My Summer of Love

What are you gonna say about this little Irish treat. Beautifully shot, smoking and drinking, hot lesbo action. Born agains too. But no depth, a relatively pale shadow of the films from which it derives: Chtilova's Daisies and the bemusingly psychotic Heavenly Creatures.

The other King

Picked up a copy of the CD Elvis Costello made with Burt Bachrach at a yard sale last fall, from a couple of gay guys who also sold me a copy of Auntie Mame and a black Banana Republic bowling jacket for all of two dollars. Mary objected that it was dry clean only until I pointed out that it was only two dollars.

Anyhow. I had looked askance at the Costello-Bachrach project when it came out, but, as with most things Costello touches, it was well worth the price of purchase, especially since it was from a yard sale. Now I've listened to it a few times and I see that there are many excellent songs on there. Who else could write a hauntingly beautiful and poignant song about empty nesters getting divorced and dealing with the pain of leaving the family home.

Of course, Costello has long since been the songster counterpart to Cheever and Updike. Songs like little novels that complicate rather than disdain the suburbs.

Melvin G, RIP

A sad call from my mom this morning. Melvin, her boyfriend through much of the 90s, is dead.

Melvin popped into mom's life sometime in the early 90s, when mom, still getting over divorce from Dad, despairing of meeting an upstanding upper middle-class guy who wasn't a major jerk in some way, hauled in home from a shag club (those of you in Great Britain, it's not what you think). Tan, bearded, he had a bit of Kenny Rogers going on, and he claimed, at least, to have kicked substances. He claimed, as well, to have been in Vietnam, though subsequent discussions would call this into question. He claimed, in fact, to have been trapped below deck on a ship or something which gave him some sort of disability. In fact, it turned out he had been involved in a bad wreck sometime in the 60s, had a head injury, and had never quite recovered.

Melvin's was a sad tail. It's not that he was poor or disadvantaged from the start, he came from a pretty well off family, he just frittered himself away until he flipped the car and busted his head. His first wife died a long, slow painful death. He was basically illiterate, not too skilled, watched a lot of TV, ate a lot of ice cream. He was polite without being terribly charming.

He died more or less of malnutrition. He had a stroke, perhaps because the woman who inherited him from my mom (and would let him drink) decided at some point in time that he should be pushed down the stairs. Discharged, the VA put him in a chain nursing home, where they basically didn't feed him or fed him crap. When he went back to the hospital, the doctors were shocked at how he had deteriorated. The doctors let his girlfriend take him out of the hospital during the day, which now appears to have been a bad decision, as it did him precious little good.

It's all very sad because, although he's survived by a number of children, one of them a one-time racist psychopath who passed for a normal guy in Eastern North Carolina, it was kind of a wasted life. He never accomplished much. He never conquered his demons. He never really learned to read.

May he rest in peace.

A fine grind

Caught up in cycle of mild boredom, precious little to blog about. As I've said before, walking to work is delightful, but I see the same things every day: that woman with horn-rimmed glasses who I could swear hung out at the Anchor in New Haven in the 80s. The couple of homeless guys. A bunch of Passats and Volvos.

Then there's work. Work. OK, we just pretty much sold another big chunk of work. That just assures more of the same, from a blog perspective.

Those who draw a connection between blogging and insomnia have a point. I've been up since 5 over here, for no really good reason other than I'm in the habit of doing so. And it's a good time to write, if there's something to write about.

Reading Elizabeth Kolbert's series of New Yorker pieces on global warming now, having recovered all three of them from the deep archives of magazines on our bedside tables (going back to late 2004, in some cases). Scary stuff. Arming myself to better argue with conservative thumper ostriches.

Mary hassling me about my weight.
"Boss" hassling me about my team not billing enough hours.
Graham has started calling many people big and small by name. And, at bedtime, he furrows his brow, looks me in the eye, and says "One more book. Last book."

Cat in peripheral vision

On the toilet this morning, a little groggy, saw a small plastic cat down by the radiator out of the corner of my eye. For a second, I thought it was both real and dead.

Which I guess it is.

John Roberts day 1

Scratching, distorted sound over intercom. Tapping:

"Testing, testing 1 2 3. Can everybody hear me? Great.

This is John Roberts, your new Chief Justice here at the Supreeeeeeeeeeme Court, and I don't want to take up too much of your extremely valuable time today, but I did want to let you all know how excited I am to be on board with the team here. I have a feeling this is going to be a great year in jurisprudence!

But first, a couple of announcements. The Supreme Court company picnic is coming up this Saturday in Rock Creek Park, and I'd like to encourage everyone to show up and bring their families and favorite sporting equipment. We're going to be collecting canned goods, diapers and whatnot for the victims of those hurricanes, so bring a little something and show that you care.

Also, health care open enrollment commences next week, so review those brochures and contact Janine with questions.

One other thing, we're having an attorney transferred over from the Pennsylvania Avenue office. She's a great gal, and she's going to be a great addition to the Judicial team, so everybody be nice.

As I was saying, this is going to be a great year. Lets all hunker down together, keep our eyes on the ball, and beat the heck out of our numbers!"

The center cannot hold water

Rough transcript of actual conversation
Nameless Garden Stater: "I don't respect people with southern accents, "
Me: "Well, you're talking to two southerners" (me & Steve) "who came from the South to college and dropped their accents on account of that attitude."
NGS: "Oh."
Me: "What do you think of James Carville?"
NGS: "Who?"

Anybody with a non-standard accent -- be it Southern or Brooklyn or Trenton -- is presumed to be provincial and, therefore, limited. Statistically, there may be a basis for this. There is perhaps a broad correlation between staying amongst and conversing with one's own, keeping an accent, and not having access to the breadth of information to the cosmopolitan center. And yet, the center is in its own way xenophobic and reductive. alas.

Get the hell out

The tech guys are mocking me again because I wasn't aware of some nerdlinger term that applies directly to our work. Tell me again how I came to work for an IT company. Time to get the hell out of here.

Every day I wake up, read the paper and envy somebody their job. Financial services is kind of mathy, but at least there's a culture of sociability.

But I walk to work. What are you gonna do?

Man of constant solo

So yeah, Don't Look Back. It'd been a long time since I'd watch that much Dylan, that many Dylans, as if there were ever a plurality. From the beginning, the same old song: nobody tells Bob what to do, who to be. Nobody revels in the game of hide and seek with the critics more than Bob, nobody uses allegorical openness to suggest but pull back from the edge of concreteness quite as well. From the beginning, he delights in fucking with the audience's head. Like David Byrne, he begins with a rhyme and a rhythm and fills the line in going backwards, and the audience takes metric fill dirt for profundity. Like Miles and Johnny Rotten, he spits on the public. Like a rapper, he accentuates the rhythm with clear articulation and a thrusting head. Like almost nobody else, he stretches verses out to arbitrary lengths with but a pro forma refrain to let you catch your mental breath, basically using the guitar get people to focus on the verse.

He's just Bob, and, yeah, at the end of the day, the acoustic work is seminal and the later stuff, well, I don't know so well. And there's a reason. But one things for sure, if he hadn't turned off the spigot of bard, he would have debased an epochal body of work. And he knew that.

All the leaves are brown

Walking to work today saw an archetypal fall scene: a hip student, a black woman wearing a Greek fisherman's hat and a bulky sweater, with a racing green retro women's bike with a kickstand, taking close up photos of the turning leaves of an elm tree through the cemetery's heavy fence, surely with fuzzy tombstones and crosses in the background.

Ahhhhhhh, the joys of Photo 101, when artsy students take their cameras out into the world to capture close up black and white abstractions of sidewalks, leaves, wet rocks, reflections on the water surfaces, etc. No fall would be complete without a mess of this production clogging the dark rooms of America and surely Europe, for this must be an international language of the middle classes of temperate climates, this reflective solemnity of surface and texture.

In other news, Marty Scorcese on Bob Dylan on NPR. Fantastic footage of Dylan and all kinds of folky freaks from back in the day.

Each Peach Pear Plum

As you may have noted, there are days when I don't feel like writing anything particularly would-be-witty, and on those days, I figure I might as well write about the kids. God forbid they should be underdocumented.

So Graham, now, when we read Each Peach Pear Plum around bed or nap time, naturally expects to be cued vis-a-vis the location of the figure hidden on each page. I.e.

Each Peach Pear Plum
I spy Tom Thumb.

Then I'm supposed to say "where's Tom Thumb?" so he can point to it with his little finger. If I don't inquire as expected, he gets his hand in a ready position and looks up at me expectantly with those big eyes.

It don't get no better.

Dying for (lack of) oil

This hurricane season is all about oil. The spectacle of thousands of SUVs, trucks and minivans stuck on Texas interstates escaping Rita, running out of gas, stations running out of gas, speaks volumes. Their many cupholders will not save them. The built-in DVD players will not save them. Why wasn't more evacuation carried out with public transportation? Oh yeah, there is none.

Where is Wall St looking? At the refineries. At the insurers and the insurer of last resort.

