Agassi should quit

Haven't checked the news today, but if he hasn't already, Agassi should drop out of the US Open. All this press about his getting 7 inch needles of more and more drugs in the spine is just inane. It's not heroic. It's poor judgement. The guy is married with children, and he needs his long-termhealth more than he needs this media coup. He could always recuperate and come back and play one more. Next year's Open with a couple of prep tournaments.

Or he could just walk away. While he still can.

The Buffmeister

I had not been aware of Warren Buffett's unorthodox marital arrangement: separated from wife for 30 years, accompanied by a woman she hooked him up with (and with her full support), but married. That's the trouble with America today. Hippies.

Harbingers of recession

Is it just me, or is there more local affiliate advertising making it through to the viewer on cable? I think they're having trouble selling time and are going to the B list, just like in the last recession. Similarly, our local grocer Wild Oats seems to be putting out fewer samples, also a sign of tight marketing dollars. This bodes ill for the economy in 2007, but well for interest rates.

Natalie's front tooth

Natalie came in at 6:15 this morning all excited cuz she had lost one of her front teeth. We had known it was coming, as they had been wiggly for some time. Both of them. This may be an "all I want for Christmas" Christmas chez nous. She plans to give it to the tooth fairy tomorrow night, for some reason. That will give me more time to get my money together.

Blasts from the Past

Back in Chapel Hill, found myself tuning in to the old college radio stations. WXYC, WXDU. Hadn't realized how starved I was for good eclectic radio. On XDU as I drove to Bullock's to get pig, the DJ was an accordion freak, so I heard a bunch of folk music from places like Latvia, Bulgaria, Ecuador, what have you, with accordions and whatnot. Fabulous. The day before the guy was playing cool Mexican folk music on XYC before launching into sophomoric drivel about how hispanics get treated in the new South. Gotta take the good with the bad. But NJ college radio largely sucks. WFMU is good, but they're too dedicated to being cooler than thou and so quickly degenerate into being the on-air version of the sour, self-righteous grey-hairs who man the indie record stores these days.

On Saturday, went into a bar and saw my old girlfriend K, who informed me that she was back in Chapel Hill briefly after a few years out West, to put some money together to go to Idaho or Acadia or somewhere else. 35 years old. I resisted the desire to shake her by the shoulders and say "Wake the fuck up, your life is slipping by," but she had to go back to her scruffy date Michael.

The Sex Lives of Cannibals

This title was entirely deceptive. Thanks God. Sounds nasty.

The book started off slow. Our narrator, one J. Maarten Troost, starts off sounding likes he's gonna be a straight up whiner. Graduate student can't tie shoes straight can't hold down good job, lots of credit card debt lives at home with mom yatta yatta. Girlfriend gets job on desolate atoll in the Pacific, known as Kiribati. They move there.

It's a shithole, literally. That is, a bunch of sand out in the Pacific doesn't have much room for septic systems, so people go to the edge of the reef and take dumps into the water. Also throw trash there. There are lots of nasty skinny dogs running around. All there is to eat is fish, rice, and random half-rotten Australian canned goods. There's no place to go. It's too hot. And so on and so on.

And yet, without ever having one of those big transcendent Ahas, Troost turns it around and begins to show a lot of love for the place. He's happy to leave when he does, but then....

Long and short of it: it's a good book, though there's no sex or cannibals.

This Week in the News: Agassi meets Katrina

As some of you may have heard, Andre Agassi will be playing in his last tournament this year at the US Open in New York, one year after hurricane Katrina razed Louisianna's Gold Coast and exposed fault lines of race and class that we had all fought so hard to repress, even as we marvelled in Agassi's mercurial ability to reach deep inside himself and show us little pieces of ourselves that we did want to see. New Orleans has had a hard time fighting its way back from the monumental destruction brought on by wind, rain, and neglect, but perhaps it, like all of us, can draw some inspiration from Agassi's herculean drive to dig himself out from a shamefully low ranking. Maybe the former Big Easy can also transition from style to substance, from bad hair to no hair, from playboy to crunchmeister.

Next week, surely, we'll hear about Federer and 9/11.

Back from the wedding

So my mom got married again. Like most people's moms, she decided it would be appropriate, after exchanging vows, to launch into a high-toned, high-pitched choral solo version of the Lord's Prayer, while standing up there holding David's hands looking him in the eye. No joke. It was pretty moving, and David had clearly not been clued in to this upcoming feature.

The preacher had all the family members stand and announce that the family's were now merged, which is pretty heavy. Luckily, we know lots of them from high school, and they mostly pull for Carolina. As with most mergers, time will tell whether it will add or destroy shareholder value.

At the lake, as is traditional, there was pig and swimming.

On the flight back, coincided with a cousin (1st once removed) who had come down for the wedding and stayed with a 1st cousin on campus in Chapel Hill, and discussed whether she had been in my sister's wedding back in 1990. We weren't sure, but I was certain I had ushered at her parents's wedding circa 1978. That's when it starts to get heavy.

Demo land

There's nothing quite like a WebEx software demo to get you worked up and raring to go. Today Greg told us all about his web-based Disaster Recovery app and all the exciting customizable features and reporting it offers. You could hardly restrain me, I must say.

Wedding preparations

Got my shoes shined today.
Mary ironed some shorts for Graham, and modified her own dress a touch.
We have to get up a 6AM (could be traumatic for kids) to make Philly airport Friday so Natalie can be at junior bridesmaids' luncheon on time.

You guessed it, my mom's getting married. It will be a significant extravaganza, with multiple events, guests into three digits, and barbeque, which tells you it's for real.

After a cavalcade of suitors over the course of the post-Dad era, one has stuck, a fine one at that, and my mom will once again have a new name, and we will be notionally Brady Bunched up with people we know from high school, though we won't share bedrooms.

It will be a beautiful day, and I will give away the bride.

Joy of joys

Looked in the compost drum this evening at my fresh batch. Tons of squirming creepy crawlies doing what they do best. Fabulous.

The Breakfast Club

Each day they bring us the New York Times. When I'm lucky, or when I sneak downstairs and pull it all together before the kids get there, I get to read some. And each day the newspaper allays some of the anxiety of being in a career which just sort of snuck up on me and leaves me wondering how I ended up looking like this, even if I like my hair and my outfit on a given day.

Because each day the paper of record shows a bit of myself, like the John Hughes movies of yore. Today, new studies of people driven to seek fame to offset feelings of abandonment by a parent (I ID with the cause if not the effect), of middle-aged men taking Viagra to recover the libido of their youth but thereby piss off their wives, who are cool with the course of nature (I haven't thought about the drug but I can see the marital dynamic), and so on. It's as if the paper offers an extension of onesself, starting the day off with a thought or two before it all degenerates into the recitation of professional scripts.

So that's some fine paper. If only the slack motherfuckers had delivered it last Sunday.

More on the mower

• Put it back in the Subaru
• Took it to Lowe's
• Guy looks at me, is like, "is all the gas out of it? The town of West Windsor says it's a fire hazard and won't let us have any gas in the building."
• Nice guy, though. Good hire.
• Put mower back in car and take home.
• Tomorrow: siphon out gas. Try again.
  

More on my relationship to objects

I have written before about how I hate things in the physical world. Here are a few bullet points about how they return my affections.

• Destroyed my old lawnmower going over a big root. Should not have been going over that root, but I had to get the grass behind it and hate the weedwacker passionately, though I bought it at a yard sale for 5 bucks. 7 with the extension cord.
• Bought new lawnmower (same as old) at Lowe's, just in time for Georgian cookout.
  
