See your dogs and raise you

Courtesy of my friend Kelley, some cats (and hyenas, which are canus-like, but not dogs, according to Wikipedia: "Although hyenas bear some physical resemblance to canids, they make up a separate biological family that is most closely related to Herpestidae, the family of mongooses and meerkats") at play with their favorite park ranger in Africa:
Rico says that his cats will not play in the water with him like that, however...

Okay, dogs are smarter than cats

Courtesy of my friend Kelley, this exposition of how smart dogs can be when they're desperate:

Stray dogs in Moscow are commuting to and from the city centre on underground trains in search of food scraps. The clever canines board the subway each morning. After a hard day of scavenging and begging on the streets, they hop back on the train and return to the suburbs, where they spend the night.
Experts studying the dogs say they even work together to make sure they get off at the right stop after learning to judge the length of time they need to spend on the train. 
The dogs choose the quietest carriages at the front and back of the train. They have also developed tactics to hustle humans into giving them more food on the streets of Moscow. 
Scientists believe the phenomenon began after the Soviet Union collapsed in the 1990s when Russia 's new capitalists moved industrial complexes from the city centre to the suburbs. According to Dr. Andrei Poiarkov, of the Moscow Ecology and Evolution Institute, “These complexes were used by homeless dogs as shelters, so the dogs had to move together with their houses. Because the best scavenging for food is in the city centre, the dogs had to learn how to travel on the subway to get to the centre in the morning, then back home in the evening, just like people.” Dr. Poiarkov told how the dogs like to play during their daily commute: “They jump on the train seconds before the doors shut, risking their tails getting jammed. They do it for fun. And sometimes they fall asleep and get off at the wrong stop.” The dogs have learned to use traffic lights to cross the road safely, said Dr. Poiarkov.
And they use cunning tactics to obtain tasty morsels of shawarma, a kebab-like snack popular in Moscow. They sneak up behind people eating shawarmas, then bark loudly to shock them into dropping their food. With children, the dogs play cute by putting their heads on youngsters' knees and staring pleadingly into their eyes to win sympathy and scraps. Dr. Poiarkov added: "Dogs are surprisingly good psychologists."
The Moscow mutts are not the first animals to use public transport. In 2006, a Jack Russell in Dunnington, North Yorkshire in England, began taking the bus to his local pub in search of sausages. And two years ago, passengers in Wolverhampton, England, were stunned when a cat called Macavity started catching the 331 bus to a fish and chip shop.

It's tomorrow, in case you forgot

Courtesy of my friend Bill Austin, this little reminder of why, eight years later, we're still killing people in Afghanistan and Iraq:

Rico says it's chilling to watch this; after eight years, the details get blurry, and it's a good reminder that there are people who don't like us (a lot) in the world...

Civil War for the day

The 26th U.S. Colored Volunteer Infantry on parade at Camp William Penn in Pennsylvania in 1865

Can't fix stupid

Courtesy of my friend Bill Calloway, this classic:

I wish someone would invent something to keep the sun out of my eyes...

More Asian history, this one edible

Samantha Storey has an article in The New York Times about bento boxes (a Rico favorite):

Armed with kittens of molded rice and sweet potato flowers, Sheri Chen took aim at her 2-year-old daughter, Lucy— a picky eater. “I have to make her food look like something she recognizes,” said Ms. Chen, 42, a stay-at-home mother in San Leandro, California. “If her boiled egg is shaped like a bunny and it is holding a baby carrot, she’ll eat it.” With cookie cutters Ms. Chen makes her daughter star-shaped vegetables; and with decorative skewers, a plastic top hat and pieces of nori (dried seaweed), cherry tomatoes become smiley faced, mustachioed creatures. Her ruse includes assembling each meal in her version of a bento box, a Japanese lunch box, decorated with cute cartoon characters.
It might seem like silly kids’ stuff, but that sense of fun has helped make bento boxes— obento as the Japanese call them— increasingly popular with grownups in the United States, too.
For dieters, they are an eye-popping form of portion control. Artistic preparation of ingredients can act as a pleasant distraction for health-conscious parents. For others, bentos are a way to make lunch pretty or indulge their love of things Japanese.
In Japan, compact, compartmented bento boxes are traditionally filled with rice, pickled vegetables, and fish or meat. Japanese mothers take pride in their obentos and hope they outshine those of other mothers, said the Japanese cookbook author Hiroko Shimbo. “Obento making is a kind of cult,” she said.
It’s approaching cult status in the United States. On Saturday in Central Park, as part of its Crossing the Line festival, the French Institute Alliance Française will be handing out bento boxes with components made by some top French and American chef — including Inaki Aizpitarte, Pascal Barbot, Alexandre Gauthier, Michel Bras, David Chang, and Wylie Dufresne.
On a more plebian level, Amazon.com said sales of the boxes and accessories like egg molds, rice shapers, and plastic skewers shaped like animals or flowers have been growing.
But toothache-inducing cuteness is not the only appeal.
Jordan Smith, 20, a junior majoring in East Asian studies and political science at Yale University, started making bento boxes in high school in Port Orange, Florida. “I was on the football team,” Mr. Smith said, “so I tried to have a balanced diet and eat healthy as much as possible.” He would group protein, rice, and vegetables. “I would usually use snap peas, tomatoes, carrots; basically things that were relatively colorful and not too bland tasting.” He endured a bit of ridicule— “like, look at that white person pretending to be Japanese”— but that didn’t stop him. “Japanese culture here is getting more popular by the day,” he said. He’s still making bento boxes, but now they’re mainly a way to save money by making his own lunch.
Debra Littlejohn, 52, a quality-assurance engineer from Edmonds, Washington, estimated that she and her husband were spending $400 a month buying lunch out every day. So, in June, she started packing her dinner leftovers into bento boxes. “If I had to price out all my ingredients,” Ms. Littlejohn said, “each box would probably cost $2.” She likes to find artistic ways to present the food. One of her recent boxes included a multihued medley of halved figs, curried eggplant, green leaf lettuce, and sliced purple carrots. “I don’t have time to break out the art supplies in my drawer,” Ms. Littlejohn said. “Every evening when I pack our lunches, I get this creative outlet. And if I don’t do something artistic, I might implode.”
Creativity matters as much as taste and nutrition to Jason Miller, a graduate student in anthropology at the University of South Florida. “It doesn’t hurt to add a funny element as well,” Mr. Miller, 28, said. He recently made onigiri, triangles of sticky rice with various fillings. “Instead of leaving them plain, I cut nori— seaweed— in strips and made the onigiri into sumo wrestlers.”
Artistry is what differentiates a bento box from a plastic container of leftovers, said Makiko Itoh, 46, who lives outside Zurich and runs the blog justbento.com, filled with how-to’s, recipes and discussion forums. “Food presented attractively looks more appetizing, since we eat with our eyes as much as our taste buds and stomachs,” said Ms. Itoh, who was born in Japan but lived for a while in New York. “That’s emphasized more in Japanese cuisine and culture perhaps than in other cuisines.” She said bento often reflect the Japanese belief that each meal should have five colors— a version of the food pyramid. It helps people remember to vary their food, especially since the most colorful foods are usually fruits and vegetables. “You can apply that to any lunch combination,” she said. “For example, sliced bread (let’s call that white, even if you use whole wheat) with peanut butter or cold cuts (brown), a green salad (green) with red peppers and cherry tomatoes (red) and a banana (yellow).” A balance of flavors, textures and cooking methods also matters, she said.
Sheri Lindquist saw bento as a healthy choice for her five sons and her husband after he had triple-bypass surgery. “I don’t make them bento lunches all the time,” said Ms. Lindquist, 48, who lives in Denair, California. “But if there is something especially yucky or healthy or new I do try to present it in a more fun format.” Like breaded spinach balls with carrot ears and faces. Acquiring accessories like plastic giraffe picks or star-shaped nori punches, however, proved challenging for Ms. Lindquist, as most of the boxes and tools were sold only in Japan. So in March 2008 she began iloveobento, an online bento box store.
Another bento blogger, Jennifer McCann, began veganlunchbox on her son’s first day of school in 2005. She made him sushi for lunch in a bento box from laptoplunches, which sells Americanized bento boxes with lidded compartments for items like yogurt or dips like ketchup. She took a picture of it and posted it. “I thought it might give a lot of vegan moms inspiration for other lunches besides PB&J, “ said Ms. McCann, 38, who lives in Kennewick, Washington. Within months she was getting thousands of page views a day of the boxes she was making, she said. She’s since published Vegan Lunch Box (Da Capo Press, 2008) and Vegan Lunch Box Around the World (Da Capo, 2009), which includes recipes for a Japanese tiger bento, Caribbean plantain wraps, and Indonesian tempeh. Her son, James, now eleven, has outgrown the boxes and no longer takes the bento to school. “He wants his lunch to be totally normal now, like everyone else,” she said.
Making lunches look cute for children is an art called kyaraben in Japan. But some bento-ists think cute takes too much time.
Deborah Hamilton, who writes the blog lunchinabox, makes boxes for her husband and four-year-old son of, for instance, tamales, broccoli florets, cherry tomatoes, and a strawberry. “You can make these as intricate or fancy as you like,” she said, “or you can make them plain and simple. You don’t have to get all kinds of Martha with it. My regular bento takes ten to fifteen minutes, maximum.”
Ms. Itoh, the author of justbento, said the boxes, about the size of a fat turkey sandwich, let her control her portions and helped her lose thirty pounds. “Generally speaking, for a tightly packed Japanese-style bento, the number of milliliters that a box can hold corresponds roughly to the number of calories it holds,” she wrote on her blog.
Crystal Watanabe, an administrative assistant in Honolulu, used bento portion control when she began a Weight Watchers program in 2007. She lost 22 pounds and wrote about her experience on her blog, Adventures in Bentomaking. The blog got her involved in the bento community on the photo-sharing site Flickr. “We post pictures and people take ideas from each other,” Ms. Watanabe said. “It’s really a very creative community and fun. Everyone is so supportive.”
Ms. Chen, in San Leandro, one of the more prolific contributors to the photo pools, can be a little wilder when making bento for Lucy’s brother, Koa, 6, who, unlike his sister, is not finicky. “He even eats the lettuce I put in his boxes as garnish,” she said. A recent lunch box for him included teriyaki salmon with peapods, two kinds of sweet potato, and golden beet “maple leaves”. On the side: skewered purple carrot discs and a tomato made to look like a frog man. For dessert: a strawberry, champagne grapes, blackberries, and a lichi. “I am not a gourmet cook,” Ms. Chen said, “but when you put anything in a bento box it looks nice.”

