Facing Out: The Week’s Most Interesting News

July 20, 2024

A statue of Harriet Tubman, titled “The Beacon of Hope,” is on display through this summer at the John Brown Farm State Historic Site in Lake Placid, N.Y., where visitors are encouraged to hold hands with the great abolitionist and conductor of The Underground Railroad. Nancie Battaglia

Dear Colleagues and Friends:

In the wake of the awful and nearly successful assassination attempt last weekend that horrified the nation and tragically took the life of a Pennsylvania firefighter who shielded his family from the bullets, politicians across the spectrum have urged a cooling of the rhetoric. Some are calling for broader reflection as to what may be fueling a nation on edge.

“Sure, we see division and scorching rhetoric most often in our politics, but the embrace of misinformation to conform to one’s biases, the desire to destroy the reputations of people, places and things and the impulse to settle disagreements with violence affect every aspect of modern society,” writes Pete Seat, a White House spokesman during the George W. Bush administration. “And if we allow ourselves to absolve our sins in those other realms of life by putting the onus exclusively on politics, there is no way we will find a cure. … The inability to accept that there could be a point of view other than our own point of view, coupled with a devaluing of life and the human experience, has brought us to a true inflection point. … We have sucked the joy out of life, preferring to find what we dislike about someone or something rather than what we like and admire.”

You don’t have to look hard to find illustrations of the problem. This week alone in New York State, a hothead who was causing trouble at a recreational softball tournament was killed with his own gun after pulling it on someone, and, incredibly, a Brooklyn City Councilwoman was arrested and charged with a felony for allegedly biting an NYPD police chief during a protest against the construction of a homeless shelter.

Perhaps the paraphrased words of St. Francis of Assisi and Mahatma Gandhi apply: Seek not to be understood but to understand. And be the change.

NO HARD FEELINGS: Rocker Sammy Hagar is returning to the Saratoga Performing Arts Center for a concert on Monday, and he used an interview with the Albany Times Union to invite the state trooper who inspired one of Hagar’s best-known songs to be his guest and “be treated like a king.” Hagar was with his family in 1983, driving a rental car to his cabin in the Adirondacks when a trooper ticketed him for driving in excess of what was then a federally mandated 55 mph speed limit. The encounter inspired the smash hit “I Can’t Drive 55.”  He told the Times Union the song was largely written by the time he reached his destination, with his then-wife jotting the lyrics. “It was just like automatic writing,” he said. “It was just coming out of me.”

HEART LIGHT: Researchers in England have created an “atlas of the human heart,” a detailed map of the heart that captures its anatomical structure down to the width of a human hair. The U.S. Sun reports that experts hope the technology will be “invaluable” in helping them better understand cardiovascular disease and “accelerate” medicine in the field. “The atlas that we’ve created in this study is like having Google Earth for the human heart,” the study’s lead author said. “It allows us to view the whole organ at global scale, then zoom in to street level to look at cardiovascular features in unprecedented detail. Being able to image whole organs like this reveals details and connections that were previously unknown.”

HIGH ON UPSTATE: Upstate New York resorts are getting appreciative attention this summer in Travel + Leisure’s 2024 Five Favorite Resorts in New York — and from travelers themselves, giving the region a significant boost in tourism spending. “The Big Apple may get all the glory, but New York has plenty of other corners well worth exploring — and this year, Travel + Leisure readers are all about venturing upstate. In addition to backcountry hiking trails, stellar vineyards, and glassy mountain lakes, there are resorts that brim with both old-world grandeur and modern luxury.” Among the choices: The Sagamore Resort in Bolton Landing and the Mirror Lake Inn in Lake Placid. Sports are a major driver of tourism in the state.

The not-for-profit Lake George Association, the oldest lake protection organization in the country, drew a sold-out crowd of nearly 400 to its annual gala at the beautiful Sagamore Resort on July 12. Board Chair Dr. John E. Kelly III, retired executive vice president of IBM, inspired the gathering with examples of the LGA’s science-based commitment to lake protection. Photo: Holly Clark

A STATE THAT LISTENS: The Adirondack Explorer is reporting on something that must seem miraculous to some residents of New York State — a state agency that listened to the concerns of the people it serves, the taxpayers, and halted a plan to treat a drinking water source with a chemical herbicide. Imagine that.

CHECK, PLEASE: The New York Times’ trusted restaurant critic Pete Wells — who made it a practice to eat three times in the same restaurant before reviewing it and founded The Times’ “100 Best Restaurants in New York City” — is pushing back from the unhealthiest job in journalism after 12 years. “My scores were bad across the board; my cholesterol, blood sugar and hypertension were worse than I’d expected even in my doomiest moments,” he writes in announcing his departure. “The terms pre-diabetes, fatty liver disease and metabolic syndrome were thrown around. I was technically obese.”

STORM CLEANUP: Uncle. Upstate New York is again dealing with the aftermath of powerful, deadly summer storms — including five tornadoes — that caused widespread damage, especially in the Mohawk Valley. A delivery driver told Syracuse.com that he had pulled off the road to wait out the storm when winds lifted his pickup truck and deposited it “four parking spots away from where I parked.” Gov. Kathy Hochul declared a state of emergency and utility crews were working nonstop to restore power that was out for days.

Athletes from around the world are in Lake Placid, N.Y., this weekend for the 25^th Ironman Lake Placid, a grinding test of both determination and fitness. Nancie Battaglia

THESE OLD BONES: A fossil estimated to be 233 million years old was discovered near a reservoir in southern Brazil. The Associated Press reported the paleontologist leading the team that made the discovery speculated the dinosaur lived during the Triassic period, when all continents were part of a single land mass called Pangaea. Researchers will now try to determine whether the fossil belongs to an already-known species or a new kind. Maybe billionaire Ken Griffin will drop tens of millions more to add it to his collection.

