Tuesday, October 25, 2005
Old-timer does not take current lifestule for granted
LOOKING AHEAD by Wally Dobelis
Coming down the morning elevator, I ran into an upstairs neighbor, and we chatted about his impending marriage. In the lobby he went into the concierge’s room, and, when he caught up with me, there was a black canvas lunch box in his hands. Sensing my curiosity, he explained it as his breakfast lunch, dinner and two snacks, from Zone diet meals. He, a financial services manager and his lady friend, a market analyst, never get home before 8PM, and have become tired of eating out late in restaurants, opting for diet meals delivered once a day from this service, five days a week (they go away on weekends).
We parted on 4th Avenue, and I walked to the 14th Street IRT, shaking my head about the newfangled ways, meanwhile picking up a morning newspaper from a box on the way. In the station I upped my discount Metro card by $20 at the manned service desk, picked my way through the arrivals streaming towards the dirty and disabled up-escalator maintained by (Zeckendorf Towers, and got a seat on the train (doable because I work an off-peak schedule, 9:30 AM to about 7 PM or whatever). At my Wall Street platform exit, noting two watching cops outside the gate, I took down my heavy shoulder bag, and jauntily carried it by the handle, like a briefcase - I had no desire to have my laptop examined, perhaps activated, as they do at the airports.
Once past the cops and the 42-story former J. P. Morgan company headquaeters building on corner Broad Street and Exchange Place being converted into millionaires’ condos on Exchange Place, I bought a $1 buttered bagel and coffee breakfast from John, an Indian who calls me papi (he must be from Guiana, where they speak some Spanish). Upon entering my office building, I waved my access card with a smile at the lady guard, and passed it over the magnetic reader that opens the gate to the elevators. Same card also opens my office door.
After a hello to my colleagues in the cubicle row, I booted the tabletop, using my network password. The e-mail popped up really slowly, and I called the help desk in Columbus, OH to complain The young woman checked my date of birth and four digits of my SS number, then entered my system, quickly deciding to purge my cache and compress the files. Mollified, I went back to last night’s unfinished compliance problem, checking into a customer complaint. The broker’s NASD licensing file and the house file matched up well, athough the man’s employment was listed through a separate broker/dealer firm, which explained the difference. I could now write up a work product and Xerox it for the afternoon’s scheduled progress meeting.
Now it was time to update my laptop’s password, which has to be done every few months. I had brought it in for that purpose, and booting it on the network did the trick. I use the personal laptop for some office e-mail at home, and to access needed current documents that I place in it for home use. People have gotten used to my sometimes off-schedule time stamp.
After a day’s rushing around I made it home just in time for dinner, this time leftover brisket, bought through FreshDirect for a festive occasion, and decorated with a spinach dish from Whole Foods takeout tables and a freshly cooked portion of stringbeans. Then it was time to reconnect the laptop to fast DSL and check our personal e-mail – about 15 pieces, none personal – and the suspect spam file, some 60 items, all prescription drug and finance offers. After some catchup reading – I receive Washington Post online - I decided to call Earthlink, my internet provider, to cancel as not worthwhile a special Norton screening package they gave me on a trial basis, The young lady at the other end of the 800 number, in Bangalore, India where it was about 10 AM, apologized profusely and seamlessly switched me to their accounting office, where a young man, speaking accentless West Coast English, took care of clearing the bill. It turned out he was in Manila, and had never been to the US. Amazing, the spread of our language.
Eventually I got round to looking at the last two days’ New York Times front pages, and was mesmerized by he color picture of the Pakistani landscape, and the poor earthquake refugee children in colorful dress, huddled on the ground and doomed to more suffering when the snow comes, a. Guericault painting come to life. The hurricane stories bode no good either.
If you wonder why I wrote up this relatively routine day (granted, the repair calls around the globe were unusual), consider that I entered the work environment before most of you all dear neighbors were born (in the case of really young readers, before your parents were born). Many of the things that most people grew up with and take for granted are still a source of wonderment for this old-timer.
.
Coming down the morning elevator, I ran into an upstairs neighbor, and we chatted about his impending marriage. In the lobby he went into the concierge’s room, and, when he caught up with me, there was a black canvas lunch box in his hands. Sensing my curiosity, he explained it as his breakfast lunch, dinner and two snacks, from Zone diet meals. He, a financial services manager and his lady friend, a market analyst, never get home before 8PM, and have become tired of eating out late in restaurants, opting for diet meals delivered once a day from this service, five days a week (they go away on weekends).