This autumn feels something like that of 2001, the steady clip of 9/11, anthrax, Flight 587 over Queens, "Axis of Evil," the snipers on the DC Beltway. Only then, there was some general confusion. There was no reason to think we deserved it.

This fall, in our hearts of hearts, we know we do deserve it. Though it's not conclusively proven, the preponderance of evidence suggests that global warming is real and that hurricane season is nastier for it. The cars stalled out on the highway are at once effect and cause, as in classical tragedy. People will die out there.

Our houses are too big, too far away from work, from each other, from all the people of color we pretend to like. OK , and yes, those of us in old houses waste energy for lack of insulation. Our cars are too big, and we're too ready to haul off to big boxes for apparent discounts.

Our real problems are not gay marriage, abortion, or stem cell research.

We need a President and government who has the vision to address causes, not symptoms. Or we can just let the invisible hand of the high price of gas do it for us.

Jet (almost) Blew

It's gonna be interesting to track the fate of the various parties to last night's sky-high drama. The pilot, and pilots in general, are big winners. Those guys did a fine job.

JetBlue, strangely, is doing well, up 1.4% at time of writing. Dunno, it seems like that landing gear malfunction might look bad. In the short term, at least, Soros squeeks by again.

Airbus, it would seem, is trying to pretend like it didn't happen. No press release on its website.

I would think that maintenance crews at the bankrupt legacy carriers, too numerous to list out, would point to yesterday's events as evidence that the discount carriers were really cutting costs too far, and that the price breaks they offered were in fact unsustainable, a failure of market-oriented risk management similar to the underfinancing of levee maintenance in New Orleans. Here's the consumer perspective: "Well, OK, maybe it's a little dangerous, but hell, I can fly out to Vegas for $79 and get cocktails with those little umbrellas, goddammit!"

The end of the Catholic Church as we know it

New Vatican Rule Said to Bar Gays as New Priests

Quoth the paper of record. As Mary pointed out, this pretty much dooms the Catholic Church, cuz who's it gonna recruit to wear them robes if it excludes the gay population. And it was such a fine and worthwhile institution.

From our Wellesley Correspondent

The loyal amongst you will recall how, back in May, I divulged that my sister was going through chemo for breast cancer. And now, the astute amonst you initial loyal are probably wondering how she's doing.

As you will see at left, she's recovering quite nicely, thank you, and her hair is even coming along with the season.

I must say Leslie has been rather inspirational throughout all of it, staying upbeat almost the whole time when she wasn't vomiting or languishing on the couch while construction crews and landscapers bustled around their home renovation, which had, after all, been scheduled, unlike the cancer thing.

I was trying to keep it on the dl for Natalie, so when we went up to Boston I thought up some euphemism for Leslie's hair loss, but Natalie had none of it: "It's because she's sick," she said. I guess a good modern parent should disclose this sort of thing. Still haven't told her about 9/11, for example.

Free Kate!

Oh please. H & M is shocked, shocked to discover that Kate Moss does cocaine, and will no longer be associated with the preternaturally twiggy girlfriend of one of Britain's baddest rock and roll bad boys (last time I checked they were together). H & M, this is, purveyor of cheap, scratchy polyester-based clubwear for the pale and skinny, in short, wholesaler of a cocaine meth ecstasy red bull coctail aesthetic. An H & M spokesdrone is quoted as saying: "If someone is going to be the face of H & M, it is important they be healthy, wholesome, and sound." Is Kate the next Martha?

In other news, Graham regaled us with his dulcet tones and a mighty poop this morning at 5, but then displayed his growing affection for hanging out under the blanket in "Granny's room." Good stuff.

Random notes

Disc 1 of Six Feet Under disappointed initially, then came together. But still, I guess I expected more. It feels like a TV show, in the final analysis. I guess it's the 1-hour form.

By the way, for those of you who object to my sometimes thumbnail movie reviews, I should note that I intend for the blog to be a written record of what I've seen, because sometimes we see so many movies that we forget what we've seen. One time Mary and I rented a 90s French movie with Deneuve and Auteuil and it was halfway done before we realized we had watched it before. I don't know if we're pathetic or just typical, but the blog should help mitigate this.

Ran into Viktor and Margarita Tupitsyn today in Tribeca. Hadn't seen them in years, but they're up to their same old shtick of writing theoretically and just plain old dense art criticism, now based out of Paris rather than Manhattan. Who knew one really could make a living being an avant-garde Russian critic?

Great scenes

Hoggett was just singing and dancing to make the sick Babe feel batter before the big sheep-herding contest. Great stuff.

Last night, My Name is Nobody, spaghetti western with Hengy Fonda and this other, good-looking blonde kid. Wierd, kinda like Soviet screwball comedies like Brilliantovaia ruka.

Women's Golf

Sat on the train today next to a corporate woman who was reading Golf and Women magazine or somesuch. Never really thought much on that whole groove, a whole aesthetic. From its pages beamed wrinkle-free tan, healthy, robust eye contact firm handshaking and capable yet still in touch with their feminine side women, cast against the swales of immaculately groomed greens and fairways, the latter day equivalent of Boucher and Fragonard. As if all of Being had been airbrushed.

Needless to say, I did not become aroused, though I did feel a vague urge to pitch deals to them or serve them mint tea and camembert.

I still don't entirely understand who let golf happen in the first place.

Grey hairs in Accords

Going to the doctor the other day I saw a number of grey heads whizzing round corners in Accords and Outbacks, suspensions torsioning as they were pushed through the curve. I do that too sometimes in my imposing S40.

Where is the great middle bustling off to? If our time was so important, or if we had focused enough to make it so, we should be driving fancier cars. We have in fact tacitly agreed that it's not worth killing ourselves to have the status symbols, ostensibly as a trade-off for something else. So why are we hurdling round bends?

Out on interstate, it takes lots of discipline to stay at Speed Limit +14 when the whole world around you is cruising along at 20 over, but the risk-reward curve shifts dramatically as you cross the 15 mph over mark. But just sitting there in the middle lane at 69 feels so goading. But why?

In the end, rushing just makes you look and feel more important.

Heard on the Street

Out on the street in steamy Princeton a few minutes ago, a passably-accessorized middle-aged woman comes up to me:

"Do you know if there's a store on this street that sells Princeton T-shirts and stuff".
Me: "Um, I tend to sort of ignore that stuff."
Her: "I have a niece in North Carolina who wants one."

Man, how people spend their days.

I told her where to go, a 5-minute walk away through a heavily-trafficked area, and she said thanks and got out her car keys to drive over there. And we wonder why we're in the middle of a demand-driven oil spike.

Points of fact

"Defending its decision not to commit forces to the Tora Bora campaign, members of the Bush administration -- including the president... -- have continued to insist, as recently as the last presidential campaign, that there was no definitive information that Mr. bin Laden was eve in Tora Bora in December 2001." The Times Magazine ("Mr. Bin Laden" indeed)

Why is it that the Bush administration and the right in general insists on such exhaustive evidentiary standards in some cases, and none whatsoever in others. Not enough evidence that Bin Laden was at Tora Bora but enough of WMDs in Iraq to go before the Security Council and lie. Global warming? What's that? Prove it to me. Evolution? A theory. But gay marriage is obviously the downfall of western society as we know it, without any evidence, etc. etc.

Things Graham says

My most dedicated readers will recall how, some months back, Graham's slowness to take up the gift of the blarney was a cause of some concern to our household. Months later, after some speech therapy paid for by our fellow Garden State taxpayers and, more importantly, some patience, he's talking. Lots.

So it's time to begin an inventory of the unbearably cute things that he says, like we have for Natalie.

If this bores you, come back tomorrow. This blog serves an archival as well as discursive and entertainment functions.

First word (a while back): Ball

Age 2
"Mama" (frequently), "Dad" (less so)
"Nana", "Natee" (more rarely): Natalie
"Ganny": Granny
"Dink": Drink
He counts: 1, 2, 3,4 (then gets excited and accelerates) 67810. OK, he skips a few.
He knows colors: bleue, geen, onger, puhpuh
He knows animals: cat, dog, cow, pig, duck, etc.
He knows the ends of all the rhyming lines in The Owl and the Pussycat

He says "No" when looking for main characters in such books as Where's Spot and Squirrel is Hungry. This is way cute.

and much much more. Back to work

The Big Story

Last night, Fox declared the "Big Story" to be the fact that there were 3,000 sex offenders in New Orleans, who haven't been dutifully calling up the 800 number set up for them in such situation. "Protecting the children" is what it's all about today, apparently.

Or, rather, that was yesterday. Today, I earnestly sought more info on these "children at risk" on FoxNews.com, but found nothing. Instead, I learned of the execution-style deaths of 3 escaped chimps in Nebraska, and of the death of a baby born to a brain-damaged woman. Sadly, there was no news of the death of Supreme Court nominee John Roberts, nor of that of Generalissimo Francisco Franco, whom we may -- lack of updates notwithstanding -- presume to be still dead.