History for the day

On 9 September 1976, Communist Chinese leader Mao Tse-tung died in Beijing at age 82.

Bit by the leopard

Rico says that, according to his expert friend Ivan, not only won't Snow Leopard run on his G5, he can't even get a board upgrade to change to the Intel processors that would work with it.
Screwed, blued, and tattoo'd. And out thirty bucks, unless he can find someone who wants it. (Which, thanks to his friend Bill, he did.)
So much for Apple support; you'd think they'd ask for a serial number or something before they let you order the damn thing...

The songs in Rico's head

Rico says he went to sleep with yet another obscure song running in his head:

I don't care if it rains or freezes
'Long as I got my plastic Jesus
Riding on the dashboard of my car

Plastic Jesus by George Cromarty and Ed Rush

Civil War for the day

Great stuff, if it works

David Pogue has an article in The New York Times in which, for once, someone acknowledges Apple's brilliance:

Buying software is not like buying a vase or a comb or a lawnmower where you pay, you take it home, and the transaction is complete. No, buying software is more like joining a club with annual dues. Every year, there’s a new version, and if you don’t upgrade, you feel like a behind-the-curve loser.
There’s a time bomb ticking in that business model, however. To keep you upgrading, the software company has to pile on more features each time. Sooner or later, you wind up with a huge, sloshing, incoherent mess of a program; a pile of spaghetti code that doesn’t run well and makes nobody happy. You’re in even worse shape if that bloatware is your operating system— the software you run all day. Just ask anyone with Windows Vista.
This year, though, Apple and Microsoft both realized that the pile-on-features model is unsustainable. Both are releasing new versions of their operating systems that are unapologetically billed as cleaned-up, slimmed-down versions of what came before. Microsoft’s, called Windows 7, comes out in October. Apple’s, called Mac OS X 10.6 Snow Leopard, arrives on Friday, a month earlier than announced. (Apple to Microsoft: “Surprise!”)
Apple’s release strategy is highly unorthodox: “Leopard, aka Mac OS X 10.5, was already a great OS-virus-free, nag-free, and not copy-protected. So instead of adding features for their own sake, let’s just make what we’ve got smaller, faster, and more refined.”
What? No new features? That’s not how the industry works! Doesn’t Apple know anything?
And then there’s the price of Snow Leopard: $30.
Have they lost their minds? Operating-system upgrades always cost a hundred-something dollars! ($30 is the price if you already have Leopard. If not, the price is $170 for a Mac Box Set that also includes two suites of Apple software: iLife (iPhoto, iMovie, iDVD, iWeb and the GarageBand music studio), and iWork (the Numbers spreadsheet, Pages word processor and Keynote presentation software).
In any case, Snow Leopard truly is an optimized version of Leopard. It starts up faster (72 seconds on a MacBook Air, versus 100 seconds in Leopard). It opens programs faster (Web browser, three seconds; calendar, five seconds; iTunes, seven seconds), and the second time you open the same program, the time is halved.
“Optimized” doesn’t just mean faster; it also means smaller. Incredibly, Snow Leopard is only half the size of its predecessor; following the speedy installation (fifteen minutes), you wind up with seven gigabytes more free space on your hard drive. That, ladies and gents, is a first. Unfortunately, Snow Leopard runs only on Macs with Intel chips— that is, Macs sold since 2006. If you have an older Mac, you’re stuck with Leopard forever. (Techie note: Popular conception has it that the space savings comes from removing all the code required by those earlier chips. But that’s not true, according to Apple. Yes, that code is gone, but new 64-bit code, described below, easily replaces it. No, Apple says that the savings comes from “tightening up the screws,” compressing chunks of the system software and eliminating a huge stash of printer drivers. Now the system downloads printer drivers as needed, on demand.)
As it turns out, Apple programmers could not leave well enough alone. They disobeyed the original “no new features” mantra. As they pored through all the bits of Mac OS X, they kept stopping and fixing little things that had always bugged them, or coming up with neat little ways to make things better. So:
The Mac now adjusts its own clock when you travel, just like a cellphone. The menu bar can now show the date, not just the day of the week. The menu of nearby wireless hot spots now shows the signal strength for each. When you’re running Windows on your Mac, you can now open the files on the Macintosh “side” without having to restart. Icons can now be 512 pixels (several inches) square, turning any desktop window into a light table for photos.
There’s now a Put Back command in the Trash, just as in Windows’ Recycle Bin. You can page through a PDF document or watch a movie right on a file’s icon. When you click a folder icon on the Dock, you can scroll through the pop-up window of its contents, turning a worthless feature into a useful one. Buggy plug-ins (Flash and so on) no longer crash the Safari Web browser; you just get an empty rectangle where they would have appeared. There’s an impressive trove of tools for blind Mac users, including one that turns a Mac laptop’s trackpad into a touchable map of the screen; the Mac speaks each onscreen element as you touch it.
There are some bigger-ticket items, too. Movies open up into a gorgeous, frameless playback window with built-in trim handles and a “Send to YouTube” command built right in. You can now record your screen activity as a movie— fantastic for tutorials. The old Services feature has been reborn as powerful commands that appear only when relevant— and you can modify, make up, or assign keystrokes to them.
Once a system administrator provides setup details, your company’s Microsoft Exchange address book, email, and calendar can show up in the Mac’s own address book, email, and calendar programs, right alongside your own personal information. That’s irony for you: the Mac now has Exchange compatibility built in, but Windows itself does not.
There are hundreds more little tweaks. In all, Apple says that more than ninety percent of Leopard’s 1,000 software chunks were revised or polished. Many are listed on Apple's site, but I kept finding more undocumented surprises until the deadline for this column. Just little stuff. Like: When you rename an icon on an alphabetically sorted desktop, it visibly slides into its new alphabetic position so you can see where it went.
Despite all of this, the haters online deride Snow Leopard as a “service pack”— nothing more than a bug-fix/security-patch update like the ones Microsoft periodically releases for Windows. That’s a pretty uninformed wisecrack. Especially because the biggest changes in Snow Leopard are under the hood, completely invisible, but responsible for some big speed and stability advances.
A big one: Mac OS X and most of its included programs (the desktop, Web browser, calendar and so on) are 64-bit software, a geeky term that, for now, pretty much means “faster”. Other new underlying technologies, called OpenCL and Grand Central Dispatch, are features that software companies can exploit for even greater speed in their new or rewritten programs.
That Snow Leopard’s looks haven’t changed at all, in other words, betrays the enormous changes under its pretty skin. Unfortunately, that fact also explains the number of non-Apple programs that “break” after the installation.
I experienced frustrating glitches in various programs, including Microsoft Word, Flip4Mac, Photoshop CS3, CyberDuck, and TextExpander, an abbreviation expander. (Interestingly, Snow Leopard offers its own typing-expander feature, but it works primarily in Apple programs, like TextEdit, Mail, Safari, and iChat.) The compatibility list at snowleopard.wikidot.com lists other programs that may have trouble.
Most of these hiccups will go away when software companies update their wares (although Adobe says, “Just upgrade to Photoshop CS4”). Let’s hope that Apple hurries up with its inevitable 10.6.0.1 update, too, to address the occasional Safari crash and cosmetic glitch I experienced, too.
Otherwise, if you’re already running Leopard, paying the $30 for Snow Leopard is a no-brainer. You’ll feel the leap forward in speed polish, and you’ll keep experiencing those “oh, that’s nice” moments for weeks to come. If you’re running something earlier, the decision isn’t as clear cut; you’ll have to pay $170 and get Snow Leopard with Apple’s creative-software suites— whether you want them or not. Either way, the big story here isn’t really Snow Leopard. It’s the radical concept of a software update that’s smaller, faster, and better— instead of bigger, slower, and more bloated. May the rest of the industry take the hint.

