The Other Curmudgeon

On the Allocation of Resources

2012-02-15T09:53:00.000-06:00

Red Tails
Starring
Cuba Gooding, Jr.
Terence Howard
Nate Parker
David Oyelowo
Directed by
Anthony Hemingway

I saw a trailer for this movie some months ago, and formed the preliminary opinion that it was a film I wanted to see. Then I saw George Lucas on the Daily Show, telling Jon Stewart how he had wanted for oh, so long to make this movie, and thought maybe I wouldn't like it after all, that it would be simply too preciously cloying in its "courage has no colour" sensibilities, and heavy-handed in its We-Are-All-Americans message.

Well, as is usual for my prejudices (in the literal sense of "judgement before the facts"), the kernel of accuracy was borne out, but that's all.

It actually is an enjoyable movie, in the Saturday-Afternoon-Matinee-serial style that Lucas seems so indelibly smitten with. There is plenty of action of the war-movie variety, and, as one would expect from the people that gave us Star Wars and Raiders of the Lost Ark, the special effects are so convincing that we wonder at times how it's possible they could be anything other than real. The plot is straightforward, as is the love-story subplot involving one of the pilots; though I thought the subplot involving another pilot who is captured by the Germans could have been left out. It seemed to serve no real purpose except to (a) give the actor playing that character something to do for his pay, and (b) give us a small happy moment near the end.

The movie (based on a true story, meaning they took bare facts and made up a lot of stuff) is about the Tuskegee Airmen, the group of black pilots got up as an experiment during World War II. It begins with them flying routine patrols behind the front lines in Italy and ends with them doing more exciting stuff. That part of the story is true, and very well told.

The race-relations undertone of the movie was embodied by the white characters, some of whom were Klan types with nice uniforms, and some of whom were Radar O'Reilly types who, yes, see no blacks or whites but only Americans. Throw in the stereotypical blond Aryan Nazi villain, and you complete the roster of cardboard cut-outs masquerading as characters. The black characters were the focus of the movie, so their characters were more developed, though none very fully. The performers do well enough with what they were given, but, as is so often the case with George Lucas productions, the dialog sounds like it's being read off the back of a cereal box, or the pages of a comic book.

All in all, I think that if Mr Lucas is strapped for cash to invest in his films, he should spend a little more on good writers, even if it means he has less available to make the smoke look real.

And Worst of All, It's Full of Parisians

2012-02-08T15:07:00.000-06:00

Midnight in Paris

starring Owen Wilson, Rachel McAdams, and Marion Cotillard

directed by Woody Allen

Sometimes it's a good thing to re-state something we all know.

In this film, a gratifyingly intelligent exploration of the yearning we all feel at one time or another, Owen Wilson plays Gil, a somewhat successful "hack Hollywood screenwriter" with literary ambitions and the draft of a first novel. Visiting Paris with his fiancée Inez (Rachel McAdams) and her loathsome parents (Kurt Fuller and Mimi Kennedy), we are immediately struck by the incompatibility of the romantic Gil and the pragmatic Inez. He idolizes jazz-age Paris; she wants a house in Malibu.

Invited to go dancing with a couple from back home, Gil wants instead to walk the mystical streets of the French capital. Inez, though, wants to party, so they go their separate ways that night, and, increasingly, in life. We follow Gil, who gets lost in the dark streets and finds himself swept up by a limousine containing Scott and Zelda Fitzgerald (Tom Hiddleston and the delightful Allison Pill). He becomes, from the stroke of midnight, a part of his idealized life. He meets Hemingway (Corey Stoll), he discusses literature with Gertrude Stein (Kathy Bates, an inspired casting choice), he pours out his heart to Salvadore Dalí (Adrien Brody), he encounters all the leading artistic personalities of Paris after the First World War. He even falls in love, with Adriana (Marion Cotillard), a student of haute-couture who is the object of desire for every artist in Paris. She, though, finds jazz-age Paris boring: she wishes she lived in la belle époque, Paris in the 1890s.

The theme of the movie lies not far beneath the surface, but that doesn't matter. In the richness and artistry of Woody Allen's still facile imagination, it becomes a magical tale: the surreal made real, more real than life itself, until Gil embraces it, and re-makes his own reality. He does what we all wish we could do.

Unfortunately for the rest of us, and as Gil discovers before he returns to the present, the Golden Age ain't all it's cracked up to be. The co-operation of the Parisian authorities and the budget of a major motion picture can make 21st-Century Paris, jazz-age Paris, and belle-époque Paris all look a pretty nice place. But it's just a movie. Watching this film, I recalled the last time I was there, sitting in a sidewalk café and wishing Paris was as beautiful, romantic and charming as it is in this movie. But Paris today, despite the architecture, the money, the culture, the history, is as loud, dirty, crass and impersonal as any modern city, just with nicer shoes. The romance of the place lies in our own hearts, and the romance Gil finds at last on the Pont Neuf, I can find with no great effort on Houston Street or Main Plaza.

What Might Have Been

2012-01-08T16:03:00.000-06:00

Mandola's Italian Market
4700 West Guadalupe
Austin

(near where Guadalupe joins Lamar)

There was a time when I would have gone to Austin for no reason, just to hang out there. Now, though, I have to have a reason, and the reason I had this time was about as flimsy as they come, but it was good enough. The day promised to be just barely warm enough (eventually) to drop the top on the ol' roller skate, so I collected my sidekick from his house out in Loopland and we scooted up the road to the Big City.

Before going, though, I made a survey of the relevant pages on Urbanspoon, to pick a restaurant for lunch in that increasingly unfamiliar land of New Age trend-whores. Mandola's was one of six I chose, and in the end it was the one we opted to sample, largely because it reminded me of the Central Grocery, in New Orleans, an old Italian market on Decatur Street, in the Vieux Carré, that I used to visit in ancient times. I recalled the fantastic atmosphere of that place: the sounds of people speaking in French, Italian, English and Spanish, often within the same sentence; the exotic goods stacked high on tables and crammed into shelves; and most importantly the aromas. There is probably no finer memory for a prepubescent New Orleans boy than the spicy aromas of the Central Grocery.

I think there must be something wrong with me.

It's ironic, because my friend Rick has been complaining for weeks now about his sinus condition, what with the belated advent of our Mountain Cedar Allergy Season: but he walked into Mandola's Italian Market and was positively wrapped up in the jumble of smells. I, whose sinuses refuse to acknowledge mountain cedar or any other pollen, could smell ... nothing. Nothing at all. No oregano, no rosemary, no comino, no yeasty bread smells, no spaghetti sauce bubbling in the kitchen, no scent of onions and peppers and beef and sausage and cheese. Nothing. Absolutely nothing.

Mandola is located in one of those brand-spankin'-new mixed-use developments, combining ground-level commercial space with residential space above; the kind of development meant to evoke a time when there really weren't any isolated commercial areas, where whole cities were flats above shops. It's an attractive enough development in a sterile, out-of-the-catalogue way. Very nearly the same development, in different brick, was built across the road from the Quarry in San Antonio, and another permutation of it slouches along 281 near the big new golf resort. This one in Austin seems to be on a different scale, though; kind of like that reproduction of the Oval Office down at the LBJ Library, done ninety percent of actual size. The parking spaces seem tight, the roadways narrow, the doorways not quite as wide as in the Real World. In actuality, they're just as wide as anywhere else, so it must be something about the air in Austin that makes me feel so confined. Odd, that.

The place consists, essentially, of two rooms: a glass-walled dining room of distressed tables with no-frills (but comfortable) chairs, a drinks station and a wait-station; and a shop room, with a small bakery, gelateria, deli and market, and a counter where one orders to dine in. It all looks very nice. The shelves are stocked with things Italian; the breads are fresh, the gelato is home-made, the pastries are ... utterly, utterly gorgeous. There are a few tables in there, too, with no crowding.

But no smells. Nothing.

I chose a small salad and lasagna, a good dish to evaluate an Italian restaurant on. I'm intimately familiar with lasagna through a lifetime's consumption, and I know what a good lasagna tastes like, and looks like, and feels like, and smells like. Rick ordered an appetizer of calamari and zucchini, and a chopped antipasto salad.

It was warm enough, by then, to have been a good day to dine al fresco, but all the outside tables were taken, and the people there had that look that says it would take heavy ordnance to dislodge them. Not wanting to make such a scene, we found a table in the main dining room and compared my sensory deprivation to Rick's overload. Before long, a waiter brought my salad and a basket of foccacia.

The salad, I will say, was good. The ingredients were perhaps as fresh as any can be, short of chowing down on them in the field. The dressing, a traditional oil-and-vinegar Italian, was tangy, and applied with a deft hand. There was enough of it to flavour every bite, but not so much that it pooled in the bowl or dribbled onto clothing and table. The bread, on the other hand, was a disappointment. It was barely adequately baked, and while light and spongy, as it should be, it seemed to lack any flavour at all. I suspect, though, that if I had invested the necessary time to assemble a plate of oil and spices for dipping, it would have been an altogether more pleasant accompaniment; as it was, it was just bread.

The other dishes we ordered arrived all at once. We shared the calamari and zucchini, which filled a dinner sized plate. The calamari was expertly done, avoiding that rubbery texture that is so often the fate of fried squid, and the zucchini was coated in the same lightly seasoned batter. The marinara sauce that accompanied the dish, though, was a letdown, being entirely too bland to be of use except as (unnecessary) moisturizer.

Sadly, that same bland marinara sauce covered my lasagna. Because of my seeming insensitivity to aroma, I had Rick confirm that it had, essentially, no aroma. It was tomato sauce with a little parsley in it; I could taste no other seasoning. This was particularly sad because, otherwise, the lasagna would have been excellent: a good-sized portion, with plenty of tasty meat and cheese in layers with perfectly cooked pasta.

Rick's salad was the best of the dishes we ordered. It had plenty of that same crispy Romaine lettuce, with two meats, two kinds of cheese, three kinds of beans, tomatoes, artichoke hearts, pickled onions and peppers, and diced heart of palm, all covered with an excellent creamy dressing. If I were rating only that, Mandola's Italian Market would qualify for a bold-faced listing in my index. As it is, though, it gets the equivalent of a C.

Local Best

2012-01-07T18:09:00.001-06:00

Chess Club Cafe
1020 Highway 281 South
Blanco, Texas

Being the best place to eat in a little town like Blanco isn't all that tough. Oh, I know: there are places there that have their partisans, restaurants that show the occasional whiff of flair in concept, menu or preparation, or maybe just a place that made you feel particularly welcome one day. But by and large, Blanco, like most small American towns, get by with a handful of ordinary cafés and diners, maybe a fast-food franchise or three, and a beer hall that sells burgers and nachos and calls itself a grill. Sometimes they add an "e" to the end to make it seem classier, but it's still a bar and grill.

For unpretentious little Blanco, population 2,205, the culinary bar was raised just a skosh when the Chess Club Cafe opened a couple of years ago. Out on the south end of town, nestled in between the Dollar General store and one of the newer fast-food places, its laid-back blue-and-white hand-painted sign can barely compete with the vibrant reds and yellows of its neighbours; and being set well back from the road, under the spread of a couple of ancient oak trees, it hardly is a place that leaps out at passing travelers.

The major distinction of the Chess Club is that they do all their own food preparation, from the mayonnaise to the pastries. Better still, they actually do a good job at it.

This visit was just a coffee break, but even so it was extraordinary. The coffee was strong; not a characteristic calculated to recommend it to me, but unlike the high-octane brew at most Starbucks-era coffee shops, this managed strength without the acidic bitterness that Seattle-style coffees cherish. It was, even in its powerful state, understated.

To accompany that, we asked for a random selection of pastries. Our waitress gave us an apple danish, a cheese danish, a cinnamon roll and a peanut-butter brownie.

I'm not wild about cinnamon rolls, but this one was better than most. Rather than trying for the steroidal size that is a selling point in some restaurants back in town, Chess Club has gone for quality, and attained it. The roll was light, the dough was yeasty, and the icing was sweet without being cloying. The overall effect was much like I remember cinnamon rolls in the era before they were a trend.

The peanut-butter brownie was tasty, too, with a mild peanut-butter flavour, and a light drizzle of chocolate icing; but it had an uneven texture. The ends were just about as they should have been, but the middle part seemed to be retaining a little water. That flaw, though, wasn't significant enough to seriously overcome the overall quality of the thing.

The danishes were exquisite. Both had a light puff-pastry shell folded around truly outstanding fillings and drizzled with sugar. The apple filling was marvelously seasoned with cinammon and, I believe nutmeg, and had a fine consistency. The cream cheese filling was perhaps the best I have tasted in many years. Just writing this a day later makes me want another.

And all this was less than ten bucks. You just can't beat that.

Sigh. Another Outrage.

2011-12-23T14:34:00.000-06:00

During a soccer match in Holland the other day, some idiot ran onto the pitch and attacked one team's goalkeeper. The keeper, who had been looking the other way, turned to see the young stranger a few feet away and running at him. They both jumped in the air and kicked at each other. The idiot fanatic landed on his back, and the goalkeeper, in the space of maybe a second, took a step towards him, kicked him again, then moved to a different position as the idiot spun on the ground, and the keeper kicked him once more. Then others intervened and the incident came to an end.

Except that the referee of the match then red-carded the goalkeeper.

The goalkeeper's team was so incensed at their teammate's sending-off that they left the field, refusing to play any further. Officially, their justification was that they felt unsafe on the pitch, but everyone with the good sense God gave a turnip knows that the real reason they left was as a protest at the referee's politically-correct idiocy.

The Dutch football association, displaying at least a modicum of understanding about the natural reactions of a man toward an attacker, the sort of reactions that kept individuals alive in less law-abiding times when attacks like this were more commonplace, has ruled that the keeper won't face suspension.

The referee should.

Mmm. Now, That's Coffee

2011-12-22T17:43:00.000-06:00

The Cup
3909 Camp Bowie Boulevard
Fort Worth

(between Montgomery and Crestline)

When my friend Rick and I stepped into The Cup, I had one of those flashbacks that can make you think you've entered a time portal, and were going to be forced to relive an unpleasant childhood. Four women of a certain age, expensively dressed and absorbed in conversation, were seated in a circle between the door and the counter, with empty cups and a tray of pastries uneaten on the coffee table. I thought I had stumbled into that period of my youth, circa 1970, when life seemed to be infested with these society types, coyly issuing platitudes to one another, claws a-quiver in their sheaths, knives ready to hand in Italian-leather shoulder bags. I made it a point to find a seat out of sight of the group, who were probably no more lethal to bystanders now than they were then, but with whom interaction is to be avoided. Sadly, it was too chilly for the attractive patio out back, but we found our refuge.

We were just there to find a light breakfast and kill some time before the Kimbell Museum opened at noon, and I've always felt comfortable enough in Fort Worth's near-west side, an area where women dress for committee meetings while men dress for the stock yards, and everyone seems to be doing fund-raising for one charity or another, usually connected to TCU or the museums down the street. The Cup has not long been on the Boulevard; its pedigree stretches back only to around July, but it is a perfect fit with its surroundings: clean, tastefully decorated, only slightly fru-fru (which I'm sure most of its customers would call "understated"), with the air of an elegance that considers Camp Bowie Boulevard to be the winter home of knowledgeable Fifth Avenue denizens. The Christmas decorations were up: several dozen monochromatic silver ornaments hanging on ribbons from the acoustic-tile ceiling over the service area, an arrangement I found a pleasing contrast to the usual clutter of holiday gewgaws, doodads and whatnots.

Well, that's OK; we just wanted coffee and a little something to eat. We turned out to have made a fortunate choice. (Everybody gets lucky, some time.)

The counter attendant was helpful, if not quite knowledgeable about coffee culture. When I asked her if their coffee was slow-drip, she shrugged and said, with a slight grin of confusion, "I guess." It turns out the correct answer was "no," which was what I'd expected. While slow-drip coffee is de riguer in snootier locations on the Left and Right Coasts, here in the Real World it's the sort of impractical, wasteful thing one associates with rom-com movies and snobs on the Left and Right Coasts. It was plain ol' high-quality drip coffee.

The coffee is illy, an Italian brand, which appealed to my distaff side, and is good stuff even without the benefit of prejudice. It hovers between the burned-corn taste of American coffee, which I like when it's not too strong, and the bitter taste of dredged-up river-bottom that characterizes coffee in Europe and, from what I hear, other parts of the Old World. At The Cup, we were served fairly thick coffee that reminded me of the best I've had in Latin America. I'm not one of those people who view coffee as an art form; I think of it as a drink, one that forces me to relax while it cools, then revs me up with a dose of caffeine. This coffee did that, and did it well.

For the light meal, I went with the vaguely named Breakfast Sandwich: ham and cheese with a poached egg on something called a "morning round," for about $4. I chose it because I wanted something to bitch about, and when the cheerful young lady behind the counter described it, I thought I had my subject. Alas, no; it proved to be not just good, but very good. The ham had a hint of rosemary about it; the cheese was good quality Swiss, not that oily corner-cutting stuff you often get; the poached egg was actually poached, and poached correctly, to just the right degree of doneness to give you all the flavour and none of the gelatinous liquidity of an undercooked egg. And the "morning round" turned out to be a sort of better Pepperidge Farms version of raisin bread, with a soupçon of maple sweetness. The whole thing got some time in a panini press and I was presented with a breakfast of exquisite flavour and texture. If I'd been hungry, I'd've ordered another.

Rick, who seemed on this trip to be on a quest for the Kolache Of The Gods, ordered a couple of sausage bagels, which are breakfast sausages wrapped in bagel dough to resemble kolaches. They must have been good — they certainly looked good: slightly reddish sausage links in admirably browned wrappings — because they disappeared before I could make a detailed inquiry.

We enjoyed another cup of coffee, and chatted with the shop's owner, a pleasant, sensible-seeming woman who is the spitting image of Van Cliburn's piano teacher's daughter (except, forty years younger). She, I suspect, is as much at home with the junior-league crowd that frequents her shop as she is with the boots-and-jeans crowd that passes by on the way to Denny's.

Bitchin' Burger Joint?

2011-12-22T16:20:00.000-06:00

Peace Burger Dive Bar & Grill
1228 William D Tate Avenue
Grapevine, Texas

(just outside the construction area, near where all the world's freeways come together)

During a short trip up to North Texas to see the Caravaggio exhibit at the Kimbell (which we both recommend enthusiastically), Rick and I drifted up the freeway to the homogenized northern suburbs of DFW, intending to mock the grotesque excesses of the ridiculous-sounding annual Christmas exhibit, Ice! At The Gaylord Texan, and to wonder how much of a carbon footprint was required to chill a 140,000-square-foot exhibit hall in Texas to nine degrees fahrenheit for two months, so that kids and their oblivious environmentally-conscious parents could have a little fun to relieve their lives of high-paid corporate drudgery. As it happens, the feeling of superiority promised by such a venture could not overcome our revulsion toward the mechanics of getting to the display. So we never saw the ice, only the SUV-choked parking lot, and the shuttle buses ferrying visitors back and forth. But I'm sure it would have been reprehensibly spectacular, or spectacularly reprehensible, in keeping with the Gaylord chain's theme of excess in everything that might make a buck.

But the visit to Grapevine wasn't a total loss: I did pick up a new art-glass sculpture by Kevin Doerner from the Vetro Glassworks on Main Street. And saw the new Sherlock Holmes movie. And found Peace Burger Dive Bar & Grill, making an unlikely trifecta of enjoyment amid the postmodern dross.