One item of note at Fox: Ebay's acquisition of Skype for $4 bln, which directly contradicts what I had just read over lunch about "gonzo" VC Tim Draper and his stake in the "disruptive" Latvian internet telephonist:

When asked in July whether Skype received a buyout offer from Yahoo in excess of $100 million, Draper scoffed at the figure before declining to comment. He then went on to claim loudly that he wouldn't sell a share of the stock his firm bought for about $10 million last year until Skype's valuation reaches $100 billion.

Unless he had some extra-special deal, it looks like he fell a little bit short of his mark. But I'm sure he got out OK.

Princeton Day School

Out over the weekend biking to the West of Princeton's Western Section, out in the parallel universe of private schools and BMWs full of blonde beings. Came upon the Princeton Day School, which I perused. In an area of pretty expensive land, this is a big facility. Huge and numerous athletic fields. Watering a baseball field in during a fall drought (I guess softball season must be in the fall, eh?). Pretty out of control, all told.

Went to check out a soccer game in prograss while I drank some water. In all this grass, they were playing on some form of Astroturf, hopefully some newer variant that doesn't eat your knees up like it used to when we were young. All these buff and preppy boys had nice uniforms and passable ball skills, but they didn't communicate with one another at all, and they pushed the ball forward continually, like a bunch of fifth graders. So the ball just bounced around at mid-field from team to team, with nobody actually controlling it or doing squat with it. I guess they sunk too much money into real estate and uniforms and ran out before it came time to hire a coach.

Kinder class

Mom (aka Granny) and I dropped Natalie off at Kindergarten this morning. She was mighty excited, but others were visibly less so. In fact, there was one little girl very much in tears, and a little boy seated next to Natalie, a boy very reminiscent of her uncle George, visibly holding back tears, clearly traumatized by the whole thing. And there mom was trying to take a picture with this sad little boy in it, till I reigned her in.

Powerful stuff, that school. Takes me back.

Kindergarten, Day 1

As the dust settled, our heroine began to show the effects of battle. When I emerged from Graham's room after reading stories at 7:55, I poked my head in Natalie's room, where Granny had read and snuggled. Where usually she would have been bounding about, pretending to go to sleep in the best case, tonight she was out cold. I pried Arthur's Valentine carefully from her hands. She didn't blink.

Data sucks

Whoever was the frickin genius who invented the database should be taken out and flogged with ramen. It's an invitation to mental Guantanamo, when left in the wrong hands.

Meanwhile, it's the first day of kindergarten for Natalie. Gotta run.

Weekend consumption

1. At Eckerds checkout on Saturday, I marvelled at Eckerds the $21.99 DVD of an Ashton Kutcher/Amanda Peet vehicle. Who would buy that stupid movie at such a high-price? I asked myself. Then my eye alighted upon a $2.48 price tag on the Greatest Hits of Curtis Mayfield CD. Instinct took over, and soon I was driving off listening to "Freddie's Dead." The Mayfield ouvre, it seems, is not but so deep. But at that price point, it need not be.
   
   
2. Memories of Murder. A 2003 South Korean flick that just needs to be seen. A mystery, meta-thriller, period piece, with strong human interest and plenty of sense of humor. Maybe the first really "round" thriller, to paraphrase Forster, since The Usual Suspects. See it.
   
   
3. Having read an article about some sort of carcinogens released by non-stick pans cooking at high temperatures without food in them, i.e. warming up, Mary issued an edict to transition the household to a strict regimen of stainless steel cookery. This, of course, means more oil in the pan. So everything, from boca burger to salmon burger, came out tasting extra swell, extra virtuous. I'm all for it.
   
   
4. Cook-out for neighbors on Labor Day proper resulted in no net diminution of beers in the house. Still 3 Dos Equises lingering from the Christmas Party. Discussion of these beers at Stacy and Eldar's pre-K get-together yesterday focused on the question of skunky beer: a reality or just a marketing ploy? Preliminary research shows that, while skunky beer does exist, its risk is generally mitigated through the use of opaque or semi-opaque (green, brown glass) containers.
   

No baby kisser he

Saturday -- Great footage of Lt. Gen. Russel Honore, hero of the hour. Handed a baby, he scarcely looks at it as a soldier puts a baseball cap on it, hands it to an enlisted man, and keeps walking.

I mean, who can blame the guy. He's a military guy, not someone running for elected office. He's not trained at handling babies. But why are they putting him through baby-holding photo ops?

He looks a lot like Cab Calloway, also not a big baby holder.

But seriously, there's a shit flying about who's at fault, who was late to respond, why wasn't risk managed better up front, etc. Aside from a few specific questions like everybody knowing the levees were insufficient and FEMA getting eviscerated by being folded into Homeland Security, it ain't simple. It's not the kind of problem you can just throw dollars at.

Maybe what's gonna happen is that, after major crises every couple of years. (9/11, Anthrax scare, 2003 Blackout, Ivan and his siblings in Florida, Katrina), disaster and crisis management will become more of a prestigious and better remunerated occupation, and more management talent will gravitate towards it, so better solutions will be found.

The Mouse that Roared

And here's Aaron Broussard, president of Jefferson Parish, musing on the efficacy of seceding from the United States in order to get some aid money. That's logic straight out of Peter Sellers' classic The Mouse that Roared, in which the Duchy of Grand Fenwyck, upon learning of the Marshall Plan, decides to attack the US in order to lose and, therefore, get some development money.

Katrina and housing bubble

How will it pan out?
How much pressure on supply side? (people needing to be housed)
How much will insurance money prop up builders and contractors whose market might otherwise have abated as bubble popped?
How will P & C premiums be impacted?
How much mortgage default will we see?
How will defaulted mortgage-backeds impact yield curve?

How will monetary policy be impacted?
Deferred or reversed rate hikes?
(Will Greenspan stay on 6 months more?)
How will total carrying cost of housing be impacted?
Probably we'll see a regression to mean ratio of cost of renting to earning?

How will federal goverment finance the ca. $75 bln dollars not covered by insurance?
More of the long bond?
Repeal of provisional Bush tax code line items?
(Estate tax a likely and easy target in class warfare environment)

How will Chinese treasury view additional US debt in an oil shock environment?

One thing's for certain, it won't be solved with a telethon.

More than 9/11, this is the big test of our systemic risk management.
At least unemployment and corporate profit trends are better going into this than they were 4 years ago.
Ironically, one of the big saving graces for the US economy now vs. then is that more services have been offshored to India, etc. That's one big business continuity plan. Healthy redundancy
And Sarbanes-Oxley and Spitzer, for all their occasional excesses, decrease the probability of a bunch of Enrons and Worldcoms riding on the coattails of this. We hope.

A few points about New Orleans

1. The collapse of rule of law in New Orleans, which gains credibility as the hours pass, is as strong an argument for gun control as we'll ever see. And we hear of morons in Baton Rouge rushing out to buy guns to protect themselves.
2. Aaron Brown terms New Orleans the first big crisis for Homeland Security. What about the August, 2003 blackout? That was no joke. Not that anything's ever been done about it. That was forgotten quickly. Until next time.
3. The big problem? Why were people living there if it's so utterly below sea level? Those levees are prima facie ridiculous. This is a dress rehearsal for rising sea levels as the polar caps recede. Mardi Gras beads my ass. New Orleans shouldn't be repopulated to the same extent.
4. We're seeing a lot of fat people out there. The urban poor are the most grotesque, but look at those relief workers. You wonder how long they can hold up in the heat. One rarely sees this broad of a cross-section of Americans on TV. The obesity epidemic is for real.
   
   I know, I know. I'm one to talk. But my BMI is only marginally on the high side.

Jesse Jackson in New Orleans on Larry King

In typical fashion, Jesse Jackson comes on and makes one good point: that the post-Katrina news is overly focused on the Heart of Darkness aspects of the onetime Big Easy, when mostly there's suffering. And then he turns around and calls the oil-price gougers in Atlanta the real thiefs. Like I give a flying fuck about some Atlanta commuters. Let em carpool or telecommute, or pony up the dough. That's not the main story.

Jackson, as ever, shows himself to be a strange cross between a decent human being and and utter demagogue.

nb. Larry also talked lots of self-serving white politicians. Bill Frist is all proud that they're allocating big money for relief. As if anybody is surprised that a W administration can rack up a deficit. All kinds of deficits. We know that. Of course we're gonna pay for aid.

I'm surprised the thumpers haven't moved in yet with free bibles.

To read or not to read

I wonder what is the evolutionary basis for the guilt one feels when around the house alone with one's kids. On the one hand, if they're quiet and/or entertaining themselves, I want to leave them alone in expectation of the next time they get in a fight or come begging for attention. It's good for them to be happy on their own. Have a little precious time to myself. Read. Blog. Clean. On the other, I feel like I'm away a lot and therefore should spend time with them.

I suspect many non-psychopathic parents no what I'm talking about. It's pretty common.

NPRukidding

As I listened in the car today, NPR discussion of rising oil prices pivoted quickly from an insightful discussion of Indonesia's extremely high oil subsidies to a story about how to beat the high cost of oil: live the old-fashioned way. Like some woman in isolated Western Wales, where they learn the old ways of laying hedges, building rock walls, and -- get this -- making yurts. That'll teach them Arabs.

