After an early dinner recently Maria and I were walking down Fourth Street in Old City where we saw one of the more unusual sites that we’ve ever witnessed in Philly. Two men and five children were on bicycles balancing a large metal frame with crossbars. At least one of the bikes had a flat tire. They were moving very slowly trying their best to ride in unison but it was a struggle. When they turned onto Vine Street they came to a stop unable to balance it. This is where the following conversation took place:
Maria: What’s that? Man: A prototype. Maria: For what? Man: We don’t know. Maria: Where are you going? Man: Around the block. Maria: What do you call yourselves? Boy on bike with flat tire: The Hungry Caterpillar (referring to the popular children’s book).
Baseball should be played in the afternoon when the sun is shining and the skies are blue in a stadium designed to bring people together and bring them close to the action on the field.
Ryan Howard awaits pitch. Above, Roy Halladay finishes a pitch while Plácido Polanco playing third base is in position to field a possible hit toward him.
It was exactly this type of day on May 6 when the Phillies battled the St. Louis Cardinals in a sold out Citizens Bank Park. The only thing disconcerting about the day is the corporate name of this beautiful stadium in South Philly.
Fans watching the game.
The game provided plenty of hitting, quality pitching and some dramatic tension as the Phillies won 7-2 in a game played at a brisk pace. Jayson Werth hit an opposite field home run and Raul Ibáñez hit a towering shot into the right field upper deck.
The upper tiers of the stadium between innings.
The tension came in the seventh inning with two outs when it appeared that Phillies pitcher Roy Halladay was going to be replaced. Halladay, currently the best pitcher in baseball, prefers to finish the games he starts, a rare feat in these days of specialty pitchers. He was not going to be finishing this game, as he already too many pitches. But it appeared he wasn’t going be finishing the inning with runners on first and second when Phillies manager Charlie Manuel jogged out to the mound and the infield players crowded around for the familiar routine that means a new pitcher was about to be replaced. The crowd stood up waiting to applaud Halladay’s effort but instead broke into cheer as they saw Manuel jog off the field without making the change. Halladay needed just one pitch to finish the inning.
The backdrop for this otherwise routine game was a sea of red and white, representing the Phillies colors worn by nearly everyone in the stand-room-only crowd that appear on every angle of this fan-friendly venue.
The standing-room-only crowd.
Of course, a Phillies game isn’t complete without that big green furry thing roaming around the stadium known as the Phillie Phanatic. Described on his Wikipedia page as being “overweight” with “clumsy feet, extra-long beak, curled up tongue, gawking neck,” he has been the official mascot of the Phillies since 1978 and one of the most recognizable sports mascots in the country, if not the world. A figure very similar to the Phanatic named “Slyly,” serves as the official mascot of a professional Japanese baseball team, the Hiroshima Toyo Carp. Below is a video of the Phanatic taunting Cardinal players on top of the Phillies dugout followed by a promotion for fans to vote for Phillies players in the upcoming Major League Baseball All-Star Game.
The game was played during a promotion known as the Business Persons Special. It’s an afternoon game played on a weekday. The games almost always start just after 1 p.m. The Phillies schedule a handful of these games each year. It serves several purposes: For the fans, it gives them an excuse to skip a half-day of work to go to the ballpark. For the visiting teams, it is always played during the last game of a series, so it gives them the opportunity to skip out of town early to their destination on a road trip. Even for the home team players, staff and umpires, it gives them a rare evening off. It’s best when the weather cooperates and the home team wins. I guess you would call it a win-win-win-win-win situation.
Ryan Howard's image on the Citizens Bank Scoreboard.
Sunshine and blue skies on the first day of May provided the perfect backdrop for the annual Rittenhouse Row Spring Festival. The center city neighborhood of luxury retail establishments, world-class restaurants and high-end housing makes it the premiere place to live, work and play in the city.
