2008 hurricane season mostly spared Florida
BY EVAN S. BENN
Forget about cones of danger, storm shutters and supply kits -- for six months, anyway.
The 2008 Atlantic hurricane season officially ends Sunday.
Despite a few close calls and a drenching from Tropical Storm Fay, Florida escaped the season mostly unscathed. Our Caribbean neighbors were less fortunate, with Cuba and Haiti getting pounded by a succession of major hurricanes.
''This will probably go down as a nonmemorable year for Florida and a catastrophic year for Haiti and Cuba,'' National Hurricane Center Director Bill Read said. ``But we came very close here a couple of times. Any small change in steering currents could have brought us a direct hit.''
As it turned out, Florida's only direct hit came from Fay, a meandering, wet mess that flooded parts of Central and North Florida during its mid-August trek across the state.
Fay made history for being the first Atlantic tropical storm to make four separate landfalls in Florida: on Aug. 18 in Key West, Aug. 19 in Cape Romano, Aug. 21 in Flagler Beach and Aug. 23 in Carrabelle.
A major hurricane hasn't struck Florida since Hurricane Wilma in 2005, but Read said he isn't worried that the state has let its guard down. He pointed to Hurricane Ike, which had South Florida squarely in its cross hairs in early September before veering away on a more southerly path through Cuba.
''When Ike was posing a threat here, people started to pay attention, test their generators and shutters, add to their supplies, gas up their cars,'' Read said. ``That's exactly what we expect people to do, and I really thought they responded well.''
Florida's luck this hurricane season was due in part to high-pressure systems that formed over the state and steered away storms, Read said. Those bursts of high pressure came at the right times for Florida, but they also helped push the storms into the Gulf of Mexico and the Caribbean.
Four consecutive storms raked Haiti in August and September: Fay and Hurricanes Gustav, Hanna and Ike. The driving rains and resulting mudslides flooded towns and crumbled infrastructure, killing more than 800 people and causing billions of dollars of damage that experts say will take years to repair.
Fay, Gustav and Ike also ripped through Cuba, which then endured a late-season hit from Hurricane Paloma this month. The country's civil defense system issued mandatory evacuations to vulnerable areas, which are believed to have kept casualties to a minimum. But damage to roads and homes and buildings is present in several of the island's provinces.
''It's sad that the two poorest countries in the hemisphere -- Haiti and Cuba -- are the ones that got the most catastrophic damage,'' said professor Andy Gomez, a senior fellow at University of Miami's Institute for Cuban and Cuban-American Studies. ``The impact in both countries is going to be long-standing.''
Haiti's recovery is likely to go smoother than Cuba's because Haiti has welcomed aid from the United States and other nations, but ''Cuba is trying to play hardball,'' Gomez said.
''If they are willing to accept outside aid, it will make the process easier,'' he said. ``The truth is, these are two countries that have become used to these kinds of disasters and having few resources available to recover.''
Recovery efforts also continue to a lesser extent in coastal parts of Texas, Louisiana and Mississippi that were affected by Gustav and Ike.
The nation watched anxiously to see if Gustav would devastate New Orleans almost three years to the day after Hurricane Katrina sunk the city and claimed more than 1,800 lives.
Gustav peaked in the Gulf of Mexico as a Category 4 hurricane with 145 mph winds, but it weakened to a Category 2 before landfall near Cocodrie, La., on Sept. 1. Despite isolated flooding and wind damage, the levees around New Orleans held up, and evacuated residents returned to their homes within days.
Hurricane Ike took a similar course up the Gulf and landed in Galveston Island as a Category 2 storm on Sept. 13. A storm surge brought significant flooding throughout the coast near Galveston, and strong winds blew out the windows of several Houston high-rises.
Government forecasters predicted in May that it would be an active hurricane season, and their estimates were right on the mark.
Scientists projected that the season would bring 12 to 16 named storms that would grow into six to nine hurricanes, two to five of which would be Category 3 or stronger. The actual numbers: 16 named storms, eight hurricanes, five of them major.
''The seasonal outlooks were quite accurate,'' said Gerry Bell, the lead seasonal hurricane forecaster for the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration's Climate Prediction Center in Maryland. ``We've been in an active tropical era since 1995, and we saw that the conditions associated with that were still in place this year.''
The combination of the active era and a gradual warming of the Atlantic Ocean meant forecasters were ''fairly confident'' about this year's seasonal outlook, Bell said. And, he said, next year's outlook will likely predict another busy season.
Florida Power & Light crews took advantage of the low-impact season by continuing their efforts to clear vegetation around power lines and harden electrical systems around hospitals, schools and other critical facilities, company spokeswoman Irene White said.
Read, coming off his first season at the helm of the hurricane center, said his team in West Miami-Dade is already looking toward next year, figuring out ``what worked and what didn't.''
''I'm still learning things, obviously, but I have a much better feel for how we operate,'' Read said. ``By and large, I like what I've seen. I like what we're doing.''
© 2008 Miami Herald Media Company.

the spectator
Everything You Need To Know About Hitler's "Missing" Testicle
And why we're so obsessed the Führer's sex life.

By Ron Rosenbaum
Somebody make it stop. This incessant fixation on Hitler's sexuality, on his alleged perversity. I think it's fair to say that the very apex of cultural stupidity in our era is the compulsive conjunction of Hitler and sex. He was a "predatory" homosexual. He engaged in excretory practices with his underage half-niece. And, one of the most enduring, a myth I thought I had refuted once and for all but that now rears its head again: Hitler had only one testicle.
Isn't it obvious by now what this is about? Our need to prove that Hitler was not "normal," thus not like us, normal human nature thereby exculpated from producing a Hitler. It fills a need to reassure ourselves there is no Hitler potential in human potential. We're off the hook.
