Regular readers of my column (See July 10 and 29 efforts) know that I have scoured the neighborhoods of Westchester and Putnam counties to come up with a purely parochial list of “Seven Wonders,” defined loosely as odd man-made things that mildly shock and awe. In the course of this important study, I solicited suggestions from readers who came up with some whoppers.
Now, you may have noticed that no photographs of the ‘wonders’ appeared in print…and so, you may have wondered what some of the wonders actually looked like. Well, wonder no more. If you’ve got a cable hookup, you can see a piece did on the Seven Wonders which will air today between 5 and 6 p.m. on RNN-TV’s Newscenter Now. I’m sorry I can’t give a precise time, but that’s the news business.

Also, check your local listings for the channel because it varies depending on the cable company. For example, Cablevision shows the program on Channel 19.
The piece begins with the so-called ‘Skinny House’ in Mamaroneck and concludes with the stupefying Roundabout in Mount Vernon.

Yonkers City Councilman Dennis Robertson is not too flattering in his comments about Mayor Phil Amicone—as clearly evidenced by today’s column in The Journal News.
Robertson, a Democrat, is hoping to take Amicone’s job in the November election.
In the column, Robertson said he fully expected that the Amicone camp would try to dig up dirt on him. (Say it ain’t so!)
This morning, I got a call from Deputy Mayor Bill Regan, who said the mayor is scheduled to swear in 20 new police officers. And guess who one of the new cops is? It’s none other than Robertson’s son, Dennis, Jr.
Regan thought this was ironic, considering that Robertson had voted against the appointment of Amicone’s choice for police commissioner, Edmund Hartnett.
“He could have been passed over,” Regan said, referring to young Robertson. ‘But we’re not like that.”
Regan chuckled. “Just to show you what a nice guy Phil Amicone is…”

Sunday’s column will be about the “Seven Wonders” Of Westchester and Putnam counties. In it, I refer to one of those wonders—the cell tower on the Hutchinson River Parkway in the Harrison-White Plains area that was disguised as a supposedly visually pleasing pine tree.
G. Keene of Pound Ridge reminded me that another silly “pine” exists in Pound Ridge. Keene wrote a poem about it.
And here it is in full, with apologies to Joyce Kilmer.

I think I shall never see
A cell tow’r lovely as a tree.

Today I spied a pseudo-pine
Its trunk a weird, faux-bark spine.

It rises over yonder hill
Bedecked in man-made chlorphyll.

Piercing through the azure sky,
It menaces all things that fly.

Would eagles on demented whim
Alight on manufactured limb?

Small airplanes, I would strongly bet,
Might be impaled en brochette.

Poems are made by fools like me,
But (apparently) Verizon thinks it can make a tree!

As of this blogging, the Dow Jones Industrial Averages is plummeting by the second, down somewhere in the vicinity of 360 points. The market is nuts, wilder than a Playland ride…and I don’t pretend to understand it.

But I had to laugh when a newspaper colleague recently handed me a copy of the last edition of the Today newspaper, a Gannett daily that we had worked on in days of yore. Not to be confused with the still vibrant national paper, USA Today, our Today was a local Westchester metro effort that was produced during the New York City newspaper strike in 1978. Today came out in the morning and was sold at newstands and vending boxes for 15 cents.
It did very well for awhile and was put to sleep five years later. The last issue came out on Feb.4, 1983.
Now, where was I? Oh yeah, the stock market. So I was perusing the last Today and I saw this headline in the business section—”Dow gains 2.02″
Like that was big news, which I guess it was nearly a quarter of a century ago when the market ebbed and lowed in micro digits. The two-point gain put the Dow at 1,064.66. (The S&P Index was 144.26.)
Compare that to last week when the Dow topped 14,000, Since then, it’s dipped under 13,500 in a seeming free fall.

Journal News staff writer Bruce Golding will be my guest tomorrow (Thursday) on the “High Noon” radio program. Our topic will be the accidental death of a 21-year-old woman on the Mind Scrambler, a ride at the Westchester County-owned Playland Amusement Park.

