MARKET WATCH COLUMNIST
“Nowadays, secrets are often easily exposed”, Ellis Henican Column, Newsday, April 14 2013
Who’s wearing the wire in your office? If not you, it could be anyone. Secret recordings are suddenly everywhere.
I’m just back from Albany, where the whole capital city is playing a new guessing game: How many politicians will get indicted from the tapes made by Nelson Castro, the secret-agent/Democratic 
assemblyman from the Bronx? No one thinks the target list stops at one.
As Albany quakes, Mitch McConnell, Republican boss of the U.S. Senate, is deflecting reports that he and campaign aides conspired to smear country singer Ashley Judd, who almost had the nerve to challenge him. Worse than his campaign tactics, the Kentucky senator insists, are the dirty tricksters who caught his words on tape.
The fact of that matter is that people have always done smarmy, dumb and embarrassing things. What’s different now is the technology for spreading our worse moments ev
erywhere. Just ask Anthony Weiner, the former congressman, Twitter user and underwear model.
Weiner may soon test the premise that New Yorkers are at least as forgiving as South Carolinians, who recently put the moony Appalachian Trail enthusiast Mark Sanford at the top of a local congressional primary pack.
Whether we are as forgiving or not, one click or misclick of a mouse can cast any of us onto the ragged shoals of Facebook, YouTube or Twitter — just hopefully not in our underpants.
TOO MUCH INFO
1. Speak into the lapel, please.
2. Don’t worry, only my Facebook friends can see this.
3. Say “cheesy.”
4. Who cares about my boring life?
5. No way Google Maps can photograph my sunbathing deck!
THE NEWS IN SONG
“All I want to be is left alone”
Mysto & Pizzi
“Somebody’s Watching Me”
ASKED AND UNANSWERED
Did someone just say “Duck Dynasty?” Major-league second-chancers Vladimir Guerrero, Dontrelle Willis and Ramon Castro are giving that idea a second chance . . . Yes, Randy Sauber got an earful from frustrated Shelter Islanders. But wasn’t the rattled Postal Service manager relieved by one thing: These customers reall
y care about mail? . . . Did superstorm Sandy blow some sense through the Nassau Police Department? Baldwin’s First Precinct isn’t being closed — for now . . . Did Lindsay get a legacy discount at the Seafield rehab in Westhampton Beach? That’s where pop Michael Lohan cleaned up — or t
ried to — in 1989 . . . Crowd-source this, please: Why would digital-media manager job pay 14 percent less on Long Island? . . . What can Stony Brook students do to help jumpy kids at sister school SUNY Korea? That’s in Songdo, just outside Seoul . . . Now that 19 states have legalized, are LI’s anti-drug advocates opening up to medical marijuana? Doc pot is back on the Albany agenda. . .More Sunday bus services in Suffolk? You mean people ride the bus on Sunday? Legis. Jay Schneiderman thinks they might…Forty feet? Fifty feet? How high is too high at Hauppauge Industrial Park? Smithtown Supervisor Pat Vecchio did promise the sky (or part of it) to help spur development (and taxes).
LONG ISLANDER OF THE WEEK
RODNEY MARVE
As a young black boy in Alexandria, La., Rodney Marve wasn’t welcome at the local library. But at 14, he rode a train north and 
soon enough took a job as maintenance helper at the Bayshore-Brightwaters Public Library. Forty-three years later, he’d risen to library page, library clerk, chief of adult reference, assistant director and interim director and picked up a master’s in library science at CW Post. At his recent retirement dinner at Captain Bill’s in Bay Shore, some people said the library just won’t be same without Mr. Marve’s reading suggestions, obscure research facts and constant smile. But his glow will remain in what is now officially known as the Rodney G. Marve Reference Area. “Truly,” he said, connecting his Louisiana boyhood and his library career, “God has a good sense of humor. He has taken good care of me.”
E-mail ellis@henican.com
Follow him at twitter.com/henican
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