Dear Father Patrick Maloney:
What are your views of NY PML Sec 105, NYConst. Art. 1, Sec. 3, and whether Nassau OTB should be closed on any day when tracks are running anywhere in the US that bettors want to bet? See below for background. Do you know the accordian player Pat Floody?
Dear Attorney General Eric Schneiderman:
The Bettors of the State of New York and the employees of the remaining OTBs, public benefit corporations, have no standing to ask for your Opinion to the following simple questions with seemingly obvious answers::
1. Will the Attorney General defend the constitutionality of NY PML Sec 105?
2. Does NY PML Sec 105 apply to Nassau OTB?
3. Does NY PML Sec 105 violate the rights of New York Bettors secured by NY Const. Art. 1, Sec. 3?
4. Is NY PML Sec 105 vague, indefinite and/or overly broad as the term "Easter Sunday" does not define one and only one Sunday in all years (see eg Gregorian and Julian Calendars)? See article from the Wall Street Journal on Calendars below.
I hope that you will sua sponte issue an Opinion as to the above so that bettors may bet, workers may work or not as they wish, and the State and its subdivisions make money. There are tracks running all across the United States every day of the year that bettors want to bet. Track calendars may be found at eg www.ntra.com. The OTBs also sell New York Lottery tickets which are drawn every day of the year. The OTBs also cash non IRS Lottery tickets in cash for any sum, a convenience for many Lotto Players.
It is critical in these current time that the OTBs are open when customers want to bet. I believe that your Opinion will belatedly validate the actions of New York City OTB taken on the advice of its Counsel in 2003.
Sincerely yours,
Open On 1st Palm Sunday, Otb Rakes In $2m - New York Daily News
articles.nydailynews.com/.../18220335_1_racing-and-wagering-boar...
Open On 1st Palm Sunday, Otb Rakes In $2m. BY JERRY BOSSERT DAILY NEWS SPORTS WRITER. Monday, April 14, 2003. New York City Off-Track Betting ...
§ 105. Supplementary regulatory powers of the board. Notwithstanding
any inconsistent provision of law, the board through its rules and
regulations or in allotting dates for racing or in licensing race
meetings at which pari-mutuel betting is permitted shall be empowered
to: (i) permit racing at which pari-mutuel betting is conducted on any
or all dates from the first day of January through the thirty-first day
of December, inclusive of Sundays but exclusive of December twenty-fifth
and Palm Sunday and Easter Sunday; and (ii) fix minimum and maximum
charges for admission at any race meeting.
The Drama of Measuring the Days of Our Lives
· By CARL BIALIK
Humanity's efforts to impose order on time don't always go like clockwork.
There was the Y2K computer-programming fiasco, as the world entered the year 2000. Then there are the seconds that have to be added to the clock occasionally—the next one is in June—to make our definition of a day match the ever-so-slight slowing of the Earth's rotation. And spare a thought for the Swedish couple who married 300 years ago but whose anniversary has never appeared on any calendar.
Sven Hall wed Ellna Jeppsdotter in Ystad, Sweden, on Feb. 30, 1712—a day that existed only because of Protestant Europe's fumbling transition from the Julian calendar system to an approximation of the Gregorian system. Sweden had tried to change gradually before realizing it was out of sync with everyone else, says Bengt Danielson, assistant archival director of the Demographical Database for Southern Sweden. The nation tried to get back in line by adding two leap days to 1712. But it was four decades before Sweden made the wholesale switch from the Julian calendar.
In the centuries since, society has improved its reckoning of time and synchronization of watches across borders. But it continues to use a relatively ancient system for tweaking time by adding leap days—such as next week's Feb. 29—that some astronomers say isn't the ideal mathematical solution to the problem that a year is a bit longer than 365 days. Add in the unpredictable variability in the length of years, and the calendar continues to defy simple computation.
The Numbers Guy blog:
"The calendar isn't a mathematical thing," says Robert Poole, a historian at the University of Cumbria in Lancaster, England, and author of a book on calendar reform in England. "All attempts to systematize calendars are misguided." Yet history is dotted with attempts to systematize calendars. The Julian calendar was named for Julius Caesar, who instituted it in 46 B.C. after recognizing that the time it takes for the Earth to orbit the sun isn't neatly divisible by the time it takes for the Earth to rotate about its axis.
