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Bay Ridge Hum
2007-11-07 03:52:00
Out-worlders would probably expect Brooklyn to sound like inner-city traffic, police sirens and "Yo! Vinnie! T'row me down some money fa a' egg cream!" Actually, it's pretty quiet down here by the harbor, except for the low-flying NYPD helicopters. Nevertheless, I have two "bizarre noise" stories. I'll talk about the most public one first and, if I can keep it short, I'll tell the other one. In late 2005, I was at the dog run when an obviously exhausted woman told me that she was kept awake all night by a loud hum outside. She lives only three blocks from me so she asked if I'd heard it too. I told her I was sorry but I hadn't heard a thing. She bore on, telling me that it sounded like a low engine rumble, almost like a fog horn, except it was non-stop. I thought there might be a simple explanation: she was nuts. A few months later, I read an article in our local paper, the Bay Ridge Courier. It was a brief interview with a resident on Colonial Rd complaining about ...

My Product Review
2007-10-23 19:05:00
The last product I was asked to review was an in-floor Kryptonite locking system for motorcycles for Motorcyclist mag. I injured my knee tripping on that #*$% lock in the dark. Let's see if I have more luck with the EZ Clean paint brush that Jeannie from Houseblogs.netasked me to check out. My project was painting my kitchen extension, which still had seven year-old primer on the walls. It's one of those Deferred Completion Syndrome items I was happy to check off the list for this product test. I didn't have a clue what I would be testing other than it would be a "new painting tool". When UPS delivered the box and I saw what it was I have to admit I was a little disappointed. I guess I was expecting something dramatic like a high tech masking tape product or an ultrasonic paint stirrer. Those are jobs I hate doing. Cleaning paint brushes doesn't really bother me. In fact, I find it strangely cathartic. I also have to say that I was skeptical when I saw the name. I'v...
More About: Product Review , Review , Product

Stripping a Door: Part 1
2007-10-21 05:41:00
I brought in an amateur stripper, Doc Karen, to serve as my photo model for this two part pictorial. Even anesthesiologists have to moonlight to make ends meet these days <grin>. I was gratified that she took our tutorial seriously enough to wear her surgical scrubs (mismatched as they were). I guess that makes me "House". Karen's own house is full of painted architectural woodwork so she wanted to learn how the paint stripping process worked. Since it's her door now I was only too happy to hand her the tools and take my position behind the camera, tucking an occasional dollar bill in her rubber glove and yelling, "Take it all off, baby!" until she threatened to beat me stupid. The first thing she did was get the door in a comfortable working position on a pair of sawhorses. Whenever possible, try to remove the woodwork and get it horizontal. This applies to baseboards and casings too. If you don't, you'll know why this is a good idea about twenty minutes into ...
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Saving The World: Black Pixels and Termite Farts
2007-10-14 20:23:00
Tomorrow, Oct 15, is Blog Action Day and tens of thousands of bloggers like me have each committed to writing an article about the environment. BrooklynRowHouse is about old home renovation and improvement so this topic is a low, slow ball over the plate for people like me. (Do you like how I worked in a baseball metaphor during playoff season? I actually couldn't care less about baseball but this will be a long article and I need to use whatever cheap literary devices I can to hold your interest because there are thousands of bloggers out there who write better than me and we're all writing about the same thing.) I think a lot of us old house shut-ins are going to contribute something along the lines of this: If you're thinking about downsizing from the SUV parked in your garage, consider what's possibly parked in your utility room: a 30 year-old, low-efficiency heating system and a 20-year old water heater. Unlike your gas guzzler, your heating system is cranking 24/7 ...
More About: World , Black , The World , Saving , Term

