Tour de Cure recap

So, like I said I would, I biked 30 miles in the hot hot New Jersey sun on Sunday, all in an effort to raise money for a diabetes cure. Ostensibly. Actually, like 21% of funds raised go to cure-oriented research, while greater than 50% go to public health initiatives. Not a problem, an ounce of prevention is worth a pound of cure, and so on.

So you would think that the public health component would be at the forefront of this event. Fact is, I've never seen so much white flour and sugar dispensed at an athletic event. At the rest stops, where the ride literature had explicitly stated that there would be PowerAde, there was water, juice, and Fuze, a diet juice drink. And protein bars and bananas too. But no sports drinks, in 90 degree weather! And then at the last rest stop they had run out of water and volunteers were standing around, like: "Maybe we should go buy some more." You couldn't have bought an electrolyte at those rest stops. Some of the slower riders reportedly pulled in shakily depleted and had to drink Fuze. yick.

At the staging area, a yoinky, pasty DJ played bad music, while our host and sponsor Bristol Myers Squibb touted its mission "enhance and extend" human life, eerily echoing Microsoft's stated 2000-era goal to "embrace and extend" the internet. I guess that's what BMS was doing when it stuffed it's sales channels with billions in product back in 2001. Thanks!

The brochure touted a "healthy lunch". This translated into a dinky little ham and cheese wrap from Applebees bundled with some cheap chips. Would you hang your brand on that?

But it was a fine ride through some of the best scenery NJ has to offer. Good exercise. Great cause. Poorly done.

Bad Education

For its first half, this Almodovar film felt a little precious, a little too geared towards those in grad school, those wishing they were still in grad school, and those pretending they were still in grad school. All the internal intertextuality, the multiple intersecting layers of narrative, yatta yatta yatta. And, of course, this being Almodovar, the cute boys and hot action. I was kind of wishing we had sent the DVD back unwatched and gotten disc 3 of 24, season 1. More on the 24 phenomenon.

But Spain's perennial poet of the kinky and worse pulls it together in the second half of Bad Education, gives the tale a reason to be twisted, and gets closer to Hitchcock than most do these days. And in the end, for all the drag queen hookers, drugs, anal sex, bulging crotch shots, violent deaths, corrupt, perverted priests, and other Almodovar trappings, this movie is held together by the theme of lost love, of two young boys who love each other and are torn apart, but never forget. Which lends the allegorical setting of 1977 more poignance. This is perhaps Almodovar's Raisin in the Sun. What happens to a dream deferred?

Who the hell made The Usual Suspects and what are they up to now, anyway? I know I can look this up on the so-called internet. And I will, too.

Food hounds argue about meatballs

Last night at around 10, Mary accused me of having had more of the organic turkey meatballs than she had, which is absurd. At the early round of dinner with kids, we were each apportioned three. Mary had, indeed, put one off to the side and not eaten it together with her pasta, but afterwards, when she must have plucked it from the pan with the zucchini and ensnarfed in a certain number of rather pleasant bites. So when each of us had a pre-bedtime snack of a touch more pasta with meatball, she basically maintained that I served the meatballs cut up to disguise having taken more, momentarily forgetting about her earlier one. But I would never cheat her of her food like that.

Once, a few years ago, I ran out to Ace on Saturday morning to pick up some sort of hardward, I was listening to NPR and I heard a young woman tell about her family -- none of them slim -- and how they would eye each other suspiciously and territorially at the dinner table as each angled for the choicest morsels. She signed off Curtis Sittenfeld, and I'm thinking "Sittenfeld, Sittenfeld... I know that name." I get back the house and Mary's telling me about the thing she had just heard on NPR by the sister of her student Jo Sittenfeld. And we were both looking at each other like, "that's our house... and get your eyes off my sandwich."

And now Curtis is the author of the hot best-seller Prep, much to the consternation of certain Princeton-area novellists. And we'll never have her over for dinner, though we've got a Jo's portrait of her on our wall.

Team lunch

Kinda depressing when a team comes into a restaurant filled with other teams. Everybody sitting around in khakis making chitchat, trying not to speak of the matter at hand (shared work), but limited in the number of topics that can be touched otherwise (i.e. kids, sports, vacation, home improvement, current events [generalities] but not politics, religion, sex, money [particulars]). Everyone's there for the same reasons. Lunch food and retreat. The oasis in the middle of the often-depressing days of doing things you're not in control of. But the expectations placed on lunch can be burdensome. It doesn't really solve problems, it only defers them, and not even for very long or very effectively. But it's still better than a sandwich at your desk. Most of the time. Not to be confused with business lunch, when meeting with someone outside of your realm. That's fun, often even ascetic (one shouldn't be too concerned with food here).

One last chance to give me your money

Time's running out to sponsor me for the American Diabetes Association's Tour de Cure in Princeton this June 26, where I will be joining my colleagues Cyrus, Webb, and Gerry to ride 30 hilly miles in Princeton's arduous outback to raise money for diabetes research. I know it's not really much of a distance, but it's the thought that counts.

It's already a team effort. Webb cleaned up my bike real good, Cyrus lent me a bike rack. I've been riding.

There's still time to SPONSOR ME and help raise needed money for research. Suggested contribution is $20, though you may go crazy or sane as you wish.

Note how the South and North are vying for dominance among my supporters. Who will win?

Current sponsors Team
Me South-North
My mom South
Joshua Stein South
John Fox South
George Berridge Jr. North
Robert Crabill South
Niklaus "Boyzu" Steiner South
Hilary Jewett North

Verbal Commitments:
Felice Marantz and David Kamien North

Expense aversion asymmetry

It's a typical middle-class trait is to be willing to expend extraordinary amounts of energy and concentration on reducing costs, but not a commensurate amount of engergy on growing revenue-producing capacity. Drive to Costco, buy big lots, etc, without really calculating the costs (fuel, time, inventory management) associated with realizing these. People who bill at $60 an hour do work at home for which they could pay $20, because subbing it out seems haughty.

This is partly because spending is thought of as waste, and therefore to be controlled, while there's somethiing vaguely distasteful if not downright immoral (getting home late, neglecting kids) about working too hard to make money.

People will talk endlessly about how much money they save, it's a competitive sport, particularly amongst the ladies. But discussing how much you earn is greatly deprecated, it's just not done.

What it all adds up to is a lot of false economies: people work so hard at saving money that they don't learn to earn more, and net net it's counterproductive. And yeah, there's a moral component to it: reducing costs is aligned with environmental preservation, while making money correlates to consumption, which is destructive. But that's stupid. If you earn more, you can spend more on purchasing the same items at more expensive and more convenient stores. Or on more expensive items. The difference is that you develop earnings capacity rather than savings capacity.

I'm sure the behavioral economists have attacked this asymmetry, I just haven't read it. Shit, this is obvious to everyone.

Camp time

School's out, and now it's camp time, which, as we now have learned, is just another way to outsource child care. On the one hand.

On the other, looking down over Hamilton Street at the Y, I see bunches of campgoers clustered in the shade of the trees around the basketball court. It's a nice day, mild and breezy, they're having some kind of water-related fun. I assume there's some sense of wonder left to camp, even if there are no farm animals or their droppings or nice natural place to swim, the kind of stuff we took for granted back in the day.

And Natalie's off to kindergarten orientation this week. If they don't keep her out because of her now-abated encounter with Fifth's disease, or "Slapped-face syndrome," (no, I didn't) which Mary so adeptly diagnosed. They had better not. It be too sad to miss orientation. I'm excited already.

Tonight, more Mary Poppins.

IHOP, Boston Post Road

A mile or so from Mary's family's home, right on the Post Road, there is an International House of Pancakes. There it has sat for at least the 10 years I've been around, surely longer, with its bright blue roof, beckoning to passers-by with sirens of buttermilk, but never has a member of the Berridge household entered into it.

The little IHOP by the road has always intrigued me and on Sunday, Father's Day, Natalie and I put an end to this neglect. IHOP. Long the only restaurant that absolved its customers of the "eggs or pancakes" decision by just bringing you both. The first breakfast place I ever saw accepting credit cards (that would be ca. 1986, Newton, MA). Provider of silver dollar pancakes to little kids. Home of multiple flavors of syrup. A national, no, an international institution.

Sunday was no different. We got there at 8:30 or so, not too long before a line started forming. First impression upon sitting down in the booth, was that IHOP had engaged some consultants to use the space most efficiently, as the booth was mighty vertical and thrust me perilously close to the table. Sadly, they could not do chocolate chip silver dollars, but Natalie did not get worked up.

Looking around, I might never have guessed I was in fancy-pants Larchmont, NY. No, no, this was America. Hispanic families, black couples, a pair of young Indians and so on. There was an older black couple dressed for church, she in a red jacket and black blouse, he in a killer bright red pinstripe suit and a red bowler. I kid you not. It was beautiful. There was a cute little almost-one-year-old boy a hispanic family with an outrageously full reddish hed of hair, like an Afro, no, like Krusty the Klown. So much hair. And, yeah, there were some Larchmonty people too. IHOP was kickin. Service reflected the volume.

And then this WASP couple comes in, he in a canary Polo golf shirt, she in a shawl or some such. The hostess tried to seat them, but they wouldn't sit there because it was "disgusting," so they took another booth. Then, after not being served for maybe two minutes and muttering to each other excitedly, they got antsy and the guy stood up in the tight aisle and tried to make eye contact with a waitron, to demand service. The Indian guy sitting next to him smirked bemusedly as he forked his omelet, enjoying the difficulties of Mr. White Guy. In truth, it was fun. Hell, Natalie had been patient, why couldn't Mercedes man?

Some kind of snoozefest

To judge from the way the critics treated it, the Metallicumentary Some Kind of Monster was gonna be a groundbreaking film: all these hard-assed metal guys getting soft and vulnerable and revealing their innermost feelings. Well, if that's as deep as they get, that's pretty pathetic.

