AP - The former home of Bruce Lee is now a love motel, renting rooms by the hour. But officials on Monday launched a design competition to turn it into a Hong Kong museum for the kung fu icon.
1. 311Text Text-based 311 for the iPhone: Grab GPS-enabled alternate-side parking info, complain about a neighbor (and include unflattering photographic evidence), never wait on hold.
2. iPee GPS-enabled public-toilet detection, sponsored by Starbucks.
3. GoldenAge It’s a Google Maps time machine that settles arguments, informs tourists, and triggers memories: Hold up your phone and see images of what any given block looked like 20, 50, or 100 years ago.
4. Automated Teller Teller Tells you which ATMs will charge you $3.99, and which will charge a more reasonable $0.99. Added bonus: This app will also helpfully point out the nearest McDonald's $0.99 ATM.
5. SaveIndie Because we all killed Kim’s Underground, we need a searchable app that makes shopping at local record stores and bookstores almost as easy as Amazon.com.
6. Suddenly Open Table The counter to Internet reservation systems: This app alerts you to suddenly available, impossible-to-get tables at Minetta Tavern and Momofuku Ko.
7. Commuter Mommuter Figures out exactly when you need to leave your apartment in order to be on time — then lies to you, just like mom, to make sure you actually leave at the correct time.
8. Alcorexia Compares the caloric values of cocktails and foods, so you know to skip the guac if you drank two margaritas. Like a celebrity liquid purge — but drunker.
9. Funnel-Cake Alert GPS-enabled in order to help you avoid the powdered sugar of New York’s many identically awful street fairs.
10. iFume Love complaining, but often find that nobody nearby cares what you think? This app offers a safe place for bitchy people stuck watching TaxiTV, waiting in line, or walking behind tourists.
Alan and Angela Seales don't seem like rabid anti-Obama profiteers. They seem like ordinary New Yorkers: They moved here to be actors, married, and now live in Washington Heights, where he heads the IT department at a midtown film company, and she studies sociology full-time at Columbia. You know, part of the demographic that helped the president win almost every single vote in the city.
And yet, together with Alan's college friend Matt Senter, they've become part of the vast right-wing tchotchke conspiracy. Log on to their website or their Facebook page and you come across the sort of incoherent ravings about Nazis, liberal fascism, and the children of Israel that could, in a weak moment, make Glenn Beck blush. But it's also a marketing tool for their Obamunism branded merchandise, all featuring the glowing, sky-blue "O" of President Obama's campaign melded with the hammer and sickle of the former Soviet Union.
"Call us capitalists, but opportunists is probably a better word," Alan says. Of course, none of them have yet to brave the streets of New York wearing the design.
Matt Senter first visualized the design that began sweeping the redder parts of the Internet last fall as soon as it was clear that Hillary wouldn't be the one making history. A college buddy of Alan's, Matt had been hanging out with the Sealeses at Disney World when the three of them decided to turn their time-passing-while-in-lines game — making up slogans they'd love to see on T-shirts and "booty shorts" (not yet in production) — into a start-up company. Conch Tees went online in January 2008 with a handful of designs, which by summer included "Obamunism," "President Evil" (Hillary with zombie eyes), and "McCaingsta" (a bling-draped McCain in a wheelchair). As the race heated up in September, the company targeted "Obamunism" ads at Republicans on Facebook — and a storm erupted.
Almost overnight, the T-shirt got glowing reviews on conservative blogs, and sales jumped from about one per month to roughly 50 per day. (The tees sell for $16 each; they've brought in around $50,000 so far this year.) Sometimes an order would arrive in the in-box and, ten minutes later, another would arrive from a customer with the same last name but a different address. Two went to Wasilla, Alaska, land of the Palin tribe. But "by far" most of the orders shipped to Texas and California. The shirt's earliest admirers were gun-rights bloggers, one of whom posted a picture of an attractive woman posing in the T-shirt with her blonde locks tossed back and an AK-47 resting on her hip.
Both the term "Obamunism" (the right's paraphrase of Obama's domestic agenda) and the pairing of his logo with Communist symbols have gradually multiplied on the Internet this year. Several independent sites sell "Obamunism" tees with similar logos, and Café Press, an online on-demand retailer, has an "anti-Obama store" with slogans like "The Obama Wreckovery," and "Don't Tax Me, Bro." It hasn't proliferated as quickly as pro-Obama kitsch — Café Press has much more of that than the sickles and sarcasm — but seems to be a major hit with the talk-radio crowd.
