Jon Stewert Rips into CNBC & Santelli

.cc_box a:hover .cc_home{background:url(‘http://www.comedycentral.com/comedycentral/video/assets/syndicated-logo-over.png’) !important;}.cc_links a{color:#b9b9b9;text-decoration:none;}.cc_show a{color:#707070;text-decoration:none;}.cc_title a{color:#868686;text-decoration:none;}.cc_links a:hover{color:#67bee2;text-decoration:underline;}

http://media.mtvnservices.com/mgid:cms:item:comedycentral.com:220252

How Upstate New York Interferes with New York City

Gotham Gazette has an interesting article about Upstate legislators interfering with New York City policy, Rural Legislator, City Issue: How Upstaters Decide:

This year, New York City residents will see legislators from all over the state vote on issues that directly affect their lives. From the transit bailout to school control, rent regulation and perhaps even term limits, the city will watch legislators from rural areas, small towns and suburbs decide its fate. This drama plays out every year, but last year the defeat of congestion pricing and enforcement cameras for bus rapid transit left some New Yorkers wondering how legislators from outside New York City make their decisions when they vote on issues that only affect New York City.

Not to harp on this subject, but this is a structural issue which will always affect New York City. Big surprise that the State appears to be shortchanging the City in Stimulus Bucks – there are only so many Downstate politicians versus the rest of the state. This will continue, unless either structural issues revolving around representation is reassessed or New York City becomes an independent state.
Further Reading

Happy Birthday Daniel Burnham

curvaceous Flatironcurvaceous Flatiron, originally uploaded by ifotog, Queen of Manhattan Street Photography

In the mid-eighteen-nineties, Daniel Burnham, then the most prominent architect in Chicago, met with a young architect named Frank Lloyd Wright. Burnham had been impressed by Wright’s talent but felt that he could use some seasoning. He offered to pay Wright’s tuition at the École des Beaux-Arts, in Paris, to support his family, and to give him a job when he returned. Wright turned him down. It was one of the few times that Burnham, who was probably the most successful power broker the American architectural profession has ever produced, didn’t get his way, and he told Wright that he was making a mistake: the Beaux-Arts style, of which Burnham was a leading exponent, was taking over the country, and Wright was deluded if he thought that his modern approach, with its open spaces and horizontal lines, would ever amount to much.

– Paul Goldberger, Daniel Burnham’s great Chicago Plan turns one hundred

Real Life Lord of the Rings Beacons

Lord of the Rings, Return of the King - Gondor Beacons
Here I was watching Return of the King and thinking how cool the Gondor Beacons were (imagine the Appalachians with a similar system where New York calls out for help from Georgia) when I found out that this system was actually used in China in the Valley of a Hundred Fengsui:

If you’ve seen The Lord of the Rings: Return of the King and remember the scene where Pippin sets a large tower alight, sending a message calling for help across an entire mountain range, you know how the system of fengsui worked. All along the wall, from Jiayuguan to Shanhaiguan, beacon towers were built so that a fire signal (feng) or smoke signal (sui) sent from one would be visible from the next in line, making it possible to transmit military information back and forth rapidly across the entire border region. According to one military manual from the Tang Dynasty (618-907 AD), when the system worked according to plan a message could travel 1000 kilometres in a day and a night.