cover photo



blog archive

main site

artwork

bio






Schwarz



View current page
...more recent posts

They've been calling it Groundhogs Day since the election but last night Greenfield on cnn mentioned another one going around, "The Sienfeld election", you know the election about nothing. But he was actually able to trace it down to a single episode. The one where Georges family celebrates Festifus (sp?). Festifus, celebrated in the holiday season culminates with the anual, "Airing of the Grievences"....he went on to run down the two very familiar D an R lists.
[link] [add a comment]

Last night Jeff Greenfield on cnn sited a republican report which described Gores "Blue" won states as "The Porn Belt". Equating liberal pro "freedom of speach" areas with porn concentrations.


[link] [add a comment]

From todays NYT "In Stress of Recount, Complaints get Bizarre" by Lynette Holloway - Plantation Fla.

......Matthew C. Rhoades, 25 a research analyst for The Republican National Comitee, said that on Friday he saw a Democratic counter in the room eating a chad, the piece of the punch-card ballot that is supposed to fall out when a voter punches in his choice.

"We couldn't find a camera," Mr. Rhoades said,"and we were about to sweep them off the table. But right before that, a Democratic counter put one on his finger, joking around, held it up and then threw it in his mouth."


[link] [add a comment]

Her Name is Kathy and she works for Jeb

Katherine Harris no stranger to controversy By Dara Kim Nov. 13, 2000

| TALLAHASSEE, Fla. (AP) -- A Harvard-educated blueblood from one of Florida's wealthiest families, Secretary of State Katherine Harris is no stranger to controversy. She's been investigated for campaign finance violations and criticized for spending state money jetting around the world, spending up to $500 a night for hotel rooms in Washington. She's also been one of George W. Bush's most prominent political supporters, campaigning for him in Florida and elsewhere.

Harris placed herself in the middle of the increasingly partisan struggle over Florida's 25 electoral votes Monday with her public announcement that all 67 counties are required by law to wrap up their recounts by 5 p.m. Tuesday.

She sits as one of six elected members on the Florida Cabinet, which with Gov. Jeb Bush, decides on issues ranging from the mundane to the momentous affecting schools, the environment and other statewide concerns.

As secretary of state, Harris oversees elections, the state's historical and cultural resources and also keeps the state's public records. She makes $106,000 a year. "For what is probably the easiest of the Cabinet positions, she's made it awful difficult," said state Democratic Party spokesman Tony Welch.

In her first two years on the job, Harris spent $100,000 in Florida tax dollars on foreign trade missions to places like Barbados and Brazil as well as the Sydney Olympics. Her travel expenses were significantly higher than the other five Cabinet members and three times more than Gov. Jeb Bush.

Harris defended her travel, saying she has brought millions of dollars of international trade to the state and established cultural ties such as a cooperative ballet between the state and Mexico. Sandra Mortham, the incumbent who lost to Harris in a nasty Republican primary in 1998, said every secretary of state emphasizes their own key areas of concern. "For me, it was elections, and it was to get the elections online and on the Internet," Mortham said. "Katherine has decided that she wanted to move the office more into the area of international relations." Ben McKay, Harris' chief of staff, said Harris was too busy with Monday's court hearing to return calls.

In 1994, Harris became implicated in a campaign finance scheme surrounding her first run for public office. She was forced to reimburse $20,000 after state investigators discovered that employees of Riscorp, Inc., an insurer, were improperly reimbursed for their contributions to her 1994 Senate campaign. She said she had no knowledge that anything was amiss with the contributions.

This year, Harris approved a taxpayer-financed public service announcement featuring retired Gen. Norman Schwartzkopf, a Bush ally, urging Floridians to vote. She received criticism for spending the public's $30,000 to finance the ads, which aired during the final month of the presidential campaign. McKay said Harris' office asked Schwartzkopf, as a prominent Floridian, to make the ads months ago, after Gloria Estefan and Tiger Woods turned down the request.

Harris, 43, earned a degree in history from the all-female Agnes Scott College in Georgia, received a master's degree in public administration from Harvard and she studied art and Spanish in Madrid, and philosophy and religion in Geneva.