• Mowed before cookout. Grass was wet.
• Went on vacation.
• Came back, need to mow yard. Lawnmower will not start.
• Took to neighbors who race go-karts. They promise to fix ("it will be fun!"). Mow with theirs.
  
• They do not fix it. In fact, they take it apart no more than I had. Advise taking back to Lowe's.
• I take lawnmower back to my yard.
• Weatherman promises rain.
• Put lawnmower in Subaru to take to Lowe's.
• Drive to work. Minor fumes.
• Go to take colleague to Audi dealer. By now fumes are major.
• Get headache while driving.
• Dump lawnmower back in yard.
• Deliver colleague to dealer.
• Return to work. Minor fumes still there.
• Brain recovers somewhat.
• Write blog
  

Transamerica

Although it's marred by some lamentable Indie-film cliches (the older station wagon covering major swaths of purple mountain majesty on 2-lane roads encountering various combinations of redneckery and authenticity), the emotional core of Transamerica is solid. You care about the characters and their relationship to one another, and they grow. That's so much more than can be said for most movies. Even the secondary characters have some pathos.

Felicity Huffman is great, all of John Steward's "muffman" jokes aside.

And it's funny too.

All told, it's the best synthesis of chick flick/buddy road movie since Thelma and Louise, or Priscilla.

Paradise Now

This is worth watching. A buddy movie about two happy-go-lucky Palestinian guys who are committed suicide bombers who've vowed to go out with one another. When the movement calls and says they've got their chance, the classic hijinks ensue. Dark night of the soul. Last kiss from a martyr's daughter. Vacillation. Debates on the efficacy of terror. Testimony to the horror of a life lived entirely under occupation.

Some of it gets a little wooden, but all in all it's very well done. I normally don't get excited about watching movies about terrorism and martyrdom, for some reason. Paradise Now is balanced and well-thought out, and has feeling. And it's purty.

Beginning of an era

Graham hit Natalie in the face with a little football last night. At point blank range. He did not apologize. Would not. I made the tactical error of giving him an ultimatum: "Say you're sorry or you won't get any drink." He would not, could not, say I'm sorry.

So I put him in his crib, him kicking and screaming. And I went downstairs. And then I heard the telltale pitter pat of his feet. He had climbed out.

This was a first, bespelling our doom. From here on out, he's only staying in the crib when he wants to. Mary was, shall we say, underpleased. As was I.

Text production

I have produced great reams of corporate text today, be it in the oral (conference call with CIO out in LA talking BCP for his BPO call centers, recap to boss) or the written (notes on this meeting, entry in sales pipeline db). At lunch I discussed fine points of corporate-speak to some bedazzled recent hires, who had never imagined that the English language could be so kniptioned.

But wait.... just thought of something better to write about.

Sharp security

NPR this morning reports that all the swiss army knives and nail clippers confiscated at airports get shipped to a warehouse in Harrisburg, PA and auctioned off in bulk. Total proceeds thus far for govt coffers? $300,000. I'm sure that's gross, not net.

How much better would it be to take the little plastic trays of sharp items and offer them to those deplaning just across the way? No shipping, storage, administration, or other costs. Get rid of the things. The laws of large numbers would average things out. It would be like the penny cup by the register.

OK. Giving out sharp things for free is not a typical govt service. But still, times have changed.

Masala on Chambers St., Princeton NJ

In keeping with the theme of restaurant reviews, I'll just say that I suppose I should be happy that Masala makes a concerted effort to be the healthier choice in Indian lunch buffets. They serve brown rice. They take the skin off the chicken Tandoori. There is no lamb saag. Truth be told, I am not grateful. Even if it makes it easier to not have seconds and gorge onesself. The naan is OK, if itself a little thin.

That are other questionable touches about the place. The banquette where I sat just plain smelled. One of those musty restaurant neglect smells, like a small tub of industrial grease was back in the corner somewhere. Paper towels in the bathroom were not in their dispensor but, upon inspection, on the window ledge, as if they were making a break for freedom but didn't quite get there.

I've never had a particularly good meal either there or as take-out. One may hope that this precious restaurant space will free up for something tastier soon.

Cafe Moxie, Vineyard Haven

Was called to task below for failure to provide review of restaurant, so here we go. The restaurant referenced above is fine indeed. My bass dish was mighty good. Mary's duck gnocchi appetizer rocked. Scallops also appealed to all of us, and the deserts were tasty too.

The place was cute. The lock on the bathroom door was not idiot-proof, however, as I demonstrated. Thankfully, I was standing facing away from the door when the nice lady opened it, elsewise it could have proved embarassing for both of us.

Best of all, there were celebrities, or, rather, one of them. This dude walked in and I was, like, "hey, that dude's in pictures." And, despite Mary's protestation that I always think people are somebody, it was in fact Luke Wilson, brother of Owen, wacko in his own right, who stopped in for a repast. Everyone was suitably impressed, though as erstwhile New Yorkers Mary and I pretended to let it roll off of us.

Home again

Back from vacation, a full weekend day spent at home. The kids are atypically happy and excited about playing with their own toys. The house is moderately clean. After fighting it for an hour, Graham naps for the first time in weeks.

At dusk, races in the back yard. Even Mary. Back and forth, back and forth. At certain moments I have thought Mary was crazy in her attachment to and insistence upon the yard, but when we have have backyard races, I see her point.

Graham loves the racing. Sometimes, when he sets out running, he extends his left arm and makes a circular motion which is the exact opposite of the natural running motion. Don't know where that comes from.

Retour a l'etat du jardin

That's back in Jersey, is what it is. After a week in Massachusetts, NJ feels like the wild west.

Coming up on four centuries after the days of Miles Standish and his fellow Puritan stiffies, Massachusetts remains and unrelentingly moralizing place. One nature preserve we went to had a sign saying "no swimming, picnicking, beach chairs, beach sports, or anything of the sort" (italics added). The paper ("we have no ethyl on the Island", said the cash register guy, whatever that means) bag from the grocery store says "supporting your healthy lifestyle." How does the bag know I didn't purchase all junk food? On the walls of the same grocery store are pictures of happy local farmers, and messages about the virtues of locally grown produce.

Meanwhile, the streets are prowled by Volvos and Subarus (we had them too) driven by hawk-nosed women in batik dresses and birkenstocks. Liberal piety reigned supreme. I was surprised that restaurants were allowed to serve both fried food and ice cream.

Grouseback

MA (Begin Magic Tree House books on tape for Natalie) -->
RI (McDonald's, where Graham spurns the dairy-free crispy chicken) -->
CT (end 4th and final book on tape, hop to Merritt from 95 for girls room Natalie can navigate alone) -->
NY (torrential downpours, flooding, and hellacious backup on West Side Highway) -->
NJ (air out house).

North Road to Menemsha

An up-island hippie farm. Sheep. Goats. Endangered ducks. Eggs. Pigs. Herbs. Wood-powered hot water. The beardedest lady you ever saw.

Vineyard viewing

Met Abe today at Seth's Pond in West Tisbury. 75-ish year old guy with a black granddaughter, Ava, 5. A good swimmer.

He kept asking if we were renters. "Yup." I said. Then he asked how much we were paying. I told him. That's too much, he tells me, "I've got cheaper houses." So he takes me to them and show them to me. On the ride there I find out that he lives in Chelsea and tought English at CUNY. When I asked about his specialization, it turns out that he ran a high school English dept and adjuncted at CUNY at night. Clue #1.

