May 27, 2015--Safe Rooms

The latest thing in New York City real estate chic are safe rooms where owners can hide from intruders; those seeking to do them harm; and, for the seriously anxious, protect them from chemical or nuclear attack.

This is post 9/11 behavior for those in fact feeling that kind of serious threat or just another form of conspicuous consumption.

According to a report in yesterday's New York Times some with safe rooms that set apartment dwellers back six figures to construct are pretty comfortably set up and stocked with enough provisions and entertainments to accommodate them for some time--until burglars leave or when after a terrorist attack it is considered safe to venture out.

Some, who do not have an extra bedroom that can be converted into a safe room, are fortifying closets and bathrooms. Though in Manhattan closet space is at a premium. When Gwyneth Paltrow had a town house in the city, her safe room doubled as a closet. A typical New York solution to never feeling you have enough square footage.

But according to safe-room contractor Tom Gaffney, president of Gaffco Ballistics . . .

The world is a very scary place right now, especially for people of means; they feel cornered and threatened. When you have so much to lose, and you can afford it, you put a premium on your safety.

My first thought--why then have a place at Ground Zero, New York City? Why not hole up in the country where you can build an electronic moat around your place and have the perimeter patrolled by security forces armed with attack dogs and the latest weapons?

But the Big Apple is irresistible even for the hyper-nervous. And for the Middle Eastern and Russian billionaire condo owners, looking for safe havens for their ill-gotten wealth, in spite of the perceived threats, NYC is still a good and safe-enough deal. Worrying about intruders or even chemical attacks is something they are used to back in their home countries.

It all, as they say, comes literally with the territory.

October 14, 2014--Gwyneth

The "paper of record," the staid New York Times strives to be objective in its reporting. No matter what the right-wing critics say, though there is a liberal tilt to the editorials, in the news reporting, with rare exceptions, they are fair and balanced.

But then every once in a while something so egregious happens that they can't control themselves and the reporting reads like an editorial or is intentionally satirical.

The latter happened last week in a report about an Obama fundraiser out in California at the home of Gwyneth Paltrow.

OK, I'll admit my own bias--I can't stand her: I don't like her acting, I don't like her looks, I don't like her smarmy politics and so I loved the Times' report.

You know, it was one of those events in Hollywood that Fox News delights in trashing--it costs $1,000 to get in, all right, but $15,000 to have dinner with Him.

How much fun can that be? Look at Obama--to stay that skinny he hardly eats anything.

But, as Rona would say, "It's not about the food."

When the formal part of the evening was about to begin, the Times recounted how Gwyneth "struggled to hold herself back as she stood next to President Obama"; but, after composing herself, told the dozens of Democratic donors who had gathered at her Brentwood house, which, to quote the mean-spirited Times, looked "like something created by Restoration Hardware on a multi-million dollar budget," she "rambled on about why she considers herself his biggest supporter [take that Barbra Streisand]" and how his support for women's issues is "very important to me as a working mother."

In full gush, again transcribed by the Timesman on duty, before she turned the microphone over to him, she giggled, "You're so handsome that I can't speak properly."

Nonplussed, Obama took the mike and proceeded to give the same after-$15,000-dinner talk he gave the night before at the home of some Jeffrey or another. About how everything is getting better at home and abroad. Blah, blah.

Come to think of it, maybe he only picked at his baby lettuces, but from this delusional stump speech he must have been hitting the sauce.

Then, in the very last sentence, returning to the passing-the-mike-to-Obama moment, the Times' Michael Schmidt couldn't resist--

"After handing the microphone to the president, [working-mom Gwyneth] sat down next to her two children--Moses and Apple--to listen."

Moses? Apple? On the other hand, what kind of a name is Gwyneth?

December 16, 2013--All the XXX That's Fit to Print

I know things are difficult these days for newspapers. The kind delivered to your front door. Even for the "paper of record," the New York Times that proclaims each morning that it offers all the news "That's Fit to Print."

Put simply, they are losing readers and in turn advertisers are abandoning them.

Fit to print suggests editors make strategic decisions about what's important to report and, connotatively, fit also means what's appropriate to write about. To the gray-lady, fit has traditionally meant what to cover as well as what not to.

When, for example, supermarket tabloids and gossipy blogs such as the Drudge Report were the first to report about President Bill Clinton not-so-allegedly fooling around with an intern in the Oval Office, the Times did not see that as fit to cover. Instead, after a few weeks, realizing they were losing readers who were panting to learn all the lurid details, they began to cover the coverage, letting readers know what Drudge and the Sun and Enquirer were up to, assuming there were any Times readers who didn't notice the blaring headlines or sneak peeks as they dawdled in the checkout line.

So you can imagine my non-surprise when two Sundays ago the Times in its Magazine and special Style sections published stories that I would have expected to find in Cosmo or the Enquirer.

The first about "Sexercise," a detailed look at the fitness value of canoodling; the second, "What Lies Beneath," about various approaches to managing and grooming one's mons pubis.

WARNING--You must be over 18 to continue.

Times reporter Gretchen Reynolds asks, "Do intimate acts count as working out?"

And concludes . . . sort of.

Some sexercise advocates claim that sex burns up to 100 calories per session (about the number of calories in two medium-size chocolate chip cookies), but until recently that has never been scientifically verified.

To measure the potential aerobic benefit of having sex, researchers at the University of Quebec undertook a careful study. They signed up 21 young heterosexual couples and began by having them jog on treadmill for 30 minutes to create a baseline. They noted their energy expenditure and other metrics. Next, over a full month, they had their subjects fool around and then engage in sexual intercourse, all the while keeping track of various metabolic reactions.

They found that sex qualified as "moderate exercise," a little more so for men than women. About the equivalent of playing tennis doubles or walking uphill. For brief periods, they found, men exert more energy during sex than when jogging. They also found that for men sex burned four calories per minute while it only consumed three for women; and thus for "sessions"that lasted an average of 25 minutes (no comment) men burned two chocolate chip cookies' worth.

Not so surprising, 98 percent of the subjects reported that "sex felt more fun than jogging." I'm more interested in the responses of the remaining two percent. And why they left gay people out of the sturdy.

Meanwhile, over in the Times Style section, Amanda Hess reports that, "After years of razors, wax, and lasers reducing pubic hair to the bare minimum--or nothing at all--there's a return to a more natural state."

She continues--

Marilyn Monroe's maid claimed she once walked in on the actress naked and splay-legged, bottle and toothbrush in hand, meticulously bleaching the hair between her legs a perfectly matching platinum . . .

Enough? Or too much information?

If you would like more, here are a couple of other things from Ms. Hess and the New York Times--

For women of Monroe's generation, pubic hair was a game of peekaboo--on full display in the privacy of the bungalow, but carefully hidden from popular view. In recent years the bombshell bush has essentially disappeared. Wax-wielding estheticians and permanent lasers have whittled it down or erased it entirely . . .

I'm done. If you're not, read the piece in full on-line to see what porn stars are up to as well Gwyneth Paltrow.

As for me, I'll get back to reading about the protests in Ukraine.