James Hetfield, in particularly, shows himself to be an object lesson in ossification, demonstrating that if Heavy Metal exists to voice desires and "thoughts" of teen boys, keeping at it into your 30s means that you have to continue on thinking and feeling at a teenager's level.

OK. It must be said that some of the other the guys in band were trying to make therapy work, that it did take some courage to let the band be filmed over such a long period of time, and that the therapist really did have some nice, cabled cotton sweaters, particularly the shocking canary yellow one.

And the Fan Appreciation Day scene where the woman in black leather wins the right to be the bass player for a day was totally, totally awesome.

Glamour mag's "shocking" Sex survey

What other people are doing in bed! Shocking!

Not.

"We usually do three positions: missionary, her on top, doggie style." Oh my God!!!!
"We like to get really sweaty and let it all hang loose." Wow!!!!
"I suck her toes." Excitement.

That was as wild as it got. I was expecting descriptive statistics. 22% like anal. 14% love thy neighbors%. 12% have oral sex in moving cars, etc. That's a survey in my book.

Thank God I didn't throw down ducats.

Novel fodder

A few weeks ago I was in my mom's boyfriend David Ontjes's house down in North Carolina, looking around. Like so many of our parent's houses, it's palpably waiting for kids to come home. It doesn't make sense to take care of that much house for one person, but it's so hard to let go of the past when it's so much of you. Pictures of people (Jason, Ethan, Sarah) I knew from high school, but not that well. Interesting to project backwards from present. And it's the same deal wherever I go, looking at houses of now grandparents, from Pittsburgh to Westchester to the Piedmont. If mom and David marry, they will likely kick loose of more of this retrospective orientation. Perhaps this is a benefit, if not an advantage, of recoupling in advanced years, rather than staying married.

And it made me realize not just that I want to write a novel eventually, but that the novel should be classical in form, organized around weddings, births, deaths, characters. Continue in the tradition of Vikram Seth's A Suitable Boy (if you haven't read it, read it!).

So I'm going to try to concentrate on characters and dialog here on the blog, which have always been my favorite posts. Of course, that means I have to get away from my desk and all my fancy pants Ivy League colleagues.

Rabies in Moscow

The Moscow Times last week reported on a rabies outbreak in the capital. OK, only three people have died, which isn't many for a country with precipitous and alarming mortality trends. Rumors that Prime Minister Mikhail Fradkov had been bitten by a rapid cat at his dacha have not been confirmed. The government has also denied allegations that rabid animals were introduced into the jail cell of fallen Yukos magnate Mikhail Khodorkovskii while he watched the Russian Wheel of Fortune, though Amnesty International has registered a protest, particularly since the Championship round was on that week.

I wouldn't be all that surprised if, shades of the freakily scary 28 Days Later, a vaccine- and treatment-resistent form of rabies were to arise out of Russia, just like the super duper TB that's been coming out of Russia's jails. After all, estimates of the number of stray dogs in Moscow range up to 30,000. Here's what Pravda wrote in an article last October entitled "Mutant Stray Dogs Attack Muscovites":

Stray dogs killed a 54-year-old woman in January. They were dragging the woman's body along the vacant ground near the garbage-pressing station for a long while, tearing the body to pieces. Dogs usually choose solitary areas and passers-by for their attacks. As a rule, one dog, a so-called scout, approaches the victim at first, and then the whole pack attacks a person.

Veterinaries say that stray dogs in big cities have become much smarter animals. Big cities turn abandoned dogs into brutal, well-organized fighters. Only smartest and strongest animals can survive in a metropolitan city

But that's Pravda, a paper who has never seemed all that interested in journalistic integrity.

Natalie's up. Must make breakfast.

Of names and teeth

Discussing names with my rather commonly named colleague Steve Thomas, we stopped by the ever useful Social Security Administration Baby Names site. There we found that, as he suspected, Stephen in all of its canonical spellings has declined in popularity in recent years. And rightly so.

Natalie, on the other hand, continues to skyrocket, having reached #19 in 2004, up from #34 when ours was born lo those five years ago. And it was #5 in California last year, which I might consider to be a good thing if I were in marketing. It just goes to show you, you think you're being all smooth and distinctive and here comes the horde right behind you, sipping on Fruitalattes and dipping their wasabe infused french fries in free range olive oil. God how I hate that stuff.

And so, five years or so after birthing our Natalie goes to the dentist who tells us that her chipped front tooth is from grinding. Grinding. At the age of five. What's up with that? Am I so stressed out by the many charms of my wondrous career that I should be transferring stress to her so that she be grinds her teeth so? And now she doesn't want to snuggle half the time at nights after I read her and Graham books, and when she does, she doesn't even bother to lay on top of my back to stop me from getting up, and then demand that I tell her a magic phrase of her own concoction before she'll release me. And today is the last day of pre-school. These are indeed uncertain times...

Birthday Party #5

Natalie had birthday party number 5 yesterday, and while it was not as full-blooded an affair as numbers 1 and, say, 2, much fun was nonetheless had by all. Highpoints and "key learnings":

• Graham's first cupcake -- Graham, with his milk and egg allergies, doesn't have much food fun. He is, in fact, pretty much shy of new foods. However, somehow the chocolate cupcake with pink sprinkles called out to him and he just knew it had to be right, and he ate it down with no delay, his first big sugar delivery ever. And he deemed it good.
• All credit to Mary for her foresight in making the cupcakes and, indeed, the party, dairy and egg free. Where usually we're watching Graham like lactose-intolerant hawks, if occasionally insufficiently so, yesterday we had no need to worry.
  
• Don't overengineer. Although birthday parties at this age -- when more parents do the drop-off maneuver -- become exercises in potlatch childcare (you watch my kid today, and I'll watch yours a few months hence), you don't really need to schedule that intensely. 2 hours is not much time. Especially with a sprinkler.
  
• City boys add spice -- We were graced with the presence of the honorable Joseph R. Wolin of Manhattan, along with the dashing young Conrad Ventur. The party was measurably funner. Usually you see many of the same people on the birthday party circuit, with the inevitable plusses and minusses.
• Natalie is now 5.
  Pink and purple are still her favorite colors.
  She has not yet mastered the art of blowing out candles.
  

Bloody Passion guy

Plumped down in front of the telly last night to the charms of Mel Gibson's The Patriot. One thing we can say about Gibson is that his tastes don't waver much. Blood, gore, and righteousness. A TNT "New Classic," which isn't surprising in these years of Bush the Younger.

Beth worked on a movie with Gibson once and said that he was essentially generally obsessed with violence and maiming, that he was outraged that the studios had not let him film one particularly gruesome scene in Braveheart in which somebody's abdomen was split open and spilled out down onto the camera pointed up from below. I'm sure that, back in the day, he was a fan of Warhol's Frankenstein, home to scenes like that and such classic lines as: "One cannot know death until one has fucked life in the Gallbladder," uttered by our hero as he is doing, guess what? She also said Old Mad Max was really short and ugly with a big head.

Hence The Passion. Who better to bloody up than the savior himself. All that exposed skin is like a canvas for a blood artist.

Back to The Patriot, anyway. Rarely does one see a plot more loaded towards melodramatic
righteousness. The Brits kill two of his boys! They burn down a church full of his friends, including his boy's fresh little wife! So yeah, I sorta figured he'd want to kill that Redcoat baddie. But I don't want to spoil the ending for you....

The cinematography is good.

It's hot and muggy...

and I really don't feel like blogging today. Am cast today in the role of corporate whipping boy, supposed to be pushing a one of my client's partners into getting on board with our project. But the partner lacks motivation and staff to do so. What are we gonna do, move the book of business? Much much easier said than done.

So I've gotta be Mr. Corporate manipulator guy, simultaneously polite and firm, direct and twisted, with a remote party that really could care not much less. It's really not a role that comes naturally. Perhaps because I've so little taste for power, I'm not all that good at faking it.

I've similarly not mastered the role of disciplined parent. If Natalie pushes my buttons. I pretty reflexively either threaten to take something away from her and/or snap or yell. Not really the ideal thing to do, I know, but somehow I' m less good with the setting policy and stand by it thing. I guess I'll have to work on that more when she starts moving towards real trouble.

Junky chick on Franklin St

Whenever I'm in Chapel Hill I try to take a walk through town to see what's up: who's still in business, who's not, how it all smells. So Mary and I set out last weekend to take it all in, parking at the "old" public library, now the I'm-sure-hugely-successful Chapel Hill Museum which features a big smiling picture of, you guessed it, James Taylor! Whenever I see his smiling face... that's when I reach for my...

No but seriously. We trudged on passed the planetarium and all the flowers, passed Art Chansky's old bar which he sold to Woody Durham (yes kids, video did kill the radio star), passed any number of other nondescript student-oriented eateries and drinkeries, including He's Not Here, the bar which has historically supported my father.

And then we arrived at the more adult portion of Chapel Hill, the slope leading up from the old Hardee's (now Panera?) to the Carrboro border. Home of the Bookshop, the Cave, and restaurants where you can actually take a date, or your spouse, depending on life stage.

And in front of one such restaurant, now Panang, formerly Pyewacket, stood a young lady in a tank top and shorts. She seemed fit, which belied the tatoos all over her arms. And then she started scratching herself and jumping about, which corroborated the tattoos. And then she took off her shorts, which Mary later ID'd as underwear. And there she was, standing on the street with nothing but a tank top on, with her natural blonde pubic hair blowing in the wind. And she walked up and down the sidewalk, not particularly animated, not visibly trying to create a scandal, just naked from the waist down, enjoying some heroin. People came in and out of the restaurant, we called the cops, Mary was just shocked. By the time we came back around the block and looked down the street at her from Rosemary, she had some jeans on. The curtain had fallen on that little act.

We don't get much of that in Princeton.

A big day

Today is a huge day around our house. Natalie turns 5. Our marriage turns 8. And my sister gets to mark her own birthday by having passed through round 3 of chemo. Though she's still a fighting past the life-giving poisons coursing through her body.

