June 2006 Archives

The Devil Wears Prada follows my own recent career path: a college journalism major from Ohio pursues dreams of working for a magazine in Manhattan. Like me, we know our hero, Andy Sachs, (Anne Hathaway), has little sense of style and is from the Midwest because of the opening montage, which shows her throwing on her Banana Republic and taking the subway to work—the subway for fuck’s sake—while all the other montage girls motor away in hired Lincolns or flag down suspiciously available and immaculate cabs.

The plot diverges from my life, however, upon the introduction of Meryl Streep as Miranda Priestly, the editor of the Vogueish magazine Runway. Against all odds, she hires Andy as her assistant and it’s made as plain as Andy’s wardrobe that the poor girl doesn’t know what she’s in for. If you haven’t heard, Miranda is the devil referenced in the movie’s title, a Cruella de Vil with a frosty gaze, a voice of whisper-sweet honey, and speech of solid snide. She leaves teeth marks all over the scenery and supporting cast.

Oh, the things she says, so cutthroat and mean-spirited. She is not to be questioned or trifled with. She mows down coworkers and colleagues with wicked asides and blunt putdowns. She asks the impossible of her assistants. (The other is played with exasperated British charm by Emily Blunt and has my favorite line of the movie, about her diet of eating nothing until she gets dizzy, at which point she allows herself “a cube of cheese.”) Miranda’s missions-impossible have Andy sprinting across the city, once to purchase a gourmet steak that ends up uneaten, another to procure a copy of the newest Harry Potter novel—so new it’s still in galleys—for the reading enjoyment of her bratty, redheaded twins.

Miranda evokes one of those acid-spitting horrors from Alien regurgitated as a queen-bitch fashionista. At least two of the gentlemen in my party remarked that the fashion sense, snarky dialogue and general fabulousness of the film were most appropriate for an audience of gay gentlemen. That does seem to be the case; there’s plentiful mockery inspired by Andy’s initially frumpy attire, particularly her blue, cotton-poly blend sweater and there was a big laugh over her inability to spell Gabbana. The clincher was not one but two Madonna songs on the soundtrack, one of which is “Vogue,” which I believe backdropped the necessary Cinderella-style wardrobe montage.

Runway’s swishy art director Nigel (Stanley Tucci), Andy’s colleague and confidant, instigates this makeover, and the audience knows the transformation is complete when it gets the requisite bottom-to-top tilt of her standing there in her haute couture. Now she’s hot and sports a bangs-intensive haircut, a Treo, a car service and, most importantly, confidence. Also, apparently, a lot more money than earlier in the movie, when she was bumming around her apartment in a Northwestern sweatshirt, eating grilled cheese sandwiches for dinner. She’s a woman aglow, like an actor in a shampoo commercial, and with renewed vigor tackles the demands of her beastly boss, basks in the nightlight of the Big City, beams Julia Roberts-wattage smiles, and allows for a fling with an apparently non-gay clothing designer (Simon Baker), who is as smooth and interesting as a sheet of Formica.

That the pure and naive Andy is gone forever, replaced by this girl from a Robert Palmer video, is realized most painfully by her live-in boyfriend (Adrian Grenier), who appears to be a member of the Strokes. He broods about how much she’s changed—and not in a good way. She spends too much time at the office and on her cell with Miranda, and not enough time with him, he suggests. But this seems petty and not a genuine concern of anyone who would actually work and live in Manhattan; you work as much as you must in order to afford that SoHo apartment, Fabrizio. Those lonely cobblestone streets you sulk upon at night don’t come for free, you know.

Tidily, Andy alienates her friends, too, even after plying them with swag from her job, including an ugly designer purse and a Bang & Olufsen phone that resembles a futuristic silver dildo. The movie’s plot hinges on Big Choices like these: work life vs. social life, self-promotion vs. screwing over a coworker, and good vs. evil, but they really aren’t choices at all. The characters, despite small variances, are hard-wired as archetypes. There’s no exercising the demons from Miranda, aside from a scene shoehorned in to show her beaten down and symbolic without her makeup, baring her soul briefly to Andy. Andy ends up learning Valuable Lessons from her year at Runway and handily secures a reputable journalistic job at a local rag. Everything’s back to the way it was when it started.

The Devil Wears Prada is a summertime trifle and a moderately entertaining diversion. I must award it at least a few stars or thumbs because, as you know, I dig this city and movies filmed in it. Prada makes this grade, even if its Manhattan is the scrubbed-till-it-glows edition seen in most Woody Allen films. I was especially amused to spot a scene taking place at Craft, where I had dinner on Monday, a coincidence recalling the one where I ate at Sea, then saw it depicted the same weekend in a scene from Garden State.

The sun and rain conspired for a rainbow today, which I photographed as I walked from the subway home after work. The red, orange and yellow are clear, but my camera swallowed some of the spectrum; in reality it was a full seven-color marvel.

Lately I’ve been thinking about (and smelling) fresh colors in association with my apartment building. Perhaps emboldened by the city’s recently approved rent hikes, my superintendent has been making capital improvements, such as repaving the front steps and repainting the trim indoors. All week he’s been slopping violent red enamel-gloss over the previously brown surfaces of window frames, molding and banisters. Today, he went for the door exteriors on my floor, and as I turned the corner at the top of the stairs, I saw mine was the color of an evil candy apple and just as sticky.

It reminds me of a detail from this Guardian article about Stanley Kubrick’s quest to film the perfect red door for Eyes Wide Shut. During preproduction, he ordered scouts to canvass London and photograph cinematic red doors. The one included in the movie was simply built on a set at Pinewood Studios and only appears onscreen for a few seconds, as the character played by Tom Cruise is welcomed through it by a prostitute. And still, somewhere in Kubrick’s estate in Hertfordshire, among the storage boxes of obsessive research, correspondence and notes, are hundreds of snapshots of anonymous red doors.

Red is one of my favorite colors, so I like my door’s makeover. It’s fighting a winning battle with the walls in the building’s stairwells and hallways, which are the texture and color of sulphur. The combination may be as garish as a 1970s Fiestaware pattern or a McDonald’s in hell, but it’s better than the previous pairing with brown.

New York City’s Rent Guidelines Board voted last night to increase rents for the city’s one million rent-stabilized apartments (including mine) 4.25% on one-year leases and 7.25% on two-year leases, according to an article in today’s New York Times (“Despite Protests, Rent Board Sets 7.25% Increase” by Janny Scott). The increases are the highest since 2003 and apply to leases renewed between this October and September 2007.

Building owners supporting the raise say they’re being pinched by fuel costs and a rise in real estate taxes. As for we poor tenants, researchers at New York University released a report this month finding that the number of apartments considered affordable to those of moderate-income households fell nearly a fifth from 2002 to 2005.

It’s quickly becoming even more of an island for rich people here.

I’d been told to keep an eye peeled for pickpockets, gypsies and gypsy pickpockets while I’m vacationing in Rome this August, and I thought, how bad can it be? I’ll just ensure my wallet is in my front pocket.

