The "Crasher Squirrel" Is Everywhere !!

The whole world's gone wild over the "crasher squirrel".

CNN reports that Melissa Brandts and her husband Jackson were hiking in Banff National Park when they set up their camera to use a wireless remote shutter for a few shots of the two of them.

"A little squirrel had been running around while we were getting the shot set up," Melissa Brandts said.

"I was joking with my husband that I hoped he was friendly because he was getting awful close and kind of scampering around our feet and stuff."

Friendly? You might say so.

It was also a bit timid and perhaps even indecisive because it soon scurried away and then, just as quickly, rushed back again.

"All of a sudden he popped back up because he heard the shutter releasing, the clicking of the camera.

The only thing we can figure is that he thought it was going to give him food or something," Brandts said.

"He popped right up and looked right into the camera, and we were laughing so hard because we were like 'get it, get it!' and we were trying to get the remote to fire.

So we got a couple of pictures -- took a couple of pictures with him there, and then he ducked down and proceeded to run away."

...thanks, Ray !

Remembering 9/11 - Never Forget

The day dawned different and stayed that way. Traffic was thin and sidewalks quiet. The stock exchange didn’t open, nor the airports, the schools, Broadway. People loaded up on bottled water, batteries, canoes. The law enforcement presence was intense: men with machine guns, gunboats circling the harbor.

http://www.youtube.com/results?search_query=world+trade+center+video&search_type=&aq=f

Downtown, fires burned, smoke plumed. The odor stood.

It was a city humbled and scared, where the possibilities of destruction had been recalibrated. It was Sept. 12, 2001. The day after.

So much has been said and written about what happened on 9/11. The following day is forgotten, just another dulled interlude in the aftermath of an incoherent morning.

But New Yorkers were introduced that day to irreducible presumptions about their wounded city that many believed would harden and become chiseled into the event’s enduring legacy.

New York would become a fortress city, choked by apprehension and resignation, forever patrolled by soldiers and submarines. Another attack was coming. And soon.

Tourists? Well, who would ever come again? Work in one of the city’s skyscrapers? Not likely. The Fire Department, gutted by 343 deaths, could never recuperate.

If a crippled downtown Manhattan were to have any chance of regeneration, ground zero had to be rebuilt quickly, a bricks and mortar nose-thumbing to terror.

Eight years later, those presumptions are cobwebbed memories that never came to pass. Indeed, glimpses into a few aspects of the city help measure the gap between what was predicted and what actually came to be.

You could start at one downtown street corner. The wisdom of the day after was that New York would never again bunch together important institutional nerve centers, binding them together in vulnerability.

On Sept. 11, American Express had its headquarters at the southwest corner of West and Vesey Streets. It is still there. Since then, Verizon has settled its headquarters into the northeast corner. Goldman Sachs has assumed the northwest. All that’s missing is the southeast corner. That will be filled by the tallest building in America.

The Times Square Novelty Man

David Cohen pointed out what the tourists like: replica taxicabs, “I Love New York” T-shirts and thimbles — any gewgaw inscribed with New York. “See this digital picture postcard?” he said. “Nice little item.”

Mr. Cohen, 83, is the patriarch of Grand Slam, a family-run novelty and baseball clothing store on Broadway between 46th and 47th Streets, in the heart of Times Square. Eight years ago, he could not have imagined the heaving commerce, the new big buildings, and especially not the complacent scene outside his doors. People basked in the balmy weather at tables and chairs, under sheltering patio umbrellas, spread across Broadway. If they worried about anything, it was sunburn.

How about that? People, at the behest of the mayor himself, flocking to Times Square to relax!

When fear engulfed the city on Sept. 12, many wrote off Times Square. Chemical bombs were sure to explode there. A suicide bomber strapped with explosives was destined to blow himself up at lunch hour.

“It was creepy,” Mr. Cohen said. “It was, ‘Oh my God, what’s next?’ I thought this would be the next hit.”

Business was slow for months. Souvenirs didn’t seem to mean the same anymore. “Yeah, it took a dive,” Mr. Cohen said. He shortened the store’s hours.

But he did not leave. “You can’t live in fear,” he said. “Things happen and then they don’t happen.”

Now the weak economy squeezes sales, but pedestrian traffic in Times Square is far higher than it was before Sept. 11. Vastly enhanced security has been put in place, and even when incidents defy it, like the small bomb that exploded at the military recruiting station in March 2008, people shrug it off, keep coming.

“This is the best spot in New York,” Mr. Cohen said. “Listen, the Square is the place.”

The Garage Manager

The fires wouldn’t go out. The smell persisted. What company would ever open its doors in Lower Manhattan? Who would live there? Who could feel secure?

The police stopped and searched trucks. Only a few cars were allowed below 14th Street.

Still, Wilson Ortega, 34, came to work. He managed the parking garage at 56 North Moore Street in TriBeCa.

On Sept. 12, business was, as he put it, “off 100 percent.” But cars were still in there, and maybe people wanted them.

As streets reopened, car pooling into Manhattan was mandated during rush hours. Bombs preyed on peoples’ minds. Many garages throughout the city began checking trunks and jabbing mirrors on the ends of poles beneath cars. Some still do, but in large part the practices are additional relics of the times.

“Yeah, I checked,” Mr. Ortega said.

Every trunk was searched. He acknowledged that he had no training in explosives, didn’t know exactly what he was looking for, but he did every car for several months, then those he didn’t recognize, the nonregulars, for nearly a year. Some people were insulted, wouldn’t pop the trunk, and he turned them away. He never found a thing.

The trade center site remains a conflicted construction project. But on North Moore it is cars in, cars out, just as before.

“I never thought things would be the same again,” he said. “But, man, I was wrong. We came back strong.”