Her grandfather, citrus magnate Ben Hill Griffin, served as a longtime legislator. He was also a friend of former state Republican Party chairman, Tom Slade, who hand-picked Harris for her Senate run. Her cousin, J.D. Alexander, is a state representative.

The Cabinet job, one that has been largely ceremonial, is being abolished after Harris' current term, which expires in January 2003.

Harris, who is married to businessman Anders Ebbeson, listed her net worth as more than $6.5 million as of December 1999, according to her latest financial disclosure.

Associated Press


[link] [add a comment]

Palm Beach County suspends hand count By Jackie Hallifax
Nov. 14, 2000 | TALLAHASSEE, Fla. (AP) --

With a deadline fast approaching, judges in three Florida cities are deciding the fate of recounted votes while Republican George W. Bush's legal team weighs whether to appeal to a higher federal court.

Amid the swirl of legal maneuvers, officials in Palm Beach County voted 2-1 on Tuesday to delay their manual recount until they can clarify whether they have the legal authority to proceed.

The county, a Democratic stronghold, had planned to count, by hand about 425,000 ballots -- exactly one week after voters first complained they were confused by their ballots. Their outcry unleashed a political tide that froze Florida's 25 electoral votes and left Americans waiting to see who their 43rd president will be. "The opinion we have received is that this manual recount is not authorized by Florida statutes. It is my understanding that an advisory opinion is in fact binding on this board," said Judge Charles Burton. Burton had opposed the canvassing commission's earlier decision to order a hand count. A federal judge who turned away Bush's initial effort to stop the recounting agreed Monday the stakes couldn't be higher. "I believe these are serious arguments. The question becomes who should consider them," said U.S. District Judge Donald Middlebrooks, who declined Bush's request for emergency federal intervention and ruled the issue was best left to local courts. Among the critical issues to be resolved in local courts -- whether counties can continue recounting votes beyond a 5 p.m. Tuesday deadline set by Florida's Republican secretary of state, Katherine Harris. In Tallahassee, a judge expressed doubts about the deadline as he weighed a request from Vice President Al Gore and two counties to give more time for recounting that could stretch into the weekend in Palm Beach County.

Leon County Circuit Judge Terry P. Lewis repeatedly questioned Monday why the state had set the Tuesday deadline when absentee votes can continue to be counted through the end of the week. "What's the good of doing a certification ahead of time?" Lewis asked. He also questioned how a large county could ever get a hand recount done within seven days since voters have three days before they even have to request one. Lewis was expected to rule Tuesday.

Republicans argue the manual recounting should be ended because the process is prone to abuse and political bias. Democrats hope the recounts will help Gore pick up enough votes to overcome Bush's narrow lead in the state, which an informal Associated Press tally put at 388 votes.

On other legal fronts:

--In West Palm Beach, a judge is considering the lawsuits of voters seeking a new vote in their county. The voters argue the punch-card ballots they were given on Election Day may have confused them enough to mistakenly vote for Reform Party candidate Pat Buchanan when they intended to vote for Gore.

--The Florida Democratic Party sued the Palm Beach County Canvassing Board on Monday evening, challenging the board's method of reading the ballots. The party wants "pregnant chads" -- dimpled fragments not detached from the card -- counted as votes.

--Democrats prepared to go to court in Broward County to overturn a decision by officials there not to order a countywide manual recount. The county's canvassing board decided Monday against the recount, after counting a sample of votes by hand in three precincts and finding no major discrepancies. "We intend to file litigation seeking judicial relief from this decision, which we think was based on an erroneous legal decision sent down by the secretary of state," Democratic National Committee spokeswoman Jenny Backus said. While Volusia County sought to wrap up its second recount, officials in Miami-Dade County -- the state's most populous -- were to vote Tuesday on whether to conduct a recount requested by Gore's campaign.

Bush's legal team is weighing whether to escalate a fight it began in federal court. The options include appealing Middlebrooks' decision to the 11th Circuit Court of Appeals in Atlanta, or possibly going to the U.S. Supreme Court on an emergency basis, according to Republican officials familiar with Bush's strategy.