Nestled in a strip-mall like a John Birch Society mole, Peace Burger succeeds in making its customers comfortable enough with themselves to face the car-culture that dominates the surrounding prairie. Its plate-glass front, darkened with film to increase the interior's separation from the mundane world outside, is almost covered with bumper stickers, some of an iconoclastic bent, others celebrating lifestyle choices from, presumably, the owners' younger years: surfing, the Grateful Dead, New Orleans. Tables for four line the outer walls of the cozily dark dining room, with high-top tables in the central area of the concrete floor. In the back is the bar, and behind that, the kitchen where irreverently-named dishes like Voodoo, Mexi-Dog and Piggy are prepared. The bar offers eight, mostly mainstream, beers on tap, plus a full selection of hard liquor attuned to the taste trends of the thirty-something crowd, who know what to like because they read about it in GQ and Cosmo. The service is competent, with what a certain Dane once called an antic disposition. In our waitress's case, this was signified by the hot-pink T-shirt she wore (for sale at the counter) with the legend, "Buy me another margarita, you still look ugly."

We started with a couple of handfuls of peanuts from the barrel by the door. Rick, who is from Florida originally and doesn't get out much, had never been to a place that embraces what was once, long ago, a widespread custom in the less sophisticated parts of the country (i.e., Not New York): throwing the peanut shells on the smooth floor, where they are trodden underfoot and swept away upon closing. Eating peanuts this way, with the faint hint of sinfulness their mess produces, makes the leisurely consultation of the menu a pastime. That, and an ice cold beer.

In the fullness of time, at the appropriate juncture, after giving full play to all considerations, and when the moment was ripe, we made our choices. First, we would split a Beach-N Quesadilla; then we would split a Havana and a Texas Steak "sammitch." Meanwhile, we would enjoy our beer and peanuts.

The quesadilla arrived first. It was a large flour tortilla folded over chunks of beef, with cheese and peppers and served with a side order of fries. It was cut into four barely-manageable strips, which made it flimsy and messy, a challenge to our dainty sensibilities. But because it was so good, we allowed ourselves the mess. It was the best thing we had at Peace Burger. The fries were good, too; thin-cut and slightly crispy, hot and not greasy.

Our other choices, while sounding more promising, disappointed. The Havana, Peace Burger's take on a traditional Cuban sandwich, would have been much better if the dill pickle chips had been forgotten in the kitchen; their overstated taste was both intrusive and jarring. Instead, it appeared the kitchen had briefly forgotten to take the sandwich off the press, as the hoagie roll was slightly burned on both top and bottom, just enough to convince me that a proper kitchen manager would have insisted that the sandwich be re-fabricated.

The Texas Steak sandwich ("Philly never had it so good! So good! So good!"), on the other hand, was made without obvious flaws, but neither did it possess any intrinsic exceptionalism. It was just a Philly steak sandwich, and not one such as Philadelphians argue over with great fervour and life-threatening passion. Just an ordinary steak sandwich, grilled with onions and peppers, with jalapeños and queso dip added to give it a vaguely Texan identity.

All the burgers and sandwiches on the menu are five bucks. For five bucks, it appears, you get near-misses rather than greatness. Overall, the food at Peace Burger disappoints because of its unrealized potential; it's just good enough; while the atmosphere makes it a pleasant place to pass some time.

Coffee for a Cause

2011-12-17T10:08:00.007-06:00

The Loft
4400 US 281
Spring Branch

(half a mile beyond Highway 46, on the northbound side)

It's just a coffee shop. It sits out on the highway in a limestone house (with a loft, yes, and a fireplace) to provide a meeting place for the locals, and a spot to relax, have a cup of coffee and some light refreshment. The need for such a place in that area is matched with the desire of a local church to raise money for causes it supports, a current trend in the coffee-shop trade. On the day we visited, the money raised was going to a project to build a home for victims of human trafficking, and to an anti-poverty project in Africa. It doesn't make the coffee any better, but it makes you feel better about choosing this place over any others. Because most of the work, if not all, is done by volunteers, the shop produces more money for the causes.

The volunteers who staff the shop are uniformly cheerful and friendly. I suspect that if we stopped in more than once in twenty years, we'd begin to develop relationships with these people, finding the points of common interest. But even as strangers passing through, we felt welcomed and cheered by the attitude of the staff. And the place itself is airy and clean and nicely decorated, adding to the pleasure we took in being there.

The food isn't particularly remarkable. Breakfast tacos, made up in advance and wrapped in foil, are in bins on one side of the room. There is a bakery case with various small treats, all home-made for the cause, and all reasonably well done. I selected a sausage kolache that looked more like a biscuit, and a potato-and-egg taco. The kolache had a very nice, slightly sweet flavour in the dough, and was filled with a tasty portion of sausage, nicely seasoned. The taco was, well, a tad bland, but at least the egg wasn't dry, as so often happens when tacos are made and stored in that fashion. Rick also had a sausage kolache, along with a ham-and-cheese kolache which wasn't as good, and could have used a little more ham in it.

The main draw, though, is the coffee. There were four types on offer, one of them decaf. I went with the breakfast blend, a nice medium-strength drink. Rick's choice was the Texas Pecan coffee, which smelled heavenly and made me regret my choice.

Words. Words. Words.

2011-12-13T16:43:00.000-06:00

MSNBC, one of the self-appointed arbiters of cultural affairs in the 21st Century, has posted an article saying that LAX is the "most social" airport in the world, because more people check Facebook from there than from any other airport.

Remember when "society" actually involved personal interactions with other people? Facebook, and other, similar, social media, are the opposite of "social."

Does Anyone Else Smell Fish?

2011-11-16T22:07:00.001-06:00

I haven't really been following this child-sex scandal out of Pennsylvania, the one involving a former coach who reportedly had sex with one or eight or forty underage (way underage) boys, sometimes actually in the Penn State University's football facilities. I know, just from not living under a rock, that the American media gets really excited, throbbing and pulsating with ratings lust, every time someone does something of a sexual nature that can be reported on ad nauseam. So I try to take it all with a chunk of salt.

Penn State University; photo by G. Chriss

I have to wonder, though, about this one: according to the reports I've read, in 2002, an assistant in the football program told head coach Joe Paterno directly that "he saw Sandusky raping a 10-year-old boy in a locker room shower."

That statement strikes me as incredible. I think if I were Joe Paterno, who, as I understand it, is a decent, upstanding guy with at least an ordinary sense of right and wrong, I would have found the allegation hard to believe. (I'm assuming, obviously, that he had no personal knowledge of any unusual sexual inclinations of the ex-coach.) Saying a man is "raping" a boy in the locker room is shocking, but in the real world, such as we have it these days, I would (1) suspect the guy making the report is exaggerating, maybe because he, like so many others in our modern world, thinks overreaction is always the appropriate reaction; (2) consider that the guy making the report might have some ax to grind where this ex-coach is concerned; and (3) find out what my obligation was in dealing with this report that I am reluctant to believe. As I understand it, Paterno's obligation was to report the matter to the University higher-ups, which, again as I understand it, is what he did.

My only point here, besides a general contempt for the salivating of the media when its nostrils catch the whiff of musk, is that "raping" a boy is such a shocking thing that I'm amazed so many people kept quiet about it. I'm a skeptic. I suspect there is much, much less to this whole story than the media wants there to be.

Occupy Wall Street

2011-11-05T16:45:00.001-05:00

The ongoing protests against the insidious culture of greed, and the lack of accountability that comes from the separation, in recent decades, of risk from reward, have a laudable objective. And it is refreshing to see a sizable number of people taking part in political action that is not orchestrated from behind the scenes by nefarious angry activists, like the Tea Party is. (I say that, even though the objectives of the Tea Party are, to some extent, also laudable.)

But the Occupy movement — if that's not too grand a term for it — lacks focus. Its participants don't to agree on what they wish to accomplish.

Of the many greed-related ills our society suffers from, I doubt that any is as ultimately damning as the growing disparity of wealth in this country. Money is power, and the concentration of money in relatively few hands is threatening to undermine some of the beliefs needed for a large democracy to continue. It has already shown its power in the very strength of the Tea Party, and in the reactionary anti-union legislation in the Midwest and California, and in the intransigence of some Republican members of Congress, who forget that "politics is the art of the possible," and in the dangerous recent holdings of the Supreme Court in political cases.

But the disparity of wealth is unlike other serious problems, in that it has a relatively easy fix.

Under present law, compensation paid to all but a few executives of a business is deductible from taxable income as a cost of doing business. Thus, Mega Corp. can pay its Vice President in charge of Sucking Up a million bucks in salary, and deduct that million bucks from the profit the corporation has to pay tax on. It can also deduct the $35,000 it pays its janitors, but the tax savings from that are paltry.

All the government has to do is limit the amount of compensation deductible as a business expense. I would recommend using a multiple of median income to determine how much can be deductible, say two and a half times the national median. Under that formula, Mega Corp is still free to pay its VP-Suckup that million bucks; but the rest of us don't have to forego the taxes on that exorbitant salary. (And yes, VP-Suckup still has to pay taxes on the income. Unfair? Nope. Just a cost of doing business.)

Limiting the deductibility of high salaries would, over time, lessen the disparity between the high and low ends. If a business finds it worthwhile to pay people more than the deductible amount, they can do so, but they'll just have to factor in the tax considerations in a slightly different way.

Similarly, the favourable tax treatment of interest and dividend income should be capped. There are still a number of older people who depend on these sorts of income for their survival, but beyond a certain point, their survival does not require further subsidies from the general population in the form of lower tax rates. I see no reason why interest and dividend income beyond, say, that same two-and-a-half times median income, should not be taxed at regular rates.

Gorgeous

2011-10-24T07:16:00.001-05:00

My cable-modem connection isn't fast enough to do this video justice. I hope yours is.

Landscapes: Volume Two from Dustin Farrell on Vimeo.

You should also check out Farrell's "Landscapes: Volume One," at http://vimeo.com/16198274.

Promising

2011-10-11T21:36:00.000-05:00

It must seem odd to say that a record of one win, one draw, and three losses is a promising start. That's the record the United States' men's national soccer team has amassed since the appointment of Jurgen Klinsmann as head coach a couple of months ago.

His start, certainly, has not been as auspicious as we all dreamt it would. Judging from much of the team's press coverage since his arrival, he was expected to be a sort of coaching Jedi master, instantly turning a moderately good team into a world-dominating powerhouse in the space of ninety minutes. No surprise, really, that hasn't happen; and many people seem perplexed and confused by the team's poor showing in the win-loss table of late.

New US MNT head coach
Jurgen Klinsmann

Like all the team's fans, I'd love to see goals being pumped into opponents' nets with regularity, but I'm not really concerned about that yet. Because what I see are two developments that, to me, promise great things in the future, and address what I've thought for years was the US team's greatest weakness.

First is the new resolve shown by the US defensive backs. It helps that Oguchi Onyewu has returned to the field and is very close to being in his former outstanding form, but even without that, I have noticed that since Klinsmann's advent, the American defense no longer panics when facing sustained pressure.

How many times, when the US was on the verge of joining the elite of the international-football ranks, were goals conceded because our defenders thrashed wildly at the ball, or lost their marks, running around in front of goal like a toddler lost in a dark theater? I can't bear to count.

But no more, or at least not yet in the "Klinsmann Era." Carlos Bocanegra, whom I've always thought was not that good, merely the best available in central defense, seems to have had a light bulb go off somewhere in his head. He has become solid: truly, reliably solid, instead of being, as before, just generally solid, a sort of American Titus Bramble. It's a shame he left it so late; it's unlikely he'll be up to the required level of play by the time the 2014 World Cup comes around. (He'll be 35 then; it's not impossible, but unlikely.)

Steve Cherundolo, the right back, has long been, with Onyewu, our best defender, but he, too, is getting up in years. Finding a successor for him, as for Bocanegra, will have to be one of Klinsmann's priorities over the next couple of years, but in the meantime, his experience and level-headedness are beginning (at last) to be seen in others of the back line.

Tim Chandler, who plays his club football in Nuremburg, is a newcomer to the US defense, and a positive asset. Playing left back, he has shown solidity in defense and an aggressive attacking sense to match Cherundelo's on the other side.

It's also good to see DaMarcus Beasley being used effectively again. He made a few appearances under former coach Bob Bradley, who inaugurated his move from midfield and forward positions to left-back; but in Bradley's time, Beasley never really seemed comfortable or useful in that role. Under Klinsmann, in the last two matches at least, he appears to be re-born as an outside back. He still has most of the speed that made him such a threat a decade ago, and seems to have matured as a player, outside the glare of the national-team lights. (It helps that he, too, is enjoying a stretch of good health.)

Even though the US defense has given up four goals in five games, while only scoring two, they have remained cohesive throughout opponents' attacks. That is a massive, massive improvement over what we often saw before. Glory is won in attack; games are won at the back. And Klinsmann's focus on developing, and quickly, that defensive composure is, to my way of thinking, the most positive development we've seen from the US national team since the 2002 World Cup.

Second is the increase in the sharp one-touch style of play that marks all of the world's best teams. The US can't yet sustain that style of play through long stretches, but, especially against Honduras and Ecuador, it's starting to show up. Some of the new players coming in, most notably Brek Shea, seem well suited to the style.

I don't doubt that, as the team develops, we'll see continued stiffness in defense, improved possession skills in the midfield, and more successful finishing in the front. And then we'll all again believe that Klinsmann is a Jedi master.

And It Only Took Six and a Half Years

2011-10-08T10:36:00.001-05:00

See the pictures.

I finally got around to posting a few of the pictures I took on my trip to Istanbul in 2005.

Hey, I've been busy. Sort of.

Getting Old. Such a Pain.

2011-09-30T21:10:00.000-05:00

I can never remember any more what the word eleemosynary means. I used to know that word. I even used to use that word, back when I was in college.

It seems unimportant, but it's frustrating not being able to remember things I used to know.

¡Magnifico!

2011-09-12T08:38:00.000-05:00

Lola's
3312 Esplanade Avenue
New Orleans, Louisiana

Sometimes I feel cursed. I live in a city, San Antonio, that is home to a fantastic array of exquisite food, and I am at home in a city, New Orleans, that is the Navel of the Culinary Universe. It's no wonder I'm a reluctant, yet willing, part of the obesity epidemic that's currently all the rage on 24-hour news channels that really need to fill the time. (You may have noticed that the Missing Or Murdered Pretty White Girl Channel, f/k/a Headline News, never mentions fat people unless they're suspected of committing the Murder of the Season.)

Other times, it's a blessing.

Tonight I felt the urge to treat myself to something really special, and Lola's seemed likely to feed that need. Oh, did it! Located in a funky part of the funky Mid-City district, this restaurant was a sort of uber-funky mix of Paris in the 1920s, San Francisco in the 1960s, Mexico City in the 1980s and New Orleans in the ... well, just New Orleans; no need to narrow it down further. It's not a large place; the dining room is the front part of a converted shotgun house; the kitchen is beyond. One neighbour is a 90-year-old Italian supermarket, the other is a private residence.

We were seated immediately, and immediately took up the waiter's suggestion of house-made white Sangria, a sweetish concoction of wine and chunked fruit. It had a slightly fizzy quality to it, and we liked it enough to go through two bottles before dinner arrived. We had one order of paella, which takes about half an hour to prepare, so to fill the time we asked for an order of garlic shrimp. That arrived bubbling hot in a small iron pan, enough shrimp to keep the four of us busy, and enough garlic to keep away all the vampires in New Orleans for the rest of our visit. Not wanting to let a drop go to waste, we asked for another round of the excellent hot bread served here, which comes with a garlic aioli spread. (We thought it was garlic butter, but the waiter explained that it is a vegan concoction.)

In time our main meals arrived. First there was the seafood paella, teeming with mussels, shrimp, fish and other seafoods mixed in a plate of saffron arborio rice and vegetables, seasoned with red pepper. I had the seafood fideua, the same dish made with capellini instead of rice. It was both beautiful and delicious, definitely worth the wait: enough seafood so that there's some in every little forkful, the pasta just slightly al dente, the bright yellow of saffron, served with the mussels standing on end around a garnish of red pepper and parsley.

We also had a dish of spinach linguine with chicken in a pesto sauce. It, too, was brightly flavoured, with artichoke quarters, tomato and olives in a pesto sauce over perfect pasta. The monochromatic look of the dish seemed less interesting to me than the other plates, but that didn't detract at all from the flavour.

Finally, we had a dish called pisto, a panoply of vegetables stuffed into a portabella mushroom. The black beans and rice that came with it were unadorned and uninteresting, but the rest of the dish was a fabulous, and fabulously complex, mix of tastes and textures. I always appreciate it when a chef takes things I don't much care for — in this case, eggplant and squash — mixes them with things I do like, and makes them enjoyable. This Castilian dish was certainly that.

I had looked forward to trying one of the house's desserts, but after all this food I just wasn't able. That, I guess, is just one more reason to try this place again. Maybe next time I'm in New Orleans.

Exotic, Thoroughly Orleanian, But Disappointing

2011-09-11T23:19:00.001-05:00

Bennachin Restaurant
1212 Royal Street
New Orleans, Louisiana

This African restaurant has been on my New Orleans restaurant wish-list for months, so when the opportunity to try it came up, I jumped at it. It's a very, very small place on Royal between Governor Nicholls and Barracks Streets. There was only one open table large enough for four people. Most were tables for two, with one for six in the window.

The service was prompt at first, though later, after the tables all filled the one server on duty was harried. Still, she got everyone served, correctly and as fast as things came out of the kitchen, though there was the distraction of the door knob falling off, so that every time someone closed the door, someone from the kitchen had to come with a knife to open it. Eventually they put a sign on the door asking people not to close it, and the people seated closest made it their special mission to enforce that injunction. Lucky, weren't we, that the air outside was unseasonably cool, and the bug population of New Orleans appeared to have taken the weekend off. (Those facts, of themselves, makes me view the entire world in an uncharacteristically optimistic light, and may have influenced my reviews of this and other New Orleans restaurants.)

Looking around the restaurant didn't give me any sense of Africa. Other than a cheesy page torn from some child's book, a map showing the major cities in Africa, and a similar assembly of photographs of some of those cities' most touristy location, there was nothing to evoke the continent, and certainly nothing to evoke the two regions where the cuisine on offer originates, the Bight of Benin and Senegambia. The pretense that all Africa is a cultural unit may be comforting to descendants of slaves, and probably to young, white New-Age One-World types, but it has no basis in reality. It is a post-modern conceit, based on ignorance and given full play in this restaurant.

But that's neither here nor there where the food is concerned. While it may be fatuous to pretend that a tourist from Luanda or Lilongwe will be right at home here, the pairing of cuisines from Cameroon and the Gambia is no more incongruous that offering both Thai and Chinese in the same restaurant, a pairing that is less exotic only because it is more familiar to Americans, who, for the most part, are likely as not to see all those peoples and foods as Basically The Same, whether lumped together as Asians or as Africans. My own experience of Africa is not extensive, but it's enough to know that people widely separated geographically will have significant differences, and people who are widely separated politically will have significant differences, and people who are widely separated both geographically and politically will have vast differences. So will their cuisines.

For our dining experience, we started with drinks of ginger. Not ginger ale; just ginger water. It is still-water with minced ginger, served cold. The flavour is powerfully strong, requiring that you sip it slowly. It's not at all sweet, and the taste seems to vary in palatability as you drink it, but it is a generally pleasant taste.

I can't quite say the same for the food. We had three dishes at our table. First was the dish for which the restaurant was named, bennachin, which I know from other sources as Jollof Rice, a delicious mixture of meat, rice and vegetables. This version was powerfully seasoned in a way that jolted at the first taste, then grew more tolerable with each successive bite. The quality of the meat (beef, in this incarnation; no pun intended) was reasonably good and the dish was satisfying in both quality and quantity. It was served with an unfortunate spinach sauté that tasted like canned spinach with some oil and onion in it. I found it inedible.

