Joe Sharkey At Large

As we all know, Northwest Airlines has canceled over 1,000 flights in the last week. At first, Northwest blamed the weather. But when that didn’t fly (no other airline was being affected severely enough by the weather to be canceling 10 percent and more of its flights each day until American’s schedule started falling apart a couple of days ago), Northwest allowed as how pilot staffing problems were also a big part of the problem. The pilots are responding that Northwest management is covering up for the fact that it has laid off so many pilots that it cannot maintain its regular schedule.

Northwest issued a statement today that, while blaming the pilots for calling in sick, also indicated that it would be further reducing its domestic schedule this summer. Meaning, if you’re planning on flying Northwest, buyer beware.

Here’s Northwest’s statement (followed by the Northwest pilots’ union statement):

EAGAN, Minn.–(BUSINESS WIRE)–June 29, 2007–Northwest Airlines today issued the following statement regarding its recent flight cancellations and its plan to address the issue:

During June, Northwest Airlines’ mainline schedule has been negatively impacted by several factors, the most important of which are: summertime thunderstorms on the east coast and at several Northwest hubs, air traffic control congestion, and pilot absenteeism — which was 80 percent higher in June 2007 versus June 2006. The cumulative impact of these factors caused the airline to pre-cancel hundreds of flight during the past week.

Over the past week (June 22 to June 28) the average percentage of canceled flights on a system-wide basis, including all NWA mainline and Airlink flights, was 7.6. For the same period, the average percentage of cancelled mainline flights was approximately 11.9.

[My note: Joe Brancatelli of JoeSentMe.com says that the average percentage of cancellations a typical major airline has is 1 to 2 percent a day]

Northwest is working to remedy the situation and expects to operate a normal summertime schedule by this weekend.

Northwest is continuing to take the necessary steps to address the situation including:

– Canceling its second Detroit-Frankfurt frequency, effective July 18, to free up 757 pilots to fly other routes. [That's what they wrote. I don't think they meant to say that a total of 757 pilots would be loosed, but rather that the pilots who fly their 757 aircraft would be.]

– In August, the airline will take further actions to reduce its schedule by 90 flying hours per day (a three percent domestic mainline capacity reduction) to increase its “reserve” of
pilot flying hours. [My note: Hey, wait a minute. Didn't they just say three paragraphs higher that they expect to operate their "normal summertime schedule?"]

– The airline continues to retrain its furloughed pilots so that They can return to active flying. Northwest wants all remaining furloughed pilots to return to work as soon as ossible and it will initiate new pilot hiring, if necessary.

– Recognizing that summer thunderstorms and air traffic control congestion are inevitable, starting in August, Northwest will modify the way that its pilots’ trips are scheduled, especially to and from large East Coast cities. This will minimize the impact to the airline’s flying schedule when bad weather and ATC delays do occur. …

And the pilots reply:

LOOMINGTON, Minn. — Leaders of the Northwest Airlines unit of the Air Line Pilots Association (ALPA) today said that NWA management’s decision to cancel hundreds of flights this past week was due to management’s operational decisions that created inadequate pilot staffing for the summer months.

NWA management has recently attempted to place the blame for flight cancellations on pilot sick calls. This reason does not adequately explain the over 10 percent rate of flight cancellations that the company has experienced during the past week. The reason for flight cancellations is that Northwest Airlines is understaffed.

“Northwest’s flight cancellations this past week are due to insufficient staffing,” NWA ALPA Spokesman Capt. Monty Montgomery said. “Pilots are not responsible for management’s lack of foresight as it pertains to staffing the airline.”

Representatives of the pilots’ union forecasted the pilot shortage and advised management months in advance. Unfortunately for all NWA shareholders, this forecast was correct resulting in unnecessary hardships being placed on all NWA employees and customers.

NWA management could have prevented the staffing shortage by expeditiously recalling the 400 furloughed pilots not yet back to work. Instead, management decided to run the airline beyond redline during the summer months resulting in the current flight cancellations.

