Deep under Grand Central Terminal, beyond basements and subway lines and through 10 stories of bedrock lays a secret underground chamber that’s almost as big as Grand Central Terminal itself. What’s inside the room? A machine the Nazis wanted to destroy in World War II.
Elon Musk reveals Tesla’s latest electric vehicle, we show off our new buyer’s guides, discover we still have a lot to learn about stem cells and take a trip to Taiwan with T-Mobile’s new global roaming plan. Read on for Engadget’s news highlights…
The filament used for 3D printing is useful, but not terribly interesting. Others have taken to printing using other substances, some for notable purposes, others more or less for novelty. The 3D pancake printer is one such machine, but in recent times MIT students have trumped it. MIT students Kyle Hounsell, Kristine Bunker, and David Donghyun Kim all worked together … Continue reading
Those who love “The Boss” or are intrigued by family history will appreciate this charming video of Bruce Springsteen accepting the Ellis Island Family Heritage Award with his mother and her two sisters. He speaks of his colorful, immigrant grandparents, of being “a son of Italy, of Ireland, and of Holland,” and of his feelings toward immigration in general. His friend, Brian Williams, served as host of the event, and both made mention of the well known, Italian-Irish mating tradition of New Jersey.
The late Major League Baseball Commissioner Bart Giamatti once wrote of baseball that “It breaks your heart. It is designed to break your heart. The game begins in the spring, when everything else begins again, and it blossoms in the summer, filling the afternoons and evenings, and then as soon as the chill rains come, it stops and leaves you to face the fall alone.”
Baseball did indeed break my heart in 1989, the year that Giamatti, a Renaissance scholar and former president of Yale, died of a heart attack just days after banning Pete Rose from the national pastime.
As a baseball fan, I have never recovered from that season, one that was tragic yet sublime, as I wrote in a piece five years ago.
That year I lost and gained everything.
I lost Rose, who had been one of my two favorite players when I was a boy (the other was Reggie Jackson).
And I lost Giamatti, who had inspired me not only with his love for baseball but also with his love for language. His wife, Toni, had been my adviser and 7th grade English teacher. She also taught me in 12th grade when I took a course in the bildungsroman. She, of all my teachers, was the one who told my class that I should be a writer.
In 1989, in the midst of losing the game’s greatest commissioner and blue-collar player, I watched my favorite team from childhood, the Oakland A’s, win the World Series in commanding fashion, sweeping the San Francisco Giants.
In addition, my favorite player of the 1980s, Rickey Henderson, had a stretch of brilliance during that postseason that few players have ever matched. He stole eight bases in eight attempts in the playoffs against the Toronto Blue Jays, including four in one game. He homered twice on October 7, my birthday.
And in the World Series, Henderson got the A’s off to a lead in every game. The A’s never trailed at any point in those four games, a record that had been accomplished only once or twice before in World Series history.
Finally, I made a small contribution to the national pastime that year by implementing the Baseball Ferry, a ferry that took fans from various locations in New York–Pier 11, East 34th Street and Glen Cove, Long Island–to the World’s Fair Marina for New York Mets games.
I had come up with the idea of the ferry in 1988 when I was a young waterfront planner for the New York City Parks Department. I made site visits to the Yankee and Shea Stadium waterfronts and wrote a detailed eight-page proposal, one of the longest papers I had written at the time, for a ferry to take fans to those ballparks.
But it would not be any ordinary ferry. I argued that it should bring a taste of the ballpark to the sea. In my memorandum, I wrote that the ferry should have an accordionist playing “Take Me Out to the Ballgame,” that there should be Crackerjack and hot dogs onboard, and perhaps even a batting or pitching cage on deck.
With the support of my supervisor, Ann Buttenwieser, and then-Parks Commissioner Henry Stern, I was able to shepherd the ferry through the permitting process.
On August 4, 1989, I gave the keynote address at the ferry opening (see the accompanying video of Buttenwieser, Stern and me giving speeches). In my speech, I paid homage to Bart Giamatti, who had referred to baseball as “an epic poem.” Baseball, he had pointed out, was one long journey, one long attempt to get home.