The Firefighter

The number was 343. Back in those awful days, Chief Charlie Williams, 9th Battalion, Manhattan, thumbed down the death list looking for the firefighters he could have said hello to by name: “Hi Tom, hi Joe, hi Ray.” After about 40, he stopped. It was enough.

The loss of life to the Fire Department was staggering. Many asked, who would put out the fires of tomorrow?

In addition to the deaths, there was a stampede of retirements. The wives didn’t want to join the widows. And the expansive opportunity for overtime pay afforded a tantalizing opportunity for firefighters to retire at bulgier pensions.

There were 11,339 uniformed members of the Fire Department on Sept. 10, 2001. By Jan. 28, 2003, the ranks had declined to 10,630.

Chief Williams asked himself: “Do I want to go back and do this job?” His wife would have liked him to walk away. But he wasn’t done.

Fresh recruits were rushed in. There was a long, difficult period. Even now, the experience level is not the same. But there are 11,415 uniformed personnel, more than before.

“The bell rings and the men put out the fires,” Chief Williams said. “The city is well served.”

In the aftermath of Sept. 11, the firefighters were elevated to superhuman status. People flocked to the firehouses, wanting to shake hands with firefighters, snap their pictures, just say thanks. Chief Williams obliged, though he allowed how it got overbearing at times; he had to shut himself in his office to do his work.

The bravery was always real. But the mythology — well, that, too, wasn’t going to last. In the ensuing years, there were embarrassing incidents: the firefighters who had sex with a woman at one Bronx firehouse, a drunken brawl at another in Staten Island, on-duty drinking and drug use.

“The worship was definitely an inflated thing,” Chief Williams said. “You couldn’t sustain that.”

His own lungs went bad on him, traced back to the trade center, and he retired last year. He chose the date: Sept. 11.

The Flag Printer

People bought them from hardware stores and Wal-Mart and street vendors and unfurled them outside their homes and on the antennas of their cars. They billowed down the Henry Hudson and the F.D.R.

Flags.

People wore their patriotism and defiance openly. A new cohesiveness, a oneness, was going to remold the character of American citizenry.

Christopher Gravagna didn’t feel right that people had to buy their patriotism. “That was ridiculous,” he said. “Why should people capitalize on flags at that time?”

He had a printing business in Long Island City, Queens, doing work for clubs and concerts. On Sept. 12, demand for his services essentially stopped and didn’t resume for weeks. So he decided to print paper American flags with the motto “United We Stand” and give them away. He and his employees handed out more than 100,000.

He saw them everywhere.

“It helped feed this feeling that we have to be one, we have to be together on this,” Mr. Gravagna said. “We’re a strong country. We’re strong New Yorkers.”

The flags — cloth and paper — are mostly gone. Some come out, as they always did, on Memorial Day, on the Fourth of July, and on Sept. 11, but that is it.

That special mood? “It’s definitely diminished a lot,” Mr. Gravagna said. “Did I expect it? No. But as a New Yorker, I understand it. I guess part of it has to do with capitalism. In America, we have issues. And time passes. It just passes.”

No one, perhaps, displayed as many flags as Mr. Gravagna himself. He taped them to the windows of his Queens apartment and in his Nissan Sentra. They festooned his offices.

After a while, they came down. The last one he possessed he had framed. He hung it on his office wall. Four years ago, someone stole it.

The Skyscraper Dentist

“The windows here open,” Dr. Charles Weiss said.

He unlatched one. The view south was dazzling, as only a 1,000-foot-high view can be. There was the Empire State Building and, way off, the Statue of Liberty and Ellis Island, as well as a spot where two duplicate towers once stood.

On Sept. 12, it seemed no one would choose to work in a skyscraper again. Especially those with the emblematic names, the ones everyone knew about, high-rise terrorist bounty.

Workers stuffed parachutes under their desks, were given particle masks, acquainted themselves with Geiger counters.

On Sept. 11, Dr. Weiss, a dentist, repaired teeth on the 69th floor of the Chrysler Building, at 42nd Street and Lexington Avenue. He still does.

Capitulation was not his style. He recalled a book, “The Last Angry Man,” in which a pugnacious Brooklyn doctor refuses to yield to the bums he calls “galoots.” Dr. Weiss thought, as an assertion of faith, “I’m not going to let the galoots get me.”

On Sept. 12, the Chrysler Building was essentially closed, but he got in. He called patients to reschedule them. Some wanted some time before readdressing their cavities. He didn’t see anyone until the following Monday.

As far as he knows, they all came back. The patients. The people who worked for him. His colleagues who minded the other dental chairs on the floor.

There are always some squeamish patients who fear heights. Dr. Weiss, now 82, dispatches a nurse down to the lobby to ride the elevator up with them. That happened before Sept. 11, too.

Waiting patients now flipped through magazines as the drills sang.

“There’s a tremendous drive of human beings to make the most of life,” Dr. Weiss said. “We’re not hermits. We rise up and move on.”

Dr. Weiss drank in the view some more, watched the ant cars crawling across the ever-clogged city. “I never get tired of that view,” he said. “Never.”

September 11 Digital Archive - 911digitalarchive.org
National Sept. 11 Memorial and Museum - www.national911memorial.org
Project 2,996 - project2996.wordpress.com

from New York Times, 9/11/09

Gay Robots

Of all the gay robots, which is your most favorite?

New Beatles - digitally remastered studio-produced albums

You still can't buy "Can't Buy Me Love" from iTunes. But the Beatles' music is taking a step toward catching up with technology.