A 2BR for about a grand, a 3BR for about 1300. Modest. No style. With cigarettes and dog. On 3 acres, as he said, but of scrubby forest. The birds back in there sang prettily, it's true.

The moral: good salesmanship can get you far, but you need product, or you can't make a sale.

The Scarlet fetter

In all the talk of today's fundamentalism, one forgets that the original Puritans settled in Massachusetts. But, in the nation's most liberal state, their hard-assed spirit is visible in many places. Take our rental house for example, when we asked if it had AC, the British owner said no, but that we could back our Hummer up to it and pump cold air in if we saw fit. But there's a ceiling fan in the living room, which I couldn't figure out how to turn on. I asked the "caretaker" about it, and she said, "Oh, that doesn't work. But there's another fan in there so you should be fine." We met the caretaker today, and she turned out to be the owner's daughter, and we discussed the current heat wave. She allowed that, last year, she decided she couldn't live without AC and spent her last $150 on a window unit. Which she proceeded to drop out of the window from two stories up.

More about Massachusetts high-handed didacticism later.

User-created bullshit

Looking for a review of a restaurant in Vineyard Haven, am shocked by the number of respectable media outlets (including the NY Times) that recycle the same user reviews and commercial content (from Fodor's which, at least sent a reviewer). As is so often the case, there's more information delivery infrastructure on the web than there is info to fill it. Like it's so hard to get somebody to write restaurant reviews.

Linguica

A spicy sausage of probably Brazilian or Portuguese derivation, found in many Mass-area breakfast and lunch treats. In the eternal war of regional pork sandwich products, this does pretty well, handily beating out NJ's porkroll.

Lookout Point Beach, Martha's Vineyard

The waves are intense today, the beach sharply sloped. Only a few are swimming, including a few 9 or 10-year olds in body suits. One 8-year old with long blonde hair, either a girl or a proto-surfer, clings to his/her father's neck as they crash the waves again and again, a couple of mini-breaks out from shore. This brings back memories. Dad and I did this many years ago, though not in surf like this.

What kind of behavior does this kind of subsidized risk-taking engender? Will this kid take and manage risk well, and rise in business, or poorly, and drive muscle cars and embrace speed and sensation for its own sake?

Back on the sound side, Natalie and Caroline ride boogie boards in the calm. Three 19-year old sunburned lacrosse-boy lunks strut out of the water, pawing a frisbee back and forth to one another with no skill, but with each movement of their chiselled delts and abs calculated to remind each other and anyone else who might be watching that they were, in fact, men (dammit!), and men who don't care what you think.

I went over to where Graham and Mary and Leslie and Joan were, and put my face in the water and blew bubbles. Graham, till now afraid of the water, came over, intrigued, and then sat with me in the bay. By the time we left, he had come out into the water waste deep. A new record.

In the woods, linked in

Running early for our ferry at Wood's Hole, we deviated off of Rte 28 onto smaller roads, looking for local color. Stopped at Catema, or some such where there was playground (too sunny) and also a nature preserve. So we walked back in there.

On bench in a clearing maybe 5 minutes into the woods, there were three teenagers whom I had espied walking in there, two boys, one girl, a blonde, in a bikini top and rolled down shorts. The girl and one boy were talking on their cellphones, sitting next to each other on the bench. The other guy, rather plump, with ragged blonde hair, sat in the dirt at the girl's feet. Ahh, high school.

A possible hiatus

For the first time in six years, your humble scribe is headed out for two weeks of vacation, on sunny Martha's Vineyard, scourge of Kennedys, but then, we're not Kennedys, are we? In this we rejoice.

Our house there, because it is affordable, has no A/C, nor has it DSL or the like. So grousing may be a little sporadic.

Which is fine, because probably there'll be little to write about. Very little lobster, given the proclivities of Mary and her sister. Perhaps corn.

But worry ye not. If the grouse drops its frequency, it'll roar back in due time, as grouses do.

Mirrors of my waist

Getting dressed this morning, I couldn't help but notice that my pants were fitting quite loosely and comfortably, which is something that happens cyclically and/or sporadically, and is always quite a relief, because it defers once again the time that I'll have to go out shopping for more clothes. Moral hazard will undoubtedly set in, and three or four months from now, having passed through a period of stress, I'll notice that they're tight again.

In other but related news, Natalie headed off to camp today with four dollars in her backpack, with the firm intention of lunching on a hot dog and french fries, but not -- despite all her protestations -- ice cream. I wish I could have been there with her for that, standing in line in the sun at the pool, clutching 4 dollars in her sweaty little palm, in distended expectation of junk food joy.

Snoopy come home

Came home from the office the other day, and the kids were watching a familiar but long since forgotten movie: Snoopy Come Home, which I recall seeing in the theater when I was young. If it was during the initial 1972 theatrical release, that would have made me right at Natalie's age. I was immediately gripped with sadness, felt tears welling up almost, though I couldn't remember why. Mary told me that she had come in the room earlier and both Natalie and Graham were crying.

Turns out, it's all about Snoopy going back to see his original owner, but can't get in cuz of "No Dogs Allowed" signs at hospital and her apt. bldg. And she's kind of a bitch. And then he misses the whole Peanuts gang and is conflicted and wants to go home.

I can identify with a lot of that.

And I totally sung right along with the theme song when it started: "Snooooopy, Snooooopy, come home Snoopy come home."

It's one thing to re-view the classics of childhood with your kids. It's another entirely to unearth long-buried emotional artefacts.

Mad scramble

Georgian feast today in yard.
Bought and assembled new mower after destroying old one on malicious root.
Mowed.
Shashlyk (with Tkemali sauce)
Khachapuri (with actual Suluguni cheese)
Adjapsandal
and more.

Mary would shoot me if she knew I was blogging about it during precious prep time.
Ever the rebel.

Small value coffee

Went to the new Small World Coffee on Nassau St today on walk to Dinkie today. Nice space (thanks Kirsten!), although there's a lot of dead room up front now where they could be generating revenue.

Got an iced coffee. 16 oz, $2.50. I said large, ahem. The Starbucks Venti gives you better unit pricing, even here in Manhattan, like $3 for 24oz, and it's better than Small World, which is muddied with espresso.

Which brings us to the big question. Why? Because it's closer to my house? OK. Because it's not a chain? I used to buy that argument, but it feels more and more like arch romanticism. I want good product. One could argue that small stores provide a service not unlike biodiversity to the consumer ecosystem. But they need good product and reasonable margins. I shouldn't pay an extra markup like some moral tax for noserings. Coffee is way high margin. They could bring the price down and still rake. Or coffee could be a quasi loss leader and have good baked goods.

Just don't soak me.

Day of anger

Nasty stupid tables in Word, with some images embedded and some floating on top.

Reconstituting basic bits of my firm's experience by hand, from local and network drives and Lotus Notes directories, when we should have a searchable KM repository to just pull this stuff from.

Why do I find myself doing this crap at my tender age? I should be pontificating.

To be cheap, we hired some local Mexican guys to haul our recently purchased treadmill up to the 3rd floor, and it gouged our stairs. I dread going home to see what they did. We are morons.

I'm anxious going into vacation. Need to get some prospects to firm up or I'll be knocked back a peg, back to working on stuff that just walked in the door.

At least Zhenya has promised to pick up some Suluguni and Tkemali up by where he works, in preparation for our upcoming Georgian feast. Good neighbors.

The wisdom to know the difference

Went back to AA for the 2nd time yesterday after a 13-year absence. Technically, this is heresy, and I should have exploded.

