Five years ago this summer, Jeremy Blake came home to the East Village apartment he shared with his longtime girlfriend, Theresa Duncan, to find her dead of an intentional overdose. A week later, despite insisting to friends that "no way am I going to follow Theresa," Blake rode the A train out to Rockaway Beach, stripped off his clothes and walked into the Atlantic Ocean...
Armed with an insatiably inquisitive mind, some good contacts and a fistful of hindsight still stinging, American investigative journalist Peter Lance has been untangling the wires since dawn on September 12th, 2001. In his books, Peter has traced the 9/11 plot backwards; peeling back layers upon layers to expose the origins of evil; and along the way he's willingly fallen down a few serious rabbit holes.
I went to see Peter address a packed auditorium at NYU's Kimmel Center on behalf of the prestigious Center for Communication last year. After the seminar, Peter had to split. I could tell he was onto something new. Off into the cold New York night to meet someone and follow a new lead. And sure enough, now I know what he was up to.
I've been a friend/fan of Peter's for some time now and he never ceases to amaze me. Truly in a league of his own, Peter has a niche for digging stuff up where no one thought to bring shovels before. He is an archaeologist of the truth. And in a newly published exclusive on his website, Lance sheds fresh light on the link between the 9/11 attacks, the February 26, 1993 WTC bombing and the assassination of Rabbi Meir Kahane... some 11 years before that horrific Tuesday in 2001.
So what can the first attack on the World Trade Center in 1993 teach us about the attempted (and seemingly since forgotten) car bombing of Times Square back in May? Well, Mr. Lance will tell you in the September issue of Playboy. Be sure to pick it up as it hits newsstands August 13. I was lucky enough to read an advanced copy of the article and it is truly damaging.
In the meantime, click here to read Peter's latest exclusive which links three men who were charged in the '93 WTC bombing to an infamous al Qaeda related homicide almost 20 years ago!
Pick up all of Peter's books if you haven't already. I really cannot recommend any better when it comes to this stuff.
He was on some awful trip. Going on and on about things like pithing and exsanguination. And even though none of us were stoned - he was killing our high. Just outside Saugerties were we. Searching for #56 Parnassus. We were gonna paint it black but by the time we got there it was dark and all we could see were fireflies. Woke up to a four dog night at the foot of the Berkshires. Turned over and whispered into her hair. It felt good to be alive.
Read MoreWaitress to The Regular: Toasted bialy?
The Regular: y'know what, today instead of the bialy, give me steak and eggs. Eggs over hard.
Waitress: OK. How many eggs, 2?
Regular: How much is 2 eggs?
Waitress: $2.25
Regular: y'know what, forget all that. Just give me the toasted bialy.
A letter scribed by a friend of this blog:
FWD.
Dear Mr Gardino,
I'm sad to report that many of your "...highly educated, affluent, well-traveled... discriminating...
...intelligent, active and passionate...." listeners (as your web-page so kindly states) have come to seriously dread having to listen to the young woman that now races dizzyingly through 95% of your underwriter announcements as if they were small-print disclaimers at the end of a pharmaceutical commercial. In fact it's to the point that many of us now rush to mute the sound, change the station, or turn off the radio the moment we hear her voice -- not the intended response, presumably!? But that breathy, coquettish, little-girl voice of hers, delivered with such a bizarrely over-enunciated and gleefully hepped-up delirium somehow manages to combine the hollow and cloying exuberance of a TV commercial with the Stepford Wife creepiness of a computer generated entity like Amtrak's 'Julie', Yahoo's 'Jenni' or Sprint's short-lived
'Claire'. All no doubt designed to be pleasing and soothing, but actually quite the reverse for many of us, and very much at odds with the spirit of WNYC, to which we gratefully turn (or used to) for some blessed relief from all that crassly manipulative and increasingly
alienating commercialism out there.
I enclose a few sample blog comments so you know that I'm not alone in being driven to distraction by her oddly disturbing voice and persona, plus -- with a nod of thanks to the Gotham City Insider -- a couple of links to the threads where I found them :
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Julia said : I found this post when I googled WNYC underwriter announcer. I am so glad that I am not the only person who cannot stand the sound of this woman's voice. I have to turn the radio off during her announcements.
Ariodante38 said : I stumbled upon this site because I, too, had to believe that there were others driven up the wall by this underwriter announcer's affect...it has gotten to the point where I can't listen to WNYC because hearing her oddly cheerful, strangely mechanical iterations of underwriter blurbs every ten minutes has simply become too irritating.
Chris said : Did anyone ever find out who that dreadful Stepford woman is? There's just something about the way she clips her words while intoning the obligatory litany of underwriters every half hour. Not only is her delivery style wooden, plastic, devoid of meaning and
generally annoying, but there's a discernible character in her voice which suggests a certain sickening variety false modesty and cutesyness (at least to my ears). Barf. Listening to her delivery every morning is the price I choose pay to support my local NPR station. I'll switch back to supporting them the old-fashioned way as soon as she's gone.
http://www.gothamcityinsider.com/2007/12/foiled-again-nprs-tweed-wall-of-silence.html
http://www.gothamcityinsider.com/search?q=droid
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It would be unreasonable to insist that she be taken out of the rotation entirely, since some people -- including your good self, one assumes -- clearly like her . No, all we'd ask is that you mix-in some other voices as well, as you did to such happy effect a month or so ago, when she was presumably on vacation for a couple of weeks. In fact I'm prepared to bet that many of us enjoyed her vacation considerably more than she did!
Thank you for your kind attention,
Yours etc.....
Brooklyn District Office (718) 630-5277
Staten Island (718) 351-1062
DC Office (202) 225-3371
We need to pass the health care bill. Get it through and we can always fine tune it later. If this makes me a socialist or a neo-Bolshevist or whatever they call me on Fox News, then fine. No one should be without health insurance in this country. Personally, I am OK with paying more taxes so my fellow man can have the same benefits I do but I realize not everyone feels that way and that must be taken into consideration. However, I feel healthcare should be a right, not a privilege. We should all be "endowed with unalienable rights, among them are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness…” and medicine or a doctor visit if you just so happen to catch the flu during your pursuit of said happiness. Right now, prisoners are the only ones who are specifically granted the right to health care – which is just insanity. I think that if the Founding Fathers could have foreseen the importance of health insurance, they would have fought for the same standard of treatment to be extended to everyone. Pass it. Get it done. Get it through and we can fine tune it later.
Call Congressman McMahon and urge him to vote YES on the health care bill!
Been too busy to update here in a while. Sorry. Lots of stuff going on. Big things in the works. Could I even be more vague? Yes. I could have not said anything at all. That would have been pretty vague. Here's some hints: It doesn't involve me starring in a new reality show or me winning the lottery. Everything else is up in the air. Stay tuned...
Read MoreWhen I rubbed her belly she rumbled; and when I scratched her chest she purred. They say dogs can only sleep when and where they feel safe. I kissed her marbled head and she closed her eyes when I closed mine. I know because I peeked to check. She was smiling; asleep. She could somehow sense me watching her doze off and would open her eyes wide to catch me in the act. She'd lick my face with her awful but endearing breath after a few short scratches on her soft stomach as if to say, “Thanks for that but please continue" and I did. I could have lain there with her all day. She was silently inviting me into her nocturnal winter world of hibernation while master goes to work. Unfortunately, I couldn't stay but thought to myself, "Is there really anything more important than this small moment in time?". I had a conversation with a dog and spoke no words.
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