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Edwin Starr Dies

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



  • Agent Double-O Soul

  • Twenty Five Miles

  • War

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


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


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


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


 

Free Wi-Fi Hotspots in Lower Manhattan

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


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



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


 

Bomb Scare and Evacuation

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I live on a mostly residential block on the neighborhood’s main commercial street. My building is nearly at the end of the street that runs into the Brooklyn Heights Promenade, which overlooks lower Manhattan.


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


At 10:30am, my babysitter called, saying she couldn’t get past the barricade at the corner. Say what? I told her to grab a cup of coffee at the Starbucks on the next blook, put on some shoes, grabbed my keys, and stepped out the front door. I saw barricades at both ends of the block. A cop across the street yelled at me to get back inside; they thought there was a bomb in a car parked in front of the building two doors down.


After a half hour or so, she called again asking if I knew anything else. I went outside the apartment door and ran into some neighbors and their kids. They said a plainclothes cop had come to their door and told them to evacuate. I collared a cop on the street and asked what the deal was; he said the suspected bomb wasn’t in front of the neighboring building but was more or less across the street and maybe five car lengths to the left in a Fire Zone at the corner. Someone saw a gun and some PVC pipes with wires sticking out of them, and he said it’d be a good idea to scram.


I called my wife, called the babysitter to tell her I’d be out shortly, and started packing. Woke the kids, changed and dressed them. Grabbed some food for them, tossed them in the stroller, and scrammed. During all this, I heard a large-ish crash out in the street, but I didn’t see anything odd out the window.


The street was pretty empty; I’d been counting on there being a cop to direct me. I headed away from where I’d been told the suspected bomb was (a good idea, it seemed to me). At the next corner, behind the barricade I saw some guys in uniform gesturing, but it was really too far to see what the gesture was. One uniform started toward me, and we met up two doors down — in front of the apartment building where I’d first been told the device was.


The cop — wearing an Inspector’s badge (Inspector is a *very* high rank in the NYPD; they command precincts and higher) suggested that I get into that building before something untoward happened. I said a task force sergeant had told me to leave my building, and he said he thought that had not been an excellent suggestion. So there I was, in the lobby of a building not my own with my twins. Indeed, I should have stayed put.


The suspected explosive was in a car owned by the super of the building I’d taken refuge in, the one where the bomb went off two years ago. The car was parked in a fire zone roughly 50 feet from my front window.


Over the next hour or so, several other strays came by, unaware of what was happening and similarly brought off the street by Inspector O’Brien. Turns out that O’Brien is the Brooklyn commander of the Counter Terrorism Task Force. Nice guy. The radiation detector on his belt kept going off, but he says all kinds of things do that, including the bricks in a lot of buildings.


The loud crash I heard was the bomb squad busting into the car. A similar explosion a little later was the same. I’d hate to have to explain it to the car insurance people.


Eventually, the Bomb Squad got the thing out of the car — it was five 18-inch lengths of PVC pipe filled with gasoline and drywall nails, with wires running in (no detonator, no means for detonation) — and they let people who were on the block either get off the block or go home. Pedestrians were allowed back at about 3p, but the block wasn’t opened for cars until after sundown.


Here’s how the NYDailyNews, the NYPost, and the NYTimes covered it. Read carefully, and you’ll see some provocative details. One thing not brought out especially well: the 911 calls came from pay phones roughly a half-mile from the car; there’s a working phone literally across the street from where the car was parked.


So how was your Monday?


 

Is This Ominous?

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I was just looking at the logs for this web site, and noticed asomething interesting. Someone from within the “af.mil” domain — that’s the US Air Force — peeked in not long ago as a result of an MSN search. Our seeker had entered a search for the string “pictures of Bagdhad.”


With that misspelling, there’s just one result on the entire Internet. I’ve fixed the typo, but the question remains: why is some flyboy cruising the Net for pix of Baghdad? Isn’t that what the CIA is for?


 

The Aerial War

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When the World Trade Center was destroyed, so was New York’s main broadcast antenna. (In fact, six broadcast techs died in the collapse.) Ever since, people have been looking for a new place to build a mast.