But despite the obviousness of it, it just doesn't stop.
Consider this passage from a recent New York Times book review of a new novel by A.N. Wilson called Winnie and Wolf:
There is a scatological leitmotif in this narrative, morally figurative of the Nazi ambience. Watching Hitler deliver a speech from an upstairs window, Herr N. notes that with every patriotic phrase, "the buttocks let out the quickfire whumps and cracks that accompanied the volleys firing from the mouth, and the room gradually filled with a gaseous sulphur odor." He comes up with his "flatulence theory": the idea that Hitler at the moment of orgasm would break wind. No woman could be expected not to laugh, and to Hitler this would be intolerable. But Winnie Wagner, with her hero-worship of the man and her great warmth of heart—with her, it would be different.
Right. Brilliant. Even novels and films about Nazis that don't feature Hitler somehow seem to have an unnatural quotient of sex. Take The Reader, the German best-seller (surprise!) and Oprah favorite in which a woman who served as a Nazi concentration camp guard later is subsequently sexually voracious with a teenage boy. Sex you will be able to see in great quantities in the soon-to-be-released film. Alas, the book has taken in literati over here as well (with the notable exception of Cynthia Ozick, who contended that it was ultimately an exercise in exculpation that metaphorically depicted the German people as somehow unaware of what was being done in their name). The movie version offers a plentitude of nudity and simulated sex with a plentifully nude Kate Winslet as the Nazi war criminal.
I've tried to point out the sheer lack of historicity or profundity in our efforts to link Hitler (and Nazis in general) with unconventional sex. I touched on these themes a few years back in a Slate column on the Hitler-was-homosexual claim, a claim that implicitly linked homosexual behavior to Hitler's criminal pathology. And I devoted a chapter of my book Explaining Hitler to attempting to discredit the emblematic Hitler perversion rumor, the Geli Raubal story: an effort by Nazi defectors and Freudians to prove that Hitler was really, really bad because of an apocryphal sexual perversion he practiced with his half-niece, Geli, who committed suicide before he became Führer. (As if, if it weren't for all that, he'd have turned out OK.) But my efforts to disprove this tall tale didn't stop supposedly literary novelists such as Ron Hansen, Norman Mailer, and lesser lights from taking it seriously.
And now the "missing testicle" is back. One of the most widespread urban legends about Hitler is that he was monorchid, and the supposedly missing testicle has seemed—to many who should know better—not just a minor deformity but the key to Hitler's psyche.
There is even a school of Freudian "psycho-historians" who view Hitler's putatively half-empty scrotal sack as the root cause of his murderous character, his sexuality, and his anti-Semitism. The rumor offers one-stop shopping for Hitler explainers.
This is a theory I thought I'd put an end to. Back in 1995 I published a prequel-like excerpt from my Hitler book in The New Yorker in which I made reference to the persistence of the one-testicle legend, including dubious, then-new reports that the testicle had been lost when the child Hitler—I'm not making this up—took part in an ill-advised barnyard prank in which he attempted to urinate down the mouth of a billy goat.
Shortly after the New Yorker piece appeared, I received a letter from one Gertrude Kurth, a psychoanalyst who during the war had participated in an OSS-sponsored attempt to evaluate "the mind of Adolf Hitler." In conjunction with the study's author, Walter C. Langer, she had tracked down Hitler's family doctor, Dr. Eduard Bloch, then a Jewish refugee living in the Bronx, N.Y. Bloch had unequivocally affirmed that he had examined Hitler during his childhood and found him "genitally normal."
End of story? Unfortunately, no. Now comes a reporter from the London tabloid the Sun, one Alex Peake, who in a Nov. 19 issue claims a new document has surfaced, the alleged testament of a priest who took the confession of one Johan Jambor. Jambor, we are told, was a German battlefront medic serving with Hitler during the 1916 battle of the Somme. According to Mr. Peake, Jambor "died aged 94 in 1985, but had told his secret to priest Franciszek Pawlar, who kept a note of their conversation."
Peake's story goes on:
Johan's friend Blassius Hanczuch confirmed the priest's account of how the medic saved Hitler's life. He said: "In 1916 they had their hardest fight in the Battle of the Somme.
"For several hours, Johan and his friends picked up injured soldiers. He remembers Hitler.
"They called him the 'Screamer.' He was very noisy. Hitler was screaming 'help, help.'
"His abdomen and legs were all in blood. Hitler was injured in the abdomen and lost one testicle. His first question to the doctor was: 'Will I be able to have children?' "
Blassius said that when the Nazis swept to power Johan began to suffer nightmares and blame himself for saving Hitler.
Astonishingly—though Peake neither produced the priest's document nor gave any further evidence of the existence of the supposed corroborating witness, Hanczuch—serious broadsheets such as the Telegraph in the United Kingdom, as well as print and electronic media on both sides of the Atlantic, picked up his story and repeated it as gospel along with sniggering headlines and references to the dirty wartime ditty (sung to the tune of "The Colonel Bogey March") that begins with the line "Hitler has only got one ball. ..."
It is true that Hitler was wounded during the battle of the Somme. The most reliable recent biographer Ian Kershaw says he was wounded in "the left thigh," not "the abdomen" as the Sun's perhaps mythical medic Jambor has it. And it's not unlikely this injury was the source of the dirty ditty.
But that's the only nugget, so to speak, of Peake's tale that appears to have any substantiation. I've e-mailed him twice asking where this alleged priestly document may be found and why it couldn't be photocopied. Asked him as well where this alleged corroborating friend Hanczuch might be reached and interviewed. No reply from Mr. Peake so far. The literature about Hitler is littered with hoaxes and urban legends, and so I call on Mr. Peake and the Sun to prove that this is not another one of them, that they haven't been taken in their eagerness.
