29. June 2008 by admin.

I haven’t been writing for the last few days because my Internet connection at home has been flaky. (Even though I’m in business for myself, and don’t bill for unproductive time, I still can’t quite bring myself to write posts at the office.) I’ve lived at the same place since 2003 and had Internet access through the local Cable TV company. Up until this past week, we’ve had maybe one or two brief interruptions per year. But now it’s really hit or miss.

I was about to give up this morning when I decided to give the setup one last kick in the pants. I disconnected and reconnected power to my cable modem, and everything started working again. I can’t say how long it will last, though.

* * *

“I have a terrific idea,” my wife said on Friday night.

“Should I be terrified?” I asked.

“I want to go to a Polish restaurant for lunch tomorrow.”

Technically, I’m a Polish-American, but I have no desire to learn Polish, or eat Polish food, or go to Poland. I wasn’t terrified, but I was a little ticked off: I wanted to have my Saturday lunch at Bar Tabac, a French bistro place on Smith Street.

“I don’t know any Polish places.”

“Do some research.”

The Internet was working briefly yesterday morning, and I found a couple of plausible spots. I had no reason to be terrified: they generally served what one would recognize as ‘American’ food, as well as some distinctly Polish items. So we went to Christine’s in Greenpoint (the Polish neighborhood in Brooklyn) and had a good lunch.

After lunch, we went to the Union Square Greenmarket and bought some vegetables. There is one place that sells vast piles of bright magenta radishes: fresh and juicy and spicier than the tepid red balls one finds in plastic bags in the supermarket. They disappear in November or so; we’re glad to see them back.

We went to Madison Square Park and sat there for a while, contemplating the line that was waiting to buy hamburgers at the Shake Shack. I’m sure they make good burgers, but I couldn’t bring myself to wait a half-hour for one. Is part of the charm of part of the Shack Shack burger the ability to moan about waiting on line for it?

And then we went home and took a nap. I run around like a maniac the rest of the week; I need a day off.

Posted in Life Goes On, Things Falling Apart | No Comments »

25. June 2008 by admin.

It’s 7:30 am.

When I first kept a blog, years ago, I had to do everything myself: I had to open up an HTML editor, write my post, then fix up the calendar page.  If it was the first post of the month, I would have to compose another calendar page and do some further housekeeping.  Then I would FTP the new files to the site and check that I hadn’t munged anything.  So there was anywhere between five and fifteen minutes of housekeeping on top of actually writing the post.

My life was calmer then, and most days I had about an hour where I could sit down, write expansively about something, and then post it.  Today, things are busier, but I’m still in the mindset about the wonderful thing that I want to write if I could sit down for an hour.  But there aren’t any hours like that, where I have time on my hands and some good energy for writing.

Fortunately, things have advanced since I was composing pages the hard way.  I don’t have to do any housekeeping: I just write, hit ‘Publish,’ and I’m done.  I still read the page after it’s posted, partly from force of habit, but even that isn’t necessary: the blogging software does not mung my text.

But I’m still in the mode of the magnificent opus that I want to write.  Unfortunately, since I don’t have the time and energy, I end up writing nothing.  I have to learn that there really is such a thing as the quick post, accomplished in less than 15 minutes, like today’s post.

It’s 7:42 am.  So I still have time to hit ‘Publish’ and check my work.

Done!

Posted in Blogging | No Comments »

8. June 2008 by admin.

Last Thursday, they started painting the corridors in the apartment.  While the building where I live is generally kept in good order, the corridors could use a paint job: they haven’t been painted since we moved here in 2003.

Aesthetically, I wish they hadn’t: the old paint was a light yellow, which was pleasantly warm originally, when lit by incandescent lights, and still decent when the lights were replaced with fluorescent bulbs.  The new paint job is a blue-gray color, dismal and cold.  Did they choose such a grim color so that we’d all know they had been painted?