Rico says he fears his Mac may predate the Intel chips; arrgghh....

Too young? Probably

Verlyn Klinkenborg has an article in The New York Times about a young girl flirting with trouble:

Early last year, the boat I was on, a 47-foot yawl, pulled alongside a red-hulled vessel of similar length not far from the mouth of a fjord in Chilean Patagonia. The lifelines around the deck of that boat had been reinforced with netting because the crew— apart from the Austrian captain, his Dutch wife and her sister— consisted of two yellow Labs and two very young children. The mother of those children had herself grown up on a sailboat. It was like pulling alongside a scene from Little Ship on the Prairie.
I thought of that brief Chilean encounter when I read about Laura Dekker, the thirteen-year-old Dutch girl who wants to sail alone around the world. She was born in New Zealand when her parents were circumnavigating, and she has become a sailor in her own right, sailing single-handed in Holland and in the waters off Friesland. Her parents are now divorced, and her father reluctantly backs the idea of her solo circumnavigation, while her mother has made no public comment.
Recently, Laura sailed solo on the 26-foot Guppy to Britain, where she was detained and placed in a children’s home. Her father went there to retrieve her, but allowed her to sail home alone instead.
The Dutch authorities were not amused. They have taken Laura into temporary guardianship until a child psychologist can assess her ability to withstand the rigors of a solo sea voyage that could last as long as two years. On 26 October, she will learn whether she can weigh anchor for parts unknown.
This isn’t pure Huck Finn on Laura’s part. Huck wasn’t trying to be the youngest person to float down the Mississippi. In fact, Laura hopes to beat the record set by Mike Perham, the British seventeen-year-old who, on 27 August, finished a nine-month circuit of the globe in a fifty-foot racing yacht. He broke the previous age record by two months. But there’s enough Huck Finn in Laura’s ambitions to make this a real tangle, just the right mixture of nautical adventure, independent youth, state paternalism, and laissez-faire parenting to get everyone upset.
A circumnavigation means knowingly taking your life in your hands, which is something the social contract doesn’t ordinarily let parents allow their thirteen-year-olds to do. Nor does it let parents purposely raise social isolates. Would a thirteen-year-old be allowed to live alone in a tiny flat in Utrecht? Why then in a very small boat— and the Guppy is a very small boat— on the high seas?
Laura would be at sea, utterly and sometimes abjectly solitary, at just the time in her life when most kids find their social world reknitting itself around them. Some people— looking back on their own adolescence— are likely to wish they could have spent those years alone at sea. Laura says she knows exactly what she’s getting into, and the question, finally, is whether we believe her.
The telling contrast isn’t with thirteen-year-olds who want to stay home. It’s with Mr. Perham, who crossed the Atlantic solo when he was only slightly older than Laura. His feat embodies the modern ideal of adventure. His boat was well-sponsored, and he had the vocal support of his family. Above all, there was never a sense that he was fleeing anything. He was sailing within the social contract, fund-raising for two charities every mile along the way.
Laura Dekker’s desire, as she told Dutch television, is “to live freely.” Knowing adults everywhere will hear her youth in that phrase, and they will recall that the usual response to adolescents who want to live freely is, “grow up”. She is, in fact, proposing to grow up at sea, to face without relief the almost unrelenting challenge of the ocean. And she’s also proposing to do it in the shortest rounding she can, in order to take the Guinness record away from Mr. Perham.
It may well be that, for Laura, a solo circumnavigation is the shortest way home. She may, in her twenties, come to inhabit the sort of floating household that my friends and I came upon in Chile, the very kind she was born into. So far, she has done an excellent job of calling her father’s bluff. If, in the end, the Dutch court allows her to set sail aboard the Guppy, the only bluff she will have to call is her own.

Rico says even he doesn't think this is a good idea, especially for a thirteen-year-old girl... (And, no, it's not sexism. Even pirates will often decline to rape a thirteen-year-old boy. And, being Dutch, they wouldn't think of providing her with a gun, of course...)

Civil War for the day

Major General William S. Rosecrans, USA

History for the day

On 8 September 1974, President Gerald Ford granted an unconditional pardon to former President Richard Milhouse Nixon.

Moving too fast

Rico says that, yes, the original box actually says 'KITES', but when you're walking fast, sometimes you misread things... (Also, the red symbol is vaguely swastika-like, which probably contributed to the problem.)

Thirty six thousand

Missed the round number, yet again.

It is good to be the prince

Rico says this is the view from my father's house, overlooking La Jolla, California. Yes, a pricey neighborhood...

Self-awareness is a bitch

Rico says he's been looking carefully at himself of late, and realizes that he's become a drunken two-year-old.
Why that particular description? Well, the drunkenness would explain his inability to consistently walk in a straight line (though using a cane helps) and, according to the National Network for Child Care website:

two-year-olds like to be independent. Favorite words are Mine! and No! and I do it! Emotions take on a roller coaster-like quality, as two-year-olds can go from excitement to anger to laughter within a few moments. A great deal of time is spent exploring, pushing, pulling, filling, dumping, and touching.
Two-year-olds are surer of themselves and of what they can do as they grow. Their bodies stretch out, and most will lose the potbellied look during this third year of life. Their appetites lessen, and they may be particular about food. They are still growing fairly rapidly.
Toddlers are very attached to their caregivers. They may try out new ideas and explore their surroundings but will still stay close, as they need a base of support and trust. Two-year-olds are usually interested in other children. However, social interest and physical abilities sometimes collide, as a hug becomes a tackle and a gentle pat becomes a whack. They will need to be taught how to express affection appropriately.

Rico says, for better or worse, it sounds just like him...

But Rico belatedly realized that he should add a touch of Alzheimer's, to explain his short-term memory loss...

Spam in Japanese is still spam

チェッカー has left a new comment on your post "Civil War for the day":
SM度チェッカーで隠された性癖をチェック！外見では分からない男女のSM指数をチェックして相性のいい相手を見つけ、SMプレイしてみよう！合コンや飲み会で盛り上がること間違いなしのおもしろツールをみんなとやってみよう

Rico says this guy's spam is now irritating, even if Rico can't read it...

