Go here to see “the Fisher sausage flop-o-meter,” which helps one to calculate tubesteak flaccidity.

“A baby hedgehog which found itself stuck in a crisp packet has been released after a three-and-a-half hour rescue involving six people.”

This new Feist video is really good. Directed by Steven Spielberg, it’s basically a remake of Schindler’s List, with a red butterfly in place of the little girls’ coat. No, it’s really good. And no, it was not directed by Steven Spielberg. It was directed by Keith Megna. The lyrics of the song are nice to listen to today while we hope that electrical power comes back to lower Manhattan, and hope even harder that New Jersey, which is in worse shape than anywhere, can start what will be a long, tough recovery. Let’s hope that benefit helps.

Chris Christie Will Do Literally Anything, Including Be Nice To Barack Obama, To Get Bruce Springsteen’s Approval

Chris Christie’s sudden respect for Barack Obama has enraged conservatives and the Romney campaign, but it makes sense when you remember that Chris Christie loves Bruce Springsteen more than anything, and a disaster just hit New Jersey, and Springsteen will obviously do a benefit. But Springsteen, who is such a Famous Democrat that he actually campaigns with Obama, refuses to have anything to do with Christie. What might change Bruce’s feelings for the Republican governor of New Jersey? What might make The Boss finally give a little love back to his biggest (!) fan, Chris Christie?

This should do it:

Springsteen To Perform At Sandy Benefit on.mtv.com/SA4DOQ Is there any chance he won’t play “4th of July Asbury Park (Sandy)”?

— Ben Greenman (@bengreenman) November 1, 2012

Christie’s unrequited love for Bruce Springsteen is well known and well documented. Conservatives are going double nuts trying to parse the GOP heartthrob’s embrace of Obama just days before the election, but they’re not only missing Christie’s obvious affection for the storm-ravaged state he governs. They’re missing the fact that Bruce Springsteen is the actual Boss of Chris Christie’s soul.

Jeffrey Goldberg wrote in the July 2012 issue of The Atlantic:

This concert is the 129th the governor has attended. His four children all went to Springsteen shows in utero. He knows every word to every Springsteen song. He dreams of playing drums in the E Street Band.

[…]

Despite heroic efforts by Christie, Springsteen, who is still a New Jersey resident, will not talk to him. They’ve met twice — once on an airplane in 1999, and then at the 2010 ceremony inducting Danny DeVito into the New Jersey Hall of Fame, where they exchanged only formal pleasantries. (Christie does say that Springsteen was very kind to his children.) At concerts, even concerts in club-size venues — the Stone Pony, in Asbury Park, most recently — Springsteen won’t acknowledge the governor. When Christie leaves a Springsteen concert in a large arena, his state troopers move him to his motorcade through loading docks. He walks within feet of the stage, and of the dressing rooms. He’s never been invited to say hello. On occasion, he’ll make a public plea to Springsteen, as he did earlier this spring, when Christie asked him to play at a new casino in Atlantic City. “He says he’s for the revitalization of the Jersey Shore, so this seems obvious,” Christie told me. I asked him if he’s received a response to his request. “No, we got nothing back from them,” he said unhappily, “not even a ‘Fuck you.’”

The hurt, the shame! You love somebody so much, and they don’t even give you a “Fuck you” in return.

Now, though, in this moment of real pain and real tragedy, in this time of real New Jersey heroes rescuing people from these Sandy-made suburban hell zones, now they can come together, as neighbors, as brothers, as the kind of people who would either write/sing or actually enjoy a song like “We Take Care of Our Own.” It is time. It is time for the Big Man to join the band.

