Meteorologists Shape Fashion Trends 
Marilynn K. Yee/The New York Times Eliot Peyser, left, and Fredric Stollmack of Weatherproof, a clothing manufacturer. Weatherproof has taken out what amounts to a $10 million insurance policy against unusually warm weather. December 2, 2007 Meteorologists Shape Fashion Trends In the capricious world of fashion, where hemlines, fabrics and colors fall in and out of favor with breathtaking speed, designers and retailers have always relied on one constant — the orderly changing of the seasons. But now it seems the seasons have become as fickle as fashion. Two consecutive years of volatile weather — last November and this October were the warmest on record for the New York City area, a retail Mecca — have proved disastrous for companies that rely on predictable temperatures to sell cold-weather clothing like sweaters and coats. So the $200 billion American apparel industry, which is filled with esoteric job titles like visual merchandiser and fabric assistant, is adding a more familiar one: weather forecaster. Liz Claiborne, the apparel company, has hired a climatologist from Columbia University to predict weather for its designers to better time the shipments of seasonal garments to retailers. The discount retailer Target has established a "climate team" to provide advice on what kind of apparel to sell throughout the year. More and more, the answer is lighter weight, "seasonless" fabrics. And the manufacturer Weatherproof, which supplies coats to major department stores, has bought what amounts to a $10 million insurance policy against unusually warm weather, apparently a first in the clothing business. Fredric Stollmack, the president of Weatherproof, said that unseasonable weather, once a widely mocked excuse for poor performance in the industry, is the new norm, forcing companies to make sweeping changes in how they manufacture and sell clothing. "I have been in this industry for 40 years, and during that time, we always knew it got cold in December and stayed that way through January and February — and that was that," he said. "Now, it's a crap shoot." The scientific debate over global warming may not be entirely settled, but in the American clothing business, at least, it is over. The apparel maker Diesel ran magazine advertisements this year proclaiming that its cold-weather clothes — in one ad, a woman's puffy coat and shorts — were "global warming ready." A host on HSN, formerly known as the Home Shopping Network, promoted a lightweight women's poncho as ideal for this winter, "especially in the midst of global warming, when none of us are wearing heavy coats anymore." The reality, of course, is a bit more complicated. According to the latest report from the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, considered the most authoritative document on the topic, average temperatures in the Northern Hemisphere rose roughly 1.5 degrees from 1979 to 2005 — a shift that has not yet eliminated the need for heavy coats. But the panel's findings suggest that the length of seasons is changing, as clothing executives suspected. Over the last 50 years, the report found, the earlier onset of spring and later arrival of fall have shaved roughly two weeks from the year's coldest period. That change is starting to rewrite decades-old rules in the clothing industry, which says that it loses several billion dollars a year because of the unexpected swings in temperature. Liz Claiborne, the clothing conglomerate behind brands like Juicy Couture and Lucky Brand Jeans, traditionally supplied department stores like Dillard's with heavy coats and sweaters in August, assuming the onset of brisk weather would persuade consumers to buy them. But with cold temperatures starting later in the year, the strategy is not working. This summer, frustrated by unpredictable weather, the company turned to a climatologist at Columbia, Radley Horton, asking him to periodically consult with employees, as well as the retailers that buy its clothing, on coming weather trends. With Mr. Horton's input, the company prepared a report for Dillard's predicting above-normal temperatures for August through September 2008. As a result, for those months, Liz Claiborne designers will favor fabrics like matt jersey and tropical-weight cashmere over chunky wool and thick cotton. "With global warming and the unpredictability of temperatures, the goal is to create seasonless clothing," said Anne Cashill, vice president for design and merchandising at Liz Claiborne. Target set up its climate team in 2004 after observing unseasonable weather throughout the country, which could create a shortage of some merchandise (like light sweaters) and a glut of others (like heavy coats). Members of the team, known inside the chain as climate merchants, study historical weather patterns and up-to-the-minute forecasts to advise colleagues on which products to buy and when to put them on the sales floor. At their urging, Target's plans for coats "have changed dramatically," said Michael Alexin, vice president for apparel design and development at the chain. "Retailers used to consider September the start of fall," Mr. Alexin said. But Target now stocks lightweight jackets during that month, waiting until November to sell heavy coats. And even then, Target is avoiding the thickest fabrics. "We sell very, very little wool," Mr. Alexin said. For Weatherproof, forecasts and climatologists are not enough. The majority of the company's business is done in November and December — and if the weather is unusually warm, as it was during those months last year, sales plunge. (The last several months were not much better, with August, September and October combined the warmest ever recorded for six states, according to Planalytics, a weather research firm.) So in a closely watched experiment, Weatherproof signed a contract that guarantees it would be paid as much as $10 million if daily temperatures in New York City are warmer than the historical average for December, 37 degrees. The higher the temperature this month, the more money Weatherproof will be paid. Weatherproof bought its coverage from a 1-year-old company called Storm Exchange, which also sells such contracts to oil and electricity companies. David Riker, chief executive of Storm Exchange, said traditional forecasts can only tell clothing makers and stores so much. "If the weather was just getting warmer, it would be easy to plan for," Mr. Riker said. "But global warming does just not mean warmer weather; it means more unpredictable weather." Last winter, for example, a warm December led shoppers to hold off on buying coats, so stores began marking down jacket prices and selling spring clothing early. But by January, temperatures dived. Mr. Stollmack of Weatherproof said the $10 million weather protection, for which the company pays a significant fee, "is something we never hope to use, just like car insurance. But it's there if you need it." "If the winter of 2006 was a fluke, and the fall of 2007 was a fluke, then great," Mr. Stollmack added, standing amid racks of winter coats in the company's Manhattan showroom. "I would love to go back to the way it was and throw snowballs on Dec. 1."
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 | A Sip for Après-Whatever Weekend In New York 
G. Paul Burnett/The New York Times At Jacques Torres Chocolate on the Upper West Side. December 2, 2007 Weekend in New York | Hot Chocolate A Sip for Après-Whatever WE don't do winter sports all that well in Manhattan. Though skating is free in Bryant Park and comes with cool views in Central Park, and diehard snow fiends find ways to cross-country ski, play hockey and snowshoe, few visitors to New York arrive with such sporty ends in mind. There is, however, one part of the play-in-the-snow ritual that the city excels in: the part where you come back inside craving hot chocolate. Judging from the proliferation of upscale shops serving $5 cups of chocolate these days, New Yorkers don't need any après-ski excuse to indulge. Après-slush is reason enough. Your typical new-age cup is not so much hot cocoa (made from ground cacao beans with most of the cocoa butter removed), but real chocolate, with milk, maybe some cream and occasionally some spices judiciously mixed in. One of the most celebrated hot chocolates in the city can be found at City Bakery, near Union Square, where $4.50 gets you a steaming cup of what is essentially chocolate bisque. Throw in an extra 50 cents and they'll add a big house-made marshmallow. (You can also get the hot chocolate in a smaller "shot" size for $2, or mixed with coffee as a mocha. In February they add a second style of hot chocolate every day.) Unlike many spots, City Bakery is a full-on breakfast or lunch stop (occasionally reaching madhouse status), with rib-sticking entrees like mac-and-cheese and carrot-sticking entrees like a salad bar. Also on the thick side of things are the Jacques Torres Chocolate spots, now up to three with the recent opening on the Upper West Side. Especially good is its Wicked version, with the bite of ancho and chipotle peppers cutting through the sweetness. Some, and by some I mean anyone who has stayed out until dawn in Spain, realize that thick hot chocolate should ideally be served with churros — deep-fried sticks of dough dusted with cinnamon and sugar — to dip in it. Luckily, tapas joints are commonplace around town these days, which is a good thing, although they're often tiny and packed, which is a bad thing. Boqueria, the champion of tapa chic, serves up a dessert of four oily-warm churros and a cup of melted chocolate that is liquidy enough to pour but thick enough to stick on your churros. Bar Jamon serves their churros wider (and colder and drier) and their chocolate thicker (and spicier); if you could match the former's churros with the latter's chocolate, you'd be in good shape. There's also Five Points for their celebrated churros-and-chocolate brunch item, but only between 11:30 a.m. and 3 p.m., and only on weekends. To the dismay of the thicker-the-better crowd, some actually prefer their hot chocolate firmly in the liquid category. Near City Bakery is the stealth Venezuelan pastry and sandwich shop Tisserie, serving Venezuelan chocolate (the stuff churning near the coffee) whipped with milk into liquid submission. In addition to the provenance of the chocolate, the few other Venezuelan giveaways: the staff's accents and the sugar cane-and-lime drink called papelón con limón. One problem with the chocolate craze these days is that, as with wine, you're under pressure to describe the flavor and feel with elegant language. But even those who eschew words like "complex," favoring the old-fashioned "mmmmm," can tell something's going on in your cup at La Maison du Chocolat in Rockefeller Center and on the Upper East Side. First, the price, $8, will predispose you to search desperately for justification. But even if it were free, their dark Caracas blend is undeniably complex and its flavor ever-changing to even the most undiscriminating palate. (In unfortunate contrast to its complexity is the catering-style thermos it's pumped from, which may remind you of office decaf.) Near La Maison du Chocolat's store on Madison is Vosges, which in addition to its traditional Parisienne serves an Aztec Elixir that comes with ancho and chipotle peppers and — surprising to those who don't read the fine print — bits of cornmeal for a coarser texture. Their hot white chocolate is flavored with lemon myrtle and lavender. Vosges is also in SoHo, where it shares chocolate snob status with the elegant (edging toward dainty) chandeliered setting of MarieBelle's Cacao Bar, in back of the MarieBelle shop. Just so we're clear: This is not the place to trudge in soaked from a snowball fight and toss off your boots. On the menu, no fancy "elixirs," but a focus on the chocolate's single origin beans and cacao percentage (ranging from 60 to 75 percent), and a choice of chocolate with water or with milk. There's really only one dark side to all this dark chocolate madness: a streak of unfair anti-cocoa sentiment among sophisticates. For some reason, as chocolate connoisseurs and shop owners seek to describe what's so great about real hot chocolate, compared with the horrible cocoa of their youths, they always pick on Swiss Miss over Nestlé or Hershey's. For example: "Eccchhh, this tastes just like Swiss Miss" or "Our chocolate is worlds apart from Swiss Miss." But they also leave out important pricing information. Your average New York City fancy hot chocolate is about $5; Swiss Miss powder is about $3 for a 16-pack, and you can make it in your hotel room. Marshmallow? Chipotle? City Bakery, 3 West 18th Street, (212) 366-1414; www.thecitybakery.com. Jacques Torres Chocolate, 350 Hudson Street and 285 Amsterdam Avenue (at 73rd Street), (212) 414-2462; 66 Water Street, Brooklyn, (718) 875-9772; www.jacquestorres.com. Tisserie, 857 Broadway (at 17th Street), (212) 463-0850; www.tisserie.com Boqueria, 53 West 19th Street, (212) 255-4160; www.boquerianyc.com. Bar Jamon, 125 East 17th Street, (212) 253-2773; www.mariobatali.com. Five Points, 31 Great Jones Street, (212) 253-5700; www.fivepointsrestaurant.com. La Maison du Chocolat, 1018 Madison Avenue, at 78th Street, (212) 744-7117; 30 Rockefeller Plaza, (212) 265-9404; www.lamaisonduchocolat.com. MarieBelle, 484 Broome Street, (212) 925-6999; 762 Madison Avenue, at 65th Street; (212) 249-4585; www.mariebelle.com.