After four years of audio engineers working from Abbey Road Studios in London with the original Beatles recording tapes, on Sept. 9, Apple Corps Ltd. and EMI Music are debuting the digitally remastered Beatles' studio-produced albums. All told, 29 CDs, in one of two box sets will go on sale. They "have the integrity of the original master tape, they're just phonically superior" to previously released recordings, says Kevin Howlett, a radio producer who consulted on the project. Diehard Beatles fans have been complaining about the lackluster quality of Beatles CDs since they were released 22 years ago, with one reviewer calling the audio "tinny and desperately malnourished."

Apple Corps Ltd., which was created by the Beatles in 1968, and EMI Music control the Beatles catalog. They are betting that they can benefit from the hype surrounding the release the same day of The Beatles: Rock Band, a video game that lets players simulate recording and performing with the band. So far, the move is paying off: Pre-order sales for all the new Beatles CD box sets are among the top 15 pre-order music best-sellers in Amazon.com's history. The retailer has sold out during pre- order sales and says it will restock.

To attract musical purists as well as more casual fans, they are releasing two versions: a limited-edition "mono" box set of recordings as they were originally configured by the band and producer George Martin; and a "stereo" box set of the same songs mixed later by Mr. Martin to satisfy the growing demand for the new "stereo" medium in which vocals and instrumentation could be separated and fed into different speakers. The CDs in the stereo box set will also be sold individually.

Apple Corps has been notable in not selling Beatles songs online as downloads. EMI declined to discuss Beatles downloads; Apple Corps didn't respond to requests seeking comment. Many young music fans who primarily buy music online
haven't been buying the Beatles. CD sales have declined 54.7% in the last five years. Year-to-date CD album sales in late August 2004 were 387.4 million units. During the same time frame this year, year-to-date CD album sales were 175.4 million units, according to Nielsen SoundScan, a company that tracks music sales.

Bill Gagnon, EMI Music North America's senior vice president and general manager for catalog marketing, isn't concerned. "We don't feel it's going to impact the sales of this particular project," he says.

Paul McCartney and Ringo Starr declined to comment, an EMI spokeswoman said.

After first marketing to the core Beatles constituency—men 40 or older—the label plans to push the box set as a holiday gift for people who are becoming fans thanks to the video game Rock Band, Mr. Gagnon says. In lieu of selling the albums online, EMI will "employ an online street team" which will promote the Beatles CDs on music Web sites and social media networks, he says.

The remastered Beatles CDs will come with the albums' original cover art and liner notes, as well as additional photographs and writings. Each CD includes a short documentary video. The documentaries, each about five minutes or less, use photographs, video and audio snippets from tape that rolled as the musicians recorded. From "The Beatles" (better known as the "White Album"), Ringo Starr complains, "I've got blisters on my fingers." During the making of "Abbey Road," John Lennon says, "Stop it, you disgusting middle-aged squares."

Seasoned followers, however, will find a lot of retread in the liner notes. In an essay already printed in an older CD's liner notes, artist Peter Blake recounts how the record label tried to get permission to use the likenesses of people such as Fred Astaire, Marlon Brando and Bob Dylan on the Sgt. Pepper's cover collage. Mae West initially turned down the Beatles, responding in a letter, "What would I be doing in a lonely hearts club?" The band persuaded her to reconsider, according to Mr. Blake.

Record labels often repackage existing albums and market them as collectors' items; it's an inexpensive way to market to an established fan base. But the rerelease of the Beatles catalog was more complex.

Audio engineers digitized the master tapes of more than a dozen albums. To retain the artistic purity, they rid the recordings of any unintentional mechanical noise, such as hiss, clicks, sibilance. But they maintained the musicians' ancillary sounds—coughs, breaths, side-chatter.

Fourteen-year-old Kevin Kaspar of Carmel, Ind., says when he was 12, his sister, then 17, lent him the Beatles's 2006 "Love" CD containing songs that had been remixed for a Cirque du Soleil show. He plans to buy the video game and new CDs next week. "I've been babysitting and saved my money to buy both," he says.

Wall Street Journal, 9/4/09

Traffic Congestion -- iPhones Overload AT&T

iPhone owners use them like minicomputers, which they are, and use them a lot. Not only do iPhone owners download applications, stream music and videos and browse the Web at higher rates than the average smartphone user, but the average iPhone owner can also use 10 times the network capacity used by the average smartphone user.

The result is dropped calls, spotty service, delayed text and voice messages and glacial download speeds as AT&T’s cellular network strains to meet the demand. Another result is outraged customers.

Cellphone owners using other carriers may gloat now, but the problems of AT&T and the iPhone portend their future. Other networks could be stressed as well as more sophisticated phones encouraging such intense use become popular, analysts say.

Taylor Sbicca, a 27-year-old systems administrator in San Francisco, checks his iPhone 10 to 15 times a day. But he is not making calls. He checks the scores of last night’s baseball game and updates his Twitter stream. He checks the local weather report to see if he needs a coat before heading out to dinner — then he picks a restaurant on Yelp and maps the quickest way to get there.

Or at least, he tries to.

“It’s so slow, it feels like I’m on a dial-up modem,” he said. Shazam, an application that identifies songs being played on the radio or TV, takes so long to load that the tune may be over by the time the app is ready to hear it. On numerous occasions, Mr. Sbicca says, he missed invitations to meet friends because his text messages had been delayed.

And picking up a cell signal in his apartment? “You hit the dial button and the phone just sits there, saying it’s connecting for 30 seconds,” he said.

More than 20 million other smartphone users are on the AT&T network, but other phones do not drain the network the way the nine million iPhones users do. Indeed, that is why the howls of protest are more numerous in the dense urban areas with higher concentrations of iPhone owners.

“It’s almost worthless to try and get on 3G during peak times in those cities,” Mr. Munster said, referring to the 3G network. “When too many users get in the area, the call drops.” The problems seem particularly pronounced in New York and San Francisco, where Mr. Munster estimates AT&T’s network shoulders as much as 20 percent of all the iPhone users in the United States.