We parted on 4th Avenue, and I walked to the 14th Street IRT, shaking my head about the newfangled ways, meanwhile picking up a morning newspaper from a box on the way. In the station I upped my discount Metro card by $20 at the manned service desk, picked my way through the arrivals streaming towards the dirty and disabled up-escalator maintained by (Zeckendorf Towers, and got a seat on the train (doable because I work an off-peak schedule, 9:30 AM to about 7 PM or whatever). At my Wall Street platform exit, noting two watching cops outside the gate, I took down my heavy shoulder bag, and jauntily carried it by the handle, like a briefcase - I had no desire to have my laptop examined, perhaps activated, as they do at the airports.
Once past the cops and the 42-story former J. P. Morgan company headquaeters building on corner Broad Street and Exchange Place being converted into millionaires’ condos on Exchange Place, I bought a $1 buttered bagel and coffee breakfast from John, an Indian who calls me papi (he must be from Guiana, where they speak some Spanish). Upon entering my office building, I waved my access card with a smile at the lady guard, and passed it over the magnetic reader that opens the gate to the elevators. Same card also opens my office door.
After a hello to my colleagues in the cubicle row, I booted the tabletop, using my network password. The e-mail popped up really slowly, and I called the help desk in Columbus, OH to complain The young woman checked my date of birth and four digits of my SS number, then entered my system, quickly deciding to purge my cache and compress the files. Mollified, I went back to last night’s unfinished compliance problem, checking into a customer complaint. The broker’s NASD licensing file and the house file matched up well, athough the man’s employment was listed through a separate broker/dealer firm, which explained the difference. I could now write up a work product and Xerox it for the afternoon’s scheduled progress meeting.
Now it was time to update my laptop’s password, which has to be done every few months. I had brought it in for that purpose, and booting it on the network did the trick. I use the personal laptop for some office e-mail at home, and to access needed current documents that I place in it for home use. People have gotten used to my sometimes off-schedule time stamp.
After a day’s rushing around I made it home just in time for dinner, this time leftover brisket, bought through FreshDirect for a festive occasion, and decorated with a spinach dish from Whole Foods takeout tables and a freshly cooked portion of stringbeans. Then it was time to reconnect the laptop to fast DSL and check our personal e-mail – about 15 pieces, none personal – and the suspect spam file, some 60 items, all prescription drug and finance offers. After some catchup reading – I receive Washington Post online - I decided to call Earthlink, my internet provider, to cancel as not worthwhile a special Norton screening package they gave me on a trial basis, The young lady at the other end of the 800 number, in Bangalore, India where it was about 10 AM, apologized profusely and seamlessly switched me to their accounting office, where a young man, speaking accentless West Coast English, took care of clearing the bill. It turned out he was in Manila, and had never been to the US. Amazing, the spread of our language.
Eventually I got round to looking at the last two days’ New York Times front pages, and was mesmerized by he color picture of the Pakistani landscape, and the poor earthquake refugee children in colorful dress, huddled on the ground and doomed to more suffering when the snow comes, a. Guericault painting come to life. The hurricane stories bode no good either.
If you wonder why I wrote up this relatively routine day (granted, the repair calls around the globe were unusual), consider that I entered the work environment before most of you all dear neighbors were born (in the case of really young readers, before your parents were born). Many of the things that most people grew up with and take for granted are still a source of wonderment for this old-timer.
.
Sunday, October 16, 2005
New Yorkers concerned about spreading Chechen insurrection
LOOKING AHEAD by Wally Dobelis
“Say, Wally, you know everything” is a gambit that I hate, sort of. It is flattering but it puts me to work, to go where I don’t want to be. This time though, the neighbor’s question was about a republic, Kabardino-Balkaria, where Muslim attackers had shot up a police station and an arsenal, a subject of justified concern in this month of terrorist fears...