Cheap digs
2007-10-05 05:33:00
Jeannie from Houseblogs.net challenged us blogger monkeys to write a show-and-tell post. Considering the probably millions of bucks that we housebloggers collectively squander annually on new roofs, new additions, central air and glass door knobs, if there was a ever a low, slow ball over the plate for this group, this was it! Bragging about my tool collection was the first thing that popped into my head. but I just got off a nine-month drunk bedroom reno project where I blabbed relentlessly about them. What about my central vac? Nah, I did that one recently too. My dogs, Jack and Auggie? Furry pets are always a safe fallback post when you've got nothing else to talk about. I wish I could boast about my auction and flea market finds but I've been pretty disappointed by them the past year or two. All I bought at the last one was a bag of kettle corn. Home automation? Not again. Instead, I want to talk about something I've had since I was 11 years old: a book that my da...
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A Prodigal Door Returns
2007-09-29 04:21:00
Okay, it's a lightweight job and it's not even for my house. But after several months of heads-down work on a software task for my client, The Children's Health Fund, I've got another DIY project. Maybe it will kick me back into gear to finish the cabinet doors and stained glass projects that have been dogging me all summmer. Well, some of it for a lot longer than that. The job is stripping an old interior door and replacing its center panel with some sort of a screen. Karen is a licensed wildlife rescuer and needs this door so her animal room has adequate ventilation. She wanted to install an aluminum screen door but my relentless bleating about what a hideous scar that would leave on her old house succeeded. I suggested that she instead do some dumpster diving for a 30" door and we'd modify it so it would at least have some architectural integrity with her old federal style house. She agreed. More importantly, I figured that would keep her busy until sometime next ye...
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Tin Roof Expert visiting: Anyone want to learn?
2007-09-10 17:59:00
October : Lady Liberty?s Tin Man ?Ternes? toward Howard Hall Farm Our House at Howard Hall Farm has a Terne Tin roof, so over the years, Reggie has done a lot of research on it. He?s been looking for an expert for quite some time now, so when he read an article in the New York Post about THE TIN MAN who is the fourth generation of a line of tinsmiths (dating back to 1892), and Lady Liberty?s personal assistant, he couldn?t resist getting in touch with him. Incredible as it seems, Dennis Heaphy has agreed to come work on Howard Hall Farm?s tin roof! He?ll be working here for a week in mid-October. During his stay, Dennis will be conducting a presentation for children (on October 20th) about the making of the statue of Liberty. In an interview for ?The Tin Man:Metalsmith puts best face on Lady Liberty?, by C.J. Sullivan(New York Post) , Mr. Heaphy said, ?This truly is my dream job. It?s an evolution of everything I?ve ever done. It?s an opportunity to use an esoteric knowledge, combin...
More About: Roof , Learn , Expert , Pert

The Flamingo Kid Rides Again
2007-08-28 05:49:00
This weekend I was invited again to my neighbor's annual court party at her cabana at the Breezy Point Surf Club in the Rockaways. Breezy, a/k/a the Irish Riviera, is as definitively "boro" as it gets and as timelessly shabby as a summer camp. Anyone who's seen Garry Marshall's 1984 movie, "The Flamingo Kid", with Matt Dillon might be able to imagine the place. In fact, that movie was filmed on location only a mile down the beach from Breezy at a similar, although higher-end, beach club. My buy-in for the annual invite is my sangria, which I immodestly admit has few peers. It's loaded with good wine, brandy, Triple Sec, at least six fresh fruits and a few secret ingredients. (I'll cop to one of them: cinnamon sticks). I come laden with six gallons of the stuff, both red and white. It's too easy to take cheap shots at Breezy. After passing through the gates, it looks less like a beach club than a refugee camp with tiny, cluttered wooden cabanas abutting the parking lot...
More About: Ming

Pet peeves
2007-08-13 05:53:00
"Pet peeve" is a terrible metaphor. Pets are warm and drooly and something you like. Peeves are something which irritates the hell out of you, sometimes to an unnatural extreme. What annoys me to an unnatural extreme? Tonight it's pinheads who have garages but instead park their cars on the sidewalk because they think they have a right to do so by virtue of having a legally protected curb cut. More often than not, they've converted their garages into attic extensions, packed full with boxes of Christmas decorations and forgotten bicycles. They have no intention of using those garages for their vehicles, which was mandatory for city approval of their curb cuts. Then there are those black belt twits who not only park on the sidewalk but park their second cars at the curb cut so pedestrians have to walk into the middle of the street to pass by. Or, worse, rent out their curb cuts as parking spaces. You just know they're the first to cry foul when someone crowds their driveway...
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A Tree Blows Down in Brooklyn
2007-08-09 03:04:00
About 5:30am this morning I was suddenly awake. I'm not sure if it was the threatening thunder approaching from the northwest or my shivering, hundred-pound Newfoundland desperately trying to crawl under the covers with me. Outside, it was like War of the Worlds... real Wrath of God stuff. Lightning was flashing like a paparazzi frenzy and the thunder was getting progressively angrier. I heard the rain starting. Within minutes it was coming down in buckets. Seriously, that's what it sounded like: someone dropping buckets on my roof. By now, most of you have probably heard that Brooklyn experienced its first tornado since the 19th century (and that one was barely a dust devil). Because modern Brooklyn doesn't like to do things small, this one was an EF2, as classified by the National Weather Service this afternoon. My immediate neighborhood was its landfall before it worked its way north-northeast and into Sunset Park, Boro Park and Kensington. At 5:45am I crawled out o...
More About: Tree , Rook

