Wear your colors.

I was a regular listener of Don Imus and the Imus in the Morning radio program in the nineties and into the oughts. It was one reason, and not the most important one, that my wife bought me a denim jacket for Christmas 2001. 

By that year, Don Imus had started marketing Imus-branded products with his brother Fred (no relation) branded through Fred's company, Auto Body Express. They sold Imus-branded coffee, hats, and other things to raise money for children's charities. As such, they were not cheap. 

Shortly after 9/11, Imus was selling a patriotic-themed denim jacket, and I wanted one. I needed a casual coat for mid-chilly temperatures, and I loved the one Imus was selling, but I didn't want to spend the dough. She completely surprised me with it. 

I still have it. 

I've worn it ever since, and in turn it has become quite worn. I saw another guy in Midtown wearing one a couple of years after 2001; he looked like a grumpy tourist who had had quite enough of New York, and I was dressed for work and did not have my jacket so I couldn't go "Twinsies!" So I let him be. But he did look mighty sharp in that jacket. 

I believe Imus, who started out as a typical hippie but was more thoughtful than that, really did love America. He was falsely accused of racism at one point in his show because of a bit that went too far. People forgot the theme of his program, which basically was: We Hate Everybody. Their self-proclaimed slogan was, "We're not happy until you're not happy." 

Still, I stopped listening regularly after longtime sidekick and newscaster Chuck McCord retired in 2011. Charles had been a counterbalance to Imus's weenie hippie tendencies and the "normal" in the room (although he wrote a lot of their sketch material). It was a less funny show after that, to my ear. But I was still sad to hear that Don himself retired in 2018, and two years later died of lung problems -- which he'd had quite a few of long before COVID. 

My favorite feature of the jacket is on the back. It's a replica of the flag that flew over Fort McHenry in the War of 1812, the flag that inspired the poem of Francis Scott Key (no relation) that became our national anthem. 

I remember seeing the actual flag itself in the Smithsonian when I was young, and being flabbergasted: "THAT? THAT's the ACTUAL FLAG?" It was not only like meeting a celebrity; it was like meeting one whom you loved and thought was dead. 

One time I was going with a friend to McDonald's for breakfast. A crusty old-timer with his veteran's cap told me that the number of stars was wrong on my jacket. I explained that the flag was supposed to look like the Fort McHenry flag, but he still objected. Maybe because there were 15 stripes and 15 stars in 1814, but the damaged flag (and thus the replica) only has 14 stars. There is a hole where one of the stars should be. Or perhaps he knew that there were actually 18 states in 1814 -- but the Fort McHenry flag never had more than 15. It was not until 1818 that Congress decided to increase the stars to match the number of states, and make more room for the field by decreasing the number of stripes to 13. The old vet was wrong, but I didn't know why at the time, and we parted amicably. 

I'd like to close this memory with a meme I think is suitable to the occasion: 

I think Imus would have liked that. 

The last call.

On September 11, 2001, Aaron McLamb captured a picture of a lone fire truck going toward disaster while most of us fled. Ladder 118 from Engine Company 205, 74 Middagh Street, Brooklyn, crossing the Brooklyn Bridge. None of the six men on that truck would return. 

I'll have something different to say about the date tomorrow. All my thoughts seem pretty insignificant today somehow. 

Going Fourth!

I often opine on Independence Day as an inspiring holiday for our nation, but today I found myself thinking about it as the thing itself and how it's been in my life. Like Christmas -- we all know the difference between the story of Christmas (awesome) and the actual celebration with loved ones (dicey). Every holiday has that kind of dichotomy -- the thing for what it celebrates and the thing for how it is. 

And I have to tell you, my Fourths of July have been a mixed bag. 

Never works out exactly as I would like.

I don't remember doing much at all when I was a kid. When I was little more than a toddler, I think I was at a parade, a big town deal with floats and stuff, but it was so far back I can barely remember anything. Later my family really didn't do anything. No parades, no fireworks. We visited relatives because it was a day off and Mom could go see her family. Then, as adults do, they sat around and talked. BORING! 

Later on there were some winners. I went to a Mets game one year, and while I don't even remember if they won the game (I think they won), the fireworks show at Shea afterward was spectacular. In 2002, my wife and I went to the local kaboomery show and it was great -- the patriotism was still thick on the ground here in the lower Hudson Valley, where many locals had been lost on 9/11. 

One July 4, after my first year in junior high, my family spent the day with a family that had enough fireworks to invade Canada. I shot off more bottle rockets in one evening than I have the entire rest of my life. Almost burned down their house, but not quite (a bottle tipped backward after I lit the fuse). In fact, it was a miracle that with alcohol-consuming adults and explosive-armed children there were no major disasters. 

For a few years the Fourth was spent at a relative's cabin in the country, something I would enjoy much, much more now than I did as a kid. Very quiet.

One year, as the Fourth loomed, I convinced a friend to get a party going at his house -- and then my parents informed me that we were going out of town for the holiday. I have never lived that down. But my friends all got even a year or so later, when I threw a party in my parents' backyard and all the guys decided to bug out because they wanted to play basketball in the park. So my parents were looking at me like Don't you have any friends anymore? It was humiliating. The guys returned later out of pity, or hunger.

More recent years have found our family unit with dogs, and we usually spend the holiday making sure no canine freaks out and goes running wild. Usually it's okay, but about five years back the idiots up the street were blowing up enough stuff to -- well, invade Canada. Poor Nipper took it hard. And it sparked an argument between my wife and Mrs. "Deuce" Baggio nearby, which my wife decidedly, comprehensively won. I could have warned the Baggios not to argue with my wife, especially when she's defending one of our dogs. 

There were other summer parties that were eventful, and even near terrible, but I think they did not land on the Fourth, so I'll leave them for another time, if at all. This year I just want to make some decent food and distract the dog when the bombs go off. I love you, America, but your birthday is not always my favorite day. 

Assault on batteries.

I have to say, I have been very let down by batteries. The limits of battery capacity have completely upended any hopes of getting away from fossil fuels. No one seems to want to talk about this in the press, but it's true. 