Searching the CIA’s reliable World Factbook (on Internet, it is a detailed though dull almanac of demographics) revealed something more about the Russian Federation, USSR before 1991, when it was composed of 15 republics. Just for a refresher, only Russia, shrunk from USSR’s 22.4M square miles to 17M, with a population down from 262M in 1979 to 143M, is keeping the pan-Slavic Confederation of Independent States together, with obstreperous Ukraine, dictator-run Belarus, and Moldova, which USSR annexed from Romania after WWII. The Baltics, Latvia, Lithuania and Estonia, broke relations and have joined EU, the five Central Asian Muslim lands, Uzbekistan, Kazakhstan Kyrgyzstan, Turkmenistan and Tajikistan, rife with insurgency, are run by Communist-style local dictators, and of the three in the Caucasus, Armenia, a Christian landlocked country, is fussing with the neighboring oil-rich Muslim Azerbaijan, and Georgia has Chechen separatist resistance group worries.
Little K-B with a population of 900K is right there, north of Georgia, with North Ossetia and Ingushetia separating it from Chechnya, which borders in the north with Dagestan, all of them so-called interior republics.
The laconic CIA book shows that Russia has 21 such interior republics, with their own constitutions, presidents and parliaments. There are also 49 oblasts (provinces with appointed governors and elected legislature), 10 autonomous okrugs (more autonomous than oblasts) and 6 krays (frontier territories, run by governors) and one autonomous oblast (the infamous Birobidjan, designated home for the Jews). All of the above plus the cities of Moscow and St. Petersburg are “federal subjects,” equal to our states, each sending two representatives to the Federal Council (upper house). The details come from the more eloquent Wikipedia, the free reader-written encyclopedia. Calling on local Russian resources proved to be useless.
The attack on Nalchik, Kabardino-Balkaria’s capital, involved insurgents invading and taking hostages in at least nine police and security buildings, with nearly 100 persons dying, mostly the attackers. Looking deeper, K-B dad been a central Chechen resistance center, with assassinations, drug crime and corruption rampant until a new president initiated raids on terrorist nests. The bloody insurgent response brought in Russian FSB security troops and the fighting is on.
This is yet another episode in the on-and-off Chechen wars, beginning when the Tsarist Empire annexed the Crimean Khanate from the Ottoman Empire in 1783. In 1936 USSR granted autonomous republic status to the Chechen-Ingushes, but in the 1940s, fearing collaboration with the invading Hitler’s armies, deported some 500K Chechens to Kazakhstan, where a quarter of them died of famine. Khrushchev permitted their return in 1956.
After the collapse of the USSR, Chechens declared independence, President Yeltsin’s Russian army tried to control the revolutionaries, expecting a short campaign, and the result was the brutal First Chechen War, 1993-96, with 100K casualties. The Russians withdrew, subsequent to negotiations releasing 1000 hostages taken in a Budjonnovsk hospital, in Russia’s Stavropol Kray, and permitted the kidnappers to retreat. But the new Russian-dominated middle-of-the-rod governments were destroyed by separatist insurgents, and more bombings and suicide attacks on hospitals, Moscow subways and two airliners, culminating in a 1999 Moscow apartment house bombing, prompted President Putin to attack, starting the equally brutal Second Chechen War. It ended with another pro-Russian government, an election and a referendum in 2002-3. Presidents and government workers are continuing to be assassinated by separatists, and there are bombings in Russia, Dagestan, Ingushetia, with a particularly horrid hostage-taking in a Moscow theatre in October 2003 resulting in deaths of 115 hostages, and another in September 2004 in Beslau, North Ossettia, at a school, taking the lives of 332, mostly children. Shamil Besayev, the Chechen warlord who has taken credit for all the violence, in revenge for past brutalities and with the objective of gaining independence, is known to operate with al Qaida money and volunteers. The Kabardino-Balkaria incident is just a routine response to Russia’s attempt of control; the Chechen nation of just over one million souls is apparently willing to supply an unlimited number of martyrs.
Looking at that part of the world, the American righteous dream of bringing democracy to the Mideast and Central Asia begins to look like a nightmare. Arab Islamists are trying to recreate a Muslim Caliphate from Spain eastward to Indonesia. Local Turkic and Tajik rebel fighters in former Soviet Muslim SSRs, China’s Western provinces and Russia’s internal republics are seeking to establish warlord-based insurrections, maybe allied with the Caliphate. All are supported by a faction of rich Wahaabis, many of them members of the 5,000-strong Saudi aristocracy, who would not mind if the ruling Saudi faction should go down. If you think I exaggerate, check the facts.
