The Columnist Manifesto

Bush Legacy: an American Nero

2009-01-13T07:47:00.000-08:00

The photos of Bush with his sheepish grin on this morning's NYT cover say an awful lot.

"Aw, shucks, I made a few mistakes. Everyone does!"

More confirmation (as if any were needed) that the man does not live in the same country (or the same time-space continuum) as the rest of us. He shouldn't bother to show his face in public without an expression of grave and humble contrition. It's a sad testament to what happens when you install a silly little man in a position of power.

Small town values

2008-09-20T07:27:00.000-07:00

I just attended the memorial service of a close relative in a town with a population of 1,500. A large number of neighbors and townsfolk attended, in addition to family members. After the service, we all moved to the nearby town hall, for a meal of homemade lasagna, salad and brownies.

Although the families were Christian, they weren't "Christian." There was a brief prayer and a mention or two of God, but no officiating religious figure, no religious doctrine, and no murmuring about the lack of any of that.

No one advocated censoring books in the local library, or breaking down the constitutional separation of church and state.

The man whose life we were celebrating was a WWII vet; there were American flags, including a veteran's flag folded into a triangle, but there was not a buzz about "my country right or wrong," or supporting the Iraq war. There was talk of peace.

There were deer-hunters in the assembly, but also vegans.

My sense is that there was a diversity of opinion on such matters as choice and shotgun weddings for teenage children. There were even Obama supporters among the attendees.

My impression of small town American values was of a place where people could vote their conscience, agree to disagree, and come together at a memorial service without shoving their beliefs in your face.

To the GOP handlers of Sarah Palin who wish to portray small town America as a monolith of intolerant, super-religious, right-wing, wildlife-killing, book-burning opinion -- you can kiss my a**.

15 Minutes of Fame -- Narrowly Averted

2008-08-23T05:40:00.000-07:00

Driving into the gym parking lot yesterday, I came within 3 feet of having a fender-bender with a big Cadillac, which was backing out. It's slightly shocked-looking driver was none other than Gerry Torres, our university Athletic Director and former bowl-winning head football coach.

How cool is that?

Stepping out on Grandma Moses

2008-08-22T07:26:00.000-07:00

Dear Dan Savage,

When I'm in My Home Town, I probably spend 75-80% of my cafe time at Grandma Moses. I'm such a regular, that they just recently used my name and testimonial quotation in a handbill ad about their iced coffee:

Grandma Moses makes the best iced coffee in the continental United States... and perhaps the world. I drink it year round!
---Oscar Madison

So I feel like I'm having an illicit affair -- with The Water Nymph! It has a warm and cozy space, really good iced coffee (regular only, however), yummy non-Vegan baked goods --- and real breakfast and lunch food. And it's equidistant from my house (fortunately, in the other direction) from Grandma M.

I really don't want to leave Grandma Moses for this new fling... but can a man be in love with two coffee shops at the same time?

Please help me,

SOOGM

The things we do for love (of hockey)

2008-08-20T06:42:00.000-07:00

This week, I'm on "jersey duty" for my hockey scrimmage group.

I'm in the 23rd percentile!!

2008-08-19T06:34:00.000-07:00

When you do the NYT Crossword on line, the web page clocks you and then shows your rank among all the online solvers so far that day.

It's kind of fun to check the fastest times -- always around 2 minutes for M-W -- and see "tylerhinman," the young puzzle phenom featured in the movie "Wordplay."

I thought I was moving pretty fast through today's crossword, because I caught on to the theme pretty quickly and had good guesses to fill in the four 15-letter theme clues. But I got bogged down and ended up at 11 min., 30 sec., good enough to place me at #350 out of about #450 online solvers.

I notice that #453 was "kranepool3." Could it be Ed Kranepool? It would be cool to be able to say that I beat Ed Kranepool in solving the crossword puzzle. Poor Ed, the "Original Met," who spent so much of his long career as a bench player. It would be just like him to be the

Rowing Pairs Disappoint

2008-08-17T14:56:00.000-07:00

Olympic rowing duo Zac Purchase and Mark Hunter of Great Britain won gold in the men's lightweight double scull today.

That's all well and good, but couldn't they have worked harder to come up with a more memorable name pairing -- like the U.S. rowing team of [Calvin] Coffey and [Michael] Staines, who took the silver in the 1976 Olympics in Montreal?

If only Purchase could have ditched Hunter for a guy named "Sayle."

I suppose Purchase could have stepped aside in favor of a rower named "Bargain." Or even "Gatherer," if he'd have been willing to sit in the back of the boat.

Memo from the Department of Useless Information Retrieval

2008-08-08T06:31:00.000-07:00

This morning I couldn't remember, when asked by the receptionist, when I last visited the eye doctor.

Among other potentially useful things I can't remember: anything from my graduate school statistics course.

But with only the letter X to go on, I answered 59 Across in this morning's New York Times Crossword, "1985 Golden Globe-nominated role for Eddie Murphy."

Answer: Axel Foley.

Free Willie

2008-06-17T05:47:00.000-07:00

Well, the Mets "freed" Willie Randolph from his job as manager.

Sometimes I wonder whether there's always an "inside story" of managers kind of like there is with married couples... when they get divorced I always say, "well, you never really know what goes on between two people."

Though maybe the better analogy is a wealthy playboy who changes his trophy girlfriend whenever he gets tired of the incumbent.

I liked Willie a lot. He didn't strike me as obnoxious and stupid like Dallas Green or hapless and ineffectual like Art Howe. He pulled the levers competently in games, and at least until last year's meltdown, it seemed as though he brought an ethos of hustle to the team.

Was it too much hustle that wore down Jose Reyes? Other than possibly that, I see no performance issues that can be laid on him. Carlos Delgado is aging out fairly normally and has reached a level where he's badly hurting the team, but we're stuck with him and his big contract for now. Carlos Beltran is very, very streaky, but I also think going through a natural age progression of a couple of so-so years after his career year (2006). He's in the trough between the two peaks of his "whale curve," and he'll have one more big year next year or the one after.

The starting pitching is playing at a very unsurprising par. John Maine and Oliver Perez are good but inconsistent #3 starters, Pedro is broken down, Mike Pelfry is figuring it out, and Johann Santana is steady but yields an ungodly number of solo homers -- his 15-13 season last year is probably closer to who he is now than his previous dominating years. It seems to me that the major problem since last year has been massive bullpen inconsistency. Had they blown three fewer saves last year the Mets would have comfortably made the playoffs, and four fewer this year they'd be in second place and 2.5 games out -- and Willie would still be the manager.

As to that, do you blame pitching coach Rick "I Can Fix Zambrano in 10 Minutes" Peterson? Or is it simply that an overperforming bullpen in 2006 and half of 2007 has returned to its statistical norm?

The evening tide

2008-06-13T21:31:00.000-07:00

Leaving the high-water midwest for a road trip...

I love departing on a journey in the evening. I'm not exactly sure why. Maybe it's the leisurely, rather than rushed, lead-up to the departure in contrast to crack-of-dawn start-outs. Maybe it's the connection to sailing ships, which would often set sail on the evening tide.

We packed the car and then hung out at Grandma Moses coffeehouse for an hour or so, waiting for traffic to die down. Then we headed east, with the sun at our backs. This is a road trip, so we didn't put a great distance behind us before turning in for the night. But sleeping in a strange bed and contemplating the miles before us was enough to make it feel like we'd gotten far away.

Maybe "tide" isn't the best metaphor, since by traveling east, we're leaving the Flooded Flyover States behind. Our area isn't flooded but the water is higher than usual. Those rocks below usually stick above the water by about 3 feet. And that short connecting section of the dock usually slopes sharply down.

Marriage-saving crossword puzzle twist

2008-06-12T08:02:00.001-07:00

B and I do the NYT Xword puzzle together most days, which usually means one of us reads clues and fills in the grid while the other sits across the table. As the reader-writer, when you know the answer immediately, it's sometimes tempting to just write it in rather than read it and give the other a moment to try to get the answer too. As the listener, you feel excluded when the reader-writer yields to that temptation.

The other day, B was the reader-writer, and I suggested that when she knew the answer immediately, she should just write it in, say the word out loud and, without reading off the clue... let me try to guess the clue!

It's a fun bit of reverse crosswordese, in which the game is to test your knowledge of NY Times cluing style.

Example: the answer was "TRANS." It could have been "__ Am" or "__ World Airways" or "Conversion from foreign lang." But my guess -- pretty darn close to exactly right -- was "__ fats."

Adds a little spice, no?

Bye bye books

2008-06-11T06:53:00.000-07:00

My computer literacy moves forward in fits and starts. I'm above average for my age group in some things. On the other hand, it was only yesterday that I first used the resource "Hein Online," a web-based archive with PDF images of something close to every page of every law review ever published.

Previously, I'd either used LEXIS or Westlaw, the two longstanding online legal databases. These are not always the best way to retrieve scholarly legal articles. Their html reformatting is not nearly as readable or visually pleasing as the original published formatting, and they don't reproduce charts and tables. Also, of course, I'd go to the actual books, though it has been some time since I got my butt out of my office and into the library stacks.

When I did that yesterday, I learned that my institution has gotten rid of almost all back issues of legal periodicals predating 1990. (Not actually thrown away, thank goodness, but moved into offsite storage.) Hein Online made the books obsolete, in the library's view. I guess shelf space is too valuable to keep dusty ol' books around.

It's true that I can browse on line and then download and print stuff I "need" to have on paper -- I just don't read with as much comprehension on the computer, and I like to mark up the texts. The latter point meant that I needed to get photocopies of the old law reviews, and now I can just print out downloads much more conveniently (and at the cost of no more trees than photocopies).

But I have great nostalgia for my scholarly immersion experiences of sitting at a carrell deep in the library stacks surrounded by piles of old law reviews. That will never happen again -- not as long as I want to look at pre-1990 stuff, anyhow.

I wonder whether other libraries are actually getting rid of books -- throwing them away. That would be short-sighted. What if in the near future, our society undertakes major energy conservation measures, including placing restrictions on computing time?

I take consolation in thinking that, if the lights go out in a big way, then old legal scholarship won't be very important anyhow.

Flowers for Hillary

2008-06-09T05:03:00.000-07:00

What's with all the metaphorical bouquets being thrown by the media at Hillary's feet as she takes her big exit curtain call? It's a little annoying. Usually, this is the winner's moment in the sun. That would be Obama.

Okay, it's an historic campaign where for the first time a woman was a serious presidential contender, she got more votes than "any previous loser," blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah.

And it's weekend coverage, so what's the harm?

One problem is that we don't know for sure that Hillary is in fact bowing out gracefully. While she made a more-or-less gracious concession speech (I think -- I couldn't stand listening to much of it), can she in fact support Obama in some suitable way without making an issue of herself? Will an ugly, self-centered wish that Obama loses so that she can then become the 2012 "candidate of inevitability" sprout up through the cracks in her artificial smile? Only time will tell.

A quick review of the facts: Hillary lost my vote for her presidential campaign when, in 2002, she voted to authorize Bush to use force in Iraq and when she refused forever after to admit she made a mistake. Call me superficial, but I think that a voter's disapproval of a candidate's position on the most important issue of the decade is appropriately signaled by voting for someone else.

Not only was Hillary dead wrong in this position, but she also revealed herself as Bill Clinton redux -- an image-driven, poll-driven centrist pol, who will do or say whatever it takes to get into power and then, once there, forget that the whole point was to use that power to do good.

Ironically, Hillary's desperate effort to repackage herself as a tough, hawkish chief-executive-in-waiting -- again, signaled by that 2002 vote -- probably has not won her a single vote. The public perception of her as a liberal feminista -- a perception driving both the votes for and against her -- was probably immovable all along. Her best strategy would have been to stay true to the ideals of her youth.

And now we learn that her much touted "experience" was also hogwash. Her totally botched campaign was driven repeatedly and ultimately off the rails by a motley crew of (1) foxy, unscrupulous types who were not as smart as they think they are and (2) loyal friends who are incompetent political amateurs. Apparently, there was not one authoritative person among them who could tell Hillary the bad news when she needed to hear it. Her apparently terrible executive style did not bode well for the "candidate of experience" to run the White House.

Hillary's long run also symbolized the Democratic Party's self-destructive streak. This is the "perfect storm" for Republicans, the year they cannot possibly win -- they are responsible for (1) an unpopular and ill-conceived war that (2) has sent the economy hurtling into an impending crisis engineered by (3) a president with 25-28% approval ratings.

But Hillary would have been a weak candidate, for all she tried to spin her self-absorbed refusal to quit as toughness. With her unredeemed Iraq war vote and the stinky cloud of questionable financial dealings that trail her and her husband everywhere, she wouldn't have been able to hit hard enough on McCain's two biggest Achilles heels -- the War and his own involvement in the Savings and Loan crisis of the late 1980s (see the Keating Five), which resonates so powerfully with the current mortgage crisis.

Hillary was the one Democratic candidate that cannot win -- if her campaign mismanagement didn't kill us, her unusually high negatives would have. And we came within a hair's breadth of nominating her! I may not be right about her unelectability -- but thank goodness we'll never know for sure.

"That information would be useless even if they had tried to get it scientifically"

2008-06-08T08:17:00.001-07:00

What my friend DT said in response to the SNY (Mets broadcast station) "In Game Fan Phone-in Poll," which asked: "Do you think Oliver Perez will pitch a good game? (a) yes (b) no."

Good guess!

2008-06-07T11:29:00.000-07:00

I'm trying to book a flight to Denver on United.com. I typed in "Denber" -- note that the "v" and "b" are adjacent on the keyboard.

The web site supposed that I meant: "Dnepropetrovsk Airport, Ukraine."

How much time have you spent handling a Rubik's Cube?

2008-06-06T09:49:00.001-07:00

The other day I made up this simile in a conversation about teaching. I was trying to make the point that any teaching problem could be solved.

For example, anything worth teaching in a law school class could be made more interesting and important than in that moment than a game of computer solitaire. Various obstacles to deploying a law school's teaching resources in a way that improves learning -- often viewed as insuperable -- can in fact be overcome.

It's a sort of faith in the existence of a solution, at the outset of tackling a problem. "It's like a Rubik's Cube," I said. "You know there's an answer even if you can't see how to get there. It takes determination and persisitence."

Having said that, I have to admit that I found the Rubik's Cube itself so boring (a tedious process to a very unsatisfying goal) that I estimate I've spent less than 5 minutes of my life handling one.

I'm badly mismanaging my Netflix queue

2008-06-05T14:10:00.000-07:00

This morning, in conversation, I confused my "Saturn return" with "Mercury retrograde." I'm not even sure that I get a Saturn return. How dumb is that?

