I realize I haven’t posted anything on this site in 3 weeks. This is pathetic. I just spent the weekend at a journalism conference where I learned about marketing myself. My big takeaway is that I don’t want to market myself. I just want to write, and that’s what I’ve been doing, cranking out several chapters in 168 Hours, another revision of the novel, another USA Today column in the hopper, Scientific American columns and another City Journal feature. Blogging or posting on Facebook or signing up for Twitter (why is everyone obsessed with this now?) is definitely going to get the short end of the stick. I guess this means I will be looking to hire someone to help with this function.

But anyway, just thought I’d post a short bit about the lower Manhattan White House plane photo-op on Monday. I was going to American Express’s headquarters in the World Financial Center around 10:30AM in order to interview the head of their small business OPEN division, and several entrepreneurs who were there for a women’s networking event.  When my cab tried to turn left off West Street into the Battery Park area, we wound up waiting through several light cycles because there were literally thousands of construction workers blocking the sidewalks, the intersections, etc. I thought there must be a protest or something going on. When I got out of the cab at Vesey Street, some of them looked at me strangely as I started going into the building so I stopped to talk to a few of them. They described seeing a big plane zoom right past the buildings in the no-fly zone. What really seemed to rattle them, though, was the F-16 flying right beside it. The obvious assumption (in this post 9/11 world) is that the plane was aiming for the buildings and a military plane was chasing it for a potential shoot-down. So all the construction workers in the various World Trade Center projects had been evacuated.

Now, I think it was ascertained very quickly that no one was in real danger, but it was also an incredibly nice day on Monday. So the evacuation was starting to turn into a nice, leisurely break. Hey, we have to seize the moments when they come…