Next was ndole, a dish combining beef, spinach and peanuts in a sauce of garlic and ginger. It was tasty, and I thought it would have been good did it not seem to use beef that was well past its sell-by date. It tasted spoiled to me, though the person who ordered it thought it good, and had no ill effects later on. It was served with fried plantains, and coconut rice that was good but had no discernible coconut flavour to it.

Finally, there was shipa shipa, shrimp and rice covered in a tomato sauce seasoned with celery and onions. I found the sauce boring, except for the unpleasantly strong taste of celery. The shrimp and the rice were both unremarkable. Again, the person who ordered it thought it was good, but he did have ill effects later on. I don't know if this is a case of cause-and-effect, or simply a post hoc ergo propter hoc fallacy; you decide.

The prices were not extraordinarily high per se. Had the food lived up to its potential, they would have been extrememly reasonable. But this, it seems to me, is a case of a restaurant pricing foods as though they were something really special, then serving up mediocrity at those same prices. Just because the cuisine is exotic, perhaps unique in the area, doesn't mean we should pay premium prices, if it just ain't good. And I don't think the food at Bennachin is all that good.

Worth Searching Out

2011-09-09T19:00:00.001-05:00

Dog House Grille
2200 East Second Street
Gulf Shores, Alabama

(off Highway 59, just south of the Intracoastal Waterway bridge)

In my entire life — and I've been 49 for more years than most people — I don't believe I have ever sought out a hot-dog place. I mean, I like hot dogs, but they're not my idea of a meal, really. Not like a burger, or a good plate of enchiladas, or pasta. So when I go out to eat, the idea of actually seeking out a hot-dog place on purpose has just never happened.

Today, though, I had to contend with this damned notion of democracy and majority rule, and hot dogs won. (I diplomatically abstained, having caused the entire discussion by reading aloud, a few days ago, some of the review comments made on the Dog House Grille's page on Urbanspoon.) So off we went.

No, that's not Laura.

At first sight, it wasn't inspiring. Set in a strip center on a secondary thoroughfare, a few doors down from another place that I vaguely recalled had received good marks, for what that's worth, the Dog House Grille looks to be your standard Early 21st-Century American strip-center eatery. Step inside, and you are immediately reminded of every sandwich shop you've ever been to. I can think of two non-chain places back home that, I'm sure, were laid out by the same architect (if architecture has anything to do with it). Walk to the counter and place your order with the reportedly attractive (or, to quote the review, "smokin' hot") young lady, and wait to be enlightened.

In addition to a wide selection of hot dogs and other sausage-shaped meats, the Dog House offers burgers and other sandwiches, and a full breakfast menu. (O! that I had known that this morning, when I settled for the local disorganized Hardee's franchise restaurant!) But we were there for the dogs, and dogs we had.

The Yeilding (sic) Frito Dog is a weiner with chili, onions, peppers, jack cheese and Fritos. Surprising, how good such simple things can taste. The chili was the flavour-maker, but the cheese, soft and sticky, was what really shone in the mix. The New York Dog is inadequately described on the menu as "mustard, grilled onions and sauerkraut," which simply doesn't do justice to it. The onions were not just grilled, they were caramelized in a way that most Cordon Bleu chefs hope to master. They were superb. The kraut was moist and tasty and completely unobtrusive — you know how sauerkraut can just jump up and shout and stomp its little feet and throw a tantrum; this kraut didn't do any of those things, it just laid itself back and surrendered itself for your enjoyment.

My choice was the Chicago Dog, a frankfurter topped with mustard, relish, big chunks of tomato, diced onion, a little celery salt that I could have done without, and hot peppers, served up in a soft bun with a pickle spear. Yes, this was worth driving a little ways to find. It was so much more than a mere hot dog, it was a meal.

Customers' pleasures at the Dog House Grille don't end with the main courses; the side dishes are fries, sweet-potato fries, and onion rings. We tried them all. The fries were good, but had more salt on them than I care for. The onion rings were sweet and crunchy and coated with a delicious batter. But the stand-out of the offerings was the sweet potato fries, crinkle-cut and lightly salted, which may be the best I've ever had. At least, I can't remember better ones.

And all of this came to around six bucks a person. I'd call that a deal.

The Gulf Shores Trip

2011-09-09T17:53:00.122-05:00

Click here to see the on-line photo album.

Can any trip be more perfect than this latest trip to the Gulf Coast? Well, okay, you're right: the latest trip is always the best. But this one was particularly enjoyable.

We arrived in Opelousas, Louisana, on Friday, September 2, as Tropical Storm Lee wandered around offshore, unable to decide where it wanted to go. Growing up in Louisiana gives you a sense of what weather to fear, and this little tropical storm didn't quite rise to that level, despite the breathless hyperbole of the Weather Channel's presenters. We spent a pleasant evening with our friends, the Nepveaux, including a delicious seafood dinner at the Steamboat Warehouse, up the road in Washington. By the time we went to bed, the wind was picking up and the rain was starting to come down pretty steadily.

In the morning, the rain was pouring down and the wind was blustering, but it still wasn't enough to deter us. Although we had to creep down the freeway at 30 miles an hour for a good while — and occasionally even much slower than that — by the time we crossed the Atchafalaya Basin, the wipers were off. This storm was relatively disorganized, meaning that it had narrow bands of bad weather widely separated by areas of calm.

We picked up Nancy and Jeff at the airport in New Orleans, and after a stop for lunch at the Bulldog, we headed off to Alabama. That drive, which would normally take about three hours, took five, including a slightly scary stretch (negotiated at less than 20 miles an hour) along the Mississippi coast. But all we faced was heavy rain; the winds were strong but not dangerous, and there was no flooding on the roads. When we arrived at our condo, the parking lot was under about four inches of water, but we even managed to avoid having to deal with that. We got rained on a little while we unloaded the car under the portico. Big deal. Then I found the one parking spot that would allow me to get out of the car without stepping in the water. I felt lucky.

about 25' high

We spent the next day and a half sitting in our condo, mostly, watching the waves outside. Most of the time they were only around four to six feet, high enough to excite us City Folk, but not really anything to get worked up about; but occasionally, when the wind would pick up, some got much higher, though it's hard to tell how high from the shore, without a ship on hand for them to break against. All I had to go by was that I was on the second floor, 12 or 15 feet above sea level, and I'm about 6' tall. Some were higher than that. Bands of heavy rain and high winds continued to pass over us, including one that took one of the deck chairs from our balcony, never to be seen again. During the calm periods, we got out for walks on the beach and a trip to a local seafood restaurant for dinner.

Pensacola Historic District

NAS Museum

Pensacola Light

Once the storm passed, we had gorgeous, gorgeous weather for the rest of the trip: warm enough to get out on the beach, but cool enough to really enjoy it. First thing we did was drive down the shore to see Pensacola, Florida: their little historical district and the Naval Air Station's museum and lighthouse. From the top of the lighthouse, I could see Fort Pickens, across the bay, where I'd first met my friend Brian Kirby several years ago — we were both renting bicycles to ride out to the fort — and down the beach to the high-rise condos and hotels in Gulf Shores, 20-some-odd miles away. It's a fairly rare treat to have air that clear when I'm up in a tall tower.

Win, Place and Show

Another day-trip took us to Fort Morgan, one of the old defenses of Mobile Bay

Dauphin Island has an interesting little aquarium focusing on estuarial life

Bellingrath Gardens, which was once a private estate, is a famous botanical experience, created by the owner of the local Coca-Cola Bottling Company back in the 1930s

We also went into Mobile, where we saw the USS Alabama

and other military vehicles, like this B-52

Mobile has some charming older parts

After our week in Alabama, we spent a few days in New Orleans

Mostly in the French Quarter

Statue of Joan of Arc in Decatur Street

Not Just In It For the Beer

2011-09-03T23:31:00.001-05:00

The Bulldog
5135 Canal Boulevard
New Orleans, Louisiana

An unplanned stop for a late lunch in New Orleans landed us at this nice mid-city pub. While the big draw of this place for the locals is the huge selection of draft beers (and don't think we didn't appreciate that bit of luck), the food was pretty good, too.

We tried the pulled-pork sandwich. It was well made but covered with a too-sweet barbecue sauce. The meat was served in large chunks on an ordinary hamburger bun.

We also had an excellent grilled chicken sandwich, a moist, marinated and butterflied breast on the same dressed hamburger bun.

Our other choice was the Philly cheese steak wrap. It was mostly meat, with enough unidentifiable cheese to give it cohesion, and some tasty sautéed onions and peppers. It was served with a side of beef juice, but the nature of the wrap's construction made it a choice between eating it dry (too dry) or having it fall apart as you try to dip it. Considering how messy it turned out to be to eat, I might as well have poured the juice over it.

The culinary stars of the show were the sweet potato fries. They were cut to a nice size, between Wendy's and a steak fry, and fried to perfection: crispy along the edges but soft inside.

The prices were reasonable, but unremarkable. The service, both at the kitchen and the bar, was typical New Orleans surly. Being an Orleanian by birth and, to some extent, upbringing, I can say that it is this common up-yours attitude that makes me proud to call myself a native Texan, Born in Exile.

A Port In A Storm

2011-09-03T22:35:00.000-05:00

The Shrimp Basket

301 Gulf Shores Parkway

Gulf Shores, Alabama

We blew into town with Tropical Storm Lee, and after portaging our stuff into our condo, went off in search of dinner. It being The Coast, we wanted seafood, and this is the place we chose. It's one of 11 locations this local chain has along this stretch of coastline.

It was pretty late in the evening, which might explain why the place was filthy. The table had been bused, but the floor was littered with napkins and bits of food. The dining room wasn't particularly large; certainly not large enough for the number of tables and chairs stuffed into it. The management may have taken this into consideration in their hiring policies, as the employees were, without exception, lithe young women who would look as much at home in bathing suits on the nearby beach as in a grease-pit seafood house. Management may or may not have standards of physical appearance, but certainly it has standards of competence, and these young women knew their jobs and did them with easy competence and gracious hospitality. They were quick to accomodate a request for something not on the menu; and they did a good job sliding unobtrusively behind the chairs of some of the restaurant's grotesquely fat patrons. This place seems quite popular among those who have to buy two seats on a Southwest Airlines jet.

There's also an outdoor dining area, but even if there were not a tropical storm passing through town, I don't think it'd be the place to dine. Laying aside the shredded awning (which appeared to have been shredded during some previous big wind event) the proximity of the busiest street in town suggests that it's no place for people without earbuds to enjoy themselves.

The food was just the tiniest bit above average for this sort of restaurant. The seafood is available grilled or steamed, but clearly it's all about the fried food. At our table we had a grilled chicken platter, billed as two chicken breasts but consisting of surprisingly greasy chicken tenders; a fried clam po-boy, which was good; and mahi tacos, which were also good; the chicken platter and the tacos were both served with small, tasty, garlicky hushpuppies. I had the fried oyster po-boy, which was nicely dressed and loaded with oysters that were coated in a tasty batter and fried just right. I had a side order of new potatoes, which were also well-cooked, although coated in what seemed to be a cheap flavoured butter substitute (which may have been the same stuff that made the chicken seem greasy).

The Search Is Ended!

2011-08-24T20:44:00.001-05:00

The Roller Skate, 2008

Some time back, I wrote a little piece about my inability to find anything worthy of replacing my little roller-skate. Seems no new convertibles have the combination of looks, luxury, legroom and, most importantly, trunk space that I need for the kind of long trips I take down the back-roads of North America.

As everyone who knows me has heard, this Jaguar XK-8 is not the car I wanted. My dream car is a 1961 Series 1 Jaguar E-Type roadster. My first-runner-up dream car is a 1949-1953 Jaguar XK-120. My second-runner-up dream car is a 1954-1957 Jaguar XK-140. Those are the three most beautiful cars ever to come off any assembly line, anywhere.

First Choice

Unfortunately, they don't come with mechanics, and while I can change the oil (or could, if I needed to) and change a tire (and have, too many times) and put gas in the tank (again, done that too many times), that's about it. So when I got to the point where I felt I could afford that sort of indulgence, I decided that, I'm not the kind of guy who can keep one of those gorgeous classic Jags up and running. Not to mention that those old brakes fade when they get wet, and you have to put additives in the unleaded fuel we have now, and there was no such thing as anti-lock brakes, or crumple zones, or all the other things we now take for granted, when these cars were built. And comfort was a luxury undreamt-of in a roadster back then.

Second Choice. Photo by Paul Fisher.

Hence, the roller skate. It's almost as pretty as an E-Type, and much nicer for long road trips. It has a modern suspension system, and air conditioning, anti-lock brakes and traction control and all kinds of bells and whistles that didn't exist as concepts when the E-Type was on the drawing board. And, despite Jaguar's well-deserved reputation as "the prettiest car you'll ever see broken down by the side of the road," it's been a good car. Still is, even with 130,000 miles on it. It's only broken down twice in the years I've had it: once while in warranty, when the rack-and-pinion was replaced and the new one lost a seal after 12 miles and had to be replaced again) and once in the Upper Midwest, when the insulation on an electrical line wore through and blew the fuse for the fuel pump (over and over, until at last I had it towed to a Jag dealer in suburban Detroit, where the problem was identified and repaired). (That problem, I thought, was the sort of thing a first-year Electrical Engineering student would have known how to prevent.)

But I come from a time when you didn't keep a car past 100,000 miles. They just didn't last that long. I know, intellectually, that these days they do, and I figure I ought to be able to get 200,000 miles, or close to it, out of that car. They're all highway miles, you know, very little city driving on those wheels.

But emotionally I'm already grieving for the Roller Skate, which I feel will die any day (or become too expensive to keep; same thing, in a car), and some time back I started looking for a replacement car. But I found nothing. Everything is too ugly, or fails on some essential criteria ... most often, the trunk space with the top down.

But now, everything is changed. The search is ended. My next convertible is out there, just waiting for me. Not only is it a gorgeous, luxurious convertible, it is actually even prettier than the 1961 Jaguar E-Type. It is the Eagle Speedster Lightweight.

Handmade by the world's premier restorer of classic Jaguars, this all-new car captures the beauty of the E-type and marries it to the most current technology.

And it's only about $800,000.

I figure in a few years, when my little roller skate finally does give out, I ought to be able to pick one up second-hand. In the meantime, I'm saving up my pocket change.

Worth A Dollar

2011-08-12T16:35:00.000-05:00

Fast Five

directed by Justin Lin

Starring Vin Diesel

Paul Walker

Dwayne Johnson

Jordana Brewster

Today I packed away all my pretensions at sophistication and taste and went to see Fast Five at the second-run cinema. The shedding of all ideas of intellectual capacity and artistry was necessary to give a movie of this ilk any chance at entertaining. Had I gone into the theater with some expectation that there would be any sort of high art in this movie, I would have been severely disappointed. Had I paid for a full-price ticket, or even a bargain matinee ticket, for this piece of ... well, let's just call it computer-generated imaging, I'd've been really pissed off.

This movie is not intended to entertain adults. It is intended to entertain virginal adolescent boys, who fantasize about touching women and driving really, really fast with no unfortunate consequences. It's intended, in other words, to get the video-game generation out into the public realm, where they might at least see and be seen by non-virtual representations of other people. There is a little touching of women in the movie; it actually plays, if I may use the term loosely, a meaningful part in advancing what passes for plot. Other than that, there's no sexuality, unless you count mention of a pregnancy of a character who may or may not be married. In other words, just enough sex to tease a 14-year-old middle-school student, who has some idea of what causes pregnancy, and who's always nursing a semi anyway, and doesn't need anything explicit to produce a more tumescent state.

No, this movie is about cars. Exotic, high-priced cars that seat two and can drive off a moving train without suffering a dent, or studly second-generation muscle cars that can drag a giant steel bank vault around the streets of Rio de Janiero fast enough that police cars in pursuit can't catch up.

The supposed plot is complicated enough that it would take at least three sentences to describe with any kind of completeness. Luckily, though, it's not worth that kind of investment of time or energy, as any of the many SUVs in the film (all of which are destroyed, of course, save one) can be driven through the holes in the plot without leaving a mark. The whole thing is executed with an artless stiffness by people who might have learned acting at the local junior college. They were selected more on the basis of appearance than ability. They are good enough to pull this picture off, since they can at least remember the words they're supposed to recite. Suffice it to say, then, that the good guys win, the bad guys lose, and crime pays big if you do it with honour and panache. There are a number of references to things that apparently happened in earlier films in the franchise; if you're like me and haven't seen any of them, you won't know what they're talking about, but don't let that worry you. None of it matters.

I'm sure this movie is now available at DVD rental boxes everywhere. If you're fourteen, literally or figuratively, or want to be for a few hours because the wife is out of town, or whatever, by all means, run down and rent a copy of this action-packed film. Call up your buddies from college (or junior-high) and get together to watch it. Just remember to use coasters.

First Class, All the Way?

2011-08-11T21:16:00.000-05:00

The Falcon Hypersonic Test Vehicle has now disappeared for a second time.

I see that the military has just tested a hypersonic airplane. This vehicle goes so fast that you could fly from New York to Los Angeles in twelve minutes, thereby witnessing three distinct forms of pointless excess in record time.

Wouldn't it be ironic, if your trip from La Guardia to LAX took one-twelfth as long as your trip through the security line at the airport?

And the really good news is, you don't have to worry about losing your luggage, as the entire aircraft will conveniently disappear.

Taking Down the Big Tent

2011-08-10T14:25:00.001-05:00

I've been thinking for a long time — I mean, a long time — that this country needs a real third party in its political system. A Moderate Party, a Centrist Party. A group of politically involved people who believe in their heart of hearts that truth and reason can go hand in hand, that if it's necessary to frighten the public, or lie to them, to gain support for a policy, then that policy probably isn't a good policy. That there is no monopoly on wisdom in any group. A party that will take good ideas from both extremities, re-work them with principled pragmatism, and produce real governance. Which might be a nice change, after sixty years of alternating excesses from both existing parties.

I've often wondered how one goes about starting a political party. I still don't know, but today it occurred to me that it's really not necessary to start a new one. We already have such a party: the Republican Party.

Oh, I know, you people who watch Fox News and MSNBC are scoffing and snorting, but you must understand that what I mean is the real Republican Party. Not these loud, angry Tea Party types, who are so pissed off at having been ignored (with good reason) that they are become the political equivalent of suicide bombers. It's a shame that they tend to label themselves Republicans, but that has its roots in history; in the history of the real Republican Party. The party of Lincoln and Eisenhower. The party that stands for fiscal conservatism — not spending money we don't have, not borrowing more than we can afford to pay back; the party that stands for limited government — not "small government": this country is way too big and powerful for a small government. The party that stands for fairness in the marketplace and in the courts — not for "free market" policy, which is unfair to small players, including consumers, and which is too lax in dealing with those who would wrap themselves in the flag of the free market to cheat others; not for "tort reform" or "industry liability," because those mantras conceal the evil of denying justice to one side or the other. The party that stands for traditional values but still tolerates, without adopting, other values, in things that should be a matter of personal choice, not public policy.

So I wonder: what would happen if those of us who are Republicans in the traditional sense were to tell the Tea Partiers and the Neo-Cons that they are no longer welcome? The rump Republican Party would be a minority in congress, as it has so often in the last 80 years, but it would be the Centrist Party, between the slathering left-wing Demagogic ... pardon me, Democratic Party, and the angry, chanting Radical Right. It would hold the balance of power in a Congress where there is no majority party, and would cast its votes where reason and wisdom take it, and it would use that balance of power to mitigate the excesses of the Left, just as it would the excesses of the Right when they become the more powerful bloc in Washington. (It'll take a while, but it'll happen.) And I predict that many who now are members of the Democratic Party would defect to the Real Republican Party, and we'd end up with a legislative branch divided roughly in thirds. Later on, when the anger of the far right subsides, as it will, many of its loudest supporters will see the error of their ways, and return to the Moderate fold. Praise be.

