And the NYT website is not opening. The entire city must be trying to get onto the page.

NEW YORK - All it took was daddy’s little girl to turn David Bowie from a rock star into the voice of a cartoon.

Bowie will be a guest on Nickelodeon’s “SpongeBob SquarePants,” playing a character called Lord Royal Highness in a show that will air next year.

Bowie, 59, said his 6-year-old daughter, Alexandria Zahra, is a huge SpongeBob fan and they watch the show together. He wrote in his blog that he’s “hit the Holy Grail of animation gigs.

“We, the family, are thrilled. Nothing else need happen this year, well, this week anyway,” Bowie said.

Bowie, who received a lifetime achievement honor at the Grammys this year and whose songs include “Fame,” “Young Americans” and “Space Oddity,” was previously the voice of Boz in David Cage’s 1999 “Omikron: The Nomad Soul.” He plays inventor and electrical engineer Nikola Tesla in Christopher Nolan’s upcoming movie “The Prestige,” in theaters Oct. 20.

No mention of his feud with Brock Samson....

[link]

I wonder why they don't use fire-fighting helicopters or something on highrises. A cargo chopper would be able to get up there with a foam pumper or water sprayer.

Eeeeeeeeee! Bowie!

In non-plane-non-Bowie news a carnivorous plant in Lyon has eaten a mouse:

Botanists discovered a partially digested mouse inside the plant on Friday after several people complained of a horrible smell.

The carnivorous plant, native to the Philippines, is the first to actually prove that plants can indeed eat small mammals.

USB desktop missle launcher: [link]

Yahoo news (and I realize all the large news sources are saying different things) says that NORAD wasn't tracking this plane. (Yeah, that's the other think -- Yahoo news is saying it's a plane.)

I didn't mean they tracked this flight. I meant NORAD scrambled the fighters in response to the incident as a precaution. I saw this confirmed by an FAA spokesperson.

Has everyone heard by now that it was a plane, believed to have been flown by Cory Lidle of the Yankees? The mayor wouldn't confirm it was Lidle (they need to notify next of kin), but CNN was reporting it far and wide, had a quote from Torre, and interviewed a Phillies announcer who if I heard the whole thing had been a good friend of Lidle's. Reportedly Lidle's passport was among the debris found on the sidewalk outside the BelAire.

An NTSB spokesman said the plane belonged to Lidle, and George Steinbrenner confirmed that Lidle had been killed.

It was flying on visual landmarks, from the reports I've seen. Private planes aren't required to be visible on radar, are they?

I write it to [my address] Associates, LLP. I think even when Related was my landlord the checks went to [my address] Associates, LLP.

Oh yeah. We just switched from writing the rent to the management company (so I knew their name) to [my address] Associates. But I now know the landlord is actually Ravi.

CNN has a breaking news banner: "New York Yankees manager Joe Torre says the plane that crashed into a building in Manhattan is registered to team pitcher Cory Lidle."

Oh, man. I was wondering, as I was just fast forwarding through the breaking news coverage they had on instead of Ellen Degeneres, why suddenly they were having sports on.

It was flying on visual landmarks, from the reports I've seen. Private planes aren't required to be visible on radar, are they?

Not if they're on VFR [link] (visual flight rules), which he was, but I'll admit to surprise that Manhattan isn't under air traffic control at all times (which disallows VFR flights).