Copyright 2007 The New York Times Company |
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| Today’s Papers One Up, One DownBy Daniel Politi
Posted Monday, Dec. 3, 2007, at 6:02 A.M. E.T. The New York Times and Washington Post lead, while the Los Angeles Times off-leads, late-breaking news out of Venezuela, where voters narrowly defeated President Hugo Chávez's quest to consolidate his power through a series of constitutional amendments. By 51 percent to 49 percent, voters handed Chávez his first electoral defeat since he became president nine years ago. The Wall Street Journal tops its world-wide newsbox with Russian President Vladimir Putin winning big as his party got more than 60 percent of the vote in yesterday's parliamentary election. There was a large turnout for the election that was billed as a referendum on Putin's presidency, but opponents said there was widespread abuse and vowed to challenge the results in court. The LAT leads with a look at how Sen. Hillary Clinton and Mitt Romney are launching new tactics after a Sunday poll revealed that both of their early Iowa leads have been rapidly disappearing. Clinton launched an aggressive attack against Obama yesterday, where she questioned his character and integrity. Meanwhile, Romney announced that he will give a speech on Thursday about religion, which is a move many have been urging for a while as voters continue to have doubts about putting a Mormon in the White House. USA Today leads with news that foreigners coming into the United States will soon have to submit to a scan of all 10 fingerprints, instead of two as had been the norm since 2004. The new program, which the Department of Homeland Security contends will allow for more precise matches, will begin this week at one Washington-area airport and will be phased in at other points of entry throughout next year. Voter turnout in Venezuela was lower than expected at 55 percent, which was particularly surprising since, as the LAT notes, analysts had said the opposition could win only if it managed to get a large proportion of the country to show up. But some say the results illustrate how Chávez no longer has unanimous backing from Venezuela's poor. The Post quotes a voter who suggests that Chávez may have simply overplayed his hand, as even his traditional supporters were wary of giving him more power. "We're not stupid like he thinks. It's that simple." There were concerns that a lack of international monitors would translate into rampant fraud, but Chávez conceded defeat soon after the results were announced. "Those of you who were nervous I wouldn't recognize the results, you can go home quietly and celebrate," Chavez said. The results of the Russian election were hardly a surprise, and the WP goes as far as to say that 60 percent was less than many in United Russia had expected, although the party would still get enough seats to change the constitution. The LAT points out that many voters "seemed utterly oblivious that they were voting for parliament," which was clearly Putin's goal all along. The Post notes that the ballots listed the names of the three top officers in each party, "except United Russia, which listed only one name: Putin." For the past few weeks, opposition parties have been complaining of harassment and media bias, while workers claimed their employers were pressuring them to cast a vote for United Russia. The LAT notes many had to cast ballots in "plain view," while monitors and journalists were prevented from entering polling places. The White House called on Russia to investigate all claims of irregularities. The NYT off-leads the Russian elections and focuses on how no one is really sure how Putin will choose to use his power. Putin has vowed to step down, but still hasn't said who he will endorse or what role he will play in Russian politics, although there's talk he might be prime minister. Whoever does take over will have to deal with a very powerful Putin, who could make a comeback either in 2012 or if the next president decides to resign early. The latest poll out of Iowa showed that Clinton trails Obama, 28 percent to 25 percent, while Romney had 24 percent of Republican support, compared with Mike Huckabee's 29 percent. Given the margin of error, the poll still shows an incredibly close race, but the WSJ points out that perhaps more important is the fact that more than half of Iowa's voters who said they have a preference claim they could change their minds before the Jan. 3 caucus. It's just another example of how hard the caucuses are to predict, but it's clear that neither Romney nor Clinton wants to take any chances. The Post fronts a look at the increasingly aggressive campaign and notes that Clinton has made it clear that she she'll attack Obama not only on policy but also "on one of his strongest selling points: his reputation for honesty." Clinton said she's been on the receiving end of much criticism from fellow Democrats and now plans to fight back. "Well, now the fun part starts," Clinton said in a statement that was immediately criticized by Obama, who said that the "campaign isn't about attacking people for fun." The new aggressiveness could backfire on Clinton, particularly since Iowa voters already see her as the most negative Democratic candidate. The LAT notes that a lot of Clinton-Obama fighting could end up benefitting John Edwards. Romney's speech this week is widely being compared to the one John F. Kennedy delivered almost 50 years ago about his Catholic faith. The comparison seems almost inevitable, particularly since Romney will speak less than 100 miles from the site of Kennedy's speech. The NYT fronts a look at Huckabee's surge and notes that he's not as well organized or funded as the main Republican contenders, which might make it difficult for him to capitalize on any momentum that he might get from an Iowa victory. The WSJ fronts an analysis of subprime loans and says that many were given to people with credit scores that would traditionally be high enough to qualify for a conventional loan. Although industry analysts say that a credit score is not the only factor when determining what kind of loan to award, there is increasing evidence that borrowers were pushed into accepting loans with unfavorable terms that they didn't necessarily understand. The NYT revals that a poll found the least favorite Christmas song among people who like the genre is a recording of "Jingle Bells" in dog barks. The Danish recording was ranked last out of 579 Christmas songs. Daniel Politi writes "Today's Papers" for Slate. He can be reached at todayspapers@slate.com.
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Sunday, December 02, 2007 | Nevada Learns to Cash in on Sales of Federal Land 
Jim Wilson/The New York Times The Mountain's Edge development sits on land once owned by the federal government in the Las Vegas Valley December 3, 2007 Public Lands Nevada Learns to Cash in on Sales of Federal Land LAS VEGAS — When it opens in 2009, the Clark County Shooting Park will be something to behold, through a scope or otherwise: hundreds of acres devoted to all things gun and bow, complete with a rifle range, a skeet center and an R.V. "host area." The coming Craig Ranch Regional Park, due in 2010, should be impressive too, with plans calling for an amphitheater, an aquatics center and sand volleyball courts, all wound around native gardens and wetlands. Much of the financing for the projects has not come from familiar sources, like local taxes, bond issues or private donations. Instead, they are being paid for through the sales of public lands owned by the federal government. Tens of thousands of acres of federal lands in the Las Vegas area have been sold under an unusual law pushed through Congress nearly a decade ago by the Nevada delegation. The sales have grossed nearly $3 billion and counting. Because of a stipulation created by the Nevada legislators, the money has not been deposited into the general federal Treasury, but rather put in a special Treasury account to be spent almost exclusively in Nevada on a something-for-everyone collection of projects. The money has bought environmentally sensitive land and paid for conservation projects, a central purpose of the law and its amendments, as well as improvements in national recreation and refuge areas. But it has also been allocated to such nuts-and-bolts governmental services as education and water projects, and a variety of local perks, including boat ramps, nature trails and community parks complete with tennis courts, dog runs and barbecue pits. Supporters say the law, which authorized competitive auctions, has been a godsend for a region dealing with rampant population growth, limited room to grow, scarce water and facilities overwhelmed by their own popularity. But critics see it as having created a limitless federal bank account that has encouraged and subsidized unbridled growth at the expense of taxpayers from the 49 other states, all while Nevada continues to draw new residents as a low-tax state disinclined to pay for such projects itself. Even some ardent fans of the law say the infusion of cash has led to overreaching on the part of some municipalities in Clark County, the mother ship for three growing cities: Las Vegas, North Las Vegas and Henderson. "We've gotten a bit greedy," said Michael L. Montandon, the mayor of North Las Vegas, which has had $176 million worth of projects approved, including $85.3 million for Craig Ranch. "When your neighboring cities are asking for five times what you are, it tends to make your staff run around looking for projects." To gauge the law's impact since its passage in 1998, The New York Times analyzed data from the United States Bureau of Land Management, the landlord for the federally owned lands. The analysis covered the more than 29,000 acres sold under the law as of Nov. 1, as well as the $2.3 billion in expenditures allocated to projects as of Aug. 31 by the Department of the Interior, which oversees distribution of the money. The examination found the following: ¶More than $1 billion in proceeds from the federal land sales have been allocated for parks, trails and nature areas that often amount to public amenities — many of which elected officials say they would not have been able to pay for otherwise. The projects have enhanced property values, and benefited big-name developers, including Focus Property Group, the American Nevada Company, the Del Webb Corporation and the Olympia Development Group, all of which have bought large parcels of arid public lands and turned them into elaborate housing tracts. ¶Nevada's schools, which have long sought more money from state lawmakers who resisted raising taxes as enrollment mushroomed, have received $150 million from the sale of the federal lands. The interest on that money has paid for expenses including teachers' salaries, utility bills and textbooks, which in other states would usually be underwritten by local property taxes. The 1998 law uses the same legal framework as a 1920s land act under which the Clark County School District has bought some 685 acres through noncompetitive direct sales for an average of $10 an acre since 2004 to provide land for public schools. ¶The Southern Nevada Water Authority, the agency that has long provided cheap water to the valley's two million residents, has received $285 million from the federal land sales, which it has used on a variety of water treatment, testing and transport projects, including facilities at drought-plagued Lake Mead. Plans for revenue from future land sales, water officials say, could include work on a pipeline to import water from 250 miles away. ¶The acquisition and protection of environmentally sensitive land in private hands was a central element of the law's purpose, but allocations for those purchases have accounted for only about 15 percent ($346.1 million) of the $2.3 billion in approved spending. Moreover, there has been a net loss of protected land: thus far, some 34,468 acres of public land have been sold or exchanged, while a little more than 20,000 acres of environmentally sensitive land have been bought, though federal officials say other big deals are pending. ¶Spending on conservation projects, a focus of an amendment to the law in 2002, has also lagged behind other construction-heavy categories. Some $180 million has been allocated for continuing projects like programs to fight litter and dumping, studies of off-road vehicle and water strategies, and wild horse and burro management. Still, some expenditures designated as conservation have been so broadly defined that they resemble traditional pork. Among them are a mobile fire education trailer ($132,000), an interagency Web site ($269,000), and several plans devoted to safety programs for the region's abandoned mines ($3 million). ¶Millions of dollars from the sale of federal lands has been set aside to meet federal requirements — typically the responsibility of local governments — to offset environmental damage from the city's sprawling growth. Under the act, $53 million has been allocated to help communities in Clark County and the Nevada Department of Transportation to conform with requirements of the Endangered Species Act when development encroaches on native habitats. Critics argue that the sales help pay for the infrastructure that then supports more expansion. "Fundamentally, we're talking about selling public lands which belong to all Americans and giving the proceeds back to local counties for what would ostensibly be conservation projects," said Myke Bybee, public lands representative for the Sierra Club in Washington. "But those projects," Mr. Bybee said, are not always "in keeping with conservation." That said, in Nevada the law is widely seen by Republicans and Democrats alike as paying off for most everyone at the table, a rarity in a gambling town. Among the winners are developers — who now have access to lands long deemed off-limits — and municipalities, which have added dozens of new recreational amenities, thousands of new residents to tax rolls, and improved the quality of life, all without raising taxes. "This bill has been across the board incredible for the entire state, for quality of life, for economic development, for managing growth," said Senator John Ensign, a Republican, who was the bill's author while serving in the House of Representatives. "And for doing things to make Nevada a better place." The law's original boundary for eligible federal land sales was expanded by Congress in 2002, and some groups, including the Las Vegas Chamber of Commerce, are lobbying to expand it even farther. The allowable area has grown by about 40 percent, or 22,000 acres more than the original 52,000 approved by Congress. Spreading the Wealth More and more local officials