A Good End

2011-08-05T09:42:00.001-05:00

Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows, Part 2
Directed by David Yates
Starring Daniel Radcliffe, Emma Watson, Rupert Grint, Ralph Fiennes, Helena Bonham Carter, and Alan Rickman

The end of the Harry Potter series leaves the world, if not a poorer place, at least a less enriching place. A really good tale of good versus evil — or seven really good tales of good versus evil — with only a hint of the vulgar about it, as is appropriate for something that is (or at least started off as) a children's story, it has generated incredible amounts of money for everyone involved with it, from the author who imagined the world of an English boarding school for wizards, to the studio that bought the rights to produce it, to every man, woman, and child that had anything to do with the final products.

And now it's over.

Except, of course, that it's not. Thanks to the Mickey Mouse law, and the routine spinelessness of our Congress, this series will continue to generate royalties for a few people and corporations for a hundred years, long after it should rightfully lapse into the public domain. None of the principals will ever want for anything, and maybe that's as it should be; but I for one see no reason why Rupert Grint's great-grandchildren should still be getting paid for something their ancestor did, and was well-paid to do.

But that's beside the current point, which is that this Harry Potter series has given us eight luxuriantly produced and well-acted films, enough to keep the kids quiet in front of the TV for days.

Some are better than others, of course: the first three films (Sorcerer's (or, in England, Philosopher's) Stone, Chamber of Secrets, and Prisoner of Azkaban) were outstanding entertainment. The next three (Goblet of Fire, Order of the Phoenix, and Half-Blood Prince) were less so; their purposes were to advance the conflict between Potter and Voldemort, without resolving it. Had these books been filmed in the traditional Hollywood fashion, those three books would have been compressed to the fourth act, which might not have been entirely bad, but would have been worse. As they are, they are at least spectacular in concept and execution.

The seventh film (Deathly Hallows, Part 1) was a dark, slow drag. It may have been necessary to the integrity of the story, and to the overall richness of the fabric. It's a just shame we all had to sit through it in order to enjoy Part 2.

The Real Reason He's Gone

2011-07-29T06:49:00.001-05:00

Separated at birth?

In this era of relentless commercial cross-marketing and film- and television-tie-ins, it should come as a surprise to no one that Bob Bradley has been let go as the coach of the United States' Men's National Soccer Team. After all, with the release of the final installment of the phenomenal Harry Potter film series, and the elemental demise of He Who Must Not Be Named, clearly Bradley's usefulness for product-placement services has come to an end as well.

No doubt the powers-behind-the-scenes at the United States Soccer Association are already deep in negotiations with several studios about a replacement, searching for just the right person: a man who can assemble a reasonably successful squad of soccer players and provide a marketing link to the next outrageously successful film franchise.

I wish them luck.

Like Superman in Middle Earth

2011-07-26T10:45:00.000-05:00

Thor
directed by Kenneth Branagh
starring Chris Hemsworth, Natalie Portman, Tom Hiddleston and Anthony Hopkins

At the beginning of this movie, the famous warrior Thor enters Odin's great hall in Asgaard, and, I swear to God, all the elves who stood by the Rohirrim at the battle of the Hornburg in The Lord of the Rings: The Two Towers have gotten cast as extras for this film. They're probably computer-generated, but it sure looks like the same group, surrounded by all the same Gaelo-Norse frippery and martial décor. Well, one could do worse than honour that masterful cinematic achievement.

But if this film hoped to be compared favourably to that, or any other, great action movie, then it would have been well to treat the characters as what they were in legend, rather than as what they became in the care of Marvel Comics. This movie attempts to tell an epic saga in half a movie, the other half being devoted to a love story involving one mortal and one immortal. (Gee, where have I seen that before?) In the end, it succeeds in telling the story in a sort of outline form that any 20th-Century college student will be familiar with from their note-taking. That's fine if all you want to do is be reminded of the ideas and themes to be studied, but it leaves the movie viewer dissatisfied.

So consider this movie as just an action flick. There are plenty of computer-generated special effects, and they run the full gamut from exciting to clever to ordinary to cheesy. The "Destroyer," a sort of cyborg come to do its master's bidding, is sometimes 30 feet tall, sometimes 12. The discrepancy rankles, as do some of the non-computer-generated special effects, with model buildings and cars succumbing to destruction in footage that would have been astounding in the 1960s, but today seem almost laughable.

Overall, Thor is something of a disappointment. The plot is well-imagined but unevenly realized, and the movie's makers' inability to develope the substance of either story line, the classic or the contrived, means that the greatest disappointment of the show comes at the end, when the names of the director and stars come on the screen. To think that the man who gave such brilliance to Shakespeare could produce such a frivolous, half-assed film, using to modest effect the great talents of such bright stars as Hopkins and Portman (who do their best, with some success, to avoid out-shining their co-stars), was the saddest part of this failure of a film.

2011-07-16T12:46:00.001-05:00

The Orchard Bar & Grill
571 Highway 63
Baldwin, Wisconsin

Just north of Interstate 94, in the small farming community of Baldwin, Wisconsin, stands a large restaurant called the Orchard Bar & Grill. The building was formerly a nursery; the bar in the main dining room is built around the base of an old silo. Except for the unavoidable television sets, the room holds a sense of elegance that, set against the fields and (actual) orchards visible through the large windows, gives diners the slight sensation of being Lord of the Manor. If only there were some serfs plowing in the distance....

The waitress turned out to be a former student of one of our group (no surprise, really; it's an area where everybody knows everybody else), so every time she came by we had a few minutes of reminiscences and gossip to listen to. Amusing to the others of us, since we're not from this part of the world, but such tidbits are the mortar that holds our society together, even if they're about people we don't know. Once heard, they give us the feeling we do know the people, after all. Because they're just like us.

The service we got was very good; the gossip and chit-chat made it even better. It was easy to see that others in the restaurant were equally pleased with it, even if they didn't get the who-done-what narrative with their food.

We started off with a round of drinks, followed up with an appetizer of New Glarus cheesebread: "Spotted Cow cheese blend" melted on a sliced baguette. New Glarus Brewing Company, located in southern Wisconsin, uses a spotted cow in its logo. It seems to be a local icon, but honestly I neither know nor care what the connection is with the cheesebread at the Orchard. It didn't taste of beer; it tasted more like pizza. Good, but not great, and in retrospect I could have done without it. I'd've had more capacity for the highlights of the meal.

The first highlight was the soup. The onion soup was well made in the thoroughly traditional manner, and was loaded with cheese over caramelized onions in a deep, dark beef stock, with a slice of the same baguette that was used for the cheesebread. The sweet potato soup was thick, slightly warm, and tasty. I might have been happy with just a big bowl of that, but I had already ordered an entrée.

What's that mean?

My friend's blackened New York strip steak was grilled perfectly and liberally covered with sprinkles of bleu cheese. You might expect cheese in Wisconsin to be extraordinary, but this, I'm told, wasn't quite to that level. It was merely very good. Since I don't like bleu cheese myself — I try to stay away from rotten food, whether the rot is considered desirable or not — I have to take his word for this. My coconut shrimp stir-fry was right up there in the food standings, too; maybe not a champion but definitely a contender.

All this, though, was but prelude to the deserts: Wisconsin cherries with vanilla ice cream, and turtle pie. Cherries are, to my way of thinking, only good at all when they are very fresh, as when found at a roadside stand at the height of their season. These cherries may have been acquired in that fashion, as they were perfectly ripe, perfectly tart, and perfectly juicy. The vanilla ice cream was as good as one can expect from a state famous for its dairy industry. Good as that dish was, the turtle pie was even better. It was heavenly, with the perfect texture in all its makings. If I were rating only the desserts, there'd be another chili pepper on the board.

Women's World Cup TV Ratings

2011-07-16T11:45:00.001-05:00

According to Soccer America, the best, yet still mediocre, American soccer publication around, the semifinal match between the United States and France last Wednesday got the highest-ever rating for a weekday Women's World Cup match. All those adjectival qualifiers — "weekday"; "women's"; "world cup" — made me wonder how the US-France game stacks up among other soccer matches.

In women's soccer, the all-time ratings leader by a huge margin, with 18.5 million households, is the 1999 WWC final between the United States and China. In that year, the organizers and sponsors of the tournament — the first Women's World Cup held in the United States — did a fantastic promotional job. Those of us who count as soccer fans still remember the ads from back then: "I will have two fillings."

The quality of play back then wasn't all that great. Most of the women's national programs in the world were newish things, with minimal organizational and financial support, but the '99 Women's World Cup was none the less a turning point for women's football, and not just in America. Here, though, ratings for three of the games were more than encouraging. The United States's come-from-behind win over Germany in the quarterfinal match was watched by two and a half million households; the semifinal romp against Brazil on the Fourth of July drew nearly twice that many, just shy of five million households. And the final against China six days later ... well, you know.

Two games from this year's Cup have broken into the all-time top five. The quarterfinal against Brazil, a much-anticipated match-up played last weekend, drew just under four million households to become the third-most-watched women's world cup match of all time; and the semifinal against France on Wednesday slides in just behind that, with about three and a quarter million households tuning in.

It's surprised me, how many people I know that have been watching these games. These are people who don't much give a hoot about soccer, and will take back a hoot over women's soccer, but they're following our national team now, and finding out how exciting a game it can be when played at this level.

So how does it compare with men's soccer in America?

Well, that 1999 Women's World Cup Final is still the leader in the TV ratings. More Americans tuned in to that match than have watched any other soccer match in history, men's or women's.

Coming second, with 14.5 million households, is the 1994 men's World Cup Final between Brazil and Italy, a tight match that was eventually resolved through penalty kicks. I suspect the game was widely watched not because of great intrinsic interest in soccer per se, but because it was being played in the United States and had been hyped out the wazoo after Brazil had barely beaten the upstart host team in an earlier round. That earlier match, which had Brazil squeaking by against our men, drew 13.7 million households and is the third most-watched soccer match.

Next, with 12 million households tuning in, is the 2006 men's World Cup final between Italy and France, famous mostly for being the final — and most ignominious — national-team appearance of Zinedine Zidane, the greatest player of his day. (Personally, I didn't watch that game. I had been so put off by the obtuse machinations of FIFA's officiating policies that I entirely quit watching the '06 World Cup halfway through the group stages.)

And rounding out the top five televised soccer matches is last year's US-England match, a so-so display of bare competence that drew 10.8 million households.

It would be pointless, I think, to deny that women's soccer is a much weaker draw than men's soccer — and men's soccer isn't all that great a draw in this country either, where Monday Night Football can routinely draw 17 million households, no matter how lame a match-up is promised. I'm sure that a lot of the difference in popularity between men's soccer and women's soccer is due to an ignorant assumption that women can't be as skilled as men at team sports.

And a larger part of it is probably due to that lack of organizational and financial support I mentioned. Most countries in the world still don't provide any real backing to their potential female athletes, in soccer or any other sport. In most cases, it's understandable: there are barely enough resources to back one national team, and men come first. (Whether it should be so is beside the point.) I don't see Somalia becoming a force in women's football any time soon; certainly not before they improve that nasty little starvation problem they've got going on.

But even countries that do provide support to their women's teams — and you can basically look at who's in this year's Women's World Cup to see who they are — provide that support at a much lower level than their men's teams. It's a function of popularity, and so a vicious circle.

The effect of that lack of support — the reduced training that it entails — explains one of the main differences between top-level men's games and top-level women's games. I've noticed in this world cup that, with a very few exceptions, female players are more likely to cluster around the ball like teenagers, a habit counterproductive to smooth, effective soccer. Young men on the path to professional clubs have this inclination trained out of them, but women's training, it seems, has not yet reached that point.

There is another fact that must be dealt with. While female athletes can be as technically skilled as male athletes — and some are; just look at the Japan-Germany match the other day — they aren't as physically strong or as fast as their male counterparts. We are still far, far away from the day when the best women's national team can beat a mid-table men's national team, or when the WPS champion can compete with a team like NAC Breda or Lyngby BK.

But then, they don't have to be as strong as men; they only have to be competitive with other women to make the contest interesting. Speed, though, is a slightly different proposition. The speed difference between male and female players is fractions of a second, but over the course of a 90-minute game, those fractions of seconds add up and make the women's game seem slower than the men's game.

There is a simple, if partial, fix for this situation. The rules of the game provide that the field of play can be anywhere from 100 to 130 yards long, and anywhere from 50 to 100 yards wide (provided that the length be greater than the width). Men's teams tend to make their fields as large as the stadium will accommodate, but if women's teams will mark out a field that is narrower, and maybe a little shorter, then the extra fractions of seconds that it takes a female player to gather in a ball, or close down an opponent, will disappear, and the game will be as fast-paced as that played by men.

Apologists for women's sports will decry that solution, saying that the fault lies not with the field but with the ignorant potential spectators. There is some truth to that, as I've already acknowledged. But if women's soccer is to grow into a commercially successful spectator sport, it will at some point have to cater to the prejudices of those potential viewers. It will have to take advantage of existing rules to make the game more entertaining, just as tennis requires less of its female players (and, I might argue, makes women's tennis more entertaining than men's).

Heather Mitts, for example...

And let's not overlook the fact that sex sells. Certainly the French know that; some of their players, I understand, have posed nude for publications in that country. (I haven't seen the pictures, but I'll just bet you there are some strategically placed soccer balls that keep you guessing.) The American team, for example, has some real babes playing on it, but mentioning that on television is like using the N-word. It's just not done. Too bad: a lot of guys might just tune in if they realized they were going to see some hot chicks sweating. And then maybe they'll get wrapped up in the sport instead of the players

2011-07-10T11:34:00.000-05:00

The sleazy British tabloid, News of the World, has published its last libel.

After years of lowering standards for reportage around the world, this maven of irresponsibility has lost its century-long race for circulation numbers in the most cynical fashion possible: by going out of business with a bad public apology, not for what it did, but for what it got caught doing. In its final publication, it pats itself on the back and speaks of its pride at 168 years of wallowing in muck. The spin is all about the good things the paper did, but I see no mention of what it was intended to do. It was intended to increase the fortunes of its owners and managers, regardless of the cost to public decency, private lives, and journalistic standards.

To its friable apology, I say, "Good riddance" to the newspaper that earned the nickname, "News of the Screws." The only sad thing about its demise, besides its own unredeemed attitude toward its behaviour, is the certainty that other sleazy papers will take its place, and will hire all the villains of the piece. I hope instead they are all, individually, subjected to the same kind of intrusive, perverted treatment that they so routinely subjected others to.

It's bad enough that they slithered around the ankles of Britain's royals and celebrities. To some extent, those people have to expect a certain amount of abusive treatment. But to hack the phones of crime victims, and their families, and the families of soldiers killed in combat .... That is low, even for the serpent in the crib. It reflects a moral gangrene that should infect not just the immediate actors who performed illegal acts — only two so far, but counting — but also those within the organization who allowed, ignored, or acquiesced in those acts. Right up to the very top of the compost heap. They should be pariahs who never live down the shame of what they have done.

Pictures from our Germany trip

2011-07-09T07:09:00.001-05:00

2011, Germany

Click on the pic to be taken to the online photo album.

London Pics Available On Line

2011-07-06T16:19:00.001-05:00

One of the photos that didn't make the cut.

A selection of the pictures we took last month in London are now posted in an album on Picasa. Click here to view them.

Just a Link

2011-06-19T17:54:00.000-05:00

Here is something I think everybody should read, no matter what their political affiliation.

What Seinfeld Has Done For Us

2011-06-19T17:42:00.002-05:00

Sometimes it takes a look at other parts of the world to make you appreciate how things are here.

In 2008, a radio host named Jon Gaunt in the U.K. was interviewing a local official named Michael Stark. According to the BBC:

The pair had been debating the council's decision to ban smokers from fostering children when Mr Gaunt called Mr Stark a "Nazi", a "health Nazi" and an "ignorant pig".

Mr Gaunt lost his job, appealed the decision, and lost. The judge said that "The broadcast was undoubtedly highly offensive to Mr Stark and was well capable of offending the broadcast audience..."

I don't know about the "ignorant pig" part, but the term "Nazi" and the more specific "health Nazi" certainly seem appropriate. At least to those of us who have seen the famous "Soup Nazi" episodes of Seinfeld.

There were, according to the BBC story, 53 complaints from the public. It does not say how many of those complaints objected to the accurate, if metaphoric, description of Mr Stark and his Redbridge council as a Nazi; how many objected to the other metaphor; how many were offended at the notion that government can deny people the right to foster children because they have habits that are no longer popular; and how many thought the "ignorant pig" comment was demeaning of swine. I would go out on a limb and guess that no complainants in the U.K., which suffered great destruction in World War II, thought Mr Gaunt was demeaning genuine Nazis by applying the label to Mr Stark.

Redbridge Council During a Lull?
(photo by Maqi)

Not Oscar Material

2011-06-10T23:16:00.001-05:00

X-Men: First Class
starring James McAvoy, Michael Fassbender, January Jones, Rose Byrne, Kevin Bacon, Jennifer Lawrence
directed by Matthew Vaughn

Official movie poster

This movie is all top-class special effects and comic-book atmosphere. If you're a fan of the X-Men franchise you'll probably like it. I'm not. I thought it was over-the-top silly and a bald-faced and cynical product designed to separate the general public from their money in five-to-ten dollar increments. If I had it to do over again, I'd wait for it to hit the second-run houses.

Most of the cast did what they could with the material. The notable exceptions were January Jones, who did nothing with her character, and Kevin Bacon, who managed to avoid outshining his co-stars. I must have faith that he did this for the pleasure of playing a comic-book villain, and a fat, fat paycheck.

B, as in Bourgeois

2011-06-10T22:53:00.002-05:00

Colton's Steak House & Grill
5 Eagle Mountain Boulevard
Batesville, Arkansas

This place was reluctantly recommended to us by our motel clerk as being "not too bad." It was, I'm afraid, only slightly oversold.

Them Texas flags ain't foolin' nobody

Colton's is a Little Rock-based franchise chain with a few dozen locations in five states. It seems to be the brainchild of a solid B student in the junior college's Restaurant Science program: everything about it is culled from one successful chain or another, from the buckets of peanuts on your table to the layout of booths and tables in the dining rooms. The atmosphere is fin de siècle trendy fused with aw-shucks hillbilly. If it weren't for the concrete floors, hard walls, and complete lack of sound-deadening materials, we would not have been treated to the cacaphony of the five squealing teeny-bopper co-eds in the corner booth, the audio from at least three televisions tuned to different channels, the canned-music soundtrack, and some unruly screaming baby in the other dining room. But credit where credit is due: when I complained about the noise to the waitress, she handled it with aplomb, and offered to turn off the television closest to us.

Alec Baldwin, who doesn't eat
in Independence County, Arkansas
(photo by David Shankbone)

Batesville, Arkansas, is in a dry county. Being sophisticated big-city types, we have forgotten what a hardship this creates for the casual restaurant diner, unable to drown the din in a nice relaxing highball. I'm sure that Congressman Wiener had just come from a meal in a dry county when it struck him as an intelligent thing to do, to snap a pic of his crotch with his smartphone and send it off to some little hotsie he was hoping to impress. Alec Baldwin, who suggested, too late to do the Congressman any good, that a martini might be a better way to unwind, obviously has not been to dinner in a dry county lately.