AA is , truly, a great thing. People in there really are making a best faith concerted effort to deal with their shit and help each other. Where else are you gonna see the kind of positivity that lets a contractor eat a big old salad for lunch. I didn't even see any cheese on there. I personally am, if not a lunch nihilist, than a lunch pessimist, consistently opting for some sort of (if not the most extreme) short-term sensory dividend as against the long term wholistic total return.

The interesting thing about it is how much is over-ascribed to alcohol. Yes, alcoholics can be impulsive people with trouble managing their passions, but so are lots of non alkies, and 10 years after quitting, for most lushes the issues may or may not be causally related. What's awesome is that AA meetings are like free for all group therapy, and everybody's totally earnest and largely well-intentioned. OK, there are no professionals in the room to moderate, but that just makes you develop a healthy level of judgment. Or not, as the case may be.

When they heard me, I detected a number of "tsk tsks" over my quasi-lapsed status. Or maybe I was just projecting.

Minor revelation

I had never really listened to Meat Puppets II until I bought it recently. So I never really understood how closely Kurt Cobain had followed Curt Kirkwood's lead in his Meat Puppets covers on the Nirvana Unplugged record. The songs are hearfelt, but shameless in their fidelity to the original, as if to promulgate a new theory of soul.

Much like Swans version of "Love Will Tear us Apart". Literal, no "value-add" in consultant speak. Lame.

Compare Bobby Darin's over the top rendition of "Bridge Over Troubled Water." He takes that puppy and makes it his own, and despite all the Vegasy shmaltz it becomes something more than the Simon & Garfunkel. Something wierd, yes.

Amongst the wild flowers

Bowman's Hill Wildflower Preserve, Rte 32, on the Delaware

Under a WPA stone and timber structure with picnic tables, a 4-piece Bluegrass band with a Legacy Outback right behind it. Guitar, fiddle, mandolin, banjo. They're pretty good, but it's suspicious that one guy has on Bass weejuns, white shorts and seersucker. The others are closer to that than the soil, too. But what do you expect.

Down in front there's a table of special needs adult guys, some with face paintings of butterflies and teddy bears. There's a Downs Syndrome guy, an autistic guy on the ground rocking while he admires his art project, and others we would once have called retards. They appear to be digging the tunes. It's a very sweet scene.

Natalie got water lilies on one cheek and a red flower on the other.

After a fruitless insect hunt through the steamy hot fields, a downpour, but the band plays in the picnic house.

Graham makes his first art project, sticking innumerable multicolored pipe cleaners into a little pine cone like thingie (what are those things called?).

The sun-drenched city

Once more it's hot. I really can't think of a ton else to say.

Cross thru Rockefeller Center this morning was closed for some stupid superannuated band in black with pasties play on Good-Morning America. Many flatlanders had come to see these famous people first thing in the morning.

Player of the Game

The hand-wringing continues, but at this point in time it's got to be clear that Materazzi should have been Player of the Game. I don't really care what he said to Zidane: it was brilliant! He pushed the right button, and old Zizou flipped what wig he had. Materazzi thereby gave Italy the edge headed into the penalties.

And now FIFA is going to haul both of them in for a spanking? Will FIFA institute new guidelines around acceptible taunting? Will the dudes on the sidelines have to monitor bad-mouthing as well as offsides?

Time to move on.

Helicopter, fire truck

One of the services I provide for the little ones is the following: I lay on my back and pick them up by the waist, balancing them horizontally over me. I then work through a routine of vehicles. I waive them back and forth and say "helicopter, bukka bukka bukka" or perhaps bounce them and say "fire truck, reeoooreeeoooreeeooo."

I do this for Graham. I did it for Natalie, until she got too big.

Except, it turns out she was not too big, I was just too weak. Now that I've undertaken a program of push-ups to beachify myself (sit-ups come next), I find that I'm stronger, and can hoist all 6 years of her up over me, hold her vertical, and fly her around over me. And when I do this, little miss stubborn screech and pout and slam the door if there's no playdate or Graham won't share a toy or really for just any reason, Natalie has the calm, sweet expression of the two-year old that the helicopter evokes memories of. It's quite a transformation.

More on Zidane

Still no good explanation for the head butt in the morning press. The Maserati or whatever his name is say "your mother is a terrorist goat, and I fucked her last night" or something like that? At the end of the day we're talking less about a contradiction, more about two sides of the same coin. Any poor immigrant or even a rich kid who has the determination, over a number of years, to acquire that level of skill with a ball, to attain that level of anything, perforce has a degree of focus, drive and edge well above that of most of us, and sometimes that cooks up a nasty cocktail.

I don't think anybody expressed so much surprise at Ron Artest, Ben Wallace, Jermaine O'Neal et al. when they went at it a couple years back. Because they're black? Admittedly, it wasn't the world cup final. But it did cost them, esp. Artest, some large ducats.

Anyhow, the moral of the story, for us average joes, is to keep it on the DL. Don't blow.

It could, of course, be the case that Zidane was deciding to kiss off his Dar-al-Jihad future and embrace a burgeoning coreligionist target demographic that is available to him via such channels as Al Jazeerah. He's got the hair for it. It'll be interesting to see how the reruns get played out throughout the ummah.

Dumb jocks

It was pretty shocking to see Zidane head butt that guy to the ground. Not really an auspicious way to end one's career.

But maybe it's not worth being all that shocked. As Americans, many of us tend to romanticize Europe, and soccer falls right into that. We think European soccer players are somehow more sophisticated and cultured than American football players, but at the end of the day, they're just dumb jocks. Sweaty, crass, beer-swiling, alladat.

But Beckenbauer looked pretty swank in his suit, that must be confessed. Better than Barkley.

Syriana

Dunno, if I had to name a fictional country, I'd probably use a name that wasn't a variant of a real country's name -- and with something looking like a known suffix (Husserliana, etc.).

Good movie, though it went a little overboard on ambiguity. What motivates the Clooney character at the end? How does he know what he knows? We have a loose sense of the former, zilch for the latter.

All told, it's pretty cynical. And I'm pretty cynical myself.

Sarah Silverman, Jesus is Magic

Sure, we laughed. But I don't really remember many of the jokes.

Actually, there's basically only one joke: cute JAP pushes the envelope of discourse around race, sex, and dukey. At the end of the day, she's like Dave Chappelle with less volatility and less talent as a physical comic. Less volatile, in that she's never as deep, but when she goes low, she's also not as puerile as some of his copraphilia.

But she's funnier than most. Would like to hang w/her and Kimmel. Would be yucks.

Princeton Junction, 7:10 AM

Wires down on the tracks at Hamilton. All New York-bound trains boarding on the middle track, on the lower level, which is to say walking across the tracks, one at a time, under the watchful eye of the cops. Delays of about an hour.. Thousands of people stacked up on the platforms. Glee abounds.

Is this somehow connected with the state budget standoff 10 miles south in Trenton?

8:05 The conductors of one track say the next one will "platform" normally. No one believes them. The overhead announcer contradicts them. Still, a few of us press on back through the crowds.

By now, my breakfast with Ken is blown. No reason to force myself onto an insanely crowded train. Have coffee and wait, that's the ticket.

A dream

Last night I dreamt that Natalie dove in a pool while Mary and I were standing there talking and swam all the way to the other side underwater, then pulled herself up. As she was doing it, I realized what was going on, and that it was a real development. I was very proud.