Who’s to blame for this tragedy? Should the county get out of the amusement park business? These and other questions will be examined, and you are invited to contribute your views.

The show airs at 12 noon on WV)X radio, 1460 on your AM dial. The program also streams live on www.wvox.com. If you want to join in the discussion, call 914-636-0110.

I’ve been off for the past week, so this blog has obviously been on a hiatus. I had a busy and far-ranging travel schedule, but one of the places I visited at the end of the week was a tourist attraction very close to home, a place I’d never been to before. In fact, I didn’t even know exactly where it was.

The place was Kykuit, the home of oil baron John D. Rockefeller and three subsequent generations of the great Rockefeller clan.

I’m not sure why I went, to tell you the truth. I mean, there’s no water slide at Kykuit. Nor is there a money bin to dive into naked to get that special feeling of what it’s like to be filthy rich. You can’t play “Rich Guy” and order a robotic butler around. Nothin like that. There isn’t even a gift shop.
Kykuit isn’t that kind of place. It’s really a museum of “stuff,” mostly exotic and/or modern art collected by Nelson Rockefeller, the late governor of New York and one of five brothers in the family’s third generation.

But I figured, Kykuit is like the Statue of Liberty. Sooner or later, you just gotta go there.
After all, Rockefeller, the patriarch, was the richest American who ever lived. He made his dough in oil and like most of the robber barons of his era he built his fortune with ruthless, monopolistic zeal that enabled him to squash all his competitors like bugs. Dollar for dollar, this cold fish of a tycoon, who nearly lived to be 100, beats out modern-day zillionaires like Bill Gates and Warren Buffet.

The story goes that he gave out shiny dimes to the children of Pocantico Hills, which I forgot to mentions is where Kykuit is situated atop a 500-foot hill. The word “Kykuit” is a Dutch word that means high place, and indeed the six-story mansion is so high up that the houses and commercial buildings of Tarrytown and Sleepy Hollow in the valley below are dwarfed by the trees and made invisible. From the vantage point of the rear veranda, the Rockefellers had a panoramic view of the Hudson River, framed by sky and a vast canopy of green.

It cost 23 bucks a ticket to take the basic tour, which includes the first floor, the surrounding garden and the coach house. I liked our tour guide. She was a very nice woman, who knew her stuff.
But the experience was a bit too girly for me, a self-admitted Philistine when it comes to art and expensive place settings. You’re not going to get a lot of history here, or for that matter, any Rockefeller family gossip. If you want to know about Teddy Roosevelt’s trust-busting exploits and battles to break up Standard Oil, or insights on class differences in the early 20th century and the rise of the anarchist movement, go somewhere else.

I found some relief in the coach house, which features several surreys, which the old titan loved to ride around in. His nostalgic affection for horse-drawn transportation struck me as ironic considering he was the guy who almost single-handedly put us on an oil-based economy.
The coach house had a number of antique cars, including a Model T and a 1918 Caddy. There was also on display a Datsun compact that Nelson
bought after seeing it at the 1964-65 Worlds Fair. I guess it was a farily unique car for its time since it was a Japanese import before Japanese autos became a factor in the decline of General Motors, et. al, but today that little red car looks like a cheap piece of junk from the crappy mid-60s.

Fascinating.

Today on “High Noon” my phone-in guest will be Assemblyman Mike Spano of Yonkers who announced yesterday that he’s switched his party affiliation from Republican to Democrat. He’ll explain why he made the move and how it help his constituents.

I’ll also read over the air some of the suggestions e-mailed to me since I wrote a column about Westchester’s “seven wonders.” I left the seventh blank on purpose so that readers could come up with their thoughts on this most important topic.

The show airs at 12 noon, and Spano is expected to come on at about 12:15 p.m. Listen in at 1460-AM or log on to www.vox.com

The Republican Party in Westchester is in dire shape as further evidenced by Assemblyman Mike Spano’s defection to the Democrats. I write about this in tomorrow’s (July 12) column.

Needless to say, it’s not good for democracy that the once proud GOP has been brought to its knees.