So we had to drink water. Local tap water is crystal clear and only slightly flavoured with treatment chemicals. I could get used to it, though it does make me really appreciate the Edwards Aquifer. Since we had the bucket of peanuts, we passed on an appetizer and went straight to salad, which was pro forma packaged. Not bad, but nothing to attract any real attention. Mostly just a salve to the guilt of not ordering the side of steamed veggies or green beans.

Our entrées were New York strip with loaded baked potato (an extra charge for the loading seemed kind of nickel-and-dime-ish) at $19, and a ribeye and shrimp combo for $20. The New York strip, ordered medium, came out somewhere between rare and medium rare. Other than that, it was a good piece of meat: maybe not USDA Prime, but acceptable, except for the price. The potato was large enough to be respected but not large enough to be impressive. That is both good and bad, depending on whether you feel you should be impressed by a baked potato.

The ribeye was a fatty piece of meat. My dog would have been very happy if I'd served this meat at home, because he has a thing for big chunks of beef fat. I used to, myself, but have outgrown that particular vice, and so was unhappy at having it placed in front of me. It was, at least, properly cooked to medium rare, as ordered.

The shrimp, five of them, were medium sized, battered in corn meal and fried artlessly. They were just shrimp, served with a mediocre cocktail sauce in a little plastic tub. Their main function is to remind the diner that Arkansas is a long way from the Gulf, and there are no shrimp in the Mississippi River. They are as good as one would get at, say, Red Lobster or some similar chain. They do not justify their cost.

Nearly Perfect

2011-06-10T19:50:00.001-05:00

Little House Restaurant & Ice Cream Parlor
309 South Walnut Street
Bernie, Missouri

7 days a week, 6am to 9pm

I'm not entirely unaccustomed to stumbling on good home cooking when I travel. Since I stay off the freeways as much as I can, going from one small town to the next, I get to see just about every restaurant there is, because they're all, or nearly all, on the main road through town. And the type of unpretentious cooking they do is often close to perfect by local standards. I've found great little cafes in almost every state of the union, but every now and then I find one that's close to perfect by any standard, including my own version of arrogant culinary snobbery.

Little House is such a place. It sits modestly aside Highway 25 in rural southern Missouri, not even in the biggest town in a nearly-empty-seeming county in the Bootheel. We pulled in for lunch with no great expectations, and were surprised by just how good a place can be.

The dining room is extremely clean and neat. It seemed to have a new coat of bright yellow paint on the ceiling and green on the walls, which were decorated with contrasting shutters, a few tasteful arrangements of plastic flowers, and a few nicely-calligraphed down-home mantras. A couple of locals were planted in what must surely be their regular tables near the front of the small dining room; we took up station near the back.

The young waitress was quick to bring us menus and drinks. The foods offered were ordinary: burgers, sandwiches, a few regular plate lunches and some daily specials. The hamburger, billed as being a quarter pound, was three dollars. My companion went for the double cheeseburger, at $4.25, plus potato wedges and a soda. I went for the hamburger steak plate lunch, which came with roll, mashed potatoes and green beans for $6. I also splurged with a Coke float for the ridiculously low price of $2.

The double cheeseburger had to be way, way more than a half-pound of good-quality beef, grilled to juicy perfection. It was, in the words of my friend, the kind of burger he would make at home on the grill on a good day. And he's a pretty good cook. The potato wedges were so far from greasy that he would have sworn they were baked; he may have been right. In any case, they were delicious, and nicely seasoned.

For my part, the green beans were unremarkable, barely seasoned and cafeterial, but not too overcooked to be good. The mashed potatoes were entirely traditional, the gravy on them was delicious and neither too thick nor too thin, as it often gets when left sitting around in the kitchen too long. (Since we were there after the normal lunch hours, it wouldn't have been surprising to find it had thickened or, consequently, been recently thinned.) The hamburger steak was cooked medium, which is a little more than I would have asked for, had I been given a choice, but it was still juicy and well-seasoned. It, too, was about a half pound, much more than I expected for the price, which is the key fact about Little House.

I've often given high marks for food, for ambience, and for service, but this is the first time, I think, that I've ever been so pleased with a restaurant's prices. Maybe that's a consequence of being long out of my home territory, where low prices are the rule more than the exception. But I have to think that these prices are about as low as any I've seen for good-quality food in any place I've ever been in America. And from someone who's been to a whole lot more of America than most people (and who has thoughtfully eaten at least as much as most people), that should count for something.

The Saga Continues: Day 3

2011-06-06T11:13:00.002-05:00

It feels like ages since that last travel post; so hard, after ten days or so, to go back and recollect what all we've done. But here goes:

After a restful night (I assume; actually, I can't even remember where we stayed, except that it was in southwestern Nebraska, in a town called McCook), we were up and off, first to an excellent and inexpensive breakfast in a little cafe in a depressed little farming community called Bartley, to eavesdrop on the local kafe klatchers as they traded reminiscences about the pranks they pulled when they were in high school; then to the Shrine of Our Lady of Fatima.

This shrine was built by a priest who had been a prisoner of war, and who swore he would build the shrine if he survived the German camp. He did, and he built it. It is mundane in many ways, but lifted above the mundane by the presence of beautiful gardening all around, and an excellent bronze of Rachel. What her connection is to the B.V.M. I couldn't say, except that both were women and both figured in the Bible. That seems sufficient for the good Catholics of Arapahoe, Nebraska, and I'm disinclined to grouse about it any more than I've just done.

Heading east from there, we came to the small burg of Superior, just above the Kansas line, where the draw is an entire building at the Nuckolls County Museum dedicated to the work of a single man: one Marvin Marquart, a bachelor farmer who, lacking the distractions imposed on us more worldly men, carved, assembled, and painted over three thousand model airplanes in the space of about fifty years. Some hang from the acoustical-tile cieling, but most are displayed crowded together in glass cases, wingtip to wingtip, arranged by nationality. While Mr Marquart's painting skills were rough at the outset, they got much better, although his hands apparently started to shake with age and the detail suffered slightly toward the end. Still, it is a most impressive display, and as a life's work it is far, far more than most of us can point to. It makes me glad for television and the Internet, and at the same time sad for those same things in my own life. (It also makes me very glad to have married, especially someone who likes soccer.) (And that reminds me: my special someone, playing forward for a new team, scored a goal yesterday. Congratulations, and I hope it's just the first of many.)

After that it was straight in to Kansas City, as the two odd sights I'd picked out along the way ended up not seeming worth getting off the highway for. This impression seems justified, in hindsight, as it pertains to one site, but I wish now that I had stopped to see the other. Fortunately, there are still counties in nearby southern Nebraska that I haven't been to yet, and it'll be just a short side-trip to visit Belleville, Kansas.

That got us in to Kansas City; we spent the weekend there, having dinner with friends at Accurso's Italian Restaurant, and visiting the Nelson-Atkins Museum of Art, one of the most impressive public collections I've seen, and watching, at perhaps the least inviting sports bar in the entire world, Barcelona beat Manchester United in the UEFA Champions League final. Boooo! Hisss!

overpriced ceiling

It being Memorial Day weekend, we stayed through Sunday to attend the annual concert and fireworks show at the Liberty Memorial. After a short tour of the city between home and show, we got there early enough to get a reasonably good parking place and a reasonably good spot on the lawn, where we were eventually joined by sixty-six thousand of our closest friends in the town. Ahead of the show, David and I toured the refurbished Union Station, which is now part Amtrak-station, part entertainment venue. I heard that the price tag for the restoration was $250,000,000, which smacks of snouts in the public trough and leads me to think we should be able to require absolute transparency for public works, or the right to sue for recovery of excess costs -- and sue not only the beneficiaries of the unrighteous public largesse, but the political creatures that made it happen.

Anyway. So the Air Force sent a band to perform a warm-up act, and then the KC Symphony took the stage, with a couple of overfed specialty acts. I was expecting a concert of familiar patriotic tunes, but what I got instead was a medley of familiar patriotic tunes interspersed with new music of a purportedly patriotic flavour, not perhaps coincidentally written or arranged by the performers, who get royalties for music that likely would never otherwise be performed. I won't go so far as to say it was bad music; just that it was not as good, not as entertaining, as a rousing string of Sousa marches would have been. And I'm wondering what rock I was sleeping under while Amazing Grace became an appropriate tribute to our fallen warriors.

One other thing I noted: at the start of the show, the audience rose, as requested, for the playing of the Star Spangled Banner. Later in the show, the audience rose, unrequested, and as one, for the playing of God Bless America.

The concert ended on a definite high, with a marvelous performance of Tchaikovskiy's 1812 Overture, complete with the requisite actual cannons, followed by, at last, the Sousa march I craved; in this case, The Stars and Stripes Forever. And by one of the better fireworks shows I've seen.

Amerigreek Steak House

2011-06-04T09:26:00.001-05:00

Log Cabin
201 North Main Street
Galena, Illinois

Galena, Illinois, is a gentrified overgrown one-street country town. Some time ago, it was rediscovered by the artsy-fartsy crowd and gussied up to look like what it looked like in its prime, nearly 200 years ago. Except, of course, without the horse droppings, cigar smoke, noise and poverty of the American frontier. Another Disney version of history, ready for the tourists who like to be abed by ten.

There's a stretch of that one street (Main Street) that has a restaurant in almost every space, it seems. They probably open and close with a regularity that would make sand dunes seem stable, but a few of them seem to have managed to stick around. We took the unanimous recommendation of our hotel staff and slid into the Log Cabin for dinner on a Friday night. Run by a Greek family, it did not so much feature Greek foods or styles as offer them here and there: feta cheese in the house dressing, a couple of appetizers, a couple of dishes. All dark wood and banquettes, the interior made a pleasant change from the slightly-humid, bug-infested evening outdoors. (Box elder bugs are swarming just now; they're harmless, but irritating like gnats.)

We started with a round from the bar, all of which were well-prepared. That would have put us in a good mood for dinner if the service hadn't been so ... uh ... expeditious. Considering that the dinner rush was long over by the time we sat down (but closing time was still a good way off), there was no reason for hurrying us through the courses; yet they did. Our salads arrived only seconds after our drinks; the main platters arrived immediately after. Our before-dinner drinks ended up being after-dinner drinks, and there are few drinks that can perform both roles with any kind of aplomb.

What's that mean?

Fortunately for our moods, the salads were quite good, large bowls of fresh lettuce, tomato, cucumber, and all the other appropriate rabbit-food items. The dressings tasted home-made (house, with feta cheese, and creamy Italian). The coleslaw chosen by one of our group was even better: sweet, creamy, lusciously delicious. If I ever return to this restaurant, that will be my salad of choice.

For main dishes we had a plate of fried shrimp, one of pork ribs, and one of steak. The pork ribs were easily the best of the three, with a sweet barbecue sauce that brought out the flavour of the perfectly cooked meat. I don't ordinarily do messy food — watermelon, buffalo wings, and barbecue (and long pasta is on my "caution" list) — but I would make an exception for these delicious ribs.

Ranking next in the hierarchy was the shrimp. Present in quantity commensurate with their price, they were breaded in a wheat batter and fried quickly, tempura-style, resulting in very light, very tasty shrimp.

The weak spot of the meal was the New York strip steak. Thick and large but hardly tender meat, with minimal ribboning of fat through it, it was grilled a little beyond the medium-rare I ordered, and it had been rubbed with unusual seasonings — possibly Greek seasonings? — that I found gave it a slightly unpleasant aroma, and the drippings from the meat concentrated the flavour of those spices in a way that I didn't like. I thought the steak was a little overpriced at $26, but not enough to get worked up about. The less-than-perfect quality of the meat was more the issue.

(And while I'm talking about price, let me say this: I wanted to order prime rib, but was irked by the fact that that dish is offered at one price ("our everyday price," ironically, since it applies only three days out of seven) on weekends and another, lower, price the rest of the week. There is no acceptable excuse for that kind of institutionalized price-gouging.)

The accoutrements of the meal were good: good, soft bread; baked potatoes offered with melted cheese, sour cream, and plenty of butter; and a relish tray of a sort that I have not seen in ages, containing raw radishes, celery, carrots and green onion to munch on. There's a tradition that should enjoy a resurgence.

There were some service issues: we asked for utensils twice (there were only two sets on a table set for four), and finally had to swipe some from another table; our waitress was ready to walk away after only one of us had ordered a drink, and had to be stopped so the rest of us could place our orders; we had to ask twice for some of the dressings for our potatoes; and despite the unrelaxed speed at which things were brought from the kitchen, empty plates were slow to make their way back, and we had to resort to piling things on the next table in order to have room to eat. Listing the flaws like that may make them seem more important than they seemed at the time. In fact all they did was keep the service at the Log Cabin from being rated above average, because otherwise the server was pleasant and engaging, knowledgeable, and attentive to our needs. Taken altogether, I would say simply that the service here was uneven, nothing worse.

Unintentionally Retro

2011-06-01T22:44:00.001-05:00

The Copper Kettle
1005 South Main Street
River Falls, Wisconsin

There are two kinds of retro restaurants in my experience of the world: the self-consciously and intentionally retro, which is to restaurant dining as the PT Cruiser is to driving; and the unintentionally retro, which is more akin to a white '65 Impala with red tucaroles. The Copper Kettle is definitely in the latter category.

The place looks, at first impression, thoroughly up to date. Then you notice that you enter, not next to the bar, but through it. The dining room is off to the side, and the patio is beyond. We opted for the patio, it being a fine late-Spring evening in western Wisconsin. (We probably would have picked the patio back home, too, but we would have sweated through the evening as the temperature grudgingly gave back that third digit.) Out there we found a plastic dog guarding plastic roses and plastic tulips, all unabashedly placed as though fashionable, and with no sense of irony.

We had to start with an order of fried cheese curds, just because my friend Rick, who is on his maiden voyage to the midwest, wasn't sure he should believe us when we said there was such a thing. He was unimpressed: snobbishly so, I would say, and I put his dismissive attitude down to a lack of timely medication. The cheese curds were nicely done. Yes, they are somewhat reminiscent of fried mozzarella, just as an old Karmann Ghia convertible could be considered reminiscent of a Jaguar E-Type -- they're both European and only nominally 4-seaters, and both were available with steering wheels and gear shifters. I, who have at least had a few cheese curds in my life, the recent parts of it anyway, consider these tasty little beer-battered morsels to be well above average in the cheese-curd universe. But then, everything tastes good fried, right?

We ordered drinks all around, something we don't normally do back home. They were delivered by our waitress in good time, precariously balanced on a tray in a manner that set the mood for the evening. By the time we left we were on our way to a close friendship with this child of exile who claims unconvincingly that she can, in fact, remember the '70s. (Not because she was spaced out during those years, but because she was too young, if she was alive at all. You don't have to clarify that for any other decade in human history, except possibly the '60s.)

Our choices for dinner started with onion soup and house salad; roast beef with mashed potatoes; a Reuben sandwich with fries; and the chicken Kiev, a dish I have not seen on a menu since the 1970s.

The onion soup was unusual, in that it was made with a light broth instead of the de rigueur dark beef broth. The onions weren't carmelized, and the cheese sprinkled (sprinkled!) on top was either mozzarella or a travesty of Swiss. It was a thoroughly unauthentic concoction, and the greatest failing of the evening, but even at that it was enjoyable. The salad was perfectly ordinary, not quite as fresh as it could have been.

The Reuben sandwich was well made: plentiful corned beef and a goodly serving of sauerkraut on a superior quality pumpernickel bread, but presented as though no one in the kitchen has ever given the least thought to making a plate attractive. It was just put on the plate with a pile of fries and served, artlessly. Well, that's okay, I guess, but how easy would it have been to make it look more attractive? Extremely easy, as my friend Rick demonstrated before eating. A little presentation doesn't hurt, and it doesn't have to be fru-fru (the opinion of too many chefs notwithstanding; it's the student-loan debt talking, with them). The fries, by the way, were pretty good, although completely unsalted; cut medium-thick, with the skins, and fried the right amount of time in new oil at the proper temperature.

The pot roast was plentiful, and made just like most people's grandmothers would have done it. The mashed potatoes were made with the skin left on, and seasoned with garlic. Made with butter and milk and left slightly lumpy, so you know it's not fake mashed potatoes, and not made with a food processor. The meat required no knife; it yielded at the mere sight of a fork waved purposefully at it. And there was almost too much of it, despite the extremely reasonable price.

The chicken Kiev, that classic dish of the 1970s, was served as though it was still 1978. I suspect that the chicken breast was rolled around the seasoned butter in some distant food-processing factory, not the Copper Kettle's kitchen: it was simply too perfectly formed to be made in house. The batter on it was underseasoned and had the gritty quality of dry corn meal. In addition to being stuffed with butter, the dish was laid in a bed of butter and topped with a butter sauce. I haven't seen that much butter all in one place since Dr Atkins made his debut. It was, of course, delicious. I only hope my cardiologist doesn't read this.

What better way to top off a trip back in time than to order drinks that haven't been ordered since Styx broke up? A Colorado bulldog for Rick, a Golden Cadillac for me. Mine was all vanilla ice cream and no discernible liqueurs; Rick was happier with his. (He is out on the front porch now, still being happy.)

On the way out, the plastic dog bit me. I kicked him, but he didn't yelp. Stoic, he is.

[Since I'm writing this post on someone else's computer, I don't have access to my usual graphic for ratings. I will give this restaurant three chili peppers for the food, four for the service, three for the ambience, and three and a half for value. What's that mean? All in all, it was a pleasant experience, and I would be comfortable recommending the place to anyone looking for a meal in western Wisconsin.]

Dining Out in Kansas City

2011-05-30T23:22:00.002-05:00

Accurso's Italian Food
4980 Main Street
Kansas City, Missouri

It's just a guess, but I suspect that as you move away from the heart of Country Club Plaza, prices get better and the snob factor declines in inverse proportion. Accurso's is just far enough from that point of overpriced snobbery that the prices are acceptable even to this miserly curmudgeon, while the snoot-elevation was still sufficient to lend an air of sophistication.

We were surprised to be seated right away, at 7pm on a Friday evening — but judging from the many restaurants we passed on our way here, no one goes out on the Friday of a three-day weekend in Kansas City. I celebrated this unexpected bit of lagniappe with a glass of wine, an inexpensive and unpretentious Riesling that I really enjoyed. We started with the antipasto sampler, tasty and easily large enough for four people: artichoke hearts, olives, salami, provolone, capicola, mozzarella, pepperoni and tomatoes slathered in way too much balsamic vinegar and olive oil.

What's that mean?

The dishes we ordered were lasagna, ravioli raphaela, and two of that evening's specials: stuffed rigatoni in a cream sauce, and tuna steaks on capellini. Of those four, only the tuna would seem to match the promise of the restaurant's atmosphere and reputation. It was excellent, cooked to within a hair's breadth of perfection, with a delicious light sauce. The stuffed rigatoni was cooked al dente but seasoned with an overdose of salt, and an underdose of stuffing in the pasta (and what there was, was bland). The ravioli raphaela was plentiful but, sadly, uninteresting, to the point where I actually left a good portion of it uneaten, and didn't take it home for leftovers, a shocking behavioural abnormality that should speak volumes. The lasagna was either okay or lousy, depending on which you accept of the four opinions it produced at our table. My own thought was that it was just okay, though the sauce relied too much on mere tomato flavour. The link of dry Italian sausage served with it was grilled well beyond expectation but not quite beyond acceptability.

Things Are Looking Up: Day 2 of the 2011 Wisconsin Road Trip

2011-05-27T08:05:00.001-05:00

[Some of the photos taken on this trip are posted on line HERE]

Stratford, Texas, at sunrise

I was up early, like 5AM, wide awake, so I got dressed and went out to see the sights of Stratford, Texas, a small panhandle town that, honestly, has no sights. It didn't take long. At least the angle of the light gave mundane things a slight romantic cast, and the cool air was bracing. Rick was up a couple of hours later, and we loaded the car pretty quickly and headed off in search of coffee.