now want a piece of the land pie. In recent years, Congress has authorized the sale of up to 135,000 acres of public land in White Pine and Lincoln Counties in eastern Nevada. Another later law was enacted in 2000 that requires 80 percent of proceeds from federal land sales be spent in the states where the land is located. And there are similar proposals in other Western states, including land hand-overs to localities in central Idaho and land sales in Washington County, Utah, another fast-growing desert area. Moreover, local authorities are getting ever bolder in using the proceeds from the federal land sales for expenses not traditionally covered by money from federal taxpayers. More recent bills, authorizing the sales in eastern Nevada, funnel 10 percent of federal proceeds back into law enforcement, fire protection and transportation, traditionally the bailiwick of local governments. Efforts to redirect at least some of the proceeds from the sales of federal lands into the general federal Treasury have repeatedly been beaten back by the politically connected Nevada delegation, which is now headed by the Senate majority leader, Harry Reid, a Democrat. In recent years, the Bush administration twice failed in efforts to take back some of the payout for the Treasury. In many ways the law, formally known as the Southern Nevada Public Land Management Act of 1998, has created a new model for managing much of the federally owned land in the West, which encompasses more than 80 percent of the state of Nevada and huge chunks of Utah, Idaho, Wyoming, Arizona, California and Oregon. That model provides a faster way of moving public lands into private hands, and encouraging growth into inhospitable places, in this case, the Mojave Desert. That local and federal governments work together on such deals is remarkable considering the historic tension between federally owned public lands and the all-American desire for private property. The centuries-old debate has resonated from the high-mindedness of Manifest Destiny's westward push in the early 1800s to the frenzied scramble of Civil-War-era homesteaders to the defiance of the Sagebrush Rebellion of the 1970s and '80s, in which ranchers and local officials in the West wanted federal lands transferred to local governments or sold to private owners. In each case, the central question has been what exactly do America's national lands represent: Are they expendable, tradeable, and now, salable resources meant to be made private for the sake of progress and individual gain? Or are they public treasures to be protected at all costs, even when they are essentially arid wastelands? In the Las Vegas area, the answer has increasingly been to sell. The first of a wave of omnibus lands bills passed by a Republican-led Congress, the Nevada law of 1998 was viewed as a pragmatic compromise by environmental groups eager to guarantee the purchase and exchange of fragile habitat. Subsequent laws affecting other parts of Nevada — which brought environmental groups, land owners and others into negotiations — have coupled land sales with the designation of hundreds of thousands of acres as wilderness. Those wilderness designations, which ban development, were trumpeted by local lawmakers and welcomed even by those who worried about land sales. "We had a decision to make: Do we pursue this opportunity to protect these special places or do we not?" said Jeremy Garncarz, the associate director of wilderness support at the Wilderness Society. "And we made the decision to pursue the opportunity to protect these places." But as the 1998 law has played out, some of its early supporters among environmentalists have also soured on it. The Office of Management and Budget, an arm of the White House, assessed the program in 2004 and said that while it had been "fairly well run," its revenues were "increasingly being dedicated to low-priority activities." Original Intent "The original concept was to allow private, environmentally sensitive land to be bought more readily," Jeff Van Ee, a longtime Nevada environmentalist who helped lawmakers draw up the law. "But over the years, what we've seen is the money going all over the place, and too much money going to projects that should be funded through more conventional means." Sales at auction have accounted for the vast majority of the law's proceeds, with more than $2.7 billion in sales from 13,000 acres, much of it situated on the edge of cities and primed for development. In a federal-local dance officially known as joint selection, municipalities nominate land for sale once they have determined their infrastructure can support them, said Steve Tryon, assistant field manager for the Las Vegas office of the Bureau of Land Management. "The cities of Las Vegas and North Las Vegas and Henderson are kind of driving the show," he said of the selection process, also mentioning that Clark County was very active. Mr. Tryon said the 1998 law had increased the use of sales provisions in the Federal Land Policy and Management Act of 1976, resulting in more than 14,000 acres sold via direct sale to developers, localities and individuals who owned property adjacent to federal lands. Those sales grossed only a small fraction of the auction sales, bringing in only $114 million. Nevada lawmakers say it is unfair to view expenditures under the law as a raid on the federal Treasury since the federal government is the largest landowner in Nevada and should be expected to contribute to the state's economic well-being, just as big private land owners do in other states. Senator Reid also said that the improvements, including the money spent on parks, trails and natural areas, were on facilities that the general public could use. "All the money is used on public land," he said. "It doesn't go onto the Las Vegas Strip." Before the 1998 public lands law, the government often converted land to private hands through land exchanges. The deals were regularly criticized by lawmakers and taxpayers, who thought the government gave too much, and wilderness lovers, who thought they got too little. Land sales, through acts like the 1980 Santini-Burton Act (which sold small tracts of Las Vegas-area land to finance land purchases in the Tahoe basin), were also laborious and the take often meager. A report in September 2001 by the General Accounting Office found that the Bureau of Land Management had sold 79,000 acres between 1991 and 2000 and received just $3 million. Under the 1998 act, the sales have grossed nearly 1,000 times that figure in the same amount of time — with less than half as much land. One reason is timing: the auctions began just as the Las Vegas real estate market heated up. The proceeds took the law's architects by surprise. The Congressional Budget Office estimated in 1998 that the sales would gross some $350 million over seven years. But developers spent more than twice that on a single day in November 2005, when 2,887 acres brought a record $783 million in bids. The majority of auction offerings have been parcels of 10 acres or less. But by 2002, a few large swaths of public lands, more than 100 acres each, were starting to attract bids. At auctions in 2004 and 2005, three bidders bought a combined 10 square miles of land for $1.7 billion for master-planned communities. These developments, often with tens of thousands of units, effectively convert desert into suburbia, complete with parks, artificial lakes, and preternaturally green golf courses. One of those master builders is John Ritter, chief executive of Focus Property Group, who called the act "a tremendous success," adding that the fact that sale proceeds would be spent near the communities his company built was an added bonus. "It's a well-thought-out way to release land," said Mr. Ritter, whose company paid $557 million for 1,940 acres at an auction in 2004. Boat Ramps and Toilets As quick as money flowed in to the special account, it flowed out. All spending requires authorization by the secretary of the interior from money held in an interest-bearing account, with recommendations from a four-member committee representing four major agencies that receive money from the act, the National Park Service, the United States Forest Service, the Fish and Wildlife Service and the Bureau of Land Management. Purchases receiving a green light have included a handsome array of land considered environmentally sensitive, which can be recommended by any interested group in the state, including nonprofit organizations and private landholders. Among the highlights are the planned purchase of Incline Lake near Lake Tahoe, an $83 million project headed by the United States Forest Service, which plans to open it to the public. But other approved projects read like a Christmas list drafted in Carson City, the state capital: $50.3 million for erosion control and fire prevention programs at Lake Tahoe; $28.8 million in improvements to the picturesque and increasingly popular Red Rock Canyon conservation area; $49.4 million for trails and other amenities at the Springs Preserve, a new environmentally friendly tourist attraction in downtown Las Vegas; and $495,900 for 30 "premier" toilets, complete with "flush technology and solar lighting" at nearby Lake Mead. This summer, ground was also broken on a tract of low-cost housing in southern Las Vegas, land sold to nonprofit developers at 5 percent of its appraised value. More than $400 million has also been allocated for building projects on federal lands for the four agencies represented on the executive committee. The law has also been amended six times, and 10 federal agencies, including the Highway Administration and the Army Corps of Engineers, now receive money through it. Many projects have been focused on Lake Mead, on water pipes, boat ramps and restrooms, as well as pleasantries like picnic tables and campgrounds. But the land sales have also helped federal agencies subsidize basic infrastructure needs, including phone lines, housing, equipment shelters, road construction, fire stations, parking lots, fencing and power supply. A report last year by the Office of Management and Budget also raised questions about some of the spending, saying too much money went to "purely local projects, which do not reflect the highest priorities of the nation." Easing the Burden Sure enough, the biggest category of approved spending by far has been the urban and suburban projects nominated by local governments, which quickly caught on that the sales of lands on their outskirts could be used to improve life in the heart of their cities. Local officials say that is only fair, arguing that the opening of the lands — and subsequent population growth — increases the stress on local governments to provide services and infrastructure. The public expenditure, said Erik Pappa, a spokesman for Clark County, in an e-mail message, "relieves some of that burden by providing funding for amenities to improve our quality of life." Amendments to the original law have also opened up more categories of spending, including up to $300 million to be set aside for restoration programs in the Lake Tahoe basin, and new counties and groups eligible for money, including fire-safe councils and the Washoe Indian tribe. Some money has also started to be allocated for projects in California, as part of fire prevention programs in the Lake Tahoe region, which includes both states. In 2006, $476 million was allocated to parks, trails and natural areas throughout the state, a category that has included such cherries as a $1.4 million softball complex in Caliente, a $10 million Las Vegas park with boccie and shuffleboard courts and a $1.5 million planning grant for picnic grounds in Alamo. P. Lynn Scarlett, the deputy secretary of the interior, defended her agency's performance, saying the Bureau of Land Management "has very vigorously and carefully selected projects" for the various categories approved by Congress. Ms. Scarlett also said that the disparity between land sold and land bought would most likely equalize as pending purchases of tens of thousands of acres of environmentally sensitive land went through. For now, with the real estate market here and nationally in a tailspin, the flow of new financing has slowed. Likewise, sales at auctions so far this year have brought in only $20 million. At the most recent auction, on Nov. 1, the average price per acre topped $500,000, though only one parcel — of 31 offered — sold. In the early days, an acre typically fetched less than $100,000. Both developers and local politicians have blamed the auction system for inflating land values in the Las Vegas Valley, and some groups have started to push for the boundary to be expanded even farther to lower those costs. Steve Hill, a major concrete supplier and the chairman of the governmental affairs committee of the Las Vegas Chamber of Commerce, said the lack of available land was making it hard for housing projects to make financial sense, a situation made worse by the mortgage crisis. As such the law was unintentionally encouraging the growth of far-flung suburbs throughout Southern Nevada, Mr. Hill said. Because Las Vegas is encircled by federal lands, these suburbs are forced miles away. "There are those that feel that land constraint is part social engineering, but the idea that we're going to squeeze people outside the disposal boundary and push them 50 miles away has social and environmental consequences as well," he said. "It would be like saying, you can live on the island of Manhattan or you have to live 50 miles away." Defenders of the growth of Las Vegas, which is expected to devour its available land by 2017, say the city is in fact very dense, not sprawling. They often refer to the "Manhattanization" of the city, with more and more vertical developments planned, making even more urgent the demand for public parks and other amenities. "I believe in 100 years they'll be studying this as a great piece of public policy," Mr. Montandon, the North Las Vegas mayor, said of the 1998 law. "I think it will go right up beside Robert Moses building New York." Meanwhile, plans for similar land sales are moving forward elsewhere in the West. A bill to sell land in fast-growing Washington County in southwestern Utah stalled in Congress last year. But its author, Senator Robert F. Bennett of Utah, said he would introduce another version this year. Both of Nevada's senators, Mr. Ensign and Mr. Reid, are circumspect about the spoils or the concept being expanded elsewhere. "Nevada is doing just fine," said Mr. Reid, who posed at the ground-breaking for the $64 million shooting range in October 2006. "But I'm not going to be trying to be a missionary for people doing this in other states." Jesse McKinley reported from Las Vegas, and Griffin Palmer from New York.