Owners of the iPhone 3GS, the newest model, “have probably increased their usage by about 100 percent,” said Chetan Sharma, an independent wireless analyst. “It’s faster so they are using it more on a daily basis.”

Mr. Sharma compares the problem to water flowing through a pipe. “It can only funnel so much at a given time,” he said. “It comes down to peak capacity loads, or spikes in data usage. That’s why you see these problems at conferences or in large cities with high concentration of iPhone users.”

When thousands of iPhone owners descended on Austin, Tex., in March during South by Southwest, an annual technology and music conference, attendees were unable to send text messages, check their e-mail or make calls until AT&T installed temporary cell sites to amplify the service.

AT&T’s right to be the exclusive carrier for iPhone in the United States has been a golden ticket for the wireless company. The average iPhone owner pays AT&T $2,000 during his two-year contract — roughly twice the amount of the average mobile phone customer.

But at the same time the iPhone has become an Achilles’ heel for the company.

“It’s been a challenging year for us,” said John Donovan, the chief technology officer of AT&T. “Overnight we’re seeing a radical shift in how people are using their phones,” he said. “There’s just no parallel for the demand.”

AT&T says that the majority of the nearly $18 billion it will spend this year on its networks will be diverted into upgrades and expansions to meet the surging demands on the 3G network. The company intends to erect an additional 2,100 cell towers to fill out patchy coverage, upgrade existing cell sites by adding fiber optic connectivity to deliver data faster and add other technology to provide stronger cell signals.

As fast as AT&T wants to go, many cities require lengthy filing processes to erect new cell towers. Even after towers are installed, it can take several months for software upgrades to begin operating at faster speeds.

The company has also delayed bandwidth-heavy features like multimedia messaging, or text messages containing pictures, audio or video. It is also postponing “tethering,” which allows the iPhone to share its Internet connection with a computer, a standard feature on many rival smartphones. AT&T says it has no intention of capping how much data iPhone owners use.

The upgrades are expected to be completed by next year and the company has said it is already seeing improvements.

But AT&T faces another cost — to its reputation. AT&T’s deal with Apple is said to expire as early as next year, at which point other carriers in the United States would be able to sell the popular Apple phones. Indeed, a recent survey by Pricegrabber.com found that 34 percent of respondents pinpointed AT&T as the primary reason for not buying an iPhone.

“It’s a P.R. nightmare,” said Craig Moffett, a senior analyst with Sanford C. Bernstein & Company.

AT&T might be in the spotlight now, analysts say, but other carriers will face similar problems as they sell more smartphones, laptop cards and eventually tablets that encourage high data usage.

Globally, mobile data traffic is expected to double every year through 2013, according to Cisco Systems, which makes network gear. “Whether an iPhone, a Storm or a Gphone, the world is changing.” Mr. Munster said. “We’re just starting to scratch the surface of these issues that AT&T is facing.”

In preparation for the next wave of smartphones and data demands, all the carriers are rushing to introduce the next-generation of wireless networks, called 4G.

Analysts expect that in a year or so, AT&T’s network will have improved significantly — but it may not be soon enough for some iPhone owners paying for the higher-priced data plans, like Mr. Sbicca, who says he plans to switch carriers as soon as the iPhone becomes available on other networks.

“What good is having all those applications if you don’t have the speed to run them?” he said. “It’s not exactly rocket science here. It’s pretty standard stuff to be able to make a phone call.”

NYT 9/3/09

Teddy Kennedy's Highs and Lows

In a memoir being published this month, Senator Edward M. Kennedy called his behavior after the 1969 car accident that killed Mary Jo Kopechne “inexcusable” and said the events might have shortened the life of his ailing father, Joseph P. Kennedy.

In that book, “True Compass,” Mr. Kennedy said he was dazed, afraid and panicked in the minutes and hours after he drove off a bridge on Chappaquiddick Island with Ms. Kopechne as his passenger.

The senator, who left the scene and did not report the accident to the police until after her body was found the next day, admitted in the memoir that he had “made terrible decisions” at Chappaquiddick. He also said that he had hardly known Ms. Kopechne, a young woman who had been an aide to his late brother Robert, and that he had had no romantic relationship with her.

The account by Mr. Kennedy, who died on Aug. 25 at age 77, adds little to what is known about the accident and its aftermath but recounts how they weighed on him and his family. The book does not shy from the accident, or from some other less savory aspects of the senator’s life, including a notorious 1991 drinking episode in Palm Beach, Fla., or the years of heavy drinking and women-chasing that followed his 1982 divorce from his first wife, Joan.

But it also offers rich detail on his relationships with his father, siblings and children that round out a portrait of a man who lived the most public of lives and yet remained something of a mystery. Among other things, it says that in 1984 he decided against seeking the presidency after hearing the emotional objections of his children, who, it says, feared for his life.

A copy of the 532-page memoir, scheduled for sale Sept. 14, was obtained by The New York Times.

In it, Mr. Kennedy also said he had always accepted the finding of a presidential commission that a sole gunman, Lee Harvey Oswald, was responsible for President John F. Kennedy’s assassination. Robert F. Kennedy grieved so deeply over the killing of the president that family members feared for his emotional health, Mr. Kennedy wrote, saying that it “veered close to being a tragedy within a tragedy.”

Mr. Kennedy’s book provides new details about life in America’s famous political family and covers the remarkable career that was celebrated in memorials last week before his burial near John and Robert Kennedy in Arlington National Cemetery. It provides his personal account of being stricken by the brain cancer that took his life and his decision to battle the disease as aggressively as he could. And it deals openly and regretfully with “self-destructive drinking,” especially after Robert’s death.

Mr. Kennedy said that his father had encouraged intensive competition among his children, especially his sons, which fed his recurrent feelings of inadequacy after the death of his three brothers, all of them older.