“First, management blames the weather and that didn’t work, so now they are trying to blame the pilots,” Capt. Montgomery said. “It is unfortunate management continues to seek a confrontational relationship with Northwest employees.”

ALPA said it is available to work with management concerning the staffing problem. Currently, NWA’s operation contains no slack in the system, thus increasing the possibility that the operation will continue to break down. In addition, Northwest pilots have been flying at their personal and contractual maximums since last year, increasing stress and fatigue.

“We are the ultimate investors in Northwest Airlines. Our careers and the futures of our families are tied to the success of this airline,” Capt. Montgomery said. “Northwest pilots will continue to focus on safety and work hard for the success of our airline.”

Founded in 1931, ALPA is the world’s largest pilot union, representing 60,000 pilots at 41 airlines in the United States and Canada. ALPA represents approximately 5,300 active and furloughed NWA pilots. Please visit the NWA ALPA website at http://www.nwaalpa.org.

-end

Above is the merry scene of would-be travelers hoping to depart during the Fall of Saigon.

An update, since only Brancatelli and I appear to be monitoring this story that has created travel hell for millions of Americans this week, as the worst summer of air travel in history dawns.

As of 2 p.m., the lull in scheduling for the day:

–Delays were averaging 105 minutes at Newark; 56 minutes at Washington-Dulles; 45 minutes at Houston; 106 minutes at Kennedy; and 79 minutes at LaGuardia.

–Having already canceled 900+ flights from Friday through yesterday, Northwest has canceled another 117 as of 2 p.m. today.

–American Airlines has also entered in the cancellation jackpot. American has canceled 148 flights so far today out of its 2,233 total scheduled flights — 704 of which have departed.

And a brief update at 7.30 p.m. — US Airways leads the pack by at least 10 lengths in the dismal-performance race today. As of 7.30, US Air was operating atb a 21 percent ontime rate for the day, and 255 of the 757 flights that had departed were at least 45 minutes late, according to FlightStats.com

Still. I hear thunderstorms moving into the New York area, so it ain’t over yet. (Update, as of 10. p.m.,, delays were running at 2 to 3 hours at airports in the New York area. The official reason: Weather. What I see out my own window, drizzles. I haven’t heard a thunderclap).

Meanwhile, the next time someone tells you that, when traveling to London, Gatwick, Stansted and Luton airports are too inconvenient compared with Heathrow, have a look at this mess in Heathrow (over last Christmastime), via YouTube.

–ends

… after the headline and the first item.

From Maritz Research, a market research company, comes this press release today, headlined: “Airline Travelers Call for Segregated Family Section …”

Here’s the key finding in what the company described as a survey of “randomly selected adults throughout the United States about airline brands and customer experience-related service”:

“Fliers Vote for a Segregated Family Section — Nearly three-fourths (73 percent) believe that there should be a family section on airplanes.”

Now let’s see … Northwest has canceled nearly 900 flights since Friday; every seat on every cramped plane on every airline in the sky is filled; passengers are being routinely stranded for six to 10 hours on planes parked near gates; you have to connect through Milwaukee to get from Miami to Dallas; delays are at an all-time high … toilets are overflowing in airplane aisles … passengers are ready to revolt — and three quarters of people surveyed by this outfit say there should be a special family section on planes?

Where’d they interview these people, at state mental institutions?

By the way, since they’re asking, I want a cigar lounge, a sauna and a flight attendant with the looks and grace of Queen Rania of Jordan for my $400 fare to Los Angeles. And no big fat guy in the middle seat next to me.

Meanwhile, try not to get hurt up there.

–ends

“Due to weirdness in climate change, the weather is specifically targeting Northwest Airlines flights, accounting for the stunning build-up of Northwest flight cancellations in the last five days. … Yeah … that’s the ticket.”

I realize I’m wearing out the joke — once again, that’s actor Jon Lovitz on the right, whose memorable character on Saturday Night Live, Tommy Flanagan (pronounced “Flan-AY-gan”) was known for his consistent inability to tell the truth.