To hell with Mitt Romney, who wouldn’t know Springsteen from Rick Springfield. To hell with the idiot southerners and midwesterners and other slobs with their shitty Nashville pop and CMT. The Boss is going to play songs, maybe even the insane Tom Waits-esque ballad “4th of July, Asbury Park (Sandy),” with its checkered-tablecloth accordion and dopey rasp lullaby about banging girls underneath the boardwalk and Dylan lines about the cops not needing Madam Marie. Maybe everything that dies, someday comes back. Maybe everythiing that monster of a hurricane did to the Shore will be willed away with song, at least for the duration of the song, anyway. And then Bruce will say some things, sincere words, hopeful words, and then he might just come off the soundstage in that weird bow-legged walk and there stands Big Chris Christie, beaming, eyes glistening with tears … and then sparks fly on E Street, finally and forever, tonight in Jungleland.

UPDATE: It has happened.

Bloomberg BusinessWeek has a very rude message for those fun people who use “climate change” as a punchline on the campaign trail: Global warming is real, superstorms are but one devastating result, and people who continue to say otherwise are “stupid.”

Just to make this science-based rude behavior clear, BusinessWeek editor Josh Tyrangiel had this to say to the world of Twitter:

Our cover story this week may generate controversy, but only among the stupid.buswk.co/PIUzUl via @bw

— Josh (@Tyrangiel) November 1, 2012

“The real campaign is startlingly simple: it is the Obama team’s fanatical pursuit, behind the scenes, diagram by diagram, plan by plan, of what politicos call the ‘base vote.’ These are the Democratic leaners who will be deciding not between Obama and Romney, but between voting for Obama and not voting at all.”

by J. Shafer

Nobody can deny Manhattan’s cultural primacy or its historical importance. But before we refloat the sunken city, before we think of spending billions of dollars rebuilding marble lobbies that may last only until the next storm, before we contemplate reconstructing the thousands of homes now disintegrating in the toxic tang of the flood, let’s investigate what sort of place Sandy destroyed.

The city’s romance is not the reality for most who live there. It’s a poor place, with about 20.9 percent of the population living under the poverty line, and it’s a brown place, where 55 percent are non-white. In 2011, in a full 123 percent of families living in poverty that appeared on “CSI: NY,” no husband was present.

New York’s public schools have failed their citizens. The state of New York rates its schools as “very arrestable” with 96 Percent of students arrested by the NYPD for being African-American or Latino. And only 18 percent of people who casually use “Bronx Science” or “Stuyvesant High School” in conversation actually graduated from either school.

The police inspire little trust and are regularly arrested for raping the population they are charged with protecting and, when charged, are regularly acquitted for the rapes.

The city’s housing stock is much older than the national average, with many of the notable new buildings carrying the Trump name. As any tourist to The Village has observed, many of these now-flooded units are modest to spartan to ramshackle brick buildings whose only claim to value is that some beatnik poet once urinated in its stairwell more than a half century ago. That these famous, washed away puke stains were closer to those buildings’ construction dates 100 years ago than the modern day are lost on the residents, many of whom are transients — students from NYU whose rents are paid by parents living far outside the physical and psychological pull of the city.

New York puts the “D” into dysfunctional. Only a sadist would insist on resurrecting this concentration of poverty, crime and deplorable schools. Yet that’s what New York’s cheerleaders — both natives and bagel-eating tourists — are advocating. They predict that once they drain the water and scrub the city clean, they’ll restore New York to its former “glory.”

Nobody disputes the geographical and oceanographic odds against New York: that re-engineering Battery Park to control flooding has made New York more vulnerable by encouraging high-rise apartment development; that the aggressive extraction of soil for subways and basement parking has undermined the stability of its land; that the Atlantic east coast is a perfect breeding ground for hurricanes (A Perfect Storm, the title of a book and later hit film with hunk George Clooney, was named after an Atlantic hurricane system). Several bankers (who wished to remain anonymous) said they saw themselves as Captain Billy Tyne (Clooney’s character) types as they made their way to work Wednesday morning. “She’s not going to let us out,” one joked on his way to Goldman’s (likely submerged) West Street office.

