The Week: What Caught Our Eye
June 3, 2023
If peace is what your soul is craving, it’s hard to beat the solitude of lily pads in a pond, in this case Mill Pond in Grafton, N.Y. John Bulmer
Dear Colleagues and Friends:
What is the deal with Antonio Brown?
If you follow local sports in New York’s Capital Region, you may know it is somewhat of a hotspot for arena football. Loyal fans pay good money to watch the fast-paced action and have a good time. No one expects that they’re watching NFL prospects, and that’s not the point. It was honest entertainment for an honest dollar.
But since Antonio Brown, the flamboyant former NFL wideout, took ownership of the Albany Empire, it’s been one clown show headline after another — coaches and/or players quitting, being fired or both on a weekly basis; players not getting paid; minority owners being treated like dirt. Last week, Brown pumped up ticket sales by teasing that he would play, then didn’t. His latest stunt is a tweet that he would pay former NFL MVP Cam Newton $150,000 to play one game for the Empire, and encouraged his Twitter followers to help with the recruiting. It’s said all great empires die from within. Careful, AB; we wouldn’t want anyone thinking your Empire is crumbling.
A TRADITION RETURNS: Now for an Albany sports tradition that hasn’t been rendered a joke: The 45th Freihofer’s Run for Women is happening this morning downtown, a race in which hundreds of ordinary runners share a 3.1-mile course with elite road racers who are competing for a share of $24,000 in prize money. It has long been considered one of the nation’s top all-women road races, and it comes complete with a two-day Health and Fitness Expo. “Running should be a celebration of healthy living,” columnist Joyce Bassett writes in the Albany Times Union. “And there’s no better place to party than at the Freihofer’s Run for Women.”
PLANE OBNOXIOUS: It’s one of those stories that makes you say wait ... what?!? The owner of the Revolution Café in Schuylerville, N.Y., said she and her family have been awakened several times a week at 7 a.m. by a Cessna buzzing their house, behavior that has been happening for years. You read that right — years. It all allegedly started when she ignored the deranged pilot’s overtures. He’s even alleged to have dropped tomatoes on her house. Police say it’s an FAA matter because police don’t patrol the airspace. The FAA says it can’t find any evidence that the pilot is violating federal regulations. The town’s mayor, Dan Carpenter, faulted the justice system, telling the Albany Times Union, “We see this as harassment of the whole community.” When Saratoga County Sheriff’s Deputies learned the pilot took his plane up Thursday morning, they headed for the airport. They were there to arrest him when he landed.
THE GRADUATES: Late spring is graduation season, and thanks to the fact that everyone today is a worldwide publisher, we were treated to moments that made us laugh, cry or join in the celebration. Service dogs were a hit at Seton Hall University and at a middle school in Texas, having been faithful companions and helpers to their handlers. A kindergartner danced her way into the hearts of Today show viewers. In Lake Placid, N.Y., a Ukrainian boy named Yehor is graduating from the private North Country School a little more than a year after his older brother wrote letters to schools in the U.S., hoping to get Yehor out of harm’s way. And the president of Yehor’s home country, Volodymyr Zelenskyy, surprised graduates of Johns Hopkins University with a livestreamed speech. The Washington Post has a video roundup of some of the more inspiring and heartwarming moments of graduation season.
TO LIFT A REGION: RPI in Troy, N.Y., was founded in 1824. It was the first institution to grant an engineering degree in the United States, in 1835. It is the oldest continuously operating technological university in both the English-speaking world and the Americas. Its new president, Martin Schmidt, is both an academic leader and entrepreneur (he spent 40 years at MIT and started seven companies). He believes RPI’s future – and the region’s — is tied to fostering more high-tech manufacturing in the Capital Region. What Boston is to biotech research, for example, the Capital Region could be to expanded biotech manufacturing.
SMOKE SIGNALS: Canada, which aims to drop nationwide tobacco use to less than 5% of the population by 2035, is the first country to require the printing of health warnings on individual cigarettes, an aim to make it impossible for smokers to miss them. The warnings, in English and French, are phrases such as “Tobacco Smoke Harms Children,” “Poison in Every Puff” and, a warning that’s sure to get attention, “Cigarettes Cause Impotence.” The new warnings will be phased in, starting in 2024.
SELFIE LOVE: Garbiñe Muguruza used to be the top-ranked woman in professional tennis and won the French Open in 2016 and Wimbledon in 2017, so it’s no surprise that someone would recognize her on a New York City street and ask for a picture. “I was left thinking, ‘Wow, he’s so handsome,’ ” Muguruza, who’s taking a break from pro tennis, told the British tabloid The Sun. That was in 2021. Muguruza and the handsome stranger, model Arthur Borges, announced this week that they are engaged.
SAD SWAN SONG: Perhaps the strangest story of the week: In Manlius, N.Y., outside Syracuse, swans have been a source community pride and celebration for 100 years. The swans are not native to New York, but a couple, Faye and Manny, and their baby swans (called cygnets), have been so beloved their image appears on the town logo and on banners around the community. Over the weekend, Faye and her four baby swans disappeared from the community pond where they lived. Three teenagers have now been charged with snatching them. The cygnets were found safe. Apparently, the teenagers took Faye home where a grandmother cooked her. Manny was left behind, in mourning.