Today, though, a friendly New York-born-and-bred coworker cautioned me as well. She’s been to Rome twice and said a fannypack or money belt was absolutely necessary for securing one’s money and other portable valuables. Yikes! Now that a lifetime New Yorker has emphasized the magical disappearing quality of tourist money in Rome, I’m inclined to believe it’s a serious situation and will buy that money belt. Although this doesn’t mean I still can’t execute the idea I had to keep an empty decoy wallet prominently stuck in my back pocket just to see how quickly and quietly it could be filched.

I’ve been granted temporary membership to the Fancy Restaurant Club, a hallowed and exclusive New York society deemed secret up until the point I started writing this sentence.

The Fancy Restaurant Club meets the last Monday of each month for dinner at a New York restaurant rated among the Zagat Survey’s top-25 or so for the current calendar year. This means costly and luxuriously long meals, which I’m not typically big on. But when I realized membership would spur activity and quality within the languishing 52 Meals Project, I filled out my application and secured my sponsor. That was in December. Since then I’d been awaiting the day I would be tapped to join, watching as I missed out on Club outings at the likes of Babbo and the Gotham Bar and Grill.

Because of club bylaws, I can’t divulge who else is a member without risking the revocation of my club card and commemorative lapel pin. Would it surprise you to learn that six U.S. presidents, two secretaries of state and Eli Whitney, inventor of the cotton gin, have at one time been members of the Fancy Restaurant Club? This much I can tell you for certain: it’s a tight-knit group of at least one saucy lady, several dapper men-about-town, and now myself. It’s a lot like the Algonquin Round Table; we too aim to change the nature of American comedy and establish the tastes of a new artistic era, one cocktail at a time. But mostly—if I may speak for the group—we savor good food presented attractively and attentively within an atmosphere of good company and conversation.

The Club’s choice tonight fit the bill: dinner at Craft, the flagship restaurant in chef/owner Tom Colicchio’s Craft portfolio, which also includes a steakhouse, a few sandwich and baked goods outposts, and a less-formal version of Craft; he also owns the storied Gramercy Tavern.

Craft is a cozy place. Thick, smooth-paneled wooden tables are topped with individual placemats instead of a tablecloth. The lighting is dim, provided by clear light bulbs, filaments aglow, strung hanging down from the ceiling in grids. The servers, decked out in checked shirts and striped ties, were helpful explaining dishes, flavors and unfamiliar French phrases, and promptly cleared dishes, refilled water glasses and refolded napkins.

I started with the Craft cocktail, made with a Champagne-like alcohol and fresh diced rhubarb, which made for a strange yet pleasingly tart summertime taste. The menu specializes in smaller portions of artfully adorned and presented comfort foods. Sharing dishes is encouraged, so we started with a cold beet salad, colorful from the other chopped root vegetables that were blended in. We also ordered the foie gras, which I avoided, as I generally make it a point not to eat internal organs that filter toxins and secrete bile. I did try a bit of pâté that was served as a between-course palate-cleanser; it was salty, buttery and topped with what I believe was a wine reduction. These interspersed treats were strange but welcome; another one was little shot glasses of ginger ale mixed with strawberry juice and the closing treat was a batch of warm caramel corn.

Side dishes included sautéed sugar snap peas, roasted wild mushrooms and potatoes au gratin, and for our main courses, we feasted upon Scottish salmon, roasted organic chicken (served in a small iron pot), prawns and Maine diver scallops.

The four entrees we ordered were basic and not seasoned excitingly, but were well-prepared, textbook examples of each dish. I’m leery of scallops because they’re often rubbery or tasteless, but Craft’s were large, fresh-tasting and done perfectly. The salmon flaked at the touch of a fork and the chicken, although still a bit pink, was tender and delicious. Craft’s menu is large enough to attract diners back if only to try different dishes; also, it would seem the selections change often, because the restaurant prints new menus daily. On a repeat visit I’d want to sample some of the more semi-exotic main dishes, like the braised duck, John Dory (an Australian fish) or quail. I’d enjoy watching someone else eat sweetbreads, as I feel the same way about thymus glands and pancreas as I do livers.

For dessert, I had a sweetly rich lemon créme brûlèe and to drink, espresso, although I very nearly ordered a glass of locally brewed mead, which I will try next time. The lady of the table had the chocolate soufflé, presented in a miniature copper pot that could only be described as cute, complemented by a plate of raspberries.

Craft

• 43 E. 19th St.
• (212) 780-0880
• Meal 21 of 52: beet salad ($14), foie gras ($26), Scottish salmon ($26), roasted organic chicken ($28), Maine diver scallops ($28), potatoes au gratin ($10), and a bunch of other stuff.

One of the reasons the view across the Hudson River from Linden Terrace at Fort Tryon Park is so unspoiled, as the story goes, is that when John D. Rockefeller, Jr. bequeathed the land to the city in 1931, he also bought hundreds of acres of the Palisades to prevent it from becoming developed. Well played, Johnny. Now you can sit, relax and look at the river, the George Washington Bridge arcing off west and a bunch of densely forested New Jersey, which is often better to look at than other kinds of New Jersey.

I was checking out the view up there late this morning for the Fort Tryon Park Trust’s “Pancakes in the Park” benefit. It was the first such benefit staged by the Friends Committee of the 25-year-old Trust and it reminded me of the “spaghetti supper” events from church basements and school cafeterias of my youth. It was a bunch of chatty Mom-types selling $10 meal tickets at the base of the terrace. Set up on the terrace under a tent was a catering service dishing out steam-tray scrambled eggs, fresh fruit, sausage, sweet rolls, orange juice and coffee, and pancakes that were being made one at a time on griddles, and could be topped with blueberries, sugar or a grilled onion-vegetable medley.

The maximum turnout while I was sitting there on a bench eating my brunch was maybe 50 folks, seemingly a solid half of them young children. I’m bad at guessing ages, but these were in the range of stroller-bound up to that age where they’re running all over the place, and even when you shout, “Cody, stop it! Get over here!” they ignore you and keep darting about.

A yard sale was part of the breakfast although the intermittent rains made it a challenge to sift through the macramé owls and World’s Best Dad coffee mugs that had been carefully arranged atop card tables. It was an actual yard sale, and paired with the pancakes, it made me momentarily nostalgic for the suburbs.

Later in the afternoon, sitting out the drizzly weather in my apartment, I came across a tidbit in a New Yorker article from 1926 mentioning that the Morris-Jumel Mansion, at Edgecombe Avenue and 160th Street in Washington Heights, had on exhibit the only mastodon bones ever found in New York City, unearthed on Dyckman Street very near where live. I certainly had to check this out, but the problem with not having home internet access (yes, it’s down again) is an inability to fact-check. I should have figured an 80-year-old article might not have contained the most up-to-date information available. When I showed up at the mansion, there were no bones in sight, other than the sour old woman who admitted me, seized my $4 admission and told me she’d be closing the house promptly at 4 p.m. Then she retreated to the gift shop to read her romance novel.

Sitting atop a rise on a neatly landscaped plot, the house contains period furniture, drapery and other old-time decor. At just over 240, it’s the oldest house in Manhattan and has really creaky wooden floors and probably a few ghosts. George Washington, when he was commander-in-chief of the American Army, made the house his headquarters for the Battle of Harlem Heights during the American Revolution.

