A Quote by Paul Laffoley
Around the corner [ of the Carnegie Delicatessen] is the Russian Tea Room, which is now out of business. Which is awful. I remember going in there and seeing the ballerinas trotting in there like they were prize horses, with their hair, their sunglasses. Really amazing. They were all White Russians. This is where [Leon] Theremin met a lot of people, and where the KGB eventually picked him up.
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Long John would sometimes hold his interviews in the Carnegie Delicatessen, which is the most famous delicatessen in New York up by Carnegie. Let's see, 57th Street, you're down to like 50th Street and 7th Avenue... You'd go in there and everybody would be eating a heart attack on a plate, pastrami, malts, that kind of stuff. But it literally was the place where Woody Allen would go.
I think it was because [Nikola] Tesla and [Leon] Theremin were part of what made up the movie, The Day the Earth Stood Still. Klaatu was actually a European among the Americans. And so the person who wrote the story said that Klaatu came from Europa, the fourth moon of Jupiter, which is now being investigated for life. There's water and ice on it and that kind of stuff.
But what we know, we who are either observers of a business we once were in and loved, or are people within it now, our business as a whole, when it is not obsessed with the business of business, is eaten up with a form of cultural conservatism which is truly amazing. Indeed, more often than not it is eaten up with pure reactionary-ism.
I was a swimmer growing up, which meant being in the pool at 5 a.m. You get used to it. You get up at 4:15 a.m.; my parents, who were amazing, they were up at 4:15 a.m. or earlier to drop me off at the pool and then go to work. I eventually stopped doing that, but the pattern remained. I like getting up really early. It feels like my time of day.
We thought that the odds of things working OK were up in the upper 90 percent or we wouldn't have gone. But the - there were some problems cropped up on the flight but was able to take care of those OK and - although they were things that we hadn't really trained that much for. But it was the time of the Cold War and so there were was a lot of pressure on the - to get going and the Russians were claiming that they were - Soviets were claiming they were ahead of us in technology.
The corncob was the central object of my life. My father was a horse handler, first trotting and pacing horses, then coach horses, then work horses, finally saddle horses. I grew up around, on, and under horses, fed them, shoveled their manure, emptied the mangers of corncobs.
As I took a step toward him your eyes met mine and I saw the silent pleading for forgiveness or acceptance. I wasn't sure which. All I knew was you were Sawyer's now. My best friend was gone. I envied him and hated him for the first time that day. He'd finaly won the one prize I thought was mine.
Both [Nikola] Tesla and [Leon] Theremin were preternaturally young. I mean, for a long time Tesla was a young man well into his 70s. And so was Theremin, even though, at the end, he looked pretty old. But he was still doing things that young guys do, beyond the time you'd normally think people should be doing that stuff.
I met Peter O'Toole for the first time at Dad's memorial service because my Dad didn't hang around with people like that when we were around. We didn't grow up with Richard Burton coming around to tea.
The problem is Silicon Valley, which is an amazing ecosystem, also ends up being an amazing bubble, with white guys talking to white guys about white-guy problems. So it's great, but you kind of miss a lot of things around you.
All I say is, nobody has any business to go around looking like a horse and behaving as if it were all right. You don't catch horses going around looking like people, do you?
The Russians haven't helped us at all in the fight against ISIS. When you total up the numbers of sorties that have been going into Syria, aircraft attacks, if you will, going into Syria, when the Russians said they were going to assist, we got a very small number of Russian sorties.
[Nikola Tesla and Leon Theremin] were European gentlemen, very well-mannered, all of the stuff you associate with living in Europe.
So, I looked up, and we were in this giant dome like a glass snowball, and Mark said that the amazing white stars were really only holes in the black glass of the dome, and when you went to heaven, the glass broke away, and there was nothing but a whole sheet of star white, which is brighter than anything but doesn't hurt your eyes. It was vast and open and thinly quiet, and I felt so small.
One strategy that the tea party smartly embraced was one of being almost entirely defensive. They consciously decided not to figure out which of their really abominable conservative policy priorities to prioritize. Instead, anything that came out of the Obama White House they were against. What they recognized is that when you've lost the White House and the House of Representatives and the Senate, you're not setting the agenda anymore. We progressives find ourselves in a similar situation now.
It was somewhere in Ohio - Cedar Point or something like that - one of those thrill rides. A few cars up, someone's sunglasses had fallen off, and we were on one of those corkscrew parts, and I saw sunglasses and just instinctively grabbed them right out of the air. I was like, 'Oh, my reaction time is really good. This is going well.'
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