But I'm still left wondering about the source of this eagerness. Why are so many so eager to believe, as the Sun's headline put it, that "Hitler HAD only got one ball"? Even if it were true, what would it prove?
The nonsensical Freudian theories about Hitler's monorchism are generally based on the idea that it was a condition he had from birth or one that developed in his pubescence, as is true for many males, mostly with little consequence. (Monorchism can refer to a testicle that never descends into the scrotum or one that descends but later retracts into the body.) It hardly needs to be pointed out that we'd live in a much more dangerous world if all monorchid youths grew up to be Hitlers.
Here's an example from one of the leading psycho-historians, the late Williams College history professor Robert Waite, author of The Psychopathic God: Adolf Hitler. After detailing a host of supposedly deleterious consequences monorchism may have on the emerging character, he adds, "Monorchid boys favor symbolic substitutes for the missing testicle. … Patients may be excessively concerned about eyes. Hitler's eyes were particularly important to him. … The adult Hitler was aware of their power and practiced 'piercing stares' in front of the mirror. He also played games with his eyes. He would slowly cross them in looking at people or would stare them down." Ooh, scary, people.
Even if the Sun document is not a hoax, it complicates these theories, because it posits that Hitler lost his testicle as an adult and thus presumably developed much of his character in a blissfully two-balled state. Of course, the supposed battlefield injury itself sounds painful, even traumatic, but again: enough to make Hitler Hitler? A factor of his character or ideological formation? In fact, Ian Kershaw in his biography makes clear that Hitler "came to hate Jews during his time in Vienna," years before the war.
And yet once again there seems to be a longing to believe what may turn out to be a shabby hoax. I think a clue to it can be found in the alleged words of the alleged medic, the poor, addled Johan Jambor: According to his friend, "[W]hen the Nazis swept to power Johan began to suffer nightmares and blame himself for saving Hitler."
Here we can see the appeal of this story, fable, fabrication, or whatever you want to call it: It wasn't the Western democracies who failed to save the world from Hitler with their fatal appeasing weakness. It was Johan Jambor who could have spared us. Hitler wasn't the fault of the German people; he was the fault of this one German, Johan Jambor—and the one missing ball. If only Jambor hadn't "saved Hitler," all the millions of "good Germans" who, for some inexplicable reason, followed Hitler slavishly wouldn't have to find excuses.
This has always been my problem with films like the German-made Downfall, which while initially being taken seriously by many, many film critics has found its true level as a YouTube camp joke. Downfall purports to offer the "inside story" of the last days of Hitler in his Berlin bunker and implicitly makes the case that the Holocaust wasn't the fault of the German people—no, they were victims, too!—but rather of one man, Hitler, and the small coterie of madmen and evil women surrounding him. Nothing to do with Germany's eager reception of exterminationist anti-Semitism.
The only good use for scurrilous sexual rumors about Hitler was the use found for them by contemporary opponents of Hitler who sought to discredit him during his rise to power. In my book I wrote about the brave, almost-forgotten, anti-Hitler journalists of Munich, Hitler's hometown, particularly the reporters and editors of the Social Democratic paper the Munich Post. These journalists would exploit anything to smear Hitler and in fact found—and published—far more serious and disturbing grounds to fear and reject him (such as the initial blue prints for the Endlösung, or Final Solution). But if ridicule of his peculiarities, sexual and otherwise, would help, they were not above it. Either way, the German people managed to avert their eyes.
But that was then. There's no excuse now for this incessant dwelling on Hitler's sexuality, as if it tells us anything about the true nature of his evil. No, all the obsession can tell us about is the way the culture as a whole exhibits a refusal to face the profundity and complexity of evil and instead—with some honorable exceptions—prefers to escape responsibility for Hitler and the Holocaust by blaming it all on ludicrously unserious and ahistorical sexual mythologies, and the Freudian-influenced notion that all behavior has a sexual explanation at heart.
In a way, the focus on Hitler's alleged sexual abnormality becomes the missing testicle of the German nation: the monocausal monorchid exculpation for the guilt for mass murder. Let's not encourage it. Ron Rosenbaum is the author of The Shakespeare Wars and Explaining Hitler.

From The Sunday Times
Sir Paul McCartney confronts the ghosts of his past
He overcame losing the love of his life and survived a disastrous second marriage. So what continues to torture him? In his most revealing interview yet, Sir Paul McCartney confronts the ghosts of his past. Portrait: Terry O’Neill Mark Edmonds
Sir Paul McCartney is sitting outside his dressing room, a tent actually, which he shares with his new American girlfriend, Nancy Shevell. It has been erected backstage with its own intimate tea lights, and one hour from now, on this September night, he will perform live before 50,000 fans in Tel Aviv. He’s relaxed, biding his time, an already busy day behind him spent meeting Palestinian and Israeli peace activists. He downplays his contribution to harmony in the Middle East.
“It was just some geezer showing up, who happens to be a musician. I am trying to do my own little bit and find out more.” Some geezer?
“Yes, I am allowed to say that. In my mind I am just an ordinary guy.”
The most famous “ordinary guy” in the world enjoys a £400m fortune, travels in a private jet, owns a dozen or so homes around the globe and has an entourage to attend to his every whim. For this night’s work the “ordinary guy” will earn $4m. He has been voted, questionably, the greatest composer ever, ahead of Mozart or Beethoven, and Messrs Putin, Blair, Bush and Clinton have courted him. The meeting with Barack Obama hasn’t happened yet, but McCartney says he will find room in his diary when the moment arises.