Before we found that, though, we reached Boise City, Oklahoma, where we witnessed the destruction wrought by the US Army Air Corps pilot who accidentally dropped three bombs on the town during a 1943 training mission. Luckily for the town, bombs used during training missions back then weren't live ordnance, so the destruction was mostly to the surface of the earth. One of the bombs has been enshrined as mute testimony to the town's will, in its crater in front of the Chamber of Commerce. The others are in the town's museum collection, which we didn't see.

After that, we drove out to the edge of town to see the city's welcome to visitors from the north. When it was built, these giant sauropods were called brontosaurs, so it probably had some cute diminutive name like Bessy the Bronto. Now they're called apatosaurs, and that just doesn't lend itself to charming iambic phrase. So now it's called The Dinosaur.

Following that, a quick tour of the town revealed that there was only one surviving eatery where we might get coffee and breakfast ... a Subway in the local truck stop. It could've been worse. Much worse. At least breakfast at Subway is a thing of known quality and composition, and the truck stop's coffee was pretty good, and voluminous.

From there we headed northeast, clipping the corner of Texas County (which was why we went that direction in the first place) and then up into unexplored Kansas. We paused briefly to admire the vastness of the grassland in the Cimarron River bottom, then continued north to Wallace, epicenter of a number of battles between the US cavalry and whichever tribe of Indians inhabited the area at the time. I thought it was Arapaho, but there was some Pawnee pottery in the local museum.

The big draw of that museum, though, is its collection of barbed-wire animal sculptures executed by local artisan Ernie Poe ("Ernest E. Poe, if you want to get formal. I don't.") His chef d'oeuvre is the near-life-sized buffalo that stands out front, seven hundred pounds of wire on a steel frame.

In addition to the museum, the exhibits include a station of the old Butterfield Overland Despatch line that ran through the area, complete with bullet holes and trap door that led to the tunnels that once connected the station with its outlying defenses; a Union Pacific Railway station; and a building built to house the collection of the larger implements of frontier life -- a corn wagon, a chuckwagon, a sleigh, some other carts, a loom, a mock-up of a blacksmith shop, and the various animals that Ernie has built to pose with the vehicles. All in all, an entertaining half hour by the roadside.

Inside the museum were some photographs of people exploring an interesting geological formation called Monument Rocks, which we found out were just a small distance out of our planned way. So we drove over to Oakley, the next town, where we saw the monumental sculpture of Buffalo Bill Cody on a mound,

and the little Fick Museum (which consists of one fascinating fossil exhibit and piles of local craftwork)

and then we drove fourteen miles south to a dirt road that led, after 7 miles, to Monument Rocks, an impressive stand of chalk towers left behind when the land around them eroded away. We spent at least a good hour clambering around in these rocks.

After that slightly mystical experience (you always understand why the Indians thought of these places as "sacred"), we headed north toward Nebraska, stopping for dinner in Oberlin, Kansas, a pleasant Plains city given to variety in its garden plantings of irises.

Like Cameron Diaz with a West Texas Drawl

2011-05-25T22:32:00.002-05:00

Green Chile Willy's
13651 Interstate 27, at McCormick
Amarillo, Texas

It's just a simple metal building, plopped down between the frontage road and a horse farm. Inside the decor is typical of many Texas restaurants: framed, autographed pictures of local celebrities, some western impedimenta, some old sepia-toned photos. Not a very large place. In fact, not nearly large enough for the crowds it attracts. We got there just in time: we were seated immediately; fifteen minutes later, all the seats in the waiting area were taken.

The menu is as simple as the architecture: fried chicken; chicken fried steak; burgers; and side dishes like fried corn and baked potatoes. I went for the Jalapeño Jack chicken fried steak; my friend Rick opted for the chicken fried chicken.

Our waitress, the title character of this post, greeted us as though we were old friends come to call, but with a degree of sincerity that is hard to fake. When Rick asked for sweet tea, she told him they only had unsweetened, "But can you stick your finger in it?" An old line, but delivered with such unforced charm that it still works. She was attentive throughout our meal, but without hovering. She struck just the right balance between visiting with her customers and getting her work done, and we could see that no one in the place felt any lack of attention from any of the staff.

Both our meals were priced at $11.25, though the menu did claim that all the chicken fried steaks were "Texas sized," and both meals included a salad and one side order. Still, I thought the price a little on the high side. My initial dissatisfaction with that aspect of the visit increased when I found that Texas is not as big in the Panhandle as it is in the rest of the state. I expected a CFS that draped over the sides of a respectable platter; I got one about the size of a dessert plate. Big enough to satisfy the stomach, but not the eyes. I know, I'm better off not having gotten some gigantic slab of breaded meat, but I had kind of been hoping for leftovers for tomorrow's lunch.

See my comment, below,
re the "value" rating

I certainly didn't leave with any sense of dissatisfaction, however. It may not have been the absolute best CFS I've ever had, but it's up there. The breading was a little crunchy, as it should be, and well seasoned; the meat was good quality, and the cream gravy was excellent. The best part of it, though, were the added ingredients of jalapeños and shredded Monterrey Jack cheese, which were present in just great enough quantity to add their flavours to the mix with clarity, not intruding on the simple pleasure of CFS with cream gravy, but augmenting it. Rick's chicken fried chicken had the same combination of ingredients, and was equally tasty.

The side dishes were done with a precise hand. Simple foods like these are hard to screw up, but also hard to excel at. Yet the kitchen at Green Chile Willy's Grill has excelled. The green beans I had were fresh, cooked long enough to be tender but not so long as to get mushy, and seasoned with a tangy mixture of spices that does not appear to include bacon or fatback. They were delicious. And Rick's baked potato was large but perfectly baked, with plenty of the toppings that make a baked potato so heart-clogging good.

The kitchen at Green Chile Willy's is geared toward speed. Salads, condiments, toppings and such are packaged in the slow times for quick delivery when the crowds start pouring in, but they achieve that speed without sacrificing appreciably on quality. It's a good thing, because the lines are out the door.

And the Adventure Begins!

2011-05-25T21:55:00.001-05:00

The start of a Road Trip is such a dull affair these days. This is because I live pretty much in the middle of Texas, and have to get through the rest of it before I get to any New Territory.

This trip, at least, is exciting for Rick, who's coming with me to Wisconsin, and who has never ever been beyond Junction (except for six weeks in Basic Training on an air base in Amarillo, but he never got off base in that whole time). So we're driving along through the more or less unremarkable landscape between San Antonio and the Oklahoma line, and he found things to look at. It helps to have new things to look at, even if it's all flat, treeless expanse. And we did have a dust storm to liven things up briefly; at one point it was heavy enough to drop visibility almost to zero. But that only lasted a few hundred yards.

We left San Antonio around 8 this morning, after I dropped Homer off at his kennel. Breakfast was in Boerne, at the Bear Moon Cafe on Main Street, which until this stop has always been a favourite of mine. Today, though, I found the coffee too strong and the scones disappointing. The cranberry scone was like eating bread, with a heavy but not crunchy crust; the buttermilk scone was like eating cake. Day-old cake.

We loaded an audiobook into the CD player and set off down the freeway. The book is P.D. James' A Taste for Death, one of her Adam Dalgliesh series. I've never read any of her work. It's by far the longest audiobook we got from the library, at 22 hours, but that's not entirely from the languid pace of the action. I find James also has a knack for elegantly simple and concise description. My favourite sentence so far, describing a character's reaction to the discovery of two bodies, was "Blood spattered against the retinas of her closed eyes." Evocative and succinct.

So in Junction we stopped to see the Deer Horn Tree. I didn't expect much of it, but that's about all there is to see in a place like Junction. Sure enough, a tree made out of deer horns. Well, we had to stop anyway, to put the top down.

Pearl of the Conchos and
Celebration Bridge

After that it was on to San Angelo. I'd been to the art museum at San Angelo a few years back, to see a travelling exhibit of paintings from some small but renowned museum in Connecticut. Right behind that museum (and I don't know if it was there at the time) is a park in the floodplain of the Concho River, and in the river, next to the new-looking Celebration Bridge, is a statue of a mermaid holding an oyster, in which is a giant pearl. The statue is called The Pearl of the Conchos. Not great art, but a nice statue in a very nice setting. Nice enough that we had a relaxing picnic lunch of the sandwiches we had brought from home.

Our next stop -- this will show you just how hard it is to find interesting things to see along the routes of western Texas -- was in Big Spring, where we were led to believe exist the world's largest pair of horns. It's only a block out of our way, so I wasn't too terribly disappointed to find that the horns are no longer there. Just an empty pavilion on the grounds of the Heritage Museum. Well, maybe they've moved the horns indoors. I suppose that if I had the world's largest horns, I'd want to protect them from the elements and rival claimants.

The rest of the trip today, with the exception of the dust storm, was unremarkable. It's now nearly 10pm and we are ensconced in the "party room" of the Stratford Inn, in Stratford, Texas. The "party room" is called that because it has four queen-sized beds in it. I sure hope we aren't woken up in the middle of the night by a small but determined band of Stratford's hardest-core partiers.

Why Would Obama Say Such a Thing?

2011-05-24T15:46:00.001-05:00

Incredibly, I heard on the radio this morning an interview, conducted by a seemingly intelligent reporter for National Public Radio, of a seemingly intelligent political analyst, concerning the recent events to do with the Middle East. Under discussion was the visit of Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu to Washington, where he met with President Obama (before the latter's departure for a visit to his ancestral home in Moneygall, Ireland; yes, we forget that his heritage is as much European as it is African), addressed a pro-Israel lobbying group, and spoke to a joint session of congress. The dust-up of particular interest to the radio pundits was because President Obama, speaking last week in anticipation of Netanyahu's visit, and with an eye toward the current climate of rebellion and reform in many parts of North Africa and the Middle East, said, near the end of his speech:

For over two years, my administration has worked with the parties and the international community to end this conflict, building on decades of work by previous administrations. Yet expectations have gone unmet. Israeli settlement activity continues. Palestinians have walked away from talks. The world looks at a conflict that has grinded on and on and on, and sees nothing but stalemate. Indeed, there are those who argue that with all the change and uncertainty in the region, it is simply not possible to move forward now.

White House photo
by Lawrence Jackson

I disagree. At a time when the people of the Middle East and North Africa are casting off the burdens of the past, the drive for a lasting peace that ends the conflict and resolves all claims is more urgent than ever. That's certainly true for the two parties involved.

For the Palestinians, efforts to delegitimize Israel will end in failure. Symbolic actions to isolate Israel at the United Nations in September won't create an independent state. Palestinian leaders will not achieve peace or prosperity if Hamas insists on a path of terror and rejection. And Palestinians will never realize their independence by denying the right of Israel to exist.
As for Israel, our friendship is rooted deeply in a shared history and shared values. Our commitment to Israel's security is unshakeable. And we will stand against attempts to single it out for criticism in international forums. But precisely because of our friendship, it's important that we tell the truth: The status quo is unsustainable, and Israel too must act boldly to advance a lasting peace.

The fact is, a growing number of Palestinians live west of the Jordan River. Technology will make it harder for Israel to defend itself. A region undergoing profound change will lead to populism in which millions of people -– not just one or two leaders -- must believe peace is possible. The international community is tired of an endless process that never produces an outcome. The dream of a Jewish and democratic state cannot be fulfilled with permanent occupation.

Now, ultimately, it is up to the Israelis and Palestinians to take action. No peace can be imposed upon them -- not by the United States; not by anybody else. But endless delay won't make the problem go away. What America and the international community can do is to state frankly what everyone knows -- a lasting peace will involve two states for two peoples: Israel as a Jewish state and the homeland for the Jewish people, and the state of Palestine as the homeland for the Palestinian people, each state enjoying self-determination, mutual recognition, and peace.

So while the core issues of the conflict must be negotiated, the basis of those negotiations is clear: a viable Palestine, a secure Israel. The United States believes that negotiations should result in two states, with permanent Palestinian borders with Israel, Jordan, and Egypt, and permanent Israeli borders with Palestine. We believe the borders of Israel and Palestine should be based on the 1967 lines with mutually agreed swaps, so that secure and recognized borders are established for both states. The Palestinian people must have the right to govern themselves, and reach their full potential, in a sovereign and contiguous state.

Israeli Prime Minister
Benyamin Netanyahu
(State Department photo)

The reference to the 1967 borders as a starting point for negotiation lit up Prime Minister Netanyahu, who has decided to start referring to them as The Indefensible 1967 Borders, a tactic that panders to unthinking people everywhere.

The question the reporter asked, for which the political analyst had no ready answer was, Given the political situation in this country, why would President Obama make a controversial reference to the 1967 borders as a basis for an agreed peace between Israel and its Palestinian neighbours? He gets nothing out of it. They seemed unable to fathom any reason for this statement.

I think I know the answer, and I think it was a wise and judicious thing for Obama to do. (I often think I'm alone among Republicans in thinking Obama wise and judicious, especially in comparison to the reactionary-pandering, fatuous, simpering, spineless, gutless wonders my own party keeps vomiting up for the entertainment of Fox "News" interviewers.)

Israel has, rightly, long enjoyed great and essentially unwavering support from the United States. We have been that nation's champion since its founding in 1948; we have backed it, even when its positions have been questionable, in every one of its conflicts with its neighbours. Each presidential administration since Truman's has understood that Israel, unlike its neighbours, is under existential threat: intractable elements throughout the region, from Islamabad to Fez, from Damascus to Sa'na, want the State of Israel wiped off the face of the earth. With that kind of threat facing it, Israel is entitled to greater deference in our dealings with it and its neighbours.

But Israel, in the last decade or so, has begun to lose the moral high ground it held in American thought since 1948. Ultra-conservative forces within Israel have begun to assert themselves with greater success, forcing what they call a "Greater Israel" on the world. The ongoing Jewish settlement of lands in the West Bank, outside the 1967 borders, is a part of that push for an enlarged Jewish state. But each new settlement, each additional hectare of land taken from the Palestinians by Israeli settlers, is a new affront to the prospect for eventual peace between Israelis and Palestinians. Israel knows this, but its weak governments have been unable to find the backbone needed to prevent further encroachments on the West Bank. American governments have repeatedly warned Israel that this nation will not support this eating away of the land that will, in some fashion, someday be an Arab state of Palestine; the Israelis, though, apologise, maybe pause, and continue to build.

Obama's statement that the 1967 border is a starting point for negotiations has long been acknowledged by all responsible parties. For my own part, I agree with that, and I would go further and say that wars have consequences, and the Palestinians much accept that the wars fought and lost in 1948 and 1956 and 1967 and 1973 mean that Israel's annexation of Jerusalem must be accepted as fact. They won it, and it is theirs.

Palestinians must accept, too, that they were offered their own state at the same time the Israelis were, in 1948, but they chose to make war instead. They lost, and they must accept the consequences of their decision, or their fathers' decision. The refugees who fled the nascent State of Israel in 1948, and their children born in refugee camps throughout the region, and in neighbouring states, many of whom have never set foot in Israel, must accept that they have no right to return to ancestral homes in Israel. Whether they have any right to return at all must depend upon their willingness to accept the status within the Israeli political structure that is offered to them — a status that, because they are not Jews and Israel is by definition a Jewish state, is likely to be what we would consider second-class citizenship for some time into the future. (Westerners who find that likelihood opprobrious should look to the status of non-believers in Islamic nations throughout Africa and Asia, or to the status of Catholics in the British colonies that became the United States, and accept that our notions of inclusive democracy are not universally shared. We may well be morally superior, but we are not the ones who make the decisions or live with the results.)

By reminding the Israelis that the 1967 borders are the starting point, and that their continuing incursions into the West Bank have never had our support, Obama is, wisely and judiciously, warning the Israelis that American backing has its limits, and that they have continually tested those limits for decades. Incursions, like wars, have consequences.

A Story

2011-05-15T15:34:00.000-05:00

Music

The day after Lester died, Emma heard music.

Her first thought was that it was pretty, but before she could decide why it was pretty, she realized how extraordinary it was just to hear music. The old, untuned piano had sat silently in the day room for the entire seven years she had worked there, and never once had anyone struck two consecutive tuneful notes on it. It was just where David sat.

He had been eight when Emma came to work there, and already a resident for three years. He spent every day sitting at the piano, not touching it, never trying the notes, not seeing anything. Just sitting, staring at the window beyond the closed case of the instrument. Mary Ann, the Supervising Nurse, said that when he first discovered the piano, he had played every note, from lowest to highest, slowly, deliberately, one time each and one after the other, as if memorizing their sound. He would take a seat there early each morning, and strike the lowest note, then the next, and the next, and when after several long minutes he finally reached the top, he would start over at the bottom, again and again, all day long, until at last Lester put a stop to it.

Lester had lived at the hospital for longer than anyone could remember. He alternated between sitting in an upholstered chair in the day room, muttering things no one understood, and shouting profanities and curses at his fellow residents, the nurses, the attendants, the walls, the furniture. And one day, about the time Emma first came to work there, Lester, who had been sitting in his chair muttering, stood and began cursing the light fixtures on the ceiling, then strode purposefully to the piano and slammed the lid down on David’s hand. Mary Ann said it broke a bone just above the left index finger.

David hadn’t touched the keys since that day. Instead, he would hold his finger over each key in turn, hovering in the air, as if he had struck it, as if he heard the vibrations of the string die away. His right foot would rise and fall on one of the pedals, relentlessly, but to no effect except the sound of something moving inside. He did this every day, all day; and then, for no reason, about three years ago he stopped. He spent each day after that still at the piano, but just sitting, hands in his lap, staring out the window, or with eyes closed, staring at something within himself.

He never spoke. No one in the hospital had ever heard his voice. He never cried, or laughed, never made a sound, never even produced the incomprehensible sounds so common among the hospital’s residents. He submitted to being dressed and undressed and bathed and fed by the attendants, but in unbroken silence. He could hear well enough, of that they were sure, and he understood them when they spoke to him. They knew that, because they would remind him to go to the bathroom, and he would go. When they told him it was time for lunch, he would follow the others to the dining room and sit, placid, while each spoon- or fork-ful was brought to his mouth. If no one fed him, he simply sat. If they remembered to tell him he was finished, he would go back to the piano and sit for the rest of the day. If they forgot, he would sit in the dining room until someone noticed him and told him he could leave. If they gave him water he drank it; if they didn’t, he did without.

He had been a beautiful young child when Emma first came, and it had pained her to imagine the sadness of his life, being lived out in such a strange madness. His blond straight hair, his smooth pale skin, his green-blue unseeing eyes. And in the years since she had come to the hospital, David had grown into a handsome young man of fifteen, almost sixteen, existing in silence in his room and the day room and the dining room and the bathroom, and in his own closed mind.

Doctors came and examined him from time to time, and postulated theories, and made recommendations and wrote prescriptions and ordered treatments, but it never made a difference. Oh, a drug might make him sleep more, or less, and one had made him sway back and forth, but nothing ever changed the way he behaved, the detached way he responded to instructions, the way he sat, hour after hour, at the piano.

Emma took him for walks from time to time, around the hospital grounds, talking to him, pointing at trees and shrubs and flowers, urging him to notice. She would take his hand and say “Come with me, David,” in as cheerful a voice as anyone has ever used with a child, and lead him out the door, down the porch stairs, across the gravel drive, off into the grass. Sometimes she took off his slippers so he would feel the cool grass between his toes. She often used to think some response was just about to dawn, a look in his eyes, awareness, confusion, surprise, but none ever did. If she walked, he followed; if she stopped, he stopped. If she walked away from him, he stood silent and patient, until she returned and took him back in, or told him to go back. If she said “Let’s go inside now,” he would follow her. If she waited, he waited. But if she said, “Go back in now,” he would go by himself. She didn’t understand how he could know the difference and seem to know nothing else.