Ancient history for the day

Courtesy of my friend Bill Champ, this (and other) now-defunct Claris products (click the post title to see more). Rico says he had a bunch of good years at Claris, and almost misses it. (He certainly misses the people; any Claris folk out there, please email Rico your data.)

Civil War for the day

General Truman Seymour, USA

Fixing their bad English, without apology

Rico says that he's prone to rewriting what passes for English in the articles he quotes, and absolutely insists on putting in serial commas.
Why?
Well, Rani Cochran, with whom Rico worked at Apple years back, explained it with a quote from a book dedication that needed one:

I'd like to thank my parents, Ayn Rand and God.

It'd make a lot more sense with another comma, wouldn't it?

Digging up the past

Elisabeth Bumiller has an article in The New York Times about digging for WW2 dead in Germany:

At the start of the Battle of the Bulge in December of 1944, an American bomber was shot down by German fighter planes and sent into a fiery, nose-first crash in a cow pasture. The pilot’s body was never found. Almost 65 years later, on a recent late summer day, a ten-member Defense Department team was in the same pasture, searching through mounds of excavated mud for a trace of the airman. The group had already unearthed shreds of a parachute and part of a leather glove when one of the team’s forensic anthropologists, Allysha Powanda Winburn, found a crucial clue to the mystery: a small piece of what she called “possible osseous remains”, or potential human bone.
The real mystery, at least to the 77-year-old farmer who witnessed the crash at the age of thirteen, Hermann Reuter, was the group of Americans who had turned up in the pasture near his home in search of the pilot. “Why after such a long time?” he asked, perplexed.
As nearly 200,000 United States troops fight in Iraq and Afghanistan, a little-known unit is engaged in the herculean and at times quixotic task of trying to account for more than 84,000 Americans still missing from the nation’s previous wars. Most of the effort has focused on those lost in Vietnam, but under pressure from families, the military has paid new attention in the past two years to a vast majority of the missing— some 74,000— still unaccounted for in Europe and the Pacific during World War Two.
The effort is a powerful part of the military culture to “bring everyone home,” no matter how elusive the goal. “We maximize the resources we have, both personnel and money,” said Johnie Webb, the deputy commander of the 400-person unit, called the Joint POW/MIA Accounting Command, based at Hickam Air Force Base in Hawaii. “That’s the best we can do until somebody says, ‘We’re going to give you the resources to do more.’"
The new focus on World War Two comes after years of attention to soldiers who were unaccounted for in the 1960s and 1970s in the jungles of Southeast Asia. “Vietnam had advocates,” said Lisa Phillips, the president of the four-year-old World War Two Families for the Return of the Missing. “This was an older generation, and they didn’t know who to turn to.” Now time is running out in Europe, where many elderly witnesses and local historians, crucial in helping to locate crash sites, are dying or already gone. There are other hurdles in Washington, where the Pentagon devotes a sliver of its annual budget, $55 million out of a half trillion dollars, toward the search. Although the teams identify more than seventy of the missing each year, at that rate it will take 500 years to find all of the 35,000 whom the Pentagon classifies as potentially “recoverable.” Many thousands of the others were lost at sea.
To the Defense Department teams, staffed by anthropologists and military veterans of Iraq and Afghanistan, the meaning of the mission lies not in the numbers but in individual lives. “I think that goes toward answering, ‘Well, you’ll never get finished so why bother to start at all?’” said Andrew Tyrrell, the other anthropologist working in the cow pasture. “It’s not necessarily all about finishing. While it’s important to have that as an ultimate goal, what’s also important is that the stories of all of these people get remembered.”
The Pentagon would not reveal the name of the lost pilot because his relatives were unaware of the search, Mr. Webb said, and there were fears of getting their hopes up. But if any remains are identified— in many cases through advances in DNA testing that extract samples from shards of bone— the family will be contacted and the pilot will be given a full military funeral at Arlington National Cemetery.
For now, the Defense Department will say only that the pilot died in a Martin B-26 Marauder on a terrible day for the Allies. The plane was on its way from a base in France to bomb a viaduct in the German town of Ahrweiler, but was ambushed and never reached its target. There were six on board: two crew members who parachuted out and were captured by the Germans and released after the war; and four who died in the crash, three of whose bodies were recovered. The plane was one of 39 B-26s lost in the area on that day alone. In all, an estimated 19,000 Americans died during the six-week Battle of the Bulge in the Ardennes, the bloodiest fighting of the war.
The military team has been searching the pasture since early August and is to remain until mid-September. They are surrounded by wooded hills and volcanic lakes in this idyllic hiking region on the border with Luxembourg, but they spend their days pouring buckets of thick mud onto quarter-inch screens, then hosing them down to catch their finds: molten bits of aircraft, a piece of a boot, hundreds of .50-caliber bullets for the plane’s eleven machine guns. At sites in the Pacific, some have found family photographs and wedding rings.
The work is monotonous, but members of the team, who have had multiple deployments in Iraq and Afghanistan, and expect in many cases to return there, say they have developed a kinship with the pilot they never knew. “It’s the same family essentially going back for our own,” said Capt. Melissa Ova, the team leader, who served in Iraq in 2007.
At times the work is maddeningly slow. Last week in another village in what was once East Germany, a different team was trying to locate a B-24 bomber with nine Americans aboard, six still missing, which had been shot down in February 1944.
An elderly witness said the plane sank in a boggy field near a river, so Staff Sergeant Kurtis Witt, a Marine who had three tours sweeping roads for explosive devices in Iraq from 2004 to 2008, spent two hours tromping through tall grass with a magnetometer— only to be told afterward by Kristina Giannotta, the historian leading the team, that she had just spoken to a 90-year-old woman in the village who said the plane had gone down in a completely different field. By day’s end, four more witnesses had put the bomber in four other areas.
“You can ask people two hours after they saw something and they’ll have different stories,” Dr. Giannotta said. “After 65 years it’s like they saw a purple rainbow.” But to Captain Ova the frustrations are worth it. “For me, it’s a comfort to know that, if something happens, somebody will come get me, eventually,” she said.

Fixing the bridge, yet again

Jesse McKinley has an article in The New York Times about more work on the Bay Bridge:

Never has steelwork seemed so entertaining. Since Thursday night, when the traffic stopped and the blowtorching began, the attention of many in the Bay Area has been firmly focused on a huge construction project under way on the San Francisco-Oakland Bay Bridge, which connects the two cities. The project has drawn interest not only because of its complexity, but also because it has resulted in the first weekday closing of the bridge since the 1989 Loma Prieta earthquake, which caused a section of the bridge’s eastern span to collapse and prompted the seismic upgrade, of which the work this weekend is a part.
“All the innovations that we’re bringing to bear are to help the bridge withstand earthquakes,” Bart Ney, a spokesman for CalTrans, said in a presentation on the project’s flashy website, adding that the clock was ticking to “beat that next earthquake.”
So it is that residents, reporters, and retrofitting fans have been watching online and from afar as a swarming construction crew has slowly— oh, so slowly— worked to cut loose and replace an old 300-foot span of the bridge that connects the eastern span to a tunnel on Yerba Buena.
In its place will be a temporary bridge serving as a detour around the old piece, which will be demolished to make way for a new seismically correct piece. That piece will eventually be connected to two sleek, curving, side-by-side decks that will lead to and from Oakland, all by late 2013. Or at least that is the plan. The cost of the complete bridge retrofit has ballooned to more than $6 billion over the years, and there have been several delays.
On Friday afternoon, workers found themselves again falling behind schedule when the old piece of bridge, which dates to its opening in 1936, proved to be more stubborn than expected. “We anticipated it would take time, we just didn’t expect it to take this much time,” said Bill Casey, a resident engineer, who added, “You’re freeing a truss that’s been sitting there for seventy years.”
And, like anything that old and sedentary, there is more than a little groaning, with the bridge letting off a few loud metallic moans, which occasionally alarmed a few members of the press corps standing under the bridge’s ample shadow. But Mr. Ney reassured reporters that those sounds were normal for a bridge its age. “When you cut and move it,” he said, “it does funny things.”
By dusk Friday, crews had begun shifting the old piece of bridge out, inching it along lubricated skids. And as exciting as that sounds, it was not. One churlish member of the press likened it to watching paint dry, which, of course, was also happening on other parts of the bridge.
Indeed, with traffic suspended, officials from several agencies took the opportunity to spruce up the Bay Bridge, which has long labored in the shadow of the showier Golden Gate Bridge, which connects San Francisco to Marin County. Potholes were filled, light bulbs changed and lanes on both levels of the double-decker bridge touched up.
Firefighters, meanwhile, used the closing as a chance to practice rescues, with crews seen headed up the suspension cables on the bridge’s western span Friday afternoon. And while local subway trains seemed more crowded than usual on Thursday night, there were few problems reported with the Friday commute, possibly because of people fleeing early for the Labor Day weekend. Despite the Friday afternoon snag, officials said crews expected to finish their work by early Tuesday or ahead of schedule, as they did with a similar closing in 2007. “Just like 2007, we got out to a great start,” Mr. Ney said. “Demolition has proven to be a little challenging, but we’ve got a lot of time in our schedule.”