It being hot, I decided to get a haircut, forgetting momentarily just how expensive the barbershop in the middle of Princeton is. After reading for a while about Pamela Anderson and her relationship to her nipples, I found myself seated in the chair of Aliya Verlasevic, who asked me where I was from before I could ask him. Turned out, he was from Bosnia, as I guessed, but his family now lived in Zagreb, Croatia. He termed himself a refugee, and after riffing on that subject for a while he told me about his haircutting experience: "As a boy, I almost cut Tito's hair," he tells me, "one day I just pick up scissors and start cutting. I cut Helmut Kohl's hair, here I cut the governor's, one time I cut Indira Gandhi's. For twenty-one years I been cutting hair." My hairs sense the presence of greatness, and are now shorter.

Construction boon

One of the little appreciated benefits of the real estate and construction boom of recent years is the abundance of porta potties available when you go out to walk, run or otherwise move about in suburban areas. This can be important for those of us who both do that and have feisty bladders.

But I have to be realistic about this. After all, as we all know, the boom in housing (and, therefore, the porta potty presence) is very interest-rate sensitive and, at present, we're at an unprecedented moment along the yield curve, with China and other emerging markets buying huge amounts of long-denominated US sovereign debt, making money and housing cheap for us. So what happens when China and South Korea start snapping up Euros, mortgage rates shoot up, the ARM-leveraged vacation home speculators get flushed out, and the bubbles bursts? Then where will I pee? Perhaps vacant, undeveloped lots will be left to reforest themselves, giving those in need desperately needed cover.

Tycoon (or Oligarch)

This 2002 Russian film starring Vladimir Mashkov could have been a great deal worse. Based loosely on the career of Boris Berezovsky, our oligarch has all the right stuff: with his PhD and piercing blue eyes, he bags the truly fine babes, thinks up schemes to defraud everybody and make big money, and drinks and roars. And he himself never orders anybody killed, which would not be comme il faut. The film, which takes its form from Citizen Kane, preserves some nice ambiguity to the end.

Oh sure, there's plenty of good old look at the crazy irrational Russians stuff. Like the time he sinks a boat for no reason at all. But, after all, that's how Russians are. Right?

In other news, lets all give a Russophile shout out to Uncle Kevin for providing me with this fine video tidbit from the German band Dzhingis Khan, a fine reminder to anyone who ever considered Europe more cultured than America that that opinion was never formed on the basis of pop music.

Cultural Awareness Day

Another of the tapes I found at Mom's said Anarchy in the PM on it, but in the documentary enthusiasm of those relatively early days of home recording I taped over it with the dulcet sounds of my band, the Unity Rockers, practicing in the rec room. That's right, the Unity Rockers, the only 13-piece all-white (no black people were listening to reggae at the high school then) reggae band in history. I hope.

And hearing us clunk through "Police and Thieves" brought back another fine memory. It was our senior year in high school, and as such we Unity Rockers were filled with a desire to spread culture throughout the school system, so we hied ourselves off to Phillips Junior High School and convinced the principle, the esteemed Herb Allred, that he should let us perform for his kids for a "Cultural Awareness Day" where we would teach them about reggae culture. Though we wouldn't say "jah" or "Rastafari" because we knew it was ridiculous for white suburban kids to be playin that.

So the big day came. To fit the whole school in we had to do two shows, one before lunch, one after. I think we lectured them a little about reggae, talked to them about 3-drop drumming or whatever you call it. But basically we knew little. And we played. I'm sure we were awesome.

One thing's for sure. Kids snuck out of class to see the second show. We were the big thing, for once! And who was the man, who got the girls screaming? Niklaus boyzu Steiner, that's who. Wearing a gaucho hat, marking the beat with his magic tambourine, toasting in Swiss-German like so few have since, he captivated the younguns fully. For a day, we were all stars, but Nick was the man.

Confusion in her eyes that says it all

At mom's house this weekend I spotted an old box on my shelf. "What's in there?" I thought. Tapes. Old tapes. Tapes as old as the one of the Cars' first two albums circa 1979.
And also some mysteriously labelled ones that once belonged to one of my mom's businesses but were repurposed when I got a stereo. With titles like "Bad Hits" and "Bad Hits II," surely they were worth a listen.

Mom's car stereo showed that they were tapes of Anarchy in the PM, WXYC's early punk and New Wave show. Seminal stuff. Old scratchy tapes with tunes from the likes of Rocky Erikson, Richard Lloyd, Iggy Pop, and so on. On Saturday nights I used to put on my big clunky headphones, sit in by big Swedish rust-colored chair and tape the show. It changed my life. This weekend I came upon one of the most life-changing moments of all: hearing Joy Division for the first time "She's Lost Control." Was it before Ian Curtis killed himself? I don't know, though I like to think so, but I had never heard anything like it, the funereal Moog, the impossibly low-tuned base, the mad depth of Curtis's range, singing about some girl on ludes or smack. It was at once raw and intensely crafted.

When, a year or so later, I spent the summer near Manchester and loitered with youth by the chip shops and in video parlors, hearing them talk about the impossibility of dreaming of a job. Then we raced one day from a field trip to the city because of hundreds of bobbies swarming the malls, shutting it down to prep for a race riot. Pre-Volcker, pre-Thatcher, this was the time of Joy Division.

And then, a year later, in Honolulu, I read that mourning had run its course and the remaining band members had reformed as New Order, and their first EP release turned out to be a classic: "Oh you've got green eyes, oh you've got grey eyes, oh you've got blue eyes." And then those ever softening New Orderites remixed it in the 90s and made it safe to be made into a soundtrack for the Gap. Thanks. I'd give several teeth for a clean copy of the original.

Fresh off the Tarmac

Just back from trip to North Carolina, upon which more reflections later. On the way there, at Newark Airport, we ran into Toby whatever his name is formerly of the Princeton Art Museum and also of some 57th st gallery. On the way back I was chasing Graham around the terminal and I noticed Eldar Shafir of the Princeton Psychology department, a young star on the behavioral economics and finance circuit, in transit between a conference at Duke and another on in frickin Venice, Itly.

People are always astonished at how many people I run into. It looks like pure randomness. But is it? I ran into a kid I knew who was from Kazan' and a woman I had met at Columbia at a bar in Moscow. Both were connected to a photo conference Mary was checking out. How does this kind of stuff happen? I keep my eyes open, wherever I am, and I look at people. It helps that I know a lot of people, sure, but a large component of it is that I expect to run into people, I actually try to do it. I go to places where people cluster and look around.

Another big factor is affinity. People from like backgrounds are likely to gravitate towards similar places and situations, and will settle in similar towns and neighborhoods. If you expect to run into people, you do.

So Natalie will give Eldar's girl Sophie an awesome Tar Heel State tourist t-shirt tomorrow at pre-school, due to a terminal hand-off. But now Graham is asleep in the car and I must go.

The Loading Dock, Bullocks, Durham, NC

Off this morning to North Carolina on what I am trying to build into our family mentality as the annual pilgrimage home. After negotiating such decisions as parking at Newark: offsite (ride in little red bus to terminal -- cool [to vehicle loving kids]!) or onsite (ride in Monorail -- even cooler!), we'll fly and get there.

This afternoon I've got to go pick up barbeque for the gathering at Mom's house on Monday. Because barbeque is a traditional, old line industry, the restaurant -- Bullock's in Durham -- is closed Sunday and also Monday. The last time when I went to pick up Q, a couple of year's ago because last year I didn't have to because we snagged the leftover Q from my high school reunion, I got to the restaurant at around 4:30 and the parking lot was packed with people eating dinner. I'm telling you, this is a very Southern place. It's partly Early Bird special mentality, partly people still on an agrarian schedule, however they in fact pass their days.

I go in and go up to the register and tell the lady (naturally) that I'm here to pick up the order for the "Kraus" family (lets' say). She tells me to go outside and go round to the loading dock.

So I do. And this is where it gets really Southern, downright atavistic. I go into the kitchen and say "hello" and out comes a black guy waiter wear, white shirt with bow tie and black pants, also jerry curls. I tell him I'm here to pick up our order and he asks my name and how much of what and goes back out. Then he comes back and announces in a deep southern accent that our order is being handled by "the honorable Jerry Bullock himself, the third proprietor of this fine establishment." The honorable Jerry appears, confirms my order and starts getting it together, and I head back out on the loading dock and back mom's car up to it, as per his instructions. By now a few people are either carrying my order out or are hanging out on the dock, smoking Kools. Jerry, the bossman, is the sole white person seen in the kitchen. Everyone else is deep south black, deep accent, unhurried, irony of untold depth.

It was like something out of an un-PC movie from the 40s, I hadn't seen this society for years, save for snippets in Ira Sach's Memphis-set movie The Delta, and wouldn't, until I visited Princeton's own Nassau Club. But that's a different story.

Blonde on bland

At the dentist this morning, I saw on the cover of People that Jason Priestly is marrying some blonde makeup artist. Below them on the cover was Sharon Stone, with child, and below her was a now blonde Lindsey Lohan. Between the three of them it was an astonishing picture of blonde boredom. Sharon Stone and her junior doppelganger Elizabeth Shue have always been the best example of what I like to call generic blondes, with sharp, balanced, symmetrical features, they blend together seemlessly. As does Priestly's new wife, who may as well remain nameless.

It reminded me of a time when, as a rapporteur for Columbia's faculty seminar on literary theory, a certain septagenarian Princeton professor started going off on how the fact that "anyone would agree that Cindy Crawford is beautiful" was a conclusive argument for a priori aesthetics and platonic forms. Hmm.. I thought. This guy is a moron.

Flash forward to Princeton, 2003 or so. At dinner, our hostess, ABD in English, tells a story of an older professor who has gotten in trouble (since hushed up by the university) for getting a male graduate student wasted, taking him home, trying to extort sexual favors, tying him up and putting him in a closet or some such. Turns out, as you may have guessed, it's the same guy. Which makes all the sense in the world.