This was no doubt the result of the 3-4 pages of The Magic Tree House and the Haunted Castle that she read to us aloud in the car on the way home from Larchmont. This included such big words as "mysterious," which she nailed. We were both very proud.

Neither of us had heard her really read that much, though we knew very well that she could read. Just that morning, at 7, Natalie got up first, grabbed a Magic Treehouse book, jumped onto the bed, and leaned against me, and read for 15 minutes or so. As opposed to climbing into bed, then squirming and whining after five minutes.

Now we can perhaps start to tell her to just go read a book when she's being impossible.

But she's clearly making the transition to big girl, which is less bittersweet perhaps than it looked a year ago. If she can read, swim (she's close), and (next) take off the training wheels, I say she's earned it.

The internet is dangerous

A This Mortal Coil song from ITunes
The first two Meat Puppets records from Amazon.
BBQ from Famous Dave's to take to Karla's cookout.

It's pretty impressive how easily you can blow through cash in without lifting more than a finger.

No chords, no wonders

On the way down, the elevator stops at 5 for Career Blazers, and some lunking stubbly dude with hair like one of the Gallagher brothers or a Japanese soccer player gets in, wearing a shiny silver tie and a hipster mail bag thingie. Made me wonder what I used to look like when I went to temp agencies in grad school.

Running a minute early to lunch today, stopped in to Best Buy to see what electronics stores are selling these days. Ipods and whatnot, I'm thinking.

And there were those. Meanwhile, somewhere off to the side, I'm hearing Joan Jett playing "I love rock and roll" and younguns are gathered round what turns out to be an Xbox console. The game is an electric guitar game, some guy's standing there with a pseudo guitar with 5 colored buttons and a wa-wa pedal. The game was to keep up with some chord changes, represented on screen with colored bars.

And the kid's looking at me and he's like "It'll just take a minute, then you can go" and I'm like "why don't you just get a guitar" (you moron).

Cash money

Lets just speak plainly here: Zidane was cold hard cash against Brazil yesterday. He was Magic to Ronaldinho's George Gervin. France was by far the most enjoyable team to watch of the tournament, the most relaxed. That's why they've got my vote.

Long time no action

It feels like it's been a long time anything interesting happened. Maybe it's because I never go anywhere off the beaten track (San Antonio was an attempt at least). Maybe it's because, at work, in sales, I'm always trying to recast some past experience in the hopes of reliving some minor variation on the same theme at a peer organization. You know that sounds awesome.

I haven't even been going to the library to get more kids' books (another source of variation), though Natalie's recent acquisition of the Magic Treehouse series provides some relief.

That's why all too often I'll be reading about somebody's job in the Times or something and I'm, like, man, they have the life. Or even on NPR, I'll get envious of somebody's gig, which is harder to imagine.

I gotta break out. Or at least get myself fired.

Fed does it again

The Federal Open Markets Committee some minutes ago announced that it was raising the Fed Funds Overnight rate by twenty-five basis points, the 17th such rate hike over the last two years. The Grouse would like to commend Chairman Bernanke and the other members of the committee for so wisely husbanding the money supply, with a stance that is neither excessively commodative nor aggressively yicky. Especially in view of certain inbalances in the markets, notably the so-called "housing bubble" about which there's been so much chatter on this thing they call the internet, as well as historically unprecedented levels of the Current Account Deficit (CAD) and really embarassingly low household savings rates, it's entirely possible that shit could get way fucked up. And then the Chinese would swoop in and, like, totally gobble us up.

Which would be bad.

We therefore reiterate our support for a program of progressive but moderated tightening of credit conditions.

Letting em know

I pulled up to a light next to a youngish businesswoman in a white blouse and a Saab convertible today. I probably don't need to tell you that my little S40 and I left her in the dust effortlessly, accelerating to 60 well before I got to the 40 mph speed limit sign on the ramp crossing Rte 1.

I probably shouldn't have a turbo. My friend Steve expressed guilt to me not long ago on account of the turbo in is PT Cruiser and the poorer mileage the car gets for it. I know that I could get better mileage by driving more conservatively, but where's the fahrvergnugen in that?

No, those rare occasions that Central NJ affords me to floor it and blow past somebody are momemts I cherish. Part of it is, for sure, the legacy of the Turner Thesis, the cowboy mentality of wanting freedom and open roads. Lord knows Detroit encourages us in this. A corollary nuance to this is the middle-aged guy feeling cooped up and needing to kick out testosterone. Detroit has that number too.

Probably I'd be better off in the big boxy 240, where all acceleration occurs in relative rather than absolute terms.

Moving away, inwards

In the Eastern bloc back in the day there was a concept of "internal emigration." This referred to the practice of just moving through the day, acquitting onesself at one's day job, and then getting home to get on with the focus of one's real life, be it art, family, hobby, S & M, whatever. It was basically trying to ignore where and how one lived in reality, and supplant it with fantasy.

I'm sure HR people have a similar concept here. And there are police-state like measures to combat it, like blocking URLs for non-work email, entertainment sites, and (gasp!) blogs. But what are the incremental costs of people whose interests are so disaligned from those of their employers that they pretty much just dial it in and focus all their energies on other aspects of their lives? How much more could companies achieve if they could harness that energy? Would people be happier if they were fully engaged with their work? Would their parallel and therefore total lives be less rich if they were deprived of a downpressor?

One thing's for certain. We're unlikely to find out.

One or many wolves?

This morning, Natalie's first day of camp, she asks me: "Daddy, why do you have to go to work?"
(Note that we've been through this before) And I lay the standard line on her. "To get money to pay for the house and food and stuff." And she rejoins: "But why can't we be like wolves?"

I didn't have the best answer for that.

As for her camp, it is at the swimming pool which adjoins and shares a name with her school, Community Park. On rainy and overcast days, like today, the kids will repair to the nearest building, which is..... her school. So, two days into summer, she'll be back in school. Thankfully, she's at an age where this probably feels more comfortable than annoying. For Freddy, from across the street, who's like 8 or 9, I don't know if that's true. She perhaps will have a vague sense that something is amiss.

Just to be clear

I can't for the life of me understand why the Dutch coach didn't put in van Nestleroy there at the end against Portugal. He's their all-time leading goal scorer. He still scores for United, it ain't like he's ancient or something.

Viewing pleasure

Alright. The second goal for Argentina against Mexico was sublime. It's what we all dream about. Chest trap. Strike with left from top of box into upper corner, coming down with topspin. And I missed it because I was giving Graham watermelon.

Capote. I resisted it at first, but in the end, it was pretty good. Everybody gets what they deserve. Except Capote's boyfriend. Why did he stick around so long? He was plenty cute and a normal guy.

Note that the killers get executed on my birthday. A year to the day before my birth. Which is to say, 100 years to the day after Lincoln got assassinated. Why does so much shit go down on April 14th? Mayakovsky's suicide. The Titanic. The great dust storm of '35, or something like that. Pete Rose.

Wickawitch

The Wicked Witch of the West is, apparently, to scary to stay in the room with, though Helen braves it.

Wickawitch is what Natalie used to call the broomstick rider in Each Peach Pear Plum. That was in fact cute.

About a boss

Had lunch with a guy the other day and two other guys who worked for him. One of them was black.

And bossman's asking me where I stayed the weekend before and I'm like "the Marriott" and he's like "was there a black wedding there? Every time I stay there there's a black wedding there." And I'm thinking, hmmm, this is a game that this Larry Bird-poster-on-the-wall motherfucker he must play all the time with his black employee all the time, and I should say something even more outrageous like "why do they even let those people get married at all," but I don't.