After 9/11, many people (including me) wondered if we could get rid of our reliance on fossil fuels quickly. Nothing to do with the climate -- this was about starving the petrogarchs who sponsor terrorism. Ruining the garbage nations that only had oil to sell and only hatred to manufacture. It has not worked out. 

Even if we lived in a fantasy world where windmills and solar panels were not a useless boondoggle of limited and ecology-flattening waste, and where environmentalists would let us dam rivers and burn garbage and split atoms for electricity instead of suing and sabotaging to demand the end of these facilities, and where all minerals needed for batteries were plentiful and cheap, batteries would still suck compared to gasoline. 

In 2009, The Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists noted that "The maximum theoretical potential of advanced lithium-ion batteries that haven’t yet been demonstrated to work is still only about 6 percent of crude oil." Which sucks, because "Renewable energy–unlike fossil carbon–is harnessed dynamically from the environment. Therefore, it won’t be as useful as fossil carbon until it can be stored and transported with similar ease." To carry the magically-generated electricity I mentioned above, cars and other vehicles would have to have a far, far better ability to hold power, resist power loss, and not explode into flames than anything we have currently. So far, no battery like this that I've heard of has even been proposed as plausible. 

We figure that at some point, maybe not for five hundred years but at some point, we're going to run out of petroleum. Assuming Mr. Fusion is not available, what then? All the optimistic science fiction stories tended to have things run on batteries, but it may be as likely as having things run on unicorn farts after all. It may be physically impossible to make the kind of batteries we need for the modern world to rely on them. 

I don't have any answers. I'm just disappointed. You're never going to get a podracer to fly on methane, let alone an Odyssey-class Federation starship. I just don't think the future is working out. Thanks a lot, you dumb ol' batteries.  

Before the bomb dropped.

Soon after September 11, 2001, I was in a supermarket checkout line. I was looking at the cheerful covers of the magazines on display near the register, magazines written and printed and distributed before the attack. I was thinking that they were each a window to a more innocent world we had just left behind forever. 

Here's something funny. 

I got a couple of books out of the library, doing fact-finding research. One of the books hadn't been checked out in some time, I guess, and it looks like the last person to take it out didn't throw away the checkout slip. Maybe the reader had been using it as a bookmark, but if so, he or she got less than halfway through the book. 

There's some hard-core irony at play here. 

Due date: February 21, 2020. Ten days earlier the World Health Organization named the Wu Flu COVID-19, a name that would swiftly become burned in our minds for the rest of our lives -- lives that would also be shortened, in a great many cases. 

A couple of weeks after that due date, Italy would be the first country to initiate a national quarantine. Two days later the WHO would declare COVID-19 a pandemic. By March 21, ten thousand would be dead and the total number of cases about 250,000. And you know the rest. 

"Stuck indoors because of the cold?" Lady, you don't know the half of it. 

This definitely has a little frisson of seeing, say, a "Visit Lovely Pearl Harbor" postcard mailed December 5, 1941, or an "I 💖 NY" postcard mailed September 10, 2001 -- or a poster for the Supernova music festival put up October 1 of this year. A little less so because COVID was a slow-growing catastrophe, but similar in that government intelligence was ineffective prior to the event. Also, in the case of the vicious surprise attacks, the evil was front-loaded. In COVID's case, while I believe the virus was man-made with American funding (using shenanigans to contravene US law about gain-of-function research), I think the release of the virus was accidental. In that case, the evil was back-loaded, with the purposeful wickedness coming later. 

All this leads to a lot of finger-pointing, because there are always people who could have prevented or prepared but were stupid or evil about it. But it also leads to "if only they had known" thinking -- If only you, innocent library patron, had known in February 2020 what was coming your way! And that leads to What's coming our way now that we don't know about? thinking. And that's the worst.

Did we forget?

We said we would never forget.

I know it's been 22 years, and barely a soul in college now was even born when it happened. All right, maybe for them it's ancient history, like the partition of Berlin or the fall of Saigon was to my generation. 

What about the rest of us?

The people in power were around. They remember. What are they talking about nowadays? 

Pronouns. Drag queens. "Fortified" elections. Foreign wars. Re-masking. Replacing reliable forms of energy with spotty ones and demanding everything be run on electricity. Teaching a generation of men that they are lower than dirt. Open arms for every criminal on earth. 

Meanwhile we have the fall of Kabul, runaway inflation, cities turning to garbage, plummeting trust in our politicized government agencies. We see them sending people to jail for being in the wrong party and letting others walk away laughing from criminal activity if they're in the right party. 

It's hard to be governed by the stupid and terrible to be governed by the wicked, but when you get both at the same time, it's brutal. How did the great meritocracy, the place where any citizen could in theory become president, have to endure same problem the British suffered generations ago -- discovering that the wealthiest families and the best schools could turn out a horde of morons who all think they're brilliant? It was not supposed to happen here.

The Flag of Honor at a local parish

When America voted for Obama over McCain, what hurt most was the fear that we had forgotten in just seven years, that we were rolling over and going back to sleep, the dragon tired of the fight so soon, to lie down and dream about the "peace dividend" era of the 1990s. 

I wish. The 1990s seems like a time of great statesmanship compared to today, and that was the Clinton era. 

Shame on every one of us that let the country become what it is now. Shame on all of us who could have prevented this. Shame on everyone who thinks any of this is okay.

We've got a Godzilla for sale.

Thinkin' about Godzilla. 

I don't believe I've ever seen a full Godzilla movie. By the time I came along they had gotten pretty silly. The original 1954 Toho movie was pretty damn dark -- Godzilla's ruin of Tokyo would have revived some horrible memories for audiences who had lived through the real thing, with Allied firebombing less than ten years earlier. The Operation Meetinghouse bombing of March 9 through 10, 1945, "is the single most destructive bombing raid in human history," according to Dr. Wikipedia. And yet people packed the theaters in Tokyo to see Godzilla (or, as he was known then, Gojira) destroy the city all over again. 

I've written before how seeing the destruction of midtown Manhattan in The Avengers in 2012 was hardly entertaining to me, having been in midtown on September 11 while my wife was downtown. I wondered about all the non-player characters in all the buildings who were getting obliterated or crippled for life. Previous superhero movies had been all about preventing horrific damage to innocents; this one felt like it was reveling in it, and less than 11 years after the terrorist attacks. 