Wally Dobelis also thanks the New York Times.
“Say, Wally, you know everything” is a gambit that I hate, sort of. It is flattering but it puts me to work, to go where I don’t want to be. This time though, the neighbor’s question was about a republic, Kabardino-Balkaria, where Muslim attackers had shot up a police station and an arsenal, a subject of justified concern in this month of terrorist fears...
Searching the CIA’s reliable World Factbook (on Internet, it is a detailed though dull almanac of demographics) revealed something more about the Russian Federation, USSR before 1991, when it was composed of 15 republics. Just for a refresher, only Russia, shrunk from USSR’s 22.4M square miles to 17M, with a population down from 262M in 1979 to 143M, is keeping the pan-Slavic Confederation of Independent States together, with obstreperous Ukraine, dictator-run Belarus, and Moldova, which USSR annexed from Romania after WWII. The Baltics, Latvia, Lithuania and Estonia, broke relations and have joined EU, the five Central Asian Muslim lands, Uzbekistan, Kazakhstan Kyrgyzstan, Turkmenistan and Tajikistan, rife with insurgency, are run by Communist-style local dictators, and of the three in the Caucasus, Armenia, a Christian landlocked country, is fussing with the neighboring oil-rich Muslim Azerbaijan, and Georgia has Chechen separatist resistance group worries.
Little K-B with a population of 900K is right there, north of Georgia, with North Ossetia and Ingushetia separating it from Chechnya, which borders in the north with Dagestan, all of them so-called interior republics.
The laconic CIA book shows that Russia has 21 such interior republics, with their own constitutions, presidents and parliaments. There are also 49 oblasts (provinces with appointed governors and elected legislature), 10 autonomous okrugs (more autonomous than oblasts) and 6 krays (frontier territories, run by governors) and one autonomous oblast (the infamous Birobidjan, designated home for the Jews). All of the above plus the cities of Moscow and St. Petersburg are “federal subjects,” equal to our states, each sending two representatives to the Federal Council (upper house). The details come from the more eloquent Wikipedia, the free reader-written encyclopedia. Calling on local Russian resources proved to be useless.
The attack on Nalchik, Kabardino-Balkaria’s capital, involved insurgents invading and taking hostages in at least nine police and security buildings, with nearly 100 persons dying, mostly the attackers. Looking deeper, K-B dad been a central Chechen resistance center, with assassinations, drug crime and corruption rampant until a new president initiated raids on terrorist nests. The bloody insurgent response brought in Russian FSB security troops and the fighting is on.
This is yet another episode in the on-and-off Chechen wars, beginning when the Tsarist Empire annexed the Crimean Khanate from the Ottoman Empire in 1783. In 1936 USSR granted autonomous republic status to the Chechen-Ingushes, but in the 1940s, fearing collaboration with the invading Hitler’s armies, deported some 500K Chechens to Kazakhstan, where a quarter of them died of famine. Khrushchev permitted their return in 1956.
After the collapse of the USSR, Chechens declared independence, President Yeltsin’s Russian army tried to control the revolutionaries, expecting a short campaign, and the result was the brutal First Chechen War, 1993-96, with 100K casualties. The Russians withdrew, subsequent to negotiations releasing 1000 hostages taken in a Budjonnovsk hospital, in Russia’s Stavropol Kray, and permitted the kidnappers to retreat. But the new Russian-dominated middle-of-the-rod governments were destroyed by separatist insurgents, and more bombings and suicide attacks on hospitals, Moscow subways and two airliners, culminating in a 1999 Moscow apartment house bombing, prompted President Putin to attack, starting the equally brutal Second Chechen War. It ended with another pro-Russian government, an election and a referendum in 2002-3. Presidents and government workers are continuing to be assassinated by separatists, and there are bombings in Russia, Dagestan, Ingushetia, with a particularly horrid hostage-taking in a Moscow theatre in October 2003 resulting in deaths of 115 hostages, and another in September 2004 in Beslau, North Ossettia, at a school, taking the lives of 332, mostly children. Shamil Besayev, the Chechen warlord who has taken credit for all the violence, in revenge for past brutalities and with the objective of gaining independence, is known to operate with al Qaida money and volunteers. The Kabardino-Balkaria incident is just a routine response to Russia’s attempt of control; the Chechen nation of just over one million souls is apparently willing to supply an unlimited number of martyrs.