The sources, speaking on condition of anonymity, said the possibility that Republicans would seek to expand voter recounts to other Florida counties where Bush fared well was "perceived as unlikely" at this time because deadlines for requesting such recounts had expired in many counties.

Bush's lead lawyer sounded his main argument against further recounting on Monday. "The process, to sum it up, is selective, standardless, subjective, unreliable and inherently biased," Theodore Olson argued.

Senior Gore adviser Warren Christopher, a former U.S. Secretary of State, acknowledged that the legal back-and-forth "seems to be getting a little bit argumentative," but said his side believed the recounts were the only way "to defend the rights of the voters of Florida to have a fair outcome."

Associated Press


[link] [add a comment]

A tree Grows in.....

....this is a send out to Porf. Wilson

By MICHAEL CREWDSON and MARGARET MITTELBACH - 11/11/00 for NYT

When we heard that the New York City Department of Parks had published "Great Trees of New York City," a guide to the city's most impressive trees, we were intrigued. Although New York has no hulking redwoods, we had heard for years about a monster tree in Queens that was said to be the biggest in all five boroughs. According to the tree grapevine, this behemoth is a tulip tree (Liriodendron tulipifera) growing in an obscure corner of Alley Pond Park, a 635-acre swath of green in northeast Queens that stretches from Union Turnpike to Little Neck Bay.

Yet as we flipped through the pages of the guide, we saw that the biggest-tree title was awarded to another tulip tree, one in Staten Island's Clove Lakes Park. The Queens tree was not even mentioned. This left us wondering. Was the Queens giant a myth, the plant version of Bigfoot? Was it a largish tree that had been exaggerated out of all proportion? Or was it a sleeping giant that had been forgotten? A series of calls to the Parks Department's press office revealed there was no recorded data for any "great tree" in Alley Pond Park. So we decided to go on a fact-finding mission. We would track down both the Queens and Staten Island trees and measure them, branch to branch, leaf to leaf.,br>
Tree measuring used to be a simple affair, an exercise for teaching schoolchildren a little geometry. You simply paced off 100 feet from the base of the tree, determined the angle at which you stood to the treetop and performed a little trigonometric calculation.

We immediately noticed two problems with this method. First, it assumed the tree was growing on flat ground. Second, it assumed you were listening during high school math class.

We concluded that bringing in experts would be absolutely necessary.

Bob Leverett, a co-founder of the Eastern Native Tree Society, is sometimes called the "guru of Eastern ancient forests." He's the co-author of "Stalking the Forest Monarchs: A Guide to Measuring Champion Trees," and describes himself as a "big-tree hunter." If anyone was going to determine the exact height of these trees, he would be the one.

There was only one problem: Mr. Leverett lives in western Massachusetts, and he is reluctant to take his car into perilous city traffic. Besides, his tree-measuring abilities are in high demand. On the weekend we were planning our tree safari, he was already scheduled to measure big trees in the Adirondacks with Bruce Kershner, a Buffalo-based forest ecologist. The two men are writing a book together, "The Sierra Club Guide to the Ancient Forests of the Northeast," due from Random House next spring. But when Mr. Kershner got wind of what we were up to, he agreed to postpone their Adirondack plans.

Born and reared in New York City, Mr. Kershner had not only heard of the Queens giant but had also seen it. He had also roughly measured the Staten Island tree five years ago, and he wanted Mr. Leverett to get a crack at it.

We rendezvoused with them on a Saturday morning in Bayside, a residential neighborhood in Queens, and caravaned together to 58th Road and East Hampton Boulevard, a quiet street opposite fenced-in woods. This sylvan site is the reputed home of the Queens giant, a narrow parcel of parkland amputated from the rest of Alley Pond Park by the crisscrossing of the Long Island Expressway and the Cross Island Parkway.

When we stepped out onto the street, Mr. Leverett began to brief us on the details of tree measuring, tossing out terms we hadn't used for a while, like hypotenuse. Oh, yes — the long arm of a right triangle. Suddenly, Mr. Kershner stopped the math talk and said, "I just want to point out how bizarre this is, looking for a giant tree on the edge of a busy highway in Queens."

