Opportunities Available to the Very Rich That You & I Don’t Even Know About

So there's David Letterman interviewing the actor, activist, and now AARP eligible, George Clooney, last night, when the questioning gets around (no doubt pre-conditionally) to Clooney's genuinely admirable charitable activities in the newly independent Republic of South Sudan. Clooney replies [and I paraphrase] that, at the moment, he is primarily involved in leasing a satellite to monitor potentially intrusive military activity along the fragile Republic's border by the unfriendly regime to its north.

BING! goes my old newsman's ¿que tal? alert, as I await what has to be Letterman's next question: "do you mean to tell us that private citizens can actually rent spy satellites?" Well, the question didn't get asked (maybe Dave already knew the answer) so your intrepid correspondent was all over the web this morning seeking the answer which, in fact, turns out to be: yes, we can.

Thanks to Congress's passage of the Land Remote Sensing Policy Act of 1992, private companies such as DigitalGlobe in Longmont, Colorado can indeed operate such satellites under license from the Department of Commerce and lease them to whomever, including Clooney's Satellite Sentinel Project (SSP), an outgrowth of the advocacy group, Not on Our Watch, founded by Clooney and his fellow global activists, Don Cheadle, Matt Damon, and Brad Pitt.

One of DigitalGlobe's biggest customers is, as I should have realized, Google, with its virtually galactic reach; but I'd always thought Google simply bought last year's non-real-time, non-sensitive, imagery from the DoD since the pictures on Google Earth don't actually have to move (although, I guess, neither do SSP's).

Which puts me in mind -- however irrelevantly -- of Galileo's supposed sotto voce comment, when he abjured the heresy of Heliocentrism before his inquisitors: "eppur si muove" (but still, it moves).

Anyway, if you have lotsa bucks, and want to surreptitiously observe what's going on behind your neighbor's fence, you now know where to turn.

Tell Me a Story

This is a rave for PBS's "Prohibition".

I've borrowed the title of Don Hewitt's autobiography as the headline for this post, because Don always used the expression to explain the concept behind the singular success of his "60 Minutes", the longest running primetime series in TV network history. Of course, all documentaries have a story to tell and/or a message to convey, but too often the latter aim overwhelms the former, leaving us with a worthy, but not overly engaging, viewing experience; especially one that demands our close attention for a cumulative five and a half hours.

Producers Ken Burns and Lynn Novick have managed to deliver both story and message as adroitly as any documentary I have ever seen, and I say this as an alumnus of the so-called "Tiffany network" era at CBS News. "Prohibition" is not – nor does it aspire to be – of as cosmically important subject matter as some classics of the documentary genre, but it more than admirably fulfils its promise and, not so incidentally, is more fun than a barrel of schnapps.

Watch it; you'll enjoy it, while painlessly learning a lot about 20th century American history, the Constitution, the astonishing power of popular movements, and how to become a home brewer without attracting undue attention from the ATF.

Reality Check

As an alumnus of CBS News, I still enjoy a frisson of familial pride when CBS aces a story, or otherwise covers itself with journalistic glory. Such was not the case last week, however, when CBS began airing a promo claiming to have "invented original reporting on television," a claim so overweeningly bogus that the frisson it produced was one of squirming embarrassment.

Prominently featured in the promo were clips from "60 Minutes" and the "CBS Evening News", the accomplishments of whose producers and anchors over the years are legendary. Don Hewitt, Walter Cronkite, the Murrow team, and their ilk must have turned over in their graves at such a display of unwarranted hubris.

For an evenhanded take on the question read David Shedden of Poynter here, and, if you want to join me in a group cringe, see the offending promo here.

Fall Follies

We note that Congressional leaders have announced their appointments for the deficit-reduction "supercommittee." Is there anyone out there who actually believes that this bunch will produce anything of benefit to the electorate, or that they will not replicate the farcical dance attending the recent debt ceiling negotiations, winding up by delivering some further recovery-killing plan at the last moment in order to avoid even more toxic statutory cuts?