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| Iron worker falls to death on Strip An iron worker plunged to his death at Project CityCenter on Friday, a day after he had taken a safety class on the prevention of falls, an MGM Mirage spokeswoman said. The death, the fourth this year at the $7 billion project on the Strip, remained under investigation by Nevada's Occupational Safety and Health Administration. The worker's name was unavailable Friday. The middle-aged man was working on the main resort tower about 8:50 a.m. when he fell 50 to 60 feet, said Scott Allison, a Clark County Fire Department spokesman. The worker died at the scene. Allison said the man had a safety harness on, but it was unclear whether it had been hooked to anything. It was also unclear whether gusty winds played a part in the accident, he said. OSHA stopped work on the tower to investigate while work continued elsewhere on the 66-acre site, said Yvette Monet, spokeswoman for project owner MGM Mirage. OSHA reopened the tower about 3 p.m., she said. The worker had taken a safety refresher course Thursday, she said. His death was the fourth at CityCenter since construction began in June 2006. The first two deaths occurred Feb. 6, when a 3,000-pound steel wall used as a concrete mold fell from a crane and hit another wall. The walls toppled on four workers, crushing to death Bobby Lee Tohannie, 44, of Kayenta, Ariz., and Angel J. Hernandez, 24, of Las Vegas. An OSHA investigation following that incident found two serious violations. Perini Building Co., the project's contractor, was cited for improperly securing the steel walls and for failing to train workers on recognizing and avoiding hazardous situations. OSHA proposed a $14,000 fine. It was later reduced to $7,000 and the second citation was dropped, according to OSHA records. CityCenter's second fatal incident happened Aug. 9. Investigators believe 65-year-old Las Vegan Harvey Englander died instantly when a construction elevator counter weight hit him while he was bending over to grease the elevator. Despite the climbing death toll, Monet said the Project CityCenter site was "very safe." Allison agreed, calling it one of the safest construction sites in the county. "Four fatalities is sad, but considering ... the number of people working there and the size of the project, that's not really all that bad," Allison said, noting the roughly 4,200 workers on the job each day. Perini Building Co. did not return a phone message seeking comment. County Commissioner Chris Giunchigliani, whose district includes part of the Strip, said the rising number of deaths at CityCenter and other construction projects deserves a look by elected officials. State regulations and safety laws might need to change as more projects work around the clock and climb higher over the Las Vegas skyline, she said. "Unfortunately it takes several accidents to bring this to light," she said --> -->Copyright © Las Vegas Review-Journal, 1997 - 2007 |
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| The Economist on what could happen if the dollar’s value keeps dropping. Greenback Goner?By Brad Flora, Elizabeth Gumport, Jake Melville, David Sessions, and Morgan Smith
Posted Friday, Nov. 30, 2007, at 4:03 P.M. E.T. Today, Other Magazines reads the Economist, Time, the New York Times Magazine, Reason, and Granta to find out what's worth your time. Must Read
Should you be worried about the slumping dollar? The Economist cover sees all the signs of a "nasty crash" looming for the American currency and explains the ramifications.—B.F. Best Politics Piece
An article in the December issue of Reason argues that Democrats should emulate Moorfield Storey, a libertarian lawyer who died in 1929, and reclaim their reputations as socially tolerant, tough-on-government libertarians. Storey's positions are as right now as they were then: "[H]e led opposition to a costly and unnecessary war, he stood against collectivism and racism, and he championed individual rights in every sphere of life."—D.S. Best International Piece
An article in the December issue of Reason uncovers the "tyrannical roots" of China's international adoption program, namely the country's "one-child" law that has resulted in millions of unwanted girls. The situation has been rewarding for American families looking to adopt overseas, but "it will be a true victory for liberty when such heartwarming stories stop appearing on newsstands and bookshelves."—D.S. Best Business Piece
"Lured by immense patient populations ailing from both chronic and infectious diseases," large pharmaceutical companies are favoring China as a testing ground for new drugs, Time notes. Some worry about intellectual property protection and tainted products, but others consider these doubts old-fashioned.—E.G. Best Science Piece
The New York Times Magazine enters the unlikely fray between stray-cat lovers and birders. Birders fret that cats are contributing to the decimation of wild bird populations, and cat lovers, well, really like cats. Stakes have been raised to absurd levels by both sides seeking to protect "their" wildlife.—J.M. Best Health Piece
Time reports on the debate surrounding sensory processing disorder, an ailment frequently treated by occupational therapists but still unrecognized by the DSM-IV. The disorder is characterized by "difficulty handling information that comes in through the senses" and is distinct from ADHD and autism, which often include similar symptoms.—E.G. Best Excerpt
Granta publishes an excerpt from Gomorrah, undercover journalist Roberto Saviano's upcoming book about the Neapolitan mafia.—M.S. Best Historical Perspective
The New York Times Magazine notices that the Library of Congress will unveil a 500-year-old map believed to be the first printed appearance of the word America and ponders the term's history and meaning in a fascinating tale of collective mythology, skewed history, "giants, cannibals, and sexually insatiable females."—J.M. Best Christmas Piece
A column in Reason's December issue humorously identifies a new aspect of the war on Christmas—"pop culture's war on secularists"—observing that even nonreligious Americans have a deep affection for the Christmas holiday. Atheists, the writer argues, should embrace our modern, inclusive definitions of the holiday and fill their stockings "with atheist junk that's as gloriously profane as the junk blessed by Jesus."—D.S. Best Photo Spread
Granta presents a series of color photographs taken by Joel Sternfield during the 1970s that prove "in thirty years, though styles of clothing may have changed, little else is significantly different; we can still feel the energy of the street, as well as the familiar sense of communal desperation."—M.S. Best Vice Piece
The Economist assesses a publicity war in California between a band of five Native American tribes looking to expand their casinos in exchange for paying more state taxes and their opponents, including the "No on the Unfair Gambling Deals" group, who say the new deal is unfair.—B.F. Best Line
In an interview with Time, romance novelist Nora Roberts says of her books, "They're not just about naked pirates, although what's wrong with a naked pirate now and again?"—E.G. Brad Flora is a Slate intern.
Elizabeth Gumport is a Slate intern.
Jake Melville is a Slate intern.
David Sessions is a Slate intern.
Morgan Smith is a Slate intern. 10:22 PM - 0 Comments - 0 Kudos - Add Comment - Edit - Remove |
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| NBC to Pay for Blocks of Programs By BILL CARTER NBC has made an ambitious deal, apparently the first of its kind, to buy a two-hour — or perhaps even three-hour — block of prime-time programming from outside producers, including Thom Beers, the creator of adventure documentary series like "Deadliest Catch" and "Ice Road Truckers." Under the plan, NBC has agreed to broadcast at least two new hours produced by Mr. Beers back to back on a single night, with many more hours possible. The terms guarantee Mr. Beers and his partners 30 hours of programs on NBC — three separate 10-episode series. These 30 hours would come at a fraction of the cost of standard network scripted or reality programming, a factor that made the deal attractive to NBC. The project is not related to the current strike by Hollywood writers but the background forces are somewhat similar as networks struggle to revise their financial formulas to face a future of diminishing ratings and growing uncertainties about how the Internet will figure in viewers' choices. The programs, which are all documentary in style, would not have staff writers. The principals in the arrangement are prominent television names, Gail Berman and Lloyd Braun, both former top network programmers, who created a production company that has what is known as a "first look" deal that gives NBC the first crack at buying their productions. Ms. Berman and Mr. Braun contracted with Mr. Beers to create the shows and then went to NBC to pitch the idea of filling an entire night — or at least two-thirds of it — with real-life action. The idea for mounting a block of shows that would play together on a night started with conversations Ms. Berman and Mr. Braun had with NBC's chief executive, Jeff Zucker, this year. The discussions centered on the way the broadcast networks have generally abandoned Saturday night, filling it with repeats because ratings on that night have been too low to sustain the high costs of original programs. Ms. Berman and Mr. Braun suggested that a new form of lower-cost programming, perhaps as an entire three-hour block of shows. The producers were already fans of Mr. Beers's shows. "It's just about all I watch," said Mr. Braun. He declined to describe the specifics of the deal. But participants on both sides described its main elements, on condition that they not be identified because they had not been authorized to discuss specific terms. "It certainly has the potential to dramatically change the network economics of a given night," Mr. Braun said. In the past, networks have contracted with outside producers to assemble a slate of Saturday morning children's programming— mostly cartoons— but networks have not commissioned outsiders previously to fill a block of prime-time programming. The chief economic benefit of programs from Mr. Beers is that they are strikingly cheap to produce by network standards. Shows like "Ice Road Truckers" cost about well under $500,000 an hour, a modest figure next to a typical cost of about $3 million for an hourlong scripted network series. Conventional network reality shows are also much more expensive at $1.5 million to $2 million an hour. The producers will will split ownership with NBC, giving the network control of domestic rights and the producers the international rights. After contracting with Mr. Beers to produce the shows, Ms. Berman and Mr. Braun met with NBC executives and pitched a roster of 10 potential series. The participants in the deal said that the NBC executives most involved were the two co-chairmen of the network's entertainment division, Ben Silverman and Marc Graboff, both of whom were described as enthusiastic supporters of the idea. Neither would comment on the deal yesterday. The original plan was to place the shows on Saturday night, the participants said — perhaps under an overall title, like "Saturday Night on the Edge." But NBC declined to commit to Saturday for the shows, seeking to retain discretion on when to broadcast them. So the program block may be shown on any night — and at the moment Saturday is not the choice, one participant said. The contract commits NBC to run as at least a two-hour block, however. NBC retained the right to cancel one or more of the linked shows if they perform below a certain ratings threshold; but it may not break up the block for any other reason — if it did, it would open the shows up to moving to another network, the participants said. "Deadliest Catch," which is shown on the Discovery Channel, and "Ice Road Truckers," on the History Channel, have become among the most popular programs on cable television. The finale of "Ice Road Truckers" attracted close to 5 million viewers. Mr. Beers, a former producer at Turner Broadcasting and Paramount's syndicated division, started his own company, Original Productions, in 1999, with a heavy emphasis on motorcycle shows and documentaries like "Plastic Surgery: Before and After" and "Ballroom Bootcamp." The company's signature hit was "Monster Garage," in which a standard car was "monsterized" into another kind of machine. The shows Mr. Beers and his partners are planning for NBC would not be ready to serve as fill-ins during the strike because they are unlikely to be seen until the third quarter of 2008. Mr. Beers uses real people in real situations in extreme locations like the Arctic. Shows set there have to be shot in warmer months, for example. By the time the shows do get on the air, at least three of them will be finished shooting. Two will go on in the initial block with the third ready to replace any that might fall short in ratings, the participants said. At the same time, NBC agreed to pay for several other ideas pitched by Mr. Beers to be turned into pilots. But these will be unlike any other pilots NBC makes, the participants in the deal said. Instead of shooting hourlong pilot episodes, NBC plans to have Mr. Beers shoot 5- to 10-minute films on some topic that can then be tried out as reports on the network's "Today" show or "Dateline" newsmagazine show. |
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| Today’s Papers The Call of K StreetBy Ben Whitford