Both men were prepared for a hard-core trek, with hiking boots, heavy pants and packs. Normally they do their research in the wilderness of state and national parks, searching for pockets of ancient forest. We asked Mr. Leverett, who grew up in a small town in the mountains of Tennessee, what he thought of it all. He considered carefully before answering. "This is an old city with a lot of history," he said in a soft Southern accent. "There's a lot of places for a big tree to hide out."

We wended our way down to a sidewalk alongside the Long Island Expressway and, ignoring a sign that read "Trail Closed," went a few yards farther and found a rough trail leading into the woodland's interior. The blare of traffic dulled slightly as we were enveloped by green. Before walking even 10 feet down the trail, Mr. Leverett and Mr. Kershner were identifying trees and estimating their ages. One big tulip tree, they agreed, was about 200 years old, a red oak was about 150 and a beech had to be at least 80. They knew this, because the beech had "1920" carved into its smooth bark.

"These are big trees," Mr. Kershner said, with an edge of excitement in his voice. "This looks like an old-growth forest."

Mr. Leverett has logged tens of thousands of miles measuring trees in the Great Smoky Mountains, the Adirondacks and New England, and he's seen some monster flora. Yet, as we walked deeper into this tiny patch of woods, perhaps another 100 feet along the trail, he abruptly let out a shout. "Whooohooooo!" he yelled. "That is a large vegetable. Ohhh, this is an old tree." Apparently, the Queens giant was for real.

Our eyes popped when we saw it. If tulips are skyscrapers among trees — the tallest species that grows in this region — then this was the Empire State Building. It dwarfed the other trees in the woods, and its massive arrow-straight trunk shot high into the canopy. The girth of the trunk was so wide you would need a whole team of tree-huggers to embrace it properly.

The only sign that anyone was aware that this tree was special was that it was enclosed by a low, broken- down chain-link fence that offered, if nothing else, symbolic protection. We scrambled over it, and Mr. Leverett began taking measurements. He whipped out a tape measure, hooked it onto a furrow of the gnarled, reddish bark and slowly circled the tree, disappearing briefly: "18.6 feet in circumference," he said, noting this down in a black binder.

Getting the tree's height was slightly trickier. We followed him up the steep slope on which the tree was growing and noticed that these woods were a bit of a mess. We passed a discarded shopping cart, rusting truck springs, a smashed air- conditioner and the remains of a long-abandoned car. And yet, the soil on the forest floor was soft and dark, the color of coffee grounds. "It's wonderful soil," Mr. Leverett said as he climbed past a little patch of ferns.

To measure the tree's height using trigonometry — or as Mr. Leverett likes to call it, "twigonometry" — he had to be able to see the tiptop of the tree. When he found a vantage point, where he could glimpse the top through the woodland's thick foliage, he stopped and broke out the latest in high-tech tree-measuring gear.

Taking a $300 Bushnell laser range finder (most commonly used by golfers to gauge the distance to the green), he aimed it at the highest leaf on the tree, which he called the leader, and pressed a button. Zap. A digital readout on the range finder told him that the treetop was 126 feet away. He then looked into the eyepiece of another device, a $90 Suunto clinometer, which established the vertical angle at which he stood to the leader. Using his equipment and a little basic trigonometry, Mr. Leverett executed the motions of measurement in a brisk ritual that left us awed and — voilà! — announced that the Queens giant was 133.8 feet high, the equivalent of a 13-story building. Let's see if Staten Island could top that.

While Mr. Leverett was working on the tree's size, Mr. Kershner was working on its age. He pointed out a hollow in the tree trunk that was big enough to sit in. Inside were an old baseball cap and an empty Coke bottle. "Look," he said, "a leprechaun convention center." He examined bald spots on the bark and said that those were sure signs of an aged tree.

On the ground he found a limb that had fallen from 50 feet up, and he got down in the dirt to count its rings. "This bough alone is 200 years old," he said when he finally finished counting. "I would say this tree is 350 to 400 years old." That meant the tree was a sapling when New Amsterdam was being settled by the Dutch in the 1600's. "We're not just talking about whether this is the largest tree here," he said. "We're talking about the oldest living thing in New York City."

