Eideard

The cat that vanished in baggage claim at New York’s John F. Kennedy International Airport and whose plight became an online sensation has been found after being missing for two months.

“American Airlines is happy to announce that Jack the Cat has been found safe and well at JFK airport,” the carrier wrote in a post on the “Jack the Cat is Lost in AA Baggage at JFK” Facebook page Tuesday evening.

“Jack was found in the customs room and was immediately taken by team members to a local veterinarian. The vet has advised that Jack is doing well at present.”

The airline plans to fly the cat to California to be reunited with his owner, Karen Pascoe.

The saga started on August 25, when Pascoe was flying from New York to San Francisco with Jack and a second cat as part of a job relocation. But Jack escaped his kennel and was last seen at JFK’s inbound baggage claim…

When a search failed to turn up Jack after a few days, Pascoe became frustrated with American Airlines and started the Facebook page “to help us put pressure on AA to step up their efforts.” She also urged fliers to “do whatever they can do to keep their animals out of cargo.”

American even hired a pet detective and issued a pet Amber alert in hopes of locating the feline. I’m not quite certain how a pet Amber alert functions – but, I am glad they found Jack.

Could have been worse!

A bird drawn into the engine of a plane taking off in New York made the cabin smell like chicken was being cooked, passengers said.

JetBlue Flight 757 to Aruba, with 109 people aboard, returned to John F. Kennedy International Airport and landed safely at 12:30 p.m. Saturday…

“Suddenly the plane smelled like chicken,” said passenger Gina Vicinanza. “I thought, ‘Wow! They have hot food on this plane…’ “

At least 13 bird encounters with planes have occurred at the airport this year

I love barbecue; but, there are limits. I really prefer grilling over natural chunk charcoal over whirling my food with Jet A 1.

Counterfeit BMW hood ornaments

There were containers filled with Botox-making ingredients, fake Louis Vuitton handbags and dead guinea pigs. There were animal parts, cigars and steroids. Viagra from China and GBL, the date-rape drug, freshly arrived from Europe.

This is a glimpse into the underworld of illicit commodities trying to get through federal inspection sites at New York’s John F. Kennedy International Airport, the busiest international air passenger gateway to the United States.

And it was at JFK that Taryn Simon, an internationally renowned photographer, spent five days and nights in 2009 sleeping on an air mattress, documenting this ordinary deluge of bizarre goods into a major port of cargo and passenger entry into the U.S., an Ellis Island of sorts for illegal commodities…

The result is “Contraband,” a 1075-photographic series that will be exhibited in New York and Beverly Hills, California. A 500-page book with the same title is coming out soon.

Simon says cataloguing what is banned and unseen is a way to understand American identity through what we are allowed to consume and what we are not.

“You confront American desire through the endless counterfeit goods that traffic through customs, said Simon.

“There’s a numbing repetition to its mainstays — Louis Vuitton bags, Nike sneakers, counterfeit gold, counterfeit Viagra, illegal steroids. The photographs collectively build a portrait of escape and consumerism while revealing a new world of black market production that threatens American business interests,” she said.

Ah, yes, the underbelly not only of what’s allowed – and therefore what isn’t; but, a chance to reflect, perhaps, on how those decisions are arrived at.

Most of these reflect trademarks, copyrights, health and safety rules. Some – like cigars – are dedicated to the politics of American foreign policy.

Marilyn Monroe’s sultry rendition of “Happy Birthday” sung for President John F. Kennedy’s 45th birthday celebration marked the actress’ last major public appearance before her mysterious death in August 1962.

Tuesday, which would have been Monroe’s 84th birthday, marks the public debut of a rare image of Monroe with Kennedy and his brother Robert F. Kennedy together after the May 19, 1962, party.

The black-and-white photo, taken by White House photographer Cecil Stoughton, showed Monroe still wearing the infamously tight-fitting, sheer rhinestone-studded dress she wore when singing earlier at Madison Square Garden.

“There is no other known photo of Bobby [Kennedy] with Marilyn or JFK with Marilyn, and it’s not because they were never photographed together,” said filmmaker Keya Morgan, who now owns the only original prints of it. “In fact, they were photographed together many times, but the Secret Service and the FBI confiscated every single photograph.”

Stoughton, who sold the prints to Morgan a year before his death in 2008, told him agents missed one negative in their search, he said.

“The Secret Service came in when he was developing the negatives and basically confiscated all the ones of Jack, Bobby with Marilyn,” Morgan said. “The only one that survived is the one that was in the dryer.”

Stoughton…told Morgan the story behind the first lady’s refusal to attend her husband’s birthday gala.

“He’s the one who told Jackie that Marilyn was going to be at the celebration, and her exact words were ‘Screw Jack,’ and she left the room and she did not go to the famous celebration,” Morgan said.

Presidents used to have the sort of privacy that facilitated all kinds of low-life behavior -equalled only by the ethics and behavior of Congress. Then – and now.

The link is usually blocked by copyright holders = UMG

Erykah Badu shed her clothes as she walked along a Dallas, Texas, sidewalk until she was nude and then fell near where President Kennedy was assassinated.

The result was a controversial video, released Saturday, for her song “Window Seat,” which Badu said was “shot guerrilla style” with no crew and in one take March 17. Children could be seen nearby as Badu stripped in Dealey Plaza, a popular tourist spot since Kennedy’s 1963 assassination…

She tweeted that “there were children there. i prayed they wouldnt b traumatized.”

The R&B singer said she was making a statement against “groupthink,” which she tweeted was an “unwritten rule” that “i will not express my true opinion if it opposes those i love and fear…”

The video opens with a November 22, 1963, radio broadcast describing Kennedy’s motorcade turning onto Elm Street seconds before fatal shots were fired…

As she reached the spot where Kennedy was first struck by a bullet, the crackle of a gunshot is heard and Badu’s head snaps back and she falls to the ground as if dead.

Brave, foolhardy. Not my kind of social and musical experiment – but, rock on, lady!

She was the intern whose secret was kept for 40 years and he was the president who didn’t confine his affairs to a side room off the Oval Office.

But now Mimi Beardsley Alford, a retired New York church administrator, who as a teenager had an 18-month sexual relationship with President John F Kennedy, has finally decided to tell the story of those White House days and the impact the revelation of the affair four decades later has had on her life.

The relationship was exposed in 2003 in a biography of Kennedy that included a reference to JFK’s involvement with a Mimi Beardsley. She had not even told her parents or children of the affair. A New York newspaper found that Beardsley Alford had married, changed her name, divorced and was working for a Presbyterian church.

After the revelations Beardsley Alford said no more than to confirm that she was “involved in a sexual relationship” with the president from June 1962. But her agent, Mark Reiter, told the New York Times that she is now writing her own account of the relationship, in a book called Once Upon a Secret, to be published by Random House.

“As she thought about it, she said: ‘This is a story that I’d like to take control of, rather than have somebody else tell my side of it,’” he said.

Reiter said Beardsley Alford would not be serving up salacious details of the affair.

“She’s just not that type of person where she’s going to spill her guts about intimate stuff for the whole country to see,” he said. “The story has three acts to it: before the White House, during the White House, and then the really powerful part is what happens afterwards. What’s the impact on your family life, your marriage, knowing that this happened to you in your early life and you have chosen to keep it a secret?”

RTFA. Chuckles. An understanding of a different time.

Even though the prurient minds of professional moralists would have exploded across the landscape, the point is made that serious journalists didn’t consider bedroom stories worth reporting about in comparison to the end-of-the-world politics in play at the time.