The meltdown at Northwest Airlines continues. As of 9 p.m. tonight, Northwest Airlines had canceled 198 of today’s total of 1,422 flights. As it has been for days, that cancellation rate if way above the typical industry cancellation rate of one or two percent of flights. (Data are from the Web site that every business traveler ought to be aware of, www.FlightStats.com

The 9 p.m. rate brings the total of canceled flights from last Friday to more than 700 Northwest flights. Since each flight was probably (and statistically) totally booked, you don’t have to do much math to see that Northwest has tossed a tremendous number of passengers into that special new circle on the exurban outskirts of rapidly-expanding Hell: Summer air travel 2007.

Joe Brancatelli, who knows more about the airlines than anyone I know, has also been hammering on this topic for days on his subscription business-travel Web site, JoeSentMe.com — the reason being that this appears to be a fairly important travel story.

But I I have done the quick math on the number of travel writers who are following it: Two. Brancatelli and me. Three, if you count Mike Boyd, the airline consultant whose weekly essay at aviationplanning.com is a must-read, and often a counter balance to Conventional Wisdom.

I shall say no more about the rest of my colleagues in the media. Perhaps some are in attendance at the annual National Society of Newspaper Columnists convention in this week Philadelphia. Hey, you got that many newspaper columnists assembled, don’t light a match in that room!.

In Philadelphia, incidentally, worthies from every dip-shit paper in the country that still tosses 700 words of space to a “columnist” actually invited Bill O’Reilly to give a speech — and they sat there politely listening to some weasel whose resume on the subject of war includes being a Vietnam draft-dodger.

Oops, I just used a curse word. Shit! Two. Which is why I am about to re-announce, any day now, the long-delayed appointment of an independent ombudsman to oversee standards at Joe Sharkey At Large.

But I digress.

In an internal memo earlier last week, Northwest Airlines told key staff to stand by for heavy rolls, as they say in the Navy when the seas get rough. The reason: Northwest had already spotted a looming shortage of available pilots, flight attendants and other employees available to fly as the end of the month loomed. I have been hearing from flight attendants and pilots all day confirming this fact.

Did Northwest, which manifestly was aware of the approaching problem, give a heads-up to its customers before the latest meltdown started on Friday? It did not.

Now that the schedules have basically collapsed, though, Northwest has put a “Statement Regarding Flight Cancellations” up on its Web site.

It begins: “In recent weeks, severe weather has disrupted air service across the East Coast and
Midwest for a number of airlines, including Northwest. As a result, the weather and related air-traffic control restrictions have disrupted Northwest’s scheduled operations, causing increased crew duty time and the inability to consistently reposition aircraft and crews as needed.”

An update: By 2.45 p.m. today, Northwest had canceled 141 flights. And let’s have a look at “a number of airlines,” which oddly seem to have been spared the Northwest weather curse.

As of 2.45 p.m., Southwest had canceled two of its 3,352 scheduled flights for the day. Continental had canceled five of 1,229 flights. US Airways had canceled 18 of 987. American had canceled 25 of 2,206. And United had canceled 26 of 1,513.

Yet Northwest is blaming the “recent severe weather events” and not its own ineptness in reducing employment to the point where they can’t run an airline if a butterfly flaps its wings and farts in Shanghai.

Yeah … that’s the ticket.

Update: Northwest has canceled 198 flights today as of 9 p.m. Since Friday, Northwest has canceled more than 800 flights.

–end

My wife and I are not campers. We don’t do rustic. Oh, we’ll get on a horse and ride all day through the drizzly bogs and hills of Connemara, or into the dusty hills and washes of the Arizona desert, but come dinnertime, we want the convivial bar, the merry restaurant with great food and company, the Jacuzzi in the bathroom and that nice comfy bed with the 400-thread-count sheets.

So I’m not real sure about bears in the woods. Or the protocol toward them.

Yes, I know you’re supposed to keep food secured at night so one of the beasts doesn’t stroll into your campsite or cozy up in your tent. But I didn’t know you could get a ticket for whacking a bear that was about to eat your son.