And then back to somewhat interesting discussion of the Manhattan DA race, although all ranging around the question: is it Agism to oppose an 86-year old who's been in office for 30 years? The first instinct is to look for a victim.

And yet, NPR's the only choice, the only place you've got reasonable odds of intelligent discussion of anything. Or maybe that Al Franken channel. Haven't tuned in to that yet.

Approaching storm

No. Not Katrina. After spotting some pencil marks on the wall last night, I asked Natalie where they came from. "Graham" she says. They were just ill-formed enough that it wasn't inconceivable that he could have made them.

Tonight, two big well-articulated drawings. Only she could have made them. Hauled from bed, she admitted guilt, and awaits sentencing tomorrow. The judge is considering the sentence as we speak, loathe though she is to take away the things that let her get through the day.

What's up? Is Natalie freaking out about the onset of kindergarten? Or is her stubborness just reaching new heights?

Needle mark, and then some

I've still got a bruise on my arm from where the guy drew blood weeks ago for cholesterol tests. The doctor already called me back with results (HDL still marginally low, up dosage of Niacin, all else fine). I think this speaks, more than anything, to the momentary robustness of the job market in the area. They'll hire anybody to work in the phleb lab, including the very fat of finger.

In other news, dodged a bullet this week with the old Subaru. It was sounding a bit rough, and then got worse, and it turns out it needed.... oil! Had run pretty low. Not dry, apparently, but low. Guys were laughing at me, telling me it would surely cost me a grand any time oil got low enough to be detectable to the naked ear. I used to check it frequently, I did, but then the aptly-named dipstick kept giving me unreliable readings, so I stopped doing anything between oil changes. I guess I'll have to go back to being a little bit more viligant (as W would have me say).

My luck, the grand's worth of work will become apparent this week, almost on account of this blog.

Falafelteria, 48th St between 5th & 6th, 1:15 pm

At the mouth of the arcade of jewellers which runs through to the real Jewelry Block, where we bought plain gold wedding bands lo those many years ago, stands a Falafel booth, glatt kosher, natch.

Standing in line, a woman comes forward to survey the bill of fare. Tight lime green shirt with lace around the edge. Sailor's capris (or something). Way pointy bright yellow low heels. Outrageous two tone green and purple eye makeup. Could be one (or two) of two things: prostitute or Russian. The Aeroflot glasses-holding string around the neck seals the deal: Russian.

She and a less-atrociously made-up girlfriend natter in Russian about the "salatiki" and the price. "It's real tasty," I tell em, in their own idiom. "Tasty?" says one, by no means surprised to be speaking Russian on the street. That's all they wanted to do with me.

They must have run out of Israeli guys behind the counter, because a friendly hispanic woman made me my falafel. Forgot to put hot sauce on, bummer. But pickles still mighty tasty.

Basketbe-all

In Wellesley the other day, I shot around a bit in the driveway with my nephew Daniel. He’s a tall, lean kid, coping with what they’ve diagnosed as Asperger’s, which in my day would have been termed introversion or shyness. Ball is not his #1 sport, but he’s got a good quality goal out there and his instinct is to shoot. So he dribbles a little and shoots, like most kids, concentrating on shots long and flashy. Takes me back.

Sometimes I think PhD in Russian is the best evidence of my contrarianism, but in some ways it’s even odder that I drove myself so hard to become good in basketball, for no good reason, and never quite got there. Sometime in junior high school, back in the days of Worthy-Perkins-and-Jordan (chronologically), I decided that being a skinny white soccer boy just didn’t cut it. It being North Carolina, I needed to get some respect on the basketball court. So time and again and again I forced my way onto the court at lunch, sometimes the only white guy, almost always the worst person on the court. I usually got the ball when I rebounded it or stole it. “Pass the ball over here, soccer boy,” I would hear, but I payed them as little mind as I could, just concentrated on the basics: box out, set picks, play D, slap backboard on layups.

On Friday nights, I often went to the gym and shot free throws, which is ridiculous, because nobody shoots free throws in pick-up and I knew I wasn’t ever gonna play organized ball. I think it was straight purism: I just wanted to shoot them well.

Not that it ever did much good. I was fast, I could jump, but poor fine motor skills made me a bad shot, and not having dribbled for hours a day during childhood left me without a good handle. So why did I do it? Why did I care so much about developing a skill of value to none and gain the validation of a quasi-literate underclass? Most of the soccer team didn’t bother. None of the cross-country team did.

Clearly I was driven by a general insecurity, a need to curry favor far and wide, of which I’ve written elsewhere on the Grouse. But also a general desire to fuck with peoples’ heads, to be the validectorian who could dunk and do bong hits. The latter, at least, I mastered.

Reverse Commute, Stamford Local, 5:30 PM, Pelham

Not surprisingly, when you think of it, the reverse commute train is populated by a substantial plurality of Mexican guys who were landscaping or doing construction out in Westchester. I’ve seen this reverse commute with Caribbean and Latina women coming back from cleaning houses in Bergen County, NJ, back when I was tutoring those Orthodox kids whose dad worked for Edward Safra back in ’97. But you forget about it, this daily shipping of people of color to the suburbs.

At Pelham, two Mexican guys who looked to be shit out of luck broke into a flat out sprint to make the train.

A strikingly expensive new apartment building, for the locale, loomed across the street from the trestle. A candy-assed turn of the century fantasy with minty green trim. But for the latter, would have been cool.

Blahhhg

Today drove from Wellesley to Larchmont. Didn't see much. Natalie seems focused on messing with Graham's developing little head by singing the ABC song and other classics in disruptive and non-standard ways. Walking around Larchmont later struck by the incredible amount of money and effort people will go to put additions on and re-landscape total frickin mansions. One household literally moved a pool it just put in a couple of years ago. "Honey, you know, I really don't like where the pool is. Could we stick it over there?"

Excited about getting to bed to read in Vanity Fair about some bigwig from Lazard Freres who got capped in Geneva while wearing a skin-colored latex suit.

I-84, Connecticut

Driving from NJ to Boston, the eternal question, take the Merritt or 684 to 84. Despite the fact that I always run into trouble between Danbury and Waterbury due to a long-running construction project, despite the fact that the Merritt has been one of the pretty roads qua road in America since the time of its building (see how Siegfried Gideon sung its praises as a utopian project in his 1941 classic Space, Time, and Architecture), I so often take the 84s because they're a 65 mph road and the Merritt has its own set of issues (all too often traffic slows down because cops have pulled David Letterman over for speeding).

Silly me. There's always trouble between Danbury and Waterbury. For what? We breezed across the GWB, up the West Side Highway, through the Bronx and Westchester -- through New York City, dammit, and then get hung up in the middle of nowhere.

Connecticut is as multi-personality (I hate the mis-overuse of "schizophrenic") a state as you can get. The Danbury rest area is pure upper crust Connecticut. Lots of Mercedeses. It has its own rock wall, for Christ's sake. By one pretty large, very climbable rock is a sign: "No climbing on objects." Clearly it refers to the rock. Presumably the sign-makers thought that by saying "objects" they could dissuade climbers from getting on the water fountains and picnic tables. No luck. Natalie and I climbed up on one of the latter until Mary told us to get down so Graham wouldn't get ideas. And we were having such fun.

Oh yes, Connecticut and MPD. At a gas station near Meriden, lots of Firebirds and big hair. A bathroom like a war zone. Maybe we don't see it in Princeton, but anecdotally I feel like there's more vestigial Springsteen culture in Connecticut than in NJ. In the Garden State, it feels like more of that has been shunted aside by Asian and Hispanic immigrants. Which is fine by me. They bring better food, better attitudes.

Mack the Tasty Ham

Tuned into channel 13, and here's this guy who's like a cross between Dean Martin and Andy Kaufman doing a groovy cover of "Bridge Over Troubled Water" backed by a band on a shiny bandstand. Early 70s, clearly.

It's Bobby Darin, performing for a audience of bouffantes and blue hairs, but he's actually good, if cover-focused. You can see where Kevin Spacey would be into him, with that disdainful look on his face that seems to expect a woman to hand him a drink and give him a blowjob right when he walks off stage.

Half of me wants to get a record, half of me fears it'll suck. But the guy had both pipes and talent.

March of the Penguins

To beat the heat over the weekend, took Natalie for only her 2nd (yes I know we're pathetic) trip to the cinema. Penguins do the craziest things. A lovely movie, powerful visually and thematically.

The craziest things, I tell you. Mating in the same place each year in the middle of nowhere. The dads standing on them eggs through that crazy cold while the moms run off and swim and feast, and then switching roles. Come end of winter, sayonara. So monogamous, so polygamous.

The movie manages to touch on many a great cycle of nature dramatic moments. "How like us they are, while at once so like cartoons," it seems to say. But, of course, they don't bring in the ever avuncular Morgan Freeman to narrate a film about molluscs, now do they.

But do see it. The dudes abide.