Each spring the five-block retail district on Walnut Street (from Rittenhouse Square to Broad Street) is closed to traffic and tents are set up by merchants to celebrate the food, fashion and services that are available year round. There are cooking demonstrations, fashion shows, and music and dance acts set up at various places along the street. Philly is a food town and the tents from restaurants in the area are the most popular attractions and often sell out before the event ends. What follows are videos from the event.
The crowd during the event
The Philadelphia Boys Choir sing Michael Jackson's "I'll Be There"
At first it sounds like a tuning fork has been struck, the ring-like tone pulses throughout the vast outdoor space. When it really gets going it becomes more like ear-piercing feedback causing people to stop in their tracks, hold their ears and turn their heads around trying to locate its source.
The true source of the noise is the wind. It whips across the Nevada desert and enters the brand spanking new CityCenter project on the Las Vegas strip. Where the wind becomes the sound is the tricky part. Even among the employees of the complex's stunning 47-story Mandarin Oriental Las Vegas where I stayed there is debate. Some believe the sound emits from an overpass and underground tunnel that leads to the below-grade entrance of the Mandarin and to an underground parking garage. Others point to the awe-inspiring leaning towers of the Veer condominium project. My money’s on the space between the Veer towers (pictured) and where it connects to the futurist metal-cube and angular Crystals luxury shopping mall.
Whatever the source, it’s hard to not think that it is a serious design flaw for the $11 billion, 76-acre luxury, retail, entertainment and residential complex that boast no fewer than eight world-architects.
The complex itself is an architectural and engineering marvel that I will write more about. But for now I’m trying to find out the source of the design flaw. I accidentally recorded the sound on my iphone and as soon as I can figure out how to convert it to a file that could be placed on the Internet, I will. But for now imagine what it would be like to purchase a $1 million condo in this complex and having to listen to the sound of an amplification system going wild with no way of controlling it.
In the rarefied world of the bond traders on Wall Street they were the outsiders, oddballs even.
It included an incredibly smart and gifted man with one working eye and an undiagnosed case of Asperger syndrome who didn’t like to deal with people. In fact, you could say he didn’t like people at all. He gave up a career as a neurologist in order to spend untold hours each day sitting alone in an office staring cockeyed into a computer screen following the financial markets.
The group also included two men in their early thirties with no real ambition or direction who teamed up with a man who was a derivative trader but quit because he feared that the world was headed to a path of self destruction and he wanted to be prepared.
Then there was a former bond trader who had an amazing ability to outlandishly insult the “Masters of the Universe” at anytime or anyplace when he felt the person was either: wrong, a liar, or corrupt. He not only couldn’t help himself but he enjoyed it. He along with two other persons, with their own quirks who understood how “The Street” operated and wanted no part of it, joined forces.
None of these people knew one another or even knew of each others existence. But in addition to being outsiders, they had a few other things in common: They all started hedge funds. They all saw the insanity and breakdown of the home mortgage market and how the subsequent repackaging of these worthless pieces of paper into new investment "instruments" was taking down the financial markets around the world. And they bet against it and won.
Their stories are told by Michael Lewis in the book, The Big Short: Inside the Doomsday Machine. With Friday’s announcement by the U.S. Security and Exchange Commission that it has filed a civil fraud suit against Goldman Sachs, I couldn’t think of a better time to recommend the book.
The book combined a character-driven narrative with analysis of how the bond market nearly took down the world’s economy. It’s funny and sad. But for me it mostly induced anger at how innocent Americans were conned into buying mortgages they could never pay off, how the Wall Street investment banks bundled these mortgages into bonds and repackaged them again into collateralized debt obligations (CDOs), and how the risk of these investment vehicles was hidden from those who bought them.
It would have been one hell of a tale, except that it’s all true.
I’ve exchanged a few emails with my friends in Poland during the past few days and they are experiencing a sadness that runs deep and familiar for a people who have experienced an insurmountable amount of suffering during the 20th Century. The past suffering was the result of occupation—first Germany and then Russia. Their country was destroyed during World War II following the German occupation, but it was the people, sleeping in tents, in many cases with nothing but hand tools and renderings of the original buildings, who rebuilt their cities to come as close as possible to the buildings that were destroyed—an attempt to keep their culture and heritage.
