A Goodbye to Shea Stadium From the Cockpit - NYTimes.com

“You are so low and close you can see it and almost smell it,” said Glen Millen, who estimates that he has flown into and out of La Guardia 1,800 times since he began flying for American Airlines in 1986.

La Guardia is one of the few airports in the country where pilots use land markers instead of instruments to guide their landings, along with Seattle (a shopping mall) and Washington (a river). Shea Stadium, which from the sky looks like a blue circle with a green center, is a primary runway guidepost. For one of the more common landing routes, pilots are instructed to follow the Long Island Expressway until they arrive at the eastern side of the stadium, at which point they bank the plane left around the outfield wall and head straight for Runway 31.

Among pilots and air-traffic controllers, it is known as the “expressway visual approach.”

[snip]

Until the 1980s, when radios that were used in cockpits to pick up transmitters began to be phased out, some pilots would tune them to the local broadcasts of the Mets’ games during landing and take-off.

“You would dial in and you could hear your plane fly over,” said Sam Mayer, a pilot with American Airlines since 1990. “There were guys who would goose the throttles to make a louder noise so they could hear themselves on the radio.”

I never knew that Shea was a landmark for aviation. How unusual.

I’m glad was able to go to Shea one last time earlier this summer before it is demolished.

To the right, you can see Citi Field being constructed. While the brick work is nice (reminds me of Camden), it’s not as iconic as the blue-ness of Shea.

I’ve never been to the old Yankee stadium, and apparently I never will!

When I saw this photos yesterday on a blog, I thought it was a mashup of Internet memes. Apparently, it’s a real photo!

A demonstrator holds up a sign behind US Treasury Secretary Henry Paulson (left) and Federal Reserve Board Chairman Ben Bernanke during Senate a hearing at Capitol Hill in Washington, DC. Bernanke has said the US economic outlook may be “quite adverse” without a stabilization soon in troubled financial markets.

What? No Fail Whale?

It looks like I need to take a vacation in Early-Mid January. “need” is due to the fact that my vacation day cup runneth over, and that school is out during this time.

I’m open to recommendations. Ideally it would be a place that has service via American Airlines so I can use my increasingly devaluing miles. I’ve ruled out London (though I love that place) due to British pound depresses me, and that it gets 1.75 hours of sunlight.

Thoughts?

Linked from Guy Kawasaki’s twitter feed. The page has full descriptions of the points below. An interesting read. It presents a compelling case for all those “Powered by…” branding that you see.

Kiss of Death – Contract Provisions Entrepreneurs Should Avoid at All Costs | infoChachkie
Kiss of Death Provisions

The allure to of a company-changing deal with a BDC is strong. Big companies make a number of seductive promises, including access to large markets, significant financial resources and vital public validation of your solution see Pulp Facts. However, fight the urge to close such enticing deals on the BDC’s terms. Stand your ground and negotiate a fair agreement, even if it takes longer and forces you to expend more energy than you would prefer.

To this end, never agree to any of the following Kiss of Death Provisions when negotiating with a BDC, no matter how lucrative the potential relationship:

Allow the Other Side to Draft the Agreement
Deploy a Free Pilot
Cut a Multi-year Agreement
Lock Down the Escape Hatches
Give up Branding
Relinquish Press Release Capabilities
Approve Unilateral Provisions
Accept Unlimited Liability
Forgo Change of Control or Agree to a ROFO or ROFR
Serve up World-wide Distribution
Relinquish Joint Intellectual Property Rights
Execute an Ambiguous Statement of Work
Agree to Bundling Without a Minimum Price
Grant Most Favored Nations Status
Issue Unmitigated Exclusivity

Could Wall Street Woes Set Off A Crisis? : NPR
“The Fed and the Treasury are very, very worried about the stability of the economy,” Greenberger says. “They’re worried about what this means to Main Street, about what it means to you and me. … In the absence of this rather dramatic move I think they believe that we would enter something much deeper, possibly, than a recession.”

This is a great interview that helps explain how AIG got into trouble, what the consequences of not bailing out Lehman was, why regulation of CDSes is banned by law, what CDSes are, and why things are only going to get worse.

Check it out - well worth your 38 minutes. Note that the link to interview is right below the headline of the page. Midway on the page there is another link, but that goes to an interview from 4/3 - also a great interview and on the same topic.

Great stuff!

I don’t envy the position our state lawmakers are in. Passing a budget that requires a 2/3rds majority, in a state where no seats are ever up grabs because of district funkiness, and where Democrats refuse to cut spending and Republicans refuse to pass new taxes? Instant recipe for a stalemate.