But no one else seemed to be bothered, so I guess I'm just a little delicate little lotus flower, too good for this world. I haven't bothered with any other superhero movies since the first Guardians of the Galaxy. Don't even mention the word Transformers to me.  

For high-body-count entertainment, though, Godzilla is king of the destroyers. When the children of the original Japanese audiences got older, Toho found that they loved Godzilla, and so movies got geared to younger viewers and it showed. Sure, cities and irreplaceable landmarks and presumably thousands of people got killed, but it was fun! There was even a promotion to design a robot for 1973's Godzilla vs, Megalon. The winning entry was Jet Jaguar! And you can't blame the kid who won for the name, because Jet Jaguar was the name the studio gave the robot. 

Come on, people now, smile on your brother
Everybody get together
Try to love one another right now

I've never even seen the entire Mystery Science Theater episode that covered that picture. 

Some of my friends were big fans of the Godzilla and Godzilla-adjacent movies, which typically ran on ABC's famous 4:30 Movie, films for post-school kids cut in half and run over two days. ABC seemed to program for boys -- it would always be kaiju movies or the Planet of the Apes or low-budget horror films or the 1966 Batman movie or the like. I don't think I had the patience for movies in those days. I could sit through hours of TV, don't get me wrong, but in 30-minute segments, please. 

These days ol' Lizard Eye is back and bigger than ever. (A friend of mine in college always wanted to make a Godzilla movie where the Big G would go up against a bunch of hillbillies who called him "ol' Lizard Eye.") I'm told that in the new films from Legendary Pictures, the good humans want to find a way to coexist with all the giant monsters. Seems like a pretty tall order to me. Every time one of the damn things sneezes, a billion dollars of infrastructure goes up in flames. This is why we can't have nice things! 

I will say this for Godzilla -- he inspired a pretty great song by Blue Öyster Cult. With a riff reminiscent of Godzilla's scream, a thumping drum footstep, and verse hammered out in iambic tetrameter, it's irresistible. 

I just don't find fun in death and destruction. But there will always be those who love the Big G, and good for them. Just don't get stepped on.   

Mission: Get into places and back out.

In the old Mission: Impossible show, the one thing you could always count on was that the team would have really good forged papers. They never got caught because they used a Form 13-F when the guards would have expected a Form 16-B. Peter Lupus just handed over the clipboard, a guy looked at it, and soon a mysterious crate with Greg Morris inside would be delivered. Later it would open up and the cat burglar would get to work. 

In the days pre-9/11, a friend of mine was convinced that you could get into any office building in Manhattan with a clipboard and maybe a lanyard. Just look like you know what you're doing and brazen it out. Sometimes it wouldn't even be that big a deal. I read an article about how gorgeous the lobby and elevators are in the Chrysler Building, so one day I just went in there wearing my suit and tie. Went straight in, rode in the elevator, left. Didn't even have to sign a guest book. (They are gorgeous, BTW.)

The clipboard act might have been worth a try to get into more secure properties back in the day. But security began to tighten after the 1993 World Trade Center bombing, and now, well, it would be easier to get a four-ounce bottle on an airplane than to sneak into a building with such a simple trick. 

However, something tells me this probably would still work.

It's the same principle as my old pal's clipboard gag -- use the appearance of mission and authority to do what you're not supposed to do. It won't work in a Manhattan office building now, but apparently you can take whatever you want from stores. This is partly because security in a Walmart isn't that great, but partly because no one cares anymore. If Target and other stores in California are just going to let looters and thieves take off with whatever, why should a branch in, say, Omaha care that much? 

So that's the world we've built in the new millennium -- maximum security for everyday schmucks, crooks running wild in the streets. For the first time in my life I hear about stores being shut down because people are stealing too much. That's serious. Ordinary petty theft is a minor infection; this kind of thievery is a fatal disease. The parasite has taken over the organism.

I had another friend whose son got in trouble with the law back in the oughts. This Napoleon of crime had the idea with his buddy to go into Target, grab all the video game discs they could hold, and dash out the door. So, the kid got a criminal record for his trouble. Now it appears he wasn't an idiot, he was just ahead of his time. 

Twenty-one.

 Psalms

Chapter 137

1  By the rivers of Babylon, there we sat down, yea, we wept, when we remembered Zion.

2  We hanged our harps upon the willows in the midst thereof.

3  For there they that carried us away captive required of us a song; and they that wasted us required of us mirth, saying, Sing us one of the songs of Zion.

4  How shall we sing the LORD'S song in a strange land?

5  If I forget thee, O Jerusalem, let my right hand forget her cunning.

6  If I do not remember thee, let my tongue cleave to the roof of my mouth; if I prefer not Jerusalem above my chief joy.

7  Remember, O LORD, the children of Edom in the day of Jerusalem; who said, Rase it, rase it, even to the foundation thereof.

8  O daughter of Babylon, who art to be destroyed; happy shall he be, that rewardeth thee as thou hast served us.

9  Happy shall he be, that taketh and dasheth thy little ones against the stones.

Fred's Book Club: At the Plate.

It's Wednesday, friends, and that means another dose of the Humpback Writers, our Hump Day book feature. Get it? Hump Day, Humpback? No? Me neither. 

Anyway, it's also the day before baseball's Opening Day, and with that we have another baseball book, and another brief tale of Fred from when he had a career. Yes, today we have a book from National Geographic and the National Baseball Hall of Fame and Museum, a children's book that is as American as anything American can be. 

And I couldn't get to Ralph Kiner for an autograph. The local TV crews were all over him. 

America at Bat: Baseball Stuff & Stories came out of a national tour, and the tour came from the love for our nation in the wake of the dastardly attacks of September 11, 2001. The Hall of Fame and its partners decided to put together a tour of sensational baseball memorabilia from the museum, a tour that would launch with an appearance by dozens of Hall of Famers. It began in New York City in March 2002, and traveled as a museum installation for six years, finishing in Boston in September 2008. It was called Baseball As America. 

At the time of the launch I was working for a magazine in midtown, and was one of the only people on staff who was a fan of baseball, or any sport other than backbiting. So when the features editor got an invitation to the launch party at the American Museum of Natural History, she kindly asked if I wanted to go. Did I!

