Blame it on Spitzer! All of it!

We need a correction, please. The story, about big bills coming due to local counties because the state has kept open near-empty juvenile jails, has a howler in it:

Borges said the state simply failed to adjust the rates when it should have, from 2002 until 2006, when the Democratic regime of then-Gov. Eliot Spitzer was in place.

Um, actually, George Pataki, a Republican, was governor from 2002-2006.
Spitzer, despite his many diabolical talents, had not yet mastered time travel to stage a coup and unseat Pataki earlier in the century. The Luv Guv took office in 2007 and was gone the next year. And Spitzer tried to close the juvenile facilities but was out of office before he could follow through.

Squirrelly

Lost in the latest mayoral public display of outrage against city electrical workers (Angry Mayor Don is upset that employees let a guy with a camera too near them while they worked) is the fact that the Plattsburgh Municipal Lighting District employees did their jobs, and well.
A squirrel got caught in the works and shut down power in the middle of a winter's day. That's kind of scary up here. MLD solved it, pronto. That was impressive, so I wrote this letter to my councilman, Mike Kelly:

Mike,
I was already leaning this way, but today we had a power outage in our neighborhood, and MLD fixed the problem (an errant and now deceased squirrel caused it, we hear) within 30 minutes. We, like a lot of Plattsburghers, rely on electric heat. I hate to think what would happen if we had to go through a night, or several nights, without power.
A back of the envelope cost calculation: Do I pay $5 to $10 a month more, or buy a $4,000-$5,000 generator?
Those six jobs are a helluvan insurance policy.
Keep em.

I'm all for keeping paparazzi at bay. Pretty sure this could have been handled in private, though, no?

A bad idea

Jim Tedisco, 20th Congressional District candidate, in the New York Times yesterday:

Around the corner at the village’s aging sports complex, he vowed to “be the congressman who brings the Olympics back to Lake Placid.”

There's this, uh, financial crisis, and we just don't have the money to finance the facilities, pay for the security, build the hotels or pay off the bribes required to hold the Olympics here.
And that's assuming the IOC would ever consider the region again. 1980 was great. Time to move on.

We got Nate!

Nate Silver, that is, talking about why A-Rod won't pass Barry Bonds, statistical-projectionally speaking. Another reason to subscribe to Insider today!

The big picture

A couple of Monday readings.
This Atlantic piece by Richard Florida is getting lots of blogosphere attention, and the writer was on NPR today. Great stuff about the opportunities in the economic shakeup, including this passage:

Along with the rise of mega-regions, a second phenomenon is also reshaping the economic geography of the United States and the world. The ability of different cities and regions to attract highly educated people—or human capital—has diverged, according to research by the Harvard economists Edward Glaeser and Christopher Berry, among others. Thirty years ago, educational attainment was spread relatively uniformly throughout the country, but that’s no longer the case. Cities like Seattle, San Francisco, Austin, Raleigh, and Boston now have two or three times the concentration of college graduates of Akron or Buffalo. Among people with postgraduate degrees, the disparities are wider still. The geographic sorting of people by ability and educational attainment, on this scale, is unprecedented.
The University of Chicago economist and Nobel laureate Robert Lucas declared that the spillovers in knowledge that result from talent-clustering are the main cause of economic growth. Well-educated professionals and creative workers who live together in dense ecosystems, interacting directly, generate ideas and turn them into products and services faster than talented people in other places can. There is no evidence that globalization or the Internet has changed that. Indeed, as globalization has increased the financial return on innovation by widening the consumer market, the pull of innovative places, already dense with highly talented workers, has only grown stronger, creating a snowball effect. Talent-rich ecosystems are not easy to replicate, and to realize their full economic value, talented and ambitious people increasingly need to live within them.

Time for a SUNY Plattsburgh-McGill University-University of Vermont research triangle. Linked to New York, Montreal and Boston by Supertrains!
And if you want something a bit less optimistic--OK, a whole lot less--read this from Jim Kunstler.

Brushback pitch

Baseball Hall of Famer, U.S. Senator and, apparently, wannabe Surgeon General Jim Bunning plays some chin music for Ruth Bader Ginsburg. Classy!

Obama and sports

I hadn't realized my piece on the First Fan was on the free part of the magazine's web site. Come for the story, stay for the comments!

Where's our Supertrain?