What I meant to say is that I'm badly mismanaging my Netflix queue.

Last week I got a copy of The Ten, a star-studded collection of vignettes based on the 10 commandments. It was truly awful -- essentially, sketch comedy that was not good enough for SCTV. At least I think so -- I couldn't watch past a minute into the second sketch. How they ever got the likes of Winona Ryder and Liev Schreiber to act in it I don't know.

But the point is: I don't remember ever putting that movie in my queue! Before that, I wound up getting two musical star biopics, Ray and Walk the Line -- have to see 'em because they were well reviewed, but expect to be bored senseless -- in the same shipment! And today, I received Six Feet Under: Season 1, disc 4. That's well enough in its way, except that what I wanted was Season 4, Disc 1!

Is Netflix taking their "based on your interest in __" recommendations a step further than I realized?

Wish I'd thought of that one

2008-06-03T08:14:00.000-07:00

The Comeback Id. Sweet!

If I had thought that one up, it would be the title to this blog post. But I guess Todd Purdum has put it to better use.

The Clinton campaign's response to the story -- which portrays Bill Clinton as a larger-than-life womanizer who loves jetting around with skanky rich guys between bouts of his explosive temper -- was weirdly, ironically right on the money:

A tawdry, anonymous quote-filled attack piece, published in this month's Vanity Fair magazine regarding former President Bill Clinton repeats many past attacks on him, ignores much prior positive coverage, includes numerous errors, and ultimately breaks no new ground," he added.

Breaks no new ground... we already knew that Clinton was like this!

Frankly, I might be sympathetic to the desire of a man of humble beginnings, who has devoted most of his adult life to public service and is now a late-middle-aged heart-surgery survivor, to kick up some dust before it's too late. True, the conduct is somewhat unseemly in a former president. But what drains away my sympathy is the aspect of his palling around with sleazy businessman political donors while still trying, in some sense, to run the country.

In one way, the Clinton's ongoing political partnership -- he really does want her to have her shot at the White House, it seems -- is kind of touching. I wonder if they'll stay together when her campaign ends?

By the way, isn't there something icky and incestuous about the fact that Purdum is married to Clinton's former press secretary Dee Dee Meyers? (Do you think he's the Tim Busfield character from the West Wing?)

Please, please, please ....!

2008-05-30T05:40:00.000-07:00

... do not pick Hillary as your running mate!

The idea that Obama should pick Clinton as his running mate to "heal the party" or, more precisely, to increase the ticket's appeal to "white, blue collar males" is ludicrous.

One of the facts of our political life is that Republicans win the white house more often than Democrats, even though more voters are registered as Democrats than Republicans. The reason for this is that many registered Democrats vote for the Republican presidential candidate in November.

It stands to reason that many of those Republican-voting registered Democrats will vote in Democratic primaries, particularly this year when the primaries continue to have an impact on the nomination. I seriously doubt that, in November, Hillary would win many votes of white males who can't stomach the idea of a black man as president. Chances are they're not too keen about a white woman either. They'll vote for McCain.

There are apparently white women who feel the same way. As for white women Democrats who would normally vote Democratic in November, but will take their ball and go home if Hillary doesn't get the nomination? How many of those are there, compared to independents among the majority of Americans who find her to be untrustworthy? The pollsters don't tell us that.

Anyway, having Hillary on the ticket doesn't pick up a single white male vote. Well, maybe one: Bill Clinton.

Clinton Unveils "Lou Gehrig Strategy"

2008-05-26T07:29:00.000-07:00

".... and we all remember that it was early June, 1925, when Yankees first baseman Wally Pipp went down with an injury," Senator Clinton continued. "If Lou Gehrig hadn't been right there, ready to take over, if he had simply given up because Wally Pipp was the front-runner for the first baseman job, why, history would be very, very different. Gehrig was of course the greatest first baseman of all time. And that was, I believe, June 2, which is still some days off."

Apparently, the legend that Pipp sat out due to an injury (a headache, in fact), is false. But the point is about the distinction between a "gaffe" and a "slip of the tongue." The latter is something that a person didn't intend to say. A "gaffe" is a broader category that also includes poorly chosen words.

Watch the video of Hillary making the "Bobby Kennedy" comment. She was clearly in pre-fabricated "talking point" mode. It's just more of her bad campaigning.

Your baby is not your rock band

2008-05-10T09:40:00.000-07:00

So why do you think it's okay to give your baby a name designed to express your identity?

I'm not saying that parents are naming their kids "Sonic Grease Monkey" or anything. My point is that I get the feeling that a lot of baby naming is about the personal expression of the parents-to-be. Here they are, bringing this new autonomous human being into the world, and they mark it with vicarious intentions even before it's even born.

"I want(ed) to be totally unique, so I'll give my kid a totally unique name!"

The category that comes to most readily to mind are girl names drawn from the 19th century American Lit survey course: for girls, "Emerson," "Whitman," "Melville" and "Fenimore."

I was thinking if I had a baby girl, it would be kind of cool to name her "Pint o' Guinness Madison."

But you have to think ahead, to such situations as when she signs up for cable TV service by phone:

No, it's P-I-N-T space, small O, apostrophe. .... No, apostrophe, the punctuation mark. Like between the I and the M in "I'm".... no, that's just an example! ... actually, it's pronounced "pine-toe," not "pinto." No, the space is between the T and the O!!!

A related issue: naming your kid after a cognitive impairment (hat tip to Voxwoman for this one):

Alexia -- a neurologic disorder marked by loss of the ability to understand written or printed language, usually resulting from a brain lesion or a congenital defect.

Even Newer Comments Policy

2008-05-10T09:32:00.000-07:00

In an effort to eliminate one of the factors that has discouraged me from blogging, I will from now on be deleting comments that annoy me. If you find your comment having mysteriously disappeared, it will most likely be because it annoyed me. To the extent that I continue blogging, it's because I enjoy doing so, and not to read and sometimes respond to annoying comments.

The man who deserves more credit for electing Bush than anyone other than Karl Rove...

2008-02-24T09:05:00.000-08:00

... enters this year's presidential race. Can he succeed in getting McCain elected this time?

McCain's combover and "reverse Swift-boating"

2008-02-13T09:55:00.000-08:00

I have a mental image of John McCain as a basically bald guy who keeps his remaining hair in a crew cut, which is what I had in mind when writing yesterday's post. Apparently I projected the crew cut onto his head -- maybe because of his military background -- but checking old photos, it looks like he's done the combover since at least as far back as 2000.

DBP's comment in yesterday's post is worth deconstructing:

Actually Oscar, he doesn't do it. He lost the ability to raise his arms to head-height at some point in N. Vietnam. His hair gets combed by someone else. I suppose he directs how they do it, but maybe he either doesn't care or just trusts the judgement of the comber--or comboverer, if you will.

I haven't bothered to fact-check DBP's assertion about the arm-raising thing, but either way, the comment -- a ploy to trick me into believing I'd made fun of someone's disability --succeeds only in exposing DBP's ignorance of the problems of male baldness. A combover is not a question of how you choose to comb your hair. It's a question of how you choose to grow your hair. You have to decide to grow those strands out long enough to cover all that bare scalp. (For mysef, I've already decided that if and when I have as little hair as McCain -- which I consider to be likely in my future -- I'm going crew cut or shaved head.) Few of us cut our own hair, so an arm-raising disability has nothing to do with it.

Nice try, DBP. To paraphrase Larry David: you sir are obviously not a member of the bald community.

But the more bothersome aspect of DBP's comment is its subtext of "reverse Swift-boating." Republicans like DBP are already girding their loins for the argument: "how dare you take potshots at John McCain, who suffered in a POW camp while serving his country and now carries the scars!"

Of course, Republicans are no great respecters of war records of wounded Vietnam vets. It's not just their all too recent and unbearably cynical hyping of Bush's Air National Guard "service," or even the disgusting "Swift Boat" campaign from 2004. Another one of Rove's triumphs was his successful Swift-boating of Max Cleland, defeating the Georgia Senator's re-election bid. Cleland had lost both his legs in combat in Vietnam, but that didn't stop the Republican sleaze machine from raising phony questions suggesting that Cleland's injuries were somehow ignominiously received.

So let's not here more of this "how dare you" nonsense from the GOP.

How does McCain do it?

2008-02-12T08:50:00.000-08:00

He's, like, totally bald, and yet has a combover at the same time!

Foreign TV

2008-02-06T11:04:00.000-08:00

We haven't turned on the TV in our rented Paris apartment until tonight. As much as I've enjoyed a week-long break from TV, I have to say it's fascinating to watch TV in Europe.

Tonight I'm struck by the extensive news coverage of Super Tuesday. The French news broadcast (my understanding of which was, admittedly, very sketchy) went into considerable detail, including an explanation of the difference between Republican "winner-take-all" primaries and Democratic proportional delegate distribution.

I'm guessing that a higher proportion of French people could name the 3rd place Republican presidential hopeful than of American people who could name the current president of France. (Hint: his name sounds like the symptom for certain forms of cancer.)

Switching over to Aljazeera's English-language broadcast, we see a news feature looking at the U.S. presidential primaries from the perspective of China. Desperate for interviews, the Chinese correspondent interviews a Chinese man who took a course with Obama while attending the University of Chicago Law School.

Aljazeera's teaser for its coverage of the U.S. presidential primaries says, "It's the most important job in the world. Who will fill it?" And now I'm watching the Riz Khan Show, a talking-head "news analysis" of Super Tuesday with Donna Shalala (former HHS secretary, and an Arab American, by the way) and two other American pundits fielding perceptive call in questions from viewers in places like Pakistan, Saudi Arabia and Dubai. Questions such as: "Would John McCain and Hillary Clinton offer the American voters a real choice, or are their moderate-to-conservative views too similar?" and "Are Americans ready for a black president?"

Aljazeera has a program called "Frontline America" which runs features on aspects of American society that don't make the mainstream American media -- like 200,000 "medical tourists" who travel to Mexico each year for medications and treatment.

I know this is a lot of "enough about us Americans... what do you think of us?" But I feel like I could learn a lot.

McCain Fails to Clinch Nomination

2008-02-06T00:05:00.000-08:00

No Longer "Candidate of Certainty"

Romney, Huckabee both declare victory

Arizona Senator John McCain's campaign suffered a major setback yesterday as he failed to deliver the expected knockout blow to the insurgencies of Massachusetts Governer Mitt Romney and that guy Huckabee from one of the southern states.

Although garnering several hundred more delegates than his two rivals, McCain let the nomination slip through his grasp as Huckabee and Romney scored surprise victories in several states.

"The image of McCain as the annointed favorite has been badly tarnished," according to Republican strategist Lawrence Flunch. "The McCain juggernaut has been knocked off course, showing a lack of sufficient punching power to 'close the deal' that could prove a fatal weakness."

Just spinning.

Just another Mardi here in Paris...

2008-02-05T13:49:00.000-08:00

Still awaiting primary results here at expat central.

On the streets of Paris, we have seen no sign that Mardi Gras is anything special here. Just business as usual. Other than a guy in a French sailor suit, who could have been in costume. Of course, he could have been a sailor.

Cry at me once, shame on you; cry at me twice... we won't be fooled again

2008-02-05T10:26:00.000-08:00

I'm not in the least surprised she cried again. It must have tested well with focus groups...

Paris, 11:45 a.m., Super Tuesday

2008-02-05T08:58:00.000-08:00

We await the Super Tuesday results with great anticipation. (In case you were wondering, one of the following is true: either (a) My Home Town is located in a state that is not holding a primary today or (b) I voted absentee. I wouldn't sit this one out for anything.)

The French understand who's in this race: "Obama against The Clintons."

Here's a little extra political plug I meant to put in my extremely influential endorsement of Obama the other day. Hilary Clinton's experience isn't particularly good experience because, I suspect, she was very wrapped up in the Clinton Administration's knack for learning the wrong lessons from political setbacks.

The lesson? I oversimplify a bit, but not much. It's this: never attempt anything that appears to be unpopular at the moment, no matter how good it is for the country in the medium or long run. Clinton was like a fairy-tale miser, forever accumulating and hoarding his political capital. And for what? So he could leave office with approval ratings over 60% in spite of his sex scandal and impeachment. That's why I say Clinton was such a disappointing president. Political capital is supposed to be spent -- on far-sighted policies, judicial appointments, and the like, that meet momentary resistance.

Bill Clinton was the biggest slave to the polls of any president in modern memory. And he's Hilary's political mentor, no matter how many pantsuits she wears in the White House.

So, 11:45 a.m. in Paris. At this very moment, millions of American voters are...

...still asleep, I guess.

In Paris, whatever you do, don't break stride!

2008-02-04T11:50:00.000-08:00

Street safety. Parisian drivers are notorious for ignoring pedestrians.... Don't assume you have the right of way, even in a crosswalk. When crossing a street, keep your pace constant and don't stop suddenly. By law, drivers must miss pedestrians by only a meter -- a little more than three feet. Drivers carefully calculate your speed and won't hit you, provided you don't alter your route or pace.

---Rick Steves, Paris 2008

I never knew this before. In former trips to Paris, I proceeded only with a generalized sense that you take your life in your hands when crossing the street.

It turns out the Rick Steves is right... and it's not only the drivers. Basically, every resident of Paris carefully calculates your speed and won't hit you, provided that you don't alter your route or pace. This includes motorcyclists, bicyclists and even other pedestrians.

"Smart car" for sure! A Parisian driver prepares to miss the pedestrian by one meter.

I found this out the hard way, on successive days, when I broke stride to avoid, first, a cyclist, and later, a pedestrian. Both were coming straight at me, having apparently done a thorough analysis of my vector and triangulated their personal solution for avoiding me but then -- whammo -- I stopped, thereby screwing up the whole system.

The problem is that, as an American, I find it very counterintuitive not to alter my pace to avoid other people in motion. I'm used to stopping for other people, whether they're on foot or in vehicles, to let them pass. But the French person will not pass harmlessly in front of me, since they'll have carefully calculated their own route and speed to pass one meter behind where I'm supposed to be. Only, having stopped, I'm in their spot.

We've all had the experience of walking head on toward another person, coming to a dead halt face-to-face, saying "excuse me," stepping to the side to get out of the other person's way only to find that they've stepped to the side, mirroring your move and continuing the impasse. And this impasse can continue for a few moves, as one or both parties chuckle in nervous embarrassment.

Two Parisian motorcyclists carefully miss me by one meter
on the sidewalk near the Hotel de Ville.

