Sleepy-faced screen grab!
…with a satellite-induced fender bender at the end.
The new steerage on the Norwegian Epic
I was invited on the two-day inaugural preview on Norwegian’s colossal new cruise ship, the Epic. While most of the other journalists were upstairs getting soused on the open bar (which I did — later), I was downstairs investigating the new “Studio” cabins. These new solo quarters will enable people who wish to vacation alone, or at least have a stateroom to themselves, to avoid paying that dreaded “single supplement” which keeps so many people from taking the trips they’d like to take.
I thought it’d be much more fun to make a video about them than to just write something. So my friend Josh Koll shot me. We had it in the can in 10 minutes, but as far as I know, I’m the only journalist who made a video of these rooms. As if that’ll win me any prizes.
I also cut it, which may explain why it’s a little choppy. I don’t expect you to share in my sense of accomplishment, but Final Cut Pro can be a beast.
Swap piano playing for check-ups, or fish for hooch
Here are two videos I made that are seemingly unrelated, but which have a common thread: bartering.
The first is a look at George Washington’s actual bookkeeping ledger, which shows that much of his business was conducted through swap. Like: He sold fish to get ingredients for whiskey! The second is about a hospital in Brooklyn that allows broke artists to trade their talents for health care (check out the original Keith Haring mural in the video!).
We shot the hospital one after the ledger one, but I realized that my trip to Mount Vernon had yielded a fascinating tidbit that was a perfect closer to it. So Washington’s balance sheet makes a double appearance. I’m a history nerd, so any chance to show off a wicked cool old document titillates me.
A few months ago, Nevada Republican Sue Lowder earned mockery for suggesting Americans might be able to barter for their health care. Yes, that’s no longer a workable system in our non-agrarian economy, but here’s proof that it was once the norm — and it can still work. So there.
Google Earth shot in 1924: the Manhattan you never knew
Want to get lost in the past for an afternoon? You want to go to this link: http://gis.nyc.gov/doitt/nycitymap/
It’s just like Google Earth: a flyover of New York City, showing all the rooftops, streets, rail lines and street life.
Except it was shot in 1924. Yes, 1924!
This incredible time machine is on New York City’s official civic site. Once you call it up, use the camera icon to change the year, and then use the slider to go back from today’s view to 1924. The magnifying glass gets you closer to the area you choose, and the arrow keys move you around.
Then jump forward a quarter century to 1951. Then compare to recent images.
It was only six years since World War One, when Germans managed to actually infiltrate New York Harbor and blow up the Black Tom munitions depot, and aerial images like these were almost certainly a crucial part of the future American defense strategy.
Pennsylvania Station, back from the dead
The changes from 1924 are extreme.
- No Empire State Building.
- Elevated railways on Ninth, Sixth, and Third Avenues.
- Sixth Avenue halts at Minetta Lane — within a year, it would begin to be sliced through to Canal Street to ease traffic to the Holland Tunnel and facilitate subway construction. By counting houses, I can find an apartment building I lived in in grad school on King Street and Sixth Avenue. It was sliced in half by The Cut, and Hancock Street and Congress Street were erased forever. My old apartment was shaped like a trapezoid because of it,and overlooked Sixth Avenue, but in this photo, it’s an intact, mid-block building.
- Wharves along the Hudson where Battery Park City was later erected on landfill.
- Sara Roosevelt Park between Chrystie and Forsyth Streets hadn’t yet been bulldozed: The Lower East Side was still relentlessly crammed with buildings.
- Look how few trees are in the parks!
Times Square without shadows -- but near the El (and there's another just west, on Ninth)
- London Terrace on 23rd Street is still a row of townhouses with front yards.
- Chelsea (north of 23rd Street between Eighth and Ninth Avenuea) is still a real neighborhood comprised of tenements. So is Stuyvesant Town and much of the Lowest East Side and the Bronx. You can really witness the destruction caused by Robert Moses as it develops over the decades.
- Pennsylvania Station is still there. So is the old Metropolitan Opera House and the original Madison Square Garden at Madison and 26th Street. Move the slider to 1951, and you can see the second Madison Square Garden at Eighth and 50th Street.
- Central Park’s Great Lawn doesn’t exist. It’s a reservoir.
The Sixth Avenue El doglegs at W. 3rd Street, the obliteration of Houston Street is decades away, and my old apartment (the top left corner of the "12A" points to it; it's on the south side of King Street just west of where the image darkens) remains in its pre-amputated state.
Seriously, I have been plumbing this link for months and I am still crazy excited about it. It’s the coolest link in my universe this year. I just had to share it with you.
My video interview: What it’s like to work at Epcot
Here’s a new video I did (and the link to the original). I’m not actually in it because I felt that it should be about them, not me. But it was me who was asking the questions, and it was me who approached Disney to do this topic.
There are actually a bunch of people working at World Showcase in Epcot who have been there since the beginning, or who are fixtures. There have been Miyuki the Japanese candy lady, there’s Jutta the German egg painting lady, there was Carol the Hat Lady in the United Kingdom, and there’s Andrew the wood carver in the Outpost.
And then there are these brothers, in Mexico:
[tube]https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Qbw4AClxBnk[/tube]
Live! From my vacation! It’s how to see Venice for less than $50 a day
I took a few days out of a five-day vacation to create this video because I thought it would be so cool to have an internationally shot segment on WalletPop. I am especially proud of a few of the shots in here, such as the shot of the traghetto gondolier shot from below. On the Grand Canal in a rocky gondola.
I really need to learn how to put work demands on a shelf when I’ve got time off. Then again, when I create stuff like this, I’m 1) doing something that pretty much no other website is doing 2) creating a cool video scrapbook of the places I go and the people I meet and 3) having fun anyway. And I’m learning.
