Bless his fuzzy li'l heart

From County Antrim to Hell's Kitchen
Word on the street has it that Liam Neeson is moving again, this time to Hell's Kitchen! So smitten was the actor with a carriage horse stable he visited on Manhattan's west side that he said: "I would move in tomorrow!" Granted, it's a fixer-upper, but he has knack for the real estate bargains. (The smaller pic shows his 6,000-foot estate).


Plus, he's got the skills to pay the bills. After a few trips to Home Depot and Lowe's, he'll have the stables looking like home and smelling minty fresh.
His appearance on "The Daily Show with Jon Stewart" was purely embarrassing. Seems like the ignominious result of a Xanax, a couple of beers, and flack's badly written script. Yikes.
New York City's carriage horses get no daily turnout and live in multistory stables in Hell's Kitchen. No life for a horse.
From the Blogosphere: Joshing Politics; the Central Park Blogger

How long will horses be mistreated?

Film documents gruesome accidents
There's a lot of buzz in New York City today about the Blinders screening last night. The Central Park Blogger comments on the ultimate irony: even Beijing has banned horse-drawn carriages, but New York City has stubbornly refused to do so. It does boggle the mind.
Read "Blinders Screened" (Central Park Blog post, June 20, 2008)
Blinders is the new documentary from independent filmmaker Donny Moss. View the trailer on the Blinders website
Photo credit: Charles Eckert (January 2, 2006)
Support a ban on horse-drawn carriages in NYC (Intro. 658)

Anything but authentic

John B. Moore, like many others, once thought that New York's carriage industry was a harmless tradition that didn't warrant a second look. Now, he writes on the Central Park Blog, he has been forced "to confront the awful truth" about the industry, reckoning that there is no excuse for making the horses live the way they do--living in squalid cells and working in some of the nation's worst traffic.
Like many of us who have discovered this same awful truth, The Central Park Blogger has been confronted with the industry's PR machinery, which is quite elaborate. Between the paid PR person (Carolyn Daly) and lobbyist Thomas McMahon (whose lone associate in his firm, Jean Kim, is lobbying for the carriage industry), and the unfortunate mix of politics and "oversight," given that McMahon's wife, Linda Gibbs, is the Bloomberg appointee who oversees the Department of Health), you can begin to see how politically entrenched this cash-only industry is. Much effort is devoted to making the horse-drawn carriage industry appear to be an inconsequential diversion. Harmless? That it isn't, because putting horses into traffic endangers the horses as well as the public.

Support a ban on horse-drawn carriages