Tribute v. tourism
: The World Trade Center viewing platform is already becoming unseemly, as I feared it would. The Wall Street Journal reports today that the city will soon require people to go get tickets before getting in line for the platform. They will be required to walk all the way over to the East Side and the South Street Seaport to get them — and that’s not just to reduce the lines and congestion at the platform but the city also hopes that these people will shop while there and on the way. So there’s the admission that we have turned the World Trade Center into a tourist attraction. That’s just terrible. Yes, I sympathize with the businesses downtown that are having problems. But turning this site of mass murder into a Disney ride is not the answer. That is exploitation in its most distasteful form.
No, it’s not the onions making me cry
: I just heard an officemate say that her husband went to Wendy’s to pay tribute to the late Dave and it was jammed with others doing the same thing. Kinda touching, in a very American way.
Portrait of power
: It’s a conflict of interest for me to deliver this compliment since I work a few floors below Vanity Fair but its February cover by Annie Leibovitz is genius: Bush, Cheney, Powell, Rumsfeld, et al looking stern and so serious you can’t even think of making fun of the Texas presidential belt buckle on GWB. It’s a great magazine cover and very smart PR from the White House. They look like they’re in charge. And we need that.
School’s out
: Pardon me for being a blog-in-the-mud but I really could not care less about the Harvard Cornel West/Larry Summers or Stephen Ambrose alleged literary pilfering dustups. Maybe it’s because I’m not in the academe and haven’t been near it in years (or can’t you tell?).
: See also Oliver Willis