None of the enterprising Conch crew seems to mind that their anti-Obama shirt put them on the map, though they had no intention of becoming a political company. "We get e-mails saying it's our social responsibility to not say these things," says Angela, "but clearly this is a website with jokes. We try to be an equal opportunity offender." Both grew up in relatively conservative states, Alan in North Carolina and Angela in Kansas. Angela's family is Catholic, and Alan's dad recently showed off the Obamunism tee at a local music festival. Angela is a registered Republican planning on becoming an independent, Matt and Alan are registered independents, and the most the three will say about their own voting is that they "all voted differently" (one for Obama). The shirts they dream are less about their political views and more about their collegiate irreverence: Who can we make fun of today?
Still, this is New York, so they intentionally left their Obama wares behind when they set up a T-shirt booth in Union Square. Angela also keeps Obamunism out of her social life. "When I meet new people at Columbia and start talking to them about my life, I want to tell them about the shirts, but I'm literally afraid to say anything unless I give it a big preface, like, 'Listen, we're just out to make money here.' I have to feel them out."
Meanwhile, Matt continues to stoke the fires on the website, as curator of its discussion. There he tries to wield with a wry, even hand. "I think we should drop the birth-certificate thing as all it does is cause a disruption from the real issues," he recently replied to a commenter, adding a Snopes link to her complaint that "God and Obama have only one thing in common: NO BIRTH CERTIFICATE!" But all of this user interaction ultimately serves the bottom line: It's peppered with links to Conch designs, Twitter reminders, and cleavage-heavy sale advertisements. Capitalism thrives, even under Obama.
Until recently, the Teterboro Airport, just twelve miles west of midtown Manhattan, was synecdochical for the New York Dream. It was a landmark of the social geography mapped by “Page Six,” Fortune, and Gossip Girl. “Teterboro!” the narrator of Plum Sykes’s bubble novel Bergdorf Blondes rhapsodized, riffing on “PJs” — private jets, which take off and land there. “All New York girls know that ugly word means something very pretty. Teterboro means ‘I have a plane.’”
During the boom, what was once the uninviting, utilitarian, secretive province of corporate chieftains sallying forth to complete deals and visit factories became the site of an almost public aspirational performance. In August 2005, Amy Sacco launched Air Bungalow, a flying-lounge business. Last summer, “Page Six” reported that George Michael’s plane was delayed behind Sting’s and Bruce Springsteen’s jets, suggesting that Teterboro had a celebrity pecking order (actually, the air-traffic controllers have no idea whose plane is whose). The U.S. extraordinarily rendered Maher Arar to Syria in 2002 via a chartered Gulfstream III out of Teterboro. The airport is so important that when Gulfstream designed its new G650, the plane’s weight was capped at 99,600 pounds in order to come in under Teterboro’s 100,000-pound limit.
But as PJ culture adjusts to the post-TARP world order, the iconic status of Manhattan’s most elite jetport is up for grabs. These days, Teterboro means: “Please don’t tell anyone you saw me here.” After years of steady growth, the charter jet business is off as much as 45 percent, traffic at Teterboro has dropped by a third, and jet sales have collapsed, leading the big manufacturers to lay off thousands of people. The crisis began last November, when the CEOs of the automakers flew private to Washington looking for a bailout. Then, in January, Citigroup, flush with $45 billion in taxpayer money, had to be shamed into canceling its order for a $50 million Dassault Falcon 7X. And the following month, in an address to Congress, President Obama denounced CEOs who “disappear on private jet[s],” and ABC News scrambled a helicopter over Teterboro to film Bank of America CEO Ken Lewis deplaning from a $50 million G5 that cost $5,000 an hour to operate.
A former CEO with experience flying in and out of Teterboro likens private jets to “crack,” and even as the industry attempts to stay on message about private aviation being “a business tool,” it has faced an unrelenting series of embarrassing revelations, such as The Wall Street Journal’s recent report that even after receiving bailout money, bank CEOs including Morgan Stanley’s John Mack and the aforementioned, singularly tone-deaf Ken Lewis were apparently using company jets to fly to their vacation homes. Also not helping with the image of private airports as drab, sober instruments of commerce is their compulsive use by celebrities; as we were walking out of the offices of Teterboro-based flight-services company Meridian, after several hours of listening to reasonable explanations of the importance of private aviation to American industry, Paris Hilton tumbled out of an SUV with her newish reality-show boyfriend and an armful of shopping bags, about to board a jet to L.A.