For decades McCartney has been written about, talked about, parodied and analysed, most recently during his divorce from Heather Mills, a split that revealed more about his private life than he has ever allowed. There’s nothing ordinary about this “geezer” and hasn’t been since 1962, and yet it is a theme he will return to time and time again, enough to beg the question, why? What’s bugging him that he needs us all to reappraise him?
In a scruffy, dusty street in Bethlehem, a small music school has been set up by the conductor Daniel Barenboim. The school is intended to bridge the cavernous divide between the Palestinians and the Israelis. Here there are no autograph hunters, no paparazzi. It is just McCartney, Nancy, a handful of staff and a bodyguard. Inside, McCartney plays the boogie-woogie intro to Lady Madonna on a Steinway. The children he has come to visit are politely baffled. For once, McCartney really is an ordinary geezer. Nobody has heard of him in this dirt-poor district.
During an unscheduled stop at the Church of the Nativity, he and Nancy light candles for peace. He pauses for autographs and a group of students interrupt the reverence with a rendering of Yellow Submarine in Spanish. He apologises to those who have come to pray. Someone shouts: “You’re fantastic, Paul!” “No, you’re more important than me,” he replies, warmly. His manner with ordinary people is intuitive and yet polished. At the church he teases a group of women: “Make sure you behave yourselves, ladies”. They purr gratefully. I can safely predict them dining out on what a nice guy he is for the rest of their lives.
At 66, McCartney is still the man your mum would want to meet. But when he is not parading before his public, he is on guard, and he politely ignores questions he deems uncomfortable. We have to remember that he is an old hand at this — he has been famous for nearly 50 years. He is still recording, but not, he says, making much money out of the new releases. Increasingly he has been building up his music-publishing interests. He still paints, and his classical works have sold well, although critics have been sniffy. More than anything, he loves performing. “I never want to get jaded. It’s still exciting for me to see people lining the route and waving out of the car. And yes, it is ego.”
But he keeps pushing the message of the ordinary guy from an ordinary house in Liverpool who’s still modestly perplexed by it all. That ordinary house, paradoxically, is now owned by the National Trust. McCartney has not been back since. “It gets dangerous when you start believing your own legacy. That’s why I’ve not gone back.”
Legacy is a tricky issue for him. He doesn’t want to be seen to be bothered by it, yet clearly it bugs him. Wherever he makes an appearance, he is followed by his own video crew; every minute of every public moment is recorded. Two stills photographers are part of the team, and he retouches and vets every image they release to the media. He even did this in the hubbub of Tel Aviv. Why? To preserve his legend for prosperity? The question draws a defensive response.
“I just don’t like to see terrible photos of myself?it’s straightforward vanity. You tell me someone who wants to see terrible photos of themselves.”
I hesitate to say I know a lot of women who’d agree, but not many men who are that bothered.
The Beatles were together for just eight years, until the split in 1970. McCartney has spent the greatest part of his life and career as a solo performer, with painfully less success than he enjoyed with Lennon. He concedes that he will probably never again write songs with the luminescence of Here, There and Everywhere or Eleanor Rigby.
It becomes clear during our sporadic conversations over five months that McCartney feels real, tangible, lingering pain about the Beatles, and particularly the fact that he has carried the blame for their break-up. It might be guilt, it might be hindsight and it might just be a desire to clear his name. It might be the reason he is so intent on presenting himself as the “nice ordinary geezer” who teases old ladies — as if to rehabilitate himself. It’s possible that the McCartney who was cast as the villain in the break-up wants redemption, and with only two Beatles left, he’s keen that posterity records his side of the story.
Those who really know McCartney say there are those who are overawed by him, those who are intimidated by him, and those who just want a piece of him. When he visited Washington a few years ago, George Bush and Colin Powell were squabbling over a book McCartney had autographed for Powell. Staff were dispatched to obtain a second copy for the president. When Tony Blair heard that McCartney was to attend a Children of Courage lunch in 1999, he kept the cabinet waiting while he posed for a picture with the former Beatle. When McCartney played Red Square, Putin invited him to hang out with him. McCartney allowed one tea and a tour of the Kremlin; he was busy. His musical legacy is guaranteed, but that of “the man who broke up the Beatles” because he couldn’t be the boss, haunts him, as does his relationship with John Lennon — the blame for the break-up still has traction 38 years later. Whatever the catastrophic nature of his marriage to Heather Mills, a line has been drawn, but with Lennon it is still untidy, unfinished business, and it’s the one personal issue McCartney doesn’t duck. Indeed, he seems driven to seek an acquittal — a pardon won’t do.
The roots of the Beatles’ break-up go back to 1967, with the death of Brian Epstein. The group’s finances soon became chaotic and McCartney pushed for the Eastmans, his in-laws, to take over their management. Lennon opposed McCartney’s desire to control the band’s destiny and legacy, and proposed a new manager, Allen Klein, with whom he, George and Ringo had already signed.
Stalemate ensued. McCartney wouldn’t budge, nor would Lennon. By then all four were ready to go their separate ways. McCartney sued to legally wind up the band, ensuring it couldn’t reform without him and leaving none of their legacy under Klein’s control. The split was messy and brutal. McCartney probably said “I told you so” when Lennon subsequently fell out with Klein, but by then his intimate relationship with Lennon was beyond repair.
In 1971, Lennon released a song called How Do You Sleep? It was aimed at McCartney — a bilious, vituperative attack, mocking him, accusing him of possessing a petit bourgeois, suburban mentality and being under his wife Linda’s thumb — “You live with straights who tell you you was king? Jump when your mama tell you anything?”