Posted Sunday, Dec. 2, 2007, 5:20 A.M. E.T. The New York Times leads on news that business lobbyists are racing to win approval for a wide range of health, safety, labor, and economic measures before the end of George Bush's presidency, spurred by concerns that the next tenant of the Oval Office will be less sympathetic to their causes. The Los Angeles Times leads with an investigation into a major lobbying drive that persuaded officials to nix plans for an improved anthrax vaccine. The Washington Post leads local, reporting that the D.C. government issued more than $44 million in questionable property tax refunds over the past nine years. Fearing that Democrats could sweep the board in next year's elections, business groups are rushing to persuade the Bush administration to pass rules covering everything from mountaintop mining to medical leave. "There's a growing sense, a growing probability, that the next administration could be Democratic," says one senior lobbyist. "Lobbying firms have begun to recalibrate their strategies." The so-called "midnight regulations" passed by outgoing administrations can prove difficult to reverse; the Supreme Court has ruled that new presidents cannot arbitrarily revoke rules that have passed into law. Scientists have long warned that America needs a better anthrax vaccine: The existing version can cause adverse reactions, requires a series of six injections over a period of 18 months, and has a shelf life of just three years. Officials awarded a massive contract to a company that appeared set to deliver a superior product—but pulled funding for the project after intensive lobbying by the old vaccine's producer. "National security took a back seat to politics and the power of lawyers and lobbyists," says one former biodefense official. The NYT off-leads on reports that corruption has reached epidemic proportions in Iraq: Bribery and petty crime are a way of life, and virtually everything the government buys or sells can now be found on the black market. Meanwhile, U.S. officials say one-third of what they spend on Iraqi contracts and grants goes unaccounted for; an estimated $18 billion has gone missing from Iraqi government coffers since 2004. "Everyone is stealing from the state," says one Shiite leader. "It's a very large meal, and everyone wants to eat." The Post goes above the fold with a profile of Elizabeth Whiteside, an Army reservist who faces court martial after attempting suicide while serving in Iraq; the prosecutor dismissed reports that she had a severe mental disorder as "psychobabble". The case highlights a gap between official policy—the Pentagon has allocated hundreds of millions of dollars to care for soldiers with post-traumatic stress disorder—and a military culture that still stigmatizes mental health problems. Turkish military officials said yesterday that they had launched an attack on Kurdish guerrillas in Iraq; details remained hazy, with Iraqi officials denying that troops had crossed the border. A Turkish lawmaker said the attacks were not part of a large-scale offensive: "It's not an invasion or a war," he told the NYT. "This is just a limited operation at the moment." The Post notes that the attack, along with violence in Diyala province and continuing political tension, underscores Iraq's lingering instability even as the security situation improves. An ice storm struck Iowa yesterday, but everyone notes that the atmosphere was unusually warm at the Democratic presidential debate in Des Moines, with the candidates lobbing one another relative softballs. The Post notes that the race remains hard to predict: "Iowans make up their minds late," sighs one Clinton staffer. The NYT fronts a look at Barack Obama's efforts to convince women voters to pick him over Hillary; on the paper's op-ed page, Frank Rich argues that Obama—battle-tested, and popular even among some conservatives—could provide Democrats with their best shot of winning the White House. Meanwhile, the LAT fronts a look at GOP hopeful Mike Huckabee; a poll published today shows him leading Mitt Romney in Iowa by five points. The NYT notes that Huckabee's change in fortune has prompted criticism from fiscal conservatives concerned at his record as governor of Arkansas—and caused Mitt Romney's campaign to rethink its talking points. Venezuelans go to the polls today in a referendum on proposals to grant President Hugo Chávez sweeping new powers; the Post says the result is likely to be close. In the paper's Outlook section, Donald Rumsfeld argues that countering the likes of Chávez will require an overhaul of outdated international institutions: "The free world has too few tools to help prevent Venezuela's once vibrant democracy from receding into dictatorship." Writing in the LAT, Sergio Munoz argues that Chávez is a threat to his own people but lacks the leverage to do much harm to America. In Russia, Vladimir Putin's United Russia party looks to be guaranteed victory in today's parliamentary elections; the Post notes that a substantial majority in the Duma would allow Putin to maintain influence even after he steps down as president next year. The LAT speculates about the Russian leader's next move: One option would be for Putin to take a post as prime minister. Iran's new nuclear negotiator warned this week that progress made in previous talks was no longer relevant; the NYT interviews several officials involved in the talks, who branded the meeting a disaster. "We can't do business with these guys at this point," one said. The Post has details of a classified war game in which U.S. officials pondered options for securing Pakistan's nuclear arsenal if the country's political institutions began to fall apart; they considered tactics ranging from full-blown military intervention to attempting to quarantine nuclear sites by sowing minefields from the air. |
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| Wired Travel Guide: Second Life Taking a trip to the coolest destination on the Web? Our guide tells you where to go, what to do - and how to buy sex organs. So you've decided to take a trip to Second Life. Good choice! Whether you're coming for the uninhibited nightlife or the affordable jetpacks and rocket ships, you're sure to have a memorable stay. Don't bother with a suitcase - everything you could possibly want is obtainable here. But be sure to bring your imagination: Second Life is a world of endless reinvention where you can change your shape, your sex, even your species as easily as you might slip into a pair of shoes back home. The vision of former RealNetworks CTO Philip Rosedale, Second Life emerged from beta just three years ago. Rosedale was convinced that the increasing adoption of broadband and powerful processors made it possible to create a 3-D virtual world similar to the metaverse Neal Stephenson described in his sci-fi novel Snow Crash. Rosedale and his team at Linden Lab govern Second Life and rent property to the steady stream of fresh immigrants, but beyond establishing a few basic protocols, they pretty much stay out of the way. Almost everything you'll see has been built by the locals, from the swaying palm trees at the Welcome Area to the pole-dancer's dress at the XXX Playground. Today, Second Life is second home to half a million people, and everyone from Duran Duran and Wells Fargo Bank to the Department of Homeland Security has funded real estate here. The national currency of Linden dollars is freely convertible to US dollars (and the exchange rate is quite favorable at the moment!), and an increasing number of residents are ditching their jobs back on Earth to make their living entirely within Second Life's economy. But this exotic realm can seem bewildering and strange to first-time visitors (affectionately known as "noobs" in the native parlance). Let Wired be your guide. Getting There Make your way to Secondlife.com and download the required software for free. No passport necessary, but you do need a credit card or PayPal account if you want to buy local currency. Your stay begins on Orientation Island, a secluded area designed to familiarize you with the interface. Then you can beam down to Help Island to let volunteer mentors assist you, or you can proceed straight to the bustling Welcome Area [above]. As with any port, this place is crowded with cheerful, often eccentric locals eager to tell you about their home. But beware of hucksters looking to separate you from your Linden dollars or entice you into the red-light districts. Continue to: Second Life: Facts for the Visitor Second Life: Entertainment Second Life: Destinations Second Life: Shopping Wired in Second Life Wired Staff | Advertising | Subscribe | Reprints | Customer Service |
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Saturday, December 01, 2007 | Polishing Sets and Lines, Broadway Comes Back
Sara Krulwich/The New York Times The cast members of the long-running musical "A Chorus Line" rehearsing for the first performance after the stagehands' union and theater owners and producers settled a 19-day strike. November 30, 2007 Polishing Sets and Lines, Broadway Comes Back At "Chicago," the cast had to do a run-through because the new leading man and two other stars joining the show — Vincent Pastore and Aida Turturro, of "The Sopranos" — had never rehearsed together. At "Hairspray," the crew had to make sure that the complicated '60s-style sets were still working before they fitted one of the stars into his costume — an enormous squishy undergarment that is a combination padded bra and fat suit. At "Mamma Mia," which has made all those Abba songs a fixture at the Winter Garden Theater since 2001, the cast warmed up around a piano outside the ladies' room, not far from the bar. At "Wicked," the crew had to put water in the bubble-making contraption that carried the actress Annaleigh Ashford across the stage before her opening line, which took on multiple meanings: "It's good to see me, isn't it?" So it went last night, on an unusual kind of opening night on Broadway. After a stagehands' strike that shut down all but eight Broadway theaters for 19 days, some shows raced the clock to get the curtain up. Others treated last night like pretty much any other night. But it was not any other night. Beneath the show-must-go-on euphoria that came with the end of the strike was a definite undercurrent of worry: How much damage had the strike done to Broadway? The consensus was that it was too soon to say. "I don't know how long it will take to build back up, but I can tell you this: We're sold out this weekend — there won't be any seats," said Barry Weissler, a producer of "Chicago." "Maybe we can take these 19days and make them past history. We did it after 9/11 and after the musicians' strike. We can do it now." The accord ending the stagehands' strike, the second walkout on Broadway in five years and the longest since 1975, was reached on Wednesday night, around the time the darkened shows usually let out. People who were involved in the negotiations said the producers won some flexibility on rules covering how many stagehands must work on a show, and when. In return, the stagehands won annual wage increases of up to 4.5 percent for five years. But the timing of the settlement meant that the casts and crews of about 30 shows had less than 24 hours before last night's curtain, and the pressure was on. And getting a theater ready for a show after a three-week hiatus is like opening a dusty, neglected summer house after a long winter — if that summer house were full of complicated electronic equipment, moving floors and one-of-a-kind costumes. "It's like Ringling Brothers is back in business," the actor Maxwell Caulfield said during a break after running through his "Razzle Dazzle" number in "Chicago" for the first time. In theater after theater yesterday, technicians blew compressed air into audio consoles, spraying away dust. Stage carpenters lowered and raised backdrops. For "Hairspray," that meant balloons and stars for a sock hop scene, microphones for a television studio, and the storefront of Mr. Pinky's Hefty Hideaway. There were lights to check and costumes to spiff up. At "Hairspray," five stylists worked in a cloud of — what else? — hairspray to reshape most of the bouffant wigs. They had deflated during 19 days of not being worn. "You wouldn't leave your car in the garage for a month and then try and drive it off on a vacation without testing it out first," said Brian Munroe, the head carpenter for "Hairspray." But the stagehands' relief at being back at work was tempered by caution. They said "Hairspray," a solid success with George Wendt, who played Norm on the 1980s sitcom "Cheers," would do fine. But other shows might not. Jessica Morton, an assistant electrician, said she had taken a second job, at a wine shop near her apartment in Harlem, out of concern that the strike might last through the holidays. Andrew Keister, a sound technician, said he was sure that the stagehands' union, Local 1 of the International Alliance of Theatrical Stage Employees, would ratify the deal. But he noted that the Actors' Equity contract runs out next summer. "Let's hope it doesn't get pushed this far," he said. For their part, theatergoers lined up at the box offices through the day, with many shows discounting ticket prices deeply. Even the ticket sellers seemed to be caught up in the new reality that Broadway was going back to work. At the Ambassador, Jim Gatens called out the row and seat number of each ticket he sold as if the buyer had just won the lottery. "Row J, center!" he told Ann Martorana of Manhattan as he handed her an envelope. "We're just happy to see the public showing up again — at any price," he said. In the theaters, the stagehands' rituals began hours before showtime. At "Hairspray," Mr. Munroe's crew went to work high above the stage at the Neil Simon Theater, on West 52nd Street. They greased winches and hoisted late-in-the-show backdrops out of the way. Mr. Keister dusted off his audio console. "There have been a lot of rodents enjoying their free time here," he said, worrying that they might have chewed through the wires. None had, he later concluded when he turned on the power and nothing shorted out. But the trouble-shooting continued through the afternoon, and less than an hour before showtime, the stagehands were still trying to fix a problem with one set of lights. With less than 40 minutes to go, they lowered the curtain. Two minutes later, the lights rotated and changed from white to blue. The electrical problem was fixed. To root out the same kinds of problems, the crew of "Wicked" ran through the show, from the top. But the cast was nowhere to be seen, and the expensive orchestra seats were empty. Onstage at the Gershwin Theater, on West 51st Street, an electrician in a union sweatshirt paced back and forth, poking the buttons on a remote control device. Then the bubble-spouting contraption that is supposed to carry Ms. Ashford, as Glinda, was hoisted into the air, and the crew spotted its first challenge: the machine had gone unused for so long that the soap solution had dried up. Water was added to the machine. The run-through resumed, and an enormous mask — the "Oz head," as the crew called it — appeared. This led to the kind of chatter, some over headsets, some not, that had not been heard since Nov. 10, the day the strike began. "Oz head rotating," a stagehand announced. Another shouted, "Look up, stand clear!" Seconds later, smoke filled the stage, as if something had caught fire. Anywhere else, that probably would have been a sign that something was wrong. But not in a show featuring the Wicked Witch of the West. "All right, we got smoke! We're good!" said a voice crackling over a speaker. That voice belonged to Mark Overton, the show's lead carpenter. He stopped for a moment to explain that the crew wanted to see that everything was functioning the way it was supposed to. That was all he had time to say. A second later, Mr. Overton turned around and bellowed into his headset, "Bridge coming in!" Behind him, a giant black bridge appeared onstage, and Mr. Overton rushed off to check on it. "What was that awful noise?" another stagehand asked him. "Is that bad?" Mr. Overton sounded as if he had forgotten what the mechanics of the show sound like after 19 days away. "No," he said, "I think it's normal." At "Chicago," the day began with the dance captain, Gregory Butler, working on the "Razzle Dazzle" number with Mr. Caulfield and other cast members. Mr. Caulfield had starred with the London company of "Chicago" and was to have joined the New York cast on Nov. 13. But that turned out to be the fourth day of the strike. His contract called for him to appear through Sunday, so as of last night, he had a very limited engagement — five performances. He and Mr. Weissler said it was not clear whether he would stay longer. And then there was Ms. Turturro, appearing in her first Broadway musical. "I'm a nervous wreck, but I'm excited," she said before going onstage for a rehearsal. "This is a marvelous cast. If I mess up a line, they know the lines. I'm sure in a few days, I'll be good." And then, for the first time in 19 days, the lights went down and the music started. Reporting was contributed by Anne Barnard, Eric Konigsberg, Anahad O'Connor, Sharon Otterman and Campbell Robertson.