Looking at that part of the world, the American righteous dream of bringing democracy to the Mideast and Central Asia begins to look like a nightmare. Arab Islamists are trying to recreate a Muslim Caliphate from Spain eastward to Indonesia. Local Turkic and Tajik rebel fighters in former Soviet Muslim SSRs, China’s Western provinces and Russia’s internal republics are seeking to establish warlord-based insurrections, maybe allied with the Caliphate. All are supported by a faction of rich Wahaabis, many of them members of the 5,000-strong Saudi aristocracy, who would not mind if the ruling Saudi faction should go down. If you think I exaggerate, check the facts.
Wally Dobelis also thanks the New York Times.
Monday, October 10, 2005
Worry about Avian Flu, but don’t panic
LOOKING AHEAD by Wally Dobelis
Three days ago Friday this friend called me to announce that Tamiflu, the anti-viral agent, will not be available in the US until 2007, because all of Roche’s production has been spoken for by Europeans and Asians.
I have these friends who seem to know more about medicine than the professionals, and who make fearless diagnoses. One, a cigar smoker who distrusts doctors, has a compendium of alternate medicines and an elephantine memory, and, when asked a question, will quote a line of recommended remedies, at will. He is an alarmist, and I tend to check his answers with the other two, both of whom have extensive experiences from having cheerfully survived staggering health problems. It is a kind of Delphic problem-solving method, trying to derive solutions from a multitude of unreliable opinions. It eventually leads to a visit with our family doctor, who knows, and also anticipates, and had, last year, flu vaccines when everyone else ran short.
This year, though, the fear of an avian flu pandemic has reached higher levels. Michael Leavitt, the Secretary of Health and Human Services, is traveling in Asia as we speak. Whether the governmental concern is real or prompted by Washington’s panic of another Katrina disaster is moot, and we should not hit the panic button. The facts are simple: the Asian/chicken flu H5N1, first seen in 1998 and revived in 2003, has reached 11 countries in Southeast Asia and now has impacted Romania and Turkey, where police roadblocks have been set to stop the transport of birds to urban markets. It is not transmitted to humans, and not communicated between humans, although there have been 116 cases in Asia blamed on it, with half of the victims dying. The fear is that of a mutation occurring, something that various strains of flu do regularly, this time making the avian flu H5N1 communicable between humans.
On the bright side, pandemics are infrequent, with three in the 20th century, and medicine has progressed. The vaccines stay in step and anticipate strains, and some medicines have capabilities to stop the most frequently encountered viruses, such as Type A and B. Thus Tamiflu, developed by Hoffman-La Roche with Gilead Sciences. Inc in Foster City, was admitted by the FDA in 1999 (there are also older and less potent medicines, such as amantadine, see below), which, when taken within two days of onset, will stop the flu from progressing through the cells. The dose consists of five treatments, fairly pricey.
In February 2005 France ordered a stockpile of 14M doses, covering 20% of its population, as did Canada, with another 8.6M. US had a 3M supply and ordered none. As of end September 2005 Great Britain had ordered 20M, Germany 14M and some 30 other countries had their requests in for 28M. The US, calling for a stockpile of 20M, has meanwhile has been assured of 3M doses and is prompting the maker to open a production facility on this continent. The Roche production unit in Geneva, already doubled twice since the WHO suggested stockpiling Tamiflu in 2004, is totally spoken for, well into the next two years.
Another complication has arisen because Gilead, Roche’s US partner in Foster City, CA., recently requested return of the process, claiming that the giant manufacturer had neglected the product and thus broken the contract. Truly, until 2003 Tamiflu had been hard to sell. We heard about it from our family doctor when asking for amantadine, the flu stopper that had helped us in the past. We used the Tamiflu, seemingly successfully, and tried to put some more of it in the medicine cabinet early in 2004, only to be told by the local pharmacist that “manufacture for the year had ceased, since the flu season was over.” Since then we were able to replenish, not without difficulties.