A cry for help

Hi everybody. We're in a pickle here. We need to name a data warehouse and a bunch of screens for performing customer relationship, client services and (in future) other functions in a hedge fund.

The hedge fund's name and one of its core products have a mountain theme, so we're looking for something that ties in to mountains. We also want it connote the idea of bringing things together, gathering.

The best thing would be "base camp", but that's a hideous term. You can't name a system that, or even "Data base camp," for obvious reasons, but a colloquial synonym for base camp would be awesome. A good synonym for "Trading Post" or one of those houses where boy scouts stay on the mountainside.

Right now, the leader is "Sherpa"or some variant thereupon, because of the association with "carrying and guiding" into mountains, and because the boss likes it. Other contenders include "Apogee" and "Vertex", thought they're distressingly tech-generic.

Others thought of then rejected: "Mountaineer", "Funicular" (good metaphor, too ugly), "Tarn" (Alpine lake, too ugly).

Help me out. Give me some more mountain-related words with some connotations of centrality or something. good mountain animals.

These just in: Ravine (idea of shelter), Lodge

Slow blog day

It's bound to happen now and again, as if the endless intoning of the Khodorkovsky verdict and the blazing Moscow heat had come round the world to suck all the energy out of me right here on a drizzly day in in the heart of the great Garden State. I have almost nothing to say.

Generally speaking, blogs impose an incredible amount of discipline on one. I used be tremendously impressed that journalists could just churn out stories day after day after day. Still am. The blog gives one the structure to accomplish the same feat. Sometimes to the readers dismay.

On the subject of Khodorkovsky and Russia, then, let me just say that it's pretty scary the stuff I've heard coming out of Russia of late. If Kafka had seemed to have gone on vacation over there briefly, he's back in full force. Police in riot gear closing off streets at random times for document checks. The street construction outside Khodorkovsky's courthouse. Creative stuff. Stuff you don't think of.

Reading a book on Boris Berezovsky right now by a guy from Forbes named Paul Klebnikov. A guy who got shot in the back of the head on a Moscow street last year. A good investigative journalist, but no one I would have killed.

Picnic table in field of some kind of yellow flowers

The other day I was running on the surprising hidden paths between Harrison and Riverside down by Carnegie Lake and I passed by this common picnic table in the woods, surrounded by a field of little yellow flowers. I don't think they were dandelions. It was pretty beautiful, and my mind flew to Russia, the endless expanses of woods and fields, which don't look to be nearly as crazily polluted as they are to the naked eye. There's an incredible sense of frontier in a place where they've been farming for nearly a millenium, all because they've never had enough money to develop it, to heat it in particular.

Heading home, on the other side of Harrison, by the old stoney bridge in the deeply wooded area, a Japanese couple slumber in the reclined front seats of their racing green late-model Civic, their windows open in the mild air, with groceries in the back seat. I shoulda reached right in and stolen their big bag of BBQ Fritos. Mmmm.

The Greatest Show on Earth?

Not.

I was excited when I heard the Ringling Brothers were in Trenton yesterday. Natalie had a fabulous time when we took her (thanks to Beth and Kevin) to the Big Apple Circus around Xmas year before last. I thought, Ringling Brothers, this is the big time. Wrong.

Unlike the Big Apple, Ringling has no live band, just some piped in pseudofunk. It has more exotic animals, but fewer interesting tricks. One clown was a good acrobat, but there was nobody with any real comic talent. Everywhere there were racist, imperialist overtones, troops of (good) Chinese acrobats and "Mongolian Pole vaulters" and scores of cheap talentless bimbos in pseudo-Arabian garb. Mostly, Ringling tries to make up for the enormous size of its undertalented cast by pandering to the crowd with lame audience participation bits ("Everybody say ho! Ho!"). Like minor league baseball. As with reality shows, it's cheaper to have the audience be the show than to actually develop content.

Concessions were a really sad spectical, selling so much cheap junk at a circus in a poor neighborhood.

Big Apple is totally worth seeing, with a lot of Russian trained performers. Ringling is crap.

Luckily, the kids had a good time. Although Graham may have been more into the bus we saw when we were ranging outside at intermission. It was a really cool bus.

Zhelary

A Czech surprise. It looked like it was going to be a pretty linear fable of the pleasures of country living, and then the director throws in a twist. Really as good a serious movie as I've seen for some time out of Europe, which has been resting on its laurels a lot. Coasting. The cinematography is gorgeous, as if it had been underwritten by the Czech tourism board. Rent it.

Ballet Recital

Rider College Auditorium
Lawrenceville NJ
May 21, 2005 1 pm

Natalie was a Butterfly. She danced very beautifully, and I've got the entire thing on digital video.

But ballet recital is really intense not for watching your own kid, but others. Aged from 3 to 13, packs of girls (and a few boys too) are ushered onto stage for a chance to shine, to dominate their peers, to space out, to nail it, and whatever else peer groups and audiences can make egos in various stages of formation do. There are all types, the ones who've clearly practiced and kind of have it but have no rhythm, the ones who wander around freely, forgetting everything they were taught but being cute anyway. For the older kids, there are those who are absolutely in command, they can dance and everybody else watches them, trying to latch hold to their rhythm. Mostly kids are just looking at each other, or the teacher if they're thinking, trying to figure out what to do next.

But emerging social hierarchies are utterly evident. You can project forward to high school pretty confidently: who's gonna be popular, who will be on the margins, who'll be in the middle. Puberty may reshape things a little, but probably not but so much in aggregate.

It's also telling to watch your kid year to year. Last year Natalie pretty much glowed and led, this year she's a little more diffident and restrained, looking at her neighbor more and more. Better technically, for whatever that's worth.

But it was wrenching to watch all the girls out there this year, thinking back to Leslie's gymnastics when we were growing up and all of the girls in that circle: Gerda, Maura and Michelle Dillon, the legendary Ari Aponte, Laura Putnam, Terry Nida, Lisa Higgs, the Burgle girls. It seems "like yesterday" when it was them up on stage, and now what? Chemo, divorce, lord knows what else. It's life, it's normal, I know, but sometimes it's heavy.

Coming clean

I lied to you a couple of weeks ago. I don't have a friend from college who has breast cancer. It's my sister. At first they said it was stage zero, but she ended up having to have chemo.

Yesterday she had her second round of chemo. Of four. In expectation of hair loss, she got a buzz cut, so there's be less hair to fall out and clean up. 24 hours out, the second round would appear to have been less nasty than the first in terms of side effects. Still no party, but less bad.

It's hard to write about this. After starting out with serious intent, the blog has become a playground for wit. But it feels radically improper to hide out and not discuss the number one things on one's mind (other topics having already been excluded).

So there you go. At 40, my sister's going through a hellish process to reduce by 33-50% the 10-15% likelihood of recurrence in the next 15 years. Best they can tell. What a fucking choice.

Good fences makes Jim Nabors

I was thinking about Robert Frost's poem "Mending Wall" (not that I remembered the precise title b4 googling) last night in connection with the development across our fence out back. I decided to call up the poem and read it, and did so. But before getting there, a Google on the trademark line "Good fences make good neighbors" led me to this entry from The New Dictionary of Cultural Literacy, the number one search response for the line. Here's what this "reference book" has to say:

Good fences make good neighbors
Good neighbors respect one another’s property. Good farmers, for example, maintain their fences in order to keep their livestock from wandering onto neighboring farms. This proverb appears in the poem “Mending Wall,” by Robert Frost.

So the frickin "cultural dictionary" gets it backwards, as do most people who cite it. Frost and his narrator are ironic. Not for nothing does the poem begin with, and repeat, the phrase: "Something there is that doesn't love a wall."

Well Gaaaaaaalllleeeeee. This is what we call cultural literacy? It can kiss my white ass.

New lows

You know you're a white-collar neck when...

For variety and fun, you come to your office at night instead of going to your study upstairs to work. It's spooky in here at night. All these bland rooms with out-of-date and yet not yet retro stylish (with the exception of the modernist table in the library) office furniture, all dark and menacing. Must do chores and skeedaddle.

Becoming my boss

People are often freaked out about the prospect of becoming their parents as they age. This doesn't seem so disturbing to me, after all, there are genetics at work as well as time.

What's truly disturbing is this -- I'm turning into my boss! Cyrus and I did a short demo for a client bigwig yesterday. After making him lead the demo and interjecting occasional comments, I fielded questions from the bigwig and lied and exaggerated in exactly the same ways as my boss always has, overstating the size of our company by a fair amount, overstating the number of people in our group even more, etc. etc. I had to stop myself from significantly misrepresenting our project status (not awful, but not perfect either).

Just put me in front of a client and there I am, doing the little salesy dance.

At least I haven't gotten into huffing and puffing yet.

Headlines

According to Times, the French are up in arms over their government's attempt to take back a holiday to save some money to take care of old folx. However, people dealt with this decision in different ways:

France's national railway company, SNCF, ran 20 percent more trains than the usual number to help compensate for local transportation disruptions and to transport those who took a three-day weekend. But the railway is treating the day as a holiday for its employees, requiring its workers to make up the time by working 1 minute 52 seconds more each workday.

Nobody's making me work no extra 1:52. Sacre bleu!

In other news, a survey shows that purchasers of GM vehicles derive the most emotional satisfaction from their cars of all brands, just love them more on average. We are told further that this shows that GM does the best job developing products that really move people. Or maybe it just does the best job marketing to the vulnerable, to losers who get too worked up about their cars. That doesn't do haul their debt up outta junk status, but I suppose it must feel nice.

Graham made it through the evening feeding and reading period last night without vomiting. A relief. He had been working on a troubling streak, several times in the last week, the night before last for NO APPARENT REASON. He hadn't eaten anything he's allergic to. As a kid with allergies, he's unlikely to pick crap up off the floor and stick it in his mouth. We're a little freaked out.

