Navy To Name Ship After Former AZ Congresswoman Gabrielle Giffords

Gabrielle Giffords and her husband, astronaut Mark Harris
at today's ship naming ceremony at the Pentagon
(photo from the Associated Press).

In an interesting statement this week, the US Navy announced that its newest Littoral Combat Ship the USS Gabrielle Giffords. The future vessel, named after the former Arizona congresswoman, will be the 13th in Navy history to be named after a living person. The story appeared in today's online editons of the Washington Post.

Giffords was the congresswoman who was nearly murdered while meeting constituents in Arizona. The incident provoked national outrage and bipartisan concern that "open season" had been declared upon the people's representatives. Some had made emotional linkage with the attempt of Giffords' life and an electoral map used by former vice presidential candidate Sarah Palin, in which political opponents across the country were identified with gunsight targets. One of those in the crosshairs was Gabrielle Giffords.

Dealer Allegedly at Center of Major Antiquities Theft Ring Dies

Euphonios krater
(photo from The New York Times)

Robert Hecht, Jr., a department store heir tied to a global antiquities theft network, died earlier this week at his Paris home at age 92. His obituary appeared in today's LA Times.

Hecht's discovered a passion for the antique world at a relatively young age. That profound interest led him into the world of buying and selling splendid physical remnants of the Greco-Roman world. He was best known for selling the Euphronios krater -- a masterpiece of Greek vase making -- to the Metropolitan Museum of Art.

The Met eventually returned the vase to its point of origin many years later, when the Italian fine arts bureaucracy, law enforcement, and legal apparatus convincingly demonstrated that the vase was smuggled out of Italy. However, the Met's gaffe was small potatoes compared to the Getty Museum's considerable traffic with the goods Mr. Hecht and his network were allegedly moving. The Getty's antiquities curator, Marion True, eventually was charged with criminal activity by Italian magistrates. The case, as well as one fingering Hecht, flopped. In both situations, the pursuit of the cases went beyond the time permitted under Italian law.

The underworld of fine art theft and smuggling offers an interesting story. For all the romantic tales of sophisticated thieves defying great odds to steal some valuable object, the reality is quite different. It involves hoodwinking a bureaucracy, doing plenty of dirty work behind the scenes, and having well-connected, respectable front men to make the transactions.

Hecht understood that world and, to some extent, shaped it. His passing does not exactly mark the end of an era. However, someone with Hecht's clout, money, and time, is rare, even in the world of high-stakes antiquity collecting.

New Downtown Kutsher's Brings Catskills To Tribeca

Kutsher's Tribeca
(photo from Kutsher's Tribeca)

When people get very sentimental, they will pay almost any price to sate their yen for nostalgia. From one perspective, this might explain why a New York restaurant called Kutsher's is a popular hit.

The Tribeca establishment deliberately provides some echoes of the Catskill hotel after which it's named. According to Adam Platt's recent New York magazine review, Kutsher's food offers new interpretations of New York Jewish ritualistic food, such as kreplach and gefilte fish.

I have not been to either the faded Catskills Kutsher's or Tribeca's new model. However, I want to check out the downtown version. I'm not Jewish, but over the years I've developed an affinity for Jewish home cooking and New York deli food. If someone can make a better gefilte fish than (fill in the blank's) grandmother, I'm game to try it.

To paraphrase the 1960s ads about Levy's rye bread, "you don't have to be Jewish to love Kutsher's." (For those unfamiliar with the Doyle Dane Bernbach ad, read this link from virutaljudaica.com.)

Report Claims JLo, Foreclosed Miami Condo Part Ways

Normally, I wouldn't care about a celeb's housing issues. This story, though, has an intriguing angle.

Pool at Icon Brickell
(photo from Travel & Leisure)

According to Jose Lambiet's Gossip Extra, Jennifer Lopez leased a fabu downtown Miami apartment that was in foreclosure. That circumstance is hardly news. The number of foreclosed residences being rented is something upscale communities, such as the Philippe Starck-designed Icon Brickell condo tower where JLo shacked up, desperately try to hush up.