The stimulus gave a decent chunk of money for high-speed rail. Huzzah! But what's wrong with this picture? And this one?
The absence of a perfectly logical link from Albany, through Plattsburgh, to Montreal, that's what. Local officials and business leaders need to make sure the North Country is part of any Empire rail plan, or risk becoming a permanent backwater. This could make a great signature issue for the new senator from upstate.

Damn DVR

So I've been trying to catch up on college hoops, and wanted a close look at Maryland's Greivis Vasquez, a Venezuelan who mysteriously escaped the clutches of baseball buscones and fittingly is nicknamed after this guy.
And the general was magnificent, scoring Maryland's first 16 points and posting a triple double against North Carolina. It was a great game, down to the wire, and thanks to the magic of digital video recording, I'd been able to delay watching the contest and instead walk out onto the frozen expanse of Lake Champlain. Win-win! And I could skip through the commercials, too.
And then with a minute and a half left in regulation, the recording cut off, having expired at 6 pm, just like it was supposed to. But the game didn't. It had continued, into overtime, and through to a huge upset victory for Maryland.
I am fully aware that no televised sporting event finishes on time any more. Sometimes, I even remember to record the first 30 minutes of the following program. But most times, like Charlie Brown and the football, I trust the TV gatekeepers and their tidy, lifestyle-friendly computronic techmology, and keep setting myself up for failure.

Pork and perks

Evidently, fiscal conservatives like the stuff, too. Here's a classic quote, about a heretofore secret GOP TV studio in Long Island:

Rich Azzopardi, a spokesman for Senator Craig M. Johnson — who had been the lone Long Island Democrat until November’s election — said he had heard “vague rumors” about the existence of the facility. He guffawed when asked if Mr. Johnson had ever been invited by the Republicans to use it.
“No,” Mr. Azzopardi said, “I don’t believe they ever gave us the password that shut down the waterfall to enter the cave leading into the studio.”

I want me one of them Bruno-mobiles, "with leather conference chairs and a conference table."
Wonder how much they'll find up North Country way?
h/t TG

USA 2, Mexico 0

Bradley the younger has quite a night. But a key moment came just after Mexico's captain Rafael Marquez flew into US goalie Tim Howard with his spikes up, earning Marquez a red card. A scuffle ensued, and US captain Carlos Bocanegra and Landon Donovan quickly moved the sometimes hot-headed Bradley and several other players away from the argument, preventing any escalation, and maybe a Yank booking.
And yes, I'm a sucker for Spanish soccer announcing.

In China, they'd kill him

When industrialists who knowingly make deadly products are found out, our friends in Beijing make sure there are consequences. Just sayin'.

Giants in the arena

Speaking of the sports/politics beat, Morris County in New Jersey has not one, but two former Jints linemen working in the trenches of power. As it happens, Roman Oben was one of my favorite players to deal with when covering the team a decade ago.

Dream job

I like mine fine, but Fred Frommer has a brand new beat I'll admit to being a tad jealous of: sports and politics. Smart move by the AP.

Fria to be, yanqui?

I break down Wednesday's U.S.-Mexico soccer clash, kickin' it Cantore-style, on ESPN Insider. Subscribe now!

How do the Cards stack up?

Find out everything you need to know about small-college hockey on this locally produced site.

Hey Andrew, shove it!

He's talented, for sure, but Sully really crashed the plane this time. It's fine to rip someone who rips Michael Phelps. Insulting George Vecsey like that, though, no matter how wrongheaded the Timesman's take is on Phelps, is just plain ignorant. Vecsey is a giant of the business who covered labor and religion for the Times news side and wrote "Coal Miner's Daughter," for heaven's sake.
And I'd trade a dozen sports columnists and beat writers I know for the very serious political pundits who were wrong about Iraq:

Yes, the incompetence and arrogance were beyond anything I imagined...But my biggest misreading was not about competence. Wars are often marked by incompetence. It was a fatal misjudgment of Bush's sense of morality. I had no idea he was so complacent—even glib—about the evil that good intentions can enable. I truly did not believe that Bush would use 9/11 to tear up the Geneva Conventions.

It's pretty clear from his time in baseball that Bush was not competent as an owner; his teams didn't win, despite an early-and-often entry into the roid race. He was more than willing to tear up people's property deeds to get a new stadium through eminent domain. Several sportswriters wrote about this after conservative, small-government, property-rights-loving commentators like George Will and Andrew Sullivan failed to. So, really, spare us the insults.

Catching up on...