Blog content by conveyance to work

You can probably predict the quality of my blog content for a given day based on how I got to work.

Walking -- While great for my life, walking to work doesn't do much for the blog. I see the same people every day, the same wacked out homeless guys in more or less the same positions depending on the position of the clouds (and, therefore, sunny spots on the sidewallk). Starbucks, Panera, the bagel place where the old-fashioned glazed donut is so good but I dare not touch it on non-holidays. Princeton is too affluent a place for there to be much of interest on the street.

Driving -- With music or gab radio on, driving to work offers lots of media stimulation and is, on average, the best place to think up a passable blog. Being in a car is like being in your head (to think along with Gaston Bachelard on the one hand and Michael Mann, the great cinematographer of cruising, on the other), and therefore something tends to come up of reasonable quality.

Train-- Has the greatest potential of all, with a high degree of randomness, especially when done off-peak, so you see fewer people in mechanized routines. Rush-hour is better for observing norms.

Today I walked. Obviously.

Uzbekistan in and out of the news

Saturday morning the headline at CNN.com was death of hundreds in a bloody crackdown by Uzbekistan's relatively authoritarian President Islam Karimov. Later in the day the story was gone and could not be found without searching, supplanted by god knows what, though it resurfaced in a more discreet location on Sunday.

Karimov blamed the uprising on Muslim fundamentalism, and indeed, who wouldn't? Putin always blames Chechens and other "blacks" when something blows up in Moscow, so far with great success. If it's Islamists, the story goes, a guy's just doing his part in the war on terror. And, who knows, he might be, but if so he's surely created a big ole bunch of martyrs. In any case, Karimov signalled that he will not, unlike his colleague Akaev of neighboring Kyrgyzstan, go softly into that good night.

Two transliterations of name of the Uzbek town which the blood was shed, Andijan and Andizhan, in linked CNN pages gave a sense of the story's editorial urgency.

The Life Aquatic with Steve Zissou

Wes Anderson goes to work once more, with a lunch pail full of drugs of his own concoction. An hugely amusing movie, but one you're unlikely to see more than once, unless you're between the ages of 17 and 26 and want to impress your friends by citing the coolest new thing. Anderson is fabulously creative, and endlessly enamored of his own creativity. His work borders on comedic coloratura. It would be interesting to see him make a movie a degree less madcap.

Bill Murray does his thing.
Owen Wilson does his.
Angelic Huston is as good as ever.
Kate Blanchett keeps building the range which is making her the next Meryl.

but
Willem Dafoe has a breakout role. Who knew the guy had a sense of humor.

A revelation

The funniest things happen out there in Corporate America. Try this piece of correspondence out for size. Only the names have been changed to protect the innocent.

Dear Client,

Good morning. A couple of questions for you. How do the roles of
consultant and advisor differ? Aren't they pretty much the same thing? Is
it possible to have more than one advisor or consultant on an account?

Grouse


Dear Grouse,

Yes, there can be more than one consultant on an account.
Consultant = advisor, advisor = consultant. It is the same word.

Client

Well I'll be

That niggah crazy

According to CNN, Dave Chappelle has checked himself in to a mental health facility in South Africa. He must be crazy to check himself in down there.

No but seriously. This may be a good thing not only for his mental health but for his craft. After a first season which blew the doors off comedy as we know it and had precedent only in Richard Pryor (hence the reference in the title of today's entry), his second degenerated into a very uneven second season focussed a little too much on excrement and the generous sharing of the same with others. He could get fresh funny bones in the funny farm.

John Stewart is also in need of refreshment. The recently announced defection of Steven Colbert will challenge him. He's still a comic genius, no doubt, but nobody keeps fresh material going for but so long. The real outstanding ones (think Steve Martin) are the ones who can drag down for a while and then bounce back. Dramatic actors have it easier when in comes to consistency.

BTW. Was on Netflix for a while last night looking for stuff. Hard to find. Have been watching movies for too long. Anybody out there who wants to hook up as Netflix buddies (share lists) let me know. Blue turned me on to this (preesh).

I am Pagliacci

This blog has gotten too light. I've let myself get dragged down into digital jestership, because it's quicker and easier to churn out wry and witty content than to actually work through problems. I've historically had a problem with cracking too many jokes in classes and meetings, mostly because I'm bored and don't really care about what's being discussed. I'm doing better with that, but it still manifests a fundamental problem with managing long / short term trade-offs. It's hard to sit on my hands and think about my future when there's a gag to be had.

There's a great "joke" I know from Alan Moore (and others'?) graphic novel The Watchmen. It feels too timeless to originate from there, probably and old Yiddish thing. Goes like this.

A tired man comes into a shrink's office and the shrink says "What's the problem?" and he says "I'm so depressed, what with global warming and terrorism and children dying in gutters throughout the third world and crime and violence in the streets and poor people eating dog food, I want to shoot myself." The doctor replies, "You're depressed. You need to take your mind off all of that. You know what, the circus is in town, and you should go. The great clown Pagliacci is performing! That'll be just the thing." And the guy says "But doctor, I am Pagliacci."

Much is in order in my life, but there is much to be resolved, for which, sadly, the blog is not the correct forum.



At least that's how I felt this morning. I'm marginally better later in the day.

Great moments in foresight

It was the summer of '83, and Akin, Liner and I were travelling in the old country: Europe. We were very sophisticated. I don't remember exactly where it was, perhaps between the "enchanting village of Echternach," where for the second night running we ran into a couple of Dutch guys named Joost and Joost and got drunk. Or perhaps it was after Heidelburg, where we ran into them again and got really drunk on "Der Stiefelbier," talls beers wondrously shaped like a shoe so that the beer slapped you in the face at a crucial moment.

Anyway, we were on a train going somewhere Germanic when Doug Liner disclosed that, at the tender age of 18, he had a 401k. We about fell out. Doug, an early adherent to financial planning best practices, explained to us the great joys of compounding, and we laughed and laughed, and laughed.

But I wonder how that account's doing today. I may have to ask him.

Physical Risk Management

As of this weekend, we have gates to keep Graham out of front yard. And I put spare fencing in the gap between the shed and the neighbor's fence to keep him from slipping out into parking lot behind next door neighbor. And we put up netting to keep deer out of back yard.
And have planned but not planted shrubs to block our view of:

a. Plumbing trucks across fence in rear of back yard
b. Back porch of house next door (10 ft)

Our backyard is becoming progressively more hemmed in and aestheticized. A mini-fortress, controlling ingress and egress. Like the mysterious white dog that's been eating our compost. Not like the great forest onto which my yards backed when I was a kid. With all them wild dogs running round.

And what of with the groundhogs beneath the shed? Will they be trapped in? Will they be forced to eat all of Mary's plants? Not bloody likely, the little tunnelers. More likely they'll be even safer from predators.

Traffic

An old theme. Traffic to the blog, while OK, is lagging a little bit. On the one hand, I shouldn't care, just write, right? But since that fateful moment when Todd showed me how to hook up a counter, I confess to a more than mild fascination with my traffic. How many people? Who's coming by? My frickin self-esteem is tied up with it.

How to improve it? Can't email my list all the time, then I just annoy them. May get a mild spike, even add a regular visitor, but must exercise restraint. Particularly when I think that my most recent posts have been underwhelming?

Link to others' blogs? No time to look for them.
Post comments on famous blogs? Have to read them and have something to say. Little time for it.
Stick in popular keywords like Britney Spears or Lindsey Lohan or "Brad and Angelina." Will drive cheap, non-repeatable traffic. Keywords with a better chance of luring sticky blind visitors might be Lewis Mumford or Dean Smith or My Bloody Valentine or Theodore Fontane.

We'll see. Probably should start inserting random but appropriate keywords as an experiment.

But you guys keep coming back. Or I get depressed.

In the olden days

"In the olden days, everybody wore Capris, right dad?"

So says Natalie, and I'm thinking the olden days bit is mighty cute, but all this fashion literacy is a little bit much for someone who isn't even five. It's really New Jersey. And then I think, is it place, or is it time that accounts for this? Are all little girls so tuned in to fashion these days? Or were they when I was a kid too?

In general, it's very difficult to figure out what's individual choice and where you're being led by trends. (Same thought as in entry below) The name Natalie, we thought, was very distinctive, but then it turns out it occurs fairly frequently in the younger female population.

I had real deep thoughts on this stuff earlier in the morning, but then I started working. Should blog earlier, maybe, while the morning crop of thoughts is still fresh and glistening with dew.

Pick up at the Y pool

At the foot of the stairs,
by the locker room entrances,
back from the pool's edge to avoid censure from the "no shoes on the pool deck" Nazis,
parents cluster densely,
towels in hand (unless they forgot them, like me).
Swim class will soon be done,
Praise the lord,
cuz it's mad hot at the Princeton Y pool.
Kids approach and fall into their towels,
then push through,
like at a Who concert.

It's NJ at its best. Lots of breeders and breedees competing for scarce resources, in this case, as so often, space.

Or is it just the new clustered demographics? Is it like this everywhere?

Anyhow, Natalie is doing the Superman jump.

Things they don't teach you in humanities grad school

1. Floss
2. Lawn mowers need to be serviced before winter. Something like: remove and clean (or replace) spark plug. Change air filter. Burn off gas that's in there. And don't use old gas either.
3. When managing projects, don't have meetings every day, or anything resembling every day. Your team gets ornery.
   
4. Get your teeth cleaned by dentist at least twice a year.
5. Make sure you have wipes before undoing diaper.
6. You gotta get some bonds in your portfolio, niggah.
   

Other than that, a humanities PhD prepares you for everything you might ever encounter in life.