Here we go again. Early this year, you’ll recall I found many more animal names than required in my Page-a-Day Boggle Brain Buster puzzle. I was able to find many more animal names than required in today’s puzzle, too. The instructions were to locate five animal names but I found more than twice as many. I suspect that in both cases this is simply because there are so many possible animal names in the English language; it’s not as restrictive as most of the Brain Buster puzzle subjects, which are usually along the lines of, “Find six words that have to do with tennis.”

Anyway, here’s the animal puzzle, if you wish to have at it yourself; let me know if I missed any.

For my solution, highlight this hidden list:
1. CHOW*
2. COW
3. ELK*
4. HARE*
5. HAWK*
6. MULE
7. OWL*
8. PIG
9. WALRUS
10. WHALE
11. WORM/S*
*=Not given in the official Boggle Brain Buster solution.

Still recovering from my trip to San Francisco, I attempted to take the 7 train out to Queens for a party thrown by the Manhattan news-blog Gothamist, only to find that the 7 wasn’t running at all between the two boroughs. I ended up taking the E and walking to the Long Island City Water Taxi Beach, many blocks through industrial parks and run-down housing, arriving two hours late.

Not like I made a stellar effort to talk to anyone, but it seemed as if most of the partygoers had arrived in groups or already knew other people there. I have no problem talking to strangers on the phone; in fact most of my meetings in San Francisco were secured with people who I’d never dealt with before and many of whom who hadn’t even heard of the publishing company I work for. And at our networking events, I don’t have much trouble mingling. I don’t know why social events like this party tonight would be any different, other than there’s not a commonality of background. I mean, I could approach someone at random and start talking about real estate, but that could come off as just weird.

Remember nearly two years ago when I was down in the World Trade Pit for the unveiling of the Freedom Tower cornerstone?

Traditionally, the laying of a cornerstone signals the start of development. Not this time. Yesterday around 6:30 in the morning, it was loaded onto a truck and returned to Long Island where it will be kept in a Plexiglas case, viewable by appointment.

The New York Times explains today in an article by David W. Dunlap, “With Tower Yet to Rise, Cornerstone Leaves Town”:

When the Freedom Tower was redesigned last year because of security concerns, the cornerstone’s location was rendered obsolete. The architects shifted the building’s edge about 40 feet to the west, leaving the cornerstone standing outside the bounds of the reconfigured tower.

Although the stone’s absence is “an acknowledgment that much of what passed for progress at ground zero to date has been longer on symbolism than on substance,” it will also allow the tower’s foundation subcontractor to begin excavating the east side of the tower site. “As it turned out,” concludes Dunlap, “the building could not start until the cornerstone was removed.”

I’d been without a proper cap since I lost my favorite in Ireland last summer, so before my San Francisco trip, I returned to Morris Bros., the Upper West Side purveyor of baggy T-shirts and school uniforms, where I bought my previous hat. I liked that ex-hat because it was one of those elastic band varieties that best fits my chubby head. The closest they had this time was “The Perfect Fit” Yankees cap in “Fitted Garment Wash,” which makes it look as if it’d been left on a hot car dashboard an entire summer, then driven over a few times for good measure. I wasn’t crazy about the logo, but it fit and protecting my balding head from the sun and the cold was of paramount importance.

On two separate occasions here in San Francisco, people in the hotel elevator used it as a conversation starter. “Oh, you from New York?” they’d ask, and we’d enact a rushed conversation abruptly ended by the elevator doors opening. It was tough to tell if this was genuine congeniality or the talk of a salesperson, who frequent hotels for meetings and conventions. Waiting for the restroom on my plane back to New York, another person struck up a conversation; by then I’d downgraded my “Are you from New York?” response to “Not originally.” This girl said she’d lived in many places ’round the world and decided that two years is the minimum amount of time that can pass before one can consider oneself a true resident of a city. Sounds about right. I guess I have to wear my hat during travel more often and strangers will talk to me.

I had to cross the bay this afternoon for a meeting in Oakland, California, and I was all set to tackle the BART card-vending machines with renewed vigor. In San Francisco, like in D.C. (but unlike flat-fee New York), you pay for your subway ride based on its length. This requires you to put a little thought into how much money you should put on your card because the machines only return a low amount of maximum change.

When I entered the Montgomery Street BART/MUNI station, all of the farecard slots were taped over with blue stickers and the electronic turnstiles were open. Signs announced a “Spare the Air Day,” which I later learned was heat-induced—apparently, 84 degrees is really hot for the city.

According to a San Francisco Chronicle article, the free rides were to lure commuters away from their cars onto public transportation to avoid exceeding state and federal smog standards. Although transit officials said the campaign drew “significant numbers of new passengers to some systems,” it didn’t sway enough to avoid tipping the smog scale, likely to 90ppb (parts per billion) of emissions for today; the federal ozone standard maxes-out at 80ppb. Hey, at least they’re tryin’.

I did some stereotypical San Francisco sightseeing today. I hiked up Telegraph Hill to see Coit Tower and a prime view of Alcatraz Island. I browsed the stacks at City Lights, co-founded in 1953 by Lawrence Ferlinghetti as the nation’s first all-paperback bookstore and publisher to the beat poets. Fisherman’s Wharf, which I also stopped by, is the Times Square of San Francisco: chain restaurants, dreary hotels, questionable entertainments, beggars, tacky T-shirts and trinkets for sale, and fat people clearly not from the city waddling about. This photo of a seagull in a shitstained landscape, eating what appears to be a bun, just about sums it up for me.

I salvaged my wharfwalk somewhat with a planned visit to the Musée Mécanique, a collection of antique mechanized penny and nickel amusements, including viewboxes for 3D photos (“See what the belly dancer does on her day off!”), player pianos and orchestrions, photobooths, fortune-tellers and palm-readers, love-testers, mutoscopes and slot machines.

It’s too bad it’s not a true museum but a bunch of stuff some daft old bastard collected and threw into a warehouse on Pier 45. There are very few placards describing who made these Wunderkammern and why, how popular they were, or how they work. Or course, there’s also no admission fee to the Musée, so I can’t complain too much.

One of the two most popular attractions was Knock Out Fighters, a primitive precursor to Rock’em Sock’em Robots. They’re these articulated, marionette-like boxer figurines, made in 1928 by a St. Paul-based scale manufacturer, that are completely mechanical and use no electricity. The arms of each player’s boxer are moved independently by two triggers on the gun handle-style “joystick.” A direct punch to the chin of an opposing boxer pushes in a pin that causes the figure to collapse in defeat. The other crowd-favored game was this mechanical test-your-strength arm-wrestler in a luchador mask, favored by gentlemen wishing to impress their ladies.

I also enjoyed this amusement park model fashioned mostly from toothpicks.