Then along came the Soviets with their own brutal form of Socialist oppression, shutting off Poland from the world and imposing their will on a people still struggling from the aftermath of World War II.
My relationship with Poland is that I was the first U.S. journalist to attend Amberif, the trade show for the Amber trade. I visited the fair twice. It is held in the port city of Gdańsk, one of the cities destroyed and rebuilt after World War II. It is also home of the Polish Solidarity movement, which eventually led to the overthrow of the Soviet occupation.
I was there to cover an event for a jewelry trade magazine. What I got was so much more. I was welcomed with open arms by the trade fair organizers and the artists and craftsmen who turn this unusual material into objects of beauty and works of art. I was exposed to the history and culture of this northern Polish city on the Baltic Sea. But mostly I learned about the struggles of the people, many of whom lived through much of the country’s sad history. I also saw a rebirth and optimism as the city and country has, again, opened itself to the world. One of worst acts of the Soviet regime was a massacre of nearly 22,000 of the Polish “intelligentsia,” including doctors, lawyers, scientists and military leaders. It was an attack that the Russians denied for years, blaming it on the Germans, but the Polish people and their leaders spent years trying to shed a light on this story. Commonly known as the Katyn Massacre, it wasn’t until the early 1990s that the Russians admitted their guilt, more than 50 years after the event took place.
It is with profound sorrow that Polish president Lech Kaczynski, his wife, Maria, and 88 others, again among Poland's best and brightest, were killed on a plane to commemorate the 70th anniversary of the Katyn Massacre, not far from the site. Many on board were leaders of the struggle to bring the truth of Katyn to the world. The first time the intelligentsia was killed through a savage act of war and occupation. This time, it was a bad decision. One friend wrote:
All the people who were killed the day before yesterday were politically involved in revealing the truth about the tragedy in Katyn that happened 70 years ago… On the plane, there were also the families of those who were killed in Katyn in 1940. There was also the over 90-year old Polish president Kaczorowski - who during the communist times was the emigrant president of Poland in London (because Poland had the second, unofficial government during Soviet Union, since we never agreed to be completely dependent on Russians). Imagine - so many years he survived, with Russians chasing after him, and now, when the work of his life was about to be successful, he was killed.
Another wrote: Some tell that we are sad nation. Katyn was one of the reasons and now it takes more victims. It is so sad and symbolic. Most people in the plane were fighting for years for memory of this massacre - and it became death fight. But the world knows now.
In less than an hour the Philadelphia Phillies will open the 2010 baseball season against the Washington Nationals in the nation’s capital. President Barack Obama will throw the first pitch for the sellout crowd on a beautiful spring day. Roy Halladay the newly acquired ace will get starting honors for the 2009 National League champs.
Roy Halladay
Opening Day means a lot of things. Most importantly it means the true beginning of spring, even though the weather doesn’t always comply. It’s also the beginning of another epic story that will last for 162 games during the season and, if lucky, playoffs and World Series games. It’s a story that will have twists and turns and sub plots, with almost all of it unfolding on the field on a daily basis. Baseball remains one of the things that unite us a nation. In honor of this day I present to you the world’s greatest baseball song every written, “A Dying Cubs Fan’s Last Request,” by the late, great Steve Goodman.
I am an award winning writer and editor with a focus on travel, luxury, architecture and design, and all things culinary. I also have a blog for the jewelry and luxury industries called the "Jewelry News Network": http://jewelrynewsnetwork.blogspot.com/
After an early dinner recently Maria and I were walking down Fourth Street in Old City where we saw one of the more unusual sites that we’ve ever witnessed in Philly. Two men and five children were on bicycles balancing a large metal frame with crossbars. At least one of the bikes had a flat tire. They were moving very slowly trying their best to ride in unison but it was a struggle. When they turned onto Vine Street they came to a stop unable to balance it. This is where the following conversation took place:
