Sunday, October 28, 2012

Sunday Observations 10.28

Next year is the 100th anniversary of the Armory Show and there are two big exhibitions to celebrate it. One, "The Armory Show At 100," opens in October at the New York Historical Society Museum. The other opens on February 17, 2013 at Montclair Art Museum and is a little more interesting. "The New Spirit" will put together fifty pieces of American art that were sold at the original Armory Show.

You can file this under a 'it's a small world' tag. From an article about the current natural gas boom in The New York Times last week;

"It is a great time to sell,” Mr. Eads recalled telling Terry Pegula, the founder of East Resources, who had built up his own operation in the Marcellus region of Pennsylvania from one well to 75 over the course of one year. “With all these new plays popping up, I had a real concern gas prices would weaken.” Mr. Eads then helped arrange what will go down as one of the great early paydays of the shale revolution: the 2010 sale of East Resources, which Mr. Pegula had started with $7,500 borrowed from family and friends, to Royal Dutch Shell for $4.7 billion."

You might wonder what that could possibly have to do with me, well here you go. Pegula, a graduate of Penn State, is huge ice hockey fan and he spent part of that fortune to buy the Buffalo Sabres. More importantly he donated $102 million to Penn State to launch its Division I men's and women's ice hockey programs and build the Pegula Ice Arena as there home. On the flip side Shell indirectly employs my brother, also a Penn State graduate, mapping wetlands in the wilds of Pennsylvania and Ohio.

Donald Trump proved once again that he is just an ignorant self-important blowhard and I'm not talking about his big announcement on President Obama, I'm not even going to discuss that. Monday Trump spent a full day on Twitter talking about nothing but Diet Coke. A small sample; "@realDonaldTrump: People are going crazy with my comments on Diet Coke (soda). Let's face it--this stuff just doesn't work. It makes you hungry." Enough on that, the man just irritates me to no end and I don't even drink Diet Coke.

We got back from the mountains just in time to see the evacuation of Zone A in New York City as the storm otherwise known as Sandy ever so slowly approaches. I'm having flashbacks to Irene now and wonder if Anderson Cooper is going to be in Washington Square tomorrow morning. I may have to go check.