The NYDailyNews reports today that Univision is close to a deal to occupy a new antenna atop 4 Times Square, the Conde Nast building, at Broadway and 42nd Street. It would reach 1,142 feet above street level and be the first new antenna in midtown since the Empire State’s antenna went up in 1938. (Yes, the antenna was added several years after the building was finished; before that, it was a dirigible mooring dock. Watch the end of 1933’s King Kong if you think I’m kidding.)


Other broadcasters want to put a 2,000-foot tower on Governor’s Island, perfectly situated in New York Harbor, but the city is saying No. The group is instead looking at a site in Bayonne, N.J. And the 1,776-foot spire in the plans for the new Trade Center won’t be built for another decade, in all probability.


 

Victory! Now, On To Maury!

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Ed points out the following at the Borowitz Report:



 Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld told reporters at the Pentagon today that the U.S. has succeeded in removing Connie Chung from the airwaves, a primary objective of Operation Iraqi Freedom.

ãTo those critics who would say that this campaign isnât moving quickly enough, let me say this: itâs only been a week and weâve already gotten Connie Chungâs show cancelled,ä Rumsfeld said. ãGoodness gracious, Iâd say weâre on track.ä


 

Apple Bafflegab

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So I had a spare couple of minutes today, and I stepped into Apple’s luxe storefront in SoHo to check out the new 17-inch Powerbook. Apparently, words south of Houston Street don’t mean the same thing as they do elsewhere.


When you walk into the store, you’re likely to see a sign that says “17-inch Powerbook. In stock now.” Given the highly restricted supply of the machines (the Apple web site cites a 3-to-5 week delivery interval), this was something of a surprise.


I cruised over the Powerbook table, which was full of 12-inchers and 15-inchers. No 17s. I found a salescritter and asked if they had any on display. He led me over to the front window, where there was a 17-inch model on a turntable.


“Would you like to buy one?” he asked prematurely, as he reached to take the computer off its pedestal and put it on a nearby counter. “Well, I’d certainly like to take a look at it first,” I said, lowering the immense screen to its latched position.


The salesman moved the screen away from my hand. “Doesn’t that hinge have a great feel to it?”


“Can’t tell. Let me take a look, will you?” I pressed the power switch a couple of times. Nothing. I latched the screen and picked up the unit and turned it over, finding that there was no battery installed. It was impossible to tell the unit’s true weight, or what the screen looked like in action, two important points for a machine that makes a big deal out of its portablility and screen real estate. I did notice that the closed lid did not meet the bottom of the unit uniformly across the width of the unit.


“So would you like one?” the salesman asked again.


“Are they in stock?”


“Yes they are. I’d be happy to put you on the list.”


“So they’re not in stock.”


“Yes they are. We have a list of 300 people waiting to get theirs.”


“There’s a waiting list? So they aren’t in stock.”


“Yes, they’re in stock,” he said. “But they go out to people who have already ordered them.”


“Oh. How long would I have to wait before I can come get my ‘in stock’ laptop?”


He shrugged. “No way of telling. Probably a couple or three weeks.”


At Apple, “in stock” does not appear to mean Give Us Money And We Give You Goods. I kind of wonder what “in stock” means to the NYC Department of Consumer Affairs…


 

Adam Osborne Dies

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A lot of people have forgotten about Adam Osborne, which is a shame because he’s one of the most important people in the history of computerdom.


He didn’t make the first portable PC; that came from Kaypro. But there was something completely sexy about the Osborne 1, a CP/M-based machine that looked like a Korean War-era radio crammed into a sewing machine enclosure. The Osborne came with a complete suite of software from WordStar, and the computer’s tiny screen wasn’t even wide enough to display a full-width document.


But for less than $2000, it was a real honest-to-god computer that could actually do things, a true geek lust object. And what’s more, you could take it with you. Good lord, I spent a lot of time at my local Prodigy computer store in the early 80s, trying to imagine how I could possibly scrape together the money on my pitiful UPI salary.


The company grew like a dot-com, until Adam made one titanic error: he announced an IBM compatible model, but it didn’t ship for months. Sales of the old model instantly dropped to near zero, and his company just vanished.


Osborne — a columnist, book publisher, computer entrepreneur, software publisher — was a wild man in an industry that badly needed them at the time. He faded from the scene in the late 80s, and the word was that he fell quite ill. Adam passed away the other day in India.