It happens -- but not that often -- and we Americans live with that and move on. But the French totally melt down in that situation. I looked into the eyes of this French bicyclist and pedestrian and on both occasions, what I saw there was sheer, uncomprehending terror -- followed quickly by a barrage of epithets.

Don't try to avoid pedestrians like these -- the safest thing for all involved
is to walk straight at them.

So my advice for dealing with a pedestrian walking right toward you is the same as Admiral Lord Nelson's advice to his captains for dealing with French ships: "never mind maneuvers, always go straight at 'em."

"For us its Mardi Gras, but for you it's 'Super Tuesday'"

2008-02-03T13:41:00.000-08:00

This is what the cab driver said to us on the way into Paris from Charles deGaulle Airport. Which candidate does he like?

"Obama," he said. "He represents something new, something different."

A nice way to boil it down. One of our friends, who we're traveling with, put it this way: "Voting for Hilary is like feeding the dog that bit you. You don't really know whether Obama is a dog that's going to bite you are not. But with Hilary, you know."

I found it inexpressibly irritating the way the New York Times kept running those profiles of the young Hilary Clinton featuring cute-as-a-button photos of her from her idealistic college and law school days. The idealistic Hilary is long gone. All she has to offer now is another round of cynical, centrist Democratic Leadership Council centrism. Dick Morris all over again. It's so '90s.

Of course, is doesn't matter, because, get this: Hilary can't win. The Democratic Party is self-destructive enough to hand her the nomination, and she may well win it with her sub-50% support among registered Democrats. But she has prohibitively high, intractible negatives, even among Democrats. And this country can afford another Republican administration even less than another Clinton administration.

Obama offers at least the possibility of vision and inspiring leadership. Obama for President.

The tricoleur has this certain je ne sais quoi

2008-02-02T23:41:00.000-08:00

The French flag -- the "tricolor" -- is so simple in design that it can hardly be called a design, yet for some reason I find it to be a really good-looking flag. I'm not quite sure why. Maybe it's from the overwhelmingly cute illustrations in the Madeleine books I read as a child.

Or maybe the French, in their genius for design, figured out that the tricolor just looks good in front of the sandstone building facades of Paris -- a small but striking patch of color in a sea of beige, buff and gray.

The Musee d'Orsay.

Whatever the reason, it seems inevitable that Major League Baseball, with its almost bloody-minded obsession with protecting its various logos, will one day soon try to sue the French Republic for trademark infringement.

How long before I receive a cease and desist letter demanding the removal

of the MLB logo, above left?

What's wrong with this picture?

2008-02-01T04:07:00.001-08:00

No, I'm not inviting you to comment on my meager photography skills. The theme for today is: how is Paris different from just a few years ago (the last time I was here).

1. Where are the cigarettes?

Paris has instituted a smoking ban. I don't know the details, but cafes disallow smoking indoors at cafes, restaurants, etc. I'd heard about this before our arrival, but we'd assumed that the ban would be as strictly enforced as the requirement to pick up dog poop. But so far, we haven't encountered any scofflaw-ism. It's incredible to linger over your amazing French coffee without the acrid smell of cigarette smoke wafting into your face. Maybe Parisians are even discovering that their food tastes better! Smokers are relegated to the outdoor seating -- they have to be pretty intrepid to smoke in this cold, rainy winter weather.

Get your butts outside! Paris smoking ban seems to be working.

Unfortunately, there is still dog crap all over the sidewalks, as usual. But one victory at a time -- today, public indoor smoking, tomorrow dog poop!

2. Les velos publiques

Paris now sports 20,000 community mopeds. Apparently, you rent one at these stands located all over the city, ride it around, and leave it at an open stall in the stand nearest your destination. Quelle bonne idee!

3. Where's the attitude?

As incredible as the smoking ban is, I'm at least equally struck by the consistent friendliness and politeness we've encountered from Parisians. The legendary Parisian brusqueness toward American tourists isn't merely a myth -- it's what I've always encountered, in 5 prior trips to Paris. But not this time.

This morning, B and I entered a coffee store to by some ground coffee for our apartment. And while I have no trouble ordering a cup of coffee, I suddenly realized I lacked the vocabulary to buy bulk coffee. How do you say "beans"? How do you discuss which degree of grind you want? I said to the proprieter (in my high school French), "I believe that I don't speak coffee" -- and he actually laughed!

Taxi drivers, proprieters, people on the street... they've mostly displayed patience with our lousy French, a willingness to help, a general benevolence, even a willingness to smile.

What's the difference? Could it be that they like Americans at this particular moment because of our Democratic primaries -- enchanted by the potentiality that the Americans may replace the internationally despised Bush with a woman or a black man?

Could it be that we're here in the dead of winter, rather than -- as in my past visits -- during spring or summer when there were heaps of tourists?

Who can tell? I'm just going to ride this velo of good will as long as it lasts.

Sailing on the evening tide

2008-01-31T13:05:00.000-08:00

Northwest Airlines ground crew on the tarmac at My Home Town Airport.
The little figure at bottom center is a snowman, which the ground crew dressed up
with a reflective vest and hand-signal flares.

In the olden days of transoceanic travel, departures frequently occurred in the evening, to take advantage of the tide. Sailing on the evening time symbolizes sleeping, eating, living on the ship until it reaches at the destination port. That has always struck me an integral part of the romance of travel, where time has to be taken in the getting there, where the adventure is not only in the arrival. The need for sleeping accommodation on the conveyance itself shows a commitment, that one will transfer one's whole life, albeit temporarily, to the journey.

A vestige of that can be recreated by train travel, but air travel essentially kills that romance. Air travel is simply about getting there fast. I generally zone out, "kill time" until it's over, all the while looking forward to the day when, like Star Trek, we can be simply "beamed" to our destination.

On this trip, a 6 p.m. departure for the Old World, I tried to get into the mindset of the evening tide. And it sort of worked. The flight was kind of nice. I have to say, I really like the fancy new personal entertainment centers they provide at your seat -- we had a choice of about 20 movies, in addition to music and other stuff, and they were offered DVD like with start times when you wanted them (not a single start time for the whole cabin) and the ability to pause, rewind and fast forward.

The next morning we were in Paris.

WWJBD?

2008-01-29T19:00:00.000-08:00

It's my new mantra for travel-related frustrations. Such as:

Incomprehensible airline regulations

Train conductor screaming at me because the train is four hours late and he is “tired of taking shit from people.”

Camera is "on the fritz"

Vendors who skillfully rip you off

Department store cashier treats you like an industrial spy

Helmut, the authoritarian flight attendant

Security guard stops you from taking pictures

Unanticipated public transportation strike

Getting stared at

Sketchy internet access

Fussy "tour fuhrers"

People who spray chloroform into your train compartment and then rob you when you're unconscious

European low-cost-flight airports

WWJBD -- What would Jason Bourne do?

Yep, you guessed it -- TRAVEL BLOGGING!!!

But at least he won't be able to shampoo on the plane

2008-01-28T17:30:00.000-08:00

News item: "TSA tester slips mock bomb past airport security"

Bill Clinton...

2008-01-27T18:42:00.000-08:00

... is really starting to seem like an ex. I don't mean an "ex-President." He's like the nation's ex-boyfriend from a long-term relationship that was ultimately disappointing and unhealthy for us. We still think he's fundamentally a good guy, and super smart, but his charm has become somewhat threadbare. We still like him. But, honestly, he's starting to act somewhat nutty. Thank goodness we got ourselves out of that one!

1,000 Lies

2008-01-26T06:30:00.000-08:00

What I love about the new Center for Public Integrity study -- documenting 935 false public statements made by Bush and his administration to justify going to war in Iraq -- is the pure numoristy of it. Not only is it a big number, and a big validation of the feeling of most of us that we were repeatedly lied to. It's a number. A simple, compact fact. A reduction of an entire campaign of lies, indeed of an entire administration to a single integer.

And it cries out to be rounded off to 1,000. "The Presidency of the 1,000 Lies" -- a beautifully perfect historical label. The chapter heading for "w" in the Book of American Presidents.

Or you could think of it as the Scheherezade Presidency. "If you tell the American people one lie every day for a thousand days, you will have a second term."

I wonder whether this study will have any impact at all on the 2008 presidential election. The story has been picked up by msm, but does it have any "legs"? In my book, the Republican Party should be per se disqualified from the election. I say, more than 500 big lies and you're out.

Who's next?

2008-01-20T07:54:00.000-08:00

Friday -- Bobby Fisher.

Saturday -- Suzanne Pleshette.

Whose demise will round out this latest "celebrity three"? (Note: If you Google "celebrity threes," this blog comes up as the first hit!)

Often, you'll find some significant connection between two of the three celebrities who die within a short time of one another. The next one could be Bob Newhart -- Pleshette's fictional husband on The Bob Newhart Show. Gosh, I hope it's not Bob Dylan.

They could be brothers: the two Bobby's,
born two years apart -- left, Zimmerman, right, Fisher.

What's the connection? According to "Bobby Fisher's Pathetic Endgame," five years ago in the Atlantic Monthly,

To generate income, however, [Fisher] resorted to selling himself to chess fans and curiosity seekers. The going rate for an hour's phone conversation was $2,500. Bob Dylan is said to have received a call from Fischer as a gift from his manager. For $5,000 a personal meeting could be arranged.

According to "bobbyfisher.net", Dylan is "a rabid chess player and fellow religious recluse." The Fisher-Dylan conversation is probably in my top ten "conversations between famous people I'd be curious to have heard."

I'm posting this photo of Suzanne Pleshette to emphasize the point that she was rather hot at one time and that youth and beauty are fleeting. The obits tend to post this very recent photo of her. Actually, she wasn't bad looking for a 70-year old, in a Judge Judy sort of way.

She had a somewhat scratchy voice as a late-30/early-40 -something on the Newhart show. I'm guessing that she was a heavy lifelong smoker, hence her relatively early death from lung cancer.

UPDATE (1/23/08): Tuesday -- Heath Ledger. Huh??? Didn't see that one coming...

Perfect week!

2008-01-20T07:49:00.000-08:00

Seven-for-seven solving NYT crosswords this week, only the second time ever!

The puzzle week begins on Monday, of course, since that's when they restart the easy-to-hard degree-of-difficulty progression.

So, basically, when the Terrorism Threat Level is "orange," the threat level in my bathroom is "red"

2008-01-15T18:54:00.000-08:00

According to John Tierney in today's "Science Times Section" of the New York Times:

when statisticians look at cold numbers, they have variously estimated the chances of the average person dying in America at the hands of international terrorists to be comparable to the risk of dying from eating peanuts, being struck by an asteroid or drowning in a toilet.

Thus, my bathroom is far more dangerous to me than international terrorists, when you consider the added risks of slipping in the shower, of hitting my head on the corner of the medicine cabinet door when I stand up after picking up the dropped toothpaste-tube cap, and the fact that I on occasion eat peanuts in the bathroom...

Bermed! Though not too badly bermed this time...

2007-12-31T08:48:00.000-08:00

I wish they could invent a snowplow that could clear the street without leaving a berm of snow across the entrance to one's driveway.

We've been bermed much, much worse than this. But this camera tends to supress verticals. That's about 10 minutes worth of shoveling right there.

Calling Neel Mehta

2007-12-17T19:22:00.000-08:00

In a recent post about rock music, Neel displays a rock band poster for "Citizen Dick." Sly movie afficianado that he is, Neel doesn't even mention that Citizen Dick was the name of the fictional band headed by the Matt Dillon character in Cameron Crowe's Singles. Has some real band stolen the name?

Here's a movie trivia question for the master (Neel). Last year's well-regarded mockumentary about public school teachers, Chalk, was made by a production company called "Virgil Films," which sports a modest logo against a back backdrop with an evocative soundtrack: "plock-plock... pffft.... plock-plock .... pffft."

Okay, Neel, re-rent the movie if you have to. To what film is "Virgil Films" alluding? Hint: it's one of my all-time faves.

ANSWER (12/24/07): The Great Escape. The lead character, played by Steve McQueen, was named "Virgil Hilts," and the sound was that of playing solitaire catch by bouncing a baseball off the concrete walls and floor of the "cooler" -- the solitary confinement cell in the prison camp. McQueen/Hilt's repeated stints in the cooler and the baseball-bouncing were a leitmotif in the film.

"Magical realism is the chili-inflected chocolate of literature"

2007-12-16T18:16:00.000-08:00

That's all, really. Just a clever thing I said over dinner.

A ravaged advent calendar

2007-12-15T05:21:00.001-08:00

I totally get the charm of these Christmas season calendars: you open the tiny trap door marked by a number corresponding to that particular day in December and get a little piece of chocolate. It's a ritualized treat that keeps you going until Christmas.

It's great in theory, but I'm not one to be hidebound by traditional rules when it comes to chocolate. I'm somewhat rapacious when it comes to chocolate. With this particular advent calendar, I played along for 3 or 4 days, and then I said to myself, "It's my advent calendar, and I can eat it all now if I want to!"

I don't want you to have the image of me shoveling fistfuls of dainty chocolate morsels into my mouth all at once. It was really quite a civilized, one-at-a-time affair. Many of the pieces of chocolate were eaten together with these ginger-infused shortbread thingies which I discovered went really well with milk chocolate.

So why do I feel like Attila the Hun?

Aping the banana

2007-12-12T14:55:00.000-08:00

I read recently that apes and monkeys peel bananas from the tip at the opposite end of the stem.

Like the author who described it, I agree that this is a better way to peel a banana. Basically, you pinch the tip, the peel breaks open more easily, and the little chewy strands peel away rather than sticking to the banana. Also, the stem -- now on the bottom -- can serve as a little "holder."

I have no idea why we humans invariably peel the banana from the stem, but the bigger point is that sometimes doing things in the opposite way turns out to be better. After years of shoveling snow, I tried "aping the banana" yesterday by shoveling in a direction away from the snowpile and throwing shovelfuls of snow over my shoulder and onto the pile.

Aside from trivial amounts of "redeposition" (stray powder falling back onto the ground where I'd already shoveled), I found that I could toss the snow onto the pile with sufficient accuracy from a distance at least equal to the width of my driveway. More importantly (perhaps due to the ergonomic "dog-leg" design of my shovel handle), I found it easier on my back to toss snow over my should than with the traditional forward scoop-toss.

I'm not saying this approach works for everything. I'm not saying we should all drive down the street in reverse. But for some things, it's worth considering.

Shirts and skins

2007-12-04T07:43:00.001-08:00

After playing hockey in the mornings, I often have occasion to walk through the part of the gym with the basketball courts. There one can see numerous pickup games with teams divided into "shirts" and "skins."