Da Vinci Kodak moment

Sony Pictures is apparently concerned that Christians will be offended by the central premise of the Da Vinci Code which it has hired the venerable Ron Howard/Tom Hanks team to bring to life. The novel's plot involved a long-running Catholic conspiracy to conceal the fact the Jesus boned Mary Magdalene and sired a kid by her, who was supposed to inherit his mojo or something. Apparently Sony is attempting to make this premise "more ambiguous" (I always thought pregnancy, if not paternity, was a pretty binary thing).

What are they afraid of? Didn't 36 million copies of the book sell? That shows some marketing potential. Do they fear that the thumpers' widespread preference for a literal interpretation of the Bible means that Christians think all books are literally true? Or that media concerning Jesus that are? The threat to the Bible's literal truth posed by a work of adventure fiction is similar to the threat posed to the sanctimony of marriage by some gay nuptials: it's all about the inherent insecurities of the besieged.

Or perhaps they fear that the mesmerizing artistry of Howard (the erstwhile "little Opie Cunningham") and Hanks, who once conviced many that Darryl Hannah was really a mermaid.

The two faces of Michael Milken

Just finished James Marshall's Den of Thieves, which chronicles the insider trading scandals of the 80s that had Michael Milken at their center. As I read the book, which depicted Milken as a voracious, mendacious, controlling paranoiac who one year grossed $550 million for himself but still wasted hours haggling over twenty grand, I thought: this doesn't quite jibe with another Michael Milken I've read about.

So I went back and tracked down Keith Ferrazzi's mega-bestseller Never Eat Alone, in which he gives a fluff job to the man he can scarcely hold himself back from calling "Mikey." (As in "Let Mikey try it, he'll eat anything."). Here's the pearl of wisdom Mikey shares with Keith: "There are three things in the world that engender deep emotional bonds between people. They are health, wealth, and children." I guess that's what Milken had on his mind when he wrote volumes on how to commit new securities frauds back in the eighties.

So which is the true face of Milken? That of the hard-nosed financier ready to rape anybody for a nickel? Or the air-brushed version his legions of flacks would concoct to approximate him to his eternally bemused doppelganger, Ted Danson.

You be the judge. Me, I always figured that capital punishment should be reserved for crimes of capital.

24 is, like, 16 too many

Alright. Mary and I have dutifully slogged through the first season of 24 over the last month or two. This show -- which has so profited by the release of serial DVDs, is ridiculous. (I've removed a number of plot details upon which I earlier commented so as not to offend people who haven't watched the show. Suffice it to say that the complex plot doesn't hold together internally. Stuff in the first half contradicts stuff in the second half.) I'm sorry, this is a show that seeks to survive purely on plot and surprise as technique, like trompe l'oeil painting. And it's also got some Russ Meyeresque cleavage to balance out skinny chicks.

Still, I'm sure we'll eventually watch season 2 because there aren't enough good movies to rent and Netflix's catalog and search interface suck so bad. You would think Netflix might be good, but it ain't.

Things I saw while out Running

• Old Lady with small dog, poop in bag, crosses street to pick up styrofoam cup of water, tip it out into street, and leave it there. What, did she think the stagnant water would breed mosquitos? If she lives near there, why not pick up the cup? If she doesn't, why does she care? Surely a bitch.
• Mint condition ca 1973 Blue and White Ford Maverick. I've been seeing this car around for years. Who would think to preserve such a vehicle? Sumptuous curves. A perverse classic.

Battery dying

Forgot my cord at work before running out to client meeting, and blew all my power on, you guessed it, work. What are you gonna do? Didn't see anything interesting or have any thoughts to speak of today anyway.

Momento McGreevey

So I'm at the doctor this morning for some blood work, and after waiting for 45 minutes for the nominally first drawing of the day, they finally take me back. And I'm pissed.

So I lean back in the grey Naugahyde chair and look up at the wall, and there, amidst insurance notifications and various public health detritus, in a small wood frame, held up by blue thumbtacks, is a picture you don't expect to see in a place of honor.

Governor James McGreevey announces to the world that he is "A gay American," flanked by his well-accessorized Courtney Love-looking wife #2.

What in the world would make someone memorialize this moment? It was a normal moment of shame for New Jersey, a typical revelation of corruption, wrapped up in homo-scandal. Is McGreevey perhaps a cult figure in the gay community for ascending to such a position of power? Is McGreevey the next Barney Frank? He's certainly a good deal cuter, that must be said.

Anyhow. It was wierd.

Bad moments in me -- Fire Island, 1995

A number of earlier posts have focused on events in my life which either aggrandize or dramatize me. As a counterweight, here begins a series of looks back at things I'd love to forget, if only. Perhaps the blog will help me forget.

It was a summer of love. Mary and I got together at the tail end of winter, and quickly it became apparent that what I needed to do was sublet my apartment and stay in her studio in the village so as to generate cash to put towards a house rental share on Fire Island, without working for money (I needed to pass my written exams to progress towards the M.Phil. glimmering on the horizon). It worked just fine. 2 Grand was just what we needed to secure a one of four bedrooms, one week a month, in Fair Harbor.

We took Mary's Collie-Shepherd mix Story with us. Why they let us rent the house with a dog, I don't know. It was prior to the tech stock boom, so rental markets dictated it, I reckon. Why our housemates put up with him, I don't know. In the evenings, story would often slip off the deck and chase deer through the grassy areas between the boardwalks of Fair Harbor. We would throw a tennis ball for him in the water of the sound, and he'd swim out to get it, and pounce on the ball demonstratively at the last minute to let it know who was boss. When other dogs walked by, he barked.

So one day we were out on the beach. We took plastic bags to the beach to pick up Story's poop. He'd get kind of hot and restive on the beach, when we weren't throwing the frisbee for him. One day, he must have gone a couple of times, so I must have been out of plastic bags. Then he must have gotten barky, so I took him for another walk along the shoreline, sans bags. This is a NYC-area beach, probably weekend, July, pretty crowded. Where water meets the shore, right by a woman in a squat chair, Story squats down. As usual, the 3rd dump of the day is not well-formed. A wave was approaching. I couldn't let it float out to sea. I couldn't pick it up. I stomped on it with my bare foot. Into the sand. It was squishy. What else could I do? The squat chair woman said "That's disgusting."

Filled with shame, I jerked Story around and went back to where our towels were. And told everyone. It was disgusting.

Let us never speak of it again.

Young Irony

Getting dressed upstairs I hear Natalie say "Give me my breakfast, please", and then, after ten seconds maybe, "Give me my breakfast, please." So she's showing us she knows when to use the word please, but her tone of voice tells us that she doesn't really know how to use it in earnest. She's saying it because she associates it with certain behaviors on our part, but she's saying it in a special, ironic way. She knows she doesn't really mean it, she just wants what it gets.

How do kids learn irony? From me and Mary carping at each other like siblings all the time? From us spelling out the words "we don't want them to understand," as the song would have it. She knows what's going on when we stumble in French with one another, and doesn't really tolerate it.

What does "please" mean if it's compelled? And when is it not compelled? I'm not sure one really gets the gut meaning of niceties until one is much older, at which point in time they're fully internalized. Which underscores the link Marxist theory has always posited between irony, manners and ideology. Irony and manners are different manifestations of doing something you don't really believe in, and ideology is a systemic instantiation of both. Only after the youth gets beat out of you does culture really feel natural, when it is in fact an overcoming of nature.

Upcoming: Bad Moments in me: concerning dog shit

"Ken Mehlman is gay"

Actual Google results
"Ken Mehlman" 205,000 hits
"Ken Mehlman is gay" 39,200
"Ken Mehlman is not gay" 64, all of them seemingly citing a single utterance

Is the RNC National Chairman gay, or is he just a smug, evil bastard? The results are in, and seem to indicate that he's both. I think the numbers pretty well speak for themselves.

This is obviously not a chamber topic like the preferences of your odd Tom Cruise or Nicole Kidman, or the historical predilections for small rodent insertion of Richard Gere, or the genital composition of Jamie Lee Curtis (by the way, her children's books are damned good, if PC). If Mehlman is gay, as he should feel free to be in this great liberty-loving land in which we all live so freely, then he should be pummelled mercilessly for being affiliated with the most nominally homo-averse party in recent memory.

While there's really not a whole lot one can say about this topic save that it's not all that shocking, it's the kind of thing that makes you want to spring out of bed in the morning and blog.

Bad blog day

Worked all day today. Worked.

Meetings. Showing people stuff. Nosing through data. Sucks.

Blog suffered. Could be a continuing trend. Must start splitting time between Wall Street and Princeton hedge fund. Then again, as I've said before, the commute is good for the blog, introduces a welcome element of randomness to the day that's good for narrative. And I guess I can write on the train and post later.

Hiring frees, oder Arbeit macht frei

My employer, Princeton Consultants, has once more embarked on a bulking up phase. We've got more work than we can shake a stick at, and we're looking for smart youngish people who have either done some IT work or are open to the prospect of doing so. It's management consulting with heavy IT seasoning. Offices in Manhattan and Princeton.