I could not have imagined being in a room with so many baseball superstars at once. Kiner was there, and Hank Aaron, and Warren Spahn, and Bob Feller, and 22 others, and somewhere I had a notebook and press info with everyone's names but that has been lost to time. 

Out of the tour came a commemorative book for adults, but I wasn't given a copy of that. I got the kids' book, written by Paul Rosenthal, with an introduction by Aaron, from which these pages come. It's a great little book, full of amazing baseball pictures, stories, trivia, and photos of objects from the Hall of Fame's museum that were on the tour. Tour items included a replica of Ruth's bat you could pick up, FDR's "green light" letter to Commissioner Landis recommending baseball continue during World War II, and of course ancient equipment, priceless uniforms and cards, and an Andy Warhol silkscreen of Tom Seaver. 

I thought then and think now that it was a nice thing for the Hall of Fame to do, and a reminder that sports could really bring people of all backgrounds together. 

Of course, in recent years, sports, like everything else, is being used to tear us apart instead. Which is why I can be sentimental about this sentimental book -- baseball was a light in a dark hour in New York City in the year after 9/11. I wish Major League Baseball and the other pro sports leagues felt that way now. Instead they seem to hate America as much as our foreign enemies do, and then wonder why Americans are tuning out. But I'll probably be watching some games this year, at least until the newly configured Mets fall prey to injuries and stupidity, as usual. 

Fred's Book Club: The End, 2001 Edition.

Happy Wednesday, a.k.a. Hump Day, the day we run our Humpback Writers feature, in which writers with no known back issues have written books that have the singular advantage of me owning a copy of them. The books, that is, not the writers. I don't have a big photocopy of P.G. Wodehouse hanging on my office wall. Although that might improve the décor.

Today, January 20, for no particular reason, I am profiling a book from 2001 -- Barbara Olson's The Final Days: The Last, Desperate Abuses of Power by the Clinton White House. 

Okay, I should clarify that I'm not using this book to take shots at our departing president -- I mainly chose today to run this book because it's another day for the transference of presidential power, as when the Clintons left the White House twenty years ago. 

So what, according to author Olson, did the Clintons do that rates the "Last, Desperate Abuses of Power" subtitle? Well, to cite one abuse, the second chapter is called "Clemency for Cop Killers." For example, she writes, "Susan Rosenberg was a member of the Weather Underground, one of the most violent of the left-wing militias that disrupted the nation from the 1960s through the 1980s.... In October of 1981, Rosenberg's gang held up a Brink's truck in Nanuet, New York, killing guard Peter Paige and two police officers, Edward O'Grady and Waverly Brown, the first black officer on the local force. Rosenberg drove the getaway car and managed to escape." Rosenberg and her little friends also bombed the U.S. Capitol on November 7, 1983, causing no loss of life but a hell of a lot more damage than the "sedition" of two weeks ago did. Naturally Bill Clinton granted her clemency on his last day in office, and she now works for Black Lives Matter, along with other expressly Communist outfits. 

Anyone who still harbors some weird ideas that Bill and Hillary Clinton are good and decent people ought to read this book, although in the wake of #MeToo I wonder if anyone does, at least in Bill's case. But here's a description of the Clintons that could fit any well-known Washington lizard people with whom you may be familiar: 

The Clintons are members of the mandarin class -- public officials, accustomed to influence, respect, and privilege. People listen to them. People flatter them. And people do things for them, like feeding them, paying their bills, and giving them gifts. The Clintons may not even realize how much they have come to regard as an entitlement public financing and ubiquitous sycophancy. They can thus disparage the wealthy and rail against the "decade of greed" without any sense of shame at never, really having had to pay bills, meet a mortgage, or fix a roof. The perquisites and comforts of eight years in the White House further insulated them from the harsher economic realities of life. Bill and Hillary have every indication of believing that this form of life was their due; they were doing good things; therefore, they ought to be treated well -- very well. 

And people still wonder why so many in the nation backed Trump.

Although the book was published by Regnery, a conservative press, Barbara Olson was no far-right crusader. She had worked in the justice department as a prosecutor. Her husband Ted was solicitor general under George W. Bush and was a lawyer for him in Bush v. Gore, but has since represented clients on behalf of anchor babies and gay marriage. How Barbara Olson felt about these issues I don't know. She had previously written a book called Hell to Pay: The Unfolding Story of Hillary Rodham Clinton, so she seemed to have taken a particular disgust with the Clintons and their tactics. 

I would love to have heard Barbara Olson's commentary during the 2016 election, but that was not to be.

Maybe the worst thing Bill Clinton did as president was nothing -- about a certain Osama Bin Laden. Bin Laden gets only a brief mention in this book:

In the mind of Bill Clinton, political considerations outweigh even life-and-death matters of great concern to his own law-enforcement officials, not to mention the nation. As many in his own cabinet had repeatedly stated, terrorism, both foreign and domestic, was the nation's primary security anxiety. Since the end of the Cold War, Soviet aggression had been replaced by a number of particularly venomous threats, from Timothy McVeigh to Osama Bin Laden.

Barbara Olson perished on September 11, 2001, when the airplane to Los Angeles in which she was a passenger, American Airlines Flight 77, was forced to crash into the Pentagon by psychopathic terrorist flunkies working for Osama Bin Laden. 

Out of the clear, blue sky.

I'm glad my mother didn't live to see September 11, 2001. She would have suffered unbearably from anxiety. It might have killed her in a slower and more cruel way than the heart failure that took her a couple of years earlier.

I have a friend who was an EMT down there. He talks about going to Iraq later with the army, looking for a pound of flesh, killing an enemy, getting hurt by a suicide bomber, but he doesn't talk about September 11.

Another friend was a fireman uptown. He likes sharing bawdy stories about his days with the department, on trips to Vegas and other shenanigans, and will talk about his past job, finding dead children and pets in apartments gutted by fire sparked by crack pipes or stupidity. But he's never talked about September 11.

All I did that day was walk down from midtown to as close to the Financial District as the police would let me go, which at that point was Houston Street, so I could finally find my wife and get her out of Manhattan. We had no idea how we would do it, but we did it.