In my speech, I alluded to Homer’s The Odyssey, and I mentioned that the maiden voyage of the Baseball Ferry would include a descent into the underworld as we would have to brave the whirlpool of Hell Gate at the convergence of the East and Harlem rivers.
I also hailed Giamatti for his sage warning that “without fans, who enjoy being at the ballpark, live, the whole enterprise does not exist.”
As I stated in my speech, the Baseball Ferry would “improve the quality of the experience of baseball fans en route to the ballpark.”
At the ferry christening, we did indeed have an accordionist who played “Take Me Out to the Ballgame,” and we had hot dogs and Crackerjack onboard. The boat, a catamaran run by S.K. Paul, a ferry operator based in Long Island, could not accommodate a batting or pitching cage, but it did provide a scenic route to the ballpark, which was much better than being stuck in traffic, paying toll fare, or battling for a seat on the subway.
A few weeks later, Giamatti banned Rose permanently from the game. Then about a week after that, the commissioner died while vacationing on Martha’s Vineyard.
I have never quite recovered the love that I once had for the game, not after that tumultuous season, which was also disrupted by an earthquake in the middle of the World Series.
Since then, the game has been severely damaged by steroids and other performance-enhancing drugs, which were being used by some players even in 1989. Records that I once cherished have been broken and tainted.
And the Baseball Ferry spawned The Yankee Clipper, which has sailed to Yankee Stadium, where great ones like Derek Jeter, who is retiring this season, still play.
But for me the game has never been the same.
I lost Bart Giamatti and Pete Rose.
As Giamatti said, “it breaks your heart.”
Planning a wedding is a ton of work — anyone who tries to tell you otherwise probably isn’t telling the truth.
That’s one reason many couples opt for a low-key elopement rather than the headache of planning a big wedding. Below are 11 confessions from brides and grooms on Whisper — a free app where people share their secrets anonymously — who decided to elope, or at least wish they had.
Check out Whisper for more wedding secrets.
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A woman in Lakewood, Ohio, committed the biggest party foul possible Saturday afternoon when she drove her SUV right into a swimming pool as guests were swimming.
It is unknown how the vehicle got out of control, but the driver, Cheryl Chapman, 46, was charged with operation of a vehicle while impaired and reckless driving, WKYC TV reports.
Homeowners Nancy and Trent Wilson were shocked to see Chapman’s SUV crash through the fence.
“The firemen, police said she was probably going about 30 to 40 miles an hour to break through the fence,” Trent Wilson told Fox8.com.
“And, we looked towards the fence, we heard an explosion,” Nancy Wilson told the station. “I thought it was a bomb. That’s what everyone thought, it’s just a bomb.”
Christopher Sanford was in the pool at the time the SUV crashed in it, but he heard it.
“I hit the water and heard an explosion,” he said. “I turned around and there’s a Jeep in the pool,” he told Cleveland.com.
Chapman was at the bottom of the pool still in the car, so he swam to her, removed her safety belt and hauled through the open car window onto the pool deck.
He said the woman was struggling for air “and kept saying her brakes were bad.”
No one was injured seriously and a crane removed the car out of the pool by the end of the evening.
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WHITE PLAINS, N.Y. (AP) — A lawyer asked the public Wednesday not to rush to judgment in the case of a young mother accused of killing her 5-year-old son by poisoning him with salt, but he offered no details in her defense.
Lacey Spears “looks forward to her day in court and the opportunity to challenge the allegations,” attorney Stephen Riebling said after a brief court session. “We continue to trust the people will keep an open mind and not judge Lacey or the facts of this case based on what’s been reported,” he said. “The defense of this case will be focused on the relevant facts, not fiction.”
He would not elaborate.
Spears, 26, was not in court. Riebling would not comment on how she is doing behind bars. A sister, Rebecca Spears, was in court but would not comment afterward.
Lacey Spears, of Scottsville, Kentucky, pleaded not guilty last month on charges of depraved murder and manslaughter in the death of Garnett-Paul Spears.