The majority of men in these games are over thirty and have love handles and a layer of seal blubber, accentuated by a shiny layer of sweat. A solid minority are pale and scrawny. They are the opposite of eye candy. Eye rat poison, perhaps.

Men clearly overestimate how good they look without their shirts. Objectively speaking, I'm guessing that perhaps 5% of men look good without their shirts -- and perhaps that's wildly optimistic -- but if American men were surveyed on the question "do you look good without your shirt," at least 60% would answer "yes."

In hockey, we don't play "shirts" and "skins." We play light and dark jerseys. So what's the deal with basketball -- don't these guys own light and dark t-shirts?

Living in Lake Wobegon

2007-12-01T09:17:00.000-08:00

Sitting in the Cottage Cafe over a recently "warmed up" cup of coffee, I stared out the plate glass window while an inch of snow accumulated, I realized that if I don't live in Lake Wobegon, I don't live that far from it either.

The Cottage Cafe is an authentic diner of this region. Not an old-time railroad-car style diner, nor a 50s style diner, nor a breakfast nook of a place with cozy booths, the Cottage has a large, square dining room filled with formica tables and bathed in the cool glow of flourescent lights. The warmth of the place is provided by a combination of well-made comfort food and friendly waitresses who volunteer just a wee bit more than you want to know about them.

In the entrance-way "air lock," where we button up our coats on the way out into the snow, we a bulletin board covered in tacked-up leaflets advertizing such matters as used dairy equipment for sale, and a "meat raffle."

Lake Wobegon's Chatterbox Cafe undoubtedly looks like this. It resembles the Hollywood version of a warm and cozy diner about as much as a real gen-exer's New York apartment resembles the huge New York loft apartments of the movies.

Bobby

2007-11-24T11:41:00.000-08:00

I finally watched Bobby last night, having every intention of liking it. Its political context, in which the subversion of the democratic process leads to the prolongation of a pointless war, is certainly timely.

Writer-director Emilio Estevez tells the story from the vantage point of the random assortment of collateral victims of the shooting -- their backstory, how they happened to be in the line of fire at that moment. Although that's a challenging tack, I'm sure there must be a way to make it work.

But not this attempt. The overwhelming impression was that of a cheesy disaster movie. And the late 1960s clothing and hairstyles made it even more reminiscent of flicks like The Towering Inferno.

Guage your mental decline...

2007-11-23T15:58:00.000-08:00

... with this simple test:

How frequently do you forget which way to turn the hot and cold water taps in your shower or bathtub?

Happy Thanksgiving

2007-11-22T08:30:00.000-08:00

I was going to write a new blog post about Thanksgiving, but looking back into the archives, I found that I really couldn't say it any better than I did here, two years ago.

As with Thanksgiving food prep, the old ways are the best. Why come up with something new just for the sake of newness?

Should I feel shame or alarm?

2007-11-20T11:48:00.000-08:00

Today's NYTCP gave the clue "Spock, on his father's side," and I immediately started writing "Klingon." I only realized my mistake when I found that I had run out of spaces after writing "Klingo."

I can't tell which feeling should predominate: alarm at my eroding memory, or shame at having mortally insulted the inhabitants of planet Vulcan.

Where's my $10,000???

2007-11-14T17:54:00.001-08:00

So the Iraq War is going to cost every U.S. family of four about $20,000. I have a family of 2, so I figure that two Bush voters need to pony up $5,000 each to pay me back. No checks, please.

I'm running my kitchen like it was a crime lab!

2007-11-13T07:11:00.000-08:00

I made a batch of regular and a batch of decaf iced coffee at the same time -- and forgot to mark which was which.

Can you please look at this picture and tell me which one you think is caffeinated?

Into the Wild

2007-11-11T07:16:00.000-08:00

I saw Into the Wild last night, Sean Penn's adaptation of Jon Krakauer's book recounting the true story of the last two years in the life of Chris McCandless. Right after graduating from college, McCandless embarked on a "journey of self discovery," bumming around the Western half of the U.S. for two years, ultimately reaching his destination of trying to live alone in the Alaskan wilderness, where he starved to death. From the beginning, McCandless made himself untraceable and made no contact with his family, driving his parents mad with worry and grief.

Although McCandless seemed to have been exceptionally charismatic and resourceful, there is nothing particularly original about a young man dropping out of society to "find himself" -- indeed, by the time McCandless tried it in 1992, it was perhaps as quaint and passe as the aging hippies he hooked up with for a time.

But that's why Krakauer's book was so brilliant: taking a well-worn story line of youthful angst and grandiosity, where we know the unpleasant outcome from the beginning, Krakauer spun a compelling, page-turning narrative.

Movie adaptations of books can go two different ways: either try to stay close to the source material, or else use the book as a mere point of departure for something different. Most go the latter route, since sticking close to the original book is difficult to pull off. Penn goes for the "faithful adaptation" and has made the best film rendition of a book I've ever seen.

I read a particularly galling and stupid review of Into the Wild, regrettably by eminent New Yorker critic David Denby, that attacked Penn for failing to see "the egocentricity in a revolt that is as naïve as it is grandly self-destructive." But both Penn and Krakauer understand and convey McCandless's egocentricity perfectly. Denby's critique is simply his own baggage -- that of a middle-aged fogy who can only deal with youthful angst by minimizing and denigrating it. Denby might as well could easily say the same thing about Hamlet -- whose quest for meaning, likewise triggered by rage at his parents, was just as egocentric, grandiose and cruelly heedless of others as that of McCandless. Isn't Into the Wild a retelling of the Hamlet story, with the backdrop changed from Elsinore Castle to the American west?

There are certain times when the soul opens a window into the bottomless question of whether our lives have meaning. One is when, as teenagers or a bit later (college graduation for McCandless), we stand on the threshold of adulthood and realize with resentment or outrage, that our parents will not in fact take care of us our whole lives. The next is when, on reaching middle age, we first truly understand that we are going to die.

These open windows are terrible and frightening. Egocentricity and neurosis probably distort whatever glimpses of "the truth" may be found by those who, like McCandless, take these moments seriously. The rest of us deal with our fear and anxiety by laughing at the foolishness of "teen angst" and "mid-life crisis." Shakespeare's gift to our culture was that, in Hamlet, he took that window of "teen angst" very seriously and told us that we can learn something from those who are willing to stare out into the void. I'm not saying Sean Penn or Jon Krakauer are Shakespeare, but like Shakespeare, they get it.

Looks like somebody didn't get the memo about the Chevy "Nova"

2007-11-06T16:33:00.000-08:00

The "Nothing" Corportion, Tyson's Corner, Virginia.

World's greatest murder mystery

2007-11-05T20:53:00.000-08:00

You know this murder mystery movie formula: the first half of the movie sets up several possible suspects for the murder that has not yet, but inevitably will, occur. You see these several characters behaving suspiciously, acquiring a motive, and positioning themselves to have the opportunity to kill the victim.

Lately I've been feeling like a minor character in a great murder mystery -- just a helpless onlooker. The victim -- not dead yet -- is the human race, or perhaps even the planet earth. The suspects include global warming (or its handmaidens: flood, drought, severe climatic shift); pollution and/or extinction of species vital to the food chain; famine; MERSA, avian flu or some other pandemic; or nuclear terrorism; or a computer virus that shuts down the civilized world; or Putin's new Russia; or overpopulation. We don't quite know yet which one will get us.

Just another way to express my worries.

That's got "high school play" written all over it

2007-10-13T07:00:00.000-07:00

Claire Danes stars in Pygmalion.

It's finally happened

2007-09-02T08:33:00.001-07:00

I always wondered whether you could finish a crossword puzzles with answers that seem to fit, but are "wrong," or at least not what the puzzle author intended.

B and I just did last Sunday's (August 26) crossword puzzle. Here are the correct answers for the section in question:

The clue for 38 Across (answer: "AGES") was "It's been ____." We had "AGAS."

The clue for 49 Across (answer: "RAGGED") was "Rough." We had "JAGGED."

This meant that we had "RAAJ" for 33 down, whose clue was "Trunk location." Which I took to be an alternate spelling of RAJ, which means "the British rule in India," where they have elephants, which have trunks.

Okay, it's a stretch. And wrong, too, since RAAJ doesn't seem to be an alternate spelling of RAJ. But as a stretch, it's not that much stretchier than many of their correct answers. Like "Hugmetight" for "Short, close-fitting jacket" this past Friday.

Still, a lesson learned. Like the Multistate Bar Exam, sometimes you have to look for the "best" answer rather than a single "right" answer.

Don't let the screen door hit you, Condi

2007-09-01T07:04:00.000-07:00

The front page story in today's NYT suggests that Condi Rice's soft landing from her bumpy ride as the Bush Admin's foreign policy guru may have to be somewhere other than Stanford University, where she was provost before joining the Bush team.

There's a lot of feeling of revulsion toward her by Stanford students and faculty. And in my view it's well deserved.

History will soon reveal that George W. Bush's governing style was characterized by two things. First, he was led around by the nose by a couple of key advisors who put or kept him in power or were surrogate father figures for having served in his father's administration: Dick Cheney, Donald Rumsfeld, Karl Rove. Second, everybody else of importance in his administration was a flunky and a yes-man or -woman.

It's one thing for a mediocre non-entity like Alberto Gonzalez to act as flunky: unquestioningly towing the Bush party line at every step and then taking the heat to protect the President. It's quite another for somebody like Condi Rice to do so.

Loyalty can be an admirable quality, but within limits. Loyalty to a dishonest administration that makes historically bad decisions, loyalty that leads one to distort and manipulate facts in order to deflect blame for those historically bad decisions, shows a serious absence of integrity. Condi Rice was smart enough to know better, but lacked the moral fiber to do better. She should have resigned years ago.

The notion (always ludicrous, I thought) that she would be a serious candidate for president is surely dead now. That's justice. So is her rejection by Stanford, if that's how it plays out. A leading university like Stanford should be a community of conscience. Let her next post be an executive position at Halliburton.

International News Roundup

2007-08-20T04:14:00.000-07:00

Whoever said that Americans are uninterested in important current events in other parts of the world? The following are from CNN.com/World. (See here and here, to prove that I am not making any of this up.)

Bears eat man at beer festival
A 23-year old Serb was found dead and half-eaten in the bear cage of Belgrade Zoo at the weekend during the annual beer festival.

The man was found naked, with his clothes lying intact inside the cage. Two adult bears, Masha and Misha, had dragged the body to their feeding corner and reacted angrily when keepers tried to recover it.

"There's a good chance he was drunk or drugged. Only an idiot would jump into the bear cage," zoo director Vuk Bojovic told Reuters.

But only a diabolical genius would drug someone and leave him inside the bear cage. What about that, Mr. Zoo Director? You are not as clever as the German police, as we see in the next item.

11 hurt at Tom Cruise film shoot
Eleven people were injured when they fell off the back of a truck during the shooting of Tom Cruise's latest film in Berlin, police said on Monday.
In "Valkyrie," Cruise plays Colonel Claus von Stauffenberg, who fronted the failed attempt by a group of largely military conspirators to assassinate Adolf Hitler in July 1944.

The 11 fell from the truck when a side panel burst open as it drove around a corner in central Berlin on Sunday evening, police said. One of them was seriously hurt and had to remain in hospital. Filming was halted after the accident.

"We have no findings to suggest anyone famous was involved in the accident," said a police spokesman...

If anyone famous had been involved, CNN would have had to upgrade the story from World News to Star news.

The Leader

2007-08-14T05:39:00.000-07:00

To German speakers, "Fuhrer" is a generic word meaning "leader." Of course "the Fuhrer" (actually, "der Fuhrer") is, to German speakers, Hitler. But the historical fact of Hitler hasn't removed the word "fuhrer" from normal German vocabulary in its generic sense. Thus, my amusement in a former post when I encountered this sign at a tourist locale, which I translate as "enter only with [tour] leader."

This has gotten me wondering why, if Hitler is known by Germans with a phrase that literally translates as "the Leader," we English-speakers know him as "the Fuhrer"?

To me this is the linguistic equivalent of those scenes in WWII movies, where Germans are speaking to one another in English with a German accent.

If we English speakers referred to Hitler as "the Leader," we'd be using the true English equivalent, conveying something of the sense of the phrase Germans get from "der Fuhrer." Moreover, we'd convey more meaning by capturing the creepiness, the sense of giving oneself (and one's language) over to a totalitarian dictator that is inescapably part of the designation "der Fuhrer" (his official title, if I'm not mistaken).

By calling him "the Fuhrer," however, we subtly distance ourself from that meaning. It's much easier for English speakers to laugh or scoff at "the Fuhrer" than "the Leader." What's more, "fuhrer" suggests the pun with the English "furor," slyly conveying the national hysteria that we English-speakers contend was the reason Hitler came to power. I can understand the need, during WWII itself, to belittle Hitler in that way to get a morale boost. But that trick has less justification for historians and those of us whose humanity obligates us to understand the phenomenon of Hitler.

At bottom, using the label "the Fuhrer" rather than "the Leader" signals a view that Hitler's rise to power was an essentially German problem. No worries -- it couldn't possibly happen here!

Vive la difference

2007-07-31T06:31:00.000-07:00

Starbucks U.S. merchandizing scheme apparently translates pretty directly into the German marketplace. There are few immediately noticeable differences in the look of the place or the offerings, right down to the "Tall, Grande, Vente" sizes -- Starbucks' own international language of the $4 cup of coffee.

I couldn't bring myself to set foot in a McDonald's, but from quick outside pass-bys, it seems to be basically the same in Germany as in the U.S.

Dunkin Donuts is a different story, however. The many Dunkin's around Berlin offer a selection of donuts presumably adapted to German tastes. In contrast to the "shades of brown" expectations of U.S. consumers, German Dunkin goes tutti fruity, both in color and flavor, even as they deploy mostly English in the point-of-sale display.

Dunkin Donuts, Friedrichstrasse S-Bahnhof, Berlin.

Lemon, peach, cherry, cherry-banana, banana split, pink, orange, red. Who came up with these?

So pointless... it wasn't even exclusive coverage

2007-07-30T06:56:00.000-07:00

I refer of course to Saturday's tragically ironic story of the collision of two news choppers while filming a police car chase.

What's the lesson here? Please take the following internet poll with your interpretation:

1) The journalist always becomes the story.

2) What won't they do to generate a headline on a slow news day!

3) Bad karma catches up to "if it bleeds, it leads" journalism.

Now, a question for all you legal eagles:

Can the fleeing felon in the underlying car chase be charged with murder for the four journalist deaths under the "felony murder rule"?

I'm baaaack!