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| Citing Statistics, Giuliani Misses Time and Again 
Darren McCollester/Getty Images On the campaign trail, Rudolph W. Giuliani uses numbers to point out areas of success during his years as mayor of New York. November 30, 2007 Citing Statistics, Giuliani Misses Time and Again In almost every appearance as he campaigns for the Republican presidential nomination, Rudolph W. Giuliani cites a fusillade of statistics and facts to make his arguments about his successes in running New York City and the merits of his views. Discussing his crime-fighting success as mayor, Mr. Giuliani told a television interviewer that New York was "the only city in America that has reduced crime every single year since 1994." In New Hampshire this week, he told a public forum that when he became mayor in 1994, New York "had been averaging like 1,800, 1,900 murders for almost 30 years." When a recent Republican debate turned to the question of fiscal responsibility, he boasted that "under me, spending went down by 7 percent." All of these statements are incomplete, exaggerated or just plain wrong. And while, to be sure, all candidates use misleading statistics from time to time, Mr. Giuliani has made statistics a central part of his candidacy as he campaigns on his record. For instance, another major American city claims to have reduced crime every year since 1994: Chicago. New York averaged 1,514 murders a year during the three decades before Mr. Giuliani took office; it did not record more than 1,800 homicides until 1980. And Mr. Giuliani's own memoir states that spending grew an average of 3.7 percent for most of his tenure; an aide said Mr. Giuliani had meant to say that he had proposed a 7 percent reduction in per capita spending during his time as mayor. Facts and figures are often the striking centerpieces of Mr. Giuliani's arguments. He has always had a penchant for statistics — his anticrime strategy as mayor was built around a system known as Compstat that closely tracked crimes to focus law enforcement efforts. On the campaign trail he often wields data, without notes, with prosecutorial zeal to hammer home his points. But in recent days, both Mr. Giuliani's Republican rival Mitt Romney and Democrats have accused him of a pattern of misleading figures and have begun to use the issue to try to undercut his credibility. An examination of many of his statements by The New York Times, other news organizations and independent groups have turned up a variety of misstatements, virtually all of which cast Mr. Giuliani or his arguments in a better light. "He's given us a lot of work up until now," said Brooks Jackson, the director of Annenberg Political Fact Check, which is part of Factcheck.org, a project of the Annenberg Public Policy Center of the University of Pennsylvania that has corrected statements by candidates in both parties. Aides to Mr. Giuliani dismiss questions about his use of statistics as nitpicking, arguing that no one can dispute the big points he makes by using the statistics: that crime dropped significantly during his tenure, say, or that he worked to restrain spending in New York. "The mayor likes detail, and uses it frequently on the campaign trail in ways the other candidates don't," said Maria Comella, a spokeswoman for Mr. Giuliani. "And at the end of the day, he is making points that are true." Mr. Giuliani is not alone in citing statistics in a questionable way. Last month, Senator Hillary Rodham Clinton, Democrat of New York, said that financing for the National Institutes of Health had decreased under President Bush; it has increased. Senator Barack Obama, Democrat of Illinois, said the national debt had doubled under President Bush; it has not. But with Mr. Giuliani running so strongly on his record, statistics have taken on a central role in his campaign. In recent days, Mr. Giuliani seems to be taking greater care to be precise. At the Republican debate on Wednesday night, he was careful when referring to crime statistics in Massachusetts during Mr. Romney's term as governor, which had been the subject of a debate over the weekend. And at a "Politics and Eggs" breakfast on Monday in Bedford, N.H., he took greater care to describe his record on cutting taxes. Last weekend, speaking about his belief in supply-side economics, Mr. Giuliani said, "I lowered, argued for lowering, and got the hotel occupancy tax lowered by 33 percent. And I was collecting $200 million more from the lower tax than the city had been collecting from before I was mayor from the higher tax." In fact, the increase in revenues from the hotel occupancy tax was just over a quarter of what Mr. Giuliani asserted — the city's hotel tax revenues grew by roughly $58 million during his term, according to the city's Independent Budget Office — and a booming economy, as well as the reduction in crime Mr. Giuliani helped produce, probably played a part. Factcheck.org has reported that the Giuliani campaign exaggerated when it boasted on its Web site that "Mayor Giuliani increased the police force from 28,000 to 40,000," noting that most of that increase came from his merger of the Transit and Housing Police Departments with the New York Police Department, a transfer of more than 7,000 existing officers to the department. The campaign argues that giving housing and transit police officers jurisdiction beyond the city's public housing and subways gave the city more flexibility to fight crime. It said that it usually notes the effects of the merger when describing the size of the police force, and said it would change a post on its Web site to mention the merger when citing the increase. And the group also found that Mr. Giuliani erred at a Republican debate when, while calling for tort reform, he said that 2.2 percent of the nation's gross domestic product "is spent on all these frivolous lawsuits." That statistic, the group reported, came from a study that pegged the cost of all civil claims at 2.2 percent of the G.D.P., without judging whether the cases had merit or not. Even some people who support Mr. Giuliani's proposals say he risks undercutting his own arguments when he relies on imprecise or questionable statistics. In a recent radio advertisement by the campaign about his health care proposal, Mr. Giuliani repeated another false statement that he had been using on the campaign trail. In the advertisement Mr. Giuliani, who has had prostate cancer, asserted that his chances of surviving prostate cancer in the United States were 82 percent, while his chance of surviving in England would have been only 44 percent. His point was that the American health care system is far superior to England's government-run system, which he refers to as "socialized medicine." The figure came from an article written by one of Mr. Giuliani's health care advisers, but was soon discredited: the source of the research that was used to derive the statistic said that its data had been misused. The Office for National Statistics in Britain said that the true five-year survival rate was 74.4 percent — still lower than in the United States, but by a much smaller margin. Mr. Giuliani stood by the statistic, however, and kept using the advertisement, though it has since gone off the air. Ramesh Ponnuru, a senior editor at National Review magazine, said Mr. Giuliani's plan "may be the best of the Republican health care plans." "The trouble is that the exact statistic he used was misleading," Mr. Ponnuru said in a recent interview, elaborating on a blog post he wrote. "It became an argument about the statistics, and he dug in and defended it when he was wrong." Another radio advertisement that Mr. Giuliani ran over the summer stated that as mayor he "turned a $2.3 billion deficit into a multibillion-dollar surplus." That was also misleading. According to independent fiscal monitors, Mr. Giuliani did have to close a $2.3 billion deficit in his first budget, and did accumulate a multibillion-dollar surplus during his tenure. But by Mr. Giuliani's last full fiscal year in office, the city was spending more than it was taking in in revenues, and Mr. Giuliani ended up spending almost all of the surplus to balance his final budget. Last weekend, questions about Mr. Giuliani's use of facts moved front and center in the campaign. Mr. Giuliani charged that "violent crime and murder went up" in Massachusetts while Mr. Romney was governor. The number of reported killings did go up in those years, but the state's overall rate of violent crime went down, according to statistics compiled by the Federal Bureau of Investigation. Mr. Romney accused Mr. Giuliani of having "a real problem with facts," and aides circulated a statement calling Mr. Giuliani's crime statistics "about as accurate as his prostate cancer survival numbers for England." "He has now done this time and again, making up facts that just happen to be wrong, and facts are stubborn things," Mr. Romney said. Frank Luntz, a Republican strategist who once worked for Mr. Giuliani, said he doubted that the issue would hurt him politically. "When he talks about New York, people see it," Mr. Luntz said of Mr. Giuliani, "and they feel it, and if a number isn't quite right, or is off by a small amount, nobody will care, because it rings true to them."
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| N.Y. Times Editorial Iraq War and The Endgame November 30, 2007 Editorial Still No Way Out There has been so much horrible news out of Iraq for so long that it is natural to want to celebrate better news. Sending another 30,000 American troops into Iraq has made life better: attacks are down, as are the number of American and Iraqi casualties. Some refugees are even venturing home. The news has cheered Americans and dampened Democrats' enthusiasm for keeping up the pressure on Iraq policy. Unfortunately, it is just as important to look at what has not happened since President Bush announced his surge: Iraq's leaders are no closer to making the political deals that are the only hope for building a self-sustaining peace. Without a serious effort at national conciliation, American troops are just holding down the lid on a pressure cooker. Iraq's rival militias, the insurgents, the bitter sectarian resentments and the meddling neighbors haven't gone anywhere. Consider this all too familiar horror: yesterday, police said they pulled six bodies from the Tigris River about 25 miles south of Baghdad. They were handcuffed and showed signs of having been tortured. And five, including a child, had been beheaded. Perhaps 160,000 American troops could hold down the overall casualty numbers indefinitely, but they cannot wipe away that sort of hatred. That's the job of Iraq's leaders. Either way, the American military doesn't have enough troops for such an occupation without end, and the American Treasury can't keep spending $10 billion a month to maintain it. Mr. Bush's escalation was sold as a way to buy Iraqi politicians breathing room to finally address the problems driving the sectarian violence: by agreeing on an equitable division of oil wealth, rules for provincial elections and ways to bring more Sunnis and former Baath Party members into the Shiite-dominated government. Instead, Iraq's politicians — and their American backers — have squandered the time and the best efforts of American troops. Mr. Bush's generals are so frustrated that they've begun to complain publicly about the fecklessness of Iraq's leaders. The ever-feckless White House, rather than looking for ways to compel Iraq's leaders to perform, is lessening the pressure. The Times reported this week that the Bush administration has scaled back its goals for political progress. Its newest low bar: Iraq's dysfunctional government manages to pass a budget and approves legislation to allow former Baath Party members to rejoin the government. (And that was before the Iraqi Parliament dissolved into a shouting match over the Baath reconciliation bill and decided to put it off again.) At least part of the recent good news can be traced to a new collaboration between American troops and Sunni fighters that last year were trying to kill Americans in wholesale numbers. The question is how long that collaboration will last if the Shiite-dominated government continues to deny the Sunnis access to basic government services and jobs. There are also suggestions that Iran may be exercising more restraint. Fewer roadside bombs are apparently making their way across the border, and Tehran's allies in the Mahdi Army are lying low. But Mr. Bush and his secretary of state, Condoleezza Rice, still have not begun a serious dialogue with Iran and all of Iraq's neighbors about what they're willing to do to help contain Iraq's chaos. Even after putting another 30,000 Americans in harm's way, Mr. Bush still sees no need for a strategy to get all 160,000 troops in Iraq safely home. And as long as they know that this is the case, that Mr. Bush is willing to go on paying the bills — and protecting the Green Zone — Iraqi politicians will see no reason to compromise. Americans need to ask themselves the questions Mr. Bush is refusing to answer: Is this country signing on to keep the peace in Iraq indefinitely? If so, how many American and Iraqi deaths a month are an acceptable price? If not, what's the plan for getting out?