“There was quicksand in the Times Square area,” says BKMunroe, first answerer to the Wiki Answers questions about whether or not Manhattan was once a swamp. “The Hotel Darlington was being constructed on West 46th between 5th and 6th Avenues and it collapsed killing 25 workers because it was partially built on quicksand,” he contends.

The call to rebuild Lower Manhattan may be mooted if its residents decide not to return. Federal government flood insurance is limited to $250,000 for building property and $100,000 for personal property. Because the insured can use the money elsewhere, there is no guarantee they’ll not choose to spend it on strippers. In fact, does America want to stomach reimbursing the “Pussycat Lounge” on Greenwich and Rector streets, not only because it is an “exotic” dance club but also because its dancers have long since stood on shelved stages behind the bar and were certainly high up enough to avoid any flooding?

New York won’t disappear overnight, of course. Washington Heights, The Upper East Side, Clinton Hill and other elevated parts of the city will survive until the ultimate storm takes them out — and maybe even thrive as tourist destinations and places to live the good life. But it would be a mistake to raise the American Atlantis. It’s gone.

******

Apologies to Woody Allen, Henry James, Edith Wharton, Walt Whitman, Jonas Salk, Robert De Niro (acting is the highest expression of male emotion), Jack Shafer, Martin Scorsese, Barbara Stanwyck, Mickey Rooney, Nick Denton, George Gershwin, Jackie Gleason, Billy Joel, John D. Rockefeller, JLo, Bill the Butcher, Franklin D. Roosevelt (but not Theodore Roosevelt, asshole) and, especially, Danny Aiello. I await your hate mail.

So we’re all agreed that the polite thing to do for the next couple of weeks is not mention the extra pounds we’ve put on over the last few days, right? RIGHT?

Happy birthday to Marcia Karen Wallace. Bob Newhart’s receptionist and Bart Simpson’s teacher turns 70 today.

Throughout the recent history of humanity at least, if not all of it, one thing has always been true. Rich people have their primary homes on hills, and their secondary and tertiary homes at sea level. That way when they lose their beach houses, they can fly their helicopters back to the main house.

Two articles are getting a good bit of attention in the wake of Hurricane Sandy: There’s this, about the “hideous inequality” of New York: “Divides between the rich and the poor are nothing new in New York, but the storm brought them vividly to the surface. There were residents like me who could invest all of their time and energy into protecting their families. And there were New Yorkers who could not.” True! And then there’s this, about bankers and how they suffered in their own way. (JP MORGAN CLOSED ITS DUMPLING BAR.) (If I can be fair to Wall Streeters for a minute, I am sure that there are plenty of bankers who have not bathed or left their office tower for days now, and that is not fun.)

But really the rich and poor story of New York City is topography.

There is, duh, a reason everything is called Clinton and Richmond and Boerum and Murray and Cobble HILL, and Park SLOPE, and Brooklyn and Greenwood and Morningside and Washington and Hamilton HEIGHTS, it seems obvious to point out. And that that is where, for the most part, the real nice houses are. (Carroll Gardens, likewise, is directly atop a hill.) Poor people, in general, live in the valleys, and down the slopes, and by the water. They live in the landfill of Alphabet City and the marshy edges of Manhattan, and then it floods. (Lord knows what it would be like if we hadn’t largely leveled Manhattan.) Rich people, still, own nice houses on the hill. (And some of us in the middle rent floors in them.)

If you want a fairly useful picture of class divisions in New York City, and also one of who gets the shaft during a hurricane, just get a nice topographical map.

While that’ll basically remain true, what with the $2-million-plus Clinton Hill townhouse, but as New York City spreads, and you get your towers on the far west side of Trumptown, and your new condos on the Gowanus and in Williamsburg, and all that jazz — you get richer people squeezing out poorer people.

But nice new housing stock floods almost as easily as old housing stock.

Not that it’ll matter too much in the Horrible Dystopian Future, when Washington Heights, at 265 feet above sea level, looks out over the vast submerged plain of lower Manhattan.

Image and caption from Gotham:A History of New York City to 1898.