My review of flu literature is strictly nonprofessional. There are reliable Internet sources that you may want to check. Thus, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) identify the three 20th century pandemics, “Spanish Flu” of 1918-19 (H1N1, 500K deaths), “Asian Flu” of 1958-9 (H2N2, 42K deaths) and “Hong-Kong flu” (H3N2, 34K deaths). This, my chilling recount of fatalities is only to assure us that the progress of medicine has been real, making pandemics less fearsome. The CDC identifies four medicines, amantadine, rimantadine, zanamivir (Relinza) and oseltamivir (Tamiflu), with the H5N1 strain stated to be resistant to the former two. CDC estimates that the costs of the next pandemic will be much more severe than the last two, but studies continue and precautions are made.
What to do? Well, let’s get back to the flu basics. Cover your nose thoroughly when sneezing, and stay away from others so afflicted. Find solitary spots in movies, and in crowded events. No social kissing. Surround your face with a big newspaper in subways (the Paper of Record is best). Try using public transportation in off-hours. Good luck to all of us.
.
Three days ago Friday this friend called me to announce that Tamiflu, the anti-viral agent, will not be available in the US until 2007, because all of Roche’s production has been spoken for by Europeans and Asians.
I have these friends who seem to know more about medicine than the professionals, and who make fearless diagnoses. One, a cigar smoker who distrusts doctors, has a compendium of alternate medicines and an elephantine memory, and, when asked a question, will quote a line of recommended remedies, at will. He is an alarmist, and I tend to check his answers with the other two, both of whom have extensive experiences from having cheerfully survived staggering health problems. It is a kind of Delphic problem-solving method, trying to derive solutions from a multitude of unreliable opinions. It eventually leads to a visit with our family doctor, who knows, and also anticipates, and had, last year, flu vaccines when everyone else ran short.
This year, though, the fear of an avian flu pandemic has reached higher levels. Michael Leavitt, the Secretary of Health and Human Services, is traveling in Asia as we speak. Whether the governmental concern is real or prompted by Washington’s panic of another Katrina disaster is moot, and we should not hit the panic button. The facts are simple: the Asian/chicken flu H5N1, first seen in 1998 and revived in 2003, has reached 11 countries in Southeast Asia and now has impacted Romania and Turkey, where police roadblocks have been set to stop the transport of birds to urban markets. It is not transmitted to humans, and not communicated between humans, although there have been 116 cases in Asia blamed on it, with half of the victims dying. The fear is that of a mutation occurring, something that various strains of flu do regularly, this time making the avian flu H5N1 communicable between humans.
On the bright side, pandemics are infrequent, with three in the 20th century, and medicine has progressed. The vaccines stay in step and anticipate strains, and some medicines have capabilities to stop the most frequently encountered viruses, such as Type A and B. Thus Tamiflu, developed by Hoffman-La Roche with Gilead Sciences. Inc in Foster City, was admitted by the FDA in 1999 (there are also older and less potent medicines, such as amantadine, see below), which, when taken within two days of onset, will stop the flu from progressing through the cells. The dose consists of five treatments, fairly pricey.
In February 2005 France ordered a stockpile of 14M doses, covering 20% of its population, as did Canada, with another 8.6M. US had a 3M supply and ordered none. As of end September 2005 Great Britain had ordered 20M, Germany 14M and some 30 other countries had their requests in for 28M. The US, calling for a stockpile of 20M, has meanwhile has been assured of 3M doses and is prompting the maker to open a production facility on this continent. The Roche production unit in Geneva, already doubled twice since the WHO suggested stockpiling Tamiflu in 2004, is totally spoken for, well into the next two years.
Another complication has arisen because Gilead, Roche’s US partner in Foster City, CA., recently requested return of the process, claiming that the giant manufacturer had neglected the product and thus broken the contract. Truly, until 2003 Tamiflu had been hard to sell. We heard about it from our family doctor when asking for amantadine, the flu stopper that had helped us in the past. We used the Tamiflu, seemingly successfully, and tried to put some more of it in the medicine cabinet early in 2004, only to be told by the local pharmacist that “manufacture for the year had ceased, since the flu season was over.” Since then we were able to replenish, not without difficulties.
My review of flu literature is strictly nonprofessional. There are reliable Internet sources that you may want to check. Thus, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) identify the three 20th century pandemics, “Spanish Flu” of 1918-19 (H1N1, 500K deaths), “Asian Flu” of 1958-9 (H2N2, 42K deaths) and “Hong-Kong flu” (H3N2, 34K deaths). This, my chilling recount of fatalities is only to assure us that the progress of medicine has been real, making pandemics less fearsome. The CDC identifies four medicines, amantadine, rimantadine, zanamivir (Relinza) and oseltamivir (Tamiflu), with the H5N1 strain stated to be resistant to the former two. CDC estimates that the costs of the next pandemic will be much more severe than the last two, but studies continue and precautions are made.