What's interesting is that, according to Lambert's story, the condo "was one of 1276 condos seized by (HSBC Bank) in 2010 from developer Jorge Perez and Miami Dolphins owner Stephen Ross's Related Group."

Oops. Who would have thought an NFL franchise majority owner couldn't swing the payments on some South Florida condos? (Where was the NFL's due diligence on Ross, anyway?)

Ah, but the story gets better. Lopez and Marc Anthony started leasing the condo in 2009, allegedly part of a marketing scheme developer Perez cooked up. The article notes that the JLo/Anthony "publicity machine made sure the gossip press believed the duo bought as many as 10 condos at the Icon, but public records never showed they purchased in the building. The claim they were owners in a building Anthony deemed to be 'the sexiest place in town' surfaced about the time Anthony bought a minority stake in the Dolphins."

NFL Commissioner Roger Goddell next to #16
Stephen Ross next to #24

Was Mr. Anthony interested in "helping" Mr. Ross through a difficult time? Did the majority owner of the Dolphins need some assistance, given his real estate firm's foreclosure issues? What were Marc Anthony's motives in becoming a minority owner of the football team? Were there other, silent investors who were more than willing to offer a "financial injection" into the Dolphins franchise in exchange for "considerations"?

Anthony was not the only celeb Ross roped into buying a stake in the Dolphins. Serena and Venus Williams were also identified as purchasing a piece of the NFL team. However, they didn't house sit a foreclosed condo for the Big Fish.

Report: Smart Phones Outsell PCs

Fry's Ad Offering Smartphones

In something of a landmark event, a widely publicized report asserts that smart phones are now outselling PCs. The tech consulting/analysis firm Canalys, which prepared the document, estimates that 488 million smart phones were shipped in 2011. PCs followed with 415 million units shipped.

Granted that "shipped" and "sold" are not quite the same thing, as anyone working the wholesale business will quickly tell you. The data nonetheless offer a compelling illustration of a shift in how mass market consumers and providers create, retrieve, and send information.

While it's easy to infer that Apple is the big winner here, a closer look at the data offers a different perspective. The Android system has definitely taken a big bite from the smartphone market. Samsung is selling lots and lots of phones. Apple's best move, according to the data, is not the iPhone -- it's the iPad. The iPad maintains a dominant place in its category, up to now. No wonder Amazon rushed the Kindle Fire (KF) to the market (before all of KF's kinks were worked out). Even less wonder why HP dropped out of the tablet race, even though its tablet was pretty good.

I suppose all of this sounds "business-y" and a little too enamored of data for its own good. That's a point taken. However, you can't deny the revolution in communication that's now in everyman's -- and everywoman's -- hands. It's as if we've moved from the horse and buggy era into the that of the automobile, from stage to movies, from sailing to flying.

Feds Team With NFL To Use "Guilty Until Proven Innocent" Web Law To Seize Internet Domains

According to a report in tecca.com, and picked up by Yahoo News, the U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement Agency has had a recent flurry of Web enforcement activity. Using laws whose premise is seemingly "guilty until proven innocent," the Feds shut down over 300 Internet domains "suspected of violating NFL copyrights."

It is not comforting to know that the federales have worked overtime to mollify the anxieties of the powerful NFL-industrial complex. There are simply far more important issues to resolve than the aggressive protection of greedy football teams. The recent embarrassing hacking of a Scotland Yard-FBI conference call by Anonymous hints at the folly of putting commercial interests ahead of international security.

Far more disturbing is the serious wedge into civil liberties that the Feds' use of two civil statutes invites. Both liberals and conservatives (in the American political sense) should be alarmed by this development. The notion that the law is really being used as a hammer to protect powerful commercial enterprises makes one suspicious of the law's true purpose. (As I understand it, the legal references are 18 USC 981 and 18 USC 2323.)

The Feds' crackdown on NFL copyright violators comes on the heels of proposed SOPA legislation in Washington. The proposed law, a legal love child spawned by major entertainment firms, was shelved when a web-aware public deluged Congress with protest e-mail and phone calls, and major tech players brought out its heavy lobbying artillery against SOPA.