“Competition, of course, is the route to achievement in America,” Mr. Kennedy wrote. “As I think back to my three brothers, and about what they had accomplished before I was even out of my childhood, it sometimes has occurred to me that my entire life has been a constant state of catching up.”

Mr. Kennedy said that as close as his family was, there were “boundaries” that each member respected. “For example, I had no idea of how serious Jack’s health problems were while he was alive,” Mr. Kennedy wrote. “It would never have occurred to us to discuss such private things with each other.”

The book, published by Twelve, a division of the Hachette Book Group, was originally scheduled to be published in 2010 to coincide with the 50th anniversary of the election of President Kennedy but was moved up because of the senator’s illness. Much of the book, written with a collaborator, Ron Powers, was based on notes taken by Mr. Kennedy over 50 years as well as hours of recordings for an oral history project at the University of Virginia.

The memoir also suggested that President Kennedy had grown uneasy about Vietnam and was increasingly convinced that the conflict could not be resolved militarily. It said the president’s “antenna” was up, and surmised that he was “on his way to finding that way out,” though “he just never got the chance.”

Mr. Kennedy wrote of a secret meeting in the spring of 1967 between President Lyndon B. Johnson and Robert Kennedy, whose increasingly outspoken criticism of the war in Southeast Asia was becoming a political threat to Johnson. According to the book, Robert Kennedy proposed that Johnson give him authority to personally negotiate a peace treaty in Vietnam. This implicitly would have kept Robert from running for the 1968 Democratic presidential nomination, a prospect that worried Johnson.

“If the president had accepted his offer,” the book said, “Bobby certainly would have been too immersed in the peace process to become involved in a presidential primary.”

But Johnson could not take the offer at face value, concerned that Kennedy had ulterior motives, the senator wrote.

In raw and often intimate terms, Mr. Kennedy wrote of the despair he experienced after Robert’s assassination in 1968. It was at first impossible for him to return to the Senate. And even when he managed to, he could not focus on his work. He spent days on the ocean, taking long sails from the family compound in Hyannis Port, Mass.

He described drinking to excess during that period and driving Joan Kennedy “deeper into her anguish.” He drove himself and his staff hard. “I tried to stay ahead of the darkness.” The shooting of his brothers traumatized him in ways both existential and mundane, Mr. Kennedy noted. He would flinch at loud, sudden noises like the explosion of firecrackers, or hit the deck whenever a car backfired.

Mr. Kennedy also said he had written a letter to the Los Angeles district attorney asking that he not seek the death penalty for Robert Kennedy’s assassin, Sirhan Sirhan. (The judge, Herbert V. Walker, disregarded the letter, Mr. Kennedy said, though Mr. Sirhan’s life would be spared by the California Supreme Court.)

The book opens with an account of Mr. Kennedy’s falling ill and then, in May of last year, receiving a diagnosis of a lethal brain tumor. Doctors said he had just a few months to live, Mr. Kennedy wrote, but he refused to believe the grim prognosis, because he had been raised not to give up. His son Teddy Jr. had survived a supposedly fatal cancer in his leg, and his daughter, Kara, had beaten lung cancer, against long odds.

“And I believe that approaching adversity with a positive attitude at least gives you a chance for success,” he said. “Approaching it with a defeatist attitude predestines the outcome: defeat. And a defeatist’s attitude is just not in my DNA.”

Mr. Kennedy expressed regret over the 1991 episode in Palm Beach, when he went drinking with his son Patrick and his nephew William K. Smith, who would be charged with rape that allegedly occurred that night. (Mr. Smith was later acquitted.)

Those events hobbled him later that year when Clarence Thomas was nominated for a seat on the Supreme Court. Mr. Kennedy strongly opposed the nomination, but, he wrote, he could not speak out as forcefully as he would have liked. He understood, he wrote, a “hard truth: with all the background noise about Palm Beach and my bachelor lifestyle, I would have been the wrong person” to raise questions about Mr. Thomas’s alleged sexual harassment of Anita F. Hill.

But even as Mr. Kennedy offered apologies for the darker moments of his life, he raged against the portrait of him in some tabloids, magazines and books. He described some of those accounts as “totally false, bizarre and evil theories.”

Of his indulgences, Mr. Kennedy wrote: “I have enjoyed the company of women. I have enjoyed a stiff drink or two or three, and I’ve relished the smooth taste of a good wine. At times, I’ve enjoyed these pleasures too much. I’ve heard the tales about my exploits as a hell-raiser — some accurate, some with a wisp of truth to them and some so outrageous that I can’t imagine how anyone could really believe them.”

Mr. Kennedy wrote about his views of various presidents, sometimes affectionately, sometimes harshly. Some of his most critical words are directed against Jimmy Carter.

He said that while they had found common cause on a few issues, their relationship had broken down over health care. He accused Mr. Carter of timidity that had doomed any chance of meaningful health insurance reform and said the president had been virtually impossible to talk to. “Clearly President Carter was a difficult man to convince — of anything,” Mr. Kennedy wrote. “One reason for this was that he did not really listen.”

While Mr. Kennedy had little patience for the president’s piety and punctiliousness, he found the disengagement of Mr. Carter’s successor, Ronald Reagan, at times oddly charming, though at other times frustrating. The senator said it had been difficult to get Reagan to focus on policy matters. He described a meeting with him that he and other senators had sought to press for shoe and textile import limits.

The senators were told that they would have just 30 minutes with the president. Reagan began the meeting, the book said, commenting on Mr. Kennedy’s shoes — asking if they were Bostonians — and then talking for 20 minutes about shoes and his experience selling shoes for his father. “Several of us began conspicuously to glance at our watches.” But to no avail. “And it was over!” Mr. Kennedy said. “No one got a word in about shoe or textile quota legislation.”