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| Rudy Giuliani has been having a bad week 
Tony Cenicola/The New York Times Gail Collins December 1, 2007 Op-Ed Columnist Rudy's Security Blanket By GAIL COLLINS Rudy Giuliani has been having a bad week. Or, as he might put it, suffering persecutions never seen upon this planet since Mel Gibson was tortured on the rack, castrated, disemboweled and beheaded in "Braveheart." As Michael Cooper reported in The Times, New York's ex-mayor is prone to exaggeration on the campaign trail, stretching facts or replacing them with more dramatic, more interesting, more untrue ones. Still, nobody would deny the last several days have been a downer. First, Rudy looked bad in that debate in Florida. The protégé he promoted for homeland security secretary, Bernard Kerik, kept showing up on TV in news clips captioned 16-COUNT FEDERAL INDICTMENT. Then Ben Smith reported on Politico.com about the peculiar accounting practices the Giuliani administration had used for security details that guarded Rudy when he was out of town pursuing nonmayoral ventures such as golf and adultery. The bills were stashed away under the budgets of obscure city agencies like the Loft Board and — oh, dear — the Office for People With Disabilities. Rudy said the story sounded like a "hit job" to him, aimed at reminding primary voters about his divorce-studded private life. Actually, LoftBoardgate is a reminder not of what Rudy does behind closed doors, but of his inability to keep them shut. When he was mayor, his sex life spilled into weird press conferences and court fights over who got custody of Gracie Mansion. Lately, he's contented himself with interrupting his speeches to accept strange cellphone calls from the latest wife. It's fitting that Giuliani's first big campaign crisis wound up being about his special subject: security. When he was mayor, he got a whole lot of it. The city was at one point paying for police guards to protect and transport not only Rudy, his children and his elderly mother, but also both his wife and his mistress. Really, they were thisclose to assigning a detail to the family retriever and a springer spaniel he was courting down the block. The Giuliani presidential campaign is based on the idea that he understands that the world is a dangerous place and knows the steps that need to be taken to protect us. But his real conviction has always seemed to be that the world was a dangerous place for him. After American embassies were bombed in East Africa, his administration responded by blocking off the driveways to City Hall, barring protesters and politicians from their traditional press conference site on the building steps, and banishing tourists. Meanwhile, behind the barricades, the mayor was planning to put the city's emergency command center inside the best-known terrorist target in America. Does this sound like a good plan, people? Do you want the next president putting a nuclear missile at Camp David while he moves the Situation Room to the Louisiana flood plain? The conflation of the safety of Rudy with the safety of New York reached its peak on 9/11, when the entire public security leadership of the city left ground zero in order to protect the mayor in his walk uptown. And then there was the aftermath, when he tried to postpone the mayoral election under the theory that the factor most critical to our survival was his continued presence at the helm. If the vision of city police officers cooling their heels outside his mistress's home in the Hamptons is troubling, it's not because of the moral implications. It's a reminder that Rudy is one of those people who doesn't handle power well. The more important he becomes, the more impossible he becomes. Let's look back at what he was like in 1994 when he was first sworn in as mayor. The rest of the world noted the inauguration mainly because Giuliani's 7-year-old son, Andrew, stood at the lectern while his father read his speech, declaiming right along with him. When Giuliani told his predecessor, "Mayor Dinkins, I salute your accomplishments," Andrew yelled out, "me, too!" Nobody could really focus on the speech; they were just watching the gesticulating child. But Giuliani cheerfully plowed on along, like millions of other parents who had learned through long experience that if you require hushed silence to say your piece, you will be waiting a very long time. He called his wife, Donna, "my lover" and thanked his family for teaching him about love. His mother, Helen, who was a charming character, sat proudly on the dais. "Children can be very thickheaded," she told me once, describing the way Rudy had preferred the dirty city to the Long Island suburbia where she and her husband had tried to transplant him. He seemed like a guy whose life required him to consider the emotional needs of people other than himself. That had to be a promising sign. And now here we all are. Giuliani's mother is dead. His wife discovered that her husband wanted a divorce when he called a press conference to announce it, and she is now married to someone else. The son has grown into what appears to be a fine young man who doesn't really speak to his father. But at least they all got security.
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| Strike Without Movie Stars Why are A-listers like George Clooney, Tom Hanks, and Brad Pitt avoiding the picket lines?By Kim Masters
Posted Friday, Nov. 30, 2007, at 11:21 A.M. E.T. Greetings: Hollywoodland has not been on strike but on hiatus. And here we are, back to the grind while the writers are still out. Attempting to read the tea leaves at this point defeats us, but a question has come to mind: Where is Hollywood's A-list movie talent? The writers have flooded the Internet with videos at Web sites from YouTube to United Hollywood to LateShowWritersOnStrike.com, and those videos are helping them win the public-relations war. Many actors have appeared in the videos, including Holly Hunter, Sandra Oh, a gaggle of Desperate Housewives, Ed Asner, and Josh Brolin. That's a lot of television stars—feeling the pain because their shows are shut down. But where are the movie stars? OK, you get Harvey Keitel, William H. Macy (married to a television star), and inevitably Susan Sarandon, but what about Brad Pitt, Tom Hanks, and Johnny Depp, who have had movies canceled because of the strike? Where's the one you'd most expect to see, George Clooney, who happens to be a Writers Guild member? Clooney hasn't been entirely invisible, in that, if you read the trades closely, you might know he gave $25,000 to the Actors Fund in a donation earmarked to help those affected by the strike. And he said he is encouraging others to donate, too. But that's as far as it's gone. A powerful producer observes that the top movie talent is "not touching [the strike] with a 10-foot pole." Why? "They don't want things to change," says a former studio president. "They have the greatest deal in town. Why hurt the golden goose?" Movies haven't been hit as hard as television shows, he adds, so the movie stars are not really feeling it yet. An agent who represents A-list talent agrees. "Most movie stars aren't affected by any of this," he says. "And for them, it's like, 'No matter what you get [out of the fight], it doesn't really benefit me.' " This agent paused to admire the adroitness of the Clooney contribution—showing he cares without actually putting himself out front and center. "That was smart," he says. Despite this display of cynicism, the agent doesn't think the absence of the big stars matters much. "I don't think movie stars' picketing for any cause is effective," he says. "I even think they hurt political candidates." (link) Nov. 9, 2007 Here's the story: The writers seem to be keeping up their momentum, and talent from Jason Alexander to Ray Romano to Holly Hunter to Patricia Heaton is turning out to support them. The question is: How stiff is their resolve? Show runners—those rich writer-producers—caught the studios off guard by refusing to cross lines. At first the studios assumed the writers would work without a contract. Then they assumed they'd performing nonwriting duties on their shows during a strike. Wrong on both counts. Many show runners really, really want to do the work because these shows are their babies. But by refusing to work at all, they've shut down shows like Desperate Housewives and Grey's Anatomy faster than the studios expected. The studios may have stockpiled scripts, but if just anyone could put these shows together, they wouldn't be shelling out the big bucks to the show runners in the first place. Now the show runners are getting threat letters from the studios and clearly, some are getting plenty nervous. Rather than vowing to fight until the bitter end, they're hoping they can return to work not when the two sides resolve their enormous differences, but simply if they resume bargaining. So far, nothing's scheduled, though there's a widespread belief that the two sides will called back to the table next week. "Everyone seems to feel that next week, it's do or die," says a very prominent producer. If there's no resolution, can the writers hold out? A representative of many show runners says they're up for it now, in the initial wave of excitement. But how long will they keep picketing, he asks, when the weather gets cold (for Los Angeles), it rains, the holidays roll around, and there's no end in sight? He predicts they'll crumble like biscotti in a latte. (Would you want to be repped by this guy?) The writers' stamina may be an open question, but the networks cannot be as sanguine as the bosses pretend. Even if the networks see this as an opportunity to dump failing shows and unproductive deals, they are taking an enormous risk. They are looking at a potentially permanent loss of audience, not to mention falling revenues when advertisers don't pay for commercials during repeats and bad reality programming, plus a pilot season made up of worse dreck than last time. If ever there was an example of mutually assured destruction, this strike would appear to be it. A note: Your Hollywoodland correspondent is not going on strike but must take a break for a week or two. More later. (link) Nov. 1, 2007 Strike! As you've no doubt heard, film and television writers have joined the picket lines. At first, many weren't sure what to do once they got there. But eventually, they seemed to get the hang of it. Among the celebrities who turned up to support them were: James L. Brooks, Tina Fey, Julia Louis-Dreyfus. In New York, John Oliver from The Daily Show was there explaining that writers must demand a share of Internet revenue now. A source at NBC denied that The Office was shut down, as rumored, but what might have been shot isn't clear because Steve Carell, Rainn Wilson, and other talent didn't show up for work. CBS's Cane was said to be shut down, but the network probably isn't too upset about that. As reported elsewhere, negotiations collapsed Sunday night after a long day of talks. It's hard to say whether both sides were in good faith or just trying to make it look that way. It seems that the writers made some concessions, but the studios wouldn't budge on the key issue: compensation for work that appears via the Internet or new technologies. Nick Counter of the Alliance of Motion Picture and Television Producers was predicting a strike that lasts for months yesterday, saying the writers appear determined to stay off the job until the Screen Actors Guild negotiates this summer. Can that be taken seriously? The studios can talk about shooting movies based on locked scripts, but that seems fanciful. Movies go through reshoots routinely; it's hard to believe studios want to start filming hundred-million-dollar pictures without the ability to fix scenes that aren't working. The networks can talk all they want to about stockpiling material. They can't keep scripted series on the air for that long. Going to reruns and reality shows seems a good way to drive viewers away, perhaps forever. On the other hand, the networks may be screwed, anyway. They're having a lousy fall—a lot of expensive shows from Viva Laughlin to Bionic Woman, and no breakout hit. Now may be as good a time as any for them to cut their losses with a particle of an excuse about how the shows would have built audiences if it hadn't been for the strike. It just doesn't seem like a long-term solution to their admittedly serious problems. Of course, the studios might be able to hold out longer than the writers. J.J. Abrams is about to start directing Star Trek. He was on the picket lines yesterday and said he'll direct but not write. For a guy who seems to write in his sleep, that would seem to present a challenge. This is his second shot at directing a big feature film, and it's a potential kickoff to a franchise. Can he really resist the desire to give it his best shot? Television show runners, those well-remunerated producer-writers, are also in a bind. They are being told by the guild to turn in copies of scripts by Thursday to ensure that those who violate the terms of the strike—i.e., those who write—can be punished. Meanwhile, the studios are warning them not to turn over the scripts to any third parties. Contractually, they are obligated to do producing duties. The problem is that the line between producing and writing isn't clear. A couple of show runners have gone on the record saying that they'll do nothing at all, risking legal action from the studios. Shawn Ryan, creator of The Shield, sent around an e-mail that read, "I obviously will not write on my shows. But I also will not edit, I will not cast, I will not look at location photos, I will not get on the phone with the network and studio, I will not prep directors, I will not review mixes. ... I can't in good conscience fight these bastards with one hand, while operating an Avid with the other. I am on strike and I am not working for them. PERIOD." Not many will go that far, but dozens of other show runners, including those from Grey's Anatomy, Ugly Betty, Heroes, Reaper, and The Office, signed an ad in Variety titled, "Pencils Down Means Pencils Down," expressing their intention to enforce the strike vigorously. Whether they stick to that resolve should have a lot to do with when the strike ends, and how. (link) Kim Masters is an NPR correspondent and the author of The Keys to the Kingdom: The Rise of Michael Eisner and the Fall of Everyone Else.
