Happy Halloween!

BOO!!
(not Williams)

This is what is decorating our 14th floor reception area. It made me laugh!

Happy Halloween!!

Did You Fall Back?

Did you remember to fall back?

WASHINGTON (AP) -- Most Americans got an extra hour of sleep this morning, as the clocks fall back to standard time. If you didn't, now's the time. And work in an hour for a nap later, just to make it up to yourself.

It's the last time this will happen in October.

Thanks to a law passed last year, daylight-saving time will start earlier and end later beginning in 2007. It will last from the second Sunday in March to the first Sunday in November.

The clock change switches an hour of daylight from evening to morning, meaning drivers will need to be extra careful on Halloween night to be sure of avoiding excited little trick-or-treaters.

The official change occured at 2 a.m., though most folks made the change before going to bed Saturday night.

Some states and territories don't observe daylight-saving time and won't have to worry about changing their clocks. Those are Arizona, Hawaii, Puerto Rico, the Virgin Islands, American Samoa, Guam and the Northern Marianas.

Daylight-saving time returns next March 11.

Only in New York

I thought I might have inadvertently wandered on to the set of Law & Order. The fact that a film crew was busy positioning their cameras only deepened my suspicions. And this began my adventure to One Police Plaza, the official headquarters of the NYPD.

You see, last Friday I managed to leave my beautiful, brand new Samsung A900 cell phone in the back of a taxi cab. After spending almost a week trying to track it down without any success, I finally caught a break. The local 17th Precinct had a description of a phone like mine that had been turned in over the weekend. I dashed over to the station (which turned out to be a trailer), expecting to be happily reunited with my phone. Instead, a gruff police officer gave me a voucher number and told me I would have to go "identify" it at One Police Plaza, across from City Hall.

Two subway rides later and I was downtown, walking across a movie set, and waiting in a long line to be searched, photographed, and basically fingerprinted before I could enter police headquarters. Once inside, I walked through another metal detector and handed over my driver license to be run through their system. Perhaps looking for outstanding warrants or unpaid parking tickets.

I was then directed to a most unpleasant basement room which is clearly the morgue for the poor cell phones, blackberrys, and wallets that have met their untimely fate in the back seat of a New York City taxi cab. Joining me in line were a few charming souls who had just been released from prison and were there to pick up the personal property confiscated from their bodies when they were arrested.

According to the Property Clerk's web site: "Approximately two-thirds of all property taken in is evidence required for criminal cases. Other categories of property accepted include the safekeeping of found property, decedent's property, prisoner's property, property no longer needed as evidence or for further investigation, contraband, seized peddler property pending release, serological evidence, and property confiscated for forfeiture proceedings.

Property received by this Division includes cash, jewelry, rifles and guns, various weapons, general property of every description, evidence related to homicides and other crimes (except serological evidence retained by the NYPD Forensic Investigation Division), and vehicles."

I was finally called to the barred window and presented my voucher number to the property clerk. After several minutes of anticipation, she returned with a carefully sealed plastic evidence bag containing a Samsung A900 phone. My heart soared as I waited to make the identification. "What does it play when you turn it on?" the clerk asked. I described the happy, upbeat melody and my beach screensaver. She turned on the phone. Chimes. No happy melody. No beach scene. Not my phone.

I returned to work, called Sprint, paid the $50 for a brand new replacement phone (thank goodness for insurance!), and that's that. Even if the phone turns up, I don't think I can handle another trip to the cell phone morgue and identification process. So send me your phone numbers - I'll be spending the weekend updating my contact lists. And not letting the phone out of my sight!

How fast can he go?

How fast can Lance Armstrong run a marathon? Predict Lance's NYC Marathon time and win sneakers! Armstrong has entered the ING New York City Marathon on November 5th and Runner's World is holding a contest to see who will best guess how fast the seven time Tour de France winner can cover the 26.2 mile distance.

Submit your estimated guess here and the person who comes the closest to predicting Lance's finishing time down to the second will win a year's worth of running shoes. So what do you think? Send in your guess!

Guilty Pleasures

While I was recovering from my jaw surgery, Brooke was kind enough to make me some pretty great dinners. She also introduced me to Betty Crocker Warm Delights™. The two of us are now hooked on these things. My favorite is the Molten Caramel Cake. Brooke loves the Hot Fudge Brownie. If you have not tried these yet, you do not know what you are missing! They are the easiest desserts to make. They come in a little single-serve bowl. You simply add water, stir, and microwave. (Sometimes we also add ice cream - fat free of course!) They are so good. As the web site says, "With Betty Crocker Warm Delights, you're just three minutes away from heaven!"

One of our favorite ways to spend a week day evening is making these sinful desserts and watching the latest episode of the Girls Next Door on E! This is perhaps the worst show on television. Which of course means it's awesome! Brooke records it every Sunday night & we wait to watch it together. It gives us some pretty good laughs.