I love Brian Piccolo

Mark my words, this will be the title of my novel. For those of you who don't remember, these are the climactic words of the classic 1971 TV movie Brian's Song, when Billy Dee Williams, as Gale Sayers, declares his love for the by-then-dead-of-cancer Brian Piccolo. The movie had all the typological conflict you could dream of, white-black, brass-shy, alladat.

But mostly, it was a tearjerker for guys, and a permissible one because it featured football players. And it had a soupy theme song, that was a hit of sorts: "If the hands of time, were hands that I could hold, I'd keep them warm and in my arms they'd not turn cold." And they played it every year, it seemed. And we'd watch it and cry, and that was OK cuz it was football.

And later, my dad would cite this line as if ironically, though we in fact knew it was serious.

Looking for a book

Down in the basement this morning looking for a book that I bought a couple of years ago and never read. Unboxed many books that I hadn't seen for years. Books I've never read and may never. And yet, how nice it is to see them, and think such thoughts as "Oh yeah, that book. I've always thought it would be nice to read that." This despite the fact that I deaccessioned a good portion of my libary 3 or 4 years as a service to the field of Slavics, and adverse selection meant that many fine titles walked.

And, for some reason, the dehumidifier was off in the basement. That's not right.

And so the general morning mood was much better than the day before, when Natalie had vexed me so by whining and crying and not wanting to put on socks with her sneakers, despite the fact that she had gym. And I yelled at her louder and meaner than I should've, enough so that even Mary chided me, when she's plenty barky herself sometimes. Stubborn children (primarily Natalie) are not my strongest skillset. Which makes me wonder about my promise as a manager.

Time will tell.

For some reason, things fall apart

Driving home from Bethesda, arguing with Mary, spaced out on the Beltway, and headed East of DC to the South. Not towards NJ. It was bumper to bumper headed counter-clockwise on the Belt, so I cut into Prince George's County to cut over to the BW Parkway.

By repute, this is the capital of Middle class African-American culture, and indeed, it looked just like any other boring piece of middle America, save for the fact that everybody was black. A friendly woman in an Accord at the gas station gave me good directions, and then clarified them further on her way out. But there was thick glass surrounding the cashier inside the gas station. No bathroom. Car stereos turned up to 11.

In a later convenience store, there was filthy cardboard in the floor by the drink machines and also no bathroom. Finally, a toilet was found at Subway, and it was dirty.

There were decrepit tennis courts at high school, and poor signage.

What's the deal? The median household income there is 50% higher than the national median.
Why this seeming attempt to recreate ghetto conditions amidst plenty?

The sweet brownfields of home

Shockingly, we hit bumper to bumper traffic on the way back between... Baltimore and Wilmington. On top of what we had seen on the Belt and the BW Parkway. People be driving.

So imagine our joy when we came across the Delaware Memorial Bridge, exited the Turnpike onto 295, and headed north for the charming burgs or Camden, then Trenton, surrounded by lush green brownfields.

New Jersey. Our home. Land of Springsteen, Soprano, and other older people.

Right next to The City.

The power of sugar

In a tantrum after we leave, Graham succumbs to a lollypop.

For 20 years, traffic on 95 between Baltimore and Wilmington. I guess there's nothing else to do there.

A tricky game

Matt's kids were in the office today, and I had to guess what age his boy was. I guessed a year high. I realized that guessing kids' ages is sort of like guessing women's weight: you can't win unless you're spot on. If you guess too high (or low, in the other case), you simultaneously flatter and imply that the real age (or weight) is somehow defective.

Not true for little kids.

White males above the law

After a meeting over a fruit smoothie with a guy from Brown Brothers Harriman, I needed to pee, so I went into the Brooks Brothers (what is it with brothers?) across from Ground Zero. I was in fact wearing one of their suits, albeit from an outlet, so I felt fully entitled to sneak a little urination action. On the second floor, in the shoe section, some buff Wall St. guy was trying on shirts out in the open, talking to his buddy, rather than go in a changing room, as if he couldn't be bothered. I guess he couldn't.

Grousing round the big blue marble

In the car on the way to school today, during a discussion of which instruments Margaret and other neighborhood girls were playing or thinking of playing, Natalie informed me (and I already knew this, mind you) that Ruth's sister Nora is learning to play the cello. However, it comes out like this "Ruthis sister Nora is learning to play the jello." I know I should probably be helping her with her pronunciation. But how are you gonna beat a sentence like that?

Meanwhile, in Djakarta, somebody was Googling the phrase "hortatory text," and I'll be damned if the Indonesian Google didn't put my entry from flying back from San Antonio a couple of weeks back #3 in its search. Google.com puts it on the third page, nestled in amongst a bunch of academic claptrap that doesn't mention spaghetti straps at all. Shortly thereafter, someone peaked at me from Amsterdam. By gum, you've got to love this so-called "internet" thingie.

A soft evening

After considerable Sturm und Drang, a lovely mild evening in the back yard. Graham had a late nap, so Mary instructed me to take the kids out there and run em down so they would sleep.

Natalie has, of late, taken to running races the length of the yard. Fortunately, she does not require that I race her every time. Sometimes she'll just go against the clock. Wearing the sharp orange outfit that Nora gave her for her birthday, and some cobalt butterfly sandals, back and forth she went, somehow miraculously achieving a back and forth time of 20 or 19 each time.

Later, she concocted some ball games, making up fine rules each time. When she's in this mode, she smiles and giggles almost as if she were 3 or 4 again, and not a mighty and often whiny 6.

Graham, for his part, ran a few races with the stroller but then concentrated on shovelling mulch into the wagon with a soup spoon. Resisting the call to come back inside for stories, he declared: "I just gotta finish with my garden." Clearly, he has learned much from Mary.

Signs of growth

Though the run-up to Natalie's 6th birthday party had its tensions, Mary and I were able to successfully make it through with only minimal sniping and no out and out yelling.

Likewise, the party itself was largely uneventful, and entirely dairy-free, for Graham's sake.

Graham, for his part, was observed to have eaten 10 pieces of watermelon. And then had a nasty blow-out.

Crash

This movie is equal parts Altman (the many parallel existences) Kieslowski (cosmic coincidence, operatic soundtrack) and Michael Mann (dudes driving in cars at night). For all that, and for all its occasional excesses, it's a pretty decent movie. It has a moral center, which can be reached in fewer than a hundred and one licks.

Sleep

What can I say. I'm just sleepy.

Driving around the Delaware with an investment banker looking for opportunities to package deals that we didn't quite find just yet. Nice little towns, though. Old mill-like housing stock and parks along the river with bandstands, but no post-industrial scenarios next to the rail line to bundle up for a developer. Alas.

Witherspoon Grill

Four guys holding forth on the subject of suburban angst and undertones of desire that aren't supposedly found in the city. Basically about how people want to fuck each others spouses out here because they're bored. Not new material, but groundbreaking for guys to discuss it. Vasectomies are also mentioned, as are kids being excluded from playgroup for being too rough.

Basically, we broke it down. Lettuce was consumed, oddly enough.

Reportage, or, saddle up!

After foolishly inquiring whether there was any press in the room today at the Mid-Atlantic Hedge Fund Association, Orin S. Kramer, Chairman of the New Jersey State Investment Council, which presides over New Jersey's $72 billion dollar pension plan, disclosed that the council had yesterday been discussing (with no resolution, mind you) upping the $800 million currently actually placed in hedge funds to $3.8 billion, with a substantial portion of that (can't read handwriting) to go to single-manager funds, rather than funds of funds.