The post that this video lives in comes with a list of 10 ways to save in Venice.
My video tours of the U.S. Mint in Philadelphia
This weekend, I was having drinks with an old friend, someone I’ve known for 17 years, when all of a sudden he asked what I did. Maybe I shouldn’t be surprised; dear friends know each other deeply and don’t always need to sweep up every morsel of information of their progressing careers.
Nonetheless, I realized that I need to do a much better job of posting my work so that people will know about it. Starting today.
I’m going to get some of my videos for WalletPop.com and Aol.com up onto the blog. Each one was originally published with a link to a story that, often, gave more context or detail or behind-the-scenes information than we could fit in the actual video, so I’ll also provide a link to that story. You can watch the video alone right here or, preferably, click through to WalletPop.com and read the story that went along with it.
The first two were supposed to be one, but my colleague/producer/cameraman Ken Shadford got so much material that we ended up cutting them into two segments, each covering different aspects of coin production. The first is about how coins are now designed digitally and carved into molds using computers, and the second shows the actual production line on the day the Mint was making the new Yosemite state quarter.
The Mint was a fascinating place to shoot, not just because of what we captured about production there — we all carry its products around in our pockets, every day — but also because of what we couldn’t shoot. Wide shots, pans, and shots of windows were not permitted lest we give outsiders a sense of how the building is laid out. I confess I was all turned around myself and relied on our guide to thread me through the caverns and warrens of clattering equipment.
Some days I get to shoot things that are so over-the-top cool that the whole experience feels rather dreamlike. I am so focused on asking questions and guiding the narrative and heeding Ken that I often forget how to just bask in the great fortune of my job. Maybe this blog entry will count toward the appreciation, just a little.
I also loved the fact that you’re not allowed to bring loose change into the Mint. Every penny is left in an envelope at the security desk, and the metal detectors (both coming and going) are amped up so high that even the foil in a gum wrapper will set them off.
The contents of my pocket kept beeping until we realized that my tube of ChapStick was triggering the alarm. “Huh,” said the guard, who like the rest of the staff was exceptionally friendly, “I had no idea ChapStick had metal in it, but it must, because it’s going off.” He looked at it closely, rolling it between his fingers with a quizzical expression, and then handed it back. “You have a great day,” he said.
The macabre truth behind those Duck boat tourist tours
After yesterday’s appalling Ride the Ducks tragedy in Philadelphia, which killed two Hungarian tourists, the media is doing its typical post-game pig-pile, grilling operators about the safety of the land-to-water vehicles and forcing Herschend Family Entertainment, which operates Ride the Ducks, to suspend all operations across the country. The sad truth is that accidents happen. I don’t know all the facts, but that’s where I lean in this case.
The CEO of Herschend is Joel Manby, who used to run Saab, and I interviewed him in May following his appearance on CBS’s Undercover Boss. In that episode, he personally rode the Ride the Ducks operating in Stone Mountain, Georgia. I found him to be forthright and thoughtful, and his employees told me they loved him. Today’s news flurry seems designed to let reporters look like they’re behaving as watchdogs, even if that alertness comes after the burglars have already left the house with the silverware.
Listen for yourself to the kind of values Manby says he has when it comes to running his company.
[tube]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yEPHLHdR4yc[/tube]
What do I know, but to me, that doesn’t sound like the kind of guy who would be fine with skimping on maintenance or training.
I have also taken a Duck tour. In tourist towns, they’re now ubiquitous (and uniformly annoying — unless you’re on one, in which case they’re delightful), which is one of the reasons they make such a plump target.
Here’s a shot of the one in the Wisconsin Dells, one of America’s most popular resort towns for families.
If that cockpit looks old, it’s because it truly is. There, and not in any assumed maintenance laxness, is where the unpleasant truth lies:
These amphibious, 75-ton vehicles, which are actually called DUKWs, were created to ferry G.I.s to the beaches of World War II. Many of the ones used in America were only employed in training exercises, but it’s true that some of the soldiers it carried did end up dying on the front. Duck boats were created to be tools that conveyed young men to their final showdowns, in which they would often be slaughtered, filling the boats with blood. If they made it off, it was their mission to either kill others or get killed trying to do so.
The Duck tour in London has a particularly macabre distinction: Its boats really were used to ferry boys to their ends on D-Day. Watching these ugly ducklings paddle up the Thames past the Houses of Parliament is gruesome. But the hyper-militaristic truth of their origin, and the true purpose of their invention, is what I find the most creepy.
We owe the DUKWs for a major turning point in that war, but they were also never intended to be the frivolous amusement that the tourism industry likes to pretend they are.
Inappropriately cheerful in Philly…
As I was heading to Fox News’ studio to do my weekly segment on Fox Philly, there was a terrible boat accident in the Delaware River involving one of those Duck tours, and two people were still missing. As I was sitting in New York in my chair, waiting for the cue in my IFB to begin, people in Philadelphia were watching disturbing pictures of the scene of the accident, as divers searched the waters at Penn’s Landing.
What a perfect time to throw to Jason talking about restaurant deals! Today was the day I learned to decide for myself what my on-camera mood ought to be. Next time, I will be more careful about my segues. I gained more respect for the daily tightrope walk that anchors master when I was inadvertently so chipper at the top of this segment. Just another lesson in this step-by-step evolution I’m going through.
Check out my original in-depth story on this subject on WalletPop.com
Setting sail on the new Norwegian Epic
Leaving Manhattan by ship is always sublime. It makes me feel lucky, or like it’s 1924.