The law would have permitted a "guilty until proven innocent" approach to websites fingered for alleged "copyright violations." This approach emasculates Internet freedom of expression so that media moguls can sleep more comfortably at night. Meanwhile, despite all the whining from Hollywood (and its financial enablers on the East Coast), the movie makers and cable monopolists are making more money than ever. It is illuminating to watch back-to-back TV segments in which movie flaks complain about piracy, followed by a review of the week's box office receipts for new releases. Sadly, the irony of the juxtaposition is lost on the entertainment business' far from innocent power brokers.

I don't mean to diminish commercial piracy as an issue. However, "guilty until proven innocent" is the wrong way to stop the pilferage. To my mind, the law, as it was applied in the NFL case, is the guilty party. Of course, the Immigration and Customs Enforcement Agency and the NFL are welcome to prove their innocence in the online court of public opinion.

Ben Gazzara -- RIP

Ben Gazzara (center)
with Peter Falk (left) and John Cassevetes

The actor Ben Gazzara, best known for his work with movie director John Cassavetes, has passed away at age 81, according to an Associated Press story picked up by The New York Times.

Gazzara, born in New York's Lower East Side, attended the city's renowned Stuyvesant High School. He later made his name on Broadway, where he eventually won three Tony Awards. In 1965, he shifted to the small screen, starring in the unusual drama Run For Your Life. The program's premise was that Gazzara's character is diagnosed with terminal cancer. This inspires him to cram a lifetime of adventure into two or three years. Around that time, another show featuring a man on the run, The Fugitive, was a big hit. That period was an odd one even for the strange, strange world of American television. Gazzara's running around the world was part of the mix.

In his later years, Gazzara played many parts without commanding a signature role. However, he usually found work, something that for older actors is an accomplishment in and of itself.

Gazzara's survivors include his German-born wife Elke Krivat and a daughter.

Nevada Hookers Lean Libertarian in GOP Prez Primary

Sign Outside Moonlite BunnyRanch

The Republican Party's race for Nevada's hooker votes has come to a head in recent days (puns very much intended). The surprise leader, up to this point, is Ron Paul. His libertarian ideology struck a sympathetic note with the state's legal prostitutes (no, we're not talking about its elected officials).

According to a bloomberg.com story, the customers and sex workers at Nevada's Moonlite BunnyRanch are ponying up for Paul's campaign. Intriguingly, they don't care for Mitt Romney, whom they view as "too square." That was not the case with Newton Leroy Gringrich, whose extra-marital affairs and tawdry divorce proceedings have generated more public debate than his policy positions have. Dennis Hof, the owner and self-proclaimed "pimp master" of the Moonlite BunnyRanch and other Nevada brothels, claimed his hooker poll (what a phrase to use in a political discussion!) indicated the women who play for pay liked Gingrich. "They don't have a problem with him being a womanizer," Hof said.

My Encounter with Baratunde Thurston

Baratunde Thurston
(photo from the Washington Post)

Earlier this evening, I attended a reading at Freerange, a New York venue for writers to read from work that has typically already been published. This is my second visit to the monthly event. Some work appeals to me; some of it doesn't. That's okay, as I believe experiencing authors' voices (literally and figuratively) offers enriching value that one can't get sitting on the sofa.

What made tonight a little different for me was that I won a Freerange raffle prize: a copy of Baratunde Thurston's new book How to Be Black. (I thought it was ironic, given that Don Cornelius, whose show Soul Train offered a window into popular African-American culture, died today.) The author read from his work, so I got a preview of what I'd just won. Later, I was encouraged to have the book autographed. That action was out of character for me, as I don't like author signings. However, since Thurston's autograph had some legitimate personal context, I walked up to him and he signed the book.

I didn't understand why he was wearing orange sneakers and an orange scarf on an unseasonably warm night, but it didn't matter. Then again, he didn't question why I wore a black shirt, black pants, black socks, and black shoes. After all, we were in New York's Lower East Side.

Later, I read today's Washington Post story on DC-born Thurston, conveniently dovetailed with the release of his book.

Quite possibly the most unusual observation of the Freerange event was watching a woman write notes by hand and then use her phone to tweet a report of the event for her Twitter following. Think of it as instant journalism: type 140-characters, add interest, stir lightly.