Rico says he was living in Oakland in 1989, when the earthquake took down the approaches to the bridge.

Ticks on Nantucket? Rico knows them all too well

Pam Belluck has an article in The New York Times about Nantucket and its tick problem:

In the annals of animals linked to human disease, there is surely a place for Old Buck of Nantucket. Spotted in 1922 deer-paddling in the ocean, he was scooped up by a fishing sloop and brought to Nantucket, an island then without a single deer. And since the animal, nicknamed Old Buck, was single, Nantucket took pity on him. With help from a summer resident, a diplomat who had helped create the League of Nations, two does were imported from Michigan in 1926, greeted at the wharf by a cheering crowd.
Nantucket became so sweet on its deer that when Old Buck was killed by a car in 1932, a newspaper editorialized: “he deserved to live to a good old age, that he might see his grandchildren, great-grandchildren, great-great-grandchildren, and a lot more grand progeny, thrive happily in the swamps and moors of Nantucket.” Now that progeny, island-bound with no apparent swimmers among them, is the focus of Nantucket’s attempt to grapple with diseases caused by ticks that feed on deer blood. Not just the familiar Lyme disease but also babesiosis and ehrlichiosis, which are less common, can be debilitating or fatal.
Last year, Nantucket had 411 laboratory-confirmed cases of tick diseases, up from 257 in 2007. And health officials say some cases are not reported, some Lyme disease diagnoses are made clinically, and some visitors’ ailments are diagnosed off-island.
“We recognize that it’s a big problem here,” said Michael Kopko, chairman of the Nantucket Board of Selectmen, whose wife and daughter have had tick illnesses. “Those of us who live here all know someone or are related to someone or have ourselves had a tick-borne disease.”
After prodding from summer residents, Mr. Kopko said, the town appointed a committee, which will make recommendations this fall. It is looking at options including trimming brush in backyards and installing feeders that coat deer with insecticide. Most controversial is whether to allow more deer hunting.
“The numbers of tick-borne diseases are so off the graph, and it all comes back to the deer,” said Richard Ray, Nantucket’s health department director. Some tick experts believe that island-dwellers may more frequently encounter ticks infected with two or all three diseases. That could be because high numbers of ticks increase the odds of being bitten by co-infected ones or because the ticks’ concentrated food supply increases their co-infection risk.
Michael Miller, a 52-year-old martial arts instructor, contracted Lyme disease and babesiosis simultaneously and was so weakened and feverish that doctors initially thought he had malaria or tuberculosis. “In a place like Nantucket or any other island, there’s less biodiversity, which can mean more intense transmission of infections,” said Dr. Sam Telford III, a tick expert at Tufts University’s school of veterinary medicine.
Houses built closer to deer habitat draw deer to tasty landscaping, and that brings ticks closer to people. Officials estimate that there are about 2,500 deer, about sixty per square mile— compared with ten to twenty per square mile on the mainland.
Measuring the problem is difficult. Reporting criteria for tick diseases have changed, and per capita disease rates are inexact because Nantucket’s population swings from about 10,000 off-season to about 40,000 in summer and because cases contracted on-island but diagnosed elsewhere are often not reported here. Numbers fluctuate for other reasons— this year, for example, the authorities expect fewer cases, saying tourism was down and rain kept people inside.
The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention has listed Nantucket among the top three Lyme disease counties since 1992. In a recent survey of about 220 homeowners in Nantucket’s Tom Nevers section, 61 percent said one or more household members, including guests and renters, have had a tick disease. “We see the tip of the iceberg, the people who get sick,” Dr. Timothy Lepore, Nantucket’s surgeon and tick expert, told the committee. “These diseases, while not necessarily the four horsemen of the apocalypse, have caused near-fatalities.”
Tom Foley, 54, a summer resident, contracted babesiosis recently, which lacerated his spleen. He was one of many people who had to be airlifted off Nantucket for treatment because its hospital would be overstretched. “People are going to die from this,” Mr. Foley said. “People don’t want to talk about it— they’re worried it will hurt property values— but something has to be done.”
Laura Mueller, 73, a forty-year summer resident, barely survived babesiosis in 2007. “I’m dying,” she kept telling doctors. Her condition proved too dire for airlifting; Dr. Lepore removed her ruptured spleen, exhausting most of the hospital’s blood supply. Her recovery took teh months.
As the island considers solutions, the “February hunt” of 2005 looms large. An extra hunting week, added because few other states have deer hunting then, attracted hundreds of hunters from as far as Florida and Texas. But Nantucket was blasted with three feet of snow, and hunters unfamiliar with the terrain could not get to the moors.
“They were showing up in bright orange where there were occupied houses, and people were going bananas thinking they were going to shoot,” said Jim Lentowski, executive director of the Nantucket Conservation Foundation. A preschool even closed. In the end, 246 deer were killed, far exceeding scientists’ expectations of 100.
“From our point of view it was great,” said Rob Deblinger, deputy director of the Massachusetts Division of Fisheries and Wildlife. “But from some other points of view it was horrible.” After a public outcry, the extra hunt was canceled. Nobody advocates a February hunt again, and the committee will probably recommend several strategies, including public education and Damminix, which kills baby ticks feeding on the mice carrying the initial tick-disease bacteria.
Laura Simon, a wildlife ecologist for the Humane Society of the United States, told the committee that “killing deer will not work” because ticks would feed on other animals. But several experts told the committee that more hunting is necessary, saying other methods, while potentially helpful, were insufficient and expensive. “I think there are a lot more people who want to reduce deer numbers than want to snuggle with them,” said one committee member, Dr. Tristram Dammin, son of the scientist for whom a deer tick, Ixodes dammini, was named.
But Beverly McLaughlin, another committee member, said: “I really love the deer, and I can’t help it. My mother took me to see Bambi when I was little.” Although her husband had Lyme disease and babesiosis, she said that even if Nantucket had 400 cases last year, “you know what? That’s not an epidemic.”
A hunter on the committee, Kevin Madden, said many hunters wanted only modest increases in hunting, so that bagging deer would remain easy. “I don’t want to see all the deer wiped out because some people get Lyme’s disease,” he said. “Let them live until I need them.”

Rico says he had his brush with Lyme disease in California, another tick-ridden place, not Nantucket, however...

History for the day

On 6 September 1901, President William McKinley was shot and mortally wounded by anarchist Leon Czolgosz at the Pan-American Exposition in Buffalo, New York.

Now playing in Rico's head

Rico says it's odd what starts, of a morning, running unbidden through what passes for his mind; today it was the theme song from the old Paladin television series, starring Richard Boone (he of the face like an old boot).

Rico says he and his father happened to be vacationing (scuba diving) in Hawaii in the late 1960s, and who should be drinking in the same bar but a local resident, Mr. Boone. He looked just like his photos, only worse...