What to do? Well, let’s get back to the flu basics. Cover your nose thoroughly when sneezing, and stay away from others so afflicted. Find solitary spots in movies, and in crowded events. No social kissing. Surround your face with a big newspaper in subways (the Paper of Record is best). Try using public transportation in off-hours. Good luck to all of us.
.
Sunday, October 02, 2005
Step out of doors – and into adventure: Union Square
LOOKING AHEAD by Wally Dobelis
Of a Sunday morning, well, a late morning, on our way to test the brunch at some new place that came to our attention during the Harvest in the Square celebration, walking West on 17th Street past the tropical paradise that Tony Maccagiano of Sal Anthony’s has created next to the gated entrance to the corner Irving Place building, we spied tents on Union Square.
It turned out to be the 7th Annual New York City Knit-Out and Crochet Event that this column had announced in its notes of permits granted by Community Board 5. long ago. Anyway, it was quite an event.
We turned up just as models were marching across the stage, set up in front of the Pavilion that may be partly converted to a restaurant (watch this column for the controversy). They were all fully covered up, beautifully dressed in woolen sweaters and scarves, unlike those on the Stuyvesant Oval lawn (as reported in this paper a week ago). Patterns for the sweaters were distributed by wool sellers in booths under the long tent, and nearly every visitor toted plastic bags from Red Heart Yarns and Bernat wools. Lion Brands offered warm and fuzzy easy to knit styles, not quite befitting the image of the roaring MGM animal, but so be it. Catalogs mysteriously marked Coats with a crown turned out to be from Coats and Clark, a name I remember from buying button thread at Woolworth’s. Now they have more brands (Moda Dea, TLC) and straight and funny-name websites, dominating the event.
The services dominated the center of the large Greenmarket plaza, with tables and chairs, and specialists offering lectures at various corners, a different one each half-hour, teaching Fair Isle knitting style, showing how to finish seams and other arcane of the trade. The Learn to Crochet stand, the whole West end of the market space, had people standing in lines, waiting their turn.
Knitting is good for your nerves, I have learned at the huge East Coast Wool and Sheep Fair that takes place each Fall in the Rhinebeck Fairgrounds, and attracts visitors from the entire seaboard and exhibitors from Canada and Australia. This event, though smaller in scope, seems to generate much enthusiasm, including among young people. Good news, a nation that knits will survive, even the next Ice Age (more later, I’m not in a Doomsday mood).
Moving right along, we eventually found brunch, at Pipa’s in the ABC Carpet and Home complex, a tapas place that I remember from the Harvest on the Square (for an expanded review open my www.dobelis.net website, and three taps will take you to the Looking Ahead blog). Very nice, good service, and we saw a Reece Witherspoon look-alike lunching with friends – she could not have been the real thing, she counted out her own few dollar bills out of a worn wallet for her share. Another of the kiddies hoping for a fortune in Big Apple. Be well.
Upon return to the Greenmarket plaza, the organizers were reading out the names of winners in a knit and crochet contest that I had no time to enter, with many no longer present. To make your fortune, you also gotta be there. Or buy lottery tix.
Crossing along the West side of the park, on our way to the Whole Foods Market, e passed through a gallery of artists’ stands on the right, and several high triangular poster displays on the left, showing enlarged pages of New York Times, with headlines of the Pope and Poland. Reaching the end, we found a placard announcing the 25th Anniversary of Solidarity, the Gdansk shipyard workers’ organization that broke the Communist rule. You don’t need the news and media to be reminded of history here in Union Square, it stares right at you, sometimes as demonstrators from all sides.
At the WFM, the late lunchtime lines at the fast checkout (10 items or fewer; that’s good English) were so thick that they used two line managers directing the fast traffic to some 50 stands. Downstairs, the apple stands still had their pristine symmetry, with several sweepers and stock clerks at work, and when I pointed an otherwise perfect pear ($3/lb) on the floor to one of them, he tossed it in a wastebasket without hesitation. Only in America.
