Wow, that link (http://aisserver.yachtmarine.com/US-NEWYORKHARBOR.html) is awesome!
I have never seen that website before.
I got the name off the Le Grand Blue using my spyglass. What? Don?t all of you go around town with your spyglasses?
I?m a full-on ship nerd.

Here is a music video to get you in the mood for life on a big luxury yacht. NSFW.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=R7yfISlGLNU

Aside from Le Grand Bleu, there are a bunch of visiting significant ships in the harbor. There is a huge tall ship event going on in Boston and we are getting some of the spill over. The replica of the H.M.S. Bounty, built for the Marlon Brando movie, is near Chelsea piers and just today I saw a large three masted Barque anchor somewhere near Erie Basin in Brooklyn.
The tall ships wont visit New York officially since the city no longer really has the waterfront facilities these ships need to tie up to. There are fewer and fewer places that the local municipalities control that have enough room and/or water and electric outlets pierside. The trend for the last several years has been for condominium development. It?s true the waterfront gets a nice makeover when developers go to work, but they never provide the basic necessities a ship requires to tie up at the waters edge, not even the large metal bollards or bitts the ships need to make off their dock lines.

Why that?s the Le Grand Bleu, and it is a "pleasure boat". It's one of the twenty largest yachts in the world and it has it?s own Wikipedia page:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Le_Grand_Bleu_(yacht)

I notice in the last week or so the city is installing what appear to be ?planters? along Newark. These are wide metal troughs that stand about two feet high and as of today ( June 25) are filled with dirt in anticipation of some sort of plants. Looks like they came out of the same municipal sidewalk catalog as the trash cans we have in town. I mention the trash cans since obviously no matter what gets planted in these troughs, idiots will use them to dispose of trash and any plants growing in them will soon die, and then the troughs will be overflowing with garbage. Nice work City Hall. I wonder if City Hall has any idea what the sidewalks are like in this town? Do any of them actually walk on Jersey City sidewalks? If they did they would know how stupid this idea of ?Decorative Planters at sidewalk level? is. The only way this could work would be if they hired more guys just to watch over and maintain the planters. I?m conservatively guessing the ?planters? cost $500 each with another $300 to $400 for the plants. I say whatever plants go in by the end of June will be dead by the end of July. Further I?m saying by this time next year they will all be horribly mangled by poorly operated motor vehicles. So $10,000 wasted for no gain. Thanks for being so stupid, City hall idiots!

I think you could solve this problem if all the cabdrivers in this town had to attend Charm School.

Nice! this is a block and a half away from where I live. So there is an armed murderer walking around loose in my neighborhood. How nice. Thanks City Hall!

Hey look! The name is already taken!

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Empty_Sky

Here are some things I want to get across about my objection to this stupid memorial. In no particular order:

1) We have a few nice ones already. I?m particularly fond of the couple of twisted structural steel pieces from the actual buildings. There are a few here in town. Also the Journal Square fountain comes to mind, with the engraved names of Jersey City victims.
2) The proposed monstrosity was chosen, at least in part (by my understanding of the matter), by family members of victims. I?m going to sound like a jerk for saying this, but please can someone tell me how being related to someone that died in the tragedy makes you somehow good at judging the artistic merit of a sculpture? Can any of these people give me directions to a local art museum or name a single living sculptor of note? I doubt it. Going further, did any of them ever visit the park before the tragedy, as so many of us did and still do?
3) The poorly rendered Photoshop of how the memorial will appear. Look at all the millions of dollars involved and then look at the actual artwork being circulated. The ?artists rendering? set up on a piece of askew plywood at the site of the memorial is a bad pastiche, the vanishing point of the background photograph of lower Manhattan clashes with the vanishing point of the poorly rendered computer graphic of the proposed metal canyon. Human figures are rendered as identical bizarre white two dimensional cut outs. Sloppy and lazy and it burns me to think that the people involved in this thing think this is good enough. I?m sure if you submitted that rendering at any Art or Architecture school of repute, you would get a poor grade. Anyone in the industry could do better, and you would have to be particularly lazy and perhaps hung over to do worse.
4) The two dimensional thinking involved in the underlying concept. The piece will only make sense if you are standing at the South West end of the thing, looking along it?s axis at the World Trade Center site. If you are looking at it from any other angle, you will be looking at a giant earthen berm. So it has that going for it. Which is to say it?s just wrong. Paintings you can limit yourself to one viewing angle, but sculpture is a three dimensional medium. This is just a trough and you can only view it from one point, What are you going to see if you site down the things axis from the river looking back at the land?
5) This one I?m more obscure about but I do remember it in the news years ago. The names of the known victims were going to be etched into the steel walls and some misguided person or committee decided the names should NOT be arranged in alphabetical order. I forget why. Maybe I am remembering this part wrong but if it?s true it?s just one more reason to hate this giant ugly bloated poorly conceived overbudget cancer of a memorial.
6) I say all these things and I?m sure my bitterness is apparent. But I do care about the underlying concept. I was hurt by the events of September 11th 2001 ,I know I will never get over it. The scars will never go away. That?s why I hate this stupid pile of crap.