Test, test... is this mic on?
2007-08-05 06:29:00
It's been a month since my last blog post. I'm touched that people have emailed to see if I'm okay or if I fell under a lumber truck or something. I'd like to say that I'm on an extended vacation, motorcycling in the Andes or taking an expert seminar on timber frame construction at Howard Hall Farm but, no, this is my typical mid-summer geek fest. It's when I put down the tools and immerse myself in overdue computer projects, a/k/a working for a living. For anyone who's interested, I'm building my first "Web 2.0" project for The Childrens Health Fund and it's seventeen affiliates. It's a referral and transportation management system (TRMS) to track patients, mostly kids from medically under-served communities, through their encounters with our byzantine health care system. And get them to and from their appointments. Another "first" is that I'm a one-man band on this project -- the organ grinder and the monkey. Usually, I'm spoiled with having a designer or two, ...
More About: Test

Robot, robot
2007-07-05 19:31:00
There was a song by a Chicago band called The Flock that I used to love during my trippy teen days: Robo t , robot arms and legs Teeth, bones, hair, its all there Robot, robot arms and legs Battery's dead, head's dead. (Mechanical man, mechanical man!) Whenever I muck with my home automation hardware this song plays over and over again in my head. It's pretty maddening. Sitting on my dining room table since last Thanksgiving was a small pile of boxes containing Insteon controllers, in-wall dimmers, relays and the like that have been waiting patiently for me to complete the master bedroom renovation. I was intending to do client work over the Fourth but after sixteen consecutive days of building database stored procedures I needed a break! So I assembled my tools and got busy making that pile smaller. Anyone who has read the X10 primer I posted here knows that I'm a nut for home automation gear. And anyone who has read my blog knows that I've been very faithful with renov...

A Case of the Mightaswells
2007-06-25 19:55:00
If you own home in progress, whether you're a DIYer or someone who calls a contractor to change the lightbulbs, you know the syndrome. "As long as I'm updating the kitchen, I might as well make it larger." "As long as I'm pouring a new basement floor, I might as well replace all the old plumbing underneath. And then I might as well rough out for another full bath. Then I might as well build it." "As long as I'm opening up the wall, I might as well add a central vacuum system, split-unit air conditioning and a new 50a riser to the second floor. And a whole house beer tap!" You think I'm making this stuff up? That's me, folks! Well , except for the beer tap but, believe me, I came very close to doing it. And compressor outlets on every floor too. Anyway, the mightaswells struck this weekend when I decided I needed to sand and add another coat of Danish oil to the ipe table I made for the living room deck a couple of years ago. Karen found the wrought iron base in one ...
More About: Case , Wells , Swell

More and more sawdust
2007-06-20 03:28:00
With the top floor reno winding down and my tools reunited with their friends in the basement, it was time to turn my attention to the crime scene that used to be my shop. I don't mind working in a messy environment but I can't start a new project unless everything is neat and tidy, with every tool in its proper place, the table saw waxed, stationary tools aligned, blades sharpened, etc. This is my operating room, after all, and you don't cut out new patient's gall bladder with the last one's blood still on the walls. Today was the marathon cleanup of the past nine months of mayhem. It actually began last night because I needed to catch this morning's garbage pickup. Did I say how much the Sanitation guys love me? They even autographed one of my garbage cans a few years ago, scrawling "Balls!" on it with black magic marker. Out went four large garbage cans of wood scraps, some of it legacy leftovers from earlier renovation projects -- a lot of it short pieces of crow...
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Time to buy a bed
2007-06-04 04:15:00
I can't freakin' believe it. All my tools are back in the shop where they belong, the paint's up, the room is clean, the nine-month saga of the master bedroom renovation.... so OVER! Okay, there are still a few things left to do: the cabinet drawers and doors, the hallway stained glass windows, the doorknobs. I'll get around to it. Over the last few weeks I've been finishing up the hallway, the two closets and my outside plantings. There's always a sense of closure when I lay that second coat of paint, especially after a nine month project. I used a wedgewood blue matte finish. It was down to that, salmon or a pale yellow. I couldn't decide so I just closed my eyes and picked one. I like it. It's sorta weird in these shots because the camera makes it look lighter than it really is. It's time to reflect back on the lessons I learned. At the top of the list is, don't use engineered floors if you have big, energetic dogs. The floors already look like they...
More About: Time