Our favorite idiotic Girls Next Door!

Snow Day in Buffalo

This morning I awoke to various news stations reporting a record October snowstorm in my home city of Buffalo, New York. Up to two feet of the destructive snow, delivered in a fury of thunder and lightning, blanketed Buffalo and surrounding areas by early Friday. The wet, heavy snow downed tree limbs and toppled power lines, leaving 350,000 homes and businesses without electricity in western New York and closing schools, officials said. I'm assuming my mom had a snow day, but I haven't been able to reach her as the power lines are down, which means so are the cordless phones, answering machines, and computers.

According to news reports, 8.3 inches of heavy snow on Thursday set the record for the "snowiest" October day in Buffalo in the 137-year history of the weather service, said meteorologist Tom Niziol. The previous record of 6 inches was set October 31, 1917. Lake Effect Snow is one thing I do not miss about Buffalo. But I do miss the snow days!

An aerial view of the city of Buffalo shows several inches of lake-effect snow which caused widespread power outages in Buffalo, N.Y. and the surrounding area Friday Oct. 13, 2006. (Associated Press)

The Biology of Emotional Healing

Friends for Life: An Emerging Biology of Emotional Healing

New York Times
By DANIEL GOLEMAN
Published: October 10, 2006

A dear friend has been battling cancer for a decade or more. Through a grinding mix of chemotherapy, radiation and all the other necessary indignities of oncology, he has lived on, despite dire prognoses to the contrary.

My friend was the sort of college professor students remember fondly: not just inspiring in class but taking a genuine interest in them — in their studies, their progress through life, their fears and hopes. A wide circle of former students count themselves among his lifelong friends; he and his wife have always welcomed a steady stream of visitors to their home.

Though no one could ever prove it, I suspect that one of many ingredients in his longevity has been this flow of people who love him.

Research on the link between relationships and physical health has established that people with rich personal networks — who are married, have close family and friends, are active in social and religious groups — recover more quickly from disease and live longer. But now the emerging field of social neuroscience, the study of how people’s brains entrain as they interact, adds a missing piece to that data.

The most significant finding was the discovery of “mirror neurons,” a widely dispersed class of brain cells that operate like neural WiFi. Mirror neurons track the emotional flow, movement and even intentions of the person we are with, and replicate this sensed state in our own brain by stirring in our brain the same areas active in the other person.

Mirror neurons offer a neural mechanism that explains emotional contagion, the tendency of one person to catch the feelings of another, particularly if strongly expressed. This brain-to-brain link may also account for feelings of rapport, which research finds depend in part on extremely rapid synchronization of people’s posture, vocal pacing and movements as they interact. In short, these brain cells seem to allow the interpersonal orchestration of shifts in physiology.

Such coordination of emotions, cardiovascular reactions or brain states between two people has been studied in mothers with their infants, marital partners arguing and even among people in meetings. Reviewing decades of such data, Lisa M. Diamond and Lisa G. Aspinwall, psychologists at the University of Utah, offer the infelicitous term “a mutually regulating psychobiological unit” to describe the merging of two discrete physiologies into a connected circuit. To the degree that this occurs, Dr. Diamond and Dr. Aspinwall argue, emotional closeness allows the biology of one person to influence that of the other.

John T. Cacioppo, director of the Center for Cognitive and Social Neuroscience at the University of Chicago, makes a parallel proposal: the emotional status of our main relationships has a significant impact on our overall pattern of cardiovascular and neuroendocrine activity. This radically expands the scope of biology and neuroscience from focusing on a single body or brain to looking at the interplay between two at a time. In short, my hostility bumps up your blood pressure, your nurturing love lowers mine. Potentially, we are each other’s biological enemies or allies.

Even remotely suggesting health benefits from these interconnections will, no doubt, raise hackles in medical circles. No one can claim solid data showing a medically significant effect from the intermingling of physiologies.

At the same time, there is now no doubt that this same connectivity can offer a biologically grounded emotional solace. Physical suffering aside, a healing presence can relieve emotional suffering. A case in point is a functional magnetic resonance imaging study of women awaiting an electric shock. When the women endured their apprehension alone, activity in neural regions that incite stress hormones and anxiety was heightened. As James A. Coan reported last year in an article in Psychophysiology, when a stranger held the subject’s hand as she waited, she found little relief. When her husband held her hand, she not only felt calm, but her brain circuitry quieted, revealing the biology of emotional rescue.

