Dan's Papers - July 18, 2008 - Grenades & Parachutes

Last week, a hand grenade was found in a few feet of water on the western shore of the Shinnecock Canal. The whole community was evacuated for a while, including patrons of the Tide Runner restaurant who, abandoning their knives and forks, were led to a safe shelter beneath the Shinnecock Bridge.

Those who saw the hand grenade, before it was turned over to the authorities and blown up, said it looked like a pineapple, which meant that it was an older type of hand grenade rather than a smooth, newer one. Suffolk County Sheriff Vincent DeMarco, when asked by a reporter if he could pinpoint just what era this hand grenade was from, said, "Unfortunately, when it was detonated we lost the most important piece of evidence for the investigation."

You remember all those trailers that FEMA bought for the displaced persons in and around New Orleans after the hurricane? There were 100,000 of them occupying acres and acres of farmland in Louisiana, Mississippi and Alabama. Well, they are still there. I listened to an NPR segment about them. We paid $1.8 billion for them. And after FEMA gave up trying to give them out because the project was so bollixed up with paperwork, they then discovered that they were right in not giving them out. Nearly all the trailers are leaking formaldehyde from their seams, a dangerous situation that could be life-threatening. Formaldehyde had been used in the manufacturing process.

The broadcast I was listening to went on for 10 minutes, and at various points people commented on the situation.

"I just want to live in one. They just look so nice and comfy sitting there," one neighbor says. "I don't care about any old whatchagiggit that they made 'em out of."

Since the trailers have been declared a danger to human health, there seems no choice other than to break them up for scrap. But FEMA just can't seem to bring themselves to do that.

The NPR reporter talked to a guard, who is one of hundreds guarding the trailers.

"The idea is that we're supposed to guard them so nobody'll steal 'em. We've been successful. Anyone can see that."

The cost that we taxpayers are coughing up to pay the security guards is millions of dollars every year.

I was more intrigued, however, about how FEMA came to buy these trailers in the first place. So Katrina hits, and the levees break and everybody's running around, and a FEMA official shows up at a trailer-manufacturing warehouse.

"We need 100,000 trailers right away," he says breathlessly.

"We don't have 100,000 trailers."

"What about those over there?"

"They're all no good. They're all leaking formaldehyde."

"Well, we will sell 'em to you cheap, all things considered."

"That won't be necessary."

We've all had the experience of not being able to get front row tickets to a show, or a front table at a fancy restaurant where we made a reservation, only to find out when we get there that somebody richer has commandeered our reservation.

Now there is a man here in the Hamptons who claims he has been bumped from his reserved burial plot. He bought it. Now they're giving him one in the back row. His name is Dick King, he is 73, he lives in East Hampton, and he is not taking this lightly.

King bought a plot in the cemetery that everybody wants to get into because so many famous people are buried there. I refer to, of course, the Green River Cemetery in Springs. Jackson Pollock is buried there. Steve Ross is buried there. King bought a plot, or he thought he bought a plot, under a cedar tree and right next to Alfonso Ossorio, the late artist and Filipino sugar heir who lived in a 60-acre estate on the shore of Georgica Pond in East Hampton for many years.

When King went to the funeral of a friend at the cemetery recently, he learned from the caretaker there that the site he thought he bought was now the property of somebody else, and his site was up by Accabonac Road, with all the traffic.

I don't know what to make of this story, but one of our other local papers ran it on the front page. Hey, I feel bad for him, but you know, money talks, particularly here in the Hamptons.

Then there was Jeb Corliss, the guy who, six months ago, jumped off the top of the Empire State Building, deployed a parachute, and floated down to earth where the police grabbed him.

He was originally convicted by a lower court with a felony - reckless endangerment with depraved indifference to life, which could have got him a jail sentence. But now he is in a higher court on appeal.

His lawyers argued that his earlier felony conviction was based on an older standard no longer in use, and that the newer standard required that for him to be convicted, he would have to be shown to have "an utter disregard for the value of human life and a willingness to act because one doesn't care."

They successfully argued that, as a trained skydiver, Corliss was neither utterly disregarding human life or acting as if he didn't care, because when he approached the ground, he carefully pulled on his ropes so as to not land on anybody.

Because of this flaw, the lawyers argued, the case against Corliss should be thrown out. The lawyers also noted that there was no law that made it illegal to jump off a high building.

In the end, the judge reduced the charge to a minor felony, and Corliss paid a small fine and left.

"At no time was anybody in danger of being fallen upon," the judge wrote. "As the accused approached the ground, he manipulated the ropes in order to safely avoid landing on anyone."

The New York Post last week discovered that the government's value of a human being in dollars and cents has been cut. For years and years, it was $7.8 million. Now it is $6.9 million.

How this works for the Bush administration is that whenever some proposed legislation comes in that might cost, say, $18 billion but will result in a drop in lives lost somewhere in the country, the $18 billion in "cost" is weighed in the estimated human "benefit" of lives saved. If the benefit is more than the cost, it is worth doing. If it is not, they forget it with a clear conscience.

Considering inflation and the sudden leap in the cost of living because of oil prices, you are probably half the person you once were.