We look for people who are very smart and swing both ways: management or IT. People with high SAT scores (yes, really) and fancy schools on their resumes (not necessarily, but good marketing), but no MBAs. It's a BA-PhD culture. Similar hiring profile to a DE Shaw or a McKinsey, but less arrogant and mellower.

It's a great place to jump from academia or college to the business world.

Know anyone who would be interested? Send them to me at ctroy@princeton.com. Not directly to the hiring manager. So I get my bonus.

Beignets from Butch

What does the Times bring us this morning but an article about shrimp okra beignets from Charleston, SC. Hams curing in the garage? 1968 Plymouth Barricuda? This could only be one person. The paper of record calls him Robert Stehling, but the cognoscenti will recognize him as Butch, who cut his teeth under Bill Neal at Crook's back in the southern part of heaven, once based operations out of a metallic blue Datsun pick-up, and fled Gotham in the mid-90s when he was running the kitchen at Home on Cornelia St, a place where many of us got our first taste of venison salami and where they were so starved for space that there were big ole heaters in the back garden so they could seat guests outside in winter. Greenpeace was loving that.

And now, Butch is kickin it at his own restaurant, Hominy Grill, down in the low country capital. You know what the grouse will chew if he gets down that way.

NY Times, A8, "Italians Say London Suspect Lacks Wide Terrorist Ties"

And here I had thought terrorists favored skinny, mod neckware, or perhaps a bolo on weekends. But the Italians, with their flare for haberdashery, would know.

Bad day

Almost first thing in the morning, Natalie throws up. Was it because her chicken nuggets were underdone last night? So I'm paranoid. I too had sampled them (to be sure they were done, to be sure, not because they are so organically juicy and succulent). So no swim lesson for her, another summer day at home.

At lunch, I dash through the public library, returning 15 books, checking out 13 plus the Platinum Edition of Snow White, which Natalie has seen only in snippets in the Disney Sing-a-long series. Grab a sandwich to split with Mary, rush home with my bootie. Mary and Graham come in out of the backyard and Mary tells me she's grazed her temple against rusty nails coming out of the shed, but believes Tetanus boosters to be good for 10 years (last one would have been '98, before heading to Russia).

Back at work, where I'm desperately needed cuz there's a release coming up rapidly, Hemant and Cyrus assure me that tetanus shots are good for only five years, and that Mary needs to go to the doctor. Meaning I need to go back home. Argghhhh.

And so I blog. Makes sense, no?

Expanding palette

In truth, Graham is beginning to broaden out his palette not just for the cupcake with sprinkles, but in many ways.

• After coming in from Maggie's playground today, he wanted watermelon before he wanted any of his traditional, limited range of foodstuffs (soy yogurt, turkey bologna, soy cheese, graham cracker [no pun intended] with soy cream cheese)
• He requested Disney Sing-a-long Songs rather than his earlier fixation Ralph's World for a video
• When reading stories before nap time, he accepted a number of stories I hadn't read him before without freaking out and begging for the story of the moment

In short, he's opening up.

And Natalie, after I stopped her from cheating while playing the game Memory and tried to get her to understand the strategy, came over and kissed me unsolicited on the arm. A rarity. Because of my somewhat tough love?

On the concept of dog, and other mysteries

It's hard sometimes to understand that abstraction and concreteness exist along a continuum. Is "dog" and abstract or concrete term? "Cocker Spaniel"? "Spot"?

How do toddlers so uncannily differentiate between dog and cat? How do they group Great Danes and toy breeds so effortlessly? I would think some dogs might look like cats to the young eye. Pugs, for example.

Milosz was having similar confusion when I busted him in Chapel Hill back in '89.

Graham, similarly, has an uncanny ability to differentiate junk food from other food. He eats a very restricted diet, and if you put something reasonably healthful in front of him he'll throw it on the floor. But potato chips, cupcakes, by God, he picks up the first one he sees in his life and mashes it into his mouth. How does he distinguish junk from healthful? Just by watching other kids? Was it the sprinkles?

One of the great mysteries.

Crunch time

I know it's boring to blog about work, but sometimes all you do is work, and now we've come to the point in a project where we go from "it's so cool that you're building a system to do that" to "Where can I do blah?" and "You've got blah base covered, right? Oh, I forgot to tell you about that didn't I?" And your mind races from

"How could we have missed that?" to
"How could those idiots have not told us that?" to
"It's normal for this stuff to come up" to
"We're gonna fall on our faces" to
"In this labor market, it doesn't really matter. There's plenty of jobs" to
"But what if the housing bubble pops?" to
"Shut up, brain."

Nothing stopped me from attending an exciting cruise yesterday on the Delaware River by Philadelphia at an industry event. The hedge fund nerds shared the boat with a group of court stenographers, who were very excited when the DJ set up and started in with a fine assortment of 70s classics. One 60-year old guy in T-shirt and shorts in particular was a dancing fool, and much the richer for it, cutting the rug with about 20 women at once, some of them passably attractive. They knocked back a mesmerizing funky chicken as we watched a nasty thunderstorm roll in from the north under the Betsy Ross bridge, only to mysteriously dissipate before it reached our boat.

Message in a bottle

Walking along the beach in Amagansett the other day, just West of the defunct fish factory. Saw a 16 oz. Poland Spring bottle with a piece of paper in it. Hmmmm, says I. Natalie will like. Pick it up. Take it home.

At home, with Natalie, I cut the bottle open. Inside we find a note which says:

My name is Nicholas. I'm 8 years old.
I wish all my family to be healthy and happy.
I wish to become a big toy maker when I grow up.
I wish to catch many fish today!
If you find this make a wish too!
It's a magic wish bottle!!!

Nicholas

I dunno. Seems a little pathetic to me. I wish my own family well. I hope I get things and you get things too. What about "my address is 29 Ronkonkoma Blvd," please be in contact? Wasn't that the whole deal with the message in a bottle genre? Establishing contact with the distant? Is this kid all Megan's lawed out?

I was deeply disappointed in Nicholas. Natalie listened to it once and walked away, forgot all about it.

Hamptons Beach photos

It's as Narcissistic a place as you'll ever see. Stayed in a nice house, with lovely white furniture and designer mayonnaise and all Williams Sonoma cutlery and so on. And coffee table books like "Hamptons Living" and "Hamptons Style", showing even more ornate houses, the kinds of houses our house aspired to be.

Beach pictures in the Hamptons are a genre of their own. It's always good-looking people standing on beach alone or in a pair at dusk with a drink. Self-adulatory, as in “Look, even Manhattanites can find the beach.” The relative emptiness of the beach says it all too, "We own the beach."

We went out to dinner. Our waiter was quite the piece of work, skilled with adjectives, nouns and verbs alike: "Would you care to sample a sparkling water this evening?" Or "the scallops present an especially pleasant alternative." I kid you not. The snapper was good.

Apologies

Apologies to all for the lack of content the last few days. I was out at the Hamptons, nosing around for the eternally elusive Alec Baldwin, who is reported to have been seen in the arms of Sharon Stone's cousin over a bed of arugula and heirloom tomatoes in a light plum vinaigrette. I'll try to catch up this week.

7/21/05 10:19 PM, Long Island Rail Road, Mastic-Shirley station

Heading to Amagansett to meet the family. Reading Dead Souls. Cackling uproariously as Nozdryov leads his brother-in-law and Chichikov around his estate to stall for time while his cooks get a half-assed dinner ready.

"They inspected the dogs whose haunches were so amazing, and they were very excellent dogs. Then they went to have a look at a Crimean bitch which was blind and, according to Nozdryov, would soon be dead, but which two years ago had been a very good bitch. They inspected the bitch and, to be sure, the bitch was blind."

My guffaw caused the guy across from me paying his bills (I took care of that in the morning) to look across at me one eye cocked up like Joe Flaherty. But, I mean, it's Nozdryov we're dealing with here. Here's what he says when he marches his guests across his puddle-ridden fields to show them the boundaries of his estate:

"This is the boundary. Everything you see on this side is mine and even on the other side too; all that forest which you see looking blue in the distance and everything beyond it is all mine."

So that's what boundary means. But seriously, you gotta love Nozdryov.

Am reading the Constance Garnett translation, the dog-eared Penguin I bought back in 1983, but just ordered up the new Robert Maguire version from Amazon. Lets see what the macho old queer can do with the great poet of Dikanka. I'll report back.

Six Sigma for the bench

Quick perusal of Times coverage indicates that maybe the guy could be worse: he's definitely corporate, and very revolving door. Rarely does one see so transparent an instance of putting one of "our guys" up on the bench. But from the bible thumping (henceforth let us return to our fall term"thumping") perspective he could be a lot worse. Or maybe he's just stealth.

He does continue to look a little too much like Dan Quayle, or just a purely generic midwesterner. It could be that nominating him or another like him is just meant to bring the perception of the court closer to the heartland. Instead of a big-dicked porn-loving black man, a fire-breathing Brooklyn-bred Italian intellectual, a New England momma's boy nerd, a spinster-looking Jewess... A man with a firm handshake and a steady putt, a Six Sigma justice.