They say that California leads in innovation, and I must say I find this budget gap fixing instrument to be pretty innovative:

SignOnSanDiego.com > News > State — Compromise budget skips long-term solutions
Paychecks for Californians could shrink with a 10 percent increase in withholding for state income taxes, yielding $1.6 billion. The total amount of tax paid would not increase, and any over-collection would be refunded.

That’s right even though the top state income tax bracket is 9.3%, this budget which the Democratic-majority, Republican-controlled State Assembly  (it makes sense, really) passed indicates that we will now have to withhold 10%. The extra will be refunded the next year.

Wow.

Really, you can’t tell me that another state has thought of doing this before. This has got to be precedent setting. And this is just one of the many techniques to fix the $17 billion deficit gap.

And while our budget is now 78 days over due, I’d have to agree with Schwarzenegger in vetoing this budget.

State Treasurer Bill Lockyer, a Democrat, also assailed the budget plan, saying this morning that it “gives gimmicks a bad name.”

“It’s banana republic financing,” Lockyer said. The spending plan relies on “phony money and phony estimates.”

Update at 7 p.m. ET: “When they send me the budget, I will veto it,” Schwarzenegger said at a Capitol news conference, the Los Angeles Times reports. “If my veto is overriden,” he said, ” … hundreds of bills will be vetoed.”

Oh boy.

What a peculiar coincidence that these two events happened on the same day:

New Research Raises Concerns About BPA Levels in Humans - WSJ.com
A chemical commonly used in plastic food and drink containers was associated with cardiovascular disease and diabetes, according to the first large-scale study in humans, released Tuesday.

The chemical, bisphenol-A or BPA, is used to make plastic hard and appears in products such as baby bottles, CDs and sunglasses. It is also used in resins that coat the inside of bottle tops and metal cans.

The study’s release, which will appear in this week’s Journal of the American Medical Association, coincides with a Food and Drug Administration panel meeting Tuesday on the subject.

The FDA, in a draft assessment of BPA, has concluded BPA is safe at current levels found in food and beverage containers. The FDA’s assessment relied primarily on industry data, and critics have charged the agency with ignoring other data, including a report released earlier this month by a unit of the National Institutes of Health, that raised safety questions.

The report by the National Toxicology Program said BPA was of “some concern for effects on the brain, behavior, and prostate gland in fetuses, infants, and children at current human exposures.” Frank Torti, FDA’s chief scientist, has said the agency would consider the NIH report before making any decisions on BPA.

The FDA will ask a panel of outside medical experts to review its draft assessment and comment on whether it is scientifically sound. The bulk of BPA studies have been conducted in animals, and many have raised safety concerns.

Meanwhile in a country far far away…

Canada likely to label plastic ingredient BPA ‘toxic’
By Ian Austen
Published: April 16, 2008

OTTAWA: The Canadian government is said to be ready to declare as toxic a chemical widely used in plastics for baby bottles, beverage and food containers as well as linings in food cans.

Sometimes things just leave me speechless.

Obituaries for Lehman Brothers have started rolling out. Here’s one:

Bloomberg.com: Special Report

Fuld’s Subprime Bets Fueled Lehman Profits, Undermined Survival
By Peter Robison and Yalman Onaran

Sept. 15 (Bloomberg) — Richard Fuld, a one-time international squash player accustomed to playing the angles, finally found one he couldn’t master.

The longest-serving chief executive officer on Wall Street battled for more than a year to contain the fallout from Lehman Brothers Holdings Inc.’s bad bets on real estate. His defense of the 158-year-old firm ended yesterday when Barclays Plc and Bank of America Corp. walked away from buyout talks, leaving a bankruptcy filing as his only option.

Over 14 years, Fuld, 62, turned a money-losing bond trading shop into a full-service investment bank. He won acclaim from Wall Street leaders such as Lazard Ltd. chief Bruce Wasserstein, who on June 4 called him “very able.” Fuld joined the circle of CEOs sought-after by boards, such as the New York Federal Reserve’s. Fuld ultimately gambled almost four times the firm’s shareholder equity last year on mortgage securities that he insisted were hedged by other bets.

“It makes me rather sad to see this organization brought to its knees as the result of what I’ll call a lack of control, poor management of internal risk and ultimate self-interest,” said Walter Gerasimowicz, who worked at Lehman as an investment strategist and now heads Meditron Asset Management in New York. His firm manages $1 billion and doesn’t own any Lehman shares.

The apparent upcoming death of LEH also saddens me. LEH holds a special place in my memory for being the only investment bank to give me a non-tech job interview in 1999. I still remember the grilling they gave me in a series of hotel rooms (the kinds with beds, not conference) at the Marriott World Trade Center. I didn’t think that in my lifetime, I’d have read the obits for both.