Civil War for the day

Colonel John Singleton Mosby, CSA

Not even Alabama Democrats would try for 100%

Jerome Starkey and Jon Swain has an article in The Sunday Times about ballot-box stuffing in Afghanistan:

In the southern Afghan district of Shorabak, the tribesmen gathered shortly before last month’s presidential election to discuss which candidate they would back. After a debate they chose to endorse Abdullah Abdullah, President Hamid Karzai’s leading opponent.
The tribal leaders prepared to deliver a landslide for Abdullah, but it never happened. They claim Ahmed Wali Karzai, the president’s brother and leader of the Kandahar provincial council, detained the local governor and closed all the district’s 46 polling sites on election day.
The ballot boxes were taken back to the district headquarters where, tribal leaders allege, they were stuffed with ballots by local policemen. A total of 23,900 ballots were finally sent off to Kabul, the capital— every one of them a vote for Karzai.
The alleged fraud, which Ahmed Wali Karzai denies, was the most blatant example among hundreds of incidents that have threatened to make a mockery of the election. The sheer scale and audacity of the cheating, which includes supposedly “state-sponsored” ballot-stuffing, vote burning, intimidation and the closure of polling stations in antigovernment areas, has overwhelmed the country’s fledgling Electoral Complaints Commission. Its staff are battling with more than 2,600 reports of vote-rigging, including at least 650 deemed serious enough “materially” to influence the result.
“This is a blatant violation of the procedure and I think it is stealing in daylight,” Abdullah said yesterday. His aides say privately that if Karzai wins the 50.1% of votes needed for victory in the first round, they won’t accept the result. Abdullah said he intended to use all legal means to challenge any Karzai victory; his supporters talked menacingly of “Iran-style protests with Kalashnikovs”.
In the Spin Boldak district in the south of the country, the fifth-ranked candidate, Mirwais Yasini, accused pro-Karzai agents of taking out his votes and burning them. “Democracy is dead in Afghanistan,” he said. “It’s buried. I’m not even bothering to get my results any more because it’s completely rigged. It’s completely biased.”
In the southern province of Oruzgan, pro-Karzai staff tried to bar election observers from entering the polling stations. Abdul Raziq waited three hours outside one station in Tarin Kowt, while election officials questioned his credentials as an observer. He watched 60 to 80 voters go into the Sayed Al-Khan high school, while he argued with the supposedly independent officials. “Finally, when they let me in, I saw all the ballot boxes were full,” he said. He had arrived at 8am, an hour after the polls opened. “No one was voting because there were rockets, but when I went in, there were eight boxes, all of them full of votes.”
Sher Mohammed Khan, a tribal elder from Oruzgan and an Abdullah supporter, said three of his observers were arrested. “In Derawut district the police chief, Omar Khan, told observers not to come near the polling stations. His henchmen threatened to kill anyone who tried to get in,” he said. Insecurity in Kandahar and Helmand stopped election observers from visiting all but a handful of polling sites. The country’s Independent Election Commission (IEC), which is counting the votes, is supposed to spot substantial irregularities. Yet in the Kandahar village of Torzai, the results showed that Karzai had won every vote. At four of its eight polling stations, he received exactly 500 votes. At a primary school in Dahani, Helmand, Karzai also won 100% of the votes.
A row within the IEC over what to do with the suspect ballots has held up the announcement of further results for the past four days. Its last tally on Wednesday showed Karzai three points short of his 50.1% target. He may yet face a divisive second round run-off against Abdullah.

Rico says there's creative cheating and then there's blatant cheating; these Afghans need more practice...

Too much of a good thing

The New York Times has an article by Jenna Wortham about issues with the iPhone:

Slim and sleek as it is, the iPhone is really the Hummer of cellphones. It’s a data guzzler. Owners use them like minicomputers, which they are, and use them a lot. Not only do iPhone owners download applications, stream music and videos and browse the Web at higher rates than the average smartphone user, but the average iPhone owner can also use ten times the network capacity used by the average smartphone user.
“They don’t even realize how much data they’re using,” said Gene Munster, a senior securities analyst with Piper Jaffray.
The result is dropped calls, spotty service, delayed text and voice messages and glacial download speeds as AT&T’s cellular network strains to meet the demand. Another result is outraged customers.
Cellphone owners using other carriers may gloat now, but the problems of AT&T and the iPhone portend their future. Other networks could be stressed as well as more sophisticated phones encouraging such intense use become popular, analysts say.
Taylor Sbicca, a 27-year-old systems administrator in San Francisco, checks his iPhone 10 to 15 times a day. But he is not making calls. He checks the scores of last night’s baseball game and updates his Twitter stream. He checks the local weather report to see if he needs a coat before heading out to dinner— then he picks a restaurant on Yelp and maps the quickest way to get there. Or at least, he tries to.
“It’s so slow, it feels like I’m on a dial-up modem,” he said. Shazam, an application that identifies songs being played on the radio or television, takes so long to load that the tune may be over by the time the app is ready to hear it. On numerous occasions, Mr. Sbicca says, he missed invitations to meet friends because his text messages had been delayed.
And picking up a cell signal in his apartment? “You hit the dial button and the phone just sits there, saying it’s connecting for thirty seconds,” he said.
More than twenty million other smartphone users are on the AT&T network, but other phones do not drain the network the way the nine million iPhones users do. Indeed, that is why the howls of protest are more numerous in the dense urban areas with higher concentrations of iPhone owners. “It’s almost worthless to try and get on 3G during peak times in those cities,” Mr. Munster said, referring to the 3G network. “When too many users get in the area, the call drops.” The problems seem particularly pronounced in New York and San Francisco, where Mr. Munster estimates AT&T’s network shoulders as much as twenty percent of all the iPhone users in the United States.
Owners of the iPhone 3GS, the newest model, “have probably increased their usage by about a hundred percent,” said Chetan Sharma, an independent wireless analyst. “It’s faster so they are using it more on a daily basis.” Mr. Sharma compares the problem to water flowing through a pipe. “It can only funnel so much at a given time,” he said. “It comes down to peak capacity loads, or spikes in data usage. That’s why you see these problems at conferences or in large cities with high concentration of iPhone users.”
When thousands of iPhone owners descended on Austin, Texas, in March during South by Southwest, an annual technology and music conference, attendees were unable to send text messages, check their email, or make calls until AT&T installed temporary cell sites to amplify the service.
AT&T’s right to be the exclusive carrier for iPhone in the United States has been a golden ticket for the wireless company. The average iPhone owner pays AT&T $2,000 during his two-year contract— roughly twice the amount of the average mobile phone customer. But, at the same time, the iPhone has become an Achilles’ heel for the company. “It’s been a challenging year for us,” said John Donovan, the chief technology officer of AT&T. “Overnight we’re seeing a radical shift in how people are using their phones,” he said. “There’s just no parallel for the demand.” AT&T says that the majority of the nearly $18 billion it will spend this year on its networks will be diverted into upgrades and expansions to meet the surging demands on the 3G network. The company intends to erect an additional 2,100 cell towers to fill out patchy coverage, upgrade existing cell sites by adding fiber optic connectivity to deliver data faster and add other technology to provide stronger cell signals.
As fast as AT&T wants to go, many cities require lengthy filing processes to erect new cell towers. Even after towers are installed, it can take several months for software upgrades to begin operating at faster speeds. The company has also delayed bandwidth-heavy features like multimedia messaging, or text messages containing pictures, audio or video. It is also postponing “tethering,” which allows the iPhone to share its Internet connection with a computer, a standard feature on many rival smartphones. AT&T says it has no intention of capping how much data iPhone owners use. The upgrades are expected to be completed by next year and the company has said it is already seeing improvements.
But AT&T faces another cost— to its reputation. AT&T’s deal with Apple is said to expire as early as next year, at which point other carriers in the United States would be able to sell the popular Apple phones. Indeed, a recent survey by Pricegrabber.com found that 34 percent of respondents pinpointed AT&T as the primary reason for not buying an iPhone.
“It’s a PR nightmare,” said Craig Moffett, a senior analyst with Sanford C. Bernstein & Company.
AT&T might be in the spotlight now, analysts say, but other carriers will face similar problems as they sell more smartphones, laptop cards and eventually tablets that encourage high data usage.
Globally, mobile data traffic is expected to double every year through 2013, according to Cisco Systems, which makes network gear. “Whether an iPhone, a Storm, or a Gphone, the world is changing.” Mr. Munster said. “We’re just starting to scratch the surface of these issues that AT&T is facing.”
In preparation for the next wave of smartphones and data demands, all the carriers are rushing to introduce the next-generation of wireless networks, called 4G. Analysts expect that, in a year or so, AT&T’s network will have improved significantly— but it may not be soon enough for some iPhone owners paying for the higher-priced data plans, like Mr. Sbicca, who says he plans to switch carriers as soon as the iPhone becomes available on other networks. “What good is having all those applications if you don’t have the speed to run them?” he said. “It’s not exactly rocket science here. It’s pretty standard stuff to be able to make a phone call.”