Death warmed over

Exhausted after conference at the bleating New York Athletic Club, a place that gives wood panelling a bad name. Combined with the thing in New Haven last weekend, I've probably spoken to 60 people I've never seen before in my life in the last 5 days, engaged in a wide variety of businesses, such as:

• Outsourcing refunds of student grants for universities via checking accounts at new bank: currently has 90,000 account holders. Principals aged 24-26.
  
• Marketing consultant to beverage makers
• Wacky concocter of absurdist business puzzles / Best-selling author (Barry Nalebuff)
• A guy who's considering buying all the cable companies in Ukraine
  
• Fund of funds that incubates Canadian hedge funds
  
• Wholesale grower of fine plants (for Lowe's)
  
• Two companies pitching recovery of class action claims to hedge funds
  
• Poverty eradication in 3rd world countries via free trade
• Outsourcing of investment research
• Guy proposing dialogue site between people in red states and blue states; using broadband, video conferencing, multimedia portraits, and James
  Fishkin's methods of deliberative polling. (no payment received for shameless plug)
• Executive search consultant, currently seeking Salesperson for French tech company with Ukrainian app devt team
• Plain-old hedge funds, including retail broker lunkheads who started one because customers asked them to.
  

So, as I said, I'm tired.

No push push in the Bush

The already popular Laura Bush seems to have pulled off something of a PR coup for herself and W with her performance at the White House Press Corps dinner, where she termed herself a "Desperate housewife whose husband is asleep at 9," and also nailed Barbara Bush and other administration fixtures pretty good. But it's hard to understand how any of it aside from her delivery and timing (which may have been good) should redound to her credit personally. After all, she had a speechwriter, the same guy who humanized the less-warm and fuzzy (no pun intended) Nancy Reagan back in 1982. I.e. the nation's pre-eminent first lady image guy. The whole move does show political savvy on the part of the White House, which clearly has a sense of humor when it's not out destroying the environment, church/state, corporation/state, international borders, and other key boundaries.

Baby crying. See ya.

Yalefestorama

Back from big swinging networking weekend at Yale this weekend. A pretty impressive event, where 400 self-selected people turned up and actually made a concerted effort to talk to each other, under the direction of the energetic if human Keith Ferrazzi. A few observations:

* Yale people, from President Richard Levin on down, are disconcertingly obsessed with being better than Harvard. Allusions to the rivalry were constant, as were accompanying self-congratulatory titters. I wonder if there'd be a reasonable way to do a statistical study of oral and printed allusions to the rivalry to compare their per capita incidence in New Haven and Cambridge. I'm willing to bet that, given the obscene size of Harvard's budget, they're not all that worked up about it up there. Yale should just shut up, not worry about it, and focus on being itself. Methinks it doth protest too much.

* Smart as he is, Jeffrey Sonnenfeld is an asshole. He moderated two separate panels and wasted ridiculous amounts of people's time (200 person hours?) by showing long excerpts from John Steward and CNN which he could have encapsulated quickly, thereby squelching time people like Paul Steiger and David Gergen could have had to relate anecdotes. If most people abused their audiences for the simple pleasure of hearing their voices like that, they would be fired. I may yet write to Levin.

* Roland Betts of the Chelsea Piers, on the other hand, is a really striking figure. Really interesting speaker. I hadn't a clue.

NPRrrrrrrzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzR!

On the way back to client from office in Hemant's car today listened to NPR, a rarity these days for Mr. Pedestrian. Mid-afternoon NPR no different than ever. The Philly affiliate was talking about Vietnamese-American mixed ethnicity sorts and how New York was a better place to live than Atlanta. Really. So I switched to WNYC, where I was being lulled to sleep by the dulcet tones of the generic NPR voices until, suddenly, I hear the phrase: "Aaron Lebedeff, the James Brown of Yiddish Theater." Them's big claims, demanding validation, for which no time today.

Oblivion

I promised a review of Peter Abrahams's Oblivion. Good, but the last two hundred pages aren't as good as the first hundred. The ending is pretty well telegraphed. I guessed some of the supporting details wrong, but the perp was pretty clear.

Ran into a neighbor on the street today walking to train to plane to Tampa for a conference on "Loving as Jesus loved." Trying to think up Christian alternatives to sex, drugs, and rock and roll, which we used to refer to as high school. It will be interesting to hear what they come up with. It will be interesting to see where I come down on this stuff when Natalie is 14, or 11, which they say is the new 14.

Think about it, if 50 is the new 40 and 11 is the new 14, where in middle is there the year which is the same as it was back in the day. 33?

Thanks a lot

Stopped into the neighborhood Coach store on the way back from lunch to price a business card holder wallet thingie. "$48" says the well-coiffed young sales person. "Hmmm" says I "I'll have to think about it." "OK" she says. OK? As if she had some sort of authority to approve or deny, some kind of recourse. How bout "Thanks for thinking of trying our absurdly expensive store."

Did I ever tell you my history with Coach? About the "lifetime guarantee" on a briefcase that turned out to cover the "useful life of the item?" Hell of a guarantee: It'll last as long as it lasts. Thanks.

All is vanity

Feeling very mortal today. A good friend from college, someone who's been very helpful to me at a number of times in my life, mostly likely has cancer in the lymph system of her breast. They initially thought a lumpectomy got it, but now it's not clear, and she may have to have chemo.

So when Mary brings Graham in bed with us in the morning and he's crawling around over me and everything, being annoying but cute, I'm thinking that my life basically feels right, that it makes sense to have a less than scintillating or particularly remunerative career to spend more time with the family. Vanity of vanities, that sort of thing. And the whole thing with mortality being brought so close to home, so wierd given the seemingly infinite volume of the past, the infinite number of details from the past that one recovers only gradually and by happenstance, even as the whole slips away... which seems to point towards what feels like a similarly infinite future, which all of a sudden gets cut down to size.

And then the lactic acid in my legs brought me back to the soccer field on Sunday, when I ran an overlap and that moronic Swede passed it back to me from behind me instead of playing it through in front of me or chipping it over the defense, where surely I could have controlled the ball in the air and either hit a man on the far post for a header goal, or knocked it inside the keeper to the near post with the outside of my foot, all without letting the ball touch the ground. That's what I was gonna do.

A modest proposal

At the Y on Saturday, Graham was playing in a play area (and rightly so) while I observed. Two moms were hanging out waiting for their kids, having a conversation which was entirely generic and familiar to me, from "I don't have anything at all to wear" to "I can't get one thing done all day. There's no time." And it occurred to me that, if suburban plaints and arguments ("Dinner is at 5:30! You can't bring them home at 6 and expect to get them in bed by 7:30! Are you crazy?") are entirely generic, there's really no reason why one need argue with one's own spouse.

The entire function could be randomly outsourced to someone else's spouse. So, say you're calling home at 6:45 to say you're going to be home late. If you punch a code into the phone, designating the genre of call you're about to make, you should be able to have it routed to someone else's wife with similarly aged kids, with whom you could have the same argument you would've had with your own. Your spouse, of course, would go onto the list to be a next routee. She could argue with them freely and furiously, saying whatever she felt like, knowing that her specific words would not come home to haunt her later. Another triumph for modern technology!

Picks and pans

Sideways. Basically a good movie. Funny. The characters develop. Well cast. And yet, there's something pretty depressing about the movie. It's not the pathetic alcoholism of the characters so much as the fact that, the whole time, they're drinking wine. Wine wine wine. With all the fine beers there are in the world today, so many delightful looking varieties, and the microdistillery bourbons that just weren't there in my drinking days, their heads never turned, they drank wine wine wine. It was a pretty boring movie, if you ask me, from the point of view of alchohol. I'd rather watch a beer movie anyday.

Also, here in April, we're entering a new phase of the media year, as I've just unrapped and gave a listen to my last Christmas CD (Coltrane's Traneing In) and almost simultaneously worked my way through to the end of the Times Magazine's 2004 Year in Ideas issue. That should give you an idea of how up to date I am.

Coming up soon, a review of Peter Abraham's Oblivion, a damn fine mystery novel with structural components cadged from Crime and Punishment and Sebastien Japrisot. First gotta finish book.

Graham doing reps

At the tender age of 18 months, Graham's already displaying an athlete's discipline. When he discovers a new thing to go up and down (a pile of rugs in a store, a pillow which somehow found itself on the floor, etc) he ascends and descends it over and over again, savoring a new flavor of gravity, punctuating it all with little ejaculations of joy.

Unless, of course, he climbs up on a chair, falls down, and hits his head on the floor or, perhaps (I wasn't in the room), a radiator, like he just did. Then he screams for a bit and steers clear of the vexing chair and its cousins. We'll see for how long.

Mr. Bullet Point

For this high-powered Yale networking conference I'm going to next weekend, featuring such luminaries as David Gergen and Nicholas Brady, the organizers had us fill out professional biographies and lists of personal interests to facilitate getting to know you and you and you. I like.

So I laid out my life in the style to which I've become accustomed: bullet points. Then a whopping 100-page document arrives in my email with the bios and interests of all those who had taken the time (or had their admin person do so) to fill it out. And lets guess how many did it in a bullet-pointed, resume-like style. You guessed it. One. The chewer of grouse.

When I first left academia, I was outraged at all these bullet points, all this PowerPoint. "Why are we boiling complexity down?" I asked. "We should revel in it and its cousin ambiguity." But I've unlearned that. Neither complexity nor ambiguity is the modern corporation's middle name. So I learned to love and appreciate the bullet point. Succinct. Economical. But it is, in fact, also a subordinate means of communicating, meant to respect the more expensive time of the executive being addressed or to grab the eye the many passing by the poster next to the elevator or lunch trays.

At some point in time in one's career, it seems, one re-accedes to the paragraph, luxuriating in its calm pace and relative freedom. I may yet get to the place where I can write interesting professional paragraphs, on top of these blog ones that I will let the reader characterize.

But my biographical bullet points certainly leap off the page. They've got that going for them.