I actually do have house stuff to blog about
2007-05-19 05:53:00
After all, it's been almost two weeks since my last blog post. However, I like to accompany my renovation articles with photos and the bedroom is currently an eyesore while I reorganize closets and get rid of clothes I've had since my disco show band days. No way am I posting photos of it now. A fair question would be why I'm reorganizing closets when I haven't finished the bedroom reno yet. I have a long closet that connects the two bedrooms. That's where I stuffed everything when I began this project. Now I have to lay a new floor in there. Being the well-prepared guy that I am, I didn't cover the clothes when I started the reno so they're buried under plaster and saw dust. I've been washing clothes for the last three days and hanging them in the new cedar closet. I can almost see the floor now. Even if disco comes roaring back, I don't think my 28" waistline will. Maybe St Theresa's church can find something useful to do with my purple and green palm tree motif...
More About: House , Blog , Stuff , Have , Ouse

At last, that curved baseboard!
2007-05-03 18:02:00
I've been pushing off this little project for a couple of months. The bedroom renovation began with construction of the closet and the curved plaster corner I absolutely had to have (if for no other reason than I'd never done one before). I knew that was going to create problems with the trim later but, hey, later is later. Six months later, later became today. There are basically four ways to build a curve using solid lumber. One is to steam it and bend it in a jig. Bending 1" nominal hardwood stock to as shallow a radius as I need is probably impossible, at least with my skills, and since I don't have a wood steamer anyway, it's moot. So let's move on. The second method also involves a jig but instead of bending solid lumber you build up thin veneer layers like plywood. You can construct a very small radius this way and lots of glue ensures a stable curve. The third way is to saw lots of narrow vertical kerfs in the back of the stock, leaving a thin facing layer t...
More About: Curve , That , Base

Engineered Flooring HOWTO v2.0
2007-04-15 07:04:00
I don't like drywall. I like plaster. I don't like composite mouldings. I like hardwood. Heck, I don't even like prefab mouldings. I like to cut my own. So why would I like something as new-fangled and artificial as engineered flooring? Actually, I don't. Even though I went through bloody hell to lay those herringbone floors in the living room, solid hardwood is still my first choice. But there were reasons why engineered flooring was the better option for the second floor in my house. One is that I didn't want to add an extra 1.25" to the height of the top stair. That's what would have been required if I'd gone with 3/4" hardwood. I can't count the number of times I've tripped because of uneven stair heights, on one occasion fracturing a shoulder. Also, an engineered floor has a finish at least twice as hard as that of any job-site applied finish. With two big dogs tearing up my hardwood floors downstairs that's not a small selling point for me. Just to be...
More About: Flooring , Ring , Engine , Howto , Engineer

Con Ed resolution
2007-04-13 16:16:00
Catching up on the recent fun at BrooklynRowHouse, I've finally got my electrical back. My electrician strapped the panel so I didn't have a half-dark house but I couldn't run any 220v appliances, including my Delta table saw. That brought the woodworking in the bedroom reno to a dead stop. The stories about the fried feeder line are here and here. I was very concerned that my saw and clothes dryer could be out of commission for months. My neighbor had the same problem and it took Con Ed four months to fix it. That's why I was surprised that Con Ed made an appointment for t'weaks. Of course, they failed to show up for it. After spending that day talking with Con Ed droids who played three card monte with my calls, transferring me to voice mail boxes all over Brooklyn, I guess I must have left a message with the right person because later that afternoon I got a callback from a woman profusely apologizing for their "computer screwup". Someone had flagged my job as being ...
More About: Solution , Resolution

Mea Culpa.
2007-04-10 05:09:00
Forgive me, blog, for I have sinned. It's been a month since my last confession. I've been so busy that I haven't found the time to sit down and write about what I was up to. I should break this update into a few posts. Lemme talk about the bedroom reno first. After I got derailed by Con Ed's feeder line burning out and putting my 220v Delta table saw temporarily out of commission, I regrouped and decided to start on the finish work. The remaining trim work is mostly shop stuff so I can do it later. Three days! Three miserable frikkin days! That's how long it took to fill all the nail holes and sand the 500+ square feet of woodwork in the bedroom and hallway renovation down to 220 grit. After that, I vacuumed and ran tack cloths over every square inch of it. Then I applied an oil wood conditioner. This usually isn't critical with hardwood or hardwood plywood but sometimes the veneer blades can leave cutting marks that you won't see until you apply the stain. S...