According to a report by D. Aileen Dodd in The State, a newspaper in Columbia, S.C., Chris Everhart, an ex-Marine, was camping with his three young sons at the Chattahoochee National Forest in Georgia when a 275 pound black bear wandered into their campsite while the four were toasting marshmallows around 9.30 p.m.

The bear grabbed a food cooler. Impulsively, six-year-old Logan grabbed a shovel and chased the bear. The bear dropped the cooler and lunged for the child.

Whereupon Mr. Everhart grabbed a log of firewood and chucked it at the bear, beaning the charging beast.

Bada-bing, bada-bang, the bear went down like a ten-dollar palooka.

Father and sons rushed into their Jeep to take cover, figuring they now had a very pissed off bear with a thumping headache on their hands. But nope, ol’ Smoky was more than down for the count. The bear was — well, it was bleedin’ demised. It had shuffled off this mortal coil and joined the choir invisible. It was an ex-Smoky, to paraphrase the Monty Python dead-parrot sketch.

Later, some hump with a badge from the Forest Service showed up and gave Mr. Everhart a $75 ticket for failing to secure his food properly. It is, of course, a matter of debate whether the late bear, at the moment of resolution, was defining food as the picnic cooler — or as the six-year-old.

Yes, I know you’re supposed to make sure food is out of range of bears in the woods at night or when you leave your campsite, sometimes by tying something like a cooler high on a tree branch.

But who’d have thought the Forest Kops would expect you to hoist your six-year-old up on a tree till the marshmallows got toasted?

–end

Yes, I know I have announced my retirement more often than Barbra Streisand, as regards the Brazil posts here, on what had started out as a merry little travel blog. Well, things have nutted up enough in Brazil to force me out of retirement (what was it, 3 weeks?) on the subject. To separate Brazil from the (usually) somewhat more sane world of general travel, I created a new sibling blog, “Joe Sharkey: Brazil.” It’s at Sharkeyonbrazil.blogspot.com

As soon as I figure out how to do it, I’ll link to both blogs from the basic Joesharkey.com and put all the Brazil archives on the new blog.

Thanks — JS

Photos from Continental Flight 1970
By Collin Brock, via KING5 News

Oh, this is going to be a honey of a summer in air travel.

I know this will be of little consolation to those of you currently stuck in airports or on planes after the meltdown of United Airlines worldwide schedules today, or those who have been stuck on parked planes for eight and nine hours in recent months as the air-traffic system itself slowly melts down, but it could actually be worse.

Later on this post, there’s more on United schedule collapse today. United all day has been claiming that its system is recovering. The real-time statistics I’ve been looking at say that is not true — two thirds of United’s flights were delayed today, many of them for three hours and more. Read on, but first lookit this report on the literal shit-storm on Continental last week.

Here is a look at this report on a real stinko of a flight last week — Continental Flight 1970, a 767 with about 200 passengers from Amsterdam to Newark — on which sewage overflowed from toilets and down the aisle while passengers gagged. The story is from KING5 News in Seattle:

***
Sewage flows down aisles of trans-Atlantic flight

By RAY LANE / KING 5 News

“I was more nervous than I had ever been on a flight,” said passenger Collin Brock.

UNIVERSITY PLACE, Wash.– Passengers on a Continental Airlines flight had to hold their noses for hours as sewage overflowed from toilets while they were high over the Atlantic.

“To be blatantly honest, I was more nervous than I had ever been on a flight,” said Collin Brock. The University Place man was on board Continental Airlines flight 1970 from Amsterdam to Newark, New Jersey last week when things went bad.

“I’ve never felt so offended in all my life. I felt like I had been physically abused and neglected. I was forced to sit next to human excrement for seven hours,” said Brock.

That’s after lavatories – in the middle of a flight filled with passengers – started spewing sewage.

“Sickening. It’s a nauseating smell. It’s very uncomfortable,” said Brock.

It was last Wednesday afternoon when his flight left Amsterdam, but roughly two hours into it, the passengers were told the lavatories were out of commission. An unplanned landing in Shannon, Ireland was made to fix the problem.

A pit stop became an overnight stay. The next day, the same plane headed for its original destination of Newark, New Jersey, but just after takeoff, the sewage overflow began. This time, there was no turning around.