Andrew Ladouceur, who charters out Gulfstream G-IVs, Dassault Falcons, and Bombardier Challengers for Meridian (which also refuels and hangars planes and has a posh terminal), says he has recently been receiving fewer calls from companies under scrutiny and that he’s had people who were flying to Washington send their private drivers ahead to the capital because they didn’t want to be seen being picked up by a limousine there. “There were people outside the fence taking pictures of tail numbers,” Meridian CEO Ken Forrester says he was informed.
In February, the industry launched a PR and lobbying campaign with the slogan “No Plane No Gain.” “Business aviation exists in every state and in every congressional district, so once you are on Capitol Hill, and you explain how many companies in those districts use it, and how many jobs are involved, they recognize the value,” a spokesman for the National Business Aviation Association told us. The comically impossible-to-defend industries of the Thank You for Smoking nineties — guns, tobacco, and alcohol — have some new company: corporate jets.
Whitey Ford and Yogi Berra at Old-Timers' Day in 2007.
This afternoon the Yankees hosted their 63rd annual Old-Timers’ Day festivities — the first at the new Yankee Stadium. But as much as we enjoyed Aaron Small’s half-season of excellence, forgive us if we found the roster of attendees underwhelming. Of the four Hall of Famers on hand, two of them (Reggie Jackson and Goose Gossage) played less than a third of their career in New York. For a franchise that prides itself on its unparalleled history, the fact that Small (26 total games played over two seasons) is among the limited number of invitees makes you question exactly how unparalleled it is. But the fact that Old-Timers’ Day has lost some of its star power isn’t anyone’s fault. It’s a delayed result of this: For long stretches from the sixties until the nineties, the Yankees weren’t very good — and the players from that era are increasingly becoming the alumni’s elder statesmen.
The Yankees are the only major-league team to stage an annual old-timers’ day, and with good reason: From the time Yankee Stadium opened in 1923 until 1962, the club never once went more than four seasons without winning the World Series. During this period, they also churned out not just countless Hall of Famers, but particularly legendary ones. One era just gave way to the next, providing a steady stream of stars worthy of a standing ovation at the end of Old-Timers’ Day introductions. But one by one, these great players are passing away — Mickey Mantle in 1995, Joe DiMaggio in 1999, Phil Rizzuto in 2007 — and there isn’t a comparable generation of players to succeed them.
Yogi Berra is 83 years old, and Whitey Ford, 81. We hope it’s not for many years, but when they’re gone, the greatest living Yankees will be Derek Jeter and Mariano Rivera. There were popular players in between, of course — from Willie Randolph to Ron Guidry to Don Mattingly — but none of them approach the achievements of a Berra or Ford. And while the team employed some Hall of Famers in the interim, players like Dave Winfield and Wade Boggs went into the Hall wearing the cap of another team. Or look at it this way: Take a team like the Orioles, whose best years in the sixties, seventies, and early eighties roughly correspond to the Yankees’ darkest days. If they staged an Old-Timers’ Day, they could invite Frank Robinson, Brooks Robinson, Cal Ripken, Jim Palmer, Eddie Murray, and Earl Weaver. That's an impressive list, and it tops what the Yankees were able to do today. Hell, the O's could even invite Reggie if they really wanted to.
Old-Timers’ Day isn’t going anywhere, of course, nor should it. It’s still a fun event, and it’s often the only chance all year to cheer on those popular-if-not-legendary players — even if many of them (like Randolph, Mattingly, or Dave Righetti) won’t be in attendance for a while because of coaching jobs with other clubs. That said, seeing Goose Gossage doesn’t register with us the way that, say, seeing Joe DiMaggio throw out the first pitch on Opening Day in 1994 did. One day, seeing Jeter and Rivera return will trigger the same thing — if not in those of us who watched them play, then certainly with a younger generation who didn’t. But that day is still years away.
If there were not a God, Voltaire famously said, we would have had to create him. With the empirical evidence still out on the Big Guy, the financial press built a pretty strong case for Jamie Dimon as an adequate replacement during last week's bank earnings reports.