Political text

I really should be blogging on politics. I used to, back in the Fall, then I got out of the habit. So here we go.

• Karl Rove. What a surprise. He looks evil. He gets evil things done. Now we find out he's actually been performing crimes. And I'm sure it'll roll right off his plump white butt. He'll get chased out of office and end up in some deep back room of the Republican establishment where there will be fewer controls on his Machiavellian machinations.
  
• Abramoff. Had never heard of the guy, but he's unmitigated evil.
• John Roberts. What a joke. I thought for a second it was Dan Quayle. He looks like the Southwestern SVP for sales. The least Supreme Court looking person I ever saw.

Generally speaking, I must say that I'm pretty defeatist at this point in time, even if the Times magazine detailed how a wacky Berkeley linguist has been able to on-board the Democratic Party to his theory of "framing" political discourse and the theory was used successfully in the filibuster and Social Security reform debates, I can't shake off the general feeling that we're surrounded by a bunch of smug suits and bible thumpers who are determined and empowered to do to America what they will, come what may.

All for Standards

I finished up loading the car up to go on vacation the week before last by putting my brand new $29.88 bike rack from our buddies in Bentonville, and found myself marvelling at the little metal things that you cinch down the straps with to hold the damned thing on the car. Such simple technology, so much buck bang.

And then I felt myself feeling warm, fuzzy feelings for the people that make standards for our products, culminating in the American National Standard Institute (ANSI). People get exercised all the time about the hot sweaty policemen, soldiers and firemen, heros. They are a fine lot for politicians to hold up as examples from the hustings.

But the nerds and bureacrats who make our standards get no recognition. Who sings hymns in praise of these uber-Dilberts? Think about what they do. They go to boring, oxygenless meeting after meeting after meeting building consensus around microscopic little features (thread size to the nanometer or some such), but once it's done, everything runs so smooth and cheap. It took Wall Street three years (1964 to 1967) to nail down the 12-digit code that we now call the CUSIP, but it's been doing just fine since then. Our whole economy is undergirded by a firm infrastructure of agreement. PPP, TCP/IP, HTML, 802.11.g anyone?

So we here at the Grouse raise a lukewarm diet Dr. Pepper to the not-so-evidently heroic people who slog away at our standards, whoever the hell they are.

Fat babies and seriousness

Plump children are regarded as a sign of affluence in China, and in other agrarian societies fat was also praised. After a week of Graham puking and not eating, now I get it. He's slimmer than before, not dangerously so, but enough.

I can look back at pictures of Graham on playground at South Bristol 12 days ago, there he is, plump and happy. Happy nothing, he's in ecstasy, rocking back and forth in that little fire chief convertible on springs.

And now, as I lay next to him on the couch after a 6AM puke, he stares at the ceiling, doesn't laugh at a rasberry to the belly, or peek-a-boo, or any of my best material. In some ways he's reminiscent of the all too serious, all too adult Christ on Mary's lap. You know: "I'd better have some of this breast. I've gotta expiate all the sins of the world." That kind of thing. Good work there Christ.

Blogito ergo sum

I must say

--what with it being the veritable mid-point of summer
and I'm sitting here in suit
and tie
and really need a haircut
and god knows if I'm going to be successful in fighting off this GI malady
which has so mysteriously beset Graham for a whole week
and may even account for Mary answering
neither the land line
nor her cell phone because she is, at long last, at the doctor's office--

I'm hot.

Apparently I'm not alone here, as people have been migrating from office to office in search of better AC. Lunch conversation focused on the thermostats in the individual offices? Are they real or are just palliative placebos? Let Dilbert be the judge.

Sometimes when I go through periods with nothing really to write about, I think of all the criticism of blogs, how self-indulgent and useless and onanistic they are. But that's what's interesting about them, after all, access to another's consciousness, as they say, surely not disintermediated in any given instance, but in aggregate, if you keep reading, you get there. Descartes was never quite sure about that, right: how do I know that moving body over there isn't really isn't really an automaton. Garden variety solipsists have the same thought by the dozens. Blogito ergo sum, says I.

Up at Canandaigua, I took down an odd volume of Thurber and read a couple of stories, and it occurred to me that so much of the New Yorker aesthetic (Thurber, Cheever, Updike, keep going) is really a predecessor to the Seinfeld premise of being "a show about nothing." In some sense, the craft of writing has often been seen as antithetical to narrative. The trick is to do something interesting on the page without describing much in the real world. My immense blog traffic, could be, bears me out. If not, fuck it.

Yelling and screaming, I'm all for it

After several days of post-nauseal languor, just laying around, sleeping, Graham has begun to take in calories again. He ate some toast, had some formula. And, as he's regained strength, he's once more found his vocal range, yelling and screaming for all he's worth. Pissy and ornery, as I'm sure anyone would be who hadn't eaten for three days and had been writhing around in pain, to the extent that one can even writhe. Mary, who spends more time with him, was less enthused about the screaming. But I ascribe to Leslie's words of wisdom "If they're screamin they're breathin." How true, how true.

Wail though he might, it was pretty hard to make him smile. "Wuzzah wuzzah" fell flat. Even Peek-a-boo fell on deaf eyes. So when, as I was leaving, Mary was reading him an airplane book and he was actually smiling, I must say it was pretty moving.

What a name

Out for a bike ride along Canandaigua Lake last week, I spotted a mailbox with the name "Ling S Ong" on it. I would have loved to have been that guy/gal in high school. I can just hear it now, people calling out "Ling, Ling S Ong, make it simple, to last your whole life long." Poor kid.

Bucknell 1962 yearbook

Amongst the many dusty books at the house on the hill where we stayed at Canandaigua was the Bucknell yearbook for 1962. It had some impossibly pretentious name that I'm ashamed to have forgotten. Granny glasses were totally in style for the girls, freakishly.

The posed fraternity group portraits said a lot about the era. There were maybe 12 frats, each with about 30-40 guys in them, arrayed in rows of six to eight. Clearly the instructions were: dark suits, white shirts, dark ties, face camera, feet apart, hands clasped together, left over right. As you paged from from to back through the year book, the degree of variance from this norm ramped up from about 2%: a few guys wore slightly lighter ties or hand folded right hand over left. From there it degenerates to houses where some joker has on, get this, white pants, sneakers, and an impish grin, or some frats where multiple guys appear to have on velour jackets or somesuch (these would appear to be scientists, homosexuals or other deviants).

Those were happy times.

Back'n badder

While it may not have been apparent to you, fair readers, I was out last week, off in the Finger Lakes region of what has been aptly termed the Empire State, as it branches out like a would-be Texas of the Northeast. Since our musty 1890s vacation home boasted only a rotary dial phone without even a cord to plug into my laptop, posts appeared courtesy of our San Francisco affiliate: the Pie.

And quite a vacation it was! Vomit, my friends, eight times. Twice from Natalie, including a 3am incident in which she came into our bedroom, informed us she was going to puke, had me hold her hair back as she bent over the toilet, and was very proud that she didn't get any on her nightgown. I too was proud. Graham, who clocked six upchuckings in the week, was not as refined. Poor little guy. With a stomach bug on top of food allergies and possibly reflux, he has more reason than most to just let loose.

But there was much more than nausea to this vacation. We had some good weather. There was cool mountain lake swimming, including by Natalie, who took to the water with increasing and encouraging relish as the week moved on. Mary hung with Kate. For me, Dead Souls during nap time. As good and wierd a book as it was when I met it in high school. And Graham showed that he could sing along to Sandra Boynton's new classic "Snuggle Puppy of mine," even when his stomach was getting ready to let loose half an hour later.

And now back at work. Like drinking from a Birmingham fire hose.

New Technologies (fuddy duddy rant)

Why didn't anybody tell me I needed to reprogram my cell phone or it would gradually drift away from the network?
Why didn't the directions on new phone batteries say to charge 'em for 10 hours? It's ridiculous, a crime even.

Everything comes with a manual the size of a novel these days, which is absurd. When I buy something, I'm looking to buy a thing, not a book. Given how tight my time is, if I'm gonna read a book, I want it to be edifying in some way, either entertaining or skill building. They need to do a better job with summary level instructions for people who don't want to use all the features.

Generally speaking, I could give a hoot about physical objects per se. If they have a lot of memories / narratives associated with them, that's one thing. The old horse head bottle opener we used to open Pepsis at my paternal grandmother's house (d. ca. 1981) before decanting them into frozen glasses she pulled from the freezer, now there's an object for you. I've got that one. My mountain bike, inherited from my dad's then girlfriend now second wife, the bike which got me around when the State of North Carolina repo'd my driver's license, now there's something. A phone battery or shiny new mountain bike can kiss my ass.

Sanitarpolizei, pt 2

So my train pulls into the the Zurich airport train station at 7 in the morning or some similarly ungodlily early time for someone of that age, and I stagger out, rather sweaty for having slept on Naugahyde all the long summer night with no sheets. So I look for a place to change.