A year ago, maybe a little more, there had been another change. Now, instead of sitting silent and unmoving at the piano, he would hold both hands above the keys, fingers spread, slowly moving each finger as if playing. At first Emma had watched when she could spare the time, to see if there were some pattern to the movement. He seemed to play the same thing over and over, his left hand stretched wide, his right hand moving in place, thumb, middle finger, little finger, over and over, then moving to hover over different notes and moving in the same pattern, then in different patterns, but almost always from left to right, from low notes to higher.

Every few days she would take a few minutes to watch, and after several months noticed that the patterns traced by his fingers and hands had become more and more complex over time, as if he were composing an etude, and adding to it with the passing days. She could stand beside him, or in front of him, or behind him, and it made no difference to him. Did he not care that she watched him, she wondered, or did he simply not grasp it? She couldn’t tell.

She took to watching from across the piano, watching his face for some shiver of consciousness. Was he hearing an imagined sound from the notes he pretended to play? If he was, did it have some kind of meaning for him? But his look never changed from the vacant stare, his gaze never wavered from the bright rectangle of light through the window. He never looked down at the keys, never looked in her direction, never turned his head, never showed the slightest animation in his features. Occasionally he would stop suddenly, sometimes putting his hands down in his lap, as if he had made a mistake or reached an impasse, but soon he would start again, seemingly from the beginning of whatever he imagined he heard.

Whatever it was, it seemed to last about four or five minutes. She had timed him for a few weeks, and each time, whatever he was doing, he would do it for about that long, then pause, then start again. When he stopped before that time was up, he would put his hands in his lap, as if thinking. If he went the full time, he would simply pause and start again. Over and over, over and over, over and over.

Most of the time the other residents ignored him. Most of the time, most of them ignored everything, each lost in their own mad world. Few could speak or walk unassisted, so they would remain wherever they were placed, until someone helped them away. But on occasion an ambulatory resident would go to the piano and stare at David, or strike the keys haphazardly. One old woman, now dead, used to stand by the piano and talk at David, “Are you playing something? I don’t hear no music. You can’t play this thing.” He never responded, never acknowledged her any more than anyone else, and she would get bored and leave, usually. A few times she pushed him off the piano stool, and banged the keys madly for a short while. When that no longer held her interest she would simply walk away, and David would resume his place on the stool and start again.

Lester, in his moments of activity, would stand by the piano and shout at David, demand that he really play, call him honky and peckerwood and call down generations of African Methodist Episcopal curses on the silent blond boy’s head. At first, after the incident with the piano lid, Emma grew nervous whenever Lester noticed David, but nothing ever happened again. Lester would begin by cursing the flowers on the wallpaper, the shape of the doorknob, the grill over the radio speaker, and now and then he would turn his invectives on the others in the room, calling anyone names who caught his conscious eye, as no one did more often than David.

But mostly the other residents sat where they were placed, or paced mindlessly, or listened to the radio. It was always tuned to the NBC-Red network; whether that was from a conscious decision or simple neglect, Emma never considered. During the mornings there were local programs, farm reports and news, from Nashville and Atlanta and Chattanooga; in the afternoons, network soap operas; in the evenings, comedies, or dramas, or vaudeville programs from New York. Through them all David sat at the piano, oblivious and silent, fingering the air above the keys.

Emma arrived for work that morning and taken David to breakfast with the other patients. She had an attendant feed him while she made her rounds of the wing. An hour or so later she found him at the piano, fingering, and she stood watching him.

Mary Ann came in and saw her, and told her the news. “You know Lester died last night.”

“Oh! That’s so sad. Did he go peaceful?”

“Hah! Lester? Hell, no. Died screamin’ and cursin’ God for ever havin’ put him on this earth. One minute he was hollerin’ at the top of his lungs, sump’n ‘bout Abraham or Moses, I don’t know what. Then, bloop, he just keeled over dead. Can you come help me with his stuff?” And they went to Lester’s room to inventory and box up the few things the old man had owned.

Afterwards, saddened as always by the news of death, Emma moved slowly about the hospital. Lunch came and went, and no one spoke of Lester, and that, too, made her sad. She had helped move the residents out of the dining hall, saw David at his piano – she thought of it these days as “his” piano – checked the supplies of plates and utensils, and reviewed lists of medications for the afternoon. And now she stood in the hallway just outside the day room, scrutinizing a tray covered with little paper cups that held a rainbow of pills, hearing the music. Slow, funereal, elegant music. She found herself nodding her head in time with the slow beat as she checked the pills on her tray, and the thought, what beautiful music, floated up from her subconscious, and then she thought, consciously, but where’s it coming from?

She went to the door of the day room and pushed it halfway open. The radio speaker far to the left of the door broadcast, at low volume, the dialog of some soap opera; three middle-aged residents sat hunched in chairs in front of it. Others shuffled about in their robes and slippers, and others sat senselessly in chairs and on couches around the room. And David sat at the piano, fingering. Playing.

Emma went to the piano. David was moving his fingers, seemingly in the same pattern he had used silently for months, but this time each finger pressed a key, and his foot rose and fell on the pedal, and music, complete, full-formed, rose into the still air of the room and filled it. Mournful, slow, sad, then building, more on the black keys than the white, growing louder and fuller. Then a change, a faster pace for a brief time, lapsing back into the same theme as at the start; growing again, rising to a glorious, determined, majestic climax, ending in a flurry of low notes.

And then a pause, and he started again. His left hand pressed slowly down on two black notes an octave apart, his right began its three-note pattern. Emma moved to watch David’s face from across the instrument, put the tray down on its closed case. His eyes stayed focused on the window, but there was – did she imagine it? – there was a depth to his gaze she had never seen before. As if he saw what was out there. As if he had always seen it.

She put her hand to her throat and watched him play. He seemed, except for the eyes, exactly as always. He played his music all the way through again, then paused, and started it again. She turned and stared out the window, wondering what he saw out there.

As he came to the end of the piece the third time, she took up her tray again. She made ready to leave, and glanced at him as she stepped away. He was looking now at her.

Urbanspoon Rocks!

2011-05-03T18:09:00.000-05:00

I'm only posting this because it's part of the process for "claiming" my blog for restaurant reviews to be linked to on Urbanspoon. But the thing is, for people who want to winnow through the chaff and tret of local restaurants in just about every city in the USA (even the smaller ones -- they're listed under their state), Urbanspoon is about the best web site there is.

Why do I think so? Click here.

Just a Quick Note....

2011-04-29T19:16:00.000-05:00

The only exciting thing I did in New Orleans this week, besides eat and visit relatives, was make a visit to the sculpture garden behind the New Orleans Museum of Art in City Park. I've been to similar gardens in Dallas and DC, and this was by far the best, I think.

Pictures of many of the sculptures on display are posted in my on-line photo album, City Park, New Orleans.

Best Breakfast Ever!

2011-04-26T21:27:00.051-05:00

Ruby Slipper Café
139 South Cortez Street
(one block off Canal Street, in Mid-City)

OMG! This place was fantastic!

A really good breakfast place is one that you can enjoy and relax in with friends; a great place is one you can enjoy and relax in alone. Being on my own in New Orleans, I really lucked out coming here.

I picked it because of its Mid-City location, since I planned to spend the morning at the Besthoff Sculpture Garden in City Park. Cortez Street is almost on the way there. It's an old neighbourhood, even by local standards, just off Esplanade Ridge, and despite ongoing gentrification it still exudes that dignified yet slightly degenerate charm that infuses all of this city.

Step into the Ruby Slipper and you feel immediately part of the neighbourhood. On your left is a small bar, lining the first small dining room. I got no further, having the good fortune to get a table with a view of both the street and the kitchen. The other people around me were clearly locals, if not neighbourhood residents: their accents would have told me that, had their mannerisms not done.

Community garden

I started off with coffee. Locally roasted, the menu told me, as if I would care; like coffee beans lose significant attributes when they travel. Distance doesn't matter; time barely matters. Roasting technique matters, and having it done "in town" as opposed to elsewhere is irrelevant, just a passing fad in this Starbucks-laced society. (Of more interest to me was the fact that the Ruby Slippers coffee grounds go into the community garden on the corner opposite.) If any flavour remains in those grounds, then surely the veggies produced there are some of the best available, because the coffee I had was probably the best I've had in donkey's years. Seriously, it was. And they're not stingy with it either, although the $2 price tag might have more to do with that.

I was torn. On the blackboard was the day's special, peanut-butter-chocolate pancakes. Pancakes are a little-heralded specialty in New Orleans. The city is famous for its po-boys and seafood and creole food and all kinds of other things to tempt the palate, but it lives on pancakes. Big, fluffy pancakes. To combine that tradition with two great tastes that taste great together makes for an almost irresistable combination. But then, the menu lists other house specialties that are similarly drool-inducing. Having narrowed down that list to Bananas Foster Pain Perdu and Eggs Blackstone, I eliminated the pain perdu on the basis of having had Bananas Foster Ice Cream Cake last night. As good a rationale as any, at that point. And when I mentioned my dilemma to the cheerful, attentive waitress, Lindsay, she immediately assured me I could get the Eggs Blackstone with one peanut-butter-chocolate pancake. Which I did.

(Thanks, Irving.)

The pancake was the size of the dinner plate on which it was served. It was overcooked ever so slightly, a pardonable sin, given the perfection that awaited me in everything else. The peanut butter flavour was subtle, and it's my own fault for ruining it half-way through, when I had the wild notion that maple syrup might somehow add something to this culinary treasure. Still, the chocolate flavour was in no way impeded by my rashness, and it carried me through to the pancake's proud end.

Not to be outdone, the Eggs Blackstone were a marvel. Poached eggs on a small (poached-egg size, coincidentally) English muffin, with a slice of tomato and some Applewood-smoked bacon, and just enough of the house's delicious sauce Hollandaise to satisfy the gourmand in me. The presentation was enhanced by a delectable mix of ripe, fresh fruit in bite-sized pieces, providing an outstanding sweet complement to the luxuriant Hollandaise.

What's that mean?

I had bought a local newspaper from the box outside the restaurant just to have an excuse to linger over my meal, and I almost followed up the meal with a mimosa (which the house tarts up with a splash of pomegranate juice). I could have done without the paper. Just sitting in that small room, contemplating the marvels on my table and listening to the howzyamama din around me would have been enough.

Fine Diner. Giggle.

2011-04-25T22:06:00.002-05:00

City Diner
3116 I-10 Service Road East
Old Metairie

Before starting for New Orleans this week, I spent some time poring over the list of the top restaurants in the city, hoping to pick maybe half a dozen places to try. I ended up with 19 on my list, including this place, which I found nestled into the parking lot of my hotel.

The customer comments that got this place onto my list mentioned things like crawfish and andouille sausage, blackened chicken sandwich, duck and sausage gumbo ... things you'd find in a diner only in South Louisiana. Having now been here, my first take on the place isn't particularly favourable.

I went around 8pm; the place was all but empty when I arrived at this converted Denny's. (I assume it was a Denny's, because it's in a La Quinta parking lot; and everybody knows "La Quinta" is Spanish for "Next to Denny's.") The place is clean, and simply decorated. The seats are in good repair, always a concern at places like this, where maintenance tends to get put off when money gets short, and the walls have a few good, nicely framed photos of typically Orleanian subjects, to make City Diner feel a little more like New Orleans and less like ... well, Denny's. (There's also an LED sign at the far end of the dining room, advertising specials and features, and occasionally flashing blindingly and disturbingly bright.)

There were two people in the kitchen and two on the floor when I arrived. Since I was the only person there you'd think I could have gotten quick, attentive service. I did, until another guy walked in and ordered toast and milk to go. I kid you not. This episode absorbed all the attention of the wait staff. Fortunately, the interchange with this new customer was sufficiently entertaining to keep me amused, and only then did the waitress bring my drink. ("Do you have sweet rolls? How about muffins? No, not English muffins. Cake? No, not ice-cream cake." I finally called out to the waitress that she should sprinkle some cinnamon and sugar on buttered toast for the guy. He settled for plain buttered wheat toast.) And a couple of other groups came in later, to keep me company.

I went for the evening's special: red beans and rice with sausage. It was exactly the same order I'd had back home, at the Big Easy Café, three days ago, so I thought it'd be an excellent opportunity to compare New Orleans' signature dish in Old Metairie with what I'd gotten from a family of Katrina refugees. The dish at the City Diner comes with sausage or pork chop. When I asked the waitress (who is from New Jersey and has only been here two months) if it was andouille sausage, she didn't know. It was smoked sausage, or I could have spicy sausage patties, or the grilled pork chop. I took my chances with the smoked sausage, and yes, it was andouille, and moderately good andouille at that. (She also didn't know what swamp water was, but mixed up a pretty good one when I told her how.)

Louisiana restaurant inspections have been
removed from the State's web site
for "technical reasons."

While I was waiting for my order, I had the chance to listen to the repartee going on between the employees. Without going into detail, I will say that it reminded me of why I moved away from New Orleans after only a few months, last time I came to live here.

You know how everybody thinks New Yorkers are rude? They're actually not, they're regular people, but their ways grate on my Southern sensibilities, and after a little while I grow uncomfortable in their continued company. This little group of Orleanians impressed me the same way. From their reactions, I could tell that they were all perfectly at ease with each other; but the words that come to my mind to describe their way of dealing are "attitude" and "lip." It was exactly that way when I lived here, as an adult, back in the mid-80s, and I thank God I had the good fortune to move away as a child, in time to learn a less sarcastic and caustic way of dealing, even if I don't always use it. These restaurant employees were all perfectly polite in dealing with me and the other customers, but if I'd've worked there I'd've popped somebody in the mouth before too long. Probably that smart-ass blond guy in the kitchen.

Once I was finished with the red beans and rice (which, by the way, was better than at The Big Easy Cafe -- much more like what I remember from my youth, with a creamy thick sauce), I decided to try the bananas Foster ice cream cake that had been offered to the guy with the toast. A sign on the diner's door advertises Blue Bell Ice Cream, so I expected it to be pretty good. There was banana ice cream and pecan chunks topped with whipped cream and served over a sliver of generic cake and what appeared to be pie crust. It wasn't bad, but it wasn't as good as it looked, nor was it as good as I'd hoped.

To be entirely fair, the City Diner seems to have built its reputation as a top restaurant largely on the strength of its breakfast fare. So maybe I'll come back one morning before I leave, and check that out.

Accustomed as I am to prices back home, I expect that the prices at City Diner are considered low by the locals. They're not bad. Maybe they're good enough to get excited about, if you live in a place like Metairie.

Where's My Equal Protection?

2011-04-23T11:48:00.000-05:00

Lindsay Lohan, the celebrity famous for being famous, is getting "an opportunity." On probation for ... oh, who knows what? ... she was brought before a California judge this past week for the fourth time in a year. This time it was for felony theft, following her walking out of a Los Angeles jewelry store with the goods around her neck. The necklace she took was priced at somewhere north of $2,000.

The judge in the case chose to assign the wholesale value to the necklace, making the matter a misdemeanor, with significant consequences to Lohan's probation. Now she can be put back on the street to do her important work in movies; word is, according to Associated Press, that the non-star is to portray the wife of mafia don John Gotti in some upcoming schlockbuster.

It's not like this judge has done Lohan any favours. All she gets now is a few hundred hours of community service, which will allow her to bring a camera crew into the county morgue and the women's shelter to document her ordeal. We will be treated to carefully scripted and rehearsed scenes of Lohan talking soulfully to the camera about how the dead bodies and abused women around her have affected her outlook on life, how their troubles have redounded to her own maturing understanding of herself. Kind of like those semi-celebrities on Dancing With The Stars when they talk about the obstacles they've surmounted to dance with Tony Dovolani or Chelsie Hightower.

See, if the judge had sent Lohan to prison for more than the few hours that her last three arrests have earned her, think of how that would drive up the box-office value of Lohan's name. What an imaginative advertising department could do with that!

But instead, she'll just have to limp along with her "opportunity" to be filmed doing meaningful work slopping out the autopsy tables.

Of course, we're all equal before the law; I know I read that somewhere. I suppose some would say it's just an aspirational statement, but suppose it actually is the law. That means that wholesale value, or some other lesser value, should be the scale by which such things are measured when thieves make off with your stereo and your iPad, not the exorbitant price you paid Best Buy and Apple for the goods.

And Another Thing

2011-04-21T16:45:00.000-05:00

Adding to my little rant about immigration a while back, another point about immigration:

We Americans ought to have the right to presume that government is doing its job. One of its jobs — in a fundamental sense, one of its primary jobs — is to keep our borders secure. That's part of "providing for the common defense." We ought to be able to presume that anyone walking around on the streets of our towns has the right to be there, and that anyone presenting themselves for work in our shops has the right to do so. Absent some reason to be suspicious of that person's status, we ought not to have to do government's job of ferreting out illegal foreigners. Absent some reason to overcome that presumption, we ought not to have to check their immigration or citizenship status, any more than we ought to be checking to make sure that drivers have licenses to operate a vehicle.

That's just part of being a free society, even if other people don't like it.

Immature Fun: Hanna

2011-04-14T16:55:00.001-05:00

Hanna
directed by
Joe Wright;
starring
Saoirse Ronan,
Eric Bana, and
Cate Blanchett

The film starts with Hanna stalking an elk in the snow and shooting it with an arrow. While she guts it, we hear a man's voice say, "You're dead. I've killed you." The next hour and forty-five minutes are taken up with chase scenes, fight scenes, and flash-backs with the emphasis on the flash. We learn that the man, Erik, is by way of being Hanna's father, that he has brought her up in an arctic wasteland to be a sort of teen Terminator, with all the skills of a ninja and the empathy of, well, a Terminator. We follow her through the seamy underside of Morocco and western Europe, chased by cartoon cut-outs of evil American (naturally) government agents and their sleazy minions.

Some of those cartoon cut-outs might have been interesting, had they been given any chance to develop themselves on screen: Marissa, lightly played by Cate Blanchett slipping in and out of a Southern accent; Isaacs, intensely played by Tom Hollander channeling Elton John and Amon Göth; and Erik himself, played by Eric Bana, who gets just enough screen time to be The Good Guy, but not enough to make us care. We also meet Sebastian (Jason Flemyng) and Rachel (Olivia Williams), ditzy post-modern hippies who go some way toward justifying forced sterilization; and their daughter Sophie (Jessica Barden), who is still young enough not to have yet proven her unworthiness to live. Not that it matters: she falls into Marissa's hands, and Marissa kills just everybody she meets.

As an action-adventure film, Hanna gets a top grade. It's all action, and stays far enough this side of science-fiction to keep our eyes from rolling. The adventure is sort of two-dimensional, largely because none of the characters get developed, not even Hanna (Saoirse Ronan). The script doesn't get bogged down in explaining how a slight teenaged girl could have the strength of Schwarzenegger and Mr Data combined. But it's put out on the screen artfully enough that the question is an idle, passing wonder instead of the obstacle it might have been in the hands of a less relentless director. It doesn't distract.

The sad thing is, I guess, that you just know that a lot of fascinating development of Marissa, Isaacs and Eric got cut, partly because it came down to a choice between characters and action, and partly (in the case of Isaacs) to preserve a PG-13 rating (which apparently stands for "Pretty Gruesome"). Isaacs could get an NC-17 on his own. As a result, we are left with a fully enjoyable movie and an immature, formulaic script, beautifully filmed from bookend-beginning to bookend-finish.