Jon Corzine is, reportedly, booyah for upping the state's allocation, even if the fee impact is substantial, which could be politically damaging if the returns aren't good. For the electorate, this represents the moral hazard of electing a guy who doesn't need to care if he gets reelected.

Kramer also said that the NJ pension plans funding shortfall present value, officially put at $18 bln, could easily go up to $25 bln or $30 bln if you tweak your assumptions a bit. Like, for instance, not assuming a 9.8% return on equities.

Such a nice guy.

A bundle of contradictions, a typical drive

On the way to the dentist in Somerville, mind running after email of news that Jeff's medical school load out in St Louis has brought his marriage to its knees. Whatever torture I'm going through, that puts things in context. Career not that big a deal, however mired I may be in operational minutiae of crap about which, at the end of the day, I could care less about.

Then, on NPR a story about moving Stalin's body to Georgia, and I'm, like, I gotta get back to Russia.

Desparate confusion, because I really haven't determined the color of my parachute.

At the end of it all, back in the land of Cheever and Updike. Perennial conflicts and accomodations.

One of those days

The day drags on uncertainly, despite a steady stream of caffeine. Waiting for a phone call. Making others. Making hook-ups. Here a VOIP vender, there a Russian offshorer, elsewhere a former colleague looking for high end programmers (like I'd give em up if I had em).

Teaching the new Rumanian kid about things we do other than choo choo trains.

The sun, once bright, now hidden away. 5 o'clock almost here, and my own personal 5 o'clock not too too long afterwards.

McKinsey study of Asset Management in 2010. Good stuff, despite typo on page two.

Graham's poop greatly exacerbated by window that got stuck right around time we installed air conditioner. Can't wait.

Chatterbox

On Amtrak from DC today, this post-college guy was working this post-college girl and he used "Yale" every sixth or seventh word. And I believe she also went there. So why was he breaking that out so hard, like it was going to really impress her? It's sort of like saying, "you know, I breath this really cool stuff called oxygen."

I don't think it was gonna happen, though she kept right on jabbering with him. She was taller than he was, anyhow. And he had a wierd part in his hair. Praise the lord, she left, and he shut up.

Transgressions of the Babe

I heard some smarmy dude on NPR last night comparing Barry Bonds use of steroids (not illegal at time) to Babe Ruth's use of alcohol (illegal during Prohibition). He maintained that Babe Ruth was not stigmatized for breaking the law, and what was really going on was racism, just like when Hank Aaron took Ruth's record back in the 70s.

Which is a crock. I could give a rats ass about Babe Ruth, that pickle-eating jerk. And drinking liquor was breaking the law, but it wasn't cheating, and it didn't make him better or do him any good. He died at 53 of throat cancer from another vice, cigar-smoking.

Bonds, on the other hand, was cheating, using performance-enhancing substances to get better at his profession. Mark McGwire, a white boy, has gotten no free ride himself. The real problem with Bonds is not that he took drugs, but that he's a droid. He looks like a cartoon character.

Flavors of Anxiety

The first hot weekend of the year, we pulled off a trifecta, three straight days at the fountain by the Woodrow Wilson School. Water. Shade. Social life. Free. A good thing.

And Graham decided to go in the deepest part, maybe 18 inches, which is OK deep for him. And he wasn't 100% used to the water pushing his little legs around, and at some point in time I could see he was a little unstable. But he wandered out into the middle of the pool, and I stayed by the side talking to Ivy and Julie, watching him. Sure enought, he gets unstable and starts falling down, face in the water. So I go bounding out and get him, crying and scared.

And here's the thing. I knew he might fall over. I watched him. And when he did, though it was potentially life-threatening if I hadn't been paying attention, I stayed calm and went over and got him. I remember the same calm coming over me when Natalie was 2 and slipped in the pool and got her head wet. I just grabbed her and took care of her.

But the thought of not adding an attachment on an email to a new or prospectice client, or a typo, that fills me with dread and makes my skin crawl.

What's up with that? Why do relative non-issues get me all worked up, when I handle what should be stressful situations easily?

Memorial Day

Big day. Parade. Daniel and Caroline. Playground. The fountain at Woody Woo. Lemonade. Go-carts and a red 911 with Brandon.

Cookies.

Sleep.

Shopgirl

The opening shot of the Nicolas Cage vehicle Lord of War, which tracks the lifecycle of a bullet from factory to battelfield from the point of view of the bullet, is echoed in the opening of Shopgirl, which pans close range over myriad cosmetic displays before panning out to show a number of plasticky LA women. Clearly, there's a heavy dumanization groove going on. And then there's Claire Danes, who's "real," from Vermont.

And clearly we're back in the realm of Jane Austen and Eugene Onegin, the authentic woman set off against the artificial. And she in turn has two suitors, the rich guy with manners but no heart, and the goofball with heart. And Steve Martin who wrote the novel, spells out the rebus for us at the end, that our heroine chooses the doofus because he's for real.

With a certain slimming of the heavy historiosophical trappings of the Russian Novel of the 1840s-1850s, this is right out of my dissertation. The high tone of the film is no surprise for a guy who was, after all, a philosophy major back in the day.

It's fairly wooden, but in the end, it's surprising that Steve Martin got this movie made. The camera, and the plot, move so slowly. The characters aren't quite real, but they are sincere. There is a certain magic.

Continental from San Antonio to Newark

Up at 4:30 for a 6:40 flight. Joy of joys.

On board, happy to see that gender-coding in the bathroom made sense. On the diaper-changing table, a picture of a woman changing a diaper. However, the "don't throw trash in the toilet" picture was of a guy.

The girl sitting behind me, all 20 years of her, wore a maroon spaghetti string tank top with gold (as in shiny) trim. In her notebook, I saw that she was writing some sort of hortatory text, perhaps a poem: "Don't give up, you're only as big as your dreams...." It's good to see our young people wax literary.

Despite my fuzziness, I struggled through The Economist Survey of International Banking. I now understand Basel II. Sort of. Feel richer.

Outside San Antonio

Yesterday evening I headed away from I-10 from the back of our Hampton Inn in the 95 degree heat of dusk. Saw a mid-eighties Black Firebird, pretty well preserved, like the Knight Rider car. A boarded up ranch house next to police station across from cosmetic surgery facility, along a trash-strewn road. Chocolate milk bottle. Who drinks chocolate milk in this heat?

Gated communities, an oddity back east. The first one I saw was nice, made sense in the context. The next one out was not. I walked off the road along a power line behind cheap gated community. All the houses' shades were drawn. There were fences between the $200-250k houses, and the backyards were pathetically. All the dogs were aggressive. What are these people afraid of? The Chinese Baptist Church out back?

Still, it's pretty intense and beautiful trees, with huisache and persimmon trees. Or something like that.

My day job

Recall, if you will, the Riddle of the Sphinx: "What goes on four legs in the morning, on two legs at noon, and on three legs in the evening?"

And the answer: man (crawl, walk, cane).

According to this logic, I'm in the middle of the day now.

And so my job must be my day job, which is why after six years it still feels like a day job, complete with substantial day dreaming. And the question would be, when will the day end, and should I be excited about that, or should I view it with foreboding, as another step towards the grave. Or, to put it another way, will I ever be able to extricate myself into something where I won't be so disengaged.

I remember how Kafka and Max Brod struggled so to find a job where they could work in the morning and then snap up their bowlers and go home and write in the afternoon. Did OK by Kafka, least till he died so young of TB.

