Arielman's Comments (65)

“I recall the Canadian press, investigating the source of hard drugs in North America, in the "Golden Triangle" in Southeast Asia, implicated people inside the US military, carried on flights by the US Air Force, and received an award for the report. In the Gulf War they also reported the strange occurrence of US ordnance next to one of the burning oil wells set afire in that conflict.

More recently, 1/4 million "ecstasy" pills were intercepted on a US National Air Guard cargo carrier at the Stewart Airport, near Newburgh, NY which recently started commercial flights to Florida, once to be the "fourth" area jetport, connected with high-speed rail, proposed by then Governor Rockefeller to take some of the air traffic form above nearby New York City. Then Senator Hillary Clinton, reviewing the Revolutionary War re-enactors there, reminded the press of the then officers plot, thwarted by General Washington, to make him a king of America. Perhaps why history repeated is often a tragedy?”

“The will of the people is the only legitimate foundation of any government, and to protect its free expression should be our first object. Thomas Jefferson”

“Some of the banks, such as the Long Island Savings Bank, were owned by the Spanish government, or multiple owners, it was reported. If a candidate gets $1+ from the local savings bank, how can we determine whether it represents our people or a foreign program to get certain policies, i.e., return of Gibraltar, enacted or to be taken up in the US Congress or the United Nations, not part of our heritage which elected officials are supposed to protect in the limited time we grant them in their term. Permitted as corporate entities which can contribute as much as they can, is counterproductive, i.e., the theft of elected time of service, in New York applied as "criminal tampering" might be considered a felony, much like tapping a public"service" utility, limiting the enabling of the "will of the people".”

“I read Carl G. Jung stated he was related by marriage to the German poet Goethe. It's stated he had analyzed Herman Hesse, besides a poet and Nobel Prize winning author, a prolific painter I see online. When my father passed on there was a "synchronitic" obituary, a nephew of Carl Jung, who held three patents, in engineering, where he worked it stated, in improving the Third World from Long Island, NY. I used to try to read and understand Carl Jung's volumes, in the former sanatorium turned community college overlooking the Great South Bay and the Atlantic Ocean, Suffolk Community College, in Selden, NY. They were going to need a bigger boat than the "J. Alfred Prufrock" to study the marine environment. Selden is named after a judge who was a "character witness" at the trial of American feminist Susan B. Anthony, tried for dressing as a man to vote in Upstae New York before women were given the right in 1920. What a Great Liberation!”

“I recall my friend telling me, she had been at Shea when the Beatles "invaded" Shea, a folk singer, she had a license to croon in Boston, standing in St. James, NY she told me, as a friend of Woody Guthrie's widow, who lived in a small apartment in the Dakota, that Mrs. Guthrie had heard the terrible shots that were fired at the Lennons. She had been trying to convince the Guthries to get Woody's unpublished material out in a collection people could see. Well amazing grace, the technology we have now is much better than old "wire recording", literally by the Lomaxes. I wonder if you read this have you seen the John Lennon Museum in Japan? It's a marvel, first of its kind. They spent three years before his death there. Bing or Google it you might be surprised.

Too bad "How I Won the War" was never tinted right for the original effect, the film he was in. He might have thought of being in a few others.”

“Maybe too many of the federal contracts, a competitor upriver hired by the Confederacy built a "powder mill" 30 miles outside Atlanta, Georgia, from brochures from the Crystal Palace exhibition in London, which burned down. Some historians think the Civil War to have been shortened by a year if General Sherman had found it.
It might have been a little "tit for tat" the foundry workers were from England who were given other identities, i.e., teacher, maid, etc. since they had a law against leaving the country with the knowledge learned in the production of weapons of mass destruction. There was also signed "industrial indenture" there as a surviving document attests, some of the last in the civilized world of indentures. I think Michigan Technological University in their five years or more of fieldwork in the West Point Foundry core has shown that to be true. Reported the first "labor action" in a Federal facility perhaps it was under different circumstances not "private enterprise" in the civil war, became a federal facility.
From 1989-1992 I was in the archeology, EPA, Marathon Battery National Priority Superfund Site, below the former "Bridge Shop" of the Chicago Bridge and Steel Co., burned down in 1912, we recovered a R.P. Parrot "gun platform" on grillage was the prototype or actually "Swamp Angel" used in the incendiary bombardment of Charleston, South Carolina in 1863. The cannon exploded and was obtained by the citizens of Trenton, NJ where it still is.”

“Bowling is probably as old as New York (New Amsterdam) and was played down on "Bowling Green" now a park. It was once I recall outlawed as "10 pins" so it was then played with only 9 and the prohibition revoked. Another story is that thunder heard around the Hudson Valley is the Knickerbockers bowling. More likely the early cannon "proofing" at what became the West Point Foundry in Cold Spring, NY which had its offices in Manhattan. Congress authorized its creation shorty after the nation's founding, to be one of its foundries producing cannons for the new US Navy, which later was "born" on the Great Lakes in the War of 1812, particularly at Sackets Harbor, NY on Lake Ontario.”

