I read blogs for my job. I used to read them for fun. There was a certain satisfaction circa 2002 in answering the question, "where did you hear that?" with the name of a blog the other person had never heard of, which by now is a blog that person is sick of reading. Of course, now dogs have blogs. Dogs. Have blogs. This is deplorable. One good thing about the old Internet was that we didn't know they were dogs. And we thought they were fascinating.
Read MoreMaybe it's the fault of my small-town redneck-hick upbringing, but I have a hard time taking any sort of connoisseurship seriously. I have always laughed at fancy descriptions of wines, and it seems even sillier for coffee. Coffee's coffee, isn't it? What kind of dope pays more than 75 cents for a cup of joe?
Read MoreGood news for my wife, Jane: The second issue of the literary journal Makeout Creek has just been published, including her poem, "Allenwood." The poem itself is not online, but you can buy a print copy. We're still waiting for ours. (You can still find her poem "Lemons" online in the Burnside Review, published over the summer, and a chapter from her novel, published in The Adirondack Review.)
When the news of the day seems particularly big, I wonder what my parents would think about it all. They're dead, and gone with them are all the stories and family lore that I only half-listened to when I was younger. Rattling around in my head are half-remembered snippets of conversations about their childhoods in the Great Depression, long-ago presidents and wars, those scary Beatles with their rock and roll, pulp fiction and radio dramas. They lived through World War II, the atom bomb, the invention of television, Vietnam, hippies, Watergate, pet rocks, disco and the bad old 70's, the Cold War, the Iranian hostage crisis, recessions and more. They never saw my journalism career leap beyond the small-town stage. They never met their granddaughter. Then again, they haven't had to live through the worry of my blood-clot scares nor their other son's repeated deployments to wartime Iraq and Afghanistan.
Read MoreOnce upon a time, a bunch of writers and editors who found themselves working quite by accident for newspapers in a small town in Pennsylvania decided to have a party. A 20-something native of the town found himself among them, and as he listened to the conversation, about the news of the day, and books, and movies, and politics, and culture, his face grew more and more pinched, until finally he confided in the woman who had invited him, "Your friends sure do know a lot of words." Wherever he is now, I am sure he knows a few more words, but sometimes I recognize the sentiment. Most recently I experienced a similar befuddlement after slogging through 114 pages of the book I am supposedly reading, "Anathem," by the uber-nerd Neal Stephenson.
Read MoreHere are some impressions of the latest episodes from my current list of active podcasts. Topics covered included the election, the financial crisis, new Macs, Frank TV, your "Desert Island Sedaris," Santa vs. Odin and a squid with a dog's head that eats penguins at the South Pole. In the order I listened this week:
Read MoreZibetto is right around the corner on Sixth Avenue, near 56th Street. You drink your cappucinos or espressos at the long bar or at a shelf in the opposite wall. There are no chairs. New York mag summed it up when Zibetto opened in 2006: "It takes nerve to open an espresso bar across the street from Starbucks—especially an inconspicuous nook without drip coffee, free wi-fi, or even seats." The service is friendly, with little or no waiting -- Anastasio Nougos owns the place and pulls all the drinks. The coffee is great, though I am still partial to Cafe Grumpy in Chelsea. Zibetto is an old-world experience that transports away from a part of the city where it's rare to find a place that isn't a chain or a ripoff. I find it hard to believe he can stay in business at this spot, but I'm glad he has. Today I knew I was running low on beans when we walked by, so I picked up a can of Danesi espresso beans imported from Italy. When I got them home, I decided to make myself another shot in the Jura. The top popped off the vacuum container with a satisfying whoosh. Fresh. Aah.
"Supposin' I did kill the Black Dahlia. They couldn't prove it now. They can't talk to my secretary anymore because she's dead..."-- Dr. George Hodel
Some friends and I are going to see "Dahlia: A Very Nearly True Theatrical Fantasia" by P. Seth Bauer, performed at the John Jay College of Criminal Justice, of all places. The gist:
Read MoreThe top aide to New York's governor has quit in a scandal over his failure to file his taxes since 2001. His lawyer says he suffers from something called "late-filing syndrome." A paper by a lawyer and a psychiatrist says people with the syndrome are perfectionists and workaholics, who have difficulty talking about their problems with others and cannot ask for help until their secret is exposed.
Read MoreCity Room has posted a chart showing the most popular baby names in New York City in 2007. Most of the popular names have the whiff of daytime dramas (Madison? Justin?), even among those from non-European backgrounds. The No. 1 name for Asian boys? Ryan. For Hispanic girls? Ashley. But, I wondered, what happens when you dig deeper into the health department's full list [pdf]? You find boys with somewhat unusual names for this day and age, like Achilles, Shemar, Shiloh, Orion; and small clusters of baby girls with names like Dakota, Essence, Heaven, Serenity, Shiloh again, Treasure, Precious and Princess.
Read More
I am surprised by how well this list held up. The updated NYTimes application is a great improvement over the first version, which I had stopped using, because it was slow and crashed so frequently. I have also added the Amazon Kindle for iPhone application. I still use these apps with some frequency
Read MoreThere are just 24 side-by-side seats at the long communal table at Socarrat Paella Bar on 19th Street in Chelsea, as Frank Bruni noted last week in The Times, and they don't take reservations. So when our party of eight -- including four kids -- showed up on Sunday night, the math was against us, even though we were arriving before 6. We would have needed a third of the entire restaurant. The place was already jammed, but the owner had a soft spot for kids and saw our dilemma as we were about to wander off in search of a different place. It was a warm October night, an unseasonable 70 degrees. We were walked through the kitchen to a big table on a back, open-air patio. The kids ran around while we ate. The paella was as great as billed, according to one in our party, who grew up eating the home-made stuff. I doubt we would get this lucky again, but I definitely plan to go back (probably with just a party of 2 this time).
I tend to whip through the graphic books and plod through the text. Don't expect a review soon.
When I started working on the metropolitan desk of The New York Times in 1997, the newsroom was using a publishing system known as Atex for text editing. Usernames were six characters long. The naming convention at the time was to take the first two letters of the staffer's given name and the first four letters of the surname. Patrick+LaForge=Palafo.
Read More