Arkansas!

The soda machine at the office out here in San Antonio costs 60c for a 12oz-er. Not bad. Today as change I got back an Arkansas quarter, which I believe is one of the ones that Natalie and I did not find when we went through all the quarters in the house a couple of weekends ago. I put in in a napkin in the front pocket of my knapsack.

Somebody remind me about that when I get back to New Jersey. I gotta give it to Natalie.

Eeyore

The pronunciation of the Milne's eternally gloomy pinnee of the tail would appear to be something of bellwether here at 29 Linden.

Natalie said "Ore" in her formative days.
Graham his "Ee-ore," in two distinct movements.

I realize that only family members might care about this kind of thing, and then to some limited extent. But this blog is my archive, too. If only blogger/google would get off its butt and let me download the whole thing to Excel or .csv or suchlike, then I'd really be in good shape. So those of you who don't like this kid stuff can go read Wonkette.

Snow White

Haven't been writing about the kids much lately. Now I'm sitting between them with Snow White on. The yodelling song is on, and Graham is bouncing off walls.

Apparently, when I came in the door, Graham said: "Daddy's home. I like him. He's a nice guy." Damn, it's good to hear that somebody thinks that.

It's pretty cool that the kids are into the classics like this. Of course, we don't let them watch much else, so go figure.

Now they're eating pear. Smacking and slurping.

Today is not Thursday

Turns out, it's Wednesday.

But I went through the day thinking it was Thursday. In the morning I talked to Bob and Simon about a meeting we've got planned for Friday. I referred to it as "tomorrow." In the afternoon I drank the Coke that I allow myself on Thursdays. It was good.

Then Webb tells me that we've got 2 freakin JADD sessions over at the dusty client. I have to actually work tomorrow.

Gradually, I've adjusted to the new reality of Wednesday. At least I've aged more slowly than I thought I had.

Hustle and Flow

From its description, I didn't think I was going to like this movie. My pimping days have long since past, and I really don't need a lot of reminders about how hos be actin up.

But this turns out to be the ghetto Breakfast Club, a feel-good movie in which we all see a little bit of ourselves. We all understand how Djay yearns to fulfill his dream of being a rapper, and how that skinny white bitch needed to be paying for that mike "in kind", as it were. As the director reminded us during the special features interview, this was a movie about "women getting behind their men," which means giving it up if necessary, to be sure.

But seriously, it's a damned fine movie. I cried. The production values were spot on. And djay had the killer. It was surprising to find out the director was some white dude.

Piracy my foot

The Times today had an article about some French kid gettin all high and mighty about file-sharing: the record companies make too much money, says he, we get robbed. We'll get the artists paid by having some pricing system that'll reward the most popular.

What he neglects is that pop music and stardom are in fact all about getting robbed. People delight to throw their money away on people with big hair, elevator boots, leopard skin and turgid prostheses. Even the Fugazis and Sleater-Kinneys -- the white t-shirt crowd -- of the world need big labels to define themselves against.

If there's rational, transparent pricing, who will pay for the marketing and the excess that sets attraction and repulsion in motion. Could their be a David Lee Roth or a Britney Spears in such a world? We may yet see.

"When you were younger"

Downtown to meet Reardon for lunch today, walking around the old West Village nabe checking things out. Happy to see that Patisserie Claude was still there, and, in it, Claude. After making my purchases, I engaged the fair Frenchman in conversation. "Ahh yes," he said, his voice smooth with french butter, "I remember you, you used to come in here when you were younger." Hmmmmm. Never heard exactly that phrase tossed my way, but indeed it was true, I was 28 when I first came in there, early in our relationship when I'd get two pastries before heading out to the dog run because, in my mind, croissants were'nt really food, they were more like condiments in bread form. Just like bacon was a condiment in meat form.

This, sadly, or felicitously, depending on your point of view, was at the beginning of my education at the hands of Professor Berridge. It is not an interesting story.

Deep in the woods

Today in other offices of the firm discussed yesterday. Wood Hall. Just off of cafeteria. Again, as if in a time warp or even a parallel universe. Styles, hair and otherwise, strikingly retrograde. Geeks in the woods, discussing assessment. In 4 hours of powerpoint and worse, scarcely a sound was uttered about cost. And yet, nobody'd living large, the money's just pouring out. As a consultant, you'd have to love it, were it not so spooky. As a taxpayer, you feel otherwise.

Into the Netherworld

Seemed like a good idea for a change of pace, head out and do a little work for another client. But this was downright creepy, this E-T-S, world famous administrator of standardized tests.

At the door, serious security, lest their fabled IP, their test questions, be compromised: "All hats and scarves must be removed."

Up on the floor, a zombie-like condition obtained. Drowsy programmers performed slow half turns of their heads, before reverting to their screens. Worn carpet and cubes of early 90s vintage. Coming round a bend, I half-expected to trip over a basset hound scratching fleas off himself with his hind legs. But I saw him beforehand, and didn't trip.

In the project manager's office, we met to prepare for the next day's meeting. Coders appeared at the door asking for sign-off on bug fixes so they could be released to production.

F*ck&ng Word

40 minutes of grinding away, trying to hit a deadline, reduced to nothing by the demons of Redmond. Actually, not just them. Them in tandem with the pond scum of IBM's Notes division, as Notes for some reason refused to open Word docs like it normally does, and then they popped open and froze Word just as I was spell-checking. For some reason the autosave failed. And it looks like autosave is set up right.

Luckily what I was working on wasn't really all that important, but still. Vexing. On top of a bad night of sleep and a horrendous knot in my back. Delight.

A grey day indeed

After a springie weekend, the second in a row, a grim, cool, grey day. Which is fine, had it only not been corroborated by depressing meetings and news of depressing meetings I wasn't invited to. At least I haven't gotten any big bills I wasn't expecting. Yet.

Took Graham to see the emu farm on Aunt Molly Road. He wasn't entirely sure about them. I can't imagine why.

Trouble writing

Having trouble thinking of topics to write about after a friend up in Boston was just telling me about a couple getting caught having sex in the storage room at work. They're both married, to other people, got to work on a project together and bingo, bunny time!

Who actually does that shit? I thought that was what the USA Network was for, to work that kind of thing out.

In other news, will venture onto the basketball court today for the first time in years.

Another modest proposal

Cemex revolutionized the concrete business by sending out trucks along the ring road around Mexico City each day and having dispatchers rout them to construction sites when site managers called. They found that, without planning for specific jobs, they could deliver concrete to sites in an average of 45 minutes.

Here's my plan: do the same thing with consultants, or lawyers. Have them head out to airports and along major highways in the morning, cellphones and powerpoint at the ready. Dispatchers can send them out as needed to work sites.

It'll save so much time on sales and marketing and whatnot.

Power hungry

"Next time you have a change of address affix the sticker on the rear of your license so we can see the change, alright."
"You need to turn off your phone."

Ahh, empowering the powerless, in this case at New Jersey DMV, where low-paid state drones got to massage their egos by getting stern with guys like me. And why not? I say. Better that than having them beat their spouses, you gotta figure. Give em a common enemy to light into over TV dinners, the guys in the Volvos and BMWs. At least their pensions plans are rock solid. Not.

One for the road

As Jim and I were standing on the sidewalk talking and watching his son Zeke make frowny faces, our neighbors' minivan pulled out of driveway, with the generously-proportioned matron -- whom we shall call Salma -- in the passenger seat. I could not help but notice that she was eating corn on the cob, which is not on most people's lists of car food. Mmmmm.