“To add to bowling alley locations I have two. Germania Hall, on the Bowery, where during the Haymarket Riots in Chicago, I think, and people peaceably in NYC assembled in various halls, this one recently torn down and was where Kate Mullaney, of Troy, NY, sitting next to Susan B. Anthony was the first women elected to union management, is listed in a city history as a single lane bowling alley. Unfortunately the history of it as a predominately Upstate National Guard unit, perhaps descended from the Revolutionary War and post-war protection of the early government, the first federal assembly in NYC, later known as "Steuben Rifles" may have been overlooked, perhaps for its use in the "draft riots" in the Civil War, one its officer's tried in courts martial. The later guard unit up the street became the Seventh Ave Armory, the only privately built one.

The other bowling alley is in the Wave Hill complex in Riverdale in the Bronx, two Hudson River estates joined, one where Samuel Clemens, Arturo Toscanini, and others lived, lastly the British Embassy compound in the early 1960s. I mapped an inventory of trees in the botanical center and performance place today. The lower level of the "promenade" has an entrance to a single lane bowling alley, said the archaeologist then working in Riverdale Park on the proposed impacts to remove invading species of plants that were severely altering the ecology of the park on the Hudson River.”

“In some ways I think a comparison to Ralph Nader, too and Nelson Mandela. Mr. Nader has run for President, the oldest American citizen to do so and may run against Senator Lieberman in his own state, Connecticut, where he has a proposed "tort law" museum. Over the years he's inspired and formed "Public Citizen" and the various Public Interest Research Groups (PIRG) one I worked for out of St. James, NY one summer around 1982 canvassing for subscriptions to "Public Citizen" based in Texas on Long Island on "water issues". Pete Seegar and another gave us a concert at the end of it in the old Riverhead Theater, out where once migrant farmers were fought for and today "regulated", today more likely flown in from Puerto Rico, than "hoodwinked" out of the South. Issues of "race" aside, the American public needs better leadership, as did South Africa.”

“The "kicker" to the story is that then President Bush fired the head of the US Army because he sat of the board of Enron, without any "due process" or barely any public interest.”

“So I think perhaps when the OMB sued for the "energy meeting" with VP Chaney in the early days of the first Bush term, and then President Bush says they can't have that, without perhaps even knowing what was discussed, the "great decider" did us a dis-service. What if they decided, and to support Mr. Baldwin's assertion, the first former President Bush was a "wildcat driller" after WWII, they basically "don't need no stinking maps" or research, just "drill baby drill" to set up Enron as the fall guy. I was working after 9/11 (during anthrax) at Fort Hamilton, Brooklyn, and elsewhere on Federal land, Picatinney Arsenal, NJ, West Point Academy, and in the flooded Bridgewater, NJ solution, digging archeology test holes in the Parade Field behind the headquarters of the Army Corps of Engineers, that they had lost like $17 million in fuel oil at Fort Hamilton, Enron had been their supplier, and had to come up with the funds to cover their energy production. The archeology by the way was to prove or disprove that the previous archeology tests had actually found anything other than fill, nearby also the Robert E. Lee house, who lived there and was a former Commandant of the West Point Academy President Obama spoke at tonight to the Nation. The "Nation" publication has a wonderful open letter to the President that apparently the "dude does not abide by".”

“Mr. Green left out the very important counsel AG Gonzales gave former President Bush at his "call to duty" day, i.e. jury duty in Texas, in regards to a case involving a woman, employed as a stripper. As questions were asked the AG consulted with President Bush to what his response should be. I have no further info on "sitting" US Presidents called for jury duty while in office (judge Lance Ito was called up during the so-called "OJ Simpson" trial, married to Peggy York, highest ranking female in the LA Police Dept. I just learned). Interesting set of laws in the US, no due process, then defined after years as "do process". Nearby Gitmo is Cape Maisi, where America's "last slaver" a former luxury yacht "Wanderer" sank in a storm in 1871. The world might think those there held by the US, its "slaves" to political expediency.”

“Yet, there is a photo published in the Westchester, NY paper a few years ago of Sigmund Freud coming off an airplane to visit a doctor friend with a film camera in his hand, and that he enjoyed the gratification perhaps of making his own small films. Clark University in Worcester, Massachusetts, is also the developer and publisher of Idrisi, a fore-runner and premier developer of GIS and image analysis, often when I recall using it in EPA required archaeology studies, in use in the Third World, i.e., designing flood-relief centers in Bangladesh for example, with its early Trelaine digitizer map making and satellite imagery analysis software. I thought perhaps later Swiss doctor Carl G. Jung received one too there, but I might be confusing the hilarious reading I once heard of the fiction "Ragtime" where they are both traveling in NYC and Dr. Freud is embarrassed to have to find a bathroom at the back of a delicatessen.”