I think that's all I have to say about it, except -- all those Americans who promised they would never, ever forget? The 343 firemen and FD EMTs, the 23 officers of the NYPD, the 37 PATH and New Jersey police officers, and the nine others who ran in while everyone else was running out, and paid the ultimate price? America said it would never, ever forget.

It took less than 20 years.

The roof! The roof! The roof state is dire!

In theory, guys are coming tomorrow to work on the roof. 

There's a lot of ifs about this theory. It makes Descartes's defense of rationalism vs. empiricism look like third-grade homework. 

A guy once told me that we have a twenty-year roof. Guess how old the house is?

So I didn't hire that guy, who would have insisted on ripping out the whole works. Besides, there are a bunch of houses around us that are a year or so older, and I've only seen one of them get any serious roof work, and that one was surrounded by massive dead trees. 

Not one other house has needed a new roof. I doubt their original owners said, "Well, I'll pony up for the thirty-year roof. You never know."

Theoretically, the roof and gutters should be in lovely shape forty-eight hours from posting time. But there are those ifs:

IF the weather holds out. It's going to rain today, all day, off and on but mostly on. Tomorrow it will clear, but who knows? By then the roof may be too soggy to hold a nail. 

IF they can get the materials. No one has called me, but the materials shortage has been so bad and so weird that I just don't know. Thanks to the Chinese Death Virus, there has been a severe disruption in the supply chain. In fact, we were supposed to have the shutters replaced as part of the same job, but no one knows when they will be available.

IF they aren't missing workers due to the CDV or other illnesses or injuries -- say, falling off a roof.

IF the guys don't get drunk early in remembrance of September 11. That sounds unlikely, but I live just north of the city, and a lot of these men used to be card-carrying builders down there. 

IF they aren't delayed by another job that ran late, the contractor's great bane and/or excuse. 

If, if, if. Meanwhile I will spend today trying to push through a job of my own due on Monday, because I don't know how long the guys will need to do the job tomorrow and I don't know if I will be able to work with hammers above and dogs freaking out below. 

Wish me luck, and safety for the crew!

Who was that masked man?

A couple of observations from wearing a mask in public for the last couple of weeks:

1. I'm not sure I like the way my breath smells, and I've been breathing a lot of it. Maybe it's the fact that I've been digging into my supply of dust masks, which have their own slightly weird scent. And all the coffee.

2. I guess the dust masks are okay for the purpose and to comply with the order from Governor Corleone. They'll do to contain the droplets if I cough or sneeze or breathe at someone. A dust mask may not be the best but it's all I got.

3. I was in Home Depot yesterday and they were cleaned out of all types of masks. They did, however, have toilet paper, some kind of industrial brand sold by the roll. I was glad I didn't need it. It looked like the kind that would sand your butt flat. Maybe it's repurposed fine-grit sandpaper.

4. Everyone looks like a bandit, or like a dust storm is a-blowin' through town. Get the cows in, Pa! Dust storm a-blowin'!

5. These frigging things get hot. A friend of mine, a retired New York City fireman, says that the dust masks were so annoying that the guys working the World Trade Center site in 2001 would just throw them away. I asked if that's why so many of them have succumbed to lung diseases and mesothelioma. He didn't think it would have made that much difference in such a contaminated environment, but figured that we'd never know.

6. Spider-Man must be hot all the time with that full-head mask. Batman would be cooler (in every way) but non-compliant with Governor Corleone.

7. I too am non-compliant, in that while I am willing to wear the mask in stores, where it's not possible to stay six feet away from people at all times, I am not going to wear one while walking the dogs. This is the freaking suburbs, not the Avenue of the Americas, and I can easily stay away from other people.

8. They may try to enforce a mask rule, but they can't make me not wear my Bat Pants when I'm attending an online meeting!

9. Just kidding. I have some pride. I wear sweatpants.

Cord, cut.

So we did it -- something I advised a junior colleague against years ago. But yes, we have joined the legion of people without a landline telephone.

This feels weird.

The bracket and jack gape from the wall in silent accusation.

Since I was a kid, we had the phone on the kitchen wall and the phone in the master bedroom. When we moved, there was a phone on the kitchen wall and one in the master bedroom. When I had my first apartment. When I had my second apartment. When we bought the house. You get the idea.

I can remember the phone number we got when I was four years old. The phone numbers changed but the phone followed us everywhere.

And now? Phoneless.

Of course, we're not phoneless; we have cell phones. All our business calls are done through the cells; now, all our personal calls too. This is a change I wouldn't have expected. We got our cell phones back in the day because they were great for emergency use, especially when we were commuting to the city. It could be really tough to stay in contact in the pre-cell days, as anyone over thirty probably knows. My wife sold me on the idea -- "What if the car breaks down? What if you miss your train?" Memorably, the day we needed them the most -- the day those hell-bound bastards took down the towers -- cell phones weren't working at all.

Nevertheless, they have indeed been very handy at all other times.

I had told my young associate to get a landline because I felt cell phones were not reliable. You could run out of power. You could drop and break your phone! It could get lost or stolen! You could miss an important business call! But over the years I have found that these things didn't happen, or when they did could be rectified quickly. So we finally decided to eliminate one monthly bill and cut the cord.

I used the Christmas cards to alert everyone: "Don't call that old number! Ixnay on the olday umbernay! Just don't do it!"

Not that they were. Except for two aged relatives, everyone else who wanted me used e-mail or the cell phone. And the scammers. Oh, yes, they checked in on the landline once a day or so. And I have always suspected that we're one digit off from a kosher pizzeria, because the caller ID might have names like Shlomo Kritchenschmeir, and they'd just hang up when they got the voice mail.

I won't miss them. However, in addition to personal contacts, I made a list of all the businesses and utilities who had our home phone number that would have to be alerted to the change. Insurance companies, banks, utilities, clients, and so on. It was a long list, and I'm inching through it.

One that won't be alerted is the phone company. I thought when I called them (because you couldn't cancel service online) they would make the Big Pitch as to why you should stay. You know, offer to throw in free services, or cut the ever-increasing bill (over $100 monthly!), but no. Just, "Okay, sure, bye," and the phone went dead that same day. It was like breaking up with an angry girlfriend. I'm not good enough for you? Fine. Just fine. You're dead to me.

