Battery Harris

I rode my bike down to Rockaway today, to the beach and Fort Tilden. During World War II the fort was part of New York City’s coastal defenses.
From atop Battery Harris, a defunct gun emplacement, you can look north to see the Manhattan skyline, and south to see the Atlantic Ocean and Sandy Hook, New Jersey. The dunes are full of birds and rabbits. At noon, when the sun heats up the flora, the air is heavy with the scent of scrub pine and juniper.
If you’re not a native, it’s hard to believe that this is part of New York City.

Point to Point

A great site for calculating surface distances and great circle routes.

Brooklyn, New York, to Easter Island (Rapa Nui): 5203.20 statute miles.
Baghdad, Iraq, to New York, New York: 5986.96 statute miles.
Seattle, Washington, to Zanzibar, Tanzania: 9369.19 statute miles.

Ask Not for Whom the FCC Trolls…

Today in Salon, newspaper editor and sex columnist Dan Savage talks about the FCC’s war on Howard Stern, and on sexual content in the media. Savage asks Why isn’t everyone who cares about free speech rallying around the embattled radio personality?:

We should be concerned because what’s being done to Howard Stern is part of a concerted effort by religious and cultural conservatives to stamp out the sexual openness that has come to define mainstream culture over the last 20 years.
…AIDS forced Americans to start having open, honest conversations about sex and desire. It was an adult conversation about sex, and like all adult conversations about sex it involved a lot of humor. Dying is easy, as the AIDS epidemic made clear. Talking about sex is hard — and the sudden need to talk about sex in the wake of AIDS opened the door not just to condom commercials on television and safe-sex pamphlets in our mailboxes, but sexually explicit humor on “Friends,” “Sex and the City,” and Howard Stern’s radio show.