I'm cutting and pasting a coment I made on the recent "emergency Drill" the Portly Athority ran a week or so ago, it's pertinant to this thread:

A two hour drill with eight hundred people participating! Makes me want to go down there and play a ?Victim? with ketchup all over me! Later, I will insist on participating in the planning and execution of an emergency drill 2009 make believe memorial. I think I will insist they build it in some much beloved park, one I never use myself, and then cause lots of grief and unnecessary trouble as my poorly conceived and ugly memorial stalls just after ground is broken and the fences go up. Then for an encore, I will announce the memorial is also grossly over budget. How?s that for realism?

A two hour drill with eight hundred people participating! Makes me want to go down there and play a ?Victim? with ketchup all over me! Later, I will insist on participating in the planning and execution of an emergency drill 2009 make believe memorial. I think I will insist they build it in some much beloved park, one I never use myself, and then cause lots of grief and unnecessary trouble as my poorly conceived and ugly memorial stalls just after ground is broken and the fences go up. Then for an encore, I will announce the memorial is also grossly over budget. How?s that for realism?

Someone above mentioned the new path train cars. I first saw one almost a year ago on the unused track at W.T.C. with a bunch of technicians aboard with diagnostic machinery on carts with laptops and stuff. Very high tech. Then, I rode in one a couple of months ago and I said to myself ? hey, the new cars are online, took them long enough? just that one ride, not ever again since, they have pulled a vanishing act.
What do you want to bet that there is some huge unforeseen flaw with the cars and it will cost 1/3 of what has already been spent on them to get them to work? I ask since it looks like they are hung up on something and if they aren?t then why aren?t they in use now?

We have about 120 thousand registered voters and only 30 thousand voted. Healy got 16 thousand votes. So all you have to do is get 16 thousand votes and you are in charge! I would love to get a dollar figure of his campaign spending and divide that by the number of votes he got. Instead of campaigning he could just write me a check. It would have so much more simplicity, I wouldn?t feel like I was being cheated out of whatever I could hope for in my government representation since I would get a tiny piece of all that corruption and I could put it in the bank. How nice!

The nature of pizza, and it?s appreciation, is that you always love the Pizza from the location of your birth. I grew up in Buffalo N.Y., so for me the perfect pizza has a rich robust spongy and thick crust. I could never ?love? pizza in the New York City area, it?s one of the sacrifices I made when I moved here from Western New York. Don?t get me started on chicken wings! On that subject it?s like I?m the only man that can see in the land of the blind.
But anyway. I will vote for ?Three Guys From Italy? for best J.C. pizza. But oh. The vast gulf I had to traverse to say so much. The new location is just part of the growing pestilence of the Journal Square area. The illegally parked cars in front of it?s new location at a strategic Journal Square crosswalk will probably literally kill me one day.

I am too much of a newbie to cut and paste this comment in such a way as to be cool, but I read this and wanted to comment. Here is the part of the post I am responding to:

6. Mix together one-third cup of molasses, six tablespoons of sugar, and six tablespoons of active dry yeast into a smooth paste. Use the mixture to coat strips of cardboard. Keep out of reach of pets and small children. You can leave mixture on a saucer outside anthill and they?ll eat it and die!

And I say, if I was an Ant, I think I would love to eat this and would be encouraged to move right in and keep eating whatever else you left out for me. Is the yeast going to make me explode and die? Hmmm. I sort of doubt it, I think the six tablespoons of sugar and all that molasses will encourage me to stay in your kitchen for the long haul. Hey, maybe I'm wrong but you can't argue with all that sugar.

This is so sad on so many levels. I have noticed lately that drivers in this town are getting worse. Pedestrians in cross walks (me and you) are at the bottom of the food chain and the drivers are making it a point of reminding us of our status. I am always on foot in this town and at each corner we take our lives into our hands as automobile drivers flout all the laws of the city as well as the laws of common sense as they nearly kill us in order to shave two seconds off their drive time. At each corner I cross I warily eye the typical driver as he or she coasts forward the entire time I?m crossing in front of their car (with the light in my favor) hoping to make eye contact with them so I can at least be assured that my death under their wheels will register on them as they blather illegally into their cell phone. Don?t get me started on the dollar vans, the worst of all. I wonder how many people in positions of authority in this city actually walk on the sidewalks in this town? I can?t help but mention that Dan Levin is running for mayor in this town and alone among the candidates he does not own a car.