HYDRANGEA NATION: Hydrangeas are having a heck of a good summer. The semi-official flower of Cape Cod is thriving from New England to the Mid-Atlantic. Hydrangeas require a lot of water, and last year was one of the 10 wettest years on record for many states in the Northeast. A warm winter with El Niño conditions also helped because it caused very little damage to the dormant buds, leading to an explosion of blossoms now.

RULES? PFFFT: Whoopi Goldberg said she knew there was a rule against the scattering of human remains on Disney properties, but her mother loved Disneyland so she did it anyway, thereby reinforcing every stereotype of the entitled elite. “No one should do this,” she told late night host Seth Meyers. “There’s a reason they don’t want ashes just floating around.” You don’t say?

BASEBALL’S GREATS: Was that Johnny Bench at the Albany International Airport? It was. And if you’re lucky, you may catch a glimpse this weekend of Derek Jeter, Mariano Rivera, Pedro Martinez, David Ortiz, Ken Griffey Jr. and Cal Ripken. Some of baseball’s greatest names are in Upstate New York for induction weekend at the Baseball Hall of Fame in Cooperstown. 

RECORD BREAKER: Cavan Sullivan this week became the youngest player ever to play in a match at the top level of Major League Soccer, taking the field for the Philadelphia Union at 14 years, 293 days old in a 5-1 win over New England. The previous record holder, Freddy Adu, was 13 days older when he debuted for D.C. United in 2004.

GIMME MY GATOR: An Upstate New York resident is suing the state Department of Environmental Conservation for the return of an alligator that had been his pet for more than 30 years. The plight of Albert the alligator has led to an outpouring of support for his owner, Tony Cavallaro, who told The Associated Press the situation is “overwhelming me. ... It’s ruined my whole year, destroyed it.”

FOUND AT SEA: A New York City man who was swept out to sea by a strong riptide off Breezy Point in Queens was rescued by a commercial fisherman about two miles off the New Jersey shore after hours of treading water.

RACE AGAINST TIME: The Hudson-Athens Lighthouse on the Hudson River, a landmark erected in 1874, is in danger of collapsing into the river, showing signs of stress from deteriorating pilings. A $10 million fundraising effort to shore up the lighthouse is under way.

MAKING CONTACT: Logging activity in the Peruvian Amazon is stirring members of the Mashco Piro tribe, believed to be the world’s largest Indigenous community living without outside contact. An advocate expressed concern that the logging workers could bring new diseases into the area, devastating the Mashco Piro, and that violent clashes could break out between loggers and the Indigenous community.

AMERICAN POP CULTURE lost iconic figures in the last several days. George Robert Newhart was a bored Chicago accountant when he and coworker Ed Gallagher began calling each other on the phone with improvised comic dialogues. They tried selling the routines to local radio stations, but their client base was small and Mr. Gallagher took a job in New York. Mr. Newhart kept writing solo routines, and soon he was the stammering Everyman character not unlike himself who found huge success on television. He was 94. Before Richard Simmons came along, televised fitness was the domain of the beautiful people, men and women who appeared to have been chiseled from granite. Simmons, with his loose tank tops, short shorts and boundless enthusiasm, showed the masses that fitness was for them, too, and they rewarded him, buying more than 60 million copies of his workout videos, mostly on VHS tape. Dr. Ruth Westheimer brought taboo talk into the open, hosting a wildly popular show in which she answered people’s questions about sex. “They were true eccentrics,” Gal Beckerman wrote in The Atlantic of Dr. Ruth and Mr. Simmons. “How else to describe a 4-foot-7 grandmother with a thick German accent doling out explicit sex advice with an impish giggle or an exuberant man in short shorts with a halo of curls who talked with his hands and implored everyone to sweat to the oldies?” Shannen Doherty was a child star whose later characters, in the words of the BBC, “usually seemed to inhabit a glossier, more beautiful world.” She soared to fame in 1990 as Brenda Walsh in the original Beverly Hills, 90210, and later starred in Charmed and North Shore, in addition to various movie roles. She died of cancer at 53.

LOU DOBBS’ first job after college was in federal government anti-poverty programs. He concluded they weren’t working, so he tried banking and later got into the news business. He came to CNN when the network was launched in 1980, anchoring an evening business program called “Moneyline” just as the dot-com bubble was growing and the Nasdaq was surging. Media critic Ken Auletta said Dobbs’ show “served as a sort of video clubhouse for corporate America.” He won an Emmy for Lifetime Achievement in 2005 and a Peabody Award for his coverage of the 1987 stock-market crash. But his political statements made CNN uncomfortable, and soon he found a more comfortable place at Fox Business News. The New York Times called Dobbs “the country’s foremost populist … a voice for the real economic anxiety felt by many Americans.” He was 78.

“It scared the hell out of our guys, I know that.”
—  Joe Coffey, commissioner of the City of Albany (N.Y.) Water Department, after workers encountered a nearly 13-foot snake while preparing to fix a water main.

CHRISTMAS IN JULY: The National Weather Service reported trace amounts of snowfall last week at Philadelphia International Airport, where the daytime high topped 90 degrees. Say what?

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AUTHORS AND CONTRIBUTORS: Bill Callen, Mark Behan, Ryan Moore, Leigh Hornbeck, Troy Burns, John Brodt, Kristy Miller, Tara Hutchins, Claire P. Tuttle, Holly Clark and Nancie Battaglia.

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