Nearby was an intriguing text-and-photo-based history of the roller coaster and the magic year of 1884, when LaMarcus Adna Thompson, a crafty inventor from Ohio, installed the first, the 600-foot Switchback Railway at Coney Island. It topped out at six miles-per-hour and required passengers to exit their car at the halfway point to switch to another track. But even that couldn’t hinder thrill-seekers who waited up to three hours in line to pay their nickel and take the wild ride. That same year at Coney Island, San Franciscan Philip Hinckle installed the first power-chain operated lift-hill coaster, while in San Francisco, two “continuous oval-track gravity coasters” opened, one at Ocean Beach and another at Mission and Eighth. Here’s the text of an ad from that year promoting the latter coaster:

SOMETHING NEW UNDER THE SUN.
A Sled-Ride Down Hill Without Snow!
GREAT SPORT!
PHYSICIANS RECOMMEND IT. * OPEN DAY AND NIGHT.
The CALIFORNIA GRAVITY RAILROAD CO.
Cor. Eighth and Mission Sts.
ADMISSION FREE. * FIVE CENTS A RIDE.
Bring your family and enjoy yourselves.
Polite Attendants. Electric Lights.

There are newer exhibits in the Musée as well: about a dozen old video games plunked way in the back. I was disappointed that the only inoperable machine was one of my all-time favorites, Tempest (1980), and to read the instructions revived fond memories. This game was easier than Old Maid:

TO PLAY:
Shoot the approaching enemy and enemy charges. Player loses a life when:
* caught by an enemy
* hit by a charge
* skewered by a spike

Wrapping up a fine afternoon on my long walk back to the hotel, I was able to score some Mexican Coke. No, not the Lindsay Lohan kind. Check it out, baby: hecho en Mexico.

If you wonder what my fuss is about, you are no soda connoisseur. Here’s part of an Associated Press article from 2004:

[D]iscriminating shoppers [...] say the cane sugar sweetener used in Mexican Coke has a sweeter, cleaner flavor than the high-fructose corn syrup in the American version. Many are willing to pay $1.10 per 12-ounce bottle for the imports, even with cans of American Coke sitting nearby for 49 cents each.

I’ve since read not all Coke in Mexico is made with sugar, but I trust that mine is because there’s an official label stuck to the oldschool green-tinted glass bottle by the importer with sugar listed as the second ingredient after carbonated water.

If you believe a recent article in the Santa Cruz Sentinel, which doesn’t offer any hard data to back up its claim, you can find Mexican Coke “just about everywhere in Latino communities across the United States.” But most of the officially sanctioned product here is found in Texas and Southern California, two of the largest Mexican markets in the country. The rest of the country’s Mexican Coke may be “grey market” stock brought over the border by third-party distributors or retailers. See, the Coca-Cola Co. limits official imports of the stuff because U.S. bottlers don’t get any money from Mexican Coke and that makes the U.S. bottlers sad.

One reason U.S. Coke isn’t made with sugar is that domestic sugar prices are artificially inflated to several times of those anywhere else in the world in order to help poor Florida sugarbeet farmers buy another Olympic-sized swimming pool for their second house.

So drink Mexican Coke and not only is it tastier than “the real thing,” you’re screwing over sugar farmers, the Coca-Cola Co. and its bottlers. Amazing how quickly an American icon can turn renegade. I’m going to lug my bottle back to New York and store it in a cool, dark place. As is done with Dom Perignon, I will save it to drink with a special someone for a special occasion.

As I’ve noticed in other big American cities I travel to, it’s much quieter here in San Francisco than in New York. The looser density of buildings and the wider spaces of the streets and sidewalks diffuse sound. There’s not as much traffic, so there’s less engine noise and honking, and the streets are thick with bicycles, trolleys, zero-emissions buses and hybrid buses fueled by diesel-powered electric generators. The quietude made me think of New York’s most traditional summertime form of noise pollution, the lilting music-box tune of the Mister Softee ice cream trucks.

About 250 of these refreshment repositories roam the five boroughs but their siren song makes it seem like more. The jingle, which has been around since Mister Softee was founded in 1956, is recalled fondly by old-timers and is as much a city institution as the year-round strains of tripped car alarms, street musicians and the bing-bong signaling the closing subway doors.

Infamously, Mayor Bloomberg tried to silence Mister Softee in 2004 as part of a proposed anti-noise package, inspiring a wave of love-hate backlash. “Resistance is futile” from the “cacophonous creature of confection lurking about the city,” wrote Dan Barry in The New York Times that summer.

So far as I know, the proposal failed, because the trucks are out in full force this summer, the jingle tinnier than ever. At McCarren Park on Sunday, there were Mister Softee trucks planted at two of the four corners, dishing out cone after cone of soft serve in the 90-degree heat. Standing at the halfway point between the vehicles, I could hear their simultaneous jingles overlap in a hellish round that was nonetheless like Pavlov’s bell to children and the obese.

The problem with the jingle isn’t so much that it’s annoying in itself but that it’s repeated ad nauseam. Most complaints about it originate from city-dwellers whose buildings the trucks will choose to park in front of, loathe to move on if they’re attracting a steady stream of customers.

Compounding the annoyance factor, it’s been alleged in the eGullet forums that the jingle has lyrics, although the tune seems too nimble for these clumsy phrases.

Here comes Mister Softee, the ice cream man.
The creamiest, dreamiest ice cream you get from Mister Softee.
For a refreshing delight supreme, look for Mister Softee.
My milkshakes and my sundaes and my cones are such a treat.
Listen for my store on wheels, ding-a-ling down the street.
S-O-F-T-double-E...Mister Softee.

Have a listen to the jingle for yourself, recorded lo-fi by my PowerShot S30 camera, and before you consider it charming, imagine it playing on infinite repeat.

Greetings from San Francisco! I’m here all this week for work and I must ask you: Is there any song more annoying to have stuck in your head here than “San Francisco (Be Sure to Wear Flowers in Your Hair)” by Scott McKenzie?

Up on the 20th floor of the Argent Hotel, as I utilize my $14.95 per night DSL connection, I can hear streetcars trundle by on the street below. Probably the most interesting structure visible from my window is the Hobart Building, although within walking distance are the Transamerica Pyramid and other architectural marvels.

Right now, I’m trying to adjust to the time difference, a chore aggravated by my busy work day today, as well as going to bed very late last night and rising at 4:00 this morning to catch my 7:00 a.m. flight from JFK to Oakland. I’m to that point where when I turn my head, my vision lags 50 frames behind my motion, slowly dragging objects and people into focus. It’s like being drunk, only not as fun.

Wordplay is a documentary whose idea of an action sequence is to have Merl Reagle rush to his overstuffed home library, grab his abridged dictionary and page through it excitedly to see if redtop is listed, because damned if it wouldn’t be the perfect fit for the crossword puzzle he’s building. And it is a word! For a type of grass! The crowd goes wild.

Reagle is forever puzzling, driving by a sign for Dunkin’ Donuts and remarking that the simple switch of a letter makes them Unkind Donuts. I had always wondered if guys like him used computer programs to help develop their masterworks. Apparently not. An extended scene shows Reagle hunkered at his kitchen table with a laser-printed grid of blank squares and armed with nothing but a mechanical pencil and his wits, as he speedily fills the page with letters that by some strange magic form full words or phrases in both directions.