The fact that George and Ringo also played on the track made it more painful. To his credit, McCartney tried to build bridges, contacting Lennon whenever he was in New York, but sources say he was systematically and rudely rebuffed. In 1972 they did meet briefly — and frostily. Lennon’s biographer Philip Norman refers to a guarded truce that soon evaporated, though McCartney still wanted to reach out. He would call Lennon regularly, often to be greeted with “What the f***, do you want, man?” For some reason Lennon was particularly annoyed by McCartney’s tendency to talk about his young children. John said that the man he once dismissively described as the best PR in the business had become “all pizza and fairy tales”. It’s hard to escape the conclusion that Lennon could be a boorish snob. They played together just once after the break-up, at Lennon’s house in Santa Monica. McCartney and Linda arrived and they joined an all-star jam session.
The one-time friends met for the last time over an awkward dinner in New York about two years before Lennon’s death: one person who was there said they had nothing left to say to each other.
McCartney seems painfully conscious of the shadow John still casts over his life three decades later. He would live to regret the insanely glib remark he made on TV when asked about John’s death: “Drag, isn’t it?” A clip of it has ended up on YouTube; McCartney appears callous, but those close to him defend him vigorously. McCartney was in shock at the loss of his closest-ever friend, they say, and for once his composure deserted him. Two years later when the BBC filmed McCartney recording a special edition of Desert Island Discs, he wept as he talked about Lennon.
Throughout our conversations McCartney is keen to return to the subject of Lennon. There is the overwhelming sense that their prodigious, at times toxic, relationship is never far from his mind. I ask if he would ever consider performing Lennon’s How Do You Sleep? He doesn’t take the bait. “Maybe I wouldn’t do that one. I doubt it,” he answers with a wry smile. But it sparks an attempt to set the record straight, to varnish the epitaph and insist that the Lennon/McCartney friendship survived and endured. “The answer to John was well — I was sleeping very well at the time.
“Before John died I got back a good relationship with him. That was very special. The arguments we had didn’t matter. We were able to just take the piss about all those songs; they weren’t that harsh. In fact, I have been thanked by Yoko and everyone else for saving the Beatles from Allen Klein. Everything comes round in the end.” I ask him why it still matters so much. “I was placed in the most awkward position I’ve ever been placed in. I had to fight three mates to save their legacy, their money, as well as mine, and I did so knowing it would put me in a very dodgy position.” He goes on, eager to impress his defence upon unforgiving or undecided Beatles fans. He only sued his mates to stop Klein destroying them. “Anyone who didn’t thoroughly review the whole thing would be forgiven for thinking ‘What a tosser’. So yes, that matters to me, it is still a haunting episode? It was pretty scary having to say to Johnny, Georgie, Ringo, I’m suing you!”
When he started touring with Wings in the 1970s, McCartney refused to sing any Beatles songs. Now the set he has brought to Israel, one of a series of special gigs this year, consists mainly of the songs he wrote and recorded with Lennon. “I love John’s songs. In the Beatles, if you said it was one of your songs, it basically meant it was your idea. So Eleanor Rigby was my song, but John helped me finish it. A Day in the Life was his, but I helped him finish it. He came up with ‘I read the news today’ and I came up with ‘he blew his mind out in a car’. At the end of the song in Tel Aviv, McCartney segues into Lennon’s Give Peace a Chance, which in recent years he has quietly appropriated.
McCartney’s decision to play in Tel Aviv has prompted huge controversy, pushing him onto the front pages for the first time since the divorce settlement that cost him £24.3m. Omar Bakri Mohammed, a radical sheikh based in Syria, makes death threats. “I don’t get worried — if I did I’d get worried about walking across the street and getting run over in London.” The Israeli ambassador to the UK has already publicly apologised to McCartney and Ringo for banning the Beatles in the 1960s — their music was deemed too decadent — and the government is milking this visit. McCartney, meanwhile, has decreed that he wants to meet some Palestinians.
We wait for hours in the hotel lobby for McCartney to emerge from his suite. He has had a long lie-in. His famous love of punctuality doesn’t always apply to himself. If you arrange to call at his office, a member of his staff will send a nervous text five minutes before asking: “Where are you?” As he finally enters, he cannot resist a tinkle on the piano. He strides purposefully; he has learnt to walk faster than most over the years, which may be why he wears trainers with suits.
For a 66-year-old, he looks relaxed and fit, with not a grey hair on his head. He and Nancy get into a bomb-proof Land Rover, the rest of us in a Mercedes minibus. We drive into the West Bank.
The trip gives us a snapshot of vintage McCartney: it shows how he operates and how he has survived for so long. He is not a great political thinker, but in politics, as in so many things, his approach is instinctive and pragmatic. He is disarmingly honest. “I’m not very politically aware of the situation, I suppose like the average British person. We do know there’s a conflict, but we didn’t know all the ins and outs. You don’t have to visit a refugee camp to know there are a lot of Palestinians who have become dispossessed.”
On tour, as at home, with staff, officials, crew and the public, he is polite and warm. When faced with the dull prospect of a “meet and greet” with local bigwigs before the concert, he still manages to pretend he is enjoying himself. The mayor of Tel Aviv is here, anxious to be seen — and photographed — shaking McCartney’s hand. “It’s okay. I understand why it has to be done. I know it’s not going to go on for long. It’s not entirely boring.”
There is a part of McCartney that relishes being famous, even now. He enjoys ringing people up out of the blue. “Most people think it’s Frank from the office having a laugh. But then I say, ‘No, it’s Paul, you know, She Loves You?’” I’m not convinced he could cope with being the ordinary guy he claims to be. “This morning,” he says, “I was walking into a cafe. A girl shouts, ‘Hi Paul, you are fantastic. I really love you.’ I take it with a pinch of salt, but I am honoured. I am pleased she didn’t say, ‘You’re a total arsehole and I hate you.’ I am pleased I have got a compliment, and I can still walk around Soho as I’ve always done.”