The boy died in January at the Westchester Medical Center when, prosecutors say, his sodium levels rose to an extremely dangerous level with no medical explanation. Spears, then living in Chestnut Ridge, was sharing her son’s hospital room — he had been brought there after suffering seizures — and doctors thought she might be harming him. Prosecutors believe she administered sodium through a feeding tube in his stomach.
Spears, who is originally from Decatur, Alabama, for years had chronicled on social media what she said were the boy’s various medical crises.
The depraved murder charge alleges extreme recklessness rather than intentional killing. It carries the same maximum sentence, 25 years to life in prison.
Spears’ lawyers have not yet filed the paperwork that would be required if they plan to offer a psychiatric defense. They would not comment Wednesday on whether that was being contemplated.
Acting state Supreme Court Judge Robert Neary gave the defense until September to file motions. He set Oct. 13 for the next court date.
After nine days of Israeli aerial assaults that have killed more than 200 people in Gaza, Israel and militant groups in the territory said late Wednesday that they would suspend the attacks for five hours on Thursday as a humanitarian gesture at the request of the United Nations.
BONNE TERRE, Mo. (AP) — A former methamphetamine dealer was executed Wednesday for killing three people in rural northern Missouri out of fear that they would report his drug activity to police.
John Middleton, 54, died from an injection of pentobarbital, the sixth execution in Missouri this year. Only Florida and Texas, with seven each, have performed more executions.
Middleton was convicted of killing Randy “Happy” Hamilton and Stacey Hodge in early June 1995, then Alfred Pinegar several days later.
Middleton was a small-time meth dealer in sparsely populated northern Missouri in the mid-1990s. After several drug suspects were arrested on June 10, 1995, he allegedly told a friend: “The snitches around here are going to start going down.”
A day later, according to court records, Middleton and his girlfriend met Hamilton and Hodge on a gravel road. Prosecutors said Middleton shot and killed them both and hid the bodies in the trunk of Hamilton’s car.
Pinegar, another meth dealer, was shot in the face on June 23, 1995. His body was found in a field near Bethany.
Acquaintances say Middleton told them he killed all three. Police also had eyewitness accounts of Middleton purchasing ammunition in the hours before Pinegar’s death. Middleton was convicted in 1997.
Middleton’s girlfriend, Maggie Hodges, is serving life in prison after pleading guilty to second-degree murder in all three deaths.
In February, a man whose name has not been disclosed because he fears retribution signed an affidavit saying that two rival meth dealers drove him to a rural area soon after Pinegar’s death and accused him of being a snitch. He said the men showed him Pinegar’s body, saying: “There’s already been three people killed. You want to be number four?”
The witness said the two dealers then beat him unconscious with a baseball bat and raped his girlfriend.
Harrison County Sheriff Josh Eckerson agreed to take a new look at the case but said his investigation found no evidence to back up the claims. He is convinced that Middleton was the real killer.
The execution Wednesday evening occurred several hours after it was originally scheduled, at 12:01 a.m. A federal judge granted a stay of execution late Tuesday, citing a need for a hearing to determine if Middleton was mentally ill. A federal appeals court overturned the stay and neither the U.S. Supreme Court nor the Missouri Supreme Court would halt the execution. Middleton’s appeals on claims that he was innocent were also turned away, and Gov. Jay Nixon denied a request for clemency.
Missouri has executed one man each month since November, with the exception of May, when the U.S. Supreme Court halted the execution of Russell Bucklew. Bucklew suffers from a rare congenital condition that causes weakened and malformed blood vessels as well as tumors in his nose and throat. The 8th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals plans a hearing on Sept. 9 to determine if lethal injection could cause him to suffer because of his medical condition. After the Supreme Court denied Middleton’s earlier requests for a stay, his attorneys filed another petition. The court also denied that request.
And Missouri Gov. Jay Nixon has denied a request for clemency.
The execution was originally scheduled for 12:01 a.m. but has been delayed all day by legal wrangling.
Missouri law allows a 24-hour window for executions. That means if Middleton has not been executed by midnight Thursday, the Missouri Supreme Court would need to set a new execution date.
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