Are there any words that can’t be in The New York Times puzzles Reagle concocts other than the obvious obscenities, vulgarities and offensives? Yes. They must pass the same “breakfast test” as the stodgy newspaper’s photos and editorial content. In other words, the Times wishes not to offend crossword fans of delicate constitutions who come across rectal or urine while eating their sausage and eggs, so words like those are verboten. Reagle bemoans that enema alone, a banned noun with a word-nerd tempting alternating vowel-consonant-vowel structure, could have bailed him out of many a literal and figurative corner.

Then there’s Will Shortz, the thin, dapper, mustachioed editor of the Times puzzle, who invented his major at Indiana University (enigmatology) to turn his childhood passion into a field of academic authority. He’s described at one point as the “Errol Flynn of crossword puzzling” and the movie’s funniest moment has him reading selections from the cache of letters he receives daily from the confused or irked members of the puzzle-solving public.

Representing the demand side of puzzling, we are presented neatly encapsulated lives of the odd group of world-class solvers, who can routinely complete an entire puzzle in two minutes, but otherwise seem at a glance like normal people. Ellen Ripstein, perhaps the top female puzzle-solver, is shown performing another one of her hobbies, an endearingly clumsy baton-twirling routine, which wouldn’t be as weird if she wasn’t in her late 40s.

Wordplay also features great segments from interviews with celebrity fans of the Times puzzles, including a raucous Jon Stewart, Ken Burns, Bill Clinton, Mike Mussina, and the Indigo Girls.

I lathered up in sunblock for a brief afternoon constitutional at McCarren Park in Williamsburg, Brooklyn for the Renegade Craft Fair.

I think that “Renegade” in the title is a ruse to spice up something not normally considered exciting, like calling contact bridge FULL CONTACT BRIDGE!. All of the goods on sale from the 200-some vendors did have a indie, Williamsburg sorta flavor—lots of ’50s patterns and designs, lots of punk and DIY—although it was almost exclusively stuff for ladies: purses, T-shirts, jewelry, stuffed animals and knit things.

It was a blazingly hot and humid day, and being in a park featuring little more than softball fields and not much shade, most of the vendors operated from small booths, in lean-to tents or at tables under dainty handheld parasols, all of which served to shield an array of Victorian-alabaster skin, vintage ’60s sundresses, tattoos and Bettie Page haircuts.

For Andie’s birthday party tonight, each guest was directed to write a poem or bring one, then read it. I think only Andie’s Dad wrote one, and it was a clever and funny rhyme that she read from her iBook. Everyone else’s selections covered a wide variety, although Shel Silverstein and Charles Bukowski were favorites. We had some laughs over a D.H. Lawrence orgy of words, and Andie read a passage of Jeanette Winterson, prose like poetry. Red wine flowed freely, there was birthday cake and cupcakes, and the room was filled with flowers. The audience was a fine group of greatest-hits friends and family; here are Gary, Andie and Megan, conversing in a corner.

And here’s the arrangement that was on the living room table, which features a particularly rare specimen of an in-bloom Katieflower.

Have you ever seen a man kicked to the ground? I’m talking real life, and in one swift movement, a foot to the head of a chump that’s going to stay down for a while. I’d only previously seen a kick this exacting and powerful in The Way of the Exploding Fist, a video game for the Commodore 64, but I saw it in the flesh tonight with a few hundred rowdies at Friday Night Fights, an occasional event held in the low, vaulted basement of the Church of St. Paul the Apostle.

Conversing at work earlier in the day about my weekend plans, one guy in the production department asked, “You’re going to Fight Club, aren’t you?” a question that prompted my obvious reply, “Even if I were, I wouldn’t be able to talk about it.”

I arrived an hour late because of an Amazing Race-style rush to find the venue that’s only of heartbreaking comprehension to a New Yorker¹. By arriving when I did I learned the hundred or so folding chairs flanking three sides of the ring go quickly and one is wise to arrive early. It was still fun to walk around the ring and view it from different angles, as one would a sculpture, and to mingle with the overflow crowd, a surprisingly even mix of men and women, munching hot dogs and drinking canned Sapporo, which was the sole available alcohol.

The fights are a grand mix of amateurs and semi-pros, weight classes, fighting styles (muay Thai and amateur boxing), male and female, and all the fights I saw only went three rounds, or until an opponent was floored or disqualified, which kept it fast-paced and interesting.

Real fighting has escaped me. I suppose when our foreheads were sloped and we lived in caves, the instinct was necessary. But my perception now has been diluted by movies, where every thrown fist connects with the sound of a wet clap. I don’t even know what I’d do if I had to fight someone. Probably hire a man from New Jersey with questionable morals to do it for me.

The tension in the real fights I saw was heightened by anticipation; there are fewer direct hits, those that serve as the punctuation for the scrapping and defensive movements that run out most of the clock. The boxing was cool, but better was the more violent Thai-style rumbling. The larger classes of these guys looked to be roughly my weight and height, except 98% muscle, clad only in gloves and shiny shorts. Bareheaded and barefoot, they punch and kick. Too close and you get a glove or a knee jackknifed to your torso. Farther apart still isn’t far enough for the reach of these guys, arms and legs cabled with muscle.

The atmosphere was equal parts sweat and adrenaline, and the crowd cheered favorites, booed rogue maneuvers, thrust fists into the air and howled. At one point, some guys in the back chanted for blood, or maybe it was for a fighter whose name sounded like “blood.” It made the hair on my arms stand on end.

Fighting aside, even the typical elements of boxing are a delight to the senses: the bell; snatches of jock rock blasting between bouts to jazz the crowd, everything from “Beat It” by Michael Jackson to “Crazy” by Gnarls Barkley; improbably proportioned girls in heels hoisting posters to herald the number of the round; and the trainers with their hurried, animated advice for their man in the corner. The announcer, who was also the event’s promoter, came equipped with that sonorous, drawn-out voice, where each syllable is stretched thrice its normal length: “Aaaaaaand in this cornerrrrrrr...”

I stayed for about two hours, and it didn’t look as if the mayhem would conclude soon, so I headed out into the muggy night. I had a primal urge to bring down a gazelle for dinner, but I imagined the nearest was grazing in the wild at least a continent away, so I settled for a gorgonzola burger at Big Nick’s. Medium. I’m not a total savage.

¹My internet source for the Fight Night informed me that it was going down at 450 Columbus Avenue, between 81st and 82nd, which turned out to be an art gallery, and a nonviolent one at that. Phoning the number for the gym that puts on the event, I got a recorded message for the Church Street Boxing Gym, so I took the C down to Chambers and walked over to 25 Park Place between Church and Broadway. There a sign taped to the door noted that the gym was closed because of the boxing matches at 59th and 9th so I took the A all the way back up to 59th Street, my final, correct destination. [back]

Andie and I met up at the tiny, basement-musty Looking Glass Theatre for the opening night of Shakespeare’s Richard III, adapted and directed by our buddy Kelly.

The fellow playing the king, everyone’s favorite conniving hunchback, bore a resemblance to the real deal: thin, with drawn lips, and still eyes caught flashing at the thought of cunning plots.

It was a good show; I find enactments like this one, with a minimum of props and stage design, make it easier to concentrate on the actors and the dialogue. Kelly craftily emphasized the humor burried in the play, which is usually top-billed as a tragedy, what with all the murder and the famous endgame battle-cry of “my kingdom for a horse!”