And that's fine.

Got the final bill yesterday. I owe $0.00. And that really rang my bell.

Fred's Book Club: Empire!

Welcome back to Fred's Book Club, home of the Humpback Writers feature, named so because it falls on Wednesday and we thought "Wednesday Writers" was too silly. We're morons, we know.

This week we bring you a bit of twentieth-century history, a 2001 book by Wall Street Journal editor and writer Mitchell Pacelle. 

Empire: A Tale of Obsession, Betrayal, and the Battle for an American Icon is about the famous and magnificent Empire State Building, as you might have guessed from the cover, but is mainly about the shenanigans of Japanese billionaire Hideki Yokoi and assorted other players vying for control of the landmark tower back in the 1990s. Among them are Yokoi's daughter, her French-Jewish husband Jean-Paul Renoir, Leona and Harry Helmlsley, real estate tycoon Peter L. Malkin, and a certain future president of the United States -- guess who!

After the real estate mania of the Go-Go Eighties had fallen away, Prudential Insurance, which owned the Empire State Building, was eager to unload it. It was and probably still is the most famous skyscraper in the world. But the prestige was not what it once was, having been overshadowed by so many other taller buildings, and its interior space was still mostly set up along typical use plans of the 1930s -- small offices connected on each floor by a common hall, rather than entire floors occupied by businesses surrounding a central elevator shaft. Occupancy was high in 1981, but as Pacelle writes, "the building's occupants -- 850 small businesses -- were hardly the sort coveted by glamour buildings. There were 302 menswear firms, 74 in the shoe business. There were second-tier lawyers, accountants, and travel agents. Most New Yorkers seldom even set foot in the place."

In 1991, the main problem Prudential faced was not the small tenants but the big renters; it was a dumb deal they had made 30 years earlier to rent the entire 102-story building to an investment company that controlled the actual leases to occupants. "Whoever bought the Empire State Building now would face prospect of wrangling with two of Manhattan's most difficult real estate magnates: Peter Malkin, an iron-willed Harvard-educated lawyer who was exacting to the point of annoyance, and Leona Helmsley, a notoriously volatile woman who was sowing terror through the billion-dollar real-estate empire assembled by her ailing husband, Harry. What Prudential was selling, in truth, was little more than sizzle: the right to boast, 'I own the Empire State Building.'"

And then the Japanese enter the picture.

We tend to remember Japanese real-estate deals in the United States as a purely eighties venture, but Mitsubishi Estate's foray into Rockefeller Center came in at the end of the decade, in 1989 (and they slumped right back out, selling in 1996). Billionaire Hideki Yokoi was a different sort. He had grown wealthy making uniforms for the Japanese army, and then after the war went into real estate, "snapping up treasures from Japan's royal family." He liked undervalued stocks. He collected European castles. He was a hardheaded businessman, but he was also a dreamer -- just the kind of man Prudential was looking for. 

The thing was, Yokoi's illegitimate daughter, Kiiko Nakahara, and her financier husband Renoir, also wanted in. Nakahara had spoken with Prudential initially as her father's representative, but while Dad was cooling his heels in prison back in Japan -- a fire at one of his hotels killed 32 people and he was found responsible -- she and her husband led a group of investors and made the deal to buy the building. Nakahara's group included a new partner -- one Mr. Donald Trump.

In all the hijinks going on over this building, it's weird to find Trump a relatively small player, and of course he never talked like one. When the deal was made his people shot out a press release that said "Trump Buys Empire State Building." He said, "It is my intent to take the actions necessary to restore the Empire State Building to its rightful position as a world class real estate asset." This led him into battle with his archenemy, the hated Leona Helmsley, which as we all know now is the kind of thing Trump lives for.

Trump and Renoir were of like minds in wanting to get rid of Helmsley and Malkin. They also intended to renovate the building's interior into a modern space, a job that Renoir estimated would cost hundreds of millions of dollars. Renoir thought Trump was just the man to make it work. "They would bring in classy tenants, like media companies. In the soaring tower, Renoir saw luxury condominiums, good restaurants, and a hotel. Renting a room in the Empire State Hotel, he felt, would be an unbeatable draw. And up top, of course, gold-class condos." Renoir had many such ideas, including exciting exterior elevators. None of them ever came to pass. 

In fact, by 1996 Yokoi was out of jail and back in the hunt. His daughter's actions were widely seen as betrayal, and he was not a man to take that lying down. Nor were Malkin and Helmsley going to let their lease be broken. So off came the gloves.

You'd think a story that involved enough lawyers to land an assault on Omaha Beach might make dry reading, but not here. Probably no story involving Trump could ever be dull, however one feels about the man. Pacelle is wisely dispassionate about all the subjects, letting the story tell itself as it ought to, and it's a fun read. 

Trump doesn't come off all that well -- the fact that no one remembers his boast of owning the building gives you an idea of how the deal worked out for him in the end -- but for all his bluster, he kept his wits and remained afloat while other owners sank. Nakahara and Renoir wound up in a mountain of legal trouble; Yokoi's battle became quixotic, as his life trailed toward its end; Malkin and Helmsley held an ironclad lease but turned on each other; and the tabloids of New York and Tokyo had a wonderful time. 

Pacelle notes that while Trump had the least on the line in the Empire State battle, he found it hardest to let go. With his love of prestige and his boundless optimism, Trump had a lot in common with Yokoi. "The building is magic," Pacelle quotes Trump as saying. "It's got a unique place in people's hearts."

Pacelle's story ends in the middle of 2001, so it takes place entirely in the pre-September 11 world. I got my copy from a friend at Wiley when the book was first published, in early 2002. I had hoped that Pacelle might write a new edition with the eventual fate of all the legal wrangling (largely resolved in 2002), and how the terrorist abomination on September 11 affected the real estate market, especially for skyscrapers. It would seem that Trump's election should interest a publisher in an updated edition as well. Sadly, neither Wiley nor the author have chosen to write one. But the book contains such an interesting story so well told that I endorse it all the same. 

Fred's Book Club: Throwback Thursday.