2007-07-30T06:37:00.000-07:00

Not to get all greeting-card on you or anything, but one of the great things about a long trip is returning to an emotional wave of how much you love where you live. (If you do. I do.)

Here I am, depicted iconically, at my favorite table at Grandma Moses. Note my one travel souvenir: an Ampelmann mousepad.

Lots of catch-up travelblogging still to come... stay tuned!

Kino

2007-07-22T08:38:00.000-07:00

I love the word “Kino.” To me it suggests an engrossing foreign intrigue. It means “cinema,” not only here in Germany, but in other middle and eastern European countries – Poland, the Czech republic, and I don’t know where else. It’s an international word that’s not English.

I’m a firm believer in visiting the kino when traveling abroad. It’s interesting to see a familiar cultural experience twisted 60 degrees off kilter.

The differences can be a hoot. I particularly recommend seeing comedies, so you can hear what the native residents laugh at. I’ll never forget seeing Woody Allen’s “Everything You’ve Always Wanted to Know About Sex (But Were Afraid to Ask)” in Britain. In a pretty full theatre, I was the only person who laughed during the Italian-movie parody sequence when Allen says (in Italian, with English subtitles), “when we have sex, my wife lies there like a lox!”

In Germany, most foreign films are dubbed, but a handful of theatres catering to hard-core film-buffs (and English-speaking tourists) offer an “Originalversion.” So B and I went to see “Ocean’s Thirteen” in the Englishe Originalversion at the Sony Center "Cine Star" multiplex at Potsdamer Platz.

On our first attempt, a Sunday matinee, we arrived just a minute or two before showtime, but we figured there would be several minutes of commercials and trailers, so that we wouldn’t miss the beginning. The ticket lines were long, but I estimated we’d have our ticket in five minutes – plenty of time.

But I was applying time-motion study experience from American movie theatres. Here, the tickets were sold at a counter that looked like one set up for serious, involved transactions. Twenty yards or so long, staffed with half a dozen or more seated ticket sellers with two head-setted managers moving fussily behind them, answering phones and trouble-shooting, the ticket counter looked like a bank or a busy inter-city train station.

How slowly did the line move? Slow enough that the customers being served crossed their legs and leaned on the counter, airport style. Ticket purchase took, on average, a minute. That may not seem long, but do these two mental operations: (1) look at your watch for a minute while imagining buying a movie ticket in the States. (That’s right, it normally takes us Americans about 10 seconds – 15 if you banter with the ticket seller.) (2) Multiply the minute by the 15 people in front of us.

I quipped to B, “Do you think they’ll ask for our passports? I didn’t bring mine!” B replied, “We’re going to miss the beginning. Let’s leave.”

On our second attempt, a Friday night, a crowd of people were lined up halfway across the Sony Center. It turned out, though, that they were lining the man-ropes along a red carpet (in Germany, more of a heavy white construction paper) to see some B-list American Celebrity who was to show up for some sort of premiere thing. Jessica Alba, we were later uncertainly told.

The ticket lines were short – there were twice as many ticket sellers as before – and we breezed in early, the first ones in the theatre. While B and I often dither about where to sit in an empty theatre, here would couldn’t, because this theatre sells assigned seats.

There were 15 minutes of ads and trailers, followed by a short break. (We may well have made it the last time!) German moviegoers know this, so they purposely arrive late: the theatre only started filling up as the ads and trailers were rolling.

Memo to Robert Redford and his new Sundance Cinema concept: it is extremely annoying and needlessly anxious-making to have assigned seats in movies. I counted at least half a dozen disputes over who was in the right seat in the semi-darkness of the flickering screen, and for the first five minutes of the film I kept expecting someone to tap me on the shoulder and claim my seat.

I’m glad we didn’t miss the ads. They’re well made and visually clever (I couldn’t understand the language, of course), and I particularly enjoyed one about AIDS prevention in which a 20-something couple is involved in tasteful R-rated foreplay while two individually-wrapped condoms – animated in the style of the Pixar film “Cars” – keep up a snide running commentary.

After an ad for Ben & Jerry’s ice cream, featuring “Cherry Garcia,” the house lights came up and in walked a vendor with a box strapped to his shoulders, baseball-stadium fashion, full of – can you guess? – Ben & Jerry’s. He hawked his wares by calling out the American flavor names: “Cherry Garcia”, “New York Fudge Brownie.” I particularly liked his germanicized version of “Chunky Monkey” in which he rolled over the k’s with a quick, hard “g”– “Chungy-mungy,” like it was a single word with the accent on "chung." I wondered whether the Germans would get the great pun behind Cherry Garcia, especially since they tend to pronounce “Jerry” by saying “Cherry” anyway. As in “Ben & Cherry.” And do they know that we “Ami’s” used to call the Germans “Jerries?” My mind began spinning.

The house lights went off again, and the ads resumed with one for beer. I wondered whether they’d stop again after this one so that a beer vendor could enter the theatre. No such luck. Most people had gotten their beer already, at the refreshment stand.

The movie finally began. “Ocean’s Thirteen” is perfect light entertainment for an expat feeling the first tugs of homesickness. You get to see many of your favorite American movie stars as you admire the slick Soderburgh Ocean franchise that, improbably, still works in its third iteration.

Sony Center, Potsdamer Platz, Berlin.

Only about halfway through did I notice that the “Englishe Originalversion” did not even have German subtitles. The mostly-German spectators were so fluent in English that they followed the dialogue without language aids, laughing at most of the jokes to boot. Most, but not all. They missed a few, including (perhaps especially) Matt Damon’s lascivious line to Ellen Barkin, “perhaps you should ask Mr. Wang yourself.”

After the movie, it was a perfect summer night at the Sony Center, warm and breezy with festive lighting and plenty of seats by the fountain where you could people watch – and get free WiFi.

The sausage test

2007-07-21T02:34:00.000-07:00

At the Viktualienmarkt in Munich. Each of these five shopfronts is a different butcher.
With a wide-angle lens, I'd have gotten a few more in this shot.

During the Ardennes battle in December 1944 (aka the Battle of the Bulge), a German commando unit infiltrated American lines in captured U.S. vehicles wearing American army uniforms. German soldiers fluent in unaccented American English were recruited for the purpose. News of this infiltration, augmented by rumor, spread during the battle and caused a lot of panic.

As made famous in war movies, American MPs developed impromtu tests to distinguish friend from foe, basically quizzing suspected infiltrators on American trivia ("who plays shortstop for the Brooklyn Dodgers?" and the like.)

I was put in mind of this recently standing in front of a sausage counter in a Munich butcher shop. Like the French with their cheeses, so the Germans with their cold cuts and sausages: it seems that every village in the entire country has developed, over the centuries, its own special brand. The array of sausages and cold cuts is so bewildering that it would take years of study to master and at least several months to develop a working knowledge.

This would have been an effective way for the Germans to have exposed a non-German infiltrator during the war. "You will now look at these cold cuts and name them, please!"

The "Kaffee und Kuchen" diet

2007-07-20T07:05:00.000-07:00

After a couple of weeks of eating delicious but heavy German food, you start to feel full most of the time. But necessity is the mother of invention: I now unveil the "coffee and cake diet," which I will keep to for most of the rest of my stay in Berlin.

Heavy, but delicious, German food. Above and below: two versions of the German specialty called "eis bein," a cured and roasted pork knuckle. Note the "cocktail sausage" charmingly hung at the edge of the beer glass, below.

The coffee and cake diet is simple: eat a big meal early in the day -- a breakfast buffet, brunch, or a large early lunch -- followed by coffee and cake in the late afternoon. You're set until bed time!

This nutritional regimen received a big boost when our German friends gave us their national secret of how to make latte. It depends largely on a special milk steamer and a few tips for knowning when the milk is done. And voila -- professional, cafe-quality lattes in your own kitchen. (Pictured below with take-out cakes.)

B's home-made decaf soy latte, using the secret German technology.

No Coke... Pipi!

2007-07-19T04:56:00.000-07:00

In Split, we had lunch on this lovely piazza while waiting for our ferry.

Our cafe, from our table, and from the Vis ferry.

In one of those "life imitates art, amost but not quite" moments, I ordered a "Coca-cola" and was given a bottle Pepsi. What was disappointing to me was not the switcheroo, but rather the failure of our Slavic waiter to say, "No Coke... Pepsi!" (For those of you too young to pick up the reference, it's John Belushi in the "Cheeseburger, cheeseburger, cheeseburger" skits on SNL.)

But my disappointment was fully redeemed a couple of days later, at a beachside cafe on Vis. I ordered an "Orangina," ubiquitous in European cafes, and the waitress said, "We do not have Orangina. We have 'Pipi.'"

Pipi -- a competing orange soda drink that appears to feature none other than Pippi Longstocking as its brand icon. Look at the pigtails!

Left: Pipi today. Right: as a youngster.

Clearly, Pipi has grown up. Is it just me, or has Pipi turned out a bit ... slutty?

Vis

2007-07-19T04:52:00.000-07:00

We returned from Vis 10 days ago, so I'm catching up on a blogging backlog by posting about it now.

Vis was dreamy ... just what I wanted a Mediterranean island to be. Three days of swimming off of rocks and tiny beaches in unworldly blue water that is so bouyantly salty you can float without effort. Lying in the sun. Eating meals with lots of fish and olive oil (okay, and goat swimming in an inch of clear fat) at restaurants where the waiter brings you a platter of raw, whole fish and you discuss with him which one you'll have cooked up, as he picks each up in turn and brandishes it at you, estimating its weight.

The small seaside town with narrow cobbled streets, old stone buildings with terra-cotta roofs and heavy wooden shutters. The sun so hot that everything shuts down in midday and you have no choice but to take a siesta, keeping your shutters just a bit ajar to let in a glimmer of sunlight and cool sea breezes.

And vivid, unforgettable colors -- especially the range of blues -- that these photos just don't capture.

The egg-shaped island of Vis has a town at each end and a few villages dotting the rugged inland parts. Its overall population is a few thousand, and far less than it was in earlier centuries.

The local inhabitants are very ambivalent about tourists. The town of Vis has only two hotels, the popular swimming areas are commercial under-exploited, and there is not a single sign pointing you to hillside cavern where Tito hid with his partisans for several months in 1943. On the other hand, though the nearby Croation island of Hvar, which has emerged as the chic alternative to the Greek islands, siphons off the majority of tourists, Vis gets its share. The waterfront is lined with restaurants and the jetty crammed with tourist's sailboats most of the week. The same babel of languages one hears in Split can be heard in Vis.

Above and below: Our hotel room windows and views from them.

There is something vaguely unsettling about being a tourist there. Many Croatians seem to speak good English, but they seem begrudging about your presence there -- similar to my impression of the Poles. Is it a Slavic thing? A post-communism first-world/ second-world thing?

Or is it the fact that they only recently faught a bloody civil war? Miloje, our Serbian host, has been comfortable going to Vis only for the last three years and some of here family will not set foot there. In the last hundred years, the Balkans have seen more war, and more recently, than any other part of Europe, and contemporary Croatian nationalism openly harkens back to the Ustazi faction that in its day had sought an alliance with the Nazis.

I would not return there without having friends to visit, yet I am so glad I went.

Feel free to use this as the name for your new rock band

2007-07-18T01:50:00.000-07:00

The conversation with our German friends wound around to the subject of misapprehended song lyrics. You know the phenomenon: the singer enunciates the lyrics badly, so you painstakingly puzzle out what you think he’s singing, and you get it wrong. Or you hear the lyrics as a kid and, with your young person’s understanding and limited experience with the awkward or archaic phrasings of many songs, you fill in what seems plausible.

Well-known example, from Flashdance: “... take your pants off/ and make it happ-punn...”

What started us on this topic was a similar plausible mistake B and I heard while walking past the "Englisher Garten" in Berlin's Tiergarten. An outdoor garden party was being regaled by a German lounge singer doing American covers. He sang: "Sittin' at the top of the bay/ watching the way-aay-aves roll in..." Otis Redding is still big in Europe.

The mistaken lyrics conversation is difficult to have across a language divide. Inevitably, the bilingual folks say,

in the original German, the lyrics are supposed to be "floiner schpechh beloyten," but I always thought it was "floineh schpechh beluyrten,” which means “spank on the bottom.” So you see, it is very funny.

But I learned something important in this conversation. Basically, I learned that the correct lyric to the English version of the Christmas carol “Silent Night,” is “round yon virgin mother and child.” Not, as I thought until just now, “proud young virgin mother and child.” At my age!

In fairness to me, my version makes sense – sense, that is, once one accepts the premise of the virgin birth. I mean, in her situation, who wouldn’t rightfully feel a wee bit proud?

What are we doing in the great resorts of Europe?

2007-07-15T12:57:00.000-07:00

B and I are in the south German resort town of Lindau, on the northeastern corner of Lake Constance, with beautiful views of the Austrian and Swiss Alps.

Here we are relaxing in old world elegance in the lobby of the Hotel Bayerischer Hof.

Doing what, exactly?

Dinner at Darko's

2007-07-14T08:17:00.000-07:00

I feel compelled to begin this story near the end:

... And so, having led his donkey into the restaurant, Darko fed it from a bowl, as the Slovenians at the next table looked on, laughing and pointing.

Maybe I should back up.

When our hosts, Miloje and Miroslav, told us that one dinner possibility was a “rustic” restaurant in a small village in the mountainous center of the Island – and that you had to call a day ahead and order goat or lamb (presumably so he’d have time to kill the animal?) – how could we say no? Plus, the guy’s name is “Darko.” How cool is that?

Darko runs apparently all operations of the restaurant himself ... and I mean all operations. He raises his own animals, and cooks them, makes his own wine and liqueur from grapes he grows himself, and makes salad and side dishes from home grown vegetables. He does his own baking. And he waits the tables.

The “restaurant” itself consists of a patio – probably the patio of Darko’s house – with four wooden picnic tables, two of which appear to be the sort of massive wooden spools used for coils of large wire, turned on their side. At one edge of the patio is a small shed which houses the oven and a larder. And the patio is covered with a bower of vines so dense that you feel like you’re indoors.

Left: the vinous roof. Right: the dining area, with cooking shed in the background.

Darko cooks the meat in a brick oven by covering a large metal dish full of meat with a metal dome and sliding it right next to the fire.

On the left side is the covering pan, on the right a dish of octopus pre-ordered by other diners.

And he seasons the meat simply, with “a little bit of salt,” pursuant to his theory that the flavor comes from the grass and herbs the animals feed on.