Bad behavior by the press, yet again

Katharine Seelye has an article in The New York Times about the war within America over the war in Afghanistan:

A furious Defense Secretary Robert Gates has upbraided The Associated Press for its decision to go against the wishes of a young Marine’s family and publish a photograph of him after he was killed in Afghanistan. In a scathing letter to Tom Curley, president and chief executive of the AP, Mr. Gates said that the news agency’s decision was “appalling” and that the issue was one not of constitutionality but of “judgment and common decency”.
The AP defended the decision, which editors said they made only after careful review and sharing the pictures with the family. In an explanation of its deliberations, the AP said it decided “to make public an image that conveys the grimness of war and the sacrifice of young men and women fighting it”.
The publication of such dramatic images has been relatively rare, partly because journalists are not often on hand to see such events and because military guidelines, which the AP followed, bar the showing of pictures of dead soldiers before the family is notified.
The photograph in question was part of a package of articles and photographs about Lance Corporal Joshua M. Bernard, 21, of New Portland, Maine, and his unit, which was ambushed in Afghanistan on 14 August. Before sending the package to its newspaper clients, the AP sent a reporter to Maine to talk with the man’s family. They did so out of respect, Michael Oreskes, The AP’s senior managing editor, said in an interview, not to ask permission to publish the pictures. But the father, John Bernard, a former Marine, asked the AP not to publish the picture, saying it would only hurt the family more.
In an advisory to clients, the AP said its articles and photographs “offered vivid insights into how the battle was fought, and into Bernard’s character and background.” After the articles and pictures had been distributed but before they were published, Mr. Gates called Mr. Curley to urge him to change his mind. “I am begging you to defer to the wishes of the family,” Mr. Gates said, according to his spokesman. Shortly after hanging up, Mr. Gates sent his letter. “The American people understand that death is an awful and inescapable part of war,” Mr. Gates wrote. But publishing this photo, he said, goes against the wishes of the family and thus would mark an “unconscionable departure from the restraint that most journalists and publications have shown covering the military since September 11th.”
A few newspapers have published the picture, and many more have not. The New York Times published the photograph on its Web site.

More obscure New Yorkiana

Daniel Wakin has an article in The New York Times about bell ringers in Manhattan:

Twelve people stood in a circle in a tower high above Wall Street. Eyes flitted from side to side, watching, concentrating, as arms rose and fell to a cascading cacophony of bells, bells, bells. One shook her head in disgust over missing a beat. “This is all,” said Dale Winter, the conductor, using the technical phrase to close out a sequence of rings. The clanging inside Trinity Church’s 280-foot bell tower fell silent.
Trinity this week is the focus of the American bell-ringing world. The North American Guild of Change Ringers is holding its annual meeting at the church, which in New York fashion is promoting a mini-festival of classes, ringing performances and private sessions, including a 24-hour marathon beginning at 12:30 p.m. on Sunday (which will take place behind sound-baffling shutters and only if the church can find enough ringers). Public sessions are scheduled for noon and 4 p.m. on Saturday, along with the normal ringing before and after services on Sunday morning.
The meeting is a sign of Trinity’s rapid arrival as a beacon of bell towers: three years ago it installed a set of twelve bells, making it the only church in the nation with that many. Canada and the United States have about 45 functioning bell towers between them. North America’s only other twelve-bell tower is at the Cathedral Church of St. James in Toronto.
“It’s a Michelin three-star,” Dr. James L. Snyder said of the Trinity set. Dr. Snyder, a retired urologist and visiting ringer from Clifton Forge, Virginia, has traveled to bell towers in Britain a dozen times and to others in New Zealand, Australia, and South Africa.
The quintessentially British art form of change ringing is not the playing of carillons or chimes, in which one person controls all the clappers and can play melodies. In change ringing, each member of a band controls a rope that rings one bell, weighing from several hundred to several thousand pounds. The rope is strung along the groove of an upright wheel. The rope pulls the wheel, it revolves, and the bell— which starts with its bottom pointed upward— turns 360 degrees. Clang.
Simple rope pulling it ain’t. Change ringing is a surprisingly difficult and subtle art that involves a series of coordinated hand movements and a sensitive touch. Ringers time their strokes partly by listening, partly by watching the movement of the ropes around them. A sense of timing is essential because of the one-second gap between the pull of the rope and the sound of the bell.
The “music” consists of cascades of bell strikes, called rows or pulls. Variations in the order are introduced according to strict rules. About five minutes of ringing is called a touch. A full peal has 5,000 individual sequences. Skillful ringing is like a steady stream of sand; poor ringing clumps up like wet earth.
Ringers must master complicated sequences of rings that are notated with row after row of numbers, like some sort of primitive computer code. One ringer acts as a conductor, giving rudimentary guidance, but change ringing is very much a group effort.
The technique of holding the rope, feeling its tension and moving the hands, is highly evolved, but the simple wheel mechanism allows thousands of pounds of brass to twirl with surprising ease. It is a bit like leading a compliant elephant around on a leash.
Change ringing is an arcane realm, rich in jargon, traditions and deep devotion to an art that dates back to the early seventeenth century. Devotees travel the world to visit church towers with prize sets of bells. They have publications quaintly titled The Clapper and The Ringing World. Ringing sequences have names like Erin Cinques, Little Bob Maximus, and Stedman Caters.
The art is dominated by Anglican and Episcopal churches in the English-speaking world, with Westminster Abbey (ten bells) and St. Paul’s Cathedral (twelve bells) in London having the most renowned bells and ringing traditions. Tim Barnes, who established Trinity’s band and recently resigned as its ringing master, was a band member at St. Paul’s. In fact, many of the participants of the Trinity ringing were British expatriates. Change ringing also tends to attract the mathematically inclined, lawyers, lovers of patterns and codes and, perhaps unsurprisingly, former rowers.
“The most common characteristic is a little bit of eccentricity,” said Gregory Russell, Trinity’s new ringing master and steeple keeper and a systems engineer at IBM. The skill requires physical endurance, the ability to concentrate, and a strong sense of rhythm.
Helping out the students this week was Danielle Morse, a 29-year-old meteorologist at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, who began ringing in the ninth grade. She rings at the Old North Church in Boston, where Paul Revere once rang. She explained the dress code: no skirts or necklaces, which can get caught up in the rope with potentially unpleasant results. Comfortable shoes are a must for peals that can last more than three hours.
Susan Anderson, a registered nurse in her 50s, traveled from Honolulu for the course. She was lured into change ringing three years ago by a couple she met who invited her to visit the tower at the Cathedral Church of St. Andrew there. It has captivated her. “You’re learning an ancient musical art,” she said. “I like things that are connected to history.” The resounding of bells heard by the people around a tower also has a moral satisfaction, she said: “I feel like I’m touching a lot of lives.”
Another tyro of tintinnabulation, Marie Knup— the one who made the face about missing the beat— said that much of the appeal came from meeting people during ringing sessions. Like other ringers, Ms. Knup, 68, a semiretired librarian from Philadelphia, said she had been partly inspired by reading the classic mystery novel Nine Tailors by Dorothy Sayers, in which the change-ringing bells of a village church are central to the plot.
The history of change ringing at Trinity is murky. Records show that bells existed there at least as far back as the late eighteenth century, but in recent decades they were used as chimes. The original set, connected to the organist’s console, now sits in a chamber above the new change-ringing bells.
In the ringing room, woolen mats on the floor protect the ropes from being worn by the synthetic carpet. Air-conditioning keeps the room cold and dry: moisture causes the ropes to stiffen. Rope-pulling can also be sweaty work.
About 25 volunteers make up the Trinity Ringers, the house band. The brass bells range from 515 pounds to 2,677 pounds and trace a D major scale and four additional notes above. They are named after favorite ringers of the British benefactor, Martin Faulkes, who paid for them.
Trapdoors between the bells and the ringing room and electric shutters over the bell tower windows keep the sound inside for practice sessions, protecting nearby residents. Trinity ringers say the high quality of these bells brings expert bands from abroad, which has helped raise their own skill level.
The band practices weekly and provides rings for weddings and special events, like President Obama’s inauguration, September 11th commemorations, holidays, and the New York Giants’ Super Bowl victory parade.