Mr. Kennedy also complained that White House meetings had been barely tolerable, in part because no liquor was ever served during Mr. Carter’s term. “He wanted no luxuries nor any sign of worldly living,” Mr. Kennedy wrote.

Mr. Kennedy said he had been disappointed by President Bill Clinton’s inability to enact comprehensive health care legislation, but he did not blame Mr. Clinton or his wife, Hillary Rodham Clinton, who helped write the administration’s proposal.

He also said he called Mr. Clinton immediately after the president appeared on television to confess his affair with Monica Lewinsky, reassuring him that he would stand by him during that difficult period.

In the midst of recounting that anecdote, Mr. Kennedy took a break to offer his views on the scrutinizing of the private lives of public officials, something with which he clearly was quite familiar. Mr. Kennedy said he had no quarrel with such inquiries.

“But do I think it tells the whole story of character? No I truly do not,” he wrote. Men and women, he said, are more complicated than that. “Some people make mistakes and try to learn from them and do better. Our sins don’t define the whole picture of who we are.”

from NYT 9/3/09

Ad Wars: Mac vs. PC

Sean Siler of Microsoft would never be mistaken for a movie star. A former Navy officer who wears glasses and is a tad on the heavy side, Mr. Siler oversees the Windows division’s adoption of new Internet connectivity software.

But there were audible gasps last summer when Mr. Siler, 39, auditioned for Microsoft’s new ad campaign for Windows, created by Crispin Porter & Bogusky, the Miami agency best known for its cheeky work for Mini Cooper and Burger King.

“I was like, ‘Are you kidding?’ ” recalls Rob Reilly, one of the agency’s executive creative directors. “It couldn’t have been more perfect.”

Everybody agreed that Mr. Siler looked exactly like PC, the character played by the comedian John Hodgman in Apple’s popular “Get a Mac” ads that lampoon Windows-based computers and those who love them. Two weeks later, Mr. Siler reported to a nearby television studio. The agency dressed him in PC’s dorky uniform — white shirt, baggy khakis, brown sport coat and matching brown tie — and handed him a script with the lines: “I’m a PC. And I’ve been made into a stereotype.”

Mr. Siler joined a parade of environmentalists, budget-conscious laptop shoppers, mixed martial arts fighters, mash-up DJs and remarkably tech-savvy preschoolers who appear in Microsoft’s new campaign, which is intended to show that real Windows users aren’t all clueless drones.

For Mr. Siler, the experience was almost like being a geeky incarnation of Brad Pitt. His e-mail address was on the screen, and he received 4,000 messages from viewers — some from grateful parents whose children had wanted expensive Macs over PCs and now had second thoughts.

Crispin put up a video on YouTube in which Mr. Siler discussed his role in the campaign; it was viewed more than 702,000 times. At work, he was constantly interrupted by his fellow Microsoft employees. “For a couple of weeks,” Mr. Siler recalls, “I had people coming by my office and saying: ‘Hey, you are the PC guy, aren’t you? That’s so cool!’ ”

His mother wasn’t so sure. “You look so horrible,” she told him. “You don’t look anything like that man. Why did they make you look so bad?”

Somebody better explain to Mr. Siler’s mother that this isn’t a beauty contest; it’s an ad war, one destined to go down in history with the cola wars of the 1980s and ’90s and the Hertz-Avis feud of the 1960s. According to TNS Media Intelligence, Apple spent $264 million on television ads last year, 71 percent more than Microsoft. In the first six months of 2009, however, Microsoft responded with $163 million worth of commercials, more than twice Apple’s spending.

Surprisingly, Microsoft, which has never been known for running cool ads, has landed some punches. Shortly after the Microsoft campaign started, Apple unleashed commercials that mocked its competitor as spending money on advertising when it should have been fixing Vista, its much-maligned operating system.

“It got Apple’s attention, didn’t it?” says Robert X. Cringely, host of PBS’s NerdTV.

FOR years, Microsoft was the stodgy market leader. It sold 90 percent of the world’s operating system software, and generally left the advertising to Dell, H.P. and other hardware makers who licensed Windows. The only time Microsoft hawked its most recognizable brand on television was when the latest version of the software hit the shelves. Then the company flooded the airwaves with commercials full of loud music and swirling imagery saying that the new version of Windows is out — and that it’s awesome!

Apple is the classic smaller insurgent. Its share for desktops and laptops in the United States is just over 8 percent. Every time Apple grabs another point of market share from Microsoft’s partners, its stock price climbs. And one way that Apple has tried to gain share is by running clever ads that ridicule everything Microsoft stands for.

There’s no better example than “Get a Mac,” unveiled three years ago by Apple’s longtime ad agency, TBWA/Chiat/Day. No technology company would choose Mr. Hodgman’s character, PC, to personify its brand. He reeks of the past. He boasts of using his desktop to make spreadsheets and ridicules his more youthful friend, Mac, played by the actor Justin Long, for using his desktop for “juvenile” pursuits like blogging and movie making — even through it’s clear that PC would like to be in on the fun. He just can’t get his Windows computer to do his bidding.

Like a classic sitcom character — think Ralph Kramden of “The Honeymooners” — PC is always dreaming up ill-advised schemes intended to show his superiority. He’s thwarted by viruses, system crashes and other problems more associated with Windows-based computers than Apple’s products — and, recently, he has become a hapless apologist for Vista. Mr. Long’s character smugly watches his friend’s pratfalls, glancing at the audience with raised eyebrows as if to say, “If only this poor guy would buy a Mac. . . .”