In the photo above, you can see the main course, which stuffed four adults. In the background, a pitcher of strong homemade wine proved crucial to cut through the "clear gravy" (see below). The round black thing in about the middle of the meat platter is a rock. Darko told us that (from the current vantage point) the lamb was to the left of the rock, the goat to the right. Why did he cook with a rock, Miroslav asked. Because, Darko replied, people always ask him about the rock and he gets a big kick out of that.

When Miloje and Miroslav had called to reserve a place, they asked Darko if it was okay to bring their dog. He said that would be no problem, so long as the dog wouldn’t mind his donkey, which, he promised, would bray “hee-haw” at us when we arrived. None of us could figure out whether Darko was kidding, and as it turned out there was no donkey to greet us. But when other guests arrived – the Slovenians, according to our hosts, who ID’d them by their dialect – we did hear the donkey braying.

The meat was incredibly good. I don’t know whether I preferred the lamb or the milder-tasting (!) goat. Or the potatoes. It was deliciously salty, and I couldn’t get enough of the almost clear gravy the meat was floating in, which I kept spooning over my meat and potatoes.

It was only when the demolished meat platter was removed that I realized that the clear “gravy” was actually fat, and that I may well have consumed about half a cup of clear, liquid fat in addition to what was already in the meat. Thinking back a few years to an unfortunate experience I’d had with barbecued ribs back in the States, I realized that the entire tone of the blog post I was already writing in my head hung in the balance, on the delicate question of whether I’d ultimately keep this food down. When I awoke at 5 a.m. the next morning, I found myself incredibly thirsty and with a meat hangover. But I was basically in one piece.

Darko, a curly-haired man in his late 40s or early 50s, looks like he’s “been through the wars,” and for a resident of former Yugoslavia, this could literally be true. He’s very jolly, and he bantered continually with our hosts, finding some occasion for a hearty laugh with each course.

At the end, he asked how we enjoyed the meal, and Miroslav said that everything was wonderful except that we were disappointed that the donkey did not greet us personally. Darko took this literally. Which brings me back to where this post began.

Oscar Madison, industrial spy

2007-07-12T07:59:00.000-07:00

While standing in the checkout line at Media Markt, waiting to purchase my new 20 euro photo-card reader, I snapped a quick photo. The cashier said:

"You're not supposed to take photos inside."

"Oh, sorry," I replied.

"You must delete it."

Okay. My, but we're sensitive about ... what? The brilliant store layout, which looks like a bargain basement version of Best Buy? I realize that the look of the store's merchandise displays is proprietary, but please. As if the competition isn't sending around dozens of spies who get loads of info without obviously taking pictures.

Or was it a concern that maybe I'd reverse engineer the exceedingly clever gadget that was the subject of my photo. I photographed it because it was about as clever a bit of engineering as the hat with the beer-can holders and straws.

In fact, it was a remove control device with a bottle opener attached to the bottom. In other words, the Germans had managed to crack this very difficult engineering problem:

Unfortunately, I can't show you the photo of the actual device. When she said I had to delete it I meekly showed her my photo replay and was ready to delete it in front of her. But she muttered, "that's okay."

So I got to keep the photo. Only it was lost with all the others when my photo-disk malfunctioned.

I'd make a lousy spy.

Split

2007-07-11T06:36:00.000-07:00

Our flight from Berlin went non-stop into the Croation port city of Split. From there we were to take a ferry to the Island of Vis, where our friends – a “mixed” couple, a Serb married to a Croat – were waiting for us.

It seems as though the strange weather in Berlin followed us, as a huge thunderstorm broke just as our airport bus set off on the half-hour ride to the harbor in Split. The roads were narrow and I wondered about safety, particularly when the driver turned fully around in his seat to tell one of the passengers to close the trap door in the roof, which was now letting in rain. Normally, I wouldn’t have thought much of it, except that the passenger didn’t speak Croation and the driver needed about 15 seconds worth of hand gesturing to make his point. Luckily, the driver had a crucifix hanging from his rear-view mirror, which protected us.

Split is a large industrial city – the second largest in Croatia I believe – but the harbor, on the edge of Split’s old town, comes straight out of one’s imagination of the small Mediterranean port. Stone buildings bleached white by the Mediterranean sun, set off with painted shutters. A long waterside promenade. Boats of every description.

In the Split harbor, one finds a Babel of international tourists. In addition to local Croats and other Balkan peoples, there are Austrians, Germans, Czechs, Slovaks, Italians, French, Brits, East Asians, and a fair number of Americans. Some of this you get from the languages and accents you hear, some from the look of the people, some from the car license plates you see around.

Split is the embarkation point for several Adriatic Islands, the most popular and trendy being Hvar, and you can even ferry to the eastern coast of Italy. It is also the source of numerous small steamship cruises and saiboat charters.

The steamships look charming at first glance, but lose some of their luster when you think ahead to what the trip would actually be like – cooped up in a confined space with a couple of dozen strangers. Fun for a day or two, but for more than that?

The sailboats, I believe, can be rented for sailing on your own, with larger skippered boats available for charter.(I can’t use the word “skipper” in this context without thinking of Gilligan’s Island.)

And then of course you see the occasional outrageous yacht. One, parked along the quay in split, was about 120 feet long and its Cayman Island registry bespoke massive amounts of money moved “offshore.”

“Your tax dollars not at work,” quipped B.

The outsized yacht club. Above, flying under the Cayman Islands flag.
Below: taking a good joke too far. Doesn’t it make you want to slap them...
with confiscatory taxation?

I was particularly enthralled by the contrast between our relatively quiet Tuesday afternoon departure, and our Saturday morning return. Saturday morning is apparently when most rentals and charters begin, and the quays were filled with boats moored three and four deep.

Below: the same part of the quay, Tuesday and Saturday:

There’s a travel tip for Mediterranean ports: if you don’t like crowds, try to avoid Saturday mornings.

Above: Our ferry (I wasn't on it at the time) and the Split promenade (I wasn't on it at the time).

Below: arrival at Vis.

What, you thought I was kidding?

2007-07-11T06:11:00.000-07:00

...about Berlin's desperation shortage of free WiFi?

One of the few public spaces in Berlin offering free WiFi is (ironically) the hyper-commercial Sony Center at Potsdamer Platz.

Nice work space, huh?

Heil Helmut

2007-07-11T06:07:00.000-07:00

Modern-day Germans simply do not conform to the longstanding stereotype of the authoritarian personality. As on my previous (and first) trip to Germany, I’ve found it a pleasant surprise – indeed a revelation – that Germans are for the most part pretty laid back.

Where is the tyrannical train conductor, the overbearing policeman, the scary passport official, the stentorian shopkeeper? Where is the ubiquitous, unsmiling “Helmut” to tell you that your attempted behavior “is forbidden” or to castigate you for not sitting in your assigned seat? My goodness, here in Germany you can even jay-walk with total impunity.

Passport control for our flight to a non-EU country was a little booth just outside our departure lounge. It was also right across a narrow walkway from the restrooms. This made for a chaotic queue, as folks seeming to be on line would abruptly duck into the restroom, or people emerging from the restroom seemed to be forming part of (or cutting into) the line. Not to mention those needing simply to pass through the corridor to other gates. The setup seemed to lend itself to espionage, and for a passing moment I wondered whether my own trip to the restroom placed me under suspicion.

But it was all so caz! Even more casual was the boarding process. Without the benefit of an announcement, it became apparent that it was time to line up at the gate because the passengers – first a trickle, then building into a general flood – began to get up from their seats in the departure lounge and crowd toward the jetway entrance. “Lining up” does not in anyway describe the procedure. It was not even what Calvin Trillin has called a “French queue” (a triangle with its base at the service counter). It was more like taking a corked bottle halfway filled with marbles and flipping it over. We cascaded down toward the choke-point (the barred jetway entrance) until we formed a tight matrix. What stopped people from cutting in front of you was not any sort of queue-courtesy, but mere physics.

Only then was our flight announced, together with a call for “preboarding” – the usual call for “passengers with small children and those in need of special assistance.” I saw no elderly or disabled person, but the matrix of marbles shuddered as the largest influx of “passengers with young children” I’ve ever seen on an airplane flight forced their way forward. “Small children” was spaciously construed to include anyone below their teens. Not that there weren’t infants galore, along with large car seats and massive baby bags. It was apparent that this “pre-board” would fill half the plane – it was as if Noah’s ark were “pre-boarded” with a call for “all creatures with four legs or more.”

I should point out that this flight was one of those European budget airlines – “German Wings” – which uses unassigned, first-come/ first-served seating. A boarding priority is theoretically assigned by numbering each boarding pass sequentially, starting with #1, based on time of check-in. And B, who adeptly plays the angles in travel situations, had gotten us boarding passes #1 and #2 by checking in on line the day before.

This splendid coup was undermined somewhat by the “pre-boarding” process, and took another hit with the next announcement – “we will now board passengers with boarding passes number 1 through 30.” But our boarding advantage disappeared entirely when it became plain that no one was bothering with boarding pass numbers – not the passengers, not the ticket-takers. The cork was simply removed from the bottle, and the marbles rolled out and onto the plane.

Well, more accurately, onto the tarmac. I guess “jetway” was a misnomer, since it was just a staircase, and we passengers were directed to the plane by a sequence of traffic cones and airport workers hopefully placed to avoid unfortunate collisions with tarmac vehicles, baggage handlers and running jet turbines.

Where is Helmut when you need him? He might have been quite useful up to this point. It was then, as we stepped onto the plane, that our craving for order got the better of us, and B politely and foolishly asked the male flight attendant whether our rolling bag “would fit in the overhead compartment.” A foolish question because it’s a bag designed to fit into any normal-sized overhead compartment and a quick look down the aisle would have revealed two dozen instances of passengers with much larger and heavier baggage: heart-attacks- and back-injuries-waiting-to-happen that they were manhandling into the overhead bins. Our bag, at 20-22 lbs, was no heavier than my book-and-laptop filled napsack.

“No,” said the flight attendant in crisp German-accented English, “it is far too heavy. You will have to place it under the seat in front of you.”

I’ve never understood this instruction, which is always given but, sensibly, never enforced on U.S. flights, since the space under the seat in front of you is about the same size as that in the overhead bin. So B quite sensibly ignored the instruction, and when she got halfway down the plane to the exit row, put the bag in the overhead bin, and plopped down into the window seat.

Before I could even get my napsack up there, the flight attendant was on me.

“You cannot put your luggage up there!” He was positively vibrating with restrained fury. I quickly inspected his face for veins about that might be about to burst. “I have told you this, yet you have done so anyway. This is not okay!”

I had finally found him. It was none other than Helmut, the authoritarian German. So good was he at his role that he could make the phrase “not okay” sound very threatening indeed, and I began to worry that he would put us off the plane.

“I’m... sorry...” I stammered. A female flight attendant quickly whisked us and our offensive bag toward the back of the plane. She ended up having the bag checked into the cargo hold. B asked why our bag was a problem when all those others....

“I do not understand him,” said the female flight attendant.

Nor I. If only Helmut could be trained to work for rational order...

One question answered, another posed

2007-07-10T06:40:00.000-07:00

As correctly guessed by Nina and Brock20, our recent trip outside of Berlin was to the Dalmatian Coast of Croatia. Specifically, to the town of Vis (a/k/a Issa to the Greeks) on the Island of the same name. (See map.)

How we got there, and what we did, to follow.

But first a question. I want to be able to say that I’ve now vacationed on “a Mediterranean Island.” Yes, I know that Vis is technically in the Adriatic Sea. But isn’t the Adriatic Sea simply a subsection, a neighborhood if you will, of the Mediterranean Sea? Like the Bay of Biscay is part of the Atlantic Ocean? B insists not – the Adriatic (and presumably the Aegean, etc.) is a “separate” sea.

I say you can rightfully claim you’ve “been to Manhattan” even if you spent your entire stay in the Upper West Side. It doesn’t mean there isn’t more of Manhattan still to see.

Plan B

2007-07-10T06:33:00.000-07:00

On the morning of Tuesday, July 3, B and I reached our neighborhood S-Bahn station to take the train to the airport. We had a plan to reach Schonefeld Airport 2 hours and 16 minutes before our international flight, fitting each piece together like a Swiss watch.

6:15 – wake up (alarm)
6:45 – leave apartment
6:50 – stop at bakery
6:55 – walk to S-Bahn station (20 min)
7:15 – arrive S-Bahn station
7:19 – board train for Schonefeld
7:59 – arrive Schonefeld

Even if we were to miss the 7:19, another Schonefeld train would be along at 7:39, and we’d still be almost two hours early. We were so confident in our planning that, B, who is usually quite the Germanic task master on travel timetable issues, proposed an unscheduled stop at Coffeemama’s which would, I calculated, have made it tight even to catch the 7:39.

I was the nervous one this morning, so I vetoed Coffeemama’s and when I saw the train sitting inside the station, I started to move fast. But when we reached the platform, the train was obviously lifeless and going nowhere.

One of the more disconcerting moments in foreign travel is when you waiting for, or riding on, a public conveyance of some sort and you hear an untranslated announcement in a language you don’t understand. You don’t know whether they’re saying, “the train for [your destination] has been relocated to track 5,” or “the train for [someone else’s destination] has been relocated to track 5,” or “Please calmly exit the station, there is a bomb threat.” Instead, you simply hear “blah blah blah Schonefeld blah blah five.” Or “please blah blah blah.” And the people standing around with you collectively heave a sigh and slouch toward the exit, and you follow like a lemming. Or worse, half the people around you sigh and slouch toward the exit, and you have to decide whether you’re group is the leavers or the stayers.

But this particular morning, the train platform was sparsely peopled, so when the situation was explained by the incomprehensible (to me) announcement over the PA system, it was impossible to infer what it said from the other passengers’ movements. A telltale, 3-word phrase flashed on the “next train” signs over the platform, so I got out my Langenscheidt Pocket German Dictionary and painstakingly translated:

Please ... listen for ... announcement

With insipient not-quite panic beginning to form in the bottom of my stomach like the first signs of nausea, I tracked down a station agent having coffee in the breakroom, and said, “Keine bahn?” by which I meant something like “no train?” She replied in German, and I was pretty sure she was telling me that the S-Bahn (the elevated train) was not running, but the U-Bahn (underground) was.

A host of questions presented themselves. Was the S-Bahn stopped only on certain lines – in central Berlin perhaps – so that we could catch it elsewhere, or was the entire S-Bahn down... and for how long? Did the U-Bahn go out to Schonefeld? And, with the U-Bahn functioning more like a local compared to the S-Bahn’s express, how long would it take?

