Pod Theory, Controlled Demolition And The Flash Is Not A Sunday Matinee Hardcore Bill At CBGB

The Village Voice brings us up to date on various Sept. 11 conspiracy theories*:

Many Truth activists now dismiss the “pod theory” and its cousin “the flash,” which contend that the planes that struck the towers had unusual shapes on their undersides that may have fired missiles. More maligned is the idea that no planes hit the towers — that what we saw were drones or holograms. Even the no-planes-at-the- Pentagon theory divides Truth-ers.

. . .

By saying they’re only checking facts, the Truth activists avoid having to address the weaknesses in their own yarn. Why do the “booms” at the trade center come several minutes before the “demolition”? Why would the government destroy WTC7 when no one knew or cared about it? What happened to the people on the planes?

Some skeptics, however, aren’t shy. Fringe pol Lyndon LaRouche thinks the attacks were “an attempted military coup d’état.” Hufschmid says the Arab terrorists were patsies of several governments, including the U.S. and possibly Britain, France, Canada, and Israel. Ruppert, an adherent of the theory that oil reserves have peaked and that the petroleum-based economy is in great peril, postulates that 9-11 was a desperate effort by a couple dozen elites from the Clinton and Bush administrations to cling to dwindling energy supplies. His version stresses the links between the CIA and Wall Street and drug money, suspicion of the Secret Service, and a plot to rid the world of 4 billion people in order to reduce demand for petroleum.

*Ed Begley, Jr. is asked what he thinks of all this.

Celebrating The Gift Of Life

Stupidity hits new heights:

A baby shower turned bloody early yesterday when a gun-toting guest opened fire in a Brooklyn restaurant — hitting a Queens man who had just pulled him out of a fight over who had the better dance moves, police said.

The festivities were winding down at the New Combination eatery in East Flatbush when Teron Smith, 28, was shot in the left side of the face at about 12:45 a.m., cops said.

“Normally, we have parties here and we keep two or three bodyguards,” restaurant manager Ricardo Green said. “But we didn’t think we needed that. This was a baby shower.”

He said most of the 40 guests had left and his staff was cleaning up when one dancer stormed out, only to return shortly with two pals and a gun.

Sign A Waiver!

Brooklyn bid to break snow ball record runs into legal obstacles:

Even after Mother Nature dumped record snow on the city, there was still a you-know-what chance in hell of the largest snowball fight in history happening in Brooklyn.

Since announcing a bid to bring more than 3,000 frost flingers to Prospect Park, Cobble Hill chemist Jonathan Rosen has lined up everything he needs to shatter an existing Guinness World Record — except insurance.

“Nobody really wants to touch this because anything with the word ‘fight’ in the title just sounds scary,” said Rosen, 31.

A fear of lawsuits forced Rosen to resist holding the fight on Sunday, when New York got dumped with its own record-breaking 26.9 inches of snow. It was the first storm since the Queens native announced his plans in December.

. . .

Rosen was hoping to melt the existing record set by 3,084 people in Wauconda, Ill. — certified a month ago.

“I’ve got to admit, I was pretty bummed out most of the weekend because it just seemed like the timing would have been perfect,” Rosen said. “Still, you have to think in a city like this, where there’s a will there’s a way.”

Technology Is Cool

It’s not until the power goes out do you realize just how important electricity is:

A sewage treatment plant in Harlem nearly exploded into a “catastrophic” fireball during the 2003 blackout — a disaster only averted by a city worker armed with an old broomstick, new records show.

The dangerous near disaster, never revealed by the city, was detailed this week in federal court documents as part of a plea agreement with the city’s Department of Environmental Protection.

Under the deal, the DEP admitted that it failed to maintain backup generators at a sewage treatment plant in Red Hook, Brooklyn — causing some 30 million gallons of raw sewage to dump into the East River during the August 2003 blackout.

But records also show that DEP screwups at another plant, the North River Wastewater Treatment Plant between 137th and 145th Sts. on the Hudson River in Harlem, nearly caused a huge fireball that could have threatened nearby homes.

“We have been advised,” wrote U.S. Attorney Michael Garcia in a memo to the court last month, “that this situation created the risk of a catastrophic explosion near a residential neighborhood.”

Garcia’s investigators concluded that when the blackout hit, the lack of working generators at North River caused a flame that safely burns methane gas at the plant to go out, much like a pilot light going out inside a boiler.

With the burner extinguished, methane gas slowly built up — creating a time bomb that was defused only after “a DEP employee, at considerable risk to himself,” lit an old broomstick and reignited the burner, records show.

The actions of the employee — who was not identified in court papers or by the DEP yesterday — assured that “excess gas could be burned off and an explosion avoided,” Garcia concluded.