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| The messy history of cleanliness, and why our obsession with dirt may be making us sick. Today in Salon: The filthy, stinking truthBy Katharine Mieszkowski Nov. 30, 2007 |  To listen to a podcast of the interview, click here. To subscribe: Click here to add Conversations to iTunes or cut and paste the URL into your podcasting software:
 The thought of a daily shower would have filled the 17th century Frenchman with fear. To splash away with abandon, to open your pores and leave your body vulnerable to all that disease, would be practically asking to get sick. In fact, our bathing habits would have disgusted him, much like his habits disgust us: never washing his body with water or soap, for instance. Or changing his linen shirt to get clean. How cleanliness has changed in the West is the engrossing (and sometimes gross) subject of Katherine Ashenburg's "The Dirt on Clean: An Unsanitized History," which skates merrily from ancient frolics at the public baths to today's obsession with hand sanitizer and teeth-whitening strips. Ashenburg, whose previous book was a popular history of grief called "The Mourner's Dance: What We Do When People Die," argues that contemporary cleanliness has more to do with appearances than hygiene. Considering our relative lack of physical exertion compared with our ancestors, why do we consider a daily shower an ideal, anyway? Apparently, the less we sweat, the more we clean. But our very fear of dirt may actually be making us sick. Salon spoke with Ashenburg by phone from her office in Toronto. What did clean mean in ancient Rome? If you were a man, you would take off all your clothes, put a little oil on your body, rub it with dust and go out into the playing field to work up a sweat. Then you would get somebody to scrape off your perspiration with an instrument that looks like a little tiny rake, called a strigil. Then you would get into a tepid bath, then into a really hot bath, then into a cold bath. You never used any soap, and it was all done in public. If you were just a normal person, you'd probably spend a couple of hours every day in the bathhouse, where you could get wine, food, sex, a medical treatment, a haircut. You could have a depilator pluck the hair in your armpits. Why wasn't soap popular? Soap was a combination of animal fat and lye. The Egyptians went to great lengths to make a soap that was mild enough to use on bodies, but many cultures, including the Romans and Greeks, didn't really. So they scraped themselves. Basically, it was a kind of drastic exfoliation. They probably got as clean as soap makes you. Most people, except very rich people, didn't use soap until about the second half of the 19th century. Why did public baths go out of fashion? They went out of fashion because the infrastructure to run them -- the mechanisms that brought them water, that heated their water, that separated out the different heats of the various pools -- required an enormously sophisticated and complicated infrastructure, which the Roman Empire had. But when the empire started to fall apart, people couldn't maintain that, and the invading barbarians disabled the aqueducts. There was never an empire large enough to support that again. How have attitudes about cold versus hot water for bathing changed over the centuries? They haven't changed much. One of the most wonderful, long-lasting, historical continuities is the people who support cold-water bathing, who think it's virile and virtuous, versus the people who want to bathe in warm or hot water. They don't attach any moral significance to their choice of warm or hot water. They just think it's way more comfortable, and easier, to clean yourself in warm or hot water. There's a German expression, Warmduscher, "warm showerer," which is one of the ways you describe a man who is short on masculinity. I just love it that these two camps have been going for centuries. We all know the saying, "Cleanliness is next to Godliness," but there was a time when quite the opposite was true. Could you talk about that? Christianity turns out to be the only great world religion -- great in the sense of widespread and influential -- that had no teaching or interest in hygiene. In the early years of the church, the holier you were, the less you wanted to be clean. Cleanliness was kind of a luxury, like food, drink and sex, because cleanliness was comfortable and attractive. The holier you were -- and this really applied to monks and hermits and saints -- the less you would wash. And the more you smelled, the closer to God people thought you were. So then did Buddhists and Muslims think Christians were filthy? Absolutely. And they were right, too. And didn't Westerners have a reputation among Asians for being filthy? Yes. They probably were, relatively speaking, compared to affluent Chinese and to Japanese people of every class. One of the reasons may have been the influence of Christianity. Europe suffered this hiatus in cleanliness for about four or five centuries. When the great plagues came, the Black Death, in the 14th century, the king of France asked the medical faculty at the Sorbonne in Paris, "What is causing this hideous plague that is killing one out of every three Europeans, and what can we do to prevent it?" And the doctor said the people who were at risk for getting the plague had opened their pores in warm or hot water, in the baths, and they were much more susceptible. So in France and England and most European countries, for about five centuries, people really believed that it was very, very dangerous to get in water, and this only really broke down in the 19th century. There was nothing like this, nothing corresponded to that belief, in Asia or in India, so they had an unbroken tradition of cleanliness. They also had religions, like Islam and Hinduism, that took cleanliness very seriously, which Christianity never did. Why did a 17th century Frenchman think that changing his linen shirt was the path to cleanliness? In my childhood, there were laundry soap advertisements that talked about ring around the collar. For us, that just meant your clothes were dirty, and you needed to wash them. But the 17th century looked at the ring around your cuffs and your collar and thought linen was like a wick that drew out the dirt. They really thought, not only was it safer to change your linen shirt, but it actually cleaned you better. They thought the flax in the linen exerted some kind of magnetic attraction to the sweat and drew it out of your body. So they must have smelled terrible. They must have smelled terrible. But the ocean in which they swam was the odor of rank sweat, or fresh sweat. So I think they were quite used to it. In the Middle Ages, St. Bernard said, "We all stink. No one smells." I think that sums up their tolerance for it. We had an enormous tolerance for cigarette smoke 20 years ago. Every indoor space was filled with it. I never smoked, but I never noticed it particularly. Now, I actually checked into a hotel room on a smoking floor by mistake last week in Montreal, and I thought it was the worst thing ever. But 20 years ago, I wouldn't have even noticed it. What was the role of perfume? During the 17th century, which I think was probably the dirtiest century in Western history, people put on perfume so they wouldn't smell their neighbors. For example, Madame de Montespan, one of Louis XIV's mistresses, swathed herself in clouds of self-defensive perfume so that she wouldn't smell the king's halitosis. She didn't like the way he smelled, and he hated the way she smelled, because perfume gave him headaches. They had a great big fight about it one day in his coach, where they were also accompanied by his queen, his legal wife, and this was recorded by one of his memoirists. So you wore perfume to keep from smelling other people? That's right. I never came across an instance of somebody saying they were wearing it because they were worried about how they smelled. When did bathrooms become popular in the United States? By about the 1840s in America, architects who made pattern books -- books that everybody could buy and then build according to the patterns in the book -- added a little room that was called a "bath-room" for the first time, which meant that, eventually, there would be fixed plumbing in that room. But for a very long time, until well into the 1920s in rural places, you would just move your tin tub into the kitchen on Saturday night and fill it with warm water, and then everybody in the family, one by one, would get into the same water, starting with probably the father, who was the most important, and going down to the daughter-in-law, who was the least important. How did we shift away from the idea that water would open your pores and leave you vulnerable to disease? Very gradually. One of the things that probably enabled it to happen was the fashion for spas in naturally occurring springs all over Europe. The Romans always situated their baths near a mineral spring if they could, because their doctors believed there were health-giving properties in them. Even when people were afraid to get in water on a regular basis, if you were sick, if you had arthritis or were infertile or had some medical condition, under your doctor's care you would go to some place like Baden in Switzerland or Bath in England and take the treatments, which included getting into water. The only people who could afford to go to these spas were wealthy and prosperous. I think they became chic. By the mid-18th century, doctors had a little bit more understanding of physiology, and that your pores needed to be open so that they could let out sweat and other things. They thought you let out an awful lot more through your pores than people actually did. It gradually began to be thought of as healthy to clean your pores and let yourself perspire, but it took a long time. From teeth-whitening strips to hand sanitizer, why are Americans so obsessed with cleanliness today? I think it's a continuation of something that started with the Civil War, when the Americans had surprising success with this thing called the Sanitation Commission, which was headed by Frederick Law Olmsted, the architect of Central Park. It achieved an enormous success in limiting deaths just by washing the patients, their linen, the walls of their rooms. It drastically cut into the deaths by disease and infection. Before the war Americans had been just as dirty as Europeans, and they came out of the war thinking cleanliness is democratic because it doesn't cost much money. It's progressive. It's forward-looking. It has wonderful results. They quickly thought this is yet another way in which life in the New World is so much better than life in the Old World. The invention of modern sophisticated advertising, which began in America atthe end of the 19th century, achieved an enormous success, often by advertising things like toilet soap and deodorant. Advertisers want to find more parts of our bodies that we can clean and sanitize, and we've gotten less and less comfortable with ever smelling like a human body or having maybe ivory-colored teeth, or even cream-colored teeth -- normal teeth colors. Our teeth were not meant to be paper white at all, as any dentist will tell you, but we're kind of constantly upping the ante. We've gotten so far away from naturalness that it's really over the top now. But didn't at least one doctor you interviewed argue that the most important thing for preventing disease in terms of cleanliness -- hand washing -- is actually one that many Americans do inadequately? Yes. That's a very good point. This was Dr. Germ, or Dr. Gerba, which is his real name. He has sent his researchers into public washrooms and found that only about 15 percent of people there actually wash long enough and with soap. So much of our current interest in cleanliness is really about appearance and not ever smelling like a human being. If we smell like mangoes or vanilla and our face looks clean and our teeth are paper white, that's good enough. But really the one seriously disease-preventing practice of hand washing is not done enough. Does our obsession with cleanliness actually make us healthier? No. Not at all. I think it's making us sicker in the case of the hygiene hypothesis. It's increasingly believed by a large number of doctors and scientists, who say that the fact that we're not giving one of our immune systems enough dirt and germs to kind of flex its muscles on and get strong is allowing the other immune system, the one that gets allergies and asthma, to [take over]. It's kind of like a teeter-totter: The one that works on dirt and bacteria has nothing to do, and so it becomes really unexercised, and it's sort of on the ground of the teeter-totter. The other one is way in the air. Scientists couldn't understand why we had these skyrocketing rates of asthma and allergies. Now the hypothesis is that we are oversanitized to the point of making our children sick. Is there any health benefit to bathing every day, or is itmore of a social convention? It's totally a social convention, according to the doctors I spoke with. They said it's very important to wash below our wrists [i.e., hands], and the worst thing that could happen to you, if you suddenly became a 17th century person and never washed beyond your wrists, would be some skin conditions or fungal things. It's no doubt comfortable to be clean. But there is no health benefit to washing above the wrists [i.e., the body] other than possibly preventing some fungal things. Did you find that conventions around bathing are driven by technological change or that societal attitudes drive the technology? The latter, very much. The Romans had amazing technology. The great imperial baths were fed by the aqueducts in these enormous tanks called castella. The way they heated the bathhouse with this underfloor heating and heating within the walls was just so impressive. It wasn't that anybody ever lost the know-how of that technology. It was that, for more than 1,000 years, practically nobody was interested in getting clean. Cleanliness was not a priority, so nobody wanted to put in place that perfectly good heating and water-transporting technology the Romans had. About a third of London houses had in-house plumbing by the 1830s already, which was far above what the people had in Paris. The water inspector for Paris said the Parisians would never want this, and it would render their houses damp forever. The technology has been around; what's important is the desire to make use of the technology. About a quarter of U.S. houses built in 2005 had three or more bathrooms. Why has this room where you bathe become a status symbol? We're just raising the bar all the time in the comfort and the luxury in which you can bathe, go to the toilet and wash your face. It's becoming less and less acceptable to Americans to share that bathroom with anybody else. In the 19th century, Harriet Beecher Stowe, who wrote "Uncle Tom's Cabin," said she dreamed of a time when there would be one bathroom in an American house for every three or four bedrooms. People at the time thought that was just crazy utopian, just so over the top compared to what they were used to. Now a luxury apartment across from the Metropolitan Museum in New York City has more bathrooms than bedrooms. Heating and transporting all this water for bathing uses a lot of energy. Do youthink environmentalists are going to get any traction suggesting people bathe less to fight global warming? I think it would be even harder than telling people they shouldn't be driving their cars all the time, or that they shouldn't have cars, because to smell like a human being has become such a taboo. We've never needed to wash less in the developed Western countries, and we've never had more pressure to wash more. If your job is in front of your computer, and if you have a house full of labor-saving devices, you're not scrubbing floors too often, and if you have access to a car or public transit where you live, you're just not sweating the way that people did 50 years ago. But I think the daily bath is almost becoming the minimum. I'm hearing about more and more people who take two showers a day. I've studied 28 centuries, and the pendulum was always swinging back and forth. It's at such an extreme now of overcleanliness that I can't help thinking it is moving back. There are a couple of things that would move it back -- real concerns about the environment and the hygiene hypothesis that it's not good for our health to have robbed ourselves of all these bacteria with which we have had a pretty fruitful coexistence. Do you think we're due for a backlash away from our hypercleanliness? In 50 or 100 years, do you think our habits today will seem bizarrely fastidious? Yes, I really do. I actually hope that they do because I think they have just gone beyond the bounds of sense. -- By Katharine Mieszkowski |
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