Or should we just try to catch a taxi? Our neighborhood is not a good one for spontaneous taxi-hailing. The “plan B” that hastily materialized as we double-timed it, bumping our rolling suitcase over cobblestones, was to try the front entrance to the local hotel, and if that were to fail (which it did), to hustle to the U-Bahn. Not to make it all the way to Schonefeld, but rather to catch a taxi in front of Zoologisher Bahnhof, one of the larger Berlin train stations.

Not a perfect plan. B and I had visions of a New York City commuter rail shutdown, where every commuting soul in the tri-state area would naturally get in his or her car and jam the hell out of the already bumber-to-bumper highway traffic into the city. And in Berlin, which has no centralized downtown, we’d get LA style traffic – stop and go in all directions. That is if we could even find a cab – thinking again of New York, where available taxis become scarce during any rainstorm or transportation hiccup.

But there were several taxis waiting in front of the train station. And our super-mellow driver, a distinguished-looking man in his late 50s whose radio (and life, it seemed) was tuned to light jazz, got us to the airport in 45 minutes despite never exceeding an unhurried 50 m.p.h. This wasn’t due to traffic – there was no traffic. 8:15 a.m. in a major city during a transit shutdown, and the traffic was as light as 11 p.m. in LA.

The driver told us that there was a railroad strike affecting the intercity and S-Bahn trains. And of course there’d be no extra traffic, because people could still take the U-Bahn or buses. And because, in Germany, if a rail strike makes it too difficult to get into work, that counts as a valid excuse to stay home for the day.

What bothered me most was feeling so out of touch that I didn’t even know the long-announced strike was going to happen. The German word for “strike” is “streik,” and had I simply glanced at the Berliner Zeitung and seen “Bahn” and “Streik” in the same headline, I’d have had the sense to ask around.

Blog post to go, please

2007-07-09T05:45:00.000-07:00

Back in Berlin as of Saturday evening, yet I've barely had time to blog. I won't bore you with the details, but it has something to do with wireless internet access limited to cafes a few train stops away from our apartment. I just have to face up to the fact that I've developed a dependency on reliable internet access (preferably at home) and will have to factor that into future long-stay travel plans.

Today I ordered coffee to go from our neighborhood cafe, "Coffeemamas." It may not seem like such a big deal to order coffee to go, but it struck me that in four trips to Europe since 1999 (totaling perhaps 90 days and counting), this is the very first time I've ordered coffee to go.

The to go order had less to do with being in a hurry than that we hit Coffeemamas during its strange mid-morning rush. At about 10:30, the quiet coffee shop is set upon by about 30 people who all seem to know each other -- no doubt a regularly-scheduled coffee break at a large neighborhood employer.

Waiting on line to order my latte, I realized that I'd forgotten the German phrase for "take out," and I started obsessing about the best way to say it in English. Would the German barista be more familiar with the American "to go" or the British "to take away"? Germans seem to prefer American to British culture, but maybe their language instruction and experience is more likely to be British-influenced, Britain being so much more accessible as a matter of travel. And when you visit German websites, the link to the English-language version of the web page is almost invariably a British flag, rarely an American one. Same with train ticket machines and ATMs.

"Latte, bitte. To take away," I said. I must have made the right choice, because I was understood. And they gave me this:

Blogging hiatus

2007-07-02T08:22:00.000-07:00

B and I are taking our first side trip away from Berlin. I don't know how much internet access there will be and so we're probably not even taking our computers. So if you hear nothing from me until this coming Saturday or Sunday, don't worry!

Where are we going? Here's a clue:

“Release the hounds,” or “item number one: I love you”

2007-07-02T07:28:00.000-07:00

I don’t know if there’s any special significance, back in the States, to July 1, but it’s as if the gods of American tourism said, “Smithers... release the hounds.” For that suddenly, Berlin was beset by American tourists. Maybe people naturally plan their trips to begin at the beginning of the month.

Not that I have any right to complain. Being as how I’m an American tourist and all. Not having brushed up on even some limited tourist German for this trip, I’m not even attempting German in my interactions aside from: numerals, “yes,” “please,” “thank you,” “excuse me,” “do you have [item identified in English],” “do you speak English? and “and.”

The old saw, “they all speak English” seems a bit less true than I remember from my trip two years ago. Now it seems like around half of them do, maybe less. But a great majority show a fairly patient willingness to try to communicate, a charming quality traditionally attributed to the Italians, and so you can get by. Still, if I ever come back here, there will be serious language learning attempted.

Speaking of things American, there’s something of a buzz about Tom Cruise going on around here. It appears that Cruise is portraying Claus von Stauffenberg in a movie now filming. Staffenberg was the aristocratic German army officer who attempted to assassinate Hitler in July 1944. The Germans, bless them, are so very keen on rejecting their Nazi past that they’ve built Stauffenberg into a great hero, and many of them are uncomfortable with having that role played by a Scientologist – which the Germans reasonably view as an authoritarian cult.

You won’t ever hear me praise suicide bombers, but the fact is that Stauffenberg’s assassination attempt failed because of his determination to survive. Stauffenberg placed the briefcase bomb under the map table around which Hitler was conferencing with several of his generals, and then slipped out of the room, having set the bomb to detonate long afterward to give himself time to escape the Fuhrer’s heavily guarded compound. Someone inadvertently kicked the briefcase behind a heavy oaken table support, which effectively shielded Hitler from the bomb blast. The coup attempt failed, of course, and Stauffenberg wound up dead anyway in the wave of executions that followed.

But let’s go back to happier thoughts. The other half of this post’s title is something I overheard an American tourist say here in Starbucks. Speaking on his Blue Tooth or whatever cell phone headset device it was, he said, “I have two items to go over. Item number 1, I love you.”

It sounds sort of sweet in print, but believe me, in person it sounded officious. But it did put me in mind of the lovely walk B and I took through the Tiergarten yesterday, Sunday, July 1. Yes, the hounds had been released. But love was in the air. Couples everywhere!

Skipped it when I was in Vegas, so why would I go now?

2007-07-01T06:17:00.000-07:00

Blue Man group was in fact playing in Vegas when I was there back in January. Now they've followed me to Berlin.

Or have they? Maybe Blue Man Group is a franchise and they can play multiple places at the same time, like another once-fresh act now entrenched in Vegas, Cirque du Soleil.

I saw a Blue Man Group concert on TiVo. I was amazed at the percussion sounds they were able to acheive with clever deployment of PVC tubing. After 15 minutes, I was bored nearly senseless. I think you pretty much have to be stoned to watch those guys for more than the 15 minutes.

So, no, the show is not suitable for this foreign tourist.

-------
Sorry about the blurry photos. Will try to update with sharper ones. See what the frustration of losing my photos does to me?

Berlin weather as metaphor for my blogging fortunes

2007-07-01T05:53:00.000-07:00

Storm clouds clearing soon? The view from Moabit Bridge, a few blocks from our apartment.

On the flight from Zurich into Berlin, B chatted up a German guy sitting at the end of our row. Her immediate goal was to see if he knew the price of a taxi from the airport, but the guy had lived in Chicago and the conversation was fairly wide-ranging in the time that it took from touching down to the seatbelt sign winking off. One of his comments was that temperatures in Berlin at this time of year (which he thoughtfully translated for us into Farenheit) "can be anywhere between 50 and 100."

He wasn't kidding. Daily temperatures have ranged 25 degrees between morning and night, and from day to day we've gotten low 50s with high 80s expected tomorrow. You really have to layer for this weather.

For the past couple of days, the weather seems to come in 1-hour units, beginning with brooding overcast skies, then wind, then a 10-15 minute rainshower, then clearing to sunny and warm. Next hour, the cycle repeats.

I find this kind of weather uplifting. For one thing, it makes me feel so smart for toting my packable Marmot Mountain waterproof rain jacket. For another, I find continuous sunshine to be so overrated -- this weather is much more entertaining.

But lets indulge in the overused metaphor of storm clouds for brooding bad moods. Which brings me to blogging. It turns out that my photo problem was not the card reader, but rather the photo memory card itself -- my film as it were. I learned this only after spending an engaging half day dragging B from one photoshop to another in a vain hunt for a new card reader, which ended successfully in an outdoor shopping arcade in the Charlottenburg district at the German Equivalent of Best Buy (to quote Voxwoman's comment to the previous post).

All the photos from the start of the trip until yesterday afternoon are inaccessible -- either gone forever, or else recoverable only with some clever techno-fix that will not be attempted here in Europe.

This is too bad. I now realize that the photos for me are a journal, containing not only a visual record of what I do, but also of my mental impressions of what I see. They're pictoral notes for my blog posts. I have post ideas written around them. I mean, I could verbally describe for you the smoking lounge in the Zurich airport, with its glass facade bearing the Camel Cigarette decal with the label -- in English -- "Cigarettes harm your health." But it would be so much better to actually show you the picture before riffing on the irony of that.

Some of the photos are things that I'll re-photograph. But some are just gone, like faded memory.

Austria

2007-06-30T11:56:00.000-07:00

Not the country, the restaurant in the Kreutzberg section of Berlin. It's called "Austria," which is the English version of "Osterreich." B and I made our way there on the U-Bahn our first night in town.

The restaurant features down home Austrian specialties, like schweinbraten (sliced roast pork) and Wiener schnitzel (sliced breaded veal). The portions were definitely "bigger than your head" -- the Wiener schnitzel was spread over the extra-large dinner plate like a medium-pizza sized relief map of a fictional land mass. The leftovers provided dinner at the apartment the next night.

You probably would not hear or say "sauerkraut" and "to die for" in the same breath back in the States, but in "Austria" it was just that. Not really sour at all, but more of a sweetish, oaky flavor emphasizing the caraway. B, who has recently come to be persuaded that sauerkraut carries healthy digestive qualities (something about enzymes that are hard to find in other foods), couldn't get enough of it, and we have agreed to begin a monthlong quest for the world's finest sauerkraut. We're in the right place, I suppose.

Central Europe has an extremely laden, entangled, multi-layered history, and Berlin is very much at the center of that in the past 150 years. When you think about it, Western history in first half of the 20th Century can be understood largely as a series of responses to decisions taken in Berlin. And Berlin was the symbolic center of the Cold War that dominated the century's second half.

Here, in the quaintly old-fashioned, wood paneled restaurant Austria, B and I (a German- and a Jewish- American) wondered aloud what to do with our excess of food while the diners at the next table, who had been conversing in Hebrew, asked the German waiter, in English, for a doggie bag.

"Why did they ask in English?" I wondered outside the restaurant. The woman who spoke seemed old enough to be a Yiddish speaker who could have made herself understood in German.

Later that night, in Alan Furst's Dark Star, I read this passage:

Szara's German was that of someone who'd spoken Yiddish as a child, and the civilian, a security type, made clear that he knew Szara was a Jew, a Polish Jew, a Soviet Boshevik Jew of Polish origin. He probed efficiently through Szara's traveling bag without removing his black gloves, then examined press and travel documents, and when he was done, stamped the passport with a fat swastika in a circle and handed it back politely. Their eyes met for just a moment: this business they had with each other would be seen to in the future, that far they could agree.

Berlin Redux: the deeper significance

2007-06-29T07:47:00.000-07:00

Last time, we visited Berlin over two long weekends in May and June of 2005, and fell for the city. This time, our approach is very different.

We've rented an apartment from friends who used to live here, and with the "friend" rental rate, the cost of living here for a month is roughly the same as it would have been for a week in a good hotel.

The idea this time is to dig a little deeper into this city, and to use it as a base for excursions to other destinations in and outside of Germany.

There will be hours of hanging out in cafes, reading, writing, coping with second-hand smoke. Here's what I'll be reading:

The readily apparent theme is Berlin "noir" in the WWII era. This visit is about soaking up "atmosphere," and perhaps to a large degree the fictional atmosphere of an imagined past. I find myself staring hard at the ubiquitous photographs of pre-War Berlin.

As for the present, not a whole lot to report yet. We arrived 48 hours ago, but I was so slammed by jet lag -- following a sleepless night on the plane and a determination to stay up until 10 p.m. the first night -- that I've been in a fog the whole time. I got out of bed 2:00 p.m. yesterday and 11:00 a.m. today. And I had a headache the whole time, perhaps because I was avoiding coffee in a vain attempt to ward off sleeplessness.

You always hear about people in our country who claim to fly over to Europe for long weekends. How do they do it?

Where are the photos???

2007-06-29T07:42:00.001-07:00

After two years of reliable service, my "card reader" has finally gone "on the fritz." Ironic, since now I will depend on Fritz to repair or replace it.

The card reader is essentially a floppy disk drive that plugs into a USB port. It's the size of a double-wide flash drive (aka thumb drive, USB key, etc.), and the "floppy disks" are miniature 512 mb cards that fit into my Nikon digital. It only cost $25, and seems so flimsy that I should count myself lucky it lasted this long. Why it couldn't have broken down a couple of days before I left on my trip, I don't know.

So I can't upload photos for another day or two. Stand by....

The Mystery Revealed

2007-06-29T07:07:00.000-07:00

Berlin

Clue #1: passport required
Clue #2: George Clooney (The Good German) and Matt Damon (The Bourne Supremacy)
Clue #3: that last post with Google in German.

I'm sitting with B in Kaffee Einstein on Friederichstrasse, where they offer really good coffee and free WiFi. This would be perfect except that we are being pounded -- pounded -- by cigarette smoke. This will necessarily shorten my blog post.

Yesterday, I blogged briefly from our old haunt, the Starbucks at Hackesher Markt. I make no apologies for going to Starbucks, even Starbucks in Germany, for two reasons. First, I've gotten over my "Starbucks is heinous" thing. I take back nothing negative I've ever said about Starbucks. I just feel I've had my say and now I'm moving on -- which includes getting coffee there from time to time.

Second, and more importantly here in Europe, Starbucks offers a smoke-free environment. Sometimes a person needs coffee sans cigaretten.

The problem, once again, is internet access in Europe, a subject that I've blogged about before. (See here and here and other blog posts from May-June 2005). Although I've been teased about this, the topic is very interesting to bloggers and web surfers traveling in Europe, believe me.

Since there's no internet access at the apartment we're staying in, I'm once again an internet refugee, carrying my laptop around in my backpack in an ongoing quest for (preferably free) WiFi. Starbucks, in its squeeze-every-dime-of-profit way, is joint ventured with T-Mobile (here, T-Punkt) just like in the states. Though at Hackesher Markt's Starbucks, B's was able to free-ride another local wifi signal on her iMac.

On the itinerary of possible internet access points: Berlin Public Library!

Oskar Madison hat gesagt

2007-06-28T09:03:00.000-07:00

So says my blogger comment function. Just getting online in Germany for the first time, I haven't figured out how to translate my Google-based functions back to English. Can't remember from last time.