“Last month, over review of the NYC Landmarks Commmission, there was assisted the excavation of six (6) 5'x5'x9'+ units on a street in Bensonhurst, Brooklyn as part of the ongoing construction of a large pressure sewer (force main) there that I crewed on. They were concerned that there may have been a burial ground below 27th Avenue that was once an AME Zion church (African Methodist Episcopal, "Zion" to separate it, i.e., New York City rather than Philadelphia, PA). Lots of coal ash/trash from around the time they made Rikers Island, land-filled by 1903, it still, with a Queens causeway, in the Bronx jurisdiction from where the ferries left, but no evidence of burials and lots of evidence of a former marsh in south Brooklyn where Mr. Benson made his town.”

“July and August 2000 I worked the Cooper Square Urban Renewal project, once proposed to tear down 25 blocks of NYC's Lower East Side. I co-authored research of the lots and histories in the Bowery, Manhattan, NY, i.e., parts of three blocks, two former cemeteries, some with standing structures, one housing Kate Millet, noted feminist, next-door to “Germania Hall” where Kate Mullaney, of Troy, NY, sitting with American feminist, Susan B. Anthony was elected to a union, a first.

A Quaker cemetery on Houston St. was moved to Old Westbury and on "Coney Island Road" now Prospect Park in Brooklyn. Outside our study, is a "Negroe Cemetery" on one map a few blocks south of Houston. Another lot on Bowery had been the "satellite" cemetrery of a Methodist church, located where today a former courthouse houses Anthology Film Archives. In construction of the courthouse (2nd Ave, 2nd St.) they discovered a burial, which required a special session of the NY legislature, determined it Dept. of Education's purview. Those proceedings were lost in a State Library fire, so only the results are known, and perhaps a precedent set, in need of further research as to how the legislature determined that result.

There are two Marble Vault cemeteries nearby, first nondenominational ones in the city in the former historic theater district. The Methodist cemetery was moved to Long Island, straddling Queens/Brooklyn it avoided the legislature which forbid any larger than 250 acres in any one county.”

“Before working there, I worked in the summer of 1999 in the City Hall Park human remains found in construction and “restoration” designs for fixing the park, most thought in the "first Almshouse” cemetery, in the former Commons. I worked excavating around a two stacked burial found in the test unit dug in the planned location of a water-fountain, hopefully the fountain was moved, not far from the statue of Horace Greeley, who may also sit on some.

In the fall of 1999 I helped with The Old Soldiers Cemetery, West Farms, Bronx, NY, monitoring excavation for a new fence, bones recovered sent to Smithsonian for analysis. Street cutting and neighborhood development isolated former churchyard. Four wars (to WWI) of veterans are buried there. The stones were stood against each other their location awaiting some map, displaced by road and city planning (an aqueduct runs near it under land next to the west side of the Bronx River at 180th St. there, the church building removed to the north, where across the street is the Bronx Zoo. Also said to be one of the earliest city landmarks considered.

Quakers and Shakers never had headstones in their burials, here in New York and from my experience in Ohio, at the Watervliet Shaker community now a research park. Perhaps some of these stones were also stacked up either standing or leaning or laying flat and broken.”

“I worked on the archaeology of this cemetery in June, 2000 with Celia Bergoffen, PhD, RPA for the Queens Historical Society. The family house was on a crossroads and was commandeered by the British Army. They were tried after the American Revolution and found innocent of collaboration. The info gathering and reporting allowed the British Army to win the "Battle of Long Island" against General George Washington.

The NYC Landmarks Preservation Commission requested and reviewed a then previous research report on it. We excavated a controlled archaeology unit in front of the standing headstones. The theory was that work in the WPA period had "reconstructed" or landscaped it, then next to a Japanese-American run garden supply business. Each of the stones turned out to have been broken, i.e., usually they project 2 feet into the ground, they appeared in profile to have been broken, and there were no "pit outlines" that would have suggested a human interment.

I suggested "remote sensing" ground-penetrating radar. It would be able to describe better the street-to-street lot and thereby perhaps find where the burials had actually been before the headstones were apparently "mowed down".

At the same time I recall, the NY Times, published a story that the "Night Before Christmas" might have had been prose "lifted" from an Upstate paper who included a similar story in their request for the subscribers to pay their bills and to remember the carriers of it that brought it to them.”