Bloggadah

There are voices from the peanut gallery claiming that the Grouse concerns itself too much with religious questions. Sorry, guys. In fact, the best term for what's going on here is probably "Bloggadah", i.e. using the blog as a channel for content which would be otherwise found in a Haggadah, if (and this is important) I was a Jew from back in the day. I.e. non-doctrinal narrative which nonetheless contains important moral lessons for the reader. If I didn't already have a name for my blog, I'd name it bloggadah. Dag.

Oh yeah. Just because she asked me not to write about this, let me say that the woman Stacy Mann was with today at Palmer Square did a horrible job parallel parking. Just horrible.

A new pope

And there was much rejoicing.

Seriously, most knowledgable commentators have compared this to the installation of Bill Guthridge to the throne of UNC basketball upon the retirement of Dean Smith. Not so much a decision as, given the career level and age of the selected replacement, a deferral or a refusal of a decision.

As if I really care. The old German guy at least looks liberal next to our homegrown life-loving fag-hating thumpers. Somebody just needs to design better entertainment to get those people out of their churches. What would you do for fun if you lived in a red state? Go to Cracker Barrel?

The One and the Many, v2

One day a few years back on the way to work I found myself listening to JM in the AM (Jewish Moments in the AM) on WFMU. JM in the AM is always a quirky listen, as its host Nachum tries to pepper his talk with enough Hebrew words, and his playlist with enough soupy ballads, to lure young secular Jews back into the observant fold. This day was telethon day, and it was pretty striking. Nachum was reading pledges aloud: "Marlene Epstein of South Hackensack donates $25 in honor of her great aunt Esther. Jacob Smithberg of Trenton has given us $20 in loving memory of his dearly departed mother Janet," and so on, and on, and on. Nachum read aloud all the details of every single donation, no matter how small. I heard half and hour of it myself. And at the end, they totalled up the contributions to the exact dollar and cent. And there was great rejoicing and singing, accompanied by the house band. A goy telethon would have rounded and focused on threshhold points: "We've now reached the $100,000 mark." Maybe the MC-Wink Martindale type reads testimony from exemplary contributors, but in general attention is paid to signs of volume: rising collection totals, volunteers in the background busily working phones, lights lighting up, etc. An aggregate view. On the one hand, this is a contrast between, Judaism and Christianity, "this-worldly" and "other-worldly" soterioliogy (theory of salvation), in Weber's terms. On the other, the contrast bears witness to a post-Holocaust mentality. "Every one counts." Like the AIDS quilt. Or, to some extent, the Vietnam memorial. Or, indeed, the coverage of the Iraq war and the growing difficulty of sustaining both casualties and good PR for an offensive. We're a long way from the "human fodder" view discussed here a few days back.

Love that penis

There's no greater joy, for Graham, than bursting into the bathroom when I'm taking a shower and pressing his face against the glass of the enclosure, fixated, the whole time, on the most exciting part of the male anatomy: the penis. And it's so much better when I open the glass when I'm ready to dry off, and he can view the object of his fascination with nothing intervening. Perhaps he'll even point and say "Ahhh!" Mary claims he's mastered the nomenclature of this body part in record time, and indeed he has. I ask him, "Graham, where's your penis?" He gives a big smile and points straight at mine.

A mellow weekend

It was an almost utterly eventless weekend, mostly in the good sense. Nice weather. Went nowhere, except when I got on my bike late in the day Sunday and tore off along the Delaware & Raritan Canal towpath, pumping and grunting the whole way in an attempt to get enough exercise to justify the food consumed at the multiple social events I had attended or hosted earlier in the day. The towpath is a fine place to ride a bike, but it's also a jim dandy place to walk with one's family, dog and/or stroller. Many's the time I've been out in the family way along the path and have half-cursed the jerks who come along on their bicycles, pumping and grunting in an attempt to get enough exercise to justify the food consumed at something earlier in the day. I tried to mitigate this risk by taking the path in a less-popular direction (towards Trenton), to no avail. Instead, New Jersey in all of its glory was out. Big families of Indians lingering under blooms. Linkin Park fans fishing. People running and walking at a wide variety of speeds, with and without personal music devices (ie. in various stages of oblivion). By the time I got close to Trenton, it had finally emptied out and there was no one to terrorize.

Seriously. I'm not all that bad.

One other thing. At the yard sale at the Westminster Choir College, where Graham was wandering into the street constantly and playing with a tennis ball (he actually said the word "Ball"!), there was nothing to buy. Except, except except, a groovy brown suede briefcase and overnight hanging bag for $25. Trouble was, when you opened the briefcase, you found some fine gay hardcore pornography. You can imagine how delighted the corn-fed choir girls were to learn about this hidden present, which was quickly squirreled away in a pillowcase by some guy. It had not been his earlier in the day. Who knows if it was later.

Home value appreciation

The 1050 foot 1910 semi-detached house we sold in 2003 for $360,000 has just come on the market for $499,000. Lets see what's changed in that time, based on the advertising copy for each of the sales

2005
This handsome circa 1900s half house has been totally renovated while retaining its charming period details... Featuring sparkling refinished hardwood floors, a delightful turned staircase, plaster walls, high ceilings, a welcoming front porch and walk-up attic.

2003
...a home solidly built in 1910... Hardwood floors are featured throughout...

2005
You will be delighted with the light-filled living room and dining room.

2003
(Passed over in silence. All this light must have been an effect of the putative renovation, cuz it was dark when we lived there).

2005
A fenced back yard with gorgeous English country perennial gardens.
(just plain not true.)

2003
It overlooks a spacious fenced yard, shared with its neighboring unit.

If the house appreciates in line with houses in Princeton Borough, it will sell for $445,000. So that's about 50 grand worth of adjectives and possibly spurious claims. Admittedly, we ourselves did list for an aspirational (and quirky) $418,900, and then came down about the same amount.

Adjectives, of course, are valuable in New Jersey. Restaurant menus, for example, use adjectives to account for high prices.

Closer

With Jude Law, Julia Roberts, Clive Owen, and Natalie Portman, how could you go wrong, a young Hollywood exec might figure. By making a movie like Closer, that's how. Don't believe whatever reviews you might have read. This movie sucks. The dialogue is worse than Mamet, and that's saying something.

One thing I wanna know, who's checking in with the Grouse from Norwalk? I can't decipher that one. Give us a shout out.

The One and the Many, v1

Beth and Kevin have an extremely wide-angle photograph in their bathroom of 1000 odd troops near Charlotte in 1918. When I first saw it in the mirror I assumed, from the massing and the tones that it was in Russia. The arrangement, like the massing and clustering of soldiers' bodies in war paintings from the Middle Ages through the 19th century, really brings home the point of what those guys are there to do. Die. For so many of those guys, that photo was probably one last look. 

I remember, in '87, walking somewhere in Moscow with a Russian guy and he points up a hillside and says "See up there. That's where, back in the Great Patriotic War (WWII), some guys thought up a new technique. The Germans had a pillbox up there, and our troops couldn't pass by the foot of the hill without being cut down. So one guy charged up the hill and threw his body in front of the pillbox, while some other guys came round the back and took out the Krauts. Then our guys proceeded on." I was, like, shit. Nobody ever thought of that back in my neighborhood. This is very different from anything I could ever consider doing, a different order of being. 

So the other day, I'm talking to this Kievan guy Genna, and he's telling me that Gorbachev can rot in hell and that everybody in Russia agrees with him and spits when they hear his name and that Stalin understood Russia and people were ready to die for him and Russia made great strides under Stalin... All standard stuff you're used to hearing from liquored up semi-educated Russians, but Genna's neither of those. He's straight intelligentsia. The point is, there are attitudes towards masses of dead bodies and sacrifice and necessity that we can't begin to process.

The Big 39, for better or worse

Yes, in the natural rhythm of things, my birthday has come back around, after 364 other days in a row. Lets review some of the goods, bads, and the uglies of the day.

Good

• It's my birthday
• Delicious meal at Ethiopean restaurant last night
• Graham is crossing a threshhold with speaking. We're pretty sure he's said a few words beyond "mamamamama" and "dadadadada", including "up" and other stuff too
• Natalie is learning to swim
  
• Graham has mastered coming down the stairs
• Natalie may have passed the worst of her psychotic clinginess and noisemaking
• Graham has been cured of his mullet. Cute new haircut.
  
• Spring has sprung: Witherspoon Street is awash in blooms
  
• Large project has sold, meaning a nice bonus for me and accolades and protection from various evildoers and I can walk to work for a while
  
• Other good stuff I'm not talking about on the blog
  (available for select individual distribution)
  

Bad

• There's nothing that's bad but not ugly

Ugly

• My project involves building a system
  
• Spring having sprung, Graham has a fit when we try to bring him in from outside
  
• I have a rash. It's itchy. It's hell. Hard to sleep.
  
• I'm wearing a suit.
• The bastards are going to tear down the trees across our back fence any day, and it will become a construction site for butt-ugly houses.
  

Slow day

Graham up again at 5:15, plus have actual work to do, so groggy.

Did a quick troll of various media sites looking for something to be wryly smarter than, could do no better than the seeming incongruity of some poor hostage in Iraq between black masked thugs with guns, with a banner ad below it of an absurdly busty bikinied Victoria's Secret model at (shockingly) Fox News. Normally I would fear that putting in link to a top level domain would mean that the content would shift quickly, so the reference wouldn't make sense. Given the target, I'm not all that worried today. There'll always be something ridiculous at Fox.

Actually, just went back to Fox and found the breasty woman had been replaced first by Billy Graham, then by "Family Values," a banner for Ameriquest mortgage, ETrade, Lenscrafters, and on subsequent reloads by various tax preparers, IQ tests, and other mortgage shovellers. In other words, my first sighting was really just a little ironic serendipity from Doubleclick.

Chinese Bakery, 35th and 7th

Felt like Moscow. Sweet smell of sugar, white flour, and something like lard. Don't ask. People pressed together against the greasy glass display case, transacting in monosyllables. There's a different sense of personal space entirely. Pork bun is delicious.