Pools in New York? Who knew

Ralph Blumenthal has an article in The New York Times about a little-known aspect of New York:

When Matthew Keiser and his daughter, Mia, needed to cool off with a swim the other day, they climbed to the roof deck of their pre-Civil-War loft in TriBeCa and plunged into their own sleek custom steel infinity pool whose disappearing edge seems to merge with the looming downtown towers of the city’s municipal acropolis.
Kelvyn Jackson in the Bronx took his daughter— also named Mia— for a dip in their family pool on the same sweltering August afternoon. Theirs sits on the ground visible from the clattering No. 1 elevated train and came in a box from Target.
Two Mias, two New York families, two gritty urban settings, two very different swimming pools.
Yes, Palm Springs disbelievers, New Yorkers also have their private pools, albeit mostly seasonal and now nearing their end-of-summer apotheosis. In-ground, above-ground or underground, inflatable or portable, behind fenced-in backyards, in alleyways, on high-rise terraces or tucked into billionaire penthouses, they are often invisible to the casual passerby, but not to air travelers who spot them winking in the cityscape below like shards of Navajo turquoise or Chinese jade.
“It’s like sometimes I say, ‘Is this real?’ ” said Louis Hernandez, a retired police officer, who excavated his backyard in Sunset Park, Brooklyn, with pick and shovel to build his gleaming blue 25-by-12-foot pool, carrying out the soil through his brownstone in five-gallon buckets.
New York City’s pools number certainly in the thousands, with the census in space-precious Manhattan— the unlikeliest of private swimming pool habitats— at close to one hundred, according to pool suppliers and property brokers.
That includes aquatic spectacles like the Keisers’s watery aerie, and the 48-foot-long top-floor indoor lap pool with workout gym of a TriBeCa neighbor, Steven Schnall, a venture capitalist and real estate developer, in another building, on North Moore Street.
Long celebrated is the Roman-style pool in the double-wide former Guccione Mansion at 14-16 East 67th Street, sold last year to the hedge fund investor Philip Falcone for a near-record $49 million. And no, said his spokesman, Charles V. Zehren, Mr. Falcone would not allow even a tiny peek.
Seen by viewers of Sex and the City, but also off-limits to the idly curious, is the legendary twelfth-floor rooftop pool lined with hand-painted blue Spanish tiles atop the soaring 11,000-square-foot triplex at 704 Broadway that the Israeli entrepreneur and architect Jonathan Leitersdorf sold in 2007 to the supermarket mogul Ronald Burkle for $17.5 million.
Lesser known is an indoor private pool at 3 East 94th Street, according to a former owner, and an eight-room duplex condo with private outdoor pool at 51 Walker Street whose occupants also declined a look, said the property’s agent, Edwin Cabrera.
But in Princes Bay, Staten Island— the most rural and pool-besotted of the boroughs— Frank D’Amato was proud to show off his extravagant saltwater pool with fountains and water slide where his children Rosina, twelve, and Frank, nine, and their Yorkie name Chloe, frolicked alongside a brickwork piazza with a koi pond, television screens visible from any angle, bar, grill, and pizza oven. “It started out as new kitchen cabinets and went a little out of hand,” said Mr. D’Amato, 47, a commodities broker, who estimated the project “sort of snowballed” to around $250,000. But he said, “I’m a pool fiend.”
You could say that, too, of Mr. Keiser, 37, a diver, sailor, and marketing entrepreneur whose Internet startup LiveIntent connects fans and followers with brands and personalities on Twitter and Facebook and whose new stimulant snack, Perky Jerky, caffeine-infused beef jerky, is just reaching store shelves.
After buying half of the cast-iron 1857 Cary Building running along Church Street between 89 Reade Street and 105 Chambers Street, Mr. Keiser, inspired, he said, by his friend Mr. Leitersdorf, spent unspecified millions and three years in renovations, including about $500,000 on a 17-by-11-foot steel roof-deck pool with a current, designed by Diamond Spas in Frederick, Colo. To bear the weight, the roof was reinforced with 51-foot steel beams that had to be trucked in at night through a closed Lincoln Tunnel, at additional thousands billable to Mr. Keiser. “People say to me, ‘What, are you out of your mind?’ ” he said, shrugging. “Other people buy Ferraris.”
He and his wife, Adriana, and Mia, now three, moved in last September, keeping the pool open and heated to 94 degrees through the winter. (They have since been joined by a son, Pax, now nine months old.) In the pool, they are visible to gawkers in surrounding buildings but say they don’t mind. “There’s no point in having all this if you can’t show it, right?” said Mrs. Keiser, a fashion executive.
The same afternoon, on Godwin Terrace in the Kingsbridge section of the Bronx, Mr. Jackson, 28, an unemployed father who lives with his mother, father, and brother, hoisted his year-old Mia into a tube in their 12-foot round above-ground pool overlooking their backyard vegetable garden and a Rite Aid parking lot under the elevated train. “We got it last year at Target, on sale for $300,” Mr. Jackson said. Maintenance was reasonable, he figured— about $60 in chlorine tablets for the season. And come fall, he said, “there’s a drain in the parking lot; we’ll take it apart and put it back in the box.”
In neighboring forested Fieldston, Lewis and Hindy Weinger and their children, Natan, six, Azriel, four, and Liya, two, spend evenings after work and camp cooling off in the collapsible fifteen-foot round pool the family found on the Internet five years ago for $250. “The reality is, when you’re lying on a lounge chair in the pool, you don’t know how deep or big it is,” said Mr. Weinger, 50, chief financial officer of a real estate company.
Of course, no borough has land for pools like Staten Island, where Anthony and Donna Rugolo in Eltingville spent $50,000 on a pinch-waisted pool 32 feet long and up to 16 feet wide, created by Nick Tsoukas of Grecian Pools in Eltingville, who also built the D’Amatos’s pool. Mr. Rugolo, 45, a contractor, grinned at the tireless cannonball leaps of their daughters Lauren, thirteen, and Brianna, ten, and friends and called it “one of my best investments— I always know where they are.”
In the heights of Dongan Hills, Paula Cecala also entertained a crew of splashing teenagers: her sons, Joseph, eighteen, and Anthony, sixteen, and their friends at her pool decorated with a mural of a Sicilian landscape. The week before, she and her husband, Glenn, an auto mechanic, had thrown Joseph a prom party for a hundred classmates at the pool.
Elsewhere, the possibilities scale down. On 62nd Street in Sunset Park, Brooklyn, James and Kim Basile, schoolteachers, find their twelve-foot collapsible backyard pool a welcome antidote to classroom pressures, despite maintenance headaches like the algae bloom from recent rains that turned the water green. As Ms. Basile struggled with a pool vacuum the other day, her husband called out helpfully, “Want me to get you the ladder, hon?”
There may be no more modest and beloved pool in the city than the ten-foot-round, blue plastic thirty-inch high Intex model from Target in an alleyway on 36th Street in Astoria, Queens, where Michelle and Joe Mifsud, immigrants from Malta, and their children, Joey, thirteen, Jared, ten, and Mary, seven, splash around on hot days. “It’s enough to keep you cool,” said Mrs. Mifsud, a teacher.
Mr. Hernandez, 68, the retired police office in Brooklyn, said he had little idea what was in store when he decided ten years ago to build his in-ground pool in the backyard of his brownstone on 45th Street. Disdaining an excavator’s estimate of $2,000 as exorbitant, he decided, he said, to do it himself, recruiting Mexican workers and friends. It ended up costing him $2,400 for the hole, plus $12,000 for the pool installation and $800 for the brickwork and coping. “It was worth every bucket,” said his wife, Carmen. Their grandson, Anthony, ten, had a particularly good time in the water this summer. “You don’t see too many pools like this,” Mr. Hernandez allowed. But he said, “if I had it to do over again, I wouldn’t do it.”