The new Joker movie has been getting lots of accolades, but I don't particularly want to see it. Some people are calling it subversive. I can only approve of subversion in a true dictatorship, and even then I can never approve of the idea of someone killing for fun and glory. To hell with that, to the hell it came from. We saw it 18 years ago today, in spades.

Which is why this week's Fred's Book Club focuses on one of my all-time favorite novels,  rare in that I've read it more than twice, and every time through I love it even more. I mean G. K. Chesterton's thrilling, baffling, and wonderful The Man Who Was Thursday, first published in 1908.

My wife finds Chesterton a tough read, even though he never wrote long (my Penguin edition comes in at 184 pages), but I know what she means. He's an English writer of very contemporary observations, meaning that his universal focus is tied to the commonplace, that is, England of 111 years ago. He assumes his audience will understand all his references, but of course we don't. Even a simple word like "suburb" is rather different to a modern American than it was to him, let alone his comments on particular neighborhoods in the city of London that have changed tremendously. Furthermore, he was a philosophical writer, which means that a lot of what he notices are interior to the main character's point of view, which sometimes requires work to understand. He either grabs you and convinces you to follow him or not. Either way, this novel is a ripping good yarn.

What's the story behind that fantastic title? Without giving too much away: Our hero, Gabriel Syme (who looks a lot like that portrait of Herbert Everett used for the above edition), is enticed by a devilish modern to join his cause -- that cause being anarchy, the terrorist mission of 1908. Their secret headquarters is packed to the rafters with bombs and guns, and they are eager to destroy everything and remake the world. The anarchists are led by seven men, each code-named for a day of the week, and the leader is Sunday. Syme decides he must infiltrate the group, becoming the man who is called Thursday.

And then it really becomes strange.

The book's subtitle is A Nightmare, and indeed it has many nightmarish aspects; time and space are distorted; villains wear strange disguises; weather changes in unnatural ways; getaways are made with balloons and elephants.

The edition I have features a brief introduction by Kingsley Amis, which surprised me when I bought it, Chesterton having been a fearless Catholic convert and Amis a notorious God-hater. And yet Amis loved the book, calling it "the most thrilling book I have ever read."

Syme is a terrific adventure hero, ready to face every kind of danger, but human all the same. At one point he realizes the only way to stop a plot is to deliver a mortal insult to the wicked Marquis, a superior swordsman who will be bound to duel him, and Syme just hopes to prevent his own death long enough to stop the plot. The duel begins, and:

... he found himself in the presence of the great fact of the fear of death, with its coarse and pitiless common sense. He felt like a man who had dreamed all night of falling over precipices, and had woke up on the morning when he was to be hanged. For as soon as he had seen the sunlight run down the channel of his foe’s foreshortened blade, and as soon as he had felt the two tongues of steel touch, vibrating like two living things, he knew that his enemy was a terrible fighter, and that probably his last hour had come.
     He felt a strange and vivid value in all the earth around him, in the grass under his feet; he felt the love of life in all living things. He could almost fancy that he heard the grass growing; he could almost fancy that even as he stood fresh flowers were springing up and breaking into blossom in the meadow—flowers blood red and burning gold and blue, fulfilling the whole pageant of the spring. And whenever his eyes strayed for a flash from the calm, staring, hypnotic eyes of the Marquis, they saw the little tuft of almond tree against the sky-line. He had the feeling that if by some miracle he escaped he would be ready to sit for ever before that almond tree, desiring nothing else in the world.

You can read the book for free at this link, thanks to the noble volunteers of Project Gutenberg. Or you can get the Penguin edition. I like the one I have, with the Amis introduction and an article excerpt at the back from Chesterton about the novel, but I'm not too sure about the current Penguin edition. It has an introduction by author Matt Beaumont, who seems to be another bad fit for the project. He is also credited with "editing" the book. I should hate to see what a modern author would do to "edit" a book from 1908, and I fear the worst.

Living with the shadow of Islamic terrorism still stalking the world 18 years after 9/11, and with masked idiots running with impunity on our streets as some sort of fascist anti-fascists (a neat trick if you can pull it off), not to mention a popular culture that loves killers and bombers, we probably need a book like The Man Who Was Thursday now as much as ever. It's a crazy, wild, even hallucinogenic book, but in classic Chestertonian paradox, its nightmarish insanity brings us a stiff dose of clarity.

📜📜📜

P.S.: I suppose one possible benefit of the Joker movie is that the black-masked know-nothings who are disturbing the peace might be inspired to start dressing like clowns, an outfit that would be far closer to their true natures.

The perfect sign.

I've long thought that the perfect symbol for something momentous has got to be the cross, which Christians think is the perfect sign of the most momentous sacrifice in history. It works out so well that it's easy to see God's hand in it.

1) It's simple.

A small child can make a cross. It's even easier to draw than the ichthus, the fish symbol composed of two arcs, because you have to make curved lines -- straight lines are easier to draw. The cross is simpler than any sign of a supernatural faith -- the Star of David, the pentacle, the star and crescent, and surely every motif associated with Hinduism. It's simpler than secular signs like the hammer and sickle. It's even simpler than the Bass Ale triangle. Simplicity helps a message spread.

2) Its essence and scope are in the design.

It's not hard to understand the principles of the public torture and murder method known as crucifixion; once we do, we see it in those simple lines. It is also the post and beam that holds up the roof to shield us, the sail to move us. The cross also means a crossroads, a change of direction, and believers find that the cross is the ultimate change of direction for humanity. The cross is sturdy, as faith must be. In other words, the sign expresses so many things within its two lines, many that require no prior knowledge of crucifixion. G. K. Chesterton has a lot to say on this topic in his novel The Ball and the Cross. 

3) It speaks history.

The public nature of the cross is vital to the story; Jesus's death was a public event, witnessed by many. He did not go sneaking off somewhere before he died. You can't go sneaking off the cross; even if you could get off, the Romans would stick you right back up there. It is crucial (if you will) that we know that Jesus died, because when He was seen later, that was pretty significant. It goes to the faith as being tied to a definite event that happened in a definite time and place, unlike the legends of gods in other cultures. For all its cruelty, though, the cross leaves a body that is recognizable and not in pieces; not that God cannot reassemble pieces, but it would have just made Jesus seem more like a ghost on His return than the One who had defeated death. (As it was, He had to prove to the Apostles twice that He was not a ghost.)

