THE COOL HANDSHAKE

March 23, 2013 – Awesome Downtown Penthouse

57 Bond Street, Apt. PHE Greenwich Village $3,900,000 | 2 Bedrooms | 2 Bathrooms | Approx. 1,470 sq. ft.

This luxurious penthouse features a private rooftop oasis with over 1,100 square feet of fully landscaped and furnished outdoor space that is accessible via an interior stairway as well as the elevator. You’ll enjoy wide open north, south and eastern exposures with incredible panoramic views of the city. Inside there are 11-foot ceilings, a wood burning fireplace and hardwood floors. A Chef’s kitchen featured custom cabinetry and a suite of strictly high end appliances. The master bedroom has a luxurious en-suite bathroom with Carrera marble and a steam shower. There are also great custom closets in addition to a storage unit in the lower level of the building.

For more information about today’s 10am Special, please visit corcoran.com.

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THE CIA’s SECRET EXPERIMENTS TO TURN CATS INTO SPIES»

In the 1960s, the Central Intelligence Agency recruited an unusual field agent: a cat. In an hour-long procedure, a veterinary surgeon transformed the furry feline into an elite spy, implanting a microphone in her ear canal and a small radio transmitter at the base of her skull, and weaving a thin wire antenna into her long gray-and-white fur. This was Operation Acoustic Kitty, a top-secret plan to turn a cat into a living, walking surveillance machine. The leaders of the project hoped that by training the feline to go sit near foreign officials, they could eavesdrop on private conversations.

The problem was that cats are not especially trainable—they don’t have the same deep-seated desire to please a human master that dogs do—and the agency’s robo-cat didn’t seem terribly interested in national security. For its first official test, CIA staffers drove Acoustic Kitty to the park and tasked it with capturing the conversation of two men sitting on a bench. Instead, the cat wandered into the street, where it was promptly squashed by a taxi. The program was abandoned; as a heavily redacted CIA memo from the time delicately phrased it, “Our final examination of trained cats … convinced us that the program would not lend itself in a practical sense to our highly specialized needs.” (Those specialized needs, one assumes, include a decidedly unflattened feline.)

Operation Acoustic Kitty, misadventure though it was, was a visionary idea just fifty years before its time. Today, once again, the U.S. government is looking to animal- machine hybrids to safeguard the country and its citizens.

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by saotou homemade

2012 L.A. Times Book Prize Finalists announced Biographer Robert Caro, novelist Michael Chabon and cartoonist Chris Ware are among the fifty authors whose books were announced as the Times’ finalists for the 33rd annual Book Prizes.

Also nominated are Nate Silver for “The Signal and the Noise,” U.S. poet laureate Louise Glück and Katherine Boo for “Behind the Beautiful Forevers.”