Caesar added a leap year every four years, which was almost right. But the almost added up. Those extra leap days made the average year too long, shifting annual phenomena—such as the spring and autumn equinox—earlier than their normal seasonal dates by 10 days by 1582. Since the date of Easter is tied to the spring equinox, Pope Gregory XIII sought to overhaul the calendar, skipping 10 days and then removing three leap years every 400 years.
In Gregory's time, England had just emerged from a schism with the church and wasn't eager to follow papal authority. Enter John Dee—"variously listed as an astronomer, mathematician, magician and mystic; today one might even call him a crackpot," says Geoff Chester, a spokesman for the U.S. Naval Observatory, which plays a key role in counting world time today.
Associated Press
Petr Skala walking on a ledge Friday during his weekly maintenance of the famous astronomical clock in Prague, Czech Republic. The clock was first installed in 1410, making it the third-oldest astronomical clock in the world and possibly the oldest one still working.
Dee suggested to Queen Elizabeth a cycle of eight leap years every 33 years. The leap years would come every fourth year starting with the fourth of the cycle, putting a five-year gap between the last leap year of the cycle and the first of the next cycle. Dee didn't invent the system, says Duncan Steel, an astronomer at the Australian Centre for Astrobiology and author of a book about calendar history. A variant of the system remains in use in Iran today, a millennium after Persians first used one like it.
The average year in the Gregorian system lasts exactly 365.2425 days, compared with the average year in the Dee system of a touch over 365.2424 days. The latter is closer to the actual time it takes the Earth to rotate around the sun, about 365.242 days, says Dr. Steel.
Still, Dee was ultimately unsuccessful, and most of the world eventually fell into line with a uniform calendar.
But that hasn't run out the clock on calendar problems. Another complication is that years are measured in days, and days are getting longer as tides create friction and slow the Earth's rotation. The length of the second has been fixed to the oscillation frequency of Cesium-133, using a duration that once corresponded to 1/86,400th of a day. But today—and tomorrow—are longer than the 86,400 seconds clocks world-wide include in a day by about one or two milliseconds—the gap changes daily.
To rectify that shift, the world's timekeepers have agreed to add so-called leap seconds whenever the drift nears a second, typically at midnight London time—the minute starting at 11:59 p.m. has 61 seconds.
As the day grows longer, somewhat unpredictably, there are fractionally fewer days in the year, and so eventually, in the very long run, today's calendar may need to be amended once more. But then, that should be expected, says Steve Allen, an astronomer at the University of California who maintains a website with research about the leap second.
"It is extraordinary hubris for any civilization to presume that its calendar will still be in use in 1,000 years," he says.
Learn more about this topic at WSJ.com/NumbersGuy. Email numbersguy@wsj.com.
| Live Racing For further information, please contact: NTRA Communications at (212) 230-9500 E-mail: calendar@ntra.com   |   |
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Character Study
A Priest Unafraid of Trouble
Marcus Yam for The New York Times
STREET PRIEST The Rev. Patrick Moloney says he has run afoul of the authorities for helping people he believed were in the right.
By COREY KILGANNON
Published: April 13, 2012
AH, now here comes Father Moloney, ambling down East Ninth Street in his priest’s outfit, a crucifix on a heavy chain around his neck.
The Particulars
NAME The Rev. Patrick Moloney
AGE 80
WHERE HE’S FROM Limerick, Ireland
WHAT HE IS Radical priest
TELLING DETAIL Says proudly that he worked with Robert Collier and other Black Panthers, and that he met with Yasser Arafat.
NAME The Rev. Patrick Moloney
AGE 80
WHERE HE’S FROM Limerick, Ireland
WHAT HE IS Radical priest
TELLING DETAIL Says proudly that he worked with Robert Collier and other Black Panthers, and that he met with Yasser Arafat.
Multimedia
Related
More Character Study Columns
A Priest, a Big Robbery and Even Bigger Questions (November 14, 1993)
Melkite Priest and One Other Guilty in Theft at Brink's Depot (November 29, 1994)
A Convicted Priest Practices His Ministry Behind Bars (August 17, 1997)
Out of Prison, Priest Reopens Homeless Shelter (October 8, 1998)
This cuddly 80-year-old priest with the Limerick lilt doesn’t exactly look like “the underground general” of Irish Republican Army gun runners, as one British intelligence officer pronounced him in 1982.
“That’s what he called me,” said the Rev. Patrick Moloney, chuckling on Wednesday as he recounted being arrested along with his brother John, who wound up serving three years in prison.