One-party rule ensures only one thing: corruption will reign. It doesn’t matter which party is in control. The old adage of absolute power corrupts absolutely applies to both Democrats and Republicans.

So we now have the Democrats running everything. Some Democrats are speaking of this with the crazed spirit of Manifest Destiny.

I wasn’t able to work into the column a bizarre quote from Assemblyman Richard Brodsky, D-Greenburgh who said the Democratic Party goal was to be number one “which it now is top to bottom, coast to coast, north and south, east and west—and that’s the way it should be.”

No, that’s not the way it should be.

Unless, of course, we want a dictatorship.

Back in February, I wrote this about Gov. Eliot Spitzer:

“Most taxpaying citizens know he’s right that Albany is a disgrace and that (Sheldon) Silver and Joe Bruno, who contrls the Republican majority in the state Senate, are contributors to the problem.
“But he’s also dangerously close to looking like a spiteful bully, and it could backfire on him.”

Five months later, partisans and pundits (and even some Democrats) are calling Spitzer just that—a bully. As predicted, the governor’s style has indeed backfired on him.

But when I sounded the alarm, it was because Spitzer appeared to be using his considerable weight to publicly browbeat Assemblyman George Latimer, a capable Democrat from Rye with little power to do any harm to the governor. Latimer had the temerity to side with his boss, Assembly Speaker Silver, who pushed the controversial appointment of Tom DiNapoli to fill out the comptroller’s term vacated by the disgraced Alan Hevesi.

Spitzer had a right to be angry. It appeared that Silver pulled a bait and switch on the comptroller deal, and DiNapoli was nothing if not a crony handpicked by a man who surrounds himself with cronies and yes-men.
The problem as I saw it and expressed in my Feb. 13 column, was that Spitzer clearly picked on Latimer by dropping in on his Assembly district for an unrelated event and suggesting that Latimer would get his comeuppance next time he runs for re-election.

That episode made Latimer look vulnerable, but it made Spitzer look like a bully.

Now Spitzer is engaged in an epic battle against Bruno. And NOW people are calling him a bully! That’s nuts, the powerful Bruno is exactly the guy Spitzer should be slapping around. Same with Silver.

Finn McCool’s in White Plains was a watering hole where the local newspaper crowd used to hang out. It recently closed. There’s still Dunne’s but the truth is that except for the few remaining diehards with hollow legs and livers which should be donated to science, the after-hours drinking days are pretty much over.

But Finn’s was an OK saloon. I didn’t go there often, but I have enough memories of some interesting nights there—and one in particular a long time ago that I’d like to forget, and so (I’m sure) would the other person involved.

Strange thing. On Sunday, I was walking my dog on a field and feeling low. I was having one of those imaginary conversations you sometimes have with someone you’ll never speak to again in a thousand years. At one point, I muttered aloud, “I want my soul back.”

Just as I said it, a happy, little boy ran up to me. “Can I pet your dog?” He asked.
“Sure you can, absolutely,” I replied. Not far away, a woman whom I assumed was the boy’s mother was reading a book on the grass. She looked back and smiled. So I figured it was OK.

My dog, a mixed labrador retriever with cock-eyed ears, must have outweighed the boy by at least 25 pounds. She is the kind of dog that children are drawn to naturally, and she loved the boy’s attention And he loved her.

“Do you have a dog?” I asked.
“I have a kitten,” he said.
“That’s nice, ” I said. “I also have two cats.”

Finally, as I turned to go, I asked the boy his name. He told me, but I couldn’t quite hear what he said.
“Tim?” I said.
He corrected me. “No, Finn,” he said.

“Finn,” I repeated. “That’s a great name. I’ll see ya around, Finn.”

I swear this is true, and I have no idea what it means. Just one of those strange coincidences in life, probably. But that boy was an angel, and so was my dog. It was a moment of happiness and innocence, and for a moment it restored my spirit, if not my soul.

QUICK ADDENDUM:
Later that day, my next door neighbor in Yonkers was unloading some things from his car. On the sidewalk was a tall chair, the kind you find in a bar.
It was a Finn McCool’s chair. He had taken it as a memento. “Went there for 22 years,” he said.