And then, in the lobby, someone posted a notice that the apartment doors were being painted with (gasp!) oil-based paint.  “Oil-based paint is a paint whose primary component is oil,” the notice reminds us.  (As opposed to, say, peanut butter?)

“Do you want your children  to breathe these fumes?”

At this point, my son is old enough that I can no longer control what he breathes.  But if he were younger, while I wouldn’t take him to a paint factory, I can’t get upset about the paint on the apartment doors.

When I was a kid, oil-based paint was common enough as a wall paint, and the smell of a freshly-painted apartment was part of its charm.  But I have to wonder if the people who are fear for their children from freshly-painted doors ever change their shower curtains: the funk from a new plastic curtain can make a bathroom uninhabitable for a week.

*          *          *

On my way home this afternoon, the trains were screwed up: a blackout in Brooklyn.  I feared for the worst as I took an alternate route home.  But the lights were still on when I got home.  Whew: I had loaded up on groceries this morning.

I have to wonder, though: we never had to worry about blackouts in New York City until a few years ago.  Electricity in the city was expensive, but reliable.  Now, some part of the city loses power every year: a couple of years ago, part of Queens was in the dark for over a week.

Maybe if electricity got cheaper, one might consider it a fair trade.  But it’s still expensive, and Con Ed has asked for yet another rate increase.

Posted in Things Falling Apart, Fearmongering | No Comments »

7. June 2008 by admin.

My wife and I went to see the new Sex and the City movie today.  All the reviews of it that I’ve seen to date considered it either wonderful or horrible.  My sense of it was somewhere in between: it isn’t a cinematic masterpiece, but it’s a good light entertainment.  It would have been better if it were cut about twenty minutes shorter, but I can’t complain too hard: today was the first seriously hot day of the year in New York City, and it was good to sit in an air-conditioned movie theater.

My wife introduced me to the TV series when we got married.  If I had watched it when I was a lonely single guy, I would have hated it: how could I find a decent companion when women were like that?  But ensconced in a happy marriage, the women of Sex in the City seemed unreal: they lived under different laws of relationship physics than the rest of us, and their situations were entertaining when it happened to them, but in the real world, we wouldn’t do things like that.

The TV series got formulaic after a while, and came to a reasonable end in 2004.  The movie represents a continuation of the story a few years hence, and a chance to answer the one thing that I never understood:

What does Carrie see in Mr. Big?

Throughout the entire television series, Carrie Bradshaw, the lead character, is irretrievably attracted to ‘Mr. Big,’ but I could never understand why: Big is a self-absorbed asshole with a fear of commitment.

In the movie, Carrie and Big have been living together, and decide to get married so coldly that the theater had to shut off the air conditioning to prevent frostbite among the audience.  You might have thought that a few years with his true love would have softened Big, but no: he’s still a self-absorbed asshole.  If he were as unsure of himself in his working life as in his relationship with Carrie, he’d be a total loser instead of a bigshot construction executive.  Later, he backs out of his own wedding, and we’re not surprised.

In the end, it’s all resolved, and yes, Carrie and Big get married.  (I don’t think I’ve given away much: in this case, the journey is more interesting than the destination.)  But the groundwork is there for a sequel, say 3-4 years hence, when they get divorced….

Posted in Movies, Television | No Comments »

2. June 2008 by admin.

This weekend, I watched the remake of The Andromeda Strain on A&E. When the original came out in the early 1970s, I thought it was way cool: crack scientists in a secret underground lab, trying to understand an actual (if microbial) creature from outer space. I was curious how it got transformed for our time.

First, the story has been retuned to our current mania for death and destruction. In the original, Andromeda did almost all of its killing before the picture started: we drive around the town of Piedmont and wonder what how everyone died at once. But in the new version, Andromeda is the Energizer Bunny of microbes: we see it kill again and again. The odd thing is that its victims only die after they have passed it to someone else.  Later, it kills plants, as well. We’re supposed to believe that Andromeda is intelligent, that it has been sent across billions of miles over at least some number of years with hostile intent. Mostly, I think the scriptwriters are just lazy.