“I don’t know how you can say a plane needs to be grounded one day for a problem that’s not as major as a problem the next day, and it doesn’t qualify for being grounded,” said Brock.

He says was there was one half-working restroom on the plane for the more than 200 people onboard.

He also says the flight attendants – who were serving meal service in a stinky, unappetizing cabin – told everyone to not eat or drink too much.

“To be told that we were supposed to monitor what comes out the other end of us was insulting,” said Brock. “Shame on continental. It was the worst flight experience I have ever had.”

Continental gave Collin a $500 voucher for a future flight for the inconvenience. He says he’s not sure he’ll ever use it.

[Anyone who was on that flight or any other horrible flight in the last week or two and wants to vent, please contact me at sharkey_joe@yahoo.com]

***

Returning to the United Airlines meltdown today, United’s Web site as of mid-afternoon had a short notice with the headline “Operations Recovering” as if that was some triumphant feat. The usual stenographers in the daily media were obediently parroting this statement, treating the incident as a two-hour glitch and reporting that things were returning to normal.

But when I checked United’s real-time performance as of 5 p.m. EDT today on the invaluable FlightStats.com, it did not appear that a recovery was underway. Here was the picture:

–Overall on-time departure rate for United, 37 percent — and the vast majority of late flights were leaving 45 minutes or more behind schedule. Some “recovery.”

–At Chicago O’Hare as of 5 p.m., 31 percent of flights had departed on time. The figure was 12 percent at Denver; 29 percent at San Francisco and 30 percent at Los Angeles International. (The vast majority of late flights at those hubs departed more than 45 minutes late).

These figures were worse than the previous statistics I had checked at 3 p.m and worse than 4 p.m. — meaning the situation was not improving as the day wore on.

At 10 p.m., the overall United on-time rate was 31 percent. More than three-quarters of the 1,671 scheduled flights that were late were at least 45 minutes (and in many cases many hours) late.

So be wary of travel on United for a day or two because the airline has a lot of equipment and crew sorting-out to do.

Here’s a note worth reading. The travel guru Joe Brancatelli sent it late this morning to members of his Web site JoeSentMe.com:

“Dear JoeSentMe member:

I am writing with urgent travel information for United Airlines passengers.

An as-yet unexplained glitch in United’s computers essentially grounded the airline this morning. The grounding lasted for at least two hours throughout the entire system. Although United now claims that its computers have been restarted, several hours worth of flights have simply not left the gate, have been or will be canceled or are stranded on runways at airports.

My advice to you, frankly, is to cancel any travel you may have planned today on United. Planes are now out of position throughout the country and possibly throughout the world. I would also be extremely circumspect about flying United in the next day or two. As we have learned, even a small disruption in aircraft movements can affect schedules for days. This is clearly a large disruption and is certain have a ripple effect on United’s schedule throughout the week.

I will contact you if I have further relevant details. I urge you to proceed with extreme caution and disregard most of what United may be publicly saying. Check instead with FlightStats.com {http://www.flightstats.com} for more accurate and unbiased information.”

–end

I thought the only television reviewer who really got the final episode of “The Sopranos” last night was Heather Havrilesky in Salon.

“In what may go down as the most heart-stopping final scene of a drama series in the history of television, Tony walked into a restaurant, sat down at a booth, ate a few dozen onion rings and … that was it. Roll credits,” she wrote. “As the screen went blank in the middle of a line from the song “Don’t Stop Believing,” by Journey, it was hard not to wonder: Is [writer-creator David] Chase brilliant for so thoroughly subverting our expectations or … is he just an asshole?”

People complained about a lack of resolution. To me, the characters were resolved and it — like the long-faded Mafia water-slide that “The Sopranos” took the long last giddy ride on — was over.

There were two characters in this show that I wanted to whack myself: Dr. Melfi, the smug psychiatrist who spoke like Rosie O’Donnell on Quaaludes (honestly, I thought she had to have been given two pages of script for everyone else’s 10). And A.J., the supremely annoying teenager who distressingly failed in a cinderblock-tied-to-the-neck backyard swimming pool suicide attempt a few episodes back.