GOOD DEEDS: As an usher at the University of Dayton Arena, Richard Keehn has seen a lot of fans come and go over the years, but a group of seven high school girls made such an impression on him that he just had to do something. The girls, fans of a team that had just lost in a state championship game, left their seats to pick up the trash left behind by the other fans. “I tell you what, all you hear about in the news anymore is the bad stuff kids do, but these students were just the opposite,” the 71-year-old told the Dayton Daily News. He asked the girls if he could take their picture, then sent it, along with a type-written letter of praise, to their school, signing it “Just an Usher.” He then got seven Dayton Flyers T-shirts and delivered them to the girls at their school in a small town 90 minutes away. “We didn’t expect to get recognized,” one of the students said, “it’s just something everybody should do.”
CALL YOUR FRIENDS: Harvard started a global study in 1938 with an ambitious, log-term goal: to track participants throughout their lives and try to find out what made them happy. The research team said its most consistent finding is that positive relationships, more than any other factor, keep people happier, healthier and living longer.
Forte, with trainer Mike Repole at Churchill Downs, was the pre-race favorite for the Kentucky Derby before being scratched because of a minor injury. He’s back in training now and is expected to compete in next week’s Belmont Stakes. Skip Dickstein
WORLD OF INNOVATION: Some good news from the medical field this week. Researchers in Switzerland reported that a man whose legs were paralyzed in an accident 12 years ago is able to stand up, climb stairs and perform other functions using spinal and brain implants that connect to external devices and translate his thoughts into movement. In the UK, scientists studying one of two people in the world who is known to carry a unique gene that enables her to live without anxiety, fear, or physical discomfort, had what one called “a eureka moment,” discovering the genetic root of the subject’s phenotype. “By understanding precisely what is happening at a molecular level, we can start to understand the biology involved and that opens up possibilities for drug discovery that could one day have far-reaching positive impacts for patients,” Professor James Cox from the University College London Medical School, the study’s senior author, said. Of course, all this could be made moot if we don’t get our arms around artificial intelligence before it kills us, which scientists and tech industry leaders warned could be the case, issuing a statement that said, “Mitigating the risk of extinction from AI should be a global priority alongside other societal-scale risks such as pandemics and nuclear war.” Even if we do succeed in taming AI, another new study suggests Earth is in terrible shape ecologically and getting worse.
AUTHENTIC REBUILD: Carpenters in Paris are rebuilding the roof of the fire-ravaged Notre Dame Cathedral using the same tools and techniques as the tradesmen who built the original more than 800 years ago. “We want to restore this cathedral as it was built in the Middle Ages,” Jean-Louis Georgelin, the retired French army general who is overseeing the reconstruction, told The Associated Press. “It is a way to be faithful to the (handiwork) of all the people who built all the extraordinary monuments in France.” Computers drew detailed plans for the carpenters, to help ensure that their hand-chiseled beams fit together perfectly.
WHALING AWAY: Authorities in Portugal and Spain are dealing with a fairly recent phenomenon — pods of killer whales ramming pleasure boats off the Iberia Peninsula. The Atlantic Orca Working Group, a team of Spanish and Portuguese marine life researchers, started tracking the incidents in 2020, when 52 such events were reported, some resulting in damaged rudders. The number jumped to 197 in 2021 and 207 in 2022. This week, a pod repeatedly rammed a yacht in the Strait of Gibraltar, damaging it enough to require Spanish rescuers to come to the aid of its four crew members. Researchers aren’t sure what’s causing the behavior, but that it does not appear the orcas are hunting. One theory is that they’re just a bunch of young whales having a good time; another is that one of the pod members had a traumatic event involving a boat.
CONCIERGE SERVICE: Companies these days have a ton of data about consumer habits, which is why the most successful are so good at knowing what people want and having enough of whatever it is to go around. With predictive analytics, they’re now able to develop a sense of an individual’s routines beyond consumption, enabling them to anticipate what someone might want or need at a particular time. That may help companies carefully tailor both marketing and service for their most valuable customers, according to the authors of a study that analyzed the patterns of 2,000 rideshare customers in New York City and created what they called a “routineness score.”
ALMOST FINAL WORDS
“You can say gravity isn’t true, but if you step off the cliff, you’re going down. And if you teach other people that gravity is not true, you are morally responsible for anything that happens to them if they make decisions based on the information you provided.”
— Katharine Hayhoe, an atmospheric scientist who teaches at Texas Tech University, on an Ohio bill that, if passed, would prohibit faculty at public colleges and universities in the state from teaching that global warming is an indisputable fact.
THE SIGNOFF
DOH-MAIN NAME: Maryland in 2012 redesigned its standard license plates to commemorate the 200th anniversary of the War of 1812, complete with a website people could visit to learn more about Marylander Francis Scott Key and what inspired him to write “The Star Spangled Banner.” But someone neglected to renew the domain name, so now almost 800,000 vehicles in Maryland are advertising a Filipino online casino.
—
Some of the linked material in Facing Out requires a subscription to read.
Principal Author: Bill Callen.
Sincere Thanks to Contributors: Ryan Moore, John Brodt, Lisa Fenwick, Leigh Hornbeck, Troy Burns, Tara Hutchins, Claire P. Tuttle, Mark McGuire, John Bulmer, and Skip Dickstein.
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
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