“I worked archaeology testing nearby in Penns Neck, NJ, part of a proposed Route 1 interchange for Princeton, NJ. The road to Grovers Mills was closed then as the bridge was being replaced. The RCA Sarnoff research center, a co-developer of "successful television" and a General in WWII in charge of "ionospheric" transmissions, i.e., large acreage of wires stretched about tree top level in New Jersey nearby, and on Long Island, NY, (Rocky Point, NY ~4500 acres given to NY state for $1 for parkland), to transmit radio and perhaps images to Europe at night were in place nearby or proposed. I remember the "strange shaped water tower" in Grovers Mills, on a tripod that was apparently shot at with a shotgun after the radio show. I purchased my IBM PCjr internal 300 baud modem nearby after the bridge was finished and the job done. We found one Orient Fishtail projectile point in the gas-line pipe trench in the research center's front yard.

So I think perhaps, the "Martians" chose their landing site carefully that Halloween. Happy landings!”

“A number of years ago I used to work on Stone Street once Brewers Street that has been fixed up for the public. What I recall, as I often had to then travel out of the city to work, was one day the FDR went under in a storm surge not 30 minutes after we had passed by the spot. It would be terrible to have this salt spill. I once studied the alternatives of the "West Side Highway" though that proposed for Buffalo, NY and also in a 100 year flood plain, that was superseded by the then new subway system there. Certainly getting this onto higher ground would make more sense.”

“John Brown raid sesquicentennial

http://nightly.newsvine.com/_video/2009/10/09/3365168-john-brown-raid-sesquicentennial”

“OK it was taught that the world was considered "flat" perhaps as in off the edge of a piece of parchment there might be monsters of the sea. I also read that Columbus did his homework, Masons of Bristol, England report his query regarding lands sighted by fishing west. His father, a pilot hired by the Italians might have been Danish!
The survival of Spanish-Jewish tradition in the "New World" perhaps shows they had left already before Columbus! Botanical descriptions of maize in early Arabic treatises and perhaps are depicted where the Chinese "discoverer" of North America died, in India, in difficult to date sculpture that was described by an archaeologist working on the origins of turquoise trade from mines in the American Southwest found in the Aztec culture in prehistoric Mexico.
Columbus named the east point of land in Cuba, "Cape Maysi" (Maisi), near Guantanamo. It is where in 1871, "Wanderer" sank in a storm, built in Setaket, NY outfitted for slave-running in 1858 by a cotton broker, boarded by a British anti-slavery blockade off Africa where it was thought "too luxurious" and landed on Jekyll Island, Georgia in 1859 with a cargo of slaves, a third of which perished in the "Middle Passage" and perhaps precipitated the American Civil War, as it became a "chess piece" and later mail packet for the Union, it was used in the early fruit trade in the Caribbean.
Surely Americans don't want to blame slavery on Columbus yet?”

“Alex I enjoyed your intros and comments on the opening of the season of the NY Philharmonic that I saw on PBS 13 here in NYC. Years ago I attended a n experimental NY state university program in residential education in Buffalo, NY, where suddenly wings appeared! But really, the college "B" of the "Visual and Performing Arts had such great classes, a "Seminar in the Arts" where Leslie Fiedler, Eric Bentley, architects, musicians, one the tympani player in the Buffalo Philharmonic, etc., came to the newly opened IM Pei designed "Governors Residence" (named in quads after four of them) and talked about careers in the arts on the Amherst, NY campus. Another had talked about his upcoming book "Sex in the White House" a history of that back during the Nixon admin. At the time, like "Blazing Saddles" a train was acomin', the later subway built in Buffalo that once was to connect to the Amherst campus. I cannot understand why we must not allow the orchestra to Cuba! Are they afraid its patrons will drop billions there and cause a wide-scale panic on Wall Street? How silly we seem...and no wonder political satirist Mark Russell played from their campus after his venue at the Watergate!”

“Sorry I thought the caption was at the bottom of the photo. Dali had a work displayed at Rikers Island (an island made out of household coal ash trash, where, though a causeway to Queens, prison infractions are tried in the Bronx, where the ferry once left for it) which was stolen by the guards and I think never recovered. He would have liked the sculpture.”

“I think "Giunta" is "Dali's Moustache" in Carol Eisner extensive catalog. http://www.caroleeisner.com/outdoor/2009/dali_moustache.htmll)”

“One of the last states to require mandatory vehicle insurance (a matter of choice whether to be protected on their roads, and at the time the cheapest law school in the country) perhaps it's more a question of product liability before the court there and whether its residents would have any recourse in cases of product mis-representation or breakage with other states. If its illegal I don't have to go chasing the manufacturer from state to state to foreign origin in cases of liability, i.e., shock, injury, etc. In my opinion however, it seems all too repressive to actually prosecute someone for it, in a state that should be known more for it's Vulcan industry, i.e., iron and steel manufacture.”