In a week when four big banks — Bank of America, Citigroup, Goldman Sachs, and JPMorgan — announced profits, only Dimon's shop, JPMorgan, was greeted with pure, unadulterated adoration. It's a good lesson in Wall Street brand management. Goldman Sachs earned more money — $3.44 billion to JPMorgan's $2.72 billion — and, like JPMorgan, it paid back its TARP money. But Goldman, alas, has that whole "vampire squid" thing to contend with now, which means a public profile that defines any profits by the firm as downright ostentatious. Goldman's profitability seems almost supernatural — the New York Times gleefully noted that rivals call the firm's traders "orcs" — which made the firm a target of mockery by everyone from The New Yorker ("don't wear your crowns outside the office") to Jon Stewart ("The bailouts are working ... for Goldman Sachs").
JPMorgan's profits appeared politely restrained in contrast — but more important, its charismatic, press-friendly chief executive, Jamie Dimon, enjoys a reputation as the biggest hard-ass on Wall Street. Who wants to mess with Jamie? Just to make the distinction clear, the Times featured a picture of Dimon towering a full head above Blankfein as they strode across the White House grounds. The caption, "one bank chief holds sway," strongly implied that the other didn't.
Bank of America and Citigroup's profits may have been an unexpected delight for investors — Citigroup! Profitable! Just like the stories our parents told us! — but a skeptical press immediately dismissed those earnings as the flukes that they were, built on onetime events like selling assets. Dimon and JPMorgan, on the other hand, turned in not only profits, but good profits — moral profits. "Congratulations on a great quarter," gushed CNBC's Melissa Francis to JPMorgan chief financial officer Mike Cavanagh. BreakingViews claimed that the bank, like a finishing-school maiden, had identified all its previous faults and learned from its mistakes. The Times called earnings "stellar" and handed in a Sunday profile on Dimon's friendship with Rahm Emanuel. It's not surprising that Dimon knows how to manage up — he maintained a close relationship with prickly Citigroup architect Sandy Weill for years — but the coup de grâce is the Times anecdote in which Richard Parsons, the chairman of Citigroup, tried to explain the business of banking to President Obama. He was apparently unsuccessful, since Obama interrupted to quip, "All right, I'll ask Jamie." Play again next time, Dick.
It's easy to see why the elevation of Dimon is a good narrative. It bridges the cognitive dissonance of a group of banks that were bloodsucking government-welfare villains three months ago and now appear to be healthy. For the layman, it's hard to tell what changed to make that happen (the real answer is boring: accounting laws and government subsidies for bank debt). The canonization of Dimon helps us put the "good" and the "bad" back into the story.
But make no mistake: Banks are still contending with a host of troubles, and they're still pretty much all in this together. Underneath the profits are a boiling cauldron of troubles with mortgages, consumers, and companies; even the most optimistic pundits concede that things are only less bad, not good.
For his own part, Dimon predicted that unemployment will continue to rise, as will home foreclosures once government moratoriums end. The struggling consumer is supposed to be the source of many of these troubles — JPMorgan lost $1 billion on consumer loans and $4.6 billion on credit-card costs — but that is only part of the story. Many banks — including JPMorgan — are flirting with trading in mortgages again to get to profitability. JPMorgan's big revenues in investment banking — $2.7 billion, or more than any bank in history — came mostly from a one-quarter boom in helping other banks raise money (a factor that also helped boost Goldman Sachs's profits).
More troubling, midsize corporations — a major lending customer for banks — are suffering badly and will continue to. Bank of America's nonperforming commercial loans tripled over the past year and jumped 23 percent just over the past three months. The default rate on corporate leveraged loans — loans held by companies with weak credit ratings — is over 9 percent, a record high according to Standard & Poor's. The ones that aren't defaulting are dropping in market value; JPMorgan is valuing its $3.3 billion of leveraged loans at a pitiful 42 cents on the dollar, down from 80 cents on the dollar a year ago.
What will Dimon do with his power? So far he's used it to advance his bank's cause, arguing against tough accounting laws. But as economist Simon Johnson pointed out, if Dimon continues to oppose the administration's last stand for reform of the banking sector — the creation of a consumer protection agency — he is likely to become less sympathetic to Main Street. More important, the deification of Jamie Dimon leads investors to believe that the bank crisis could end just through good management. Unfortunately, it can't. JPMorgan, like its rivals, turned its fortunes around in large part by accepting government debt subsidies and scoring primo, inexpensive deals for Bear Stearns and Washington Mutual. But the economy as a whole is weak, and any victory that an individual bank enjoys can only be marginal while its debt is still backed by the government. Until we accept that banks — all banks — will continue to struggle, we can write this off as our Quarter of Magical Thinking.