Meadow had already shown she was hopeless, as deluded as her mother. We knew where she was headed, chiseling out of med school and opting instead for “the law” because, she told Tony earnestly, she had seen how authorities oppressed people like himself. After all, she had seen him dragged away on several occasions by the FBI. Italians, immigrants, the poor and oppressed were routinely crushed by “the state,” she said.

“New Jersey?” he asked, bewildered.

Besides, he had to be thinking, “This girl seems not to acknowledge to herself that I am the head of a violent criminal organization? I thought she, at least, unlike her mother and brother, had some brains.”

A.J., meanwhile, prattled on about joining the Army — we knew this phony creep would do no such thing — after informing his family: “You people are fucked. You’re living in a fucking dream!”

That is an apt description of every mob family and Family since “The Godfather” first came out. I mean the novel. Did you know that its author, Mario Puzo, never met an actual Mafioso until after the book was published? All of that ritual and steeped-in-misty-Sicilian lore, he picked up in a library or from relatives.

Francis Ford Coppola brightly illuminated the myth with the first two “Godfather” films which, in effect, showed the various organized mob gangs how to play their roles. In a very real way, the Mafia in its cultural heyday of the 1970s through 1995 was playing a part — from the overriding narrative to the physical tics like flashing those cuffs — that it had learned at the movies. (Though, of course, the blood and bullets were real).

“Goodfellas,” the greatest Mafia movie ever made, was the one that successfully blended both the mythology and the reality. As a newspaper columnist who wrote some true-crime books, I got to know a fair number of actual mob figures in both New York and Philadelphia. The two Godfather movies they said, taught them how to act “the life,” as they referred to it. (“Godfather III” they always dismissed as asinine, and they cheered as other movie audiences did when Sofia Coppola — a horrible actress who later redeemed herself as a director — was shot to death on the church steps, in what was supposed to be a tear-wrenching finale).

But “Goodfellas” showed them the life as it was, at least for a while.

That life was almost entirely history by the mid 90s, after all of the New York mob families, and the vicious Philadelphia mob, had been decimated. One of the things that amazed me most about “The Sopranos” was that it managed to seem contemporary, in a world in which the Mafia simply no longer existed, except in the imaginations of retired mobsters and prosecutors and young reporters eager to get in on the game. To this day, I chuckle when I read of some poor gavone in Newark or Elizabeth or Brooklyn being arrested and referred to as a “capo” in some Mafia family that hasn’t actually existed in 12 years.

In the final Sopranos scene last night, as Tony, Carmella and A.J. sat in a booth at a Holsten’s, an actual ice cream parlor/candy store/luncheonette in Bloomfield, the curtain slowly came down. Carmella opened the menu and asked, deluded airhead to the end: “So, what looks good tonight?”

Meadow is outside, having a hard time parallel-parking her car (lucky for her, we can only assume in a few minutes). Inside Holsten’s, a sinister stranger disappears into the men’s room, and another sinister figure on a stool at the soda fountain furtively watches Tony at his booth. I though it was brilliant that Chase left it at that. The screen went dark. At first, we thought out cable had suddenly gone out. Then, roll credits.

As I said before, people who live in the Montclair, N.J., Bloomfield area — lots of them transplants from Manhattan –know Holsten’s for its terrific home-made ice cream and its wonderful candy counter. The food? Not so hot. Certainly not up the standards of a “diner,” which several clueless reviewers called it today.

A neighbor of mine, a Manhattan transplant, said she’d taken her young son there once for lunch “and they couldn’t even make a decent grilled cheese.”

So what’s good?

Leave the grilled cheese. Take the butter creams.

And goodbye, at long, long last, to the Mafia, the whole damn lot of yez. It’s been a blast but please, enough already.

–end

Quote of the Day:

Steven Van Zandt plays Silvio Dante in “The Sopranos” and was a member of Bruce Springsteen’s legendary E Street Band. Along with 10 other key members of the cast of “The Sopranos,” he was profiled and quoted in the New York Times in a walk-up to the finale tomorrow night. The best line: “I am having the experience two times in my life of doing something that makes New Jersey fashionable. What are the odds on that?”

