Facing Out: The Week’s Most Interesting News

December 7, 2024

Good morning, deer; another spectacular dawn in the Adirondacks, where many fields now rest under a blanket of snow. Nancie Battaglia

Dear Colleagues and Friends:

Is there some sort of end-of-year clearance on bad ideas that we hadn’t heard about? Because three headliners from this week — one very dangerous, one absurd, one appallingly obnoxious — have us wondering.

Hard to know what South Korean President Yoon Suk Yeol was thinking when he briefly declared martial law, which was promptly overridden by a unanimous vote of parliament, whose members scaled walls of the legislative building to evade troops and cast their votes. His removal from office seems on the horizon.

In the realm of the absurd, as if the ghost runner on second in extra innings isn’t enough of an affront, Major League Baseball Commissioner Rob Manfred floated the idea of a “golden at-bat,” giving a manager the chance once a game to send his best hitter to the plate, regardless of where the batting order stands. Credit Manfred for trying new ways to make the game appealing to younger fans, but come on, now.

And this week’s winner of Most Obnoxious Human on the planet is Justin Sun, the cryptocurrency clown entrepreneur who paid $6.2 million for a piece of “conceptual art” — a banana duct-taped to a wall — and then ate the banana at a news conference at a swank hotel in Hong Kong. A proud moment for the whole family.

MANHATTAN MANHUNT: New York City basks in a twinkling, golden glow most holiday seasons, replaced this year by black-and-white surveillance-camera images of a brazen assassination. Authorities were intensely searching for a gunman who shot and killed the CEO of the largest healthcare insurance company in the nation, UnitedHealthcare’s Brian Thompson, outside the Hilton Midtown hotel, where the executive was set to attend a conference for investors. The words “deny,” “defend” and “depose” cryptically appeared on shell casings recovered from the scene of the shooting, ABC News reported. The killing, The New York Times reported, “unleashed a torrent of morbid glee” online. “The insurance industry is not the most loved, to put it mildly,” the chair of the management division at Columbia Business School told the Times. “If you’re a C-suite executive of another insurance company, I would be thinking, What’s this mean for me? Am I next?”

THE RACES GO FOURTH: For the first time, there will be thoroughbred racing at historic Saratoga Race Course on the Fourth of July. The New York Racing Authority this week announced a new Fourth of July festival in addition to a five-day Belmont at Saratoga Racing Festival, June 4-8. For the second year, the Belmont Stakes will be run at Saratoga on June 7, while construction continues at the Belmont Race Course. The customary 40-day summer meet at Saratoga opens July 10 and continues through Labor Day.

COMING HOME: Jim Weinman’s thirst for thrills drove him to tackle challenges for only the most daring and fit — ascents of Mount Rainier, Mount Hood and Denali, high-altitude adventures the world over. The challenges were a balm for the debilitating depression that sometimes seized him, his brother and climbing partner, Bob Weinman, told the Albany (N.Y.) Times Union. Jim Weinman, who was raised in the Albany suburb of Clifton Park, disappeared in June 2000 as he attempted for the fourth time to scale Cerro San Francisco, a 14,000-foot peak in the Andes near Santiago, Chile. He was recovered after glacial ice melt.

LEGACY OF LOVE: Seuk Kim, the volunteer pilot who used his private plane to rescue pets and deliver them to no-kill shelters for adoption, was remembered this week as “a wonderful guy” by friends from across the country who are mourning his death in a crash in the Catskill Mountains near Albany, N.Y. He rescued hundreds of animals over four years and had three dogs with him when the plane crashed. Two survived. The ashes of the one who didn’t were given to Kim’s family for burial in their yard.

PET BREAKS: During the pandemic, millions of Americans adopted pets and a new focus on work-life balance. Some employers responded by adding discounted pet insurance and subsidized online vet calls to their benefit plans. Now, some members of the New York City Council think private-sector employers should be required to offer “pawternity leave” – paid time off for new pets or pet emergencies.

Fresh snowfall frames Buttermilk Falls in Schaghticoke, N.Y. John Bulmer

IT’S ALL PERSONAL: The future of independent weekly newspapers is not entirely clear, but in Vermont, it’s personal. At the publication Seven Days, launched in 1995 to cover Burlington’s arts scene, the personal ad section has become must reading for those seeking companionship and those with the more prosaic interest of understanding the community. While the personals sections of some weeklies smack of the racy, Seven Days’ personals are more farmers’ market poetry than meat market tabloid.

SAVING THE STORE: General stores are the Green Mountain State’s social glue, purveyors of the essential groceries, clothing and supplies to get through a Vermont winter and the best place to swap the latest local news. Singer-songwriter Noah Kahn gets that, and it’s why he’s trying to save Coburn’s general store in his hometown of Strafford. Melvin and Sue Coburn, well past retirement age, put the store up for sale two years ago but there have been no takers. Now, a small group of Strafford residents has established a nonprofit community trust and are raising the $1.8 million needed to buy Coburns’ and set aside funds for its repair and upkeep.