People who know him say there is the real McCartney and there is Beatle Paul. “I’ve learnt to compartmentalise,” he says. “There’s me and there’s famous Him. I don’t want to sound schizophrenic, but probably I’m two people. I’m the guy who does shows in Israel, but I’m also the guy who goes home to the kids. There I am just Dad.
Apart from the “ordinary guy”, McCartney is also the “family guy”. He is close to all his children. “They’ve not been cloistered — Linda and I were very conscious of that. They’re likable people.” But they are different from others, financially at least. “If you’re as well off as I am, inevitably they will benefit. They’ve never understood hunger, like I did. I’m still hungry because I had that hunger, I’ve never lost it. It’s good to have.”
One of his gripes with Heather was not the money but his wish that their daughter Beatrice did not grow up in “a gilded cage” with 24-hour security, which his other children never had. There’s that ordinary guy again. I wonder why he needs it so much.
Throughout his public life McCartney has appeared calm and in control. Even when his ex-wife was portraying him as a cannabis-smoking, wife-beating Scrooge, he kept his cool. But there are times when he loses it and the ordinary guy can be ruthless. In 2003 he let rip in public, getting annoyed with a photographer. At the time he was out at Tower Bridge in London watching the illusionist David Blaine, and referred to him as a “c***”. For McCartney, it was unprecedented: a moment of uncontrolled rudeness exposed to the world. His relationship with Heather was unravelling at the time. “We’d been out with a bunch of mates eating and drinking and going at it out late. We had our publicity guy there. He went out to tell the press ‘there he is’. I was more angry with him than anyone else. But I lost it that night. Yes.”
McCartney fired Geoff Baker, his press officer, that night, but reinstated him the following day. A year later he sacked him properly after 15 years’ service. McCartney himself put out an uncharacteristically mean press release: “Over the past few months, his behaviour has not reached the professional standards I had come to expect.”
Baker now says working as McCartney’s press officer in the Heather phase of his life had driven him to drugs and drink. “The pressure was massive? there’s the world there, Paul and Heather here, and I was in between. Nobody can blame my addictive failings on Paul or Heather or anything like that. But the pressure was unreal.”
The Blaine episode was trivial in itself, but revealing, in that it was McCartney’s first and, to date, last public explosion, although there have been gaffes, not least his response to 9/11. “Are you gonna do a bombing campaign? How dare you! If you want to take my kids out — well, screw you. Come and talk about it, right in my face, baby,” was his public challenge to Osama Bin Laden. Unsurprisingly, Bin Laden never got back to him.
In 1984, four years after the drugs bust in Japan that sent McCartney to jail and finished off Wings, he spoke about drugs: “Cannabis is a lot less harmful than rum punch, whisky, nicotine and glue, all of which are perfectly legal.” Now, he told me, “Things have changed. A lot of people started on heroin because John did.
We didn’t know the dangers of overindulgence. The problems of cannabis have escalated and it really is more dangerous. “I’ve lost too many friends through drugs. I still believe basically the same things, but I don’t want to be a spokesman for legalisation.” When pressed, for the first time in our conversations, he is irritated. “I think I’ve made my views perfectly clear.”
His prickliness over the drugs issue is an example of his refusal to deviate from his own agenda. I mention that I have recently interviewed the widow of Mal Evans, the Beatles’ long-standing roadie who felt let down by the group when they broke up — the comment is simply ignored as though he didn’t hear it. In McCartney’s world, he has to have the last word, and there is no doubt he is always right — probably because there is nobody ever there to say he is wrong.
We talk about the perceived wisdom that he only employs yes men. At his office, the atmosphere is relaxed and informal, but he is unquestionably the boss. His entourage call him, without irony, the Big Man, a contradictory term for someone surprisingly slight and skinny. “In any situation with a high-ranking official, any boss, it’s not always a good idea to tell him he’s crap. But I try to encourage people. We all have meetings — the best ideas carry the day. If someone goofs up I tell them off. There have been one or two moments when somebody has been out of order.”
Before a concert he is a stickler for detail: the music, the visuals, how he looks. But he can’t keep on top of everything. One crew member who joined him on stage told me: “Nancy should have done something about his nose hair.” Those who work for him tend to remain loyal, not least, as Baker says, because they enjoy being part of the inner sanctum. “He’s not the king of England; he’s not going to have you executed. But too many people don’t want to offend him, because they don’t want to be dropped.”
Probably the closest person to him other than family is his “executive personal assistant”, John Hammel, who began working for him as a roadie in the 1970s. On stage he still hands him his instruments and adjusts his strap, but he is now also his driver, confidante and maybe even his best friend. “It’s funny, but no one has ever asked me to reveal all. And I never would. I’d never give an interview, I’d never write a book. I’m too loyal to Paul.” It’s hard to tell who is close to McCartney. Since the death of Lennon, nobody has filled the void who doesn’t work for him. It is remarkable how so few of his intimates have kissed and told. Jane Asher has never spoken of their relationship, and Neil Aspinall, the Beatles roadie who went on to run Apple, also remained loyal. When Aspinall retired McCartney gave him a gold watch, but, more tellingly, he also paid for Aspinall’s cancer treatment. McCartney flew to New York to say goodbye to him just before he died.
One thing does emerge from talking to his friends and associates: McCartney can be controlling, difficult and demanding, but he is fundamentally decent.
In the 1960s, the Beatles biographer Hunter Davies asked the group if he could keep some handwritten song lyrics they’d left lying around in Abbey Road, which would otherwise have been thrown out by the cleaners. They all agreed, but McCartney forgot about it until he took his daughter Mary to the British Museum and spotted a lyric in his handwriting in a case. (Davies had given them to the nation.) He wrote to Davies asking for the lyric back; they eventually agreed between them that McCartney would leave it in the museum. Someone who has known him well for years says: “Rich and famous people like him are always bugged about something. The relationship with John was hard. He was in awe of him. He doesn’t care when people mock his art or his music. But more than anything he has the Beatles legend looming over him.”