Punditville has until Thanksgiving to dine out on this story.

Bastille Day

David McCullough, writing in the New York Times, reminds us of the reasons why Americans should be toasting the French on July 14. No indiscriminate francophile I, but we (and especially the "freedom fries" crowd) need periodic reminding that if it hadn't been for the French army, navy, and bankroll at the battle of Yorktown, we'd still be singing "God Save the Queen".

Yesterday's Daily Beast listed the 20 most dangerous jobs in America. Close scrutiny failed to turn up blogging among them, and yet, and yet…

On April Fool's Day, I was blithely processing a post when I decided to get a Coke™ from the fridge. As I rose from my desk, one of the computer cables dangling thereunder snared my ankle, and I pitched forward onto my hip, fracturing my femur as I hit the floor. The floor was unfazed.

Yesterday, I returned home after two weeks of surgical repair and physical therapy.

I suspect that the rats' nest of wires under my desk resembles that of many of my colleagues, so please take this posting as a cautionary tale and CLEAN IT UP before you have to bring someone in to do it for you while you watch from your wheelchair.

Liz and Me

Allow me to try your patience by adding a few more words to the millions already penned and processed on the death of Elizabeth Taylor.

First off, I would refer you to an article in the New York Times by the indefatigable Dick Cavett. As a brief personal take on the Lizanddick
era, it's worth a read.

Then there's the story-captured-in-a-caption in The Onion, an item that has challenged press critics as to its editorial appropriateness, even conceding The Onion's self-appointed role as edgy iconoclast.

And, finally, there's the story of Liz and me.

One of the great untold sagas of unrequited love in the last century was my own obsession with Liz. It got underway in wartime, the background of so many equally doomed romances. In 1944—when I was 14 and she 12—I emerged from the dark confines of our local movie palace having watched National Velvet, the stars in my eyes undimmed by the post-matinee sunlight, entranced by my first passionate crush.

Fast forward six years to the Hurricane Club, an upscale eating spot built on pilings in the shallows of Biscayne Bay between Miami and Key Biscayne well before the advent of the bay-spanning Rickenbacker Causeway. You could only get there by boat, and my ride that day was a 19-foot sailboat, helmed by my college roommate, Jack O'Leary. As we pulled up to the club's dock to tie up—a frosty Bud in mind—I glanced up, and there, leaning over the deck rail watching us, was the goddess herself. To say that I was stuck dumb at the vision is to stretch rhetorical understatement to the limit. She was accompanied by her then-boyfriend Glen Davis, the Heisman-winning "Mr. Inside" of West Point's famous "Touchdown Twins", of which Doc Blanchard was "Mr. Outside".

The couple was waiting for guests to arrive for a private luncheon, so the four of us were as yet the only patrons lounging around the deck. O'Leary and I, sophisticated, celebrity-immune New Yorkers that we were, pretended ostentatiously not to notice the glamorous duo, while they, used to such transparent pseudo-indifference, were of course well aware of our surreptitious glances. Lord, was she gorgeous! The countless words that have been written about her breathtaking onscreen beauty cannot begin to convey the punch-in-the-gut impact of an in-the-flesh encounter. At 18, wearing a violet bathing suit that mirrored the color of her eyes, her voluptuousness was simply beyond the descriptive ability of mere words, or, at least, of any that haven't lost their power through overuse.

Draining our barely-affordable beer, Jack and I reluctantly peeled ourselves away and re-boarded our boat. As I loosed the mooring line, the goddess, again leaning over the rail, asked me if I knew what time it was. SHE SPOKE TO ME! SHE ACTUALLY SPOKE TO ME! Still unable—Koothrappali-like—to utter a word in her intoxicating presence, I had, to my shame and chagrin, to leave it up to O'Leary to respond. As we set our sails, he shouted out a farewell so inane that it has haunted me all these years just to have been associated with it: "see you in the movies", he yelled, as I cringed in the cockpit. I've never forgiven him, nor forgotten her.

RIP, girl of my youthful dreams.