SILENT NIGHTS: Author Stephen King said this week he’s shutting down three Bangor, Maine, radio stations that he has owned and kept afloat for decades. “While radio across the country has been overtaken by giant corporate broadcasting groups, I’ve loved being a local, independent owner all these years,” King said in a statement. “I’ve loved the people who’ve gone to these stations every day and entertained folks, kept the equipment running, and given local advertisers a way to connect with their customers.”

EXTREME FOCUS: Single-minded focus under pressure. It’s what executives, political leaders, decision makers of all stripes seek. And athletes, too: Consider the focus required to drive a race car at 200 mph for two hours in skin-searing heat, with the prospect of disaster ever present. Formula 1 driver Oscar Piastri says staying fully engaged in the moment requires you to develop the habit of kicking out random thoughts and emotional reactions that render you more likely to make a mistake, and discipline your mind to effectively create and prepare you for what you are likely to encounter.  

TEEING UP A RENEWAL: Rich Schermerhorn, a Queensbury, N.Y., native who has built and manages about 3,000 rental units in the northern reaches of New York’s Capital Region — with another thousand in the pipeline — has purchased the decades-old Kingsbury National Golf Club in Hudson Falls, with plans to spend $7 million on upgrades and rebrand it Richwood National Golf Club — a combination of his first name and the last name of Mike Woodbury, who designed the course.

GOT FISH MILK? You got your almond milk, your soy milk, your goat milk and your oat milk. In Indonesia, the next big thing is fish milk. Twice a day in the coastal town of Indramayu, fishermen deliver their catch to a factory. There, the fish are deboned, broken down using a chemical process called hydrolysis, dried and reduced to a white protein-rich powder. At a separate facility, the powder is mixed with strawberry or chocolate flavoring, and sugar, and boxed for distribution as fish milk. 

TO THE RESCUE: New York State troopers rescued a woman who was stuck in snow while attempting to get to Cleveland for a heart transplant, transporting her first to a nearby fire station, then a local hospital, and finally to Jamestown Airport to complete her journey.

FOUND MONEY: New York Gov. Kathy Hochul this week signed a measure allowing the State Comptroller to automatically return unclaimed funds up to $250 to their rightful owners, among a spate of consumer-friendly bills that became law.

MISTAKEN IDENTITY: A Long Island retiree who stopped driving four years ago has been inundated with traffic tickets from around the country, evidently because the vanity license plate she surrendered — NCC-1701, the number of the Starship Enterprise — is also printed on novelty plates that sell on Amazon and are being used in lieu of legal plates.

100-YEAR-OLD DEFENDANT: Gregor Formanek, a former Nazi concentration camp guard who initially was found unfit to face charges of aiding and abetting 3,322 murders at Sachsenhausen concentration camp between July 1943 and February 1945, will stand trial after a judge in Frankfurt, Germany, reversed the previous finding.

NEVER TOO LATE: The world’s oldest known wild bird laid an egg this week, her first in four years. Wisdom, a Laysan albatross, is 74. Her longtime mate Akeakamai disappeared several years ago. Recently she’s taken up with a new mate. Paired birds typically reunite each year and share the duties of raising the kids.

LOU CARNESECCA led St. John’s University to more than 500 victories in his 24 seasons as men’s basketball coach, and was among the game’s most colorful figures in the 1980s heyday of the Big East. He was a two-time National Coach of the Year and three-time Big East Coach of the Year, matching wits with fellow legends like Jim Boeheim at Syracuse and John Thompson at Georgetown, who once pranked Carnesecca by wearing an identical, garish sweater to a game. “Little Looie,” as he was widely known, led St. John’s to a postseason berth every year of his tenure, which was interrupted by a three-year stint as coach of the New York Nets when they played in the ABA. A 1992 inductee to the Naismith Memorial Basketball Hall of Fame, he was 99.

“This action has called into question whether she can separate her personal biases from the proper application of the law, failing the essential test that all judges are required to pass when they put on the robe. I believe it is just and appropriate for Judge Pitts Davis to step down so all the people of our community can be assured they receive equal treatment under the law. If she does not, the Office of Court Administration should promptly suspend her from the bench.”
— Syracuse City Auditor Alexander Marion, calling for the ouster of City Court Judge Felicia Pitts Davis for refusing to marry a same-sex couple.

THE DATE which will live in infamy occurred 83 years ago today. Fewer than 1% of the total number of Americans who served in World War II are alive today. If you know any, take a moment to thank them for defending hard-won freedoms on this Pearl Harbor Day.

Some of the linked material in Facing Out requires a subscription to read.

Principal Authors: Bill Callen and Mark Behan.

Contributors: Ryan Moore, John Brodt, Kristy Miller, Claire P. Tuttle, Nancie Battaglia and John Bulmer.

FACING OUT is what we do. We help companies, organizations and individuals work effectively with their most important external audiences – their customers, their shareholders, their communities, the government and the news media.  www.behancommunications.com

Facing Out features news and other nuggets that caught our eye, and that we thought might be of value to you, our friends and business associates. Some items are good news about our clients and friends, others are stories that we hope will leave you a bit more informed or entertained than you were five minutes ago. As always, we welcome your ideas and feedback. 

Let’s make it a conversation: mark.behan@behancom.com