There are subjects that McCartney flags up firmly as no-go areas. On Heather, he will not say a word. He doesn’t have to. During and after their separation, he maintained a dignified silence. Mr Justice Bennett described him as “consistent, accurate and honest”. Perhaps the only lingering question anyone wants answered is why someone as worldly as McCartney would fall for a serial stalker of publicity, wealth and fame. The answer could be that nobody had the nerve to tell him about the real Heather Mills. His children are thought to have tried, but it would have been easy for him to dismiss their objections as loyalty to their mother. One source says McCartney’s explanation after the divorce was simple and nearer the truth: he was thinking with the wrong head. In his judgment, Mr Justice Bennett was kinder; he said McCartney was “still very emotionally tied” to Linda when he met Heather.
One day in October, when I call to see him at his London office, an assistant is mailing out the pink invitations to Beatrice’s birthday party; McCartney speaks of his daughter fondly. He is more circumspect about his new relationship with Nancy Shevell, a rich American businesswoman who is separated amicably from her husband. She is notoriously publicity shy. I asked her if she finds McCartney’s fame stressful. “I don’t find it stressful. I’m a cancer survivor, I run a trucking company and I’ve got a 16-year-old to raise. That’s stress.”
Nancy clearly idolises him. As McCartney performed in Tel Aviv, she looked on adoringly. It didn’t bother her that his set includes the song My Love, which he dedicates to Linda — Heather used to stomp out when he played it so he took it out. Nancy is confident, sophisticated and McCartney clearly feels safe and comfortable with her. “I just like being in love,” is all he’ll say on the subject.
It has been an insightful few months. The ordinary guy, the geezer from Liverpool, the rock’n’roll legend, the goodwill ambassador, they’ve all been on show, and what emerges is a man comfortable with his fame, even with his notoriety. It’s curious he doesn’t feel embarrassment over the questions his Heather episode pose about his judgment.
He has almost breezily drawn a line under the messiest divorce in decades, and yet his role in the split from the Beatles still cuts deep. McCartney is clearly in touch with his mortality, and he doesn’t want his immortality tarnished.
Electric Arguments, the latest album by the Fireman (Paul McCartney), is out tomorrow on MPL/One Little Indian Records

Metreon to be revamped
By Katie WorthExaminer Staff Writer
The Metreon will be undgergoing a renovation on three of its floors. Cindy Chew/The ExaminerSAN FRANCISCO – After years of struggling with an identity crisis, the Metreon may finally have found a new face to put forward.
Next month, owners will unveil plans to revamp the 300,000-square-foot mall, which has struggled to turn a profit despite sitting on some of The City’s most prime real estate — adjacent to the Yerba Buena Gardens on Mission and Fourth streets.
The plans include bringing in a slew of new restaurants, retail stores and cultural spaces, and redesigning the first, second and fourth floors of the four-story mall, while leaving intact the successful movie and IMAX theaters on the third floor, said Amy Neches of the Redevelopment Agency.
The first floor of the building, which now houses the food court, a bookstore and a handful of other small retail shops, will be redesigned so restaurants and retail wrap around the building, with entrances facing the street, in contrast to their current inward orientation, Neches said. The food court will be expanded and be more centrally located, rather than compressed on one end of the shopping center, as it is now, she said.
“It’ll be more of an urban, pedestrian-oriented experience,” she said.
The second floor, which contains a large video-game arcade but is otherwise vacant, will be redesigned to house restaurants, retailers and permanent cultural attractions, Neches said. The fourth floor, which has been without a long-term tenant for years, has been leased by New York restaurant giant Tavern on the Green, and is slated to become a large restaurant with public and private dining rooms.
Though they are choosing to stay mum specific details of their plans till they are presented to the Redevelopment Agency’s commission, Metreon owners Westfield and Forest City believe the changes will “captivate, appeal to and draw consumers to Metreon,” said Westfield senior asset manager Heather Almond.
That kind of success has remained elusive for the Metreon, despite high hopes and great fanfare when it opened in 1999. Then-owner Sony conceived it as a hybrid mall and high-tech theme park, and hoped it would become a mecca for techies and gamers that would attract both tourism and local dot-com dollars.
But after all the initial gusto, the Metreon never lived up to expectations. Sony sold it in 2005 to Westfield, owner of the thriving mall across the street.
Ashley Williams, a clerk at Chronicle Books on the ground floor of the building, said the changes will be positive, particularly opening the building up to the street more.
“I always get people asking me, ‘What is the Metreon,’ because you can’t really tell from the outside,” she said.
“You come in and it’s confusing, you don’t know what to categorize it as,” Tiffany Parker, another clerk at the bookstore, said. “You think it’s a mall, but there are really very few stores that actually sell stuff. It’s as though it’s not really sure what it’s meant to be.”
kworth@sfexaminer.com
Metreon makeover
Owners of the retail and entertainment space on Mission and Fourth streets are exploring major renovations to the building.
Current first-floor setup: Food court, restaurants, electronics stores, book store and small retail booths.Proposal: Remodeled floor plan that wraps restaurant and retail spaces around the building, allowing them to open out toward the street. New, centralized food court.
Current second-floor setup: Video-game arcade.Proposal: Revamped floor plan that includes restaurant, retail and cultural attractions.
Current third-floor setup: Movie and IMAX theatersProposal: No change.