The charges against Father Moloney were dropped after he spent two months in Portlaoise Prison, Ireland’s maximum-security lockup, with notoriously militant I.R.A. men.
Now the man known to his faithful simply as Father Pat, the street priest of the East Village, was in his brownstone on East Ninth Street just off Tompkins Square Park, which he opened a half century ago as Bonitas House, a shelter for troubled teenagers and illegal immigrants. Though he grew up a Roman Catholic, he was ordained in the Melkite Church, an Eastern Rite church.
He sank into a sofa, leafed through his mail and launched into another story, this one about serving four years in federal prison in the 1990s in connection with a $7.4 million Brink’s armored car robbery in Rochester — at the time, called the fifth biggest Brink’s robbery in history — which authorities said he helped pull off to fill I.R.A. coffers.
Father Moloney, a slight man with a short gray beard and glasses, emigrated from Ireland in 1955 and, inspired by the Catholic activist and anarchist Dorothy Day, began his ministry for the poor in the blighted East Village. He battled the gang leaders and drug dealers as ferociously as he now fights the developer-gentrifiers.
He also became a hero among Irish nationalists and a fixture at I.R.A. fund-raisers, calling for a united Ireland and denouncing British governance of the “occupied zone” of its northern counties.
Father Moloney is the son and grandson of I.R.A. fighting men, and he keeps his father’s Fenian rifle nearby and Irish nationalist posters hanging in his room. Above his headboard is a postcard for the Provisional I.R.A. and a snapshot of himself at a protest supporting the hunger striker Bobby Sands in 1981. Father Moloney said violence in the name of a united Ireland may have been justified up through the 1990s, but no longer.
Over the years, he has constantly run afoul of the authorities for helping people he believed were in the right, he said. He has defended and hidden fugitives, the undocumented and I.R.A. members on the lam. The list includes relatives of both Gerry Adams and Malcolm X, he said. They have stayed in the secret apartments he has kept around the city for this purpose, some of them in public housing. “I have never broken a law, but I have circumvented most of them,” he said, fingering his ever-present prayer beads, a mischievous glint in his eye.
In November 1993, Father Moloney was arrested in connection with a January 1993 holdup in which $7.4 million was taken from a Brink’s armored car service by masked gunmen, one of whom was a former I.R.A. hunger striker named Sam Millar; Mr. Millar was using one of Father Moloney’s refuge apartments in Stuyvesant Town. Mr. Millar hid $2 million in the apartment. Father Moloney was arrested for conspiring to hide the money. Arresting agents from the Federal Bureau of Investigation recovered $168,000 from a safe in Bonitas House. Father Moloney, who has always maintained his innocence, said he was safeguarding the money for members of his flock.
The judge set his bail at around $1 million.
“The judge said, 'you’re going to need a miracle,’ ” Father Moloney recalled. “I said, ‘Judge, I’m in the business of miracles,’ and I raised it in contributions in a matter of days.”
He and Mr. Millar were tried together and both were convicted. While Father Moloney was in federal prison — he called himself a political prisoner — “Free Father Pat” graffiti was scrawled around the East Village.
The remaining $5.2 million in Brinks money was never found. Certainly Father Moloney never showed signs of getting richer. He has lived like a monk, sleeping in a closet-size room on a cot stretched over his filing cabinets.
“I never took a dollar — I didn’t need to,” said Father Moloney, who used the Brinks publicity for his causes and never missed a chance to gleefully snub the authorities about it.
“I rubbed the government’s nose in it,” he said, and he poured himself a cup of Irish tea.
Character Study
A Priest Unafraid of Trouble
Marcus Yam for The New York Times
STREET PRIEST The Rev. Patrick Moloney says he has run afoul of the authorities for helping people he believed were in the right.
By COREY KILGANNON
Published: April 13, 2012
AH, now here comes Father Moloney, ambling down East Ninth Street in his priest’s outfit, a crucifix on a heavy chain around his neck.
The Particulars
NAME The Rev. Patrick Moloney
AGE 80
WHERE HE’S FROM Limerick, Ireland
WHAT HE IS Radical priest
TELLING DETAIL Says proudly that he worked with Robert Collier and other Black Panthers, and that he met with Yasser Arafat.
NAME The Rev. Patrick Moloney
AGE 80
WHERE HE’S FROM Limerick, Ireland
WHAT HE IS Radical priest
TELLING DETAIL Says proudly that he worked with Robert Collier and other Black Panthers, and that he met with Yasser Arafat.