PC will never learn. Not as long as he keeps driving sales for Apple. Since 2006, the year that he first appeared in all his pasty-faced glory, Apple’s share of the computer desktop market in the United States has more than doubled, according to IDC, the technology industry research firm. Its stock price, meanwhile, has risen 142 percent since May 2006, while Microsoft’s has barely budged. Yes, the astonishing success of newer Apple products like the iPod and the iPhone has helped. But the PC character should also take a bow. (Representatives of Apple and TBWA/Chiat/Day declined to be interviewed for this article.)

Apple’s ads put Microsoft in a bind. One of Madison Avenue’s rules is that a market leader never acknowledges a smaller competitor in its advertising. What’s more, if Microsoft responded with ads that backfired, it would look just like Mr. Hodgman’s character. Maybe it was better to grin and bear it.

Then, last year, Microsoft hired Crispin Porter and struck back with uncharacteristic wit. There was Mr. Siler’s star turn. The agency also handed bunches of cash to shoppers and asked them to choose between a PC and a Mac. Lauren, a 20-something in one of the “Laptop Hunter” spots, is giddy about the money she has left over when she selects a $699 H.P. with a 17-inch screen, rather than a $1,000 Mac with a 13-inch screen. “I guess I’m just not cool enough to be a Mac person,” she sighs. This time, the joke was on Apple. In a recession, it’s pretty hip to save $300.

Microsoft’s effort to inspire PC pride seemed to resonate after its debut last September. According to IDC, Mac shipments in the United States plummeted 20 percent in the fourth quarter of 2008 versus the previous quarter, as the economy went into a tailspin, while those of PCs manufactured by Dell and H.P. fell only 13 percent and 3 percent, respectively.

Microsoft was quick to declare victory — maybe too quick. In the second quarter this year, Mac sales in the United States rebounded 34 percent, IDC said, while Dell and H.P. had more modest gains. Even more humbling for Microsoft was the company’s announcement in late July that its year-over-year operating income for the quarter declined 29 percent.

As a result, some analysts have argued that the Microsoft campaign has failed. But they, too, may be too hasty. We are only weeks away from the Oct. 22 release of Windows 7, which may undo much of the company’s self-inflicted damage from Vista. PC users, many of whom skipped buying Vista machines, could be holding off until then to buy. And the introduction of Windows 7 will be accompanied by yet another Crispin Porter ad blitz.

“You are not so embarrassed to take your PC out of the bag on a plane anymore,” said Mr. Reilly at the ad agency. “It’s actually kind of cool that you do. I know this is working.”

EVERY Wednesday, Lee Clow, the creative director of TBWA/Chiat/Day, travels from Los Angeles to Cupertino, Calif., for his weekly meeting with Steven P. Jobs, the Apple chief executive. They started doing this years ago and have created ads that are as stylish and cool as anything on television. Usually, the subtext of these ads is that Microsoft is the Evil Empire.

Mr. Jobs started working with Mr. Clow, a laid-back former surfer dude, in the early 1980s when Mr. Clow helped to create Apple’s path-breaking “1984” television commercial introducing the Macintosh. The ad’s unsubtle message was that buyers of the new machine would be striking against I.B.M., portrayed as Apple’s Orwellian foe.

Mr. Jobs struggled to persuade Apple’s board to run the ad, which was directed by Ridley Scott. Mr. Clow was similarly adamant when his boss, the late Jay Chiat, tried to shelve it. The ad ran only once, during the 1984 Super Bowl, but it has never been forgotten.

Apple forced out Mr. Jobs the next year and hired a new ad agency, BBDO. But when Mr. Jobs returned triumphantly to the company in 1997, he reunited with TBWA/Chiat/Day. Mr. Clow brought him the idea for “Think Different,” a campaign that identified Apple with figures like Bob Dylan, Albert Einstein and Martin Luther King Jr. Mr. Jobs used it to introduce the iMac and to re-establish Apple as an iconoclast.

TBWA/Chiat/Day went on to create the 2002 “Switchers” campaign, in which the director Errol Morris filmed real computer users describing why they ditched their PCs for a Mac. Who can forget Ellen Feiss, the slow-talking teenager who made the hearts of young geeks flutter when she explained how her PC ate her homework? “It was, like, beep beep beep beep beep beep beep,” Ms. Feiss says. “And then, like, half of my paper was gone.”

Then came the iPod ads from TWBA/Chiat/Day that not only helped drive sales of Apple’s breakout product, but also made stars of little-known indie rock acts like Feist. Such is the power of Apple’s marketing wizardry.

Many of Apple’s new customers were plugging their iPods into PCs. Mr. Clow proposed “Get a Mac” to get them thinking about springing for an Apple machine. Mr. Jobs was intrigued. But he wanted the ads to be perfect.

“The discussion within Apple was: ‘Is this the right tone? How young a guy should Mac be? How dorky do we make PC look?’ ” recalls Ken Segall, a former TBWA/Chiat/Day creative director who worked early on as a consultant for Apple on the campaign. “It went many rounds before Steve was comfortable with the idea. Then he loved it.”

IN spring 2007, a year after Apple introduced the “Get a Mac” ads, Steve Ballmer, the Microsoft C.E.O., barged into the office of Mich Mathews, head of the company’s central marketing group. The two had talked about a campaign that would repair the damage from the Apple ads.

Ms. Mathews recalls Mr. Ballmer enthusiastically asking her, “When are we going to move?”

Advertising has never seemed to be part of Microsoft’s DNA. The chairman, Bill Gates, “never really seemed to get marketing,” says Rob Enderle, a longtime technology industry analyst. And for many years, Mr. Enderle says, Mr. Ballmer “just didn’t think it was worth spending the money on it.”

The company’s Windows campaigns seemed to reflect executives’ lack of interest. Perhaps the best example was the push for Microsoft Vista in 2007, created by McCann Erickson with the slogan “The Wow Starts Now.” It showed people gaping in childlike wonder at the newest version of Windows. But Vista, to put it mildly, didn’t live up to the ads.

