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The Facebook page "WTC Progress" posted on an overcast May 30, 2012, that "over 60% of the curtain wall system, representing nearly 7900 panels, have been installed to date!" along with this great HDR photograph (click to enlarge).
Notice the remarkable reflected view of the Hudson River in the west face of Four World Trade Center on the right of the photograph.
via www.facebook.com
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Someone sent me this in an email. They got it online. I'm not sure who the original author is.
COSTELLO: I want to talk about the unemployment rate in America.
ABBOTT: Good Subject. Terrible Times. It's 9%.
COSTELLO: That many people are out of work?
ABBOTT: No, that's 16%.
COSTELLO: You just said 9%.
ABBOTT: 9% Unemployed.
COSTELLO: Right 9% out of work.
ABBOTT: No, that's 16%.
COSTELLO: Okay, so it's 16% unemployed.
ABBOTT: No, that's 9%....
COSTELLO: WAIT A MINUTE. Is it 9% or 16%?
ABBOTT: 9% are unemployed. 16% are out of work.
COSTELLO: IF you are out of work you are unemployed.
ABBOTT: No, you can't count the "Out of Work" as the unemployed. You have to look for work to be unemployed.
COSTELLO: BUT THEY ARE OUT OF WORK!
ABBOTT: No, you miss my point.
COSTELLO: What point?
ABBOTT: Someone who doesn't look for work, can't be counted with those who look for work. It wouldn't be fair.
COSTELLO: To who?
ABBOTT: The unemployed.
COSTELLO: But they are ALL out of work.
ABBOTT: No, the unemployed are actively looking for work.... Those who are out of work stopped looking. They gave up. And, if you give up, you are no longer in the ranks of the unemployed.
COSTELLO: So if you're off the unemployment roles, that would count as less unemployment?
ABBOTT: Unemployment would go down. Absolutely!
COSTELLO: The unemployment rate just goes down because you don't look for work?
ABBOTT: Absolutely it goes down. That's how you get to 9%. Otherwise it would be 16%. You don't want to read about 16% unemployment do ya?
COSTELLO: That would be frightening.
ABBOTT: Absolutely.
COSTELLO: Wait, I got a question for you. That means they're two ways to bring down the unemployment number?
ABBOTT: Now you're thinking like an economist!
COSTELLO: I don't even know what the hell I just said!
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Remembering the men and women who lost their lives while serving in the US armed forces, including those who have died recently on active duty.
Approximate total of American war dead since 1775: 1,343,812, approximately 848,163 being combat deaths.
Approximate total of Americans wounded during military service since 1775: 1,529,230.
(Totals include American Civil War casualties of both Federal and Confederate forces.)
Photos L to R: The Cambridge American Cemetery and Memorial near Cambridge, England; Arlington National Cemetery in Arlington Co., Virginia; The Luxembourg American Cemetery and Memorial, Luxembourg City, Luxembourg.
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via pinterest.com
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In literature as in life, there is something to be said for indeterminacy, poetical ambiguity, and the aching, open synapses of incomplete ideas. But the essays of Gore Vidal are a break from all that, a weather station in the Alps. When the air is clear, you can see across borders; when it’s cloudy, chats by the fireside agitate and charm.
Atypically for a critic of the 20th century, Gore Vidal does not subordinate his perceptions to any school or ideology. This is why he can be trusted. For models, he looks to the worldly, progressive belletrists of the late 19th and early 20th century: Henry James, William Dean Howells, Henry Adams. Note the absence of their immediate predecessors: Hawthorne, Melville, Emerson. Vidal is not a romantic—his mind is empirical. Though he reads with a sympathetic eye, his judgments are sonorous with authority.
Though he often writes of politics, he is a critic and a satirist rather than a pundit, and much of even this work comes by way of book reviewing.
John Cotter's look at the essays of Gore Vidal for the 5-year anniversary of Open Letter Monthly.
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The Hindenburg disaster took place on Thursday, May 6, 1937, as the German passenger airship LZ 129 Hindenburg caught fire and was destroyed during its attempt to dock with its mooring mast at the Lakehurst Naval Air Station, which is located adjacent to the borough of Lakehurst, New Jersey. Of the 97 people on board (36 passengers, 61 crew), there were 36 fatalities, including one death among the ground crew.
The disaster was the subject of spectacular newsreel coverage, photographs, and Herbert Morrison's recorded radio eyewitness report from the landing field, which was broadcast the next day. The actual cause of the fire remains unknown, although a variety of hypotheses have been put forward for both the cause of ignition and the initial fuel for the ensuing fire. The incident shattered public confidence in the giant, passenger-carrying rigid airship and marked the end of the airship era.
via en.wikipedia.org
Photo (above): The airship LZ 129 Hindenburg catching fire on May 6, 1937 at Lakehurst Naval Air Station in New Jersey. The airship was manufactured by Luftschiffbau Zeppelin GmbH beginning in 1931; its first flight was March 4, 1936. It flew 63 flights before it exploded.
Photo (bottom): The Hindenburg floats past the Empire State Building over Manhattan on Aug. 8, 1936. The German airship was en route to Lakehurst, New Jersey, from Germany. The Hindenburg would later explode in a spectacular fireball above Lakehurst on May 6, 1937. (AP Photo)
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The remaining German military forces in the Netherlands capitulated to the Allies on May 5, 1945; German General Johannes Blaskowitz and Canadian General Charles Foulkes signed terms in the presence of Prince Bernhard, the prince consort of Queen Juliana and father of the current monarch Queen Beatrix. Parts of the Netherlands had been liberated earlier by American forces and additional parts by combined Anglo-Canadian forces, along with the 1st Polish Armoured Division, but it was mainly Canadian troops who completed the effort.
I can't verify it online, but I think the bespectled chap in the tank (2740x2004 enlargement) is Prince Bernhard, presumably in a liberation parade on or shortly after May 5, 1945. Bernhard was an interesting and controversial man--a daring risk taker for the cause of Dutch resistence to the Nazis in World War II, he was German born and had been a member of the Nazi Party and SA while at university in the early 1930's. He was the first chairmen of the steering committee of the Bilderberg Group and also helped found the World Wildlife Fund (WWF), but is probably best known for a rather scandal-ridden post-war life.
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"Which...gets to be on top...and does size matter?" In 1604, in the Shakespearean era, playgoers lived their lives against an interesting political backdrop: Queen Elizabeth I had died and suddenly Scotland and England--nations that had warred during most of the preceeding centuries--for the first time shared a monarch, James I, who had been James VI of Scotland first. The "intractable problem of union" on the island of Britain is alive and well today with devolution seemingly the norm and a referendum on Scottish independence expected relatively soon.
Neil MacGregor, Director of the British Museum, continues his object-based history. Taking artefacts from William Shakespeare's time, he explores how Elizabethan and Jacobean playgoers made sense of the unstable and rapidly changing world in which they lived.
With old certainties shifting around them, in a time of political and religious unrest and economic expansion, Neil asks what the plays would have meant to the public when they were first performed. He uses carefully selected objects to explore the great issues of the day that preoccupied the public and helped shape the works, and he considers what they can reveal about the concerns and beliefs of Shakespearean England.
via www.bbc.co.uk
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