True myths of New York

A couple of days ago a Frenchman scaled the New York Times building with a banner reading “Global warming kills more people than 9/11 every week”. The climb was technically trivial and the banner was appropriately lame for the venue.

Contrast the tale of Philippe Petit who walked and danced across the high wire which he'd rigged between the Twin Towers in 1974. His motive was as light as Mallory's 'because it's there' about Everest - 'When I see three oranges, I juggle; when I see two towers, I walk.' The image of the young man in the sky is a charm against the image of 9/11.

Another sky-dancer is Pale Male, the Red Tailed Hawk which nests at 927 Fifth Avenue overlooking Central Park and has fathered 26 offspring by 4 mates despite attempted eviction.

I commend the lovely books on these 2 heroes, both of whom still thrive:The Man Who Walked Between the Towers and Pale Male: Citizen Hawk of New York City.

Uncorrelated.com down

Most of my stuff is cross-posted at uncorrelated.com which actually has a readership. Right now that site is down due to an obscure technical quibble by the hosting company. I wonder if there's a political motive. Maestro Mick Stockinger is on the job. Me, I can do without Movable Type and hosting companies. Blogger works fine.

Holkham beach, Norfolk, UK

This is Holkham beach, scene of the last shots of a favourite movie, Shakespeare In Love. The beach stands in both for the New World to which duty and her father drive Gwynneth Paltrow away from Shakespeare and love and for the coast of Illyria in Twelfth Night, which Shakespeare is just imagining. From the film script by Marc Norman and Tom Stoppard:

My story starts at sea,
a perilous voyage
to an unknown land.
A shipwreck.
The wild waters roar and heave.
The brave vessel
is dashed all to pieces,
and all the helpless souls
within her...
drowned.
All save one:
a lady...
whose soul is greater
than the ocean,
and her spirit,
stronger than the sea's embrace.
Not for her a watery end,
but a new life beginning
on a stranger shore.
lt will be a love story,
for she will be my heroine
for all time.

An unexpected call

My friend Gombu Sherpa rang me today from 7000m on Everest. He's General Leader of The First Inclusive Women's Sagarmatha Expedition 2008 Climbing leader is Pemba Sherpa, who's made the fastest ascent of Everest.

Gombu was our kitchen boy in 1983 when with a friend I attempted a first ascent in Kanjiroba Himal in W.Nepal. Since then Gombu has overcome more challenges than even Michelle Obama to provide for his extended family and his home village in the Khumbu Himal by becoming a very serious mountaineer, leader and teacher. When I meet him occasionally in Kathmandu or London or Wales I am refreshed. We are hoping to go back to our 1983 target in the near future and try again. He could carry me up like the Yogistani porter in The Ascent of Rum Doodle. His voice today was crystal clear, as tho he were next to me.

Here's a shot of Lhotse's South Face. Everest's top, with a plume of snow flying in the Jet Stream, is seen low behind at the left :

function follows form

What's Farsi for 'metrosexual'?

Chicagoan, Louis Sullivan, 'the first modern architect', said "Form ever follows function.." For Chicagoan, Obama it's different. The form is prime, enveloping function and disfunction in waffle, cultspeak, wuss-speak, groupspeak and bright shining lies. To me he's transparent - a joke, impossible to take more seriously than the idea of an undergraduate as President. John Bolton says it well:

Look, he has led a very cosseted, privileged existence in his life, that this is not somebody born in poverty who was risen by his bootstraps. He’s had, basically, a fairly comfortable middle class life. He’s gone to Ivy League universities, he’s lived in a liberal bubble in Chicago. And you know, you don’t have to acquire a lot of knowledge to be acceptable in those circles, and I think what we’re seeing is, as he emerges from that bubble, we’re seeing his view of reality.

A stand-up stands up

The Nation of Idiots

This Presidential election is unserious. The deep issue is that Obama is a 'beard' for other forces, starting with his resentful wife who, I suppose, was a big motive for their adherence to the race-baiting Pastor Wright. But they have a neighbour in south Chicago who's a finer orator and finer mind than Wright. When you vote for Obama, know the company you keep...Hamas, big black bodyguards in Nation of Islam uniforms and shades, a leader in white. The tectonic plates of politics are shifting in favour of the young, fertile, sober, religious, organized, determined, Führerprinzip-driven, undemocratic groups which use the freedom of the West to destroy the freedom of the West. There is no shortage of useful idiots: academics as ever, rich liberals yearning for a yuppie messiah to fill their spiritual nothingness, blacks long trained to vote as a block and full of fake victimhood, the media, the always gullible j-school special forces, specialists in selectio veri and suggestion falsi. What you see is what you get:

Downfall

H/t an Obama supporter. Lots of swearing, but I can't help myself either:

Downfall is a good movie with a phenomenal central performance by Bruno Ganz, tho too much time spent on the attractive secretaries emoting at the Fuhrer's meltdown. What an irony that the external scenes were shot in St Petersburg/Leningrad which resembled Berlin thanks to the German architects who built in St Petersburg.

Is Boris Goodenough? Still waiting.

More reaction to the UK local government elections:

UPDATE: It's 7.30pm. Still no result, but a strong presumption that Boris will triumph. Since it's on my doorstep, I nipped down to poke around. I just took this shot of a tiny Anarchist demo in front of City Hall. I chatted with a grungy anarchist from Sweden, but his thinking conformed to liberal/socialist/anarcho sterotype: little verbal tricks trotted out instead of thought. Honestly, there should be no representation without taxation and no right to vote for childless under 25's either (military excepted).

UPDATE:  Boris has won!

Is Boris Goodenough?

The votes are still being counted to elect the next Mayor of London. It's between Red Ken and Blonde Boris. Ken can only hang on by virtue of a high turnout of the Islamic block vote. Boris would increase the gaiety of nations and scrape away some of the pc gunge that infects politics.

Most results are in from the rest of the country's local government contests. Labour's getting trashed by the Conservatives, a good omen for Boris, but very, very bad for Gordon Brown. Brown may be defenestrated over the next few months to be replaced by David Miliband, boy wonder Foreign Secretary. It looks a dead cert that within 2 years we'll have a Conservative government led by the world-class creep, David Cameron.

I took this snap of the top of City Hall from my living room just now. Near top right there's an interview being shot. I can watch it simultaneously on tv.

Here's a Boris clip to while away the tense hours. Hilarity starts 3 minutes in:

'An armed society society is a polite society'

I'm a Londoner who survived living in Houston, plays soccer in Harlem and often braves the sinister suburbs of northern New Jersey with my little girls (they seem strangely nonchalant),so I was struck by this article, America's 'safety catch' from the BBC's N.American editor:

Why is it then that so many Americans - and foreigners who come here - feel that the place is so, well, safe?

I have met incredulous British tourists who have been shocked to the core by the peacefulness of the place
A British man I met in Colorado recently told me he used to live in Kent but he moved to the American state of New Jersey and will not go home because it is, as he put it, "a gentler environment for bringing the kids up."

This is New Jersey. Home of the Sopranos.

Brits arriving in New York, hoping to avoid being slaughtered on day one of their shopping mission to Manhattan are, by day two, beginning to wonder what all the fuss was about. By day three they have had had the scales lifted from their eyes.

I have met incredulous British tourists who have been shocked to the core by the peacefulness of the place, the lack of the violent undercurrent so ubiquitous in British cities, even British market towns.

I confess a sneaky pleasure at the advertised edginess of London life, tho the truth is more humdrum.

H/T Biased BBC.