I was reading some Pablo Neruda poems tonight in a bilingual book, original Spanish on one side, English translation on the facing page, wondering why it is that Pablo doesn’t get translated to Paul on the cover.

The previous pope was known by Spanish-speaking people as Papa Juan Pablo, for example, so why wouldn’t it go the other way? Shouldn’t it be Paul Neruda, Paul Picasso, and so on?

Paul doesn’t have the same ring, not the least because it’s a blunt monosyllable, unlike the soothing trochee Pablo. Hey, and Pablo isn’t English, so it’s interesting and mysterious, right?

I suppose I don’t care either way, because I don’t want to become one of those tight-sphinctered fellows who argues whether Leonardo or da Vinci is the correct single-name way to refer to the Italian artist.

If you’re a lady, chances are there’s a song with some approximation of your name in its title. What an honor, what a coincidence. Even if you don’t have a particularly common name, your eponymous tune may be out there. I just noticed I have a song in my music library named after my sister (“Oh, Dana” by Big Star) and my mom (“Joanna” (close enough) by Serge Gainsbourg, and not the same as the Kool & the Gang song of the same title).

Lyrics are a different story. The Big Star song seems relevant to my sister only in the line about “forevermore fighting with Steven,” because I thought that was the name of one of her rambunctious charges. The rest is a free-association by Alex Chilton, slurring about how he’d rather shoot a woman than a man and something about a magic wand, I think. Nice chorus, though.

The subject of “Joanna” is wholly irrelevant to any mother not currently an entrant in the Guinness Book of World Records, seeing as it’s about a woman “as large as an elephant, the largest in all of New Orleans” who can nonetheless dance as lightly as those pink pachyderms in Fantasia. At least Serge, singing here in the mid-’60s during his “African beat” phase, seems to be enjoying himself, the off-key, laughing lothario that he was.

• “O, Dana” by Big Star (2.38 MB mp3)
• “Joanna” by Serge Gainsbourg (1.87 MB mp3)

Because people have been more leery than normal about eating it, there’s currently a glut of meat on the U.S. market, according to a Reuters article last Thursday.

Fears over bird flu have hurt the profits of [hog and pork producer Smithfield Foods Inc.] and other meat companies, including industry leader Tyson Foods Inc., as overseas demand for chicken slumped sharply, leading to an oversupply in the United States and pressuring prices for other meats, like beef and pork.

Poor meat. It’s always been saddled by ethical and religious considerations. Then it was health issues over what it contained, either inherently, such as fat, or additionally. Now it’s growth hormones, carcinogens and brain-melting diseases.

But the busy bees in lab coats are skirting these issues by growing meat in labs, the same way tissue can be grown from stem cells. Here’s William Saletan, a national correspondent for Slate.com, writing about lab-grown meat late last month:

Researchers in Holland and the United States [have] grown and sautéed fish that smelled like dinner, though FDA rules didn’t allow them to taste it. Now they’re working on pork. The short-term goal is sausage, ground beef, and chicken nuggets. Steaks will be more difficult. Three Dutch universities and a nonprofit consortium called New Harvest are involved. [...]

Growing meat like this will be good for us in lots of ways. We’ll be able to make beef with no fat, or with good fat transplanted from fish. We’ll avoid bird flu, mad-cow disease, and salmonella. We’ll scale back the land consumption and pollution involved in cattle farming.

This is as eerie as it is fascinating. I’m aware lab meat is, like, Year 3000 stuff, but if it ever caught on and became cost effective, could whole species, like pigs, become extinct? After all, what use would we have for them if they’re not going to be reared solely for sausage and bacon? Could lab-grown beef still be called beef or would it be LaBeef or Beef-Eeze or some other ridiculous name trademarked by ConAgra? Could those lab guys get some Jurassic DNA in the centrifuge and whip up some dinosaur grill patties? Suddenly I’m hungry.

I braved the throngs of Puerto Rican Day Parade revelers, who were giddy with jingoism and clad in the island’s colors of red, white and blue, on my long subway ride to Astoria, Queens, for the Kubrick retrospective at the Museum of the Moving Image.

The first film of the double-feature was Killer’s Kiss, essentially a student film Kubrick wrote, directed and edited when he was only 27. There are a few flashes of his future cinematic brilliance: the strange angles from odd staging and lens choices, the long tracking shots, and dramatic facial close-ups, including one magnified grossly by a fishbowl.

It’s mostly a love letter to Kubrick’s hometown, with shots of Times Square at night, the Brooklyn Bridge, the subway back when the seats were cushioned with fabric, and spooky warehouses around Fulton Street. The bookending scenes take place in the original Penn Station, which I recognized immediately from Berenice Abbott’s photos from the mid-’30s.

The plot is slow and basic. Davy, a down-on-his-luck welterweight (played by Jamie Smith) takes up with Gloria (Irene Kane), a “dime a dance” girl who lives in the studio apartment just across the way. They catch glimpses of each other at night through their windows and pretend they don’t know the other is looking. Her boss Vinnie (Frank Silvera), the greasy, jealous type, tries to have Davy bumped off, but kills his manager by mistake, causing the cops to implicate the boxer. After chasing one another up a fire escape and over rooftops, the climactic showdown unfolds in a mannequin factory, with Davy hurling plaster limbs and torsos at Vinnie, who retorts with wild swings from a fire axe.

Between the showings, I played Katamari Damacy on a six-foot wide wall-mounted screen in the museum’s ground-floor video game gallery. It’s a mutant arcade combining classic upright games with console systems in a clinical museum setting. So there’ll be a staid little plaque for, say, PaRappa the Rapper (“NaNaOn-Sha, 1996”), affixed to a wall above a TV and a PlayStation encased in a tamper-resistant plastic box. You can take a seat right there and play the game to your heart’s content, or at least until the 10-year-old standing behind you starts casting scowls at you and your amateur gameplay. They also have an original Mortal Kombat arcade game unit, rigged so you don’t have to insert any quarters to play.

Back in the theater, my new seat was aside two elderly women, one with a walker that she rammed into every object between the door and her seat, and the other smelling as if she spent her free time pickled in naphthalene. Both talked throughout Day of the Fight, the 15-minute short preceding the second feature, because they thought it was the second feature. “Is this the movie? What is this?” they kept asking in those voices that old people use when they think they’re whispering when in fact they’re talking loudly.

What Day of the Fight was was a “This Is America” news brief Kubrick filmed in 1951 for use like those Warner Brothers cartoons that used to screen before the main feature. It’s a day-in-the-life story of a New York City boxer and noteworthy for having a bunch of setups Kubrick obviously restaged for the fight scenes in Killer’s Kiss—one, at mat level, shows a boxer sitting in his corner and framed by the legs of the boxer seated in the opposing corner.