T'weaks
2007-03-19 17:33:00
Wow. I was surprised at 8:45am this morning when a big Con Ed truck pulled up just as I was walking out the door with the pooches. If you read my last post, I lost one leg of power to my house yesterday. The extorti...er, electrician I summoned pronounced one of the feed cables from the street DOA and called Con Ed to report it. He left me with a number to call if I didn't hear from Con Ed soon, which he translated to mean "in the next two or three weeks". In other words, it's the classic unit of flex-time I call t'weaks. Yes, I know it sounds like "two weeks" but that's where you're wrong. That only leads to false expectations (see: contractorus interruptus). It's really more of a Klingon word. T'weaks lives in a different temporal dimension from terrestrial time, immune even to General Relativity. Let's use it in a sentence. "When will that part arrive?" "T'weaks." "When can your guys get started?" "T'weaks." T'weaks is based on quantum theory. It's sorta like...

Bummer
2007-03-19 01:40:00
I was checking my email today when my computers and monitor suddenly shut down. The music went quiet in the living room downstairs as well. But I could hear the radio playing in the shop downstairs. It took me five seconds to figure out what happened. People a block away probably heard me yell, "NOOOOoooo!!" This has happened to other houses on the block. The underground feeder cables into these houses are old. Add a bunch of melting snow and road salt like we've had the past couple of weeks, throw in some leaky manhole covers and these cables can fry. A typical home has two legs of power coming into the breaker box, 180 degrees out of phase. If you lose one of them you typically lose power to half the breakers. I checked the main breaker in the panel to make sure it didn't "half trip" (it hadn't). That's about all any of us can do besides bend over and call an electrician. This isn't the kind of thing for a home owner tyromaniac to mess with, not that I could have done...
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Brooklyn wildlife
2007-03-16 06:01:00
No, I'm not talking about the street scene around here. I mean actual wildlife living in the shadow of downtown Manhattan. Rural folks are surprised to hear that we have something other than rats and pigeons here. But itsa fack, Jack. Last night around 1am, I was taking Jack and Auggie for their last walk of the evening when Auggie spotted something in my neighbor's garden and charged. I heard a hiss and caught a flash of white fur as it flew up a large bush. A cat? Then I saw the skinny tail and the lethal-looking teeth. It was a possum. I wasn't that surprised because I know that they exist here. Karen rescued one on Christmas Eve of '04. We took it to the Christmas party with us that night because there was an emergency vet specializing in wildlife rescues on the way out to her sister's place on Long Island. Karen adopted it, gave it a name (Lorilei) and took it for walks with her dogs. There's a whole colony of possums living on the Dyker Heights golf cours...
More About: Life , Wildlife , Wild , Brooklyn , Rook

My cute l'il attic
2007-03-12 18:09:00
I built and installed the doors for the "attic" over my new closet. This being a row house and all, it's the closest it will ever come to actually having an attic. These doors were another scrounge job. It's leftover lumber and red oak plywood from the wainscotting and earlier projects. I'm on a kick now to reduce my lumber scrap bin. I think I did a pretty fair job of matching the pre-fab closet doors below. But I'm really undecided about whether to leave them like this or if it needs some additional trim element to finish them off. I'm undecided. I'm posting this as a community question. Should the lower closet doors have crown moulding over them like the windows and other doors? Or will this look weird with my "attic" doors above them? Do those "attic" doors need a little more tartin' up or are they fine the way they are? Any other suggestions? I know I still need to add door knobs to the closet door but I'd love to hear your opinion. So... Am I finishe...
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Restless natives
2007-03-11 04:20:00
There's a no more contentious issue with Bay Ridge residents than parking, or rather the lack thereof. It's actually easier to find street parking in Manhattan than it is in many Brooklyn bedroom neighborhoods, including here. When I composed my list of requirements for house hunting, a garage was at the very top. No kidding, I would have bought a house without a roof before one with no garage. The last thing I wanted to do was to play car hockey on alternate side day or to come home dead tired at 2am and have to park six blocks away. I also had several nice, theftable motorcycles to protect. Lately, Brooklyn driveways have become a hot issue. Rather, the proliferation of illegal ones, which have always been a sore point with the locals, have come under fire from politicians. One of the most prized NYC building permits you can get is called a curb cut permit. Basically, a curb cut permit is a license from DOT giving you ownership of the patch of street in front of your home o...
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Aaaand... done!
2007-03-05 07:04:01
I completed all the woodwork on the bay window unit today. I won't play conquering hero either. With the weird angles and different depths of the windows, the embedded convection steam radiator, and more than a couple of measure-once goofs, I was very lucky to get through this without a major screwup. This weekend, I completed and installed that removable grill in the center of the windows. This was also a bit of work. There are seven boards and two store-bought-but-modified red oak grills in that face panel, all of them biscuited together with waterproof glue. I wanted no chance that heat and steam from a leaky air valve would cause problems with that lamination, as it did in the dining room cabinet. I was going to do some router scroll work between the grills. I caught myself just in time. It would have exposed those embedded biscuits. Because the panel needs to be removable, I used some old-style cabinet spring catches. Sometimes a 99-cent solution is the best. By ...
More About: Done