The cross teaches us about cultures that used (and sometimes still use) the evil of crucifixion, meant to be a shameful as well as cruel means of death; in it we also remember the triumph of the faith. The cross was not used commonly as a Christian symbol until after Constantine. After that, it was seen on all the structures of Christianity through the march of the centuries. 

4) It works better than any other sacrificial sign you can think of.

Think of saints who were tortured to death or otherwise murdered in the course of God's work. Do we symbolize St. Paul or St. John the Baptist with the headman's ax? The answer is not usually. These would not put one immediately in mind of the victim. You might think St. Paul was a Viking if we used the ax. St. Lawrence, famously grilled to death, is often symbolized by the gridiron, but that's not a device normally associated with torture as the cross is. The Catherine Wheel is the closest sacrificial sign I can think of, and St. Catherine of Alexandria did not die on it; the spiked wheel shattered at her touch.

5) It works better than any other simple sign you can think of.

Think of other very simple things to draw -- line, square, circle, scribble. Do any of these suggest a means of fatal torture, let alone a high public one, let alone one that tells the story of God's sacrifice to reconcile the world to Himself?

6) It is easily embellished for related uses.

Catholics display the cross as a crucifix, with the body of the Victim on it. Most Protestants just leave the cross unadorned. Some saints have different crosses; the upside-down cross is a sign of evil in Hollywood and among other ignoramuses, but in truth it is St. Peter's cross, as tradition says Peter did not think himself worthy to be crucified in the same way as Jesus. St. George, St. Andrew, St. Brigid and others have variations on the cross. St. Florian's is well known as a symbol of fire departments. At its heart, it remains the cross.

7) It spells agony, and holiness.

And sometimes it appears as such in the most appropriate times.

Here we are again.

Patriot Day, and it's hard to believe it's been 17 years. A child born on 9/11/01 is almost an adult. Everyone in high school and most people in college have no memories of the actual day.

But I do.

Sometimes I feel like a guy who was hanging out in Kepuhi Beach while the Japanese were bombing Pearl Harbor -- in Hawaii, but not there. I was in Manhattan, but in Midtown. I never got farther south than Canal Street that day. I didn't go downtown to have a look until October. I'll never forget the walled-up blocks around the area, the gray dust that covered everything. I went to the Raccoon Lodge for a drink afterward. It was still hard to believe.

So many Americans have died in the War on Terror -- Wikipedia says just over ten thousand, but we've dealt our enemies death an order of magnitude beyond that. Maybe more. Hard to tell; they lie, and figures are wildly disparate. I wish the number of American deaths had been 0 in this, America's longest shooting war, but if we're going to play numbers games, the Union lost almost a third of that number just at Gettysburg. George W. Bush warned us that this fight was going to take decades, and he wasn't kidding. Norman Podhoretz called it World War IV, World War III being the Cold War (and as he pointed out, that war against Communism did have some hot battles -- Vietnam, Korea, Grenada, etc.). Under his reckoning, World War III lasted more than 40 years, so the War on Terror has a ways to go to tie that.

So much has changed since that day in our culture, in Europe, in Asia, all over. I have to say I think our country's gotten dumber; as our phones got smarter, we got stupider. Certainly ruder, probably crazier. A lot of people nowadays like to play-act at being brave, with what P.J. O'Rourke called "that happy sense of purpose people have when they are standing up for a principle they haven't really been knocked down for yet." Our ruling class has gotten more arrogant, more threatening, but not to those useful nitwits. People who were the salt of the earth in 2001 are suddenly the enemy of all that is good and right. Social media has exploded, and is literally taking casualties. Our media is just as bad as it ever was, so nothing new there. Maybe broker. Dumber. (They "literally know nothing.")

I suppose all of this would have happened anyway, the seeds of our creeping asininity having been planted long ago. Did the war accelerate it, or wake people up who might reverse it? I don't know.

I pray a lot for this country, that its sick culture become well, that it may be worthy of the blood sacrifice of those who fight to defend it. There's just so very little I can do beyond that. Joseph Bottum wrote it that long ago:

We meet our griefs again when work is through.
We do with words what little words can do.

Raise a glass.

I was very surprised to see Original New York Seltzer back in the stores here. It looked just the way I remember seeing it when I was a youth, thirty years ago, in the little glass bottles. It's a fine family of beverages. The only complaints with Original New York Seltzer are, it's not original, it's not from New York, and it isn't seltzer. 

Aside from that it's great. 

Let's first look at what it isn't. It's not original in any New York seltzery way I can determine. The name would seem to indicate that the soda comes from someplace that made seltzer back in the days of lunch counters and bicarb and bottomless coffee cups on every block in Manhattan, but it's no such thing. It's not from New York, even; the company is from California, where it originated in 1981. It folded in the 1990s, and is now being revived, again in California. And that's not a bad thing, it just has nothing to do with New York. 

Nor is it seltzer, in the sense of seltzer as a carbonated water to which no other ingredients have been added. ONYS (as they style it) does not make a "2 cents plain," although they have introduced cans of sparkling water. One of them is technically seltzer, but even that is billed as "sparkling water" on the can. Above you see the cream soda I bought -- calling that seltzer is like calling Coke or Pepsi seltzer. 

So it isn't anything like what the company says it is. What it is, however, is a really good soda. It's got sugar -- none of their classic line comes as sugar-free, at least per the Web site -- but they're cute little 10-oz. bottles, sold in 4-packs. It's an occasional treat, then. Where else do you find blueberry soda? And the sodas were always clear, which was a thing back in the day, at least until Tab Clear killed Crystal Pepsi. 

One other thing I wanted to point out, though. I suspected that there'd been a change to the design of the original label, which has always shown a fanciful version of the Manhattan skyline, as drawn by someone who'd never seen the real thing. Except for ol' Lady Liberty, the structures are not exact depictions; there's a sort of Woolworth Building and a kinda Citicorp. But online I found the original Original cans, and you can see another structure, or rather a pair of them, that would have represented something on the skyline in 1988 but not in 2018. 

All the way on the left.

Yep. Always something there to remind me.