Before This Afternoon's Rain . . .

...there were great clouds over Manhattan at lunchtime.

Click the image to embiggen this iPhone panorama.

Maybe it's a post-Sandy feeling, but I sometimes think that Manhattan Island looks so thin and vulnerable between the Hudson River and a cloudy sky.

Build "The Pete Seeger Bridge" Between Rockland and Westchester Counties

The unnamed "New NY Bridge" that will be replacing the Tappan Zee Bridge between Rockland and Westchester Counties needs to be named after Pete Seeger, the man who has done more than any other to transform the Hudson River from an "industrial river" in the 1960s suited only as a dumping ground for sewage and GE's PCBs to the thriving and living waterway it is (or is becoming) today.

Here's a video of Pete and friends on the deck of the Sloop Clearwater in 2010 singing "Sailin' Up, Sailin' Down".

"...the river may be dirty now, but she's getting cleaner every day..."

Today, on the day we learned of Pete Seeger's death at the age of 94, the Town of Greenburgh Supervisor Paul Feiner suggested naming the new bridge being built over a section of river the Clearwater knew well in honor of Pete.  He said he would be sending this recommendation to Governor Cuomo and state legislators.  I'm going to be doing the same (and have already started on Twitter). Please consider joining in this cause. 

Naming anything to honor this great man would be the exact opposite of the current trend of naming everything in honor of the highest corporate bidders.

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UPDATE:
I've just been told there's already a petition started on Change.org: Please Sign It!

September 11, 2012: Closing A Circle?

New albums are generally released on Tuesdays, so maybe it's not that significant or coincidental that Bob Dylan's "Love and Theft" was released on Tuesday, September 11, 2001 and his "Tempest" was released today, Tuesday, September 11, 2012.  

World Trade Center from Jersey City, September 11, 2012

It seems significant to me though, because on the morning of September 11, 2001, I was looking forward to walking around the corner to the Sam Goody store on the corner of 42nd Street and 2nd Avenue at lunchtime to buy "Love and Theft".  At noon we were still being told to stay in our building and by late afternoon when I left the office, the album was not on my mind, and all the stores were closed. I can't remember when I finally picked it up. It couldn't have been more than a week or two later, but the excitement about a great recording will be forever overshadowed by events.

Today I hit my local record store as soon as it opened at 11 and picked up "Tempest" (this isn't a review, but I'm loving what I've listened to so far) and for the first time since 2001, there is a visible highlight to the lower Manhattan skyline. I don't believe that "closure" is even a proper word, and that's not what I'm talking about here, but it feels to me, personally, as if we're beginning to close a circle.

Forward, a photographic update on World Trade Center construction

Tomorrow is September 11, the 11th anniversary  of a day we won't soon forget.
 
Here's a phone picture taken of the lower Manhattan skyline this afternoon, the latest in an intermittent photographic series here on TrueBlueLiberal.org tracking the progress of construction on the new World Trade Center:

World Trade Center construction update (with bonus MZ-3A airship)

Here's a picture of the new World Trade Center site taken from my phone a little before 1 this afternoon.  The airship above it was -- amazingly -- not covered with advertisements, so I took a closer look.

It seems that there is only one manned US Navy airship, so it was the MZ-3A that flew up over the Hudson River this afternoon.

Language Matters: "Die Wolkenkratzern von New York"

On very rare occasions, le mot juste just happens to be in German.
On days like today when the sky is low over New York, I always think that the best word for the city's tallest buildings is not "skyscraper", but "Wolkenkratzer." The German word translates literally as "cloud scratcher."

Keeping with yesterday's space theme . . .

I didn't have a real camera at work today, but here are a couple of phone pictures of the Space Shuttle Enterprise making its final journey up the Hudson River earlier this morning as it passed the new World Trade Center and the Empire State Building.

Progress Report

Here's your photographic update on the status of the construction of the new World Trade Center.

The new World Trade Center's cool and tall and all, but it doesn't hold a candle to this seagull.

I'm just saying.