NEW YORK - Frank McCourt, the beloved raconteur and former public school teacher who enjoyed post-retirement fame as the author of "Angela's Ashes," the Pulitzer Prize-winning "epic of... Source: RSS feed - channel BNewsEnter | 20 Jul 2009 | 4:53 am
Author Frank McCourt, whose tragic childhood became creative grist for his first book, the Pulitzer Prize-winning "Angela's Ashes," died Sunday, according to the Web site of his publisher, Simon & Shuster. He was 78.
Front Page: Duo hire writer to adapt classic TV series -- Warner Bros. and Leonardo DiCaprio's Appian Way are moving ahead on a "Twilight Zone" movie, hiring Rand Ravich to pen a script based on the iconic TV series, which melded fantasy, science-fiction and horror elements.
“I regard myself as an unlicensed, self-appointed observer and critic of South African society,” says South Africa–born artist David Goldblatt, who has been photographing the imagery and iconography of apartheid and postapartheid since the sixities. Two floors of the New Museum were just hung with 114 of Goldblatt’s rich, impeccable works, some of them graceful portraits of dilapidated or kitsch scenes — decrepit huts or racially divided beauty contests — others spare, ominous snapshots of makeshift roadside advertisements and abandoned asbestos-ridden mines. The exhibition — 38 pieces of which we’ve included in this slideshow — is part documentary, part high drama.
NEW YORK - Frank McCourt, the beloved raconteur and former public school teacher who enjoyed post-retirement fame as the author of "Angela's Ashes," the Pulitzer Prize-winning "epic of... Source: RSS feed - channel BNewsEnter | 20 Jul 2009 | 12:38 am
Frank McCourt, the Pulitzer-winning author of Angela's Ashes, died this afternoon in a Manhattan hospice facility. According to his brother, the cause was metastatic melanoma. [NYT]
Reuters - Frank McCourt, the Irish American author best known for the Pulitzer Prize-winning memoir "Angela's Ashes" that chronicled his impoverished upbringing, died on Sunday, The New York Times reported. He was 78. Source: Yahoo! News: Entertainment News | 19 Jul 2009 | 11:59 pm
AP - Frank McCourt, the beloved raconteur and former public school teacher who enjoyed post-retirement fame as the author of "Angela's Ashes," the Pulitzer Prize-winning "epic of woe" about his impoverished Irish childhood, died Sunday of cancer.
City at age 78. He was best known for the million-selling "Angela's Ashes," a memoir about his impoverished childhood. The memoir was published in 1996 and won a Pulitzer Prize. ... Source: RSS feed - channel BNewsEnter | 19 Jul 2009 | 11:16 pm
E! Online - Following Thursday's devastating stadium collapse that killed two and injured more than 30, Madonna is continuing to do what she can to support the victims in Marseille.
Harry Potter ruled. Brüno met Doom.
The weekend box office was the domain of Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince, which followed up its big Wednesday opening with a big $79.5...
That's the second-highest start ever for a movie premiering on Wednesday, trailing the $200 million five-day opening for last month's "Transformers: Revenge of the Fallen." Source: FOXNews.com | 19 Jul 2009 | 4:52 pm
The American Idol judge's manager says he hasn't received a proposed contract even though auditions begin Aug. 6. Source: FOXNews.com | 19 Jul 2009 | 4:47 pm
Eccentric YouTube superstar Susan Boyle gets slightly spiffed up and, by the looks of this preview, slightly stiff as well for a Wednesday sitdown with Today's Meredith Vieira.
The...
Front Page: Revenue dipped 8% to $3.6 billion -- NBC Universal profits tumbled 41% last quarter, as robust cable networks couldn't offset the broadcast blues.
Couldn't make it to the hottest star-studded parties this week? No problem, we've got you covered. Come party-crashing with me as I count down the three hottest celeb bashes of the...
Front Page: Five-day domestic take totals $159.7 million -- "Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince" cleared nearly $400 million in its worldwide debut.
A pair of home town stadium concerts over the weekend gave Kid Rock and a couple of his support acts an opportunity to showcase new material for the 40,000 fans who attended each show.
Harry Potter ruled. Brüno met Doom.
The weekend box office was the domain of Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince, which followed up its big Wednesday opening with a big $79.5...
Eccentric YouTube superstar Susan Boyle gets slightly spiffed up and, by the looks of this preview, slightly stiff as well for a Wednesday sitdown with Today's Meredith Vieira.
The...
Couldn't make it to the hottest star-studded parties this week? No problem, we've got you covered. Come party-crashing with me as I count down the three hottest celeb bashes of the...