Shall I Compare Thee to a Revolution?

The March 5th issue of The Economist has lingered on my one of my desks. That's not a particularly long time, for that "newspaper" (as it likes to call itself), but this one is special because it's attractice to look at. Rarely does The Economist fall into the trap of using the common wisdom that pictures of attractive women can sell anything, but the democratic marches in Beirut let the staid periodical break through the wall and put a babe on its cover. Not that there's anything new in that. The French tradition of Marianne, the proto-lady liberty, has been inclined towards buxomness and much skin since the time of David and Gericault. And when, in 1999, time came to vote on an embodiment of Marianne, they didn't track down some French Yelena Bonner or Aung San Suu Kyi or even a Norma Rae. No no, they elected Laetitia Casta, whose political assets speak for themselves.

I must confess it strikes me as a strange metaphor, the alluring woman standing in for liberty. Perhaps it's meant to portend what comes after.

Scott on Bellow

From Times Week in Review, A.O. Scott's encomium to Saul Bellow

"(Bellow's) characters are unthinkable outside of the cities that tormented them, and in this they became something of a lost tribe. The postwar Americna novel resembles, for the most part, a suburb, populated by standardized ciphers who dream of becoming charcaters and wonder (along with their readers) why they can't quite succeed."

Boing! Especially the part about the suburbs. That's a good strong sentence that holds a lot of water. And yet the fact that suburban un-drama of accomodation and dreams less stifled than not dreamed is repeated millions of times in reality and a similar number of times doesn't make it less compelling or real. The romantic vision of the urban eccentric, from Joseph Mitchell through Jane Jacobs and Jim Jarmusch, is really something of a foil, and antipode, to the suburban vision of getting the kids in bed on time, plied with vegetables. Or rather, it is the mental spice, kicking out a stream of cultural commodities with which suburbanites can leaven and lessen their boredom. That is, for those that are actually bored.

Dunno, one thing it ain't is simple.

My Architect

Anyone who's ever been fascinated with Louis Kahn should definitely see My Architect, a documentary in which Kahn's illegitimate son follows his famous dad's tracks around to try to get to know him posthumously.

Anyone who's just into the romantic myth of the self-centered, purist, eccentric artist should also definitely see the film.

Anyone who wants to see a film which really gets at the core issues of being a kid of an absentee, jackass father should probably see the film. I'll be more certain tomorrow when we've watched the whole thing, thus far some of that has been overshadowed by the luminaries of the architectural world praising Kahn.

Anybody who likes the quirky sorts of types that documentaries can dig up should very probably see the film. The Kahn kid has an Arbus-like eye for the quirky ones.

Station wagons

Walking around Larchmont the other day I counted 25 Volvo wagons in an hour. All of them in the rounder body style, post-1998 or so. The Volvo wagon is like part of the bourgeois uniform up here in the Northeast. My sister has one. Lord knows I think they're purty. I myself sport around in one of the littler Volvos, the S40, after retiring my mom's 1987 240 not long ago. It was her divorce car, you see. So I'm a member of the tribe.

But then my father-in-law, whom we shall call George, gives me a subcription to Consumer Reports, starting with the 2005 Auto guide. Japanese cars take 9 of the top 10 spots for best in class, and totally dominate just about everything. It's unreal. Detroit sneaks a few in, as do Mercedes and BMW, but it's radically disproportionately land of the rising sun.

The Volvo wagon gets a good rating overall, even though some of its sub-ratings aren't so good. Why? Because it's the only non-SUV non-minivan full sized wagon on the market. That's not a Mercedes. Somebody has to occupy the throne.

My point is, why doesn't doesn't Honda/Acura rise up and blow Volvo out of the water? Revive the Accord wagon with a fold-down seat in the rear like the Volvo. Make a spunkier version of it and slap an Acura badge on it. Would you buy that car? I sure as hell would.

WalMart makes gas

I had been planning a post about how reduction in oil consumption should be driven less by development of hydrogen cells and hybrids than by people just driving their cars less, walking more, and having more mixed retail/residential zoning to support this. Which would argue against building big boxes. But I kept looking at the post and thinking it looked preachy and boring.

Then today WalMart comes out and blames bad numbers on bad weather and rising oil prices. As in, if the price of a tank is $3 higher, you can't really think about buying a snorkel, motor oil, chips, even dungarees. Or perhaps it's because driving out to where the big boxes are feels more expensive.

Netflix is shallow

30,000 titles my foot. All the hype is that Netflix has everything, but that's nothing like the truth.

Case in point #1: for Emir Kusturica, Netflix doesn't even have The Time of the Gypsies, a rock-solid 1989 film that followed his Best Foreign Oscar-nominated When Father Was Away on Business. Not an obscure title. Netflix goes 2 of 7 for Jacques Tati's films, and the selection of Dusan Makavejev is similarly weak.

It doesn't inspire much confidence for depth, though they do arrive quickly. What're you gonna do? They shut down the West Coast Video up the block. And the attached tanning salon too!

After boarding at Metro Park -- Redux

For some of the newer readers, I'll occasionally reach back into the earlier days of the Grouse and republish posts I like in particular, moments I was happy not so much to have a blog as to be seeing stuff worth writing about. Just being in the world.
----
10/27/4
I slunked into a seat and broke out my lunch. Roast beef on rye, fritos.

Across the aisle from me sat a woman sitting facing her roughly thirteen-year old daughter, dressed in a hot pink shirt, jeans, sneakers. I munch away, not paying much attention, until I hear her say to the girl: "And now I want to talk to you about negotiations. What happens when a supplier is trying to get a higher price out of you and you want to keep the price low" (door opens, random train noise) "You've got to always keep a stone face, impassive. Never let a customer get to you. If you have feelings, save it for home, for the dinner table."

By now I'm convinced that I'm not hallucinating. The mother is briefing the daughter on how to be a merchant. At this point mom reaches down and takes the daughter's hands in hers: "(train noise) is going to teach you about cash control, inventory management... there are three types of corporation: a sole proprietorship, a C corp, and an S corp (open door)... You should always have more than one product, and never buy stock in a company with only one product."

And so she went on, passing to her daughter all the rudiments of trade. And alway very tenderly and solicitously, never turning imperious. I looked at the daughter to see if she was bored and annoyed, but no, she was fine, listening to Mom hold forth.

Wild. It was like a whole nuther dimension. My mom fancied herself an entrepreneur , even went to the White House for some small business hoo-ha when (cough cough) Reagan was occupying it , but she never passed on the gems to me like this. Just the parable of the talents, and some yummy frozen tacos for the nights she got home late from the office.

Pink! Bitches

Good old SI.com reported how the University of Arkansas football coach has decided to quit punishing goldbricking players by making them wear pink jerseys. He took this dramatic decision after realizing that a number of breast cancer related survivors wore the pink ribbons as a mark of solidarity, and received some harsh rebukes from the breast cancer community. What about the horrible psychological scars he was imposing on these young manly men, making them wear pink? Surely these were lawsuits waiting to happen.

The controversy took me back to the glory days of the "Monk's Boutique" basketball team in Chapel Hill, North Carolina, the Southern part of heaven. Monk's, funded by pizza and alt rock impresarios, had pink and green jerseys for home and away games, respectively (I guess). I can tell you for damned sure that the referees never got comfortable referring to the jerseys as pink. They would say either "grey" or "white," as in "Foul on grey." It's hard to say pink.

Mary took this whole pink jersey controversy as another example of how all sports are stupid. Which is ridiculous. Not only do sports make it fun to get exercise, and therefore let you eat more delicious food, they are the primary way our educational system teaches kids to work together on teams. Yeah yeah, there's bands and theater and little research projects and other stuff, but there's not the same degree of pressure and momentary interdependence on the team which really teaches you get things dones. I'm sure there's research out there showing that, with some baseline of basic academic achievement assumed, there's a strong correlation between team sports participation and income later in life. The trick is learning when to stop watching Sport Center.

Overheard bathroom dialogue

Two groundskeepers, one NJ native, one hispanic.
8:51 AM
Generic Corporate New Jersey (ok. my office)

Hispanic: "How you doin?"
NJ: "Good. How bout you?"
Hispanic: "Good. You?"
NJ: (a little puzzled)
"I have good days, and bad days, this is somewhere in the middle."
Hispanic: "What?"
NJ: (slowly) "I have good days, and bad days, this is somewhere in the middle."
Hispanic: "That's good."

I think he was working on his English.

Do a little dance

One of the best moments after North Carolina's victory last night was Sean May out at mid-court, doing a goofy little dance all by himself. There's something decidedly kid-like about May, good kid-like, and when he stood up and gave a speech he hit all the proper and orthodox notes: "team, coach, together, work hard all year" and you know he meant it all. He looks like an amiable cartoon character, though it's hard to figure out which one exactly. Maybe one of the ones off of Dragon Tales.

In short, Sean May is a veritable poster child for college basketball. Something like Shane Battier was for Duke, but without those wierd folds in his scalp. One wonders how May might eventually be marketed in the NBA, as a counterweight to all the brash young high schoolers? Or does the brash thing just inherently sell better because they're shinier and more consumerist from the jump? ("get this year's model, early!")

Rashad McCants, on the other hand, is Goofus to May's Gallant. Disappears in the second half and then declares he's going pro the next day. OK.

Champions for a reason

North Carolina, for the third time since my puberty, has won the national championship, and there is order in the universe. We have pulled back from the same abyss of discord which brought UCLA low after Wooden left and never really let it come back to its former level (but then how could it have, given how dominant Wooden made them?).

And through the nasty years with jackass Matt Doherty, the program stayed true to itself and what it's supposed to be, continuing to be in the upper reaches of graduation rates for Division I programs. So what if they're Communications majors. That's OK. Communication is important. A diploma is what it's about. The tradition is intact, despite that one major hiring boo-boo which was corrected in time.