The second feature, The Killing, was directed by Kubrick from an adapted screenplay co-written by him and belongs among the best noir. Although it was made only a year after Killer’s Kiss, it had a budget, a director of photography who stayed at odds with Kubrick, and stars: Sterling Hayden as the ex-con Johnny Clay who masterminds a racetrack heist, and Marie Windsor, who’s just as great here as in The Narrow Margin, as the sniping, conniving wife of the milquetoast member of Johnny’s gang. The filmmaking is tighter and more confident than in Killer’s Kiss. Here the tracking shots follow characters as they walk all the way through several rooms of an apartment, and there’s that signature close-up of a static, oddly lit, popeyed face.

The reportedly studio-imposed narration in The Killing is obnoxious, announcing the time and place of most every scene like a police scanner, but the masterfully twisty plot and action make up for it. This is one of the better convoluted-timeline heist stories and you can tell Quentin Tarantino saw this movie like a dozen times and was taking notes, circa Reservoir Dogs and Pulp Fiction. You suspect Johnny and his gang of mostly sharp and well-meaning but ultimately outsmarted hoods aren’t going to pull off their caper without a hitch, so the fun is in watching their master plan unravel, the body count mount, the stolen cash literally whisk away, culminating with Johnny in the final scene too weary to outrun or outgun the cops closing in on him and his girl.

I was in the area of Madison Square Park early this afternoon, so I stopped by the Big Apple Barbecue Block Party, the event I missed last year. Land sakes! I was deterred by the long, unorganized lines, and they had sold out of fast passes, which I would have been wise to have bought in advance. I sour-grapesed my way out of it by noting that I’d already sampled the wares of all three of the locally based vendors, Dinosaur Bar-B-Que, Blue Smoke and R.U.B., and that I’d only get sunburned and cranky in line.

West 35th Street between Fifth and Sixth Avenues.

If it’s true that this city is a leader in fashion, dads and aging male porn stars will be happy to hear that “moustaches are enjoying something of a renaissance among young New Yorkers,” at least according to an Agence France Presse article published today.

This is one of those stories that defines or perhaps forms a trend via a time-honored cart-before-the-ass journalistic formula, which I will reveal to you here.

1. Interview three people who exhibit the trend, in this case including “a tall man with blonde highlights in his hair to match his silver jacket” who confides that moustaches are “cool, right?”
2. Quote a fellow media source backing up the trend. James Bassil of AskMen.com offers the fascinating generalization that women either love moustaches or are “absolutely repulsed” by them.
3. Patch together a trend timeline. This article’s author forms a history of the moustache in American pop culture, from Clark Gable, to the Brawny Man, through actors Tom Selleck to Nicholas Cage (a “hip role model”?), and brings it home with a reference to the New York City Beard and Moustache Championships last month, where the ’stache was “taken for granted.”

There you have it: a trend is grown as easily as facial hair. Impressionable young gentlemen throughout the five boroughs should spend an appropriate amount of time primping and contemplating their new cookie dusters in the mirror, first taking care to adjust their trucker caps so as so provide the clearest view.

An article from late March in the St. Petersburg Times of Florida, “The Endangered Joy of Serendipity,” by William McKeen, quickly became a meme, which is internet-speak for “a herd of nerds write about it on their blogs.” So here goes.

As might have been expected, the author, who is chairman of the University of Florida department of journalism and apparently the age of your dad, was taken to task for bemoaning the evaporation of serendipity in a world of music downloading and web sites that have “replaced human conversation.” He sealed his fate as a fuddy-duddy by championing libraries and bookstores as enriching places in which to browse and discover unexpected but engrossing detail. In short, he wrote, “Technology undercuts serendipity.”

Duck, buddy; the nerds zinged back, steaming that the internet can quickly and easily lead you off on crazy and unpredictable paths of serendipitousness. It’s the best for that, in fact, they seemed to suggest.

Both sides have valid points and here’s what I think:

1. Most information on the internet is one big circle jerk. The most popular blogs aren’t content generators, they’re content aggregators. A site or story gets linked to by Boing Boing or Fark, and lickety-split, other blogs link to it, and then still other blogs link to those blogs, and so on. The most popular information reigns. Now, nowhere does it say that information discovered via serendipity must be unique. But to me it should at least be unexpected, and not something that 1,001 white people are already dissecting.
2. Media other than the internet still have the upper hand in serendipity. McKeen chose some unfortunate examples to illustrate his point; libraries are always the death knell for arguments like his. “Browsing the stacks is one of the most overrated and abused examples in the canon of things-we-used-to-do-that-were-so-much-better,” fumed Steven Johnson in his blogged response. I’m reminded of Nicholson Baker’s report on the library that had embraced its new computerized reference system so fully that it disposed of its card catalog by tying each card through its punch hole to the ribbon trailing a helium balloon, then released and spirited away by the wind. However, the introduction of McKeen’s article wasn’t mentioned by any of the rebuttals I read because it’s correct: print versions of newspapers are better than online versions at finding unexpected information. And I said unexpected. I agree that, say, The New York Times online or Google News are fine briefs on what’s news. But until screens get larger and technology more robust to display more than an average of 1,000 words per screen, I’ll prefer the newsprint version of the paper, where my eyes can dart here and there, picking up words, phrases, names, photos and illustrations of interest, where I can skim two stories and move onto a third, jumping to the last few paragraphs where I may find an engrossing cache of description or detail, in the time it takes to scroll one screen of one article online.
3. I don’t know about you, but the internet is killing my ability to focus and concentrate. I flit from site to site, unable to digest anything more than a few hundred words of text. And how much knowledge do I retain? Little. My home internet connection has been down lately and I’ve found myself jittery from lack of surfing. But I soon moved on to cutting into that pile books accumulating on my bedside table and found myself more attentive and comfortably engrossed. Concentration can inspire serendipity.
4. Which brings me to the point that there’s still plenty of value to browsing books and bookstores for information. Despite the strides of Amazon.com getting sample pages and searchable versions of books online, I enjoy paging through books, reading author quotes on the jackets and then skimming books by those authors, grabbing books I remember reading about or just because I like the cover design. Seeing what other people are reading or asking the store’s staff for recommendations can also be beneficial.

Perhaps the larger lesson to be learned is that the physical world is no better or worse at serendipity than the one online. It’s just that it’s now often a lesser or forgotten option, perhaps because it requires effort and often direct human interaction. There’s still something to be said for non-text based serendipity: walking down a street you haven’t before, checking out a new shop or restaurant, heading out into the city with no purpose in mind, just to see where you may end up.

Reading antiquated dictionaries activates the same portion of my brain as reading poetry: it’s thinking about words in new ways. I considered this as I read A Classical Dictionary of the Vulgar Tongue, compiled by Francis Grose and published in 1811. Even if the defined words and phrases are unknown or obsolete, the descriptions are a language of freshness and economy. Here’s one:

Jibber the Kibber. A method of deceiving seamen, by fixing a candle and lanthorn round the neck of a horse, one of whose fore feet is tied up; this at night has the appearance of a ship’s light. Ships bearing towards it, run on shore, and being wrecked, are plundered by the inhabitants. This diabolical device is, it is said, practised by the inhabitants of our western coasts.