Now that we had taken the measure of the king of Queens, we returned to our vehicles and headed to Staten Island for the showdown. Mr. Kershner, who happened to have grown up there and had even written a book about it — "Secret Places of Staten Island" (Kendall/Hunt, 1998) — led the way. He let us know he was rooting for the Staten Island tree.

It was not surprising that both contenders were tulip trees. Except for white pines, which do not grow in the city, tulip trees are the tallest and most voluminous trees in the East. They're also fairly tough, able to survive in city parks despite air pollution and vandalism. Historically, Native Americans and pioneers used tulip trees' long, straight trunks to make canoes, and their fine-textured wood is still commonly used to make furniture, musical instruments and paper products. They're called tulip trees because the shape of their leaves and flowers resemble tulip blossoms.

Mr. Leverett is fond of tulip trees. He grew up in the mountains of Tennessee in a town called Copper Hill. "It was my favorite tree in the Smokies," he said. "Most of those huge Smoky Mountain tulip trees are 145 to 165 feet tall. The species is capable of living to 600 years."

The scene at Clove Lakes Park was quite different from the neglected, highway-beleaguered woods in Queens. In northern Staten Island, just off Forest Avenue and Clove Road, this 200-acre park was well- groomed, its paved paths filled with strollers and baby carriages. At the park's northernmost end, a green tree-studded lawn stretched away from the aptly named Forest Avenue, and in the middle of it, about 200 feet from the street, we saw a mighty big tree dwarfing everything around it.

When Mr. Leverett saw it, he let out a whistle. "This is going to be a horse race," he said.

None of the picnickers and other parkgoers seemed to notice that they were in the presence of greatness. Aside from its humongous size, nothing distinguished this tree as special except for a severed lightning-rod cable that hung ineffectually down its trunk.

According to the "Great Trees" guide, the Staten Island tree is 146 feet high. If true, it would easily be the victor over the Queens Giant. But Mr. Leverett is an expert at busting overblown claims.

"We're trying to bring truth into the big-tree numbers," he said. The big-tree-hunting world, it turned out, is rife with inaccurate measurements. But no arboreal claimant can hide from Mr. Leverett's laser range finder. For example, he and his colleagues at the Eastern Native Tree Society discovered that a red oak in Michigan, which was listed as the state champion, was overestimated by 90 feet. "Ninety feet, that's a whole tree," he said.

The Staten Island tree, which we dubbed the Clove Lakes colossus, was clearly younger than its Queens rival, and it had had the benefit of little competition. Whereas the Queens giant was losing its crown, struggling to get enough sun, the colossus was lord of the lawn, spreading out in every direction with abandon. The only hassle it appeared to face was children, running about on its massive buttressed trunk.

Mr. Leverett measured the circumference of the trunk. He hooked the tape to the bark and vanished for what seemed to be a long time as he made his way around. At 20 feet, the tape was not long enough this time, and we had to put a finger on the spot so he could measure the remainder. It was a whopping 21.4 feet around, bigger in circumference than the Queens tree.

Walking backward across the lawn, trying to get a bead on the tree's leader, Mr. Leverett commented on how easy it was to measure a tree in an open field. "It's almost like shooting fish in a barrel," he said.

He lasered the tree with his range finder and worked his mathematical magic with the clinometer and calculator. "The height," he announced, as we waited anxiously, "is 119 feet." That's 27 feet shorter than the height advertised in the "Great Trees" guide, but, more importantly, 12.2 feet shorter than the Queens' giant.

However, Mr. Kershner pointed out that the colossus had more limbs and a more massive trunk. And we had to admit that the trunk was overwhelming. Mr. Leverett, who's no wood sprite, looked like a finger puppet standing next to it.

But it was all going to come down to calculations he would make later. Height is not the be-all and end-all when it comes to determining a tree's bigness. With more measurements (height to the first bough, crown spread), Mr. Leverett planned to use a mathematical model to estimate the tree's overall volume. "I have to sit down with a pencil and calculator for an hour or so," he said. "But I can tell you it's going to be a close one."