(I exaggerated only sligtly -- it didn't translate "Oscar" to "Oskar" -- but otherwise, all the framing language is German.)

We'll talk again soon!

Airline regulations

2007-06-26T10:06:00.000-07:00

Swiss International Air Lines has a colorful set of baggage regulations that invites you to visualize your fantasy life as a sophisticated world traveler.

Your fishing equipment is 120 cm long.
Small sports equipment up to a length of 150 cm, e.g. wakeboards and body boards, can be checked in without prior information. SWISS recommends suitable packaging.
You are a wine connoisseur and always carry your own cork screw in your hand baggage.
Cork screws come under the valid international regulations for ‘dangerous objects’. Please carry your cork screw and many other objets in your checked-in baggage only. All dangerous objects will be confiscated by airport security.
The two of us always go on holidays with our tandem bicycle.
If you pack your bike into a hard-shell container, cardboard box or plastic bag with a size of 162 x 92 x 24 cm, it can be transported as sports baggage.

On a more-applicable-to-me note, Swiss Air restricts carry-on luggage to a single 8 kilo (17.6 lbs) item. Except that:

In addition to the hand baggage, the following items are allowed on board if necessary (except infants)

1 coat or blanket

1 umbrella or walking stick

1 ladies’ handbag

1 small camera or 1 set of binoculars

reading for the journey

I like referring to the flight as a "journey" -- very poetic. But questions remain: for example, may I carry a "ladies handbag"? Why not, I say? How "small" is a "small camera" -- pocket sized, or just not a honkin' videographer's case? Can the "walking stick" be a sword cane? (I'm guessing "no" to that one.) And how much "reading for the journey" qualifies as "necessary"?

And what about this:

Irrespective of the booking class, SWISS defines 1 piece of hand baggage as 55 x 40 x 20 cm and up to 8 kg - plus a laptop or hand bag.

My problem is that I have a single knapsack weighing in at 22-23 lbs. If they are really strict about these regulations, I'm prepared to whip out a sturdy plastic bag and place inside it:

my packable rain jacket
several pounds of books
my camera
even, if need be, my laptop

Will they make me go through that charade? It seems to punish me for packing efficiently.

Customer satisfaction (sort of)

2007-06-24T13:45:00.000-07:00

It's a strange sort of customer satisfaction when you feel like the company rendered good service yet you end up without having purchased anything from them. But that's where I find myself.

It all began a couple of weeks ago in Washington, D.C. I had an afternoon to kill, and decided to shop for a new suit near my hotel, at Men's Wearhouse.

The last suit I bought was from Men's Wearhouse. I like that suit: it was reasonably priced and I've gotten a lot of use out of it despite a tailoring job that left something to be desired. True to the definition of insanity, I returned to Men's Wearhouse thinking that by doing the same thing again, I'd have a different outcome.

The people who work at Men's Wearhouse are good salesmen. They make you feel good about your suit, and you end up buying a bunch of ties to go with it. I came within inches of also signing up for their "frequent buyer" program which, in return for a 10% discount after every $500 of clothes buying (i.e., $50), I would sign up for a world of pain in terms of junkmail and email solicitations. But I was in the sort of zombie consumer zone you get into at the end of buying a car, when they try to sell you Scotch Guard for an extra thousand bucks. Men's Wearhouse salesmen could sell cars.

The problem with buying suits off the rack is that they are sized for fat guys. If you buy a size 44 jacket, the pants that come with it will have a 38-inch waist. This is called a "spread" of 6 (44 minus 38 = 6) and it assumes a middling sized beer belly. I'm no male model or anything, but I'm reasonably fit and require a "spread" of about 9, meaning that the pants I get off the rack are 3 inches too big. That's a lot.

To reduce pants by 3 inches at my size is not a simple matter of "taking in" at the waste. I'm not a tailor, but my understanding is that the pants really need to be reconstructed. A "take in at the waist" alteration of 3 inches -- basically, undoing the back seam, trimming some fabric there, and redoing it tighter -- screws up the pants badly. The waistband forms a nasty "V" in the back, the butt doesn't fit, the side pockets get pulled back toward the back of your thighs, and the pants creases wind up pointing outward at 10 and 2 o'clock rather than straight ahead. This is quick and dirty alteration. I know this because I've had it done.

Whoever altered my last Men's Wearhouse suit dealt with the problem by the simple expedient of not reducing the waist size enough. Instead of being 3 inches too big, the pants are 2 inches too big.

When I raised this issue with the tailor at the Washingotn, DC Men's Wearhouse (18th Street just above Farragut Square, for the record), he snapped: "I'm a tailor, not a seamstress." Okay -- no problem!

I wasn't going to be in Washington long enough to wait for the alterations, but they assured me it was no problem. They'd ship me the suit and I could take it to the local Men's Wearhouse in My Home Town to get free pressing and any tweaking of the alterations I needed.

That the suit arrived four days late after a series of phone inquiries -- they had obviously forgotten to ship it -- was annoying, but they were good about overnighting it once they realized their mistake. That the suit has half a dozen mysterious black sticky spots on jacket and pants was bothersome, but let's assume for the sake of argument those would have come out.

The big problem is what I would call "The Worst Tailoring Job I Have Ever Seen." Weirdly, the pants wound up both two inches too big at the waist, and yet excessively "taken in" at the back. The fit was so bad I'd think Men's Wearhouse should pay me not to wear it because of the negative advertizing. Let me show you one angle:

Basically, the tailor completely added this stylish butt crack that hadn't been there when I tried them on. This was only the most serious of several fit problems, both with the pants and jacket.

The purchase receipt for the pants states a "complete satisfaction money-back guarantee," and I decided that I would not go through the hassle of testing the ability of the local Men's Wearhouse tailor to fix the problems. As I drove to the store, I imagined various arguments I'd have, with the store manager demanding that I try the suit on to demo the flaws and then trying to sell me on letting them try to fix it.

But when I arrived, they gave me a full refund, no questions asked. I had worked myself up into enough of a pitch of anxiety, that this courteous honoring of the satisfaction guarantee gave me a feeling of great... well, satisfaction.

Let's add up the total experience. On the plus side, smooth salesmanship. On the minus side, bad follow-up service with dreadful tailoring. On the plus side, great customer relations in giving the refund.

I still could use a suit, and there's a couple of hours I'll never get back. But I'm not out any money, and when I got my refund, I felt great! So in a strange way, my Men's Wearhouse experience has made me happy.

Stay tuned for travel blogging!

2007-06-23T15:03:00.000-07:00

Some of my readers like my travel blogging best. I may like my travel blogging best.

Well, great news! Some big time travel blogging is on the horizon, starting Tuesday of next week.

I can't tell you where I'm going until I get there. If I did, I'd have to kill you.

Oh, what the heck.

Clue # 1: passport required.

Clue #2: George Clooney and Matt Damon.

-- Oscar Madison, IMM (International Man of Mystery)

Fame inflation

2007-06-18T06:53:00.000-07:00

To be culturally literate, it's seeming more and more like you have to know who the top contenders are on American Idol. That sort of thing comes up more often in conversations and crossword puzzle clues.

I have no interest in ever watching American Idol or knowing anything about the winners.

I have no interest in knowing that Paris Hilton is a person rather than a hotel, though even I can't avoid hearing about her latest travails -- She's going to jail! She's not! She's going to appeal! She's dropped her appeal! She's in jail! She's out! She's in again! She cried!

The problem is this: it used to be that you could wait them out, and they'd be gone, these fad people, these human Pet Rocks.

But what used to be 15 minutes of fame has expanded to 20 -- and counting.

Suicide Watch

2007-06-15T10:31:00.000-07:00

The new (third) season of Top Chef began this past Wednesday, and looks like it will be entertaining as ever. The first guy eliminated was Clay, a Mississippian who asserted that he would bring southern-style cooking as well as entertaining southern personality to the table.

His rap about being entertaining had a bit of a forced, anxious quality, as if he were trying to make an argument to the show's producers to keep him even after he bombed the initial "quickfire" challenge. The chief judge, Chef Tom Colicchio, has asserted in the past that the entertainment value of the contestants is not a factor in the judges decisions, and, strange as it may sound, I believe him. Clay was obviously out of his league in terms of cooking know-how, and the only concern I had about his elimination is that he told us that his father, too, had been a chef, and had committed suicide. Uh-oh.

As I've said before, I find Colicchio charming, in his gruff way, and feel that he brings a measure of integrity to the show. He seems to really know his stuff about food and how to run a restaurant. So it was with very high hopes and a strong willingness to be pleased that B and I visited two of his New York eateries: last summer, his sandwich place, 'Wichcraft; and last month, his informal bistro, Craftbar.

I really enjoyed the upscale sandwich fare at 'Wichcraft, but Craftbar was a different story. The afternoon before our dinner at 'Craftbar, B and I had a portentous celebrity sighting on a Soho streetcorner near our hotel: Dave, one of the near-finalists of Top Chef season one, of all people! This was the whiner whose claim to fame was his supposed "invention" of the verbal smackdown, "I'm not your b*tch, b*tch," which he claimed was so damned original and clever that he wanted to market it on a T-shirt.

I suppose an occupational hazard of being a celebrity food judge is that Colicchio's own patrons will seat themselves at an imaginary "judges' table" when they sit down to a meal at his restaurants. I know I kept thinking -- what would Colicchio say about this if one of the Top Chef contestants made it?

The dinner opened promisingly with perhaps the best breadsticks I've ever had (I usually don't even bother to eat breadsticks), and menu descriptions that sounded very appetizing. From there it went downhill. Not disastrously downhill, but kind of a slowly building roll down a gentle slope.

Our two appetizers -- a homemade sausage and a fried tofu thingy -- sounded great in the menu. But while the flavors were interesting, the texture and presentation were odd -- kind of like fish sticks on a bare plate, with no garnishes for the eye. What's more, both items were too dry and "needed something." That something was supplied in the form a tasty dipping sauce, but the amount of dipping sauce provided -- less than a tablespoon it seemed -- was incredibly stingy, and when we asked for more, they said "no"!

For a main course, I ordered braised short ribs. Usually, you get this sort of thing in a thick, carmelized gravy, but the dish arrived in soup dish sitting in a pool of thin broth. The overall effect was something between a soup and a watery stew -- the strangest thing. I couldn't help thinking that Colicchio would have gone nuts (in a bad way) had a Top Chef contestant served up this dish.

One last thing about the Colicchio restaurants is that there seems to be something weird going on in terms of personnel management. Maybe it was just random -- two instances is not that many on which to judge, really -- but both at 'Wichcraft and Craftbar, we witnessed some service, uh, issues.

At 'Wichcraft, things seemed to be going okay behind the counter until the store manager had a meltdown and reamed out one of the line workers in plain view and hearing of the customers. An awkward moment.

At Craftbar, the service swung between friendliness and formality. This is understandable, since it must be devilishly hard to please everybody on that score: formal and obsequious service makes people like me uncomfortable, while other patrons want that. But the service also veered strangely between overattentiveness -- constantly refilling the waterglass, or wiping crumbs, or asking to clear plates that were not quite done -- and making you feel sort of ignored and small: a long wait to catch a waiter's attention for our ultimately denied request for more sauce, for example.

And I had to laugh (while gritting my teeth) when the waiter, bending over to flirt with the two women dining at the next table, kept his hand on the back of my chair to brace himself. This lasted for a couple of minutes. (What should I have said to the waiter... "Get your hands off my chair, b*tch?")

Whatever the cause, the overarching vibe I get from his restaurants is feeling vaguely uncomfortable, like I'm waiting for something else to go wrong. Is this random, or is there something about Colicchio's personality filtering down to his staff?

Actually, in Episode One of the new season of Top Chef, the less likeable side of Colicchio's personality emerged. Instead of just focusing on Clay's food preparation, he kept harping on the fact that Clay initially said "I stand by my dish," but then admitted there were cooking shortcomings to it. As if to say, "you're not just a bad cook, you're also a wimp." Boy will he feel bad if Clay ... well, let's not go there.

Don't be one of these

2007-06-09T06:36:00.000-07:00

Two days in a row, the NYT crossword puzzle has had the word "hater" (today, "haters"). Today, the clue was "bigots."

I couldn't finish today's puzzle, of which I was a major hater. I don't know which word I found inaner, "hater" or 53-across ("inaner").

Don't be like me. Don't be a hater. Have a nice day.

Trendspotting

2007-06-04T13:26:00.000-07:00

I've been a frequent and irrascible commentator on the Baby Boomers, that demographic bulge that came just before me and got in on all the good stuff while the getting was still good: the real estate boom, the stock market boom, Woodstock tickets.

I’ve watched in mixed amusement and horror as the Boomers have aged into middle and late-middle age, while their media machine has desperately tried to make those phases of life into grandiose and sexy marketing opportunities.

Here are some trends and things to look out for in the next 10-20 years as the baby boomers, now in their early 60s, cross over into old age.

An explosion in litigation over contested wills (hint to law students: study Trusts and Estates!).
Power napping DVDs!
You will learn more than you ever thought you wanted to know about geriatric sex.
40% of all romantic comedies will seem derivative of On Golden Pond.
Bifocals become cool!
High-end assisted-living facilities upgrade their cuisine with French-trained chefs.
Robert DeNiro plays the Marlon Brando role in the remake of The Godfather (Part I).

There is, of course, an up-side to the baby-boomers’ relentless pursuit of the good life. And I don’t just mean inheriting their money when they die. Baby boomers may actually fix some of the broken societal attitudes and institutions surrounding old age: nursing homes, the Social Security system, neglect and abuse of the elderly in general. Bless them and god speed. That’s something that could really benefit all of us.

Is it just me, or are those two mailboxes talking about me?

2007-05-31T09:38:00.000-07:00

Iced coffee wars, continued

2007-05-31T08:48:00.001-07:00

Is this good advertizing by Dunkin' Donuts? What's so appealing about iced coffee splashing out of the cup?

Inside the store: See what I mean?

Can't quite put my finger on the irony here

2007-05-28T13:30:00.000-07:00

Other than an extremely painful procedure, the most unpleasant thing about medical appointments, as far as I'm concerned, is the waiting. You sit there with nothing to take your mind off of the anxieties -- that you'll get bad news, that the procedure will be extremely painful -- other than the most irritating assortment of magazines known to humanity.

If hell is something affirmatively nasty, then purgatory is a waiting room with flourescent lights and bad magazines.

Which is why "Dr. Wait" is second only to "Dr. Pain" as an unfortunate name for a medical professional.

If you were "Doctor Wait," wouldn't you try real hard to find another way to phrase this idea?