“The operating system was visually beautiful,” said Jeff Musser, a former McCann Erickson creative director who worked on the campaign. “But it was a bad product. I didn’t really hear anybody saying, ‘Wow.’ ”

There were also cultural issues at Microsoft when it came to advertising. On Madison Avenue, they say that the more hands that touch an advertisement, the worse it becomes. Microsoft felt differently. “They thought the more people saw it and gave an opinion, the better it would be,” Mr. Musser said. “That’s how you develop software. It’s not how you develop great creative.”

So Ms. Mathews tried to change things. She set up a nine-member task force to figure out a marketing strategy and keep meddlers at arm’s length.

In February 2008, Microsoft picked Crispin Porter. At the agency, Mr. Reilly was initially apprehensive. He didn’t even own a PC; he had an ultraslim MacBook Air. (He has since bought himself two PCs — a Sony Vaio and a Lenovo ThinkPad.)

The adman also wondered whether Microsoft was ready for a Crispin campaign. Mr. Reilly himself oversees the agency’s irreverent work for Burger King, aimed at young men hungering for menu items like the Triple Whopper.

He wanted to come up with a campaign that would redefine Windows, and he counseled against ads that attacked Apple. Then he changed his tune. Last summer in Apple ads, Mr. Hodgman’s PC character morphed into a personification of Microsoft itself. PC was haunted by problems with Vista. He took up yoga to calm his nerves, only to discover that his teacher was on edge because Vista wreaked havoc on her billing system. PC tried to find peace by creating a line of herbal teas with names like “Crashy-Time Camomile” and “Raspberry Restart.”

“As the tone of their campaign became more and more negative, we were like, ‘We gotta do something,’ ” Mr. Reilly said. “That’s where the whole notion of ‘I’m a PC’ and putting a face on our users came about. We have a billion users. That’s who our cast is, whereas Apple is just two fictitious characters.”

Microsoft recruited influential Windows fans like the “Desperate Housewives” star Eva Longoria. “I feel bad about the little PC guy,” she said this month. “He is always getting beaten up.” It also brought in some who would appeal to niche audiences, like the Pittsburgh mash-up D.J. Gregg Gillis, who is better known as Girl Talk.

When Mr. Ballmer finally saw the ads in September, he congratulated Ms. Mathews and gave her a high-five. Then, Ms. Mathews says, he started shouting, “I’m a PC!”

THE new Windows campaign got off to an inauspicious start. Puzzling ads featuring Mr. Gates kidding around with the comedian Jerry Seinfeld left a lot of people scratching their heads. The ads quickly disappeared.

As the “I’m a PC” ads with Mr. Siler replaced them two weeks later, Apple’s “Get a Mac” spots disappeared. Microsoft doesn’t think that was a coincidence. When PC and Mac reappeared, it was in the advertising that criticized Microsoft as spending on ads rather than on Vista.

Microsoft thought that it had scored a point. “You’ve got to look at that and say, ‘You are not advertising to consumers; you’re advertising to the Microsoft marketing department,’ ” Ms. Mathews says. “I just admit that did bring a smile to my face.”

Emboldened, Microsoft continued its barrages. In February, it unveiled its “Rookies” ads, arguing that PCs are so easy to use that even Kylie, an adorable 4 1/2-year old, could upload a picture of her goldfish, Dorothy, onto her PC and e-mail it to her relatives. You want to make fun of Kylie, Apple? Microsoft and Crispin dare you to try it.

The next month, Microsoft deployed its “Laptop Hunters” ads. They clearly moved the needle in Microsoft’s favor. Ted Marzilli, a managing director of BrandIndex, a company that tracks consumer perceptions, said that at the beginning of the year, adults thought Apple offered more value than Microsoft. In May, however, Microsoft closed the gap in the firm’s surveys. “Apple took a hit,” Mr. Marzilli said. “Since then, they have been neck and neck.”

In June, Microsoft felt that it had more reason to gloat. The chief operating officer, B. Kevin Turner, says he got a call from an Apple lawyer who asked him to change the ads because Apple was lowering its prices by $100. “I did cartwheels down the hallway,” Mr. Turner subsequently boasted in speech at a New Orleans conference.

Then Apple announced its second-quarter rebound. And for some analysts, it seemed like game over. “The reality is that Apple’s business has been impacted by the overall economy, not by Microsoft’s campaign,” said Gene Munster, senior research analyst at Piper Jaffray. “Those ‘What can I get for 1,000 bucks’ ads? That was a clever campaign. But it never really caught on. If you compare it to ‘Get a Mac,’ it didn’t even register.”

And yet Apple keeps responding. On Friday, it released its Snow Leopard operating system a month ahead of schedule, accompanied by a new round of “Get a Mac” ads. One involves a red-headed woman who is clearly intended to resemble Microsoft’s Lauren. PC introduces her to his suave friend, a top-of-the-line model played by Patrick Warburton, who was David Puddy on “Seinfeld.” She declines to buy a Windows machine when they can’t promise that she won’t have virus woes.

Microsoft, however, has found it enjoys mixing it up with Apple on the airwaves. In July, Mr. Ballmer told analysts that Crispin’s work had been “quite effective.” He promised that Microsoft would continue investing heavily in Windows marketing. “We didn’t do that three, four, five, six years ago,” he added.

For Mr. Siler, this is a welcome change. “I’ve never seen more pride at Microsoft,” he says. “You walk through the campus, and you see people’s laptops that have ‘I’m a PC’ stickers on them. I walk in the company store, and there are these huge banners that say, ‘I’m a PC’ and shirts and ties and mugs. I think I made a difference. My God, that’s so cool!”

NYT 8/30/09