Current fourth-floor setup: Vacant.Proposal: Owners of Tavern on the Green restaurant in New York would build a restaurant

Pulitzer Prize Winner Studs Terkel Dies at 96
By AP / CARYN ROUSSEAU
(CHICAGO) — Studs Terkel, the ageless master of listening and speaking, a broadcaster, activist and Pulitzer Prize-winning author whose best-selling oral histories celebrated the common people he liked to call the "non-celebrated," died Friday. He was 96.
Dan Terkel said his father died at home, and described his death as "peaceful, no agony. This is what he wanted."
"My dad led a long, full, eventful, sometimes tempestuous, but very satisfying life," Terkell said in a statement issued through his father's colleague and close friend Thom Clark.
He was a native New Yorker who moved to Chicago as a child and came to embrace and embody his adopted town, with all its "carbuncles and warts," as he recalled in his 2007 memoir, "Touch and Go." He was a cigar and martini man, white-haired and elegantly rumpled in his trademark red-checkered shirts, an old rebel who never mellowed, never retired, never forgot, and "never met a picket line or petition I didn't like."
"A lot of people feel, 'What can I do, (it's) hopeless,'" Terkel told The Associated Press in 2003. "Well, through all these years there have been the people I'm talking about, whom we call activists ... who give us hope and through them we have hope."
The tougher the subject, the harder Terkel took it on. He put out an oral history collection on race relations in 1992 called "Race: How Blacks and Whites Think and Feel About The American Obsession," and, in 1995, "Coming of Age," recollections of men and women 70 and older.
He cared about what divided us, and what united us: death — in his 2001 "Will the Circle Be Unbroken? Reflections on Death, Rebirth, and Hunger for a Faith," and hope, in his 2003 "Hope Dies Last."
Terkel won a 1985 Pulitzer Prize for "The Good War," remembrances of World War II; contrasted rich and poor along the same Chicago street in "Division Street: America," 1966; limned the Depression in "Hard Times," 1970; and chronicled how people feel about their jobs in "Working," 1974.
"When the Chinese Wall was built, where did the masons go for lunch? When Caesar conquered Gall, was there not even a cook in the army? And here's the big one, when the Armada sank, you read that King Philip wept. Were there no other tears?" Terkel said upon receiving an honorary National Book Award medal in 1997. "And that's what I believe oral history is about. It's about those who shed those other tears, who on rare occasions of triumph laugh that other laugh."
For his oral histories, he interviewed his subjects on tape, then transcribed and sifted. "What first comes out of an interview are tons of ore; you have to get that gold dust in your hands," he wrote in his memoir. "Now, how does it become a necklace or a ring or a gold watch? You have to get the form; you have to mold the gold dust."
He would joke that his obsession with tape recording was equaled by only one other man, a certain former president of the United States: "Richard Nixon and I could be aptly described as neo-Cartesians. I tape, therefore I am."
Terkel also was a syndicated radio talk show host, voice of gangsters on old radio soaps, jazz critic, actor in the 1988 film "Eight Men Out," and survivor of the 1950s blacklist.
In 1999, a panel of judges organized by the Modern Library, a book publisher, picked "Working" as No. 54 on its list of the century's 100 best English-language works of nonfiction. And in 2006, the Library of Congress announced that a radio interview he did with author James Baldwin in September 1962 was selected for the National Recording Registry of sound recordings worthy of preservation. Terkel's other interview subjects included Louis Armstrong, Buster Keaton, Marlon Brando and Bob Dylan.
Terkel's politics were liberal, vintage FDR. He would never forget the many New Deal programs from the Great Depression and worried that the country suffered from "a national Alzheimer's disease" that made government the perceived enemy. In a 1992 interview with the AP, he advocated "pressure from below, from the grass roots. That means the people who live and work in cities — that used to be called the working class, although now everyone says middle class."
Terkel was born Louis Terkel on May 16, 1912, in the Bronx. His father, Samuel, was a tailor; his mother, Anna, a seamstress. The family moved to Chicago in 1922 and ran a rooming house where young Louis would meet the workers and activists who would profoundly influence his view of the world.
"It was those loners — argumentative ones, deceptively quite ones, the talkers and the walkers — who, always engaged in something outside themselves, unintentionally became my mentors," Terkel wrote in "Touch and Go."
He got the nickname Studs as a young man, from the character Studs Lonigan, the protagonist of James T. Farrell's beloved trilogy of novels about an Irish-American youth from Chicago's South Side.
Terkel graduated from the University of Chicago in 1932, studying philosophy, and also picked up a law degree. But instead of choosing law, he worked briefly in the civil service and then found employment in radio with one of his beloved "alphabet agencies" from the New Deal, the WPA Writers Project.
His early work as a stage actor led to radio acting, disc jockey jobs and then to radio interview shows beginning in the 1940s. From 1949 to 1952, he was the star of a national TV show, "Studs' Place," a program of largely improvised stories and songs set in a fictional bar (later a restaurant) owned by Studs. Some viewers even thought it was a real place, and would go looking for it in Chicago.
"People were never put down," Terkel recalled in the 1995 book "The Box: An Oral History of Television, 1920-1961." "The stories were about little aspects of their lives. There was no audience and no canned laughter. ... It was one of the most exhilarating times of my life."
The McCarthy-era antipathy toward activists cost him his national TV outlet. But his radio interview show flourished, first at WFMT in Chicago and then, through syndication, in many markets.
In 1939, he married social worker Ida Goldberg, a marriage that lasted 60 years even though she couldn't get him to dance and always called him Louis, not Studs. "Ida was a far better person than I, that's the reality of it," Terkel later wrote of Ida, who died in 1999.
"She had a certain empathy I lack. And she was more politically active than I. ... Did she play a tremendous role in my life? Yeah, you could say so."
Associated Press National Writer Hillel Italie contributed to this report