In the original, the military may have had their sinister intentions, but they were secondary to the scientists. Now we see them blundering about throughout the picture (and getting killed): they’re not only evil, they’re stupid as well. The unspoken message: they will not protect you. Meanwhile, the handsome young journalist slips through their fingers. We’re rooting for him, of course, but it’s yet another dimension of military ineptitude.

Another change was to adapt the story to our mania for instant communication. Originally, the scientists were holed up in their top-secret lab, and part of the story turned on a lapse of communication due to a trivial failure of a Teletype machine. In the current version, the scientists are on the phone half the time, even talking to our handsome journalist. What part of ‘top-secret laboratory’ do these people not understand?

Finally, in the original, the key to disarm the atomic self-destruct device is turned over to one of the scientists because he’s a single male, and the Odd Man Hypothesis suggests that single males are most likely to make the correct decision in such matters. We never knew anything about his personal life beyond that, and didn’t think anything further about it. In the current version, it’s impressed on us that the Odd Man is gay.

When I was eleven, the original Andromeda Strain was a shining illustration in the power of reason and logic, although I didn’t put it in those terms back then: it was just really cool. Even though the scientists in the new version do manage to save the world, it’s a pale imitation of the original.

Posted in Television, Fearmongering | No Comments »

1. June 2008 by admin.

Yesterday evening, the Democratic rules committee  reached a decision about Florida and Michigan.  The delegations would be seated with half-votes instead of full votes, and for Michigan, some of the delegates (including a handful that would otherwise have gone to Hillary Clinton) were allocated to Barack Obama, who did not appear on the ballot.

As a result, Clinton nets a few dozen delegates, but not enough to make a meaningful dent in Obama’s lead.  When the last primaries end on Tuesday, Obama will be in striking distance to the nomination, but will probably not have bagged it.  But he’ll be the nominee, barring something really extraordinary.

*          *          *

I’m a registered Democrat, and I consider the Bush victory in 2000 the closest thing to a coup d’etat that our country has ever experienced.  I really don’t want to vote Republican this year, but if Clinton were to win the nomination, I’d have to vote for John McCain.

On the other hand, There’s a lot that I like about Obama, most of it stuff that seems to tick everyone else off.  I like that he listens to people who don’t believe that the US is the most wonderful country on the planet, and that he’s an intellectual with a conceptual view of the world.

Part of me likes that Obama is willing to open discussions with our enemies, but he underplays the difficulty of actually doing that: he’ll be swimming with the sharks, and if he’s not careful, he’ll get his leg bitten off.

But when it comes to Iraq, he’s lost me.  Both Obama and Clinton believe that our next task with Iraq is getting out.  While our adventures in Iraq were ill-advised at best, the next President must play the hand that he is dealt.  McCain was refreshingly honest when he remarked, a few months ago, that we might be in Iraq for 100 years.  In other words: Brother, you bought yourself a protectorate.

The Iraqi government is making progress in organizing itself and preparing to function as an independent state.  But it’s a difficult job and cannot be accomplished on a timetable driven by American politics.  It’s not, as some (including Obama) imagine, that the Iraqis are imply lazy, and if we simply hold their feet to the fire, they’ll buckle down and solve all their problems.

If we move out in 2009, we endanger Iraq’s progress, and in turn we risk destabilizing the region.   None of the advocates for withdrawal has come up with a good answer to that.

Obama has an answer, but it’s not a good one: he plans to talk to Iran and hope they’ll make nice.  It’s one thing to talk to our enemies, but it’s quite another to expect that they will act in our interest–instead of theirs–as an immediate result of such talking.

I’d like to vote for Obama, but in some respects he makes it really, really difficult.

Posted in Presidential election, Barack Obama | No Comments »