One Dog Night
2007-03-01 19:01:02
After a long day at the terminal, like today, every so often, like tonight, I get the overwhelming urge to head downstairs to the shop, turn on my noisy dust collector and even more raucous bench tools and finish off some project, like the radiator grill for the bedroom reno. However, this being a row house on a quiet block that pretty much blacks out by 10:30pm, I'd get lynched. I even turn off my motorcycle engine and coast the wrong way down the street to my garage rather than rouse the neighbors, and I have street legal pipes on my bikes. But it wasn't always this way ["...always this way", "...this way" -insert dreamy, way-back transition music] When I built my downtown Manhattan loft I was in an industrial area called Noho, for NOrth of HOuston Street. With all the 24-hour factories and illegal discos in the neighborhood, I could make all the noise I wanted whenever I wanted. With my musician hours, my renovation day was typically 1pm to 6pm, then off to midtown to play...
More About: Night

Maybe a roof rack?
2007-02-26 07:00:01
Not counting the 12 year-old Pontiac wreck I owned for all of four months and on which I managed to put maybe 400 miles before I donated it in disgust to a charity, my 2001 VW Golf is the first car I've owned. I've been a motorcyclist since I was 18. When I lived in Manhattan, it was all I needed, or wanted. But when I moved to a 'burban house with a garage, I had to get four wheels, if only for lumber runs. That's pretty much all I use it for too. I've had the car for six years and it just broke 14k miles on the odometer. I put more miles than that on my last Harley in the first year I owned it. Whatever, the Golf is perfect for me. I hate SUVs and the VW is small, quick and nimble -- something like a motorcycle. And it can carry a surprising amount of stuff with the rear seat folded down, like the ten eight-foot boards I hauled home today. What it can't carry is plywood. Not even half sheets. And that's a bitch on a day like today when I needed a sheet of birch pl...
More About: Maybe , Roof , Rack

Yet another "cool tool" article
2007-02-24 18:58:01
I've blathered a lot on the blog about the coolness of routers but another tool I use quite a bit is a biscuit joiner. Wuzzat? A social dinner roll? Bread glue? It's a tool I first saw TOH demigod, Norm Abrams, use back in the 80s. Okay, let's be honest: Norm has a shop full of bizarre, narrow purpose tools. But a biscuit (or plate) joiner is really useful, especially for edge-laminating boards as I'm about to do here. It can also be used to strengthen mitered corners or to insert alignment pins. I did the latter when I installed the heavy mahogany header in my garage door surround. A biscuit joiner is a mini-circular saw mounted horizontally on a spring loaded handle. Its sole job is to cut a crescent-shaped slot in a board for an oval "biscuit", which is a piece of (usually) beech wood or compressed beech wood shavings. Functionally, the biscuit works like a dowel but without the sheer strength of a dowel. So why not use a dowel instead? Because dowels have to be ...
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All politics is local
2007-02-24 18:58:01
Thomas "Tip" O'Neill, a longtime Speaker of the House in the U.S. Congress, coined this phrase and it couldn't apply better than to my own neighborhood here in Bay Ridge. This morning's mail brought some very good news for the neighborhood. First a little background. Bay Ridge is a largely conservative Republican bubble surrounded by probably the largest liberal stronghold in the United States. While I'm a progressive political agnostic myself, the local Republicans have taken the former Democratic Speaker's words to heart. They know that throwing a bone to the electorate is worth a hundred airhead "I'm a Decider" slogans. Marty Golden, our GOP state senator and a former NYPD police officer, knows this better than anyone. I've had three contacts with him since I moved here and his office has always been responsive. The last time was after a female motorcyclist on one of the mailing lists I host here was killed by a trucker who ran a stop sign. Marty sent me a letter ...
More About: Politics , Local , Poli , Politic , Loca