A bathroom. I find one in the glimmering underground mall at the airport, so bedazzling to my young Europhile eyes. And it's a clean bathroom, you can bet, cuz its Switzerland and you know very well that they're got a middle-aged woman in a severe white nurse-like uniform collecting 50 centimes (ca. 33 c) and directing you to a stall of her choice.

So I squeeze into this exemplary toilet space, plunk down my bag and -- figuring that having paid so much money I needn't rush -- open my bag and start changing my clothes to get ready for a long transcontinental flight. I get my pants changed alright, am pulling on my shirt, when there's a knock on the stall. I ignore it. Another, accompanied by a muffled voice like the adult voice from Peanuts. Ignore. Finally, I see that the lock on the stall is being opened from outside. I'm getting mad, begin to curse. The door opens and this guy leans in with the left lapel of his clinical white smock, where there's a patch which reads: "Sanitarpolizei." He pushes the door open and I put my shirt on and push my bag out of the cell, by now cursing and livid. The Swiss stare.

What the hell was this cleanliness cop doing? At 7 am, was he so driven by a need to attest to the efficacy of the woman's stewardship that the had to check out literally every stall? Did he think I was a junky, shooting up in there? Who knows. In any case, there's only one word for it: Switzerland.

Sanitarpolizei, pt 1

It was August, 1988. For post-graduating fun, a summer of backpacking culminated in a week at a villa above Cortona rented by the mother of the now sadly no longer amongst us Sarah Pettit, with Sarah, her girlfriend Alexis, the scarcely imitable Roxana Tynan, and Sarah's mom and beer-loving brother Benj. With a swimming pool (the locals called the house la piscine) and much upper Appenines scenery, much fun was had.

But it only lasted for a week, and then I had to go back down the little old mountains and connect with the main train line headed north, through Milan, over the Alps to Zurich, whence I was fly back to RDU (via Washington National, since rebranded as Reagan Freedom International or somesuch hooey). At Milan, I had a couple of hours to gamble about, see the Duomo, and watch stylish youth with superfluous white sweaters tied about their necks eat panini, at that time an exotic term. At the station, I had my first ever risotto (also exotic), and you know it was good, if expensive.

Then I borded the trans-alpine overnight. It was one of the fine old long haul Eurotrains with compartments for four, with seats covered in Naugahyde or some morally superior European Naugahyde analog that folded together in the middle to resemble a bed. After a couple of beers and surely furrowing my brow over some smart guy book meant to impress intellectual chicks, I tried to go to sleep. As many of you may know, Naugahyde doesn't breath all that well, and so begins our adventure....

The Blog and the Novel

I've earlier declared my intent to use the blog as a place to gather content for a novel. But do I need to, or does that amount to thinking in terms of passe genre hierarchies?

The novel promises, to a certain extent, wholeness, roundness, totality. Some sorts of post-Aristotelian unities. The authorial or narratorial voice is supposed to wrap a world up, tie it with a bow and plunk it in front of the reader. However much the modernist and post-modernist novels may have struggled to twist and warp this paradigm, it remains in place.

And, in truth, the theory of the novel from Ian Watt to Lukacs to many a feminist has always relied upon the identification of reader, author, narrator, and character: one person sitting in a chair being communicated to by one person. Classically, ingesting the tale of another person following a similar path in life to that of the author. The 18th-century novel, some like to say, gave rise to bourgeois consciousness, which isn't far from the truth.

The blog, by contrast, is fragmentary and ongoing, rather than total. Viewed as a whole, a blog might undoubtedly look like a novel in diary form, a well known variant. There will be narrative structure and thematic consistency, and it's all held together by a single narratorial voice.

So why should I, and so many other middle aged people, care about writing a novel when I've already got a blog? Maybe because I've internalized the belief in totality and wholeness, because putting together an integrated piece of art has historically been, to some degree, validated as a worthy pursuit, a reasonable excuse for not having a job, while having a blog is social terra incognita. Uncharted coctail party waters.

New books from library

There's nothing quite like bringing a fresh stack of kids books home from the library. Natalie takes to it like a pig to shit. Only cuter.

All I've got to do is drop the books off up in "Granny's Room" on the second floor, and we've instantly got a measure of peace and quiet. Natalie runs up there, rifles through the bag, and leafs through them one by one. Full of glee. But then the tide turns. At some point in time, she decides that we actually need to read them to her. Graham's starting to appreciate the fresh ones too, after a long period of new book aversion (akin to new food aversion). For my part, given that I read the books every night, a new stack is like refreshing my life. I start to get excited about the uncharted stories towards the end of day at work.

Imagine how well this is gonna work when they start to read. We're not there just yet, although I half feel like we're neglecting Natalie by not pushing her to read more. Like a smart 5 year old really should be reading. But there's open warfare in pedagogical and child-rearing theory on the question of pushing kids, and Mary's both on the other side of the debate and more on top of it. Natalie will learn to read (or admit how much she knows already) soon enough, and our lives will be much easier. And then she won't be forced to memorize all her books.

Princeton Athletic fields, 6/30/05, 9:12pm

First Theo's bday party, then fireworks.

Early in the evening, yet another sign of aging. At Janet and Steve's, a lovely song on: "Oooh lady, won't you stay with me, just a little longer," and Gina and I are in the kitchen going, who is this? Violent Femmes or Velvet Underground? The former, it turns out, but it's odd how, at sufficient remove, 1986 sounds like 1970.

As we approach the fireworks on foot, other people are trying to park. Morons. Pushing through crowds of pedestrian children in Taurus wagons and SUVs, like you couldn't figure out that you need to park a few blocks away.

Fireworks
Oooo aaaah, and many variations thereupon. Sitting other dads and couples with 5 year old girls and two year old boys, which has worked out so curiously.

I had promised Natalie that she'd go to the fireworks when she was 5, and I was as good as my word, if not better. But now she's 5 and trending towards independence, and so didn't sit on my lap and gaze as beatifically and reverently at the many-colored explosions as the Hallmark cinematographer would have had her, but what are you gonna do.

Will fell asleep during the fireworks themselves. Natalie just got whiny and tired, and made me carry her almost all the way home: "but my legs have no energy, dad." And then, at home, a meltdown. Beads lost from necklace she had made at Nora's the other day. Not good. Not good at all. Tears and wailing, straight through to the pillow. Clearly, 10 really is too late.

Walmart. Trenton, NJ. 8:40 pm

Going to Walmart is most often like going to another dimension. The harsh fluorescent light and indefatigable search for the cheap make it feel like commodity porn. The many languages in use make it feel like America. In the best sense.

Got there within 20 minutes of closing, rushed to grab my few items (bike rack for me [29.88!], fire engine shaped electric toothbrush for Graham [$4.96 with batteries!]). Got right into line.

In front of me was a guy with a tattoo of a naked, big-titted Wonder Woman (could tell by tiara) on the inside of his forearm. The express line took forever. Aniela, at the cash register, couldn't for life of her figure out how to hand enter photos. Literally 10 minutes ringing up one thing. Everybody was getting angry and stood with their eyes trained on their feet or otherwise away from her, attempting to maintain stoic cool. But we were all there for the same reason: to shop as cheaply as possible, and we were getting what we paid for: bad service, drawn from the bottom of the labor pool.

And what's more, I had never seen a store where one could order McDonalds at the store register and pick up one's order on the way out. I passed.

Breakfast of Champions

In line in front of me at CVS on Saturday (buying Gatorade after being depleted of the 30-mile ride), a college girl with reddish alternative hair reached into the convenient and transparent mini-fridge to the right of the register and pulled out a four-pack of Red Bull ($7.89 for 4, a significant price break from $1.99 a pop). "Breakfast of champions," she said to the male she had in tow, "Red Bull and Fruit Loops." Then she looked over her shoulder at me, the square guy (I was actually dressed in my better shorts and a summer party shirt, the better to perhaps dazzle the Merrill Lynch dad to whose house I was going to pick up Natalie from a play date). As I was saying, she looked at the square guy to see if he would flinch at her radical, trangressive morning repast.

And, in truth, in my dehydrated state, I was a little disgusted. Even now, having just had a refreshing and delightful beverage, Red Bull and Fruit Loops doesn't sound like breakfast. But I remember pulling shit like that myself often, trying to impress people in public places with how cool and smart I was. It did me a world of good.

Fireflies

Sitting on the porch this evening reading the paper of record, I noticed that the fireflies were out in force. Though it was forty-five minutes after bed time, I tiptoed upstairs to see if Natalie, perchance, might be up with the near-solstice dusk. Even though she had refused to snuggle with me, a disturbing trend.

Was she up? You know she was, so I took her by the hand out to the back porch and we sat down and checked out all of the many many fireflies flitting around out in the back yard, over by Mary's flowers, and the great many who flew around across the fence in the bulldozed "contested zone," the big lot waiting for McMansions to be built, temporary home to backhoes and bulldozers (much to Graham's delight). And yes, you Manhattanite, California, and desert readers, the fireflies twinkled eat-your-hearts-out fine in the muggy aftermath of a summer storm.

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).