Multimedia
Related
More Character Study Columns
A Priest, a Big Robbery and Even Bigger Questions (November 14, 1993)
Melkite Priest and One Other Guilty in Theft at Brink's Depot (November 29, 1994)
A Convicted Priest Practices His Ministry Behind Bars (August 17, 1997)
Out of Prison, Priest Reopens Homeless Shelter (October 8, 1998)
This cuddly 80-year-old priest with the Limerick lilt doesn’t exactly look like “the underground general” of Irish Republican Army gun runners, as one British intelligence officer pronounced him in 1982.
“That’s what he called me,” said the Rev. Patrick Moloney, chuckling on Wednesday as he recounted being arrested along with his brother John, who wound up serving three years in prison.
The charges against Father Moloney were dropped after he spent two months in Portlaoise Prison, Ireland’s maximum-security lockup, with notoriously militant I.R.A. men.
Now the man known to his faithful simply as Father Pat, the street priest of the East Village, was in his brownstone on East Ninth Street just off Tompkins Square Park, which he opened a half century ago as Bonitas House, a shelter for troubled teenagers and illegal immigrants. Though he grew up a Roman Catholic, he was ordained in the Melkite Church, an Eastern Rite church.
He sank into a sofa, leafed through his mail and launched into another story, this one about serving four years in federal prison in the 1990s in connection with a $7.4 million Brink’s armored car robbery in Rochester — at the time, called the fifth biggest Brink’s robbery in history — which authorities said he helped pull off to fill I.R.A. coffers.
Father Moloney, a slight man with a short gray beard and glasses, emigrated from Ireland in 1955 and, inspired by the Catholic activist and anarchist Dorothy Day, began his ministry for the poor in the blighted East Village. He battled the gang leaders and drug dealers as ferociously as he now fights the developer-gentrifiers.
He also became a hero among Irish nationalists and a fixture at I.R.A. fund-raisers, calling for a united Ireland and denouncing British governance of the “occupied zone” of its northern counties.
Father Moloney is the son and grandson of I.R.A. fighting men, and he keeps his father’s Fenian rifle nearby and Irish nationalist posters hanging in his room. Above his headboard is a postcard for the Provisional I.R.A. and a snapshot of himself at a protest supporting the hunger striker Bobby Sands in 1981. Father Moloney said violence in the name of a united Ireland may have been justified up through the 1990s, but no longer.
Over the years, he has constantly run afoul of the authorities for helping people he believed were in the right, he said. He has defended and hidden fugitives, the undocumented and I.R.A. members on the lam. The list includes relatives of both Gerry Adams and Malcolm X, he said. They have stayed in the secret apartments he has kept around the city for this purpose, some of them in public housing. “I have never broken a law, but I have circumvented most of them,” he said, fingering his ever-present prayer beads, a mischievous glint in his eye.
In November 1993, Father Moloney was arrested in connection with a January 1993 holdup in which $7.4 million was taken from a Brink’s armored car service by masked gunmen, one of whom was a former I.R.A. hunger striker named Sam Millar; Mr. Millar was using one of Father Moloney’s refuge apartments in Stuyvesant Town. Mr. Millar hid $2 million in the apartment. Father Moloney was arrested for conspiring to hide the money. Arresting agents from the Federal Bureau of Investigation recovered $168,000 from a safe in Bonitas House. Father Moloney, who has always maintained his innocence, said he was safeguarding the money for members of his flock.
The judge set his bail at around $1 million.
“The judge said, 'you’re going to need a miracle,’ ” Father Moloney recalled. “I said, ‘Judge, I’m in the business of miracles,’ and I raised it in contributions in a matter of days.”
He and Mr. Millar were tried together and both were convicted. While Father Moloney was in federal prison — he called himself a political prisoner — “Free Father Pat” graffiti was scrawled around the East Village.
The remaining $5.2 million in Brinks money was never found. Certainly Father Moloney never showed signs of getting richer. He has lived like a monk, sleeping in a closet-size room on a cot stretched over his filing cabinets.
“I never took a dollar — I didn’t need to,” said Father Moloney, who used the Brinks publicity for his causes and never missed a chance to gleefully snub the authorities about it.
“I rubbed the government’s nose in it,” he said, and he poured himself a cup of Irish tea.
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