–Incidentally, lots of travelers have been shocked over the years to visit Asbury Park, based on the memorable 1973 Springsteen album cover that used a vintage postcard, and find that it is rundown, with a forlorn boardwalk. But gentrification is gaining speed, led by a vibrant gay community that’s mostly migrated down from New York City, 60 miles away. (I interviewed Madam Marie once, and she was a total old grouch).

The great Jersey boardwalk towns are, of course, Wildwood, near the southern tip of the Jersey shore, and Seaside Heights, roughly mid-coast. As to Atlantic City, where the boardwalk was invented, the Boardwalk is now mostly a seven-mile-long promenade in front of a wall of casinos. It’s still worth a stroll if you’ve never been, but it’s kind of sad to see how almost all of the landmarks and history have been obliterated. If you do take that stroll, stop by the Atlantic City Historical Museum on the old Garden Pier, toward the northern end of the Boardwalk, for a look at some artifacts and photos of the Boardwalk past.

–end

Just asking, but what in the world is this obsession with monuments to the dead all about?

Just today, I read two stories about a monument to the 40 innocent people on board the famed Flight 93 of Sept. 11, 2001, which crashed in a field in Shanksville, Pa., evidently as the hijackers aboard were trying to turn it toward Washington, D.C., where the target presumably was the Capitol building.

We know that some very courageous passengers and flight attendants violently resisted the religious psychopaths who’d commandeered the plane, and we’re pretty sure that resistance led the hijackers to fold and just crash the aircraft in the rural area. Mission unaccomplished.

(Not to get off the subject here, but I wonder how those 72 virgins the hijackers each believed they were be issued as martyrs in Paradise are working out? Certainly, I cannot be the only person who thinks that residing for eternity in the company of 72 virgins, no matter how beautiful, could possibly be uninterrupted bliss. Can you imagine how many doors would be slamming in those celestial manses every single day?)

But I digress. This is an essay about what seems to be a growing, and I think a little nutty, obsession with monuments, and this gigantic monstrosity being planned by the increasingly embarrassing National Park Service in godforsaken Shankesville, Pa. is a case in point. I can’t figure out either of the two stories I read today — maybe all the editors were at the annual picnic. Evidently there is a dispute about money, which is no surprise. The monument is partly to be built on some guy’s land. Nobody seems to have thought to ask the reporters to explain: What the hell are they doing?

What gets me is the size and cost of the of the thing — 1,300 acres and $58 million. I’m told by both stories that 4,000 people a year visit the site, leaving those dreadful bundles of supermarket bouquets that helped make the commotion over Princess Diana’s death so … well, creepy.

Of course, the planned monument at the World Trade Center site is way more expensive, but it’s only a few acres and, besides a 1,776-foot-tall skyscraper, it will contain memorial gardens, a theater and a practical, useful-to-the-living rail and subway station. And the image of those buildings coming down — terror theater from hell — will remain in our collective consciousness for centuries.

(An aside: Anyone in New York, if they didn’t actually see the horror with their own eyes, knows lots of people who did. For years, I have asked those who actually witnessed the planes hit or the buildings collapse what the first words out of their mouths were. “Holy shit,” uttered slowly and with disbelief, wins by a huge margin. Ask around and you’ll see I’m right.)

Anyway, what is it with this National Park boondoggle in Shankesville? A hundred acres wouldn’t be big enough?

Speaking of monuments, until a few years ago, I’d never been to the old Book Depository Building on Dealey Plaza in Dallas, where Lee Harvey Oswald lurked at a sixth-floor window to take at least a couple of the shots that hit President Kennedy.

(I’m back and forth on the conspiracy theories. Gerald Posner’s book arguing the lone-assassin theory had me persuaded for years, but now I’m wavering. David Talbot’s wonderful new book “Brothers: The Hidden History of the Kennedy Years” goes into a great trove of historical detail about who might have had the means and opportunity, and most certainly the motives, to conspire to assassinate JFK.)

