they did not ask me.)

Now here’s a story from CNN about a judge sparing the life of 170 feral Chihuahuas.

Nearly 170 wild Chihuahua dogs facing death at a Los Angeles-area animal shelter were spared Friday by a judge who released them into the custody of actor Gregory Peck’s former daughter-in-law, who runs a Chihuahua rescue operation.

Seems to me that there’s this hawk who’s out of a job in New York…..

Faithful readers will recall that on March 31, the kids and I were evacuated because an explosive device was found in a car about 20 feet from our front window. The local paper reports that police have made an arrest: the former cellmate of the guy who blew up a building down the block a couple of years ago.

I encapsulated it in my earlier post:

A couple of years ago, a bomb went off in the building two doors down. It was built and set off by a former building superintendent who had a romantic thing for one of the residents, who had that day graduated from the Police Academy (and whose husband was and is now the super).

It seems that the there’d been a deposition on a civil suit against the former super slated for April 1, and he’d wanted to demonstrate that maybe police had gotten the wrong man two years ago. (Not likely since the bomb had gone off in his hands, but there you go.) So he reached out to his former cellmate, who planted the new device in the current super’s car.

It might possibly have worked — Strangers on a Train and all that — except that police tape phone calls into and out of Rikers Island. Ooops. Criminal genius strikes again.

 

Actually, they’re talking about potholes. From the NYDailyNews:

“Basically, you got three types of holes: You got your A-holes, and then you have your B-holes, and your C-holes,” McFarland said in describing the pockmarked streets.

 

After digging and thinking for four years, journalism students at the University of Illinois Champaign-Urbana think they’ve figured out the identity of Watergate figure Deep Throat.

If you had that weasel Pat Buchanan in the office pool, like Dateline NBC did, you’re wrong. If you had John Dean, you’re warmer, but not quite on the mark.

This has been a Washington parlor game for going on 30 years. Woodward and Bernstein themselves say they won’t tell until Deep Throat dies. But these students have assembled what looks like a pretty good guess.

 

 

Peggy Noonan has a pretty fair column today about unashamed patriotism, but she gets tangled up.

In the late 1960s a lot of young people and liberals thought you were a dope to love your country, “to wave the flag.” But that is also the precise moment that American flag lapel pins first became popular. When a local businessman wore one of them, it was as if he were wearing a sign that said “I support my country, and if you don’t like it, that’s too bad.”

Twenty five years ago at CBS News a major network star said to a newsroom friend of mine, who still wore his pin, “I wish I could wear one of those.” But, he explained, it might be “misinterpreted.” My friend thought, but did not say: Yes, it would be interpreted in a way that suggested you love your country. How terrible.

It’s a very nice column, and it puts its finger on something important. But Noonan elides something else important: how and why that CBSer thought that a flag pin would be “mis-interpreted.”

In many ways over the last umpteen years — probably starting with the Vietnam protests, but I’m of an age where it might have started earlier and I didn’t notice — the flag has been co-opted as a symbol of the Right. More accurate: the Left rejected it as part of its anti-war rhetoric, and the Right was more than happy to take the symbol and run with it.

Rather than a patriotic symbol, the flag too often is used as a symbol to advance a partisan agenda. David Letterman got it right once: he noticed that as the election got closer, Dubya would put more and more flags on his rostrum; as a response and a gag, Letterman started putting flags behind him, more and more, until his stage was full of them. All the while, he was running clips that showed how the Republicans were quite literally covering themselves with the flag, more each day.

Call me a cynic, but I’m enough of a journalist and enough of a history student to know that when someone starts waving flags, it’s time to start listening. When someone insists that you wave flags, it’s time to start fighting.

I love my country. I wore a flag pin after 9-11 because it was the only appropriate gesture I could think of. I won’t wear one now because I think the politicians running my country are wrong in just so many ways.

If wearing a flag pin can raise that kind of issue, the guy from CBS is right to not wear one.

And if someone can call him unpatriotic because he doesn’t wear one — and if the allegation can be met with anything else but a snort — that’s only evidence that he’s right.

 

1. Can you burn a scarecrow in effigy?

2. Do observant Jews ride piggyback?

 

Edwin Starr passed away the other day. He was a soul shouter with a killer band and only three hits, but my oh my what hits:

• Agent Double-O Soul


• Twenty Five Miles


• War

One of my reference books describes “War”, from 1970, as “cataclysmic,” which is as good a description as any. Where Marvin Gaye talked about how “only love can conquer hate,” and the Temptations sang their complex and wordy “Ball of Confusion,” and Crosby Stills Nash & Young decried “Four dead in Ohio,” Starr cut to the chase. The chorus was as simple as can be: “War! Huh! What is it good for? Absolutely nothin’!”

The chart underneath it swung from snare clicks to punching horns to snarling guitars. It was impossible to ignore the song as it came pouring out of the radio — as impossible as it is to imagine such a song being programmed on any major station today.

If that were all Edwin Starr did, he’s be worth remembering. But there was also “Twenty Five Miles.” It’s the story of a guy counting down the 25 miles he’s walking to see his baby again, but it inexplicably fades out as the singer’s got 5 more miles to go. Why? Was the song too long for radio? What happened? Did he ever get there? Was she waiting for him?

If I ever get to front a soul band, with the horns and the chick backup singers and the whole deal, I’m going to find me a chart for “Twenty Five Miles,” and that’s what I’ll sing. I might even make up the last five.

 

The Alliance for Downtown New York will be installing free wireless internet access in parks all over lower Manhattan, the NYTimes reports today.

Starting May 1, you’ll be able to get free bandwidth at City Hall Park, Bowling Green, South Street Seaport, Liberty Plaza, Rector Park, and the Vietnam Veteran’s Plaza. Byrant Park is already “wired.” The paper also reports that someone is providing wireless access in Tompkins Square Park and Madison Square Park — near the Ziff Davis offices, by the way. From the Times:

NYC Wireless has mapped 141 such hot spots in the New York City area, where individuals or companies make their networks available for public use. Another nonprofit organization, the Public Internet Project, mapped more than 13,000 places in Manhattan alone where signals from home or office wireless networks can be detected and used by a computer user.