We headed our separate ways and waited nervously for the results. The next evening we received word via e- mail. Both trees had an estimated volume of 1,750 cubic feet and weighed in the neighborhood of 50,000 pounds. The Queens tree was probably a bit more voluminous, but the Staten Island tree was slightly heavier.

So what Mr. Leverett was saying was that it was a dead heat. Until further review, we had two trees worthy of being called the New York Giant.

"At this point," wrote Mr. Leverett, "I would call them co-champions. Should you want to take the contest further, we would need to have both trees climbed with periodic girth measurements taken for at least the first 75 feet. Until that is done, I'm willing to call it a draw."

And so, until some hardy spirit clambers to the top of both these behemoths, bragging rights in this heavyweight-tree contest can be shared by both boroughs. As for the other counties, Manhattan and the Bronx seem to be out of the running and, while trees may grow in Brooklyn, they grow taller in Queens and Staten Island.

Finding the Trees

To reach the Queens giant, a tulip tree measuring 133.8 feet tall and 18.6 feet in circumference, head for a section of Alley Pond Park where the Long Island Expressway and the Cross Island Parkway intersect. At East Hampton Boulevard and the Horace Harding Expressway (a service road of the Long Island Expressway) look for a nearby trail into the woodlands. The tree, which is surrounded by a small fence, is a five-minute walk from the trailhead.

The Clove Lakes colossus, a tulip tree measuring 119 feet tall and 21.4 feet in circumference, is situated in the northernmost part of Staten Island's Clove Lakes Park near the intersection of Forest Avenue and Clove Road.

From Forest Avenue, walk south across the park's lawn for about 200 feet to reach the giant tree.

"Great Trees of New York City" is a 48-page guide that describes more than 100 city trees of impressive size, age, species, form and historic association. For detailed instructions on measuring big trees, visit the Eastern Native Tree Society's Web site right here.

[link] [add a comment]

Now that Phish is on sabbatical.........

From today's New York Post:

Elephant Band a Jumbo Hit By Bill Hoffman

Meet the biggest thing in music - a pop group featuring five full-grown elephants. The musical beasts, who live in a conservation center in Thailand, have been trained to play percussion instruments, including the xylophones and a harmonica. And they also play pretty mean trumpets.

The group, which has yet to be named, is the brainchild of Sanit Homnan, who runs the center where the elephants live. Their fist album will be released in the United States next year and will include their debut single, "Chang, Chang, Chang," a popular Thai children's song. In English, it means elephant, elephant, elephant.

Homnan says the elephants work very much as a team and aren't into hogging the spotlight with solos. Two of the elephants play bamboo percussion instruments by shaking them with their trunks, while two others bang on giant xylophones, and another blows a specially designed giant harmonica. Among their tunes are "Happy Birthday," and they may soon be able to do numbers by the Beatles and the Spice Girls.

Proceeds from the record will help fund a milk bank for orphaned elephants and other elephant-conservation programs around the world. The pachyderm players will do a worldwide concert tour to promote their songs. The same conservation group has already trained elephants to paint on giant canvases. Several of those artworks have been sold to raise money for the center.


[link] [add a comment]

STYX DEGREES OF SEPARATION

Dennis De Young, co-founder of the "rock" band Styx is suing his former bandmates over misuse of the band's name and trademark.

DeYoung calls his decision to sue former partners Tommy Shaw, James Young and Chuck Panozzo "the most painful decision" of his career aside from that time he was forced to cut 12 minutes from a guitar solo.

DeYoung was one of the band's founders 35 years ago and wrote and sang most of the group's hits, including "Lady," "Babe," "Lady-Babe," and "Bady-Labe."

He says a partnership deal that was renewed in 1990 by him, Shaw, Young, Panozzo and Panozzo's brother, John, required the agreement of all five on all matters concerning the band and its trademark. Tragically, John Panozzo died in 1996 while attempting a falsetto seven octaves above high C.

DeYoung joined the 1997 Styx reunion tour but asked the others to delay their 1999 tour because he was suffering side effects resulting from 29 years of art-rock.


[link] [4 comments]