Anyway, the event was of course a central moment in memory from my high school years, so a couple of years ago, on a business trip in Dallas, I went to the Sixth Floor Museum at the old Book Depository building. On the ground floor, before taking the elevator up to Oswald’s dark lair, they had installed an airport-like security checkpoint. You had to put anything metal on a conveyor belt and pass through a magnetometer. I just couldn’t see the point.

“Now you’re checking for weapons?” I asked the security guards, who were not amused.

Nevertheless, the sixth-floor displays are interesting. It is especially fascinating to stand where the odious Oswald stood and see what an easy, easy shot it was.

Nobody asked me, but you know the monument I hate most in this country (though whatever the National Park Service is up to in Shankesville may well edge into first place)? That surly monstrosity, Mount Rushmore.

Nothing against Lincoln, Washington, Roosevelt and Jefferson, but when you actually go there to South Dakota, it becomes absolutely clear — at least to me — that this monument, staring smugly as it does into the Black Hills and the holy grounds of the Lakota Sioux nation, is making an imperialist statement! Bugger off, it seems to be saying to the indigenous ghosts. The fact that tourists speak in reverential whispers and act as if they’re in church while there gave me the willies.

Monuments I like because they convey dignity and grace:

The battleship Arizona. The Vietnam Veterans Memorial Wall; the Iwo Jima statue; Arlington Cemetery; Benjamin Franklin’s grave in Philadelphia. FDR’s modest mansion and grave beside the Hudson in Hyde Park. Lyndon Johnson’s tombstone in the little family graveyard at the LBJ Ranch in Texas, and only because it’s typically LBJ: It towers over the those of rest of the clan, looking like it’s apt to grab one of the others’ lapels at any moment.

I like the feeling inside the John Paul Jones memorial at Annapolis. Even if he was a ballsy wastrel, the boy got things done. I even kind of like Grant’s Tomb in the Bronx, though that’s partly because it was the answer to the booby-prize question on Groucho Marx’s television quiz show: “Who’s buried in Grant’s Tomb,” and also, nobody goes there anymore.

{Correction appended later: Grant’s Tomb, as several readers pointed out, is in Manhattan, not the Bronx.]

Meanwhile, there is the other subject of fake monuments — places that become tourist attractions simply because they’re seen in movies or on television.

Everybody in the Montclair, N.J. area — the town to which half of the Upper West Side of Manhattan, and three quarters of the media crowd, seems to relocate to once they have a kid or two — knows about a wonderful little ice cream parlor/luncheonette/candy store called Holsten’s in Bloomfield. Walk in, and you really do feel like you’re back in 1964.

On the left is a soda fountain with stools, behind which young men and women work to churn out sundaes, fizzes and other sodas. They are invariably pleasant and friendly. On the right is a big candy counter where you can guy a couple of macaroons or a two-pound box of chocolates — all delicious and all made, like the ice cream, on the premises. In the rear is a little luncheonette with booths, where you can order BLTs, grilled cheese, cheeseburgers, French fries, sundaes — whatever. Whole families gatherer here for Saturday lunch or for things like birthday parties.

We love the place. There simply aren’t many like it anymore.

But lately, it’s been a little difficult to get in on some days. See, Holsten’s was where they shot the final scene of Sunday night’s final episode of “The Sopranos.” People are already standing outside taking pictures. Strangers are wandering in.

If Tony gets whacked Sunday night, and my money says he does, Holsten’s is the place where the whacking gets done.

All sorts of locations in North Jersey are regularly seen on “The Sopranos,” and tour buses do a steady business dragging gawkers to monumentss like the Bada Bing, a strip club on Route 17 in Lodi actually called Satin Dolls; Pizzaland in North Arlington; Satriale’s, a fictional pork store (actually a former auto parts shop in Kearny), and even the house used for the exteriors of the Soprano family home in Caldwell.

And now, alas, dear Holsten’s. Soon to be the most famous of them all.

Bada-bing, bada-bang, bada-boom — there goes the sofa fountain where you could always get a seat.

-end