Stacy Horn

I got this mailing where I could sign a postcard supporting the ban of extra large soda and then send it back, postage paid. Instead, I wrote “I support this ban and your effort would be better spent toward changing the laws against medicinal marijuana.” I put that in the mail.

I’m sure the mailing was paid for by a soda company, or a company selling soda, and so my note would be ignored, but it felt good saying what I said.

One World Trade Center from a Hudson River point-of-view.

The picture below was from a section of the police department’s 1887 annual report called “Miscellaneous Statistics.” When I was copying all the police department annual reports going back to 1860 (for my book about the NYPD’s Cold Case Squad, The Restless Sleep) my goal was to learn everything I could about murder in NYC for the past 100 years or so. Of course I learned a lot more about crime in NYC over the years.

That reminds me, I read somewhere that Tom Fontana is working on a tv series about the 19th century NYPD. This is such a great idea I can’t believe it hasn’t been done already. The stories I came across … it could be that there has never been an organized crime group as effective and as scary as the early NYPD. It was insane.

Update: Just saw a commercial for it! It’s a BBC America series called Copper. Such a great, great idea. Can’t wait. It takes place in the 1860s.

Anyway, this is just one of many sad, sad lists that I came across in the course of my research.

Thanks to my friend Marisa, this morning I got to go on a free Audubon Eco-Cruise down the Hudson and lower New York Bay. The picture below is of Swinburne Island, one of two man made islands created in the 19th century to house and dispose of victims of contagious diseases. The birds are sitting on the remnants of the crematorium.

We were on a big boat so we couldn’t get in close. I swear the guy said it was only 72 feet deep where we were, but that can’t be right, can it? You wouldn’t believe what’s down there. When I wrote my book about the NYPD’s cold case squad I learned that the police department used to just routinely dump guns (and other items) into the water. From my book:

“For most of the past 100 years, weapons were taken out to sea and sunk. In 1933, 3,816 guns, knives and swords were dumped into the sea at the Scotland Lightship station off the New Jersey coast. A couple of years later 1,575 phony token slugs were dumped into the Long Island Sound at Eaton’s Neck in Huntington Bay, along with 500 slot machines and 4,000 weapons. Two years after that the Property Clerk poured 10,000 gallons of wine, whiskey and beer into the Lower Bay. As of the 70’s they were still throwing what they could into the various bodies of water in New York, but in the 80’s they began melting handguns down in a foundry in Pennsylvania. Rifles and knives were put in a metal shredder.”

So apparently those guns and swords not that far down, if anyone wants to try to recover them. I wonder how many feet of mud is covering everything. Also, seriously? New Yorkers were killing each other with swords in the 1930s?

I could actually look this up, I spent weeks at the Municipal Archives copying sections of the police department annual reports going back to 1860. Okay, I just pulled them out. When they reported “cuttings” or stabbings, they didn’t specify weapons, alas.

DNA. A few days ago it was all over the news that a match had been found between DNA found on a chain used in a March Occupy Wall Street protest in a subway station, and the DNA found on the cd player of murder victim Sarah Fox, (her cd player was found in the park where her body was recovered).

I started to post about it because I read a quote from an expert in criminology, who called the DNA analysis a huge clue or a big break, which was kinda insane. First, all you could really say was that someone who touched the cd player also touched the chain.  Period. It wasn’t necessarily the killer.  I mean, it could be the killer, but even then the pool of suspects would have been narrowed down to the people who took the subway at the station that day in March. That’s a huge number of unidentified suspects—hardly a big break in the case.

Then, it came out that the DNA came from an NYPD employee assigned to the Office of the Chief Medical Examiner! Anyway.

Philip Glass Sing. Here is the NPR video of the Philip Glass sing I didn’t go to (it was 1,000 degrees out and my camera was broken). I missed out. And the soprano, Rachel Rosales, is amazing.

Red Burns and Michelle Obama. The Smithsonian’s Cooper-Hewitt, National Design Museum chose Red Burns as this year’s Design Patron (Red is the former Chair of NYU’s Interactive Telecommunications Program, where I went to grad school). There’s a luncheon today at the White House to celebrate her selection and the winners of the 2012 National Design Awards. The big question of course is: what will they both wear??

My friend Howard shopping for fruit.

I keep meaning to post a Buddy update. Buddy was diagnosed with lymphoma in January, 2010 and he is still with us. I actually suspect he had it for a lot longer.

Recently he stopped eating, and his diarrhea returned with a vengeance, and I thought this was it. We tried a few things and nothing worked, and for seven days I gave him injectable steroids, pepcid and an antibiotic. He got better, but when I stopped he went right back to not eating and the diarrhea started to slowly return.

Once again I thought this was it, but then the vet switched him from prednisone to prednisolone, and his appetite returned. I started going after the diarrhea with:

1 teaspoon of slipperly elm daily.
1/8 teaspoon of canned pumpkin with rice bran mixed in.
A pinch of l-glutamine, saccharomyces boulardii, Prozyme, Pet-Dophilus (given in pill pockets).
And I resumed monthly b12 injections.

The diarrhea was under control within days and he’s gaining weight again. So wow, Budd. You keep hanging in there. This could all turn around again, but for now he’s good.