The International Freedom Center at the WTC site is no more. Thank god. I have discussed some of my reasons for opposing the plan before so I won’t repeat myself here, except to say that the WTC site was definitely not the place for so divisive an issue as freedom. Sad but true.

In other news:
Harry bows out at Harry’s Place
Blogger Michael Totten heads out to Beirut.
My hyper-local Daily Heights gets stuck in.
And Chinese blogger loves EiNY header image (created by Simon’s Brain).

*NEWSFLASH* Lew on League is back!

After a prolonged absence brought on by the visit of two Belorussian 12-year-olds, his wife’s 60th birthday, Leeds Rhinos’ Challenge Cup defeat and a rush of unsuspecting massage clients, Lew on League is staging a comeback. I think he might have had one glass of wine too many before sitting down to tap out this missive, if you can keep up with his mind flow you are a better son than I…

THE RUGBY LEAGUE CHAMPIONSHIP

On Friday, Leeds 2nd in the league, meet St Helens 1st in the league. The winner goes straight through to the final at Old Trafford. The team which loses that game, will play the winner of the game at Odsal played on Saturday between Bradford and Hull.

The winner of that game played next week then goes on to play at Old Trafford. These four teams have shown themselves to be the four outstanding teams in the league and it is anyone’s guess as to which will win. For the first half of the season Leeds seemed impregnable. Then St Helens started to show their brilliance and eventually pulled ahead. Now in the last few games Hull, following their sensational victory in the Challenge Cup, has shown how dangerous their team can be in cup matches. At the same time, Bradford have revealed how vulnerable St Helens can be against a big pack, now that the Saints have paid for their victorious run by a series of injuries to their star players.

Hull were magnificent in their thrashing of Warrington who two weeks before that had beaten Leeds in a league game. Bradford defeated St Helens in their league game and showed some of their old power and pace.

With the softer grounds now being the norm, what is certain is that success is going to come to the teams which can produce the goods ‘up front’. Both Leeds and St Helens have looked to be weaker than Hull and Bradford. However this writer feels that one hopeful sign is that Chris Feather has now returned to Leeds. Chris is a young forward who is one of the heaviest in the league. He was loaned to Wakefield to gain experience in Super League. In the final game of the season he played against Leeds and although Wakefield lost, he looked to be the most powerful forward on the field.

Smith made a bad mistake in the Challenge Cup final in leaving out McDermott in a game where the Hull forward power needed taming. We need to use Bailey, Ward, McDermott and Feather if we are to retain the championship. Hopefully he will not make the same mistake again.

A perk of being a writer is that it often leads to new friendships with interesting and inspirational people. Adam Linn, a blind film director, screenwriter and actor is one of them. (I have a story about Adam appearing in the next issue of MovieMaker Magazine.)

Adam emailed me this morning to express his disgust at a thoughtless article which appeared in this weekend’s New York Times Magazine about a blind or partially-sighted applicant for a chef’s job at a city restaurant. The article is one of 40 essays which appear in a new book by Bloomsbury called Don’t Try This at Home: Culinary Catastrophes from the World’s Greatest Chefs. It was written by Gabrielle Hamilton the chef and owner of Prune in the East Village. I don’t doubt Ms. Hamilton’s sincerity. But I do think she could have been better advised by Bloomsbury about her tone and choice of words.

The book’s blurb states:

A hilarious and heartening collection of kitchen disasters.

In this raucous new collection, over forty of the world’s greatest chefs relate outrageous true tales from their kitchens. From hiring a blind line cook to flooding the room with meringue to being terrorized by a French owl, these behind-the-scenes accounts are as wildly entertaining as they are revealing. A delicious reminder that even the chefs we most admire aren’t always perfect, Don’t Try This at Home is a must-have for anyone who loves food or is fascinated by those who masterfully prepare it.

I’ll let you be the judge. The full article is here. Here are a few extracts:

The first thing I noticed when he arrived was that he was blind. His eyes wandered around in their sockets like tropical fish in the aquarium of a cheap hotel lobby.

I showed him our menu. He held it up to his face as if to breathe in its written contents, to discover by inhaling what it said in plain print. I felt more certain than ever when I observed this that he was blind, but naturally doubted myself because obviously the guy had worked in restaurants, something that – though we may joke – really can’t and shouldn’t be done.

When he arrived for his trail I took him around on an introductory tour of the prep area and the walk-in and the hot line. At each station, he bent over and put his forehead against everything I showed him. It was fascinating at first – and later, heartbreaking – to note the angle at which he scrutinized each item in the refrigerator.

We set him up in the basement prep area with a cutting board and a menial task that wouldn’t matter if he messed it up: picking parsley. This took him most of the afternoon, and it was painful to watch him bent in half, killing his back in order to have his untethered eyes close up to the cutting board.

I never did find out what he was doing. I allowed him to finish out the whole trail, and when he had changed his clothes, I encouraged him to sit at the bar and have something to eat, which he did. And as he was leaving, I said I would call him the next day, which I did. I told him that I was looking for someone with a little more power, a bit more of a heavy hitter, but that I would keep him in mind if a position more aligned with his skills became available.

This, remarkably, he seemed to see coming.

Here is Adam’s letter to the editor at the New York Times:

To The Editor,

It is difficult for me to express the level of disappointment I felt in the Times for printing Gabrielle Hamilton’s supremely offensive essay, “Eat, Memory: Line of Sight” in Sunday’s magazine section.

I am a blind filmmaker. I would be hard pressed to create a depiction of someone as disrespectful as Ms. Hamilton does here in describing a man in search of a job at her restaurant, “The first thing I noticed when he arrived was that he was blind. His eyes wandered around in their sockets like tropical fish in the aquarium of a cheap hotel lobby.”

To allow Ms. Hamilton’s self-aggrandizing callousness in your paper is tantamount to printing blatantly racist comments. If Ms. Hamilton had chosen to belittle the appearance of any other minority group in the promotion of her book I sincerely doubt you would have seen fit to print it.

I have many accomplished blind friends including Jay Wolf, a celebrated barbecue chef in Texas and another, Peter Mikochik, who single handedly built an addition on his Shelter Island home.

Ms. Hamilton also adds, “I thought maybe I was an ignorant jerk who didn’t realize how far the blind had come.”

This is the one instance in which Ms. Hamilton manages to come close to the truth with her pompous yet amateur prose.

Adam Linn

UPDATE: Check out the American Foundation for the Blind blog

Congratulations to Ben Baruch on another animated feat of festive fun! Tekiah!.