Empire State

There is nothing wrong with being 2nd best.  According to Ricky Bobby in the Will Farrell movie Talladega Nights, the race car driver who coined the phrase shake and bake, also blurts out "if you aint  first, your last".  Its not until the end of the movie that he realizes that you could be 2nd, or 3rd too.

Yesterday the freedom tower reclaimed its spot as 1st or tallest building in the Empire State.  At one time the World Trade Center towers were 1st.  Back in its day the beautifully decorated art deco Empire State building boasted the 1st place prize as tallest.  

This day in history "On this day in 1931, President Herbert Hoover officially dedicates New York City's Empire State Building, pressing a button from the White House that turns on the building's lights. Hoover's gesture, of course, was symbolic; while the president remained in Washington, D.C., someone else flicked the switches in New York.

The idea for the Empire State Building is said to have been born of a competition between Walter Chrysler of the Chrysler Corporation and John Jakob Raskob of General Motors, to see who could erect the taller building. Chrysler had already begun work on the famous Chrysler Building, the gleaming 1,046-foot skyscraper in midtown Manhattan. Not to be bested, Raskob assembled a group of well-known investors, including former New York Governor Alfred E. Smith. The group chose the architecture firm Shreve, Lamb and Harmon Associates to design the building. The Art-Deco plans, said to have been based in large part on the look of a pencil, were also builder-friendly: The entire building went up in just over a year, under budget (at $40 million) and well ahead of schedule. During certain periods of building, the frame grew an astonishing four-and-a-half stories a week.
At the time of its completion, the Empire State Building, at 102 stories and 1,250 feet high (1,454 feet to the top of the lightning rod), was the world's tallest skyscraper."

So, after a quick spaghetti and white clam sauce dinner,  I get ready to go to the gym.  I check my phone and see that there was an issue in our editorial bureau at 3xsq.  Trying to be proactive at that point I jump onto an IRT call to make sure things are not still broken.  Turns out the issue was from earlier in the day and not quite escalated in a way to make it easily view-able by the team.  It gets lost in the emails and with no phone call to the support team, we fall short of expectations.

Earlier in the day, the team performed admirably and in my eyes, was running the race in the 1st place spot, only to slip into 2nd place at the end of the race.

For those of you that don't quite understand this, we go back to Talladega Nights.  If you aint first, your last.....

Photo the the day "Empire State"

 P.S. When does the mega millions go back over $100 million ?  I have a dollar and a dream.