But as all too many people with severe chronic diseases know, loved ones can disappear, leaving them to bear their difficulties in lonely isolation. Social rejection activates the very zones of the brain that generate, among other things, the sting of physical pain. Matthew D. Lieberman and Naomi Eisenberg of U.C.L.A. (writing in a chapter in “Social Neuroscience: People Thinking About People,” M.I.T. Press, 2005) have proposed that the brain’s pain centers may have taken on a hypersensitivity to social banishment because exclusion was a death sentence in human prehistory. They note that in many languages the words that describe a “broken heart” from rejection borrow the lexicon of physical hurt.

So when the people who care about a patient fail to show up, it may be a double blow: the pain of rejection and the deprivation of the benefits of loving contact. Sheldon Cohen, a psychologist at Carnegie-Mellon University who studies the effects of personal connections on health, emphasizes that a hospital patient’s family and friends help just by visiting, whether or not they quite know what to say.

My friend has reached that point where doctors see nothing else to try. On my last visit, he and his wife told me that he was starting hospice care.

One challenge, he told me, will be channeling the river of people who want to visit into the narrow range of hours in a week when he still has the energy to engage them.

As he said this, I felt myself tearing up, and responded: “You know, at least it’s better to have this problem. So many people go through this all alone.”

He was silent for a moment, thoughtful. Then he answered softly, “You’re right.”

Daniel Goleman is the author of “Social Intelligence: The New Science of Human Relationships.”

A Day of Football

A few weeks ago I volunteered to assist our Youth Football department with their NFL Flag Football Tournaments. I have helped with these at Super Bowl and it is a ton of fun. So at 7am Sunday morning, I found myself out on Long Island at Hofstra University for the Jets/NFL Flag Football Regional Tournament. It was a little early, but the weather was gorgeous. The sun was shining and there was not a cloud in the sky. And I definitely should have worn sunscreen.


Some of the kids are really fast! I love watching them run around the field as if they are playing in the pros. After keeping score for several of the tournament's games, I was assigned to the playoff field where the two top teams competed for advancement to the NFL FLAG National Tournament of Champions, which takes place on November 18, at Disney's Wide World of Sports Complex in Orlando. It was a fun event and the perfect day to be sitting outside watching football.

Congratulations, Daniel!

My friend Beth's husband Daniel was one of four athletes inducted into Stony Brook Athletics Hall of Fame Class of 2006 on Saturday. Daniel played men's tennis at the University of Stony Brook where he & Beth met, and never has given me that tennis lesson he promised!

Daniel also is in my personal hall of my fame after he helped move me from Hoboken to my first apartment in the city four years ago, even picking up & driving the rental truck in from the Bronx. He had the patience of a saint that day. "Am I really moving empty shoeboxes?" I believe he whispered to Beth at one point. I've gotten a lot better at packing since then!

Congratulations, Daniel!

A Trip to the Bronx

On Friday afternoon, Brooke called to tell me that our former colleague Theresa had offered her 3 tickets for the YES Network's box suite at Yankee Stadium that evening. After determining that yes, we could be ready in an hour, Brooke, Bill, and I took the 4 train out to the Bronx. And yes, even I take the subway to Yankee Stadium. The suite was very cool, it was a beautiful evening, and we had a great time.

Photo credits go to Brooke. She has more pictures posted on her blog!

New York's 7-2 win over the Blue Jays, combined with losses by Detroit and Minnesota, assured the team homefield advantage throughout the postseason. The Yankees also set a franchise attendance record that night with Friday's crowd of 52,331 to reach 4,138,605 for the season, with two games remaining.

As we were leaving the stadium, Brooke & I noticed a plaque explaining the history of the team's famous emblem. The design was actually created in 1877 by Tiffany & Co. for a medal to be given by the NYPD to Officer John McDowell, the first NYC policeman shot in the line of duty. The interlocking "NY" insignia was adopted by the team.

Think Pink

October is National Breast Cancer Awareness Month. According to the American Cancer Society, more than 200,000 women in the United States will be diagnosed with breast cancer this year. One out of eight women either has or will develop breast cancer in her lifetime. There are many ways to support breast cancer research, from wearing a pink ribbon to participating in Lee's National Denim Day on October 6, or supporting companies that give proceeds to breast cancer research.

Cook for the Cure was created in 2001 to give those with a passion for cooking a way to support the Susan G. Komen Breast Cancer Foundation. Coach will give $100 from the sale of every Gallery Breast Cancer watch to the Breast Cancer Research Foundation.

Jewelry designer Mauri Pioppo teamed up with breast cancer survivor Sheryl Crow to create the Sundari Necklace, named for the Hindu goddess of beauty and grace. The 14-karat gold “love pendant” contains a diamond in the middle, with three white topaz clusters and a larger pale-pink quartz drop, and 50% of proceeds will go to the Breast Cancer Research Foundation.

You can click below the "Fund Free Mammograms" button to help fund free mammograms, provided to low-income, inner-city and minority women in need, whose awareness of breast cancer and opportunity for help is often limited.

click here!