I’ve been told that the downstairs is a good girl-watching spot, and indeed, there were both muscular runners in shorts and languid madonnas in max cutdowns, picking among the health-lending wares, Stuy towners to note. But not everything we need in life is in a WFM.
We found the missing items at the Food Emporium, where the checkout lines were unruly and argumentative; but the man who helped us was a joy. It’s a wonderful world.
Don’t forget to check my blog, and read this paper for news.
Of a Sunday morning, well, a late morning, on our way to test the brunch at some new place that came to our attention during the Harvest in the Square celebration, walking West on 17th Street past the tropical paradise that Tony Maccagiano of Sal Anthony’s has created next to the gated entrance to the corner Irving Place building, we spied tents on Union Square.
It turned out to be the 7th Annual New York City Knit-Out and Crochet Event that this column had announced in its notes of permits granted by Community Board 5. long ago. Anyway, it was quite an event.
We turned up just as models were marching across the stage, set up in front of the Pavilion that may be partly converted to a restaurant (watch this column for the controversy). They were all fully covered up, beautifully dressed in woolen sweaters and scarves, unlike those on the Stuyvesant Oval lawn (as reported in this paper a week ago). Patterns for the sweaters were distributed by wool sellers in booths under the long tent, and nearly every visitor toted plastic bags from Red Heart Yarns and Bernat wools. Lion Brands offered warm and fuzzy easy to knit styles, not quite befitting the image of the roaring MGM animal, but so be it. Catalogs mysteriously marked Coats with a crown turned out to be from Coats and Clark, a name I remember from buying button thread at Woolworth’s. Now they have more brands (Moda Dea, TLC) and straight and funny-name websites, dominating the event.
The services dominated the center of the large Greenmarket plaza, with tables and chairs, and specialists offering lectures at various corners, a different one each half-hour, teaching Fair Isle knitting style, showing how to finish seams and other arcane of the trade. The Learn to Crochet stand, the whole West end of the market space, had people standing in lines, waiting their turn.
Knitting is good for your nerves, I have learned at the huge East Coast Wool and Sheep Fair that takes place each Fall in the Rhinebeck Fairgrounds, and attracts visitors from the entire seaboard and exhibitors from Canada and Australia. This event, though smaller in scope, seems to generate much enthusiasm, including among young people. Good news, a nation that knits will survive, even the next Ice Age (more later, I’m not in a Doomsday mood).
Moving right along, we eventually found brunch, at Pipa’s in the ABC Carpet and Home complex, a tapas place that I remember from the Harvest on the Square (for an expanded review open my www.dobelis.net website, and three taps will take you to the Looking Ahead blog). Very nice, good service, and we saw a Reece Witherspoon look-alike lunching with friends – she could not have been the real thing, she counted out her own few dollar bills out of a worn wallet for her share. Another of the kiddies hoping for a fortune in Big Apple. Be well.
Upon return to the Greenmarket plaza, the organizers were reading out the names of winners in a knit and crochet contest that I had no time to enter, with many no longer present. To make your fortune, you also gotta be there. Or buy lottery tix.
Crossing along the West side of the park, on our way to the Whole Foods Market, e passed through a gallery of artists’ stands on the right, and several high triangular poster displays on the left, showing enlarged pages of New York Times, with headlines of the Pope and Poland. Reaching the end, we found a placard announcing the 25th Anniversary of Solidarity, the Gdansk shipyard workers’ organization that broke the Communist rule. You don’t need the news and media to be reminded of history here in Union Square, it stares right at you, sometimes as demonstrators from all sides.
At the WFM, the late lunchtime lines at the fast checkout (10 items or fewer; that’s good English) were so thick that they used two line managers directing the fast traffic to some 50 stands. Downstairs, the apple stands still had their pristine symmetry, with several sweepers and stock clerks at work, and when I pointed an otherwise perfect pear ($3/lb) on the floor to one of them, he tossed it in a wastebasket without hesitation. Only in America.
I’ve been told that the downstairs is a good girl-watching spot, and indeed, there were both muscular runners in shorts and languid madonnas in max cutdowns, picking among the health-lending wares, Stuy towners to note. But not everything we need in life is in a WFM.
We found the missing items at the Food Emporium, where the checkout lines were unruly and argumentative; but the man who helped us was a joy. It’s a wonderful world.
Don’t forget to check my blog, and read this paper for news.