As for words active today, busy is exemplified as, “As busy as the devil in a high wind; as busy as a hen with one chick,” while gypsies get editorialized as:

A set of vagrants, who, to the great disgrace of our police, are suffered to wander about the country. They pretend that they derive their origin from the ancient Egyptians, who were famous for their knowledge in astronomy and other sciences; and, under the pretence of fortune-telling, find means to rob or defraud the ignorant and superstitious.

Why shouldn’t we revive words like snaggs to mean large teeth or nope to mean a punch? They seem to fit.

This particular dictionary features other entertainments for the reader today. Being British, it contains lots of snipes at the Scots and Irish, and being common it contains definitions that cannot compete with the OED in terms of sauciness, including a half-dozen synonyms for commodity (“the private parts of a modest woman, and the public parts of a prostitute”) and many variants on hump (“once a fashionable word for copulation”).

Simpletons and alcohol run through the book as well. Gin, which was apparently the Pabst Blue Ribbon of early Nineteenth Century Britain, boasts a bouquet of synonyms: blue tape, sky blue, blue/white ribband/ribbin, diddle, frog’s wine, heart’s ease, jackey, Lady Dacre’s wine, lightning (“a flash of lightning”), max, strip me naked and blue ruin, which was mentioned in Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind as a good name for a hair dye.

Reading today about this find by a heath care team at Harvard Medical School, I felt a great disturbance, as if millions of criminal defense lawyers suddenly cried out in glee.

From the press release:

A seldom-studied mental illness called Intermittent Explosive Disorder, characterized by recurrent episodes of angry and potentially violent outbursts—seen in cases of road rage or spousal abuse—has been found to be much more common than previously thought. Depending upon how broadly it is defined, this disorder affects as many as 7.3 percent of adults, or 16 million Americans, in their lifetimes.

Hmm. “How broadly it is defined.” No need to worry about that part, medical community; the legal community will get right on it.

The uncooked ingredients look more pretty than the finished product. (That’s the chopped rosemary atop the onions.)

Folks often talk about how soup tastes better the next day, after the spices and flavors have had a chance to mingle. This may be a soup that’s flat-out required to chill overnight because the cornmeal didn’t gel right way, only after the soup had sat and cooled for a half hour or so. It may have been that the meal wasn’t fine enough; I couldn’t find any in the store explicitly labeled as fine-ground.

Al Gore has been showing a digital slideshow on the current environmental crisis, by his estimate, more than 1,000 times over the last six years, all around the world. I was leery to see the film based on this presentation, An Inconvenient Truth, because let’s face it, most PowerPoint affairs are constructed in an attempt to enliven boring data and bullet points. In Gore’s case, the information is clear and scary and the presentation involving. The man’s a politician and knows how to deliver a speech; with this one, he’d better, seeing as he’s given it hundreds of times.

The structure of the movie is crafty in that 90 percent of it is footage of Gore presenting his slideshow before an audience, yet it’s engrossing to the movie theater audience, too. The editing reminded me of concert films, which are also relatively static actions requiring deft cuts and movement, with creative angles and framing to remain watchable. Plus, Gore’s more animated and funny than I thought; apparently those image consultants he so infamously consulted really believed he was more appealing with the personality, humor and poise of an empty pine coffin, instead of the literate-dork thing he has going on in reality. (For more on this, see Spike Jonze’s apparently unaired “home video” of Gore and his family taken prior to the Democratic Primary in 2000.)

The other 10 percent of the film is brief scenes from Gore’s life and career that transition into and out of the slideshow to provide a reprieve from the statistical doom. There’s him losing the election, presented in a fleeting montage of ballots and Supreme Court justices. Later, he discusses the death of his older sister from lung cancer and his father’s decision thereafter to stop growing tobacco as a moral for catastrophe-inspired-change. Some of the transitions are too Windham Hill, especially the opening shots of ambling forests and brooks, voiced-over by a hushed and sleepy-sounding Gore about how swell the great outdoors are.

Something that wasn’t included surprised me: damnation of the current administration’s environmental policy. Not until after I read a review later today did I realize that W’s name isn’t mentioned once in the film. Gore does include footage of a soundbite made about him by the grammar-challenged Bush Sr.:

You know why I call him Ozone Man? This guy is so far off in the environmental extreme, we’ll be up to our neck in owls and out of work for every American. This guy’s crazy, he is way out, far out, man.

But Gore takes pains not to point fingers or politicize the debate. The premise of his argument is that global warming is a fact, not a theory or even a debatable position. I thought he made a solid case. Of course, after I saw the film, I read a lengthy article from The Washington Post (“The Tempest,” by Joel Achenbach, Sunday, May 28, 2006) about the “handful of skeptics” who say global warming is a hoax or overrated.

Let us be honest about the intellectual culture of America in general: It has become almost impossible to have an intelligent discussion about anything.

Everything is a war now. This is the age of lethal verbal combat, where even scientific issues involving measurements and molecules are somehow supernaturally polarizing. The controversy about global warming resides all too perfectly at the collision point of environmentalism and free market capitalism. It’s bound to be not only politicized but twisted, mangled and beaten senseless in the process. The divisive nature of global warming isn’t helped by the fact that the most powerful global-warming skeptic (at least by reputation) is President Bush, and the loudest warnings come from Al Gore.

The best of the computer-animated creatures in Over the Hedge is Hammy, a hyperkinetic squirrel voiced by Steve Carell, especially a scene near the end that involves the funniest use ever of the now-cliché bullet time. The rest is a simple moralistic tale about the damnation of consumerist society and the importance of family, pushed along by easily merchandised characters voiced by a bunch of B-listers and one A-lister slumming for an easy paycheck; I’m talkin’ ’bout you, Willis.

I just know Joe or perhaps my brother will be able to shed some light on this. I was walking from Penn Station to work this morning, at ease and minding my own business, when a song popped into my head, a jingle from my youth in Toledo, Ohio.

Whether this song was from a radio ad or TV commercial, I don’t remember, but at its core was this bombastic choral arrangement about Toledo being alive. I would have originally heard this in the mid-’80s and it may have been tied into the attempted rejuvenation of the city’s downtown, which at the time featured a new riverfront market/park/entertainment complex called Portside. As you know, my memory is poor, so for all I know the song was a jingle for a gentlemen’s club named Alive. But these subconscious, therefore highly suspect lyrics point to a civic promotion:

A city growing in its pride
A people taking it in stride
Yes, we’re becoming a new city...
[practically shouting] TO-LE-DO...A-LIVE!

or maybe those first two lines were:

A ciy growing with great strides
A people glowing in their pride

I recall that the verses, which alternated between groups of male and female singers, were inexpertly written because the singers rushed to cram all the words into the melody at its already brisk tempo. The song made sense to me at the time, as did the songs of Def Leppard, because it was catchy. Now I’m not sure. Wouldn’t one hope Toledo and its inhabitants are already “alive,” in both literal and metaphorical senses? It’s like the bomb dropped on the Midwest and the President’s on the red phone saying “Get me Toledo. Is anyone there still alive?” Hell yes, Mr. President, and they’re singing about it.

I didn’t think a song this obnoxious could be obscure, but a hasty search of the internet revealed nothing. I’m hoping more knowledge about this song will help me dilute it, but for the time being I will suppress its echo in my head with sleep and/or liquor.