Got behind on some reading but am trying to make up ground. Let's start with this New Yorker piece about movie marketing. I've marveled that I haven't been to more than three movies in the past three years, and now I know why. I'm an older man:

An unexpected corollary of the modern marketing-and-distribution model is that films no longer have time to find their audience; that audience has to be identified and solicited well in advance. Marketers segment the audience in a variety of ways, but the most common form of partition is the four quadrants: men under twenty-five; older men; women under twenty-five; older women. A studio rarely makes a film that it doesn’t expect will succeed with at least two quadrants...

The collective wisdom is that young males like explosions, blood, cars flying through the air, pratfalls, poop jokes, “you’re so gay” banter, and sex—but not romance. Young women like friendship, pop music, fashion, sarcasm, sensitive boys who think with their hearts, and romance—but not sex (though they like to hear the naughty girl telling her friends about it). They go to horror films as much as young men, but they hate gore; you lure them by having the ingénue take her time walking down the dark hall.

Older women like feel-good films and Nicholas Sparks-style weepies: they are the core audience for stories of doomed love and triumphs of the human spirit...Particularly once they reach thirty, these women are the most “review-sensitive”: a chorus of critical praise for a movie aimed at older women can increase the opening weekend’s gross by five million dollars. In other words, older women are discriminating, which is why so few films are made for them.

Older men like darker films, classic genres such as Westerns and war movies, men protecting their homes, and men behaving like idiots. Older men are easy to please, particularly if a film stars Clint Eastwood and is about guys just like them, but they’re hard to motivate. “Guys only get off their couches twice a year, to go to ‘Wild Hogs’ or ‘3:10 to Yuma,’ ” the marketing consultant Terry Press says. “If all you have is older males, it’s time to take a pill.”

And I didn't even bother with "3:10 to Yuma." Or "Wild Hogs."
Maybe it's because so many movies make me feel like whoever made them thinks I'm stupid. And maybe that's because, as this Harper's essay (subscription required for the whole thing) points out, I am stupid:

What we need to talk about, what someone needs to talk about, particularly now, is our ever-deepening ignorance (of politics, of foreign languages, of history, of science, of current affairs, of pretty much everything) and not just our ignorance but our complacency in the face of it, our growing fondness for it. A generation ago the proof of our foolishness, held up to our faces, might still have elicited some redeeming twinge of shame--no longer. Today, across vast swaths of the republic, it amuses and comforts us. We're deeply loyal to it...
Wherever it may have resided before, the brain in America has migrated to the region of the belt--not below it, which might at least be diverting, but only as far as the gut--where it has come to a stop. The gut tells us things. It tells us what's right and what's wrong, who to hate and what to believe and who to vote for.

What's left of my mind recognizes a good, informative piece when it sees one, and so I offer this cool story on Somalian piracy from fellow mag writer Shaun Assael.
But my gut tells me to go off to my favorite event of the year, a huge Pro Bowl party! Just love the commercials!

Catching up with...

Still employed, which is good, but that meant I was too busy to blog, which is probably also good. Anyhow, several developments, all of which would have been worthy of separate posts had they been timely, but which now require a big computer mashup, a la Girl Talk, only less lyrical.
Leading off, while Sen. Gillibrand is no Roger Goodell, I'll concede she is somebody's kid. She's still a good choice for my neighborhood's needs, and if she screws up, so what? The people get to decide if they like her Bride of Chucky pose in two years. And Dems who worry about giving the 20th CD back to the GOP in the special election shouldn't. That seat is likely to be redistricted, possibly out of existence, by the legislature after the next census.
Downstream from that, I'm sorry we won't see Donny vs. Danny. Too bad Betty Little was born a woman and resides in the Congressional district she wanted to represent. Those both disqualify her for the nomination.
Nonetheless, Dan Stewart stays in our consciousness, thanks to this publicity whore, who evidently was jealous of the other guy named Phelps getting all the ink. Tough to tell which one is blowing more smoke. By the way, the swimmer's agent better send a big FTD order to A-Rod for leading the media DEA in a different direction.
But enough about others. I did this and this for the Super Bowl, as well as a mag preview of Wednesday's big U.S.-Mexico soccer match, which should go online next week, and in the coming issue there's a piece on sports and the presidency--including a really cool Nixon photo.
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One more note on Super Bowl stuff. I saw very little of the pregame hype but highly recommend this and this. The fact that both writers have come to speak to my Plattsburgh State class has nothing to do with these selections.

Plattsburgh drive-in blues

This is the first thing I'll post when I learn how to embed YouTube videos.