On Comments

2011-04-07T11:10:00.000-05:00

I wish I knew why some of my blog posts have a link for people to leave comments, and some don't. I've been through the settings for this thing half a dozen times, looking for something that will put that link in, and keep it in. Apparently I have not succeeded.

So -- I don't expect this to do any good, but what the hell, I'll give it a shot -- if you should feel the whimsical desire to leave a comment, for a post that has no link, you can email it to me at passepartout22@live.com. Just tell me which blog post it goes to, and I'll see if I can attach it somehow. If I can't, I'll make a separate post for it.

Unless, of course, it's vituperative, ungrammatical, internally inconsistent, jejune, or irrational. I might still publish it, just for laughs, but won't feel obliged to.

Terri Hendrix's Comment, and Response

2011-04-07T10:41:00.000-05:00

Some months ago, I went to, and reviewed, a concert by Terri Hendrix at the Carver Center in San Antonio. As I said in the review, I wasn't there as an avid fan of her music, I'm just married to one. But I enjoyed the show for the most part, and the thrust of my review was that, while Ms Hendrix is no Paul Simon, she has succeeded at two art forms, songwriting and performing. About the worst thing I said was that I wished she wouldn't give away the ending of the upcoming song while she and her band tuned their instruments.

Some weeks later, I received a comment from Ms Hendrix. (It came, for no-doubt-technological reasons I don't understand, on a review of a taco house on my other blog.) This is what she wrote:

Dear "Other Curmudgeon," I discovered what you wrote about my show at the Carver by accident. I've done music for over twenty years. I've performed and recorded long enough to know how I sound, and to know that when I talk my speaking voice sounds shaky from time to time. The is due to both a neurological condition and the medication I take to control my seizures. I was diagnosed with epilepsy in 1989. I took intensive vocal training to be able to continue to sing. This is why the "wobble" is there when I speak — but not when I sing. Flaws aside, what saddens me, is that people like you, the ... ahem, "Curmudgeon" are out there taking the seat of someone who should have been there in your place. The show was sold out. You took the seat of someone that does not thrive on seeking someone or something to put down. Had you done your research, you would know that I only play listening rooms. I'm most known for how at ease I am on stage. And I am at ease. I'm myself — naked in song. For the record, I have not played Gruene Hall as a "real" gig since 2003. It's a bar. I make my living playing university arts centers and performance arts centers all over the world. Most are all slightly bigger than the Little Carver. Your blog was not meant to be cruel. Nor did I find it as such. It was honest. But you are uneducated in my music and what I do and who I am, nor did you bother to research me or even sign YOUR REAL NAME to it before you posted. And that's just plain rotten. Please attempt to find less to pick at and a little more to pick up. With Respect, Terri Hendrix

My first thought, on reading this, was that Ms Hendrix had mis-read my review, and had responded in anger, without reflection. Having no way to contact her (her comment had no reply-to address, nor did I find one on her web site), I posted a notice on this blog asking her if she would read it again and confirm her understanding of it.

Enough time has now passed in silence for me to think that she has either not stumbled across my second post, or has chosen not to respond. A part of me thinks that maybe I should remain silent as well, and not publish her comment. But three things prompt me to publish it, and respond to it. First is the simple view that to hide uncomplimentary commentary is a form of deceit; my self-respect demands that I acknowledge it. Second was her suggestion that only proper students of her work are entitled to attend one of her concerts. And third was the suggestion that there is something unscrupulous, or deceitful, or, in her words, "just plain rotten" about my guarding my anonymity in this blog.

Regarding the first part of her comment, she refers, probably ironically, to her tremulous speaking voice as a "flaw"; I thought it was a charming, even endearing attribute, because I thought it showed that she was extremely nervous about performing but had overcome that. Turns out it's just a neurological condition, and a side-effect of treatment medications. Overcoming serious illness is certainly a good thing, something to be pleased with; just ask anyone who's had any kind of serious illness and lived. But to my mind, overcoming the paralyzing fear that I imagined she must have suffered would have been a much greater personal achievement, with all the romance and glory of a protagonist who faces, and overmasters, fear. Well, it turns out I gave Ms Hendrix too much credit.

As for the comments about her chosen venues, I stand by what I said: the setting for the concert I attended seemed stifled and overly formal for a show such as hers; why she would implicitly denigrate a venue like Gruene Hall, I don't know.

In the next part of her comment, she criticizes me for daring to buy a ticket to her show, when it could have gone to some more deserving acolyte. How dare she suggest such a thing. I find that comment arrogant in the extreme, and as anyone who knows me will attest, I know arrogance. I hope it is just her misplaced anger talking. Her performances are open to the public, and no one has a greater right to attend than me or anyone else. If she wishes to restrict her audiences to people who can pass her muster for being deserving, she ought to require some kind of test, instead of taking money from any undeserving gift-giver who would dare to intrude on her worship service. (That's my anger talking.) And she compounds this by suggesting that, in order to attend her shows, I must first do some kind of research about her and her music. I gave my reason for attending at the beginning of my review: I went because someone I care about likes her music, and I hoped to be lucky enough to be entertained myself. I don't think I'm under any obligation to delve into her musical history or philosophy, and if Ms Hendrix really thinks I am, then she's just way too full of herself.

Finally, she says that because I don't hold my identity out publicly, there's something rotten about me. I sense a small irony in this, coming as it does from someone who herself hides from the public when off stage. I can easily imagine good reasons for her to keep her contact information private. She, apparently, hasn't imagined mine, but assumes I guard my identity in this forum for nefarious reasons.

Well: I know my reasons, and that they are sufficient. I feel no need to justify my choice in this matter to her, or anyone else. Yes, I know that a lot of sleazy people do mean things under the easy cover of anonymity afforded by the internet. But there are also lots of other reasons for keeping one's identity private, not the least being the same reason she keeps her address and phone number hidden. It's not just stage performers who would deter cranks and crackpots. She has no right to impugn my integrity on the strength of her ignorant assumption.

And notice that I say "private," not "secret." Who I am is known to many people, people whose views I respect and whose good opinion I covet. I rely on them, as well as my own sense of right and wrong, to keep me honest in my comments on my blogs.

Intentional Ignorance, Political Fuel

2011-03-31T18:54:00.000-05:00

Remember how, years and years ago after a shooting in Arizona, everybody in the media was talking about toning down the rhetoric? What, was that really just last January? My mistake.

Here's an example of how media, both liberal (as in this example) and conservative (watch any broadcast of the Daily Show Starring Jon Stewart for an example from the Fox News Follies) use language to ramp up the tone of rhetoric, even when they know, intellectually, that what they're saying isn't true:

In the March 30-April 5 issue of the San Antonio Current, one of those weekly throwaway "alternative" newspapers, is a report about divisions in the local Democratic Party organization, caused by bigoted comments by its local chairman, who managed to alienate with a sentence or two just about anyone who isn't a heterosexual Hispanic. A group called Stonewall Democrats (after the 1969 riots in Greenwich Village that followed one too many police raids on a gay bar, and gave birth to the Gay Pride movement) endorsed several candidates for local office. One of the candidates who met with the group, the Current reports, "said that if she were endorsed by Stonewall she would not carry that endorsement on her website or campaign literature. 'Many in our area would look at that as something that would be divisive,' Ivy Taylor told the group."

Then the Current sinks into intentional ignorance. "Interesting to note," it continues, "that 'divisive' was the same word she later used to describe [the party chairman]'s comparisons of Stonewall to the Nazi Party, in effect placing Stonewall's potential endorsement on parity with Nazi comparisons."

The writer of "The QueQue," the column where this appears, is not an ignoramus. He or she (there's no byline) regularly delivers intelligent insight into matters of local political interest. But even this intelligent, capable writer is willing to stoop to this kind of disingenuousness in order to score a petty point.

Ms Taylor is right both times: an endorsement by Stonewall would be divisive in her conservative district. And Lord knows that the party chairman's comments were divisive, in spades. But the fact that both are true, and the fact that she accurately used the same word to describe both, doesn't mean she's "in effect placing Stonewall's potential endorsement on parity with Nazi comparisons."

The Current ought to be ashamed, but I bet it's not.

Sauce for the Gander

2011-03-08T10:56:00.001-06:00

The real problem with Wisconsin Governor Scott Walker's approach to dealing with labour unions is that it doesn't go far enough.

Walker is trying to strip the state's employees of their right to bargain collectively with their employer, on the theory that the labour unions have been too successful in their work, and have gotten the state to make promises it won't be able to keep. Although this problem really should be laid at the feet of the state's less competent representatives in bargaining -- i.e., politicians and their appointees, and those who, at Walker's urging, recently voted to bankrupt the state through corporate welfare bonuses -- it is a potentially powerful way to turn the clock back to the era of the robber barons, when it was viewed as the right of each labourer to make his or her own individual employment contract.

John D. Rockefeller;
one reason we need
labour unions

But if Walker is successful, we will be beset with the same problems that gave rise to labour unions in the first place: the widespread abuse of the labouring class by the capital class.

What then is to be done?

Well, for starters, let's take Walker's idea a step further, and say that, just as labourers cannot come together to select representatives to bargain on their behalf, neither can capitalists. No more corporations or partnerships, no more joint ventures or trusts. Everyone with a dollar to invest in the capital system must make his or her own individual investment contracts. No more of this system of shareholders choosing knowledgeable people to sit on a board and choose other knowledgeable people to operate a business. Everyone has to do it on their own.

Each state agency will have to negotiate its pen and paper purchases independently with individual producers of supplies. Each state executive will have to hire and fire his or her own secretary, each crew chief will have to staff his or her own crew ... and will, of course, have to devote some time to learning personnel laws, and defending the lawsuits that result.

Kudos, Angela Merkel

2011-02-21T21:28:00.002-06:00

Karl-Theodor zu Guttenberg, the German defense minister, has asked his university to withdraw his doctoral degree. Turns out some of it is plagiarized; how much is debatable. According to the BBC, a German newspaper identified two examples, with other texts attributed incorrectly.

According to The Local, a website offering German news in English, participants in a Wiki-hunt have found "unattributed copying" on 270 of the thesis's nearly 400 pages. But the report is vague enough that I wouldn't be surprised to find that many of these incidences amount to three consecutive words that also appear in an earlier publication on the same topic. (What's this? A blogger who has little faith in the competence, impartiality and credibility of internet users? Gasp all you want, but yes.)

Anyway, that's not the point. My point is that Angela Merkel, the German chancellor, has shown abilities remarkable in any politician: the ability to keep things in perspective, the ability to recognise a mere tempest in a teapot, and the ability to discern what's important. She has declined to sack Guttenberg. From the BBC:

"I appointed Guttenberg as minister of defence," she told reporters. "I did not appoint him as an academic assistant or doctor. What is important to me is his work as minister of defence and he carries out these duties perfectly."

You go, girl.

A Little Perspective

2011-02-20T16:56:00.001-06:00

This is not a time when I'm proud to call myself a Republican. I may have to go back to saying I'm an Independent, but the truth is, I'm still a Republican. More and more, a closet Republican, but a Republican none the less.

Has anyone else noticed the pattern? Whenever Republicans get control of a legislative body, they run wild. It happened in the U.S. Congress in '94; it happened here in Texas when they got hold of the state legislature in '02; it's happening now in the U.S. House; and most embarrassingly in Wisconsin, where the Republican supermajority is running riot on issues that, I'm sure, most Wisconsans regarded as settled long ago.

The excuse for the current gleeful excess is debt. The real reason is a deep hostility to government, approaching pathological libertarianism in some cases.

The Federal government's debt is on the order of almost eight trillion dollars: that's $8,000,000,000,000. That's a lot of money. It's also about 57% of gross domestic product. Both of these figures are high, in historical terms. While a dollar-to-dollar comparison is difficult, given inflation and the touchy-feely way that amounts are converted to comparable units (like "1982 dollars"), a comparison to gross domestic product is straightforward across the years.

Our public debt is now about what it was in 1955. The main differences, for those of us who live in the real world, are that (a) back in '55, we were coming down from World War II (which most people still think was worth going into debt for) and Korea (which most people think might not have been, but who knew at the time?), and (b) the level of debt was declining in '55, while now it is growing.

The main difference for Republicans is that, in '55, there was a Republican in the White House, so the state of affairs was Their Fault. Now there's a Democrat, so they will make their hay while the sun shines. For moderate Republicans like me, their childish glee at being able to attack, attack, attack is galling.

Yes, debt is high, but it's not so high as to warrant the kind of excesses the Republicans are laying out. It's less than Canada's, less than France's, less than Germany's, way less than Japan's, or Italy's, or Greece's, or India's. And I have no doubt that, if cooler heads can prevail over the Sturm und Drang of the Republican froth, it will be dealt with, and successfully, and we will work our way back to balanced budgets and declining debt levels, just as we did after 1994, when the Republicans last shot themselves in the foot on a national scale. That's probably what it will take.

Merger of Ideas

2011-02-15T09:26:00.001-06:00

Here we have an example of the merger of two bad ideas: limiting freedom of speech, and criminalizing stupidity.

In 1958, an airplane carrying the Manchester United football (soccer) team crashed on a runway in Munich, Germany. Eight of the team's players were killed, as were 15 other people.

Last month, a tiny little football club called Crawley Town was drawn to face Manchester United -- which has been the most successful team of the past 20 years -- in the fifth round of the F.A. Cup competition, a year-long tournament that any football team in England can participate in. It's a big, big deal for Crawley Town, and they put together a song and video to celebrate the moment and raise money for the team's official charity. The video showed a band performing the song on stage, with celebrants dancing nearby. It was posted on YouTube, of course, as is everything of even trivial moment.

Turns out, one of the people dancing by the stage was filmed making gestures, the Guardian says, "simulating a plane crashing into the ground and holding up his fingers to count one, then nine, then five and eight to symbolise 1958." Some Manchester United supporter called the Crawley Town offices and complained about this tactless and offensive performance. The club, which had until then been unaware of the gestures, pulled the video and put up an edited version, which cuts the edges of the picture off to exclude the offending images. They also banned the offender for life from attending any of the club's matches.

Now, according to that same newspaper, this idiot has been "arrested under the Public Order Act on suspicion of causing harassment, alarm or distress."

This offender is 19 years old. The Munich crash is ancient history to him, and is only of significance to most living Man U fans as an article of ancient history, like the Battle of Kosovo or the Siege of the Alamo. Banning this stupid kid for his entire life from the matches of his home-town football club is excessive; involving the heavy machinery of the State and branding him a criminal is an injustice of the first water. Sadly, it is the sort of injustice that is becoming routine, and not just in decayed old-world societies.

What's Wrong

2011-02-13T13:23:00.003-06:00

Here's an example of what's wrong with news coverage in our society: The BBC reports today that comments by the Irish singer Bono about a folk song are raising hackles in South Africa, because it includes the lyric "Shoot the Boer." ("Boer" is the Afrikaans word for farmer; it's also been used historically to distinguish settlers of Dutch ancestry from those of British ancestry, hence the Boer War; it also, according to this story, is used as a derogatory term for white people in general.) There is a push to get the song banned as hate speech -- something that is increasingly common in countries where there is no guarantee of free speech.

Far down in the story is mention of the fact that "Since apartheid was banned in 1994, more than 3,000 white farmers have been murdered."

I wonder why that fact hasn't gotten more attention in the world?

Technology Saves Us Again

2011-02-07T06:45:00.002-06:00

Tired of sitting through those tedious, start-stop Super Bowl football games just to see the inventive and entertaining commercials? Now you can see all the commercials, one after another, without the twelve minutes of football dribbled in between like glitter on a pumpkin patch.

http://www.youtube.com/adblitz

Finally, technology worth having.

Dear Terri Hendrix...

2011-01-27T16:44:00.002-06:00

I received a comment from Terri Hendrix, the singer-songwriter, in response to the review I wrote of her show at the Little Carver Center last month. Before putting it up on this blog, and responding to it, I wanted to ask her to re-read the review.

Unfortunately, I don't have a way to contact her in reply. So: Ms Hendrix, if you happen across this post as you did my review, please confirm that you don't think you mis-read my post, and that you still feel as you did in that comment.

The Value of a Dollar

2011-01-19T17:40:00.001-06:00

It's become an accepted feature of American life that captive audiences are to be charged through the nose for everything. I'm tired of it, myself, but there are enough damned fools out there -- that is, pretty much everybody -- to keep the practice alive.

It amazes me, how profligate people are, how ready and willing to part with their money for no value. So they charge you six bucks for a beer at the ball game; what can you do about it? You're stuck there for hours. Here's a thought: drink water out of the fountain, and stop off at a bar for a beer after the game. The game will be just as good. And don't eat the food at the ball park. Besides being overpriced, it's bad for you in every way.

Same thing at the airport. Eat before you go, and take food with you for the flight (since the airlines have now joined the fleece-for-all).

This diatribe is provoked today by my first-ever visit to Alamo Drafthouse Cinema, where I went to see the excellent film, The King's Speech. I figured the food prices would be higher than at a restaurant, and they were, just a bit. They were the kind of prices that would pass for normal in Seattle or San Francisco, and having just been out on the west coast a few months ago, I was not obligated to pick my jaw up off the floor when I saw them on the menu. I had psyched myself up to pay a premium price for mediocre food, and was all set to do so, until I saw the price of bottled water: $3.

That's more than a premium price; that's exorbitant. Water is free in this country, and the bottled-water craze is ludicrous. But even in a captive venue, $3 for a little water in a two-penny bottle is way, way too much. At that price, it should come with a blow job. (I assume it doesn't.) So I did without for a couple of hours. It was no hardship for me, and no doubt Alamo Drafthouse Cinema will not notice the small profit missing from their bottom line. Because all you other profligate fools will buy their water.

Dancing With The NFL

2011-01-09T21:17:00.001-06:00

While I was sitting in a doctor's waiting room a few months ago, I read a little squib about how many minutes of actual activity take place in various types of sporting matches. This was in ESPN magazine, or maybe it was Sports Illustrated -- one of those sports publications that fill the vast pages between advertisements and genuine journalism with little factoids: bits of information not worth the effort of actual development into full articles. (Naturally, to a diffuse mind like mine, these are generally the most interesting things in print.)

It reported that the average hockey match has something like 58 minutes of play in about two and a half hours of television time; basketball has like 46 minutes (again, out of about two and a half hours), baseball has about 13 (out of eternity), and NFL football, only about 12 minutes (out of three hours). At the time I noticed only that the magazine didn't bother to include soccer, which probably has about 85 minutes (out of two hours), except in Spain, where the whistle blows every time somebody passes gas on the field, so they probably only have play going on about 60 minutes.

But more recently I've noticed that the NFL, America's favourite sport, shares its dubious distinction of sparse content with America's favourite television show, Dancing With the Stars, which takes a passel of unemployed actors, models, and former athletes; anyone who can loosely be called a celebrity in a town where anybody who owns a press agent is a celebrity (reading through a list of competitors is like reading through your local telephone book: some of the names are vaguely familiar, and a few of them you maybe can identify) and pairs them with professional dancers, then puts them on stage to dance for about two minutes each. DWTS starts the season with a dozen or so of these who-are-they's, then bumps one, sometimes two, off each week until they are left with a champion.

At the start of the season -- and they have two seasons a year -- the shows run two hours on Monday night, and one hour on Tuesday night, when they give the boot. So the Monday night show starts off with about 24 minutes of dancing out of the 120; by the penultimate week they manage twelve minutes out of 90, which makes NFL football seem positively unrelenting in its pace. Throw in another six to twelve minutes for the judges to announce their scores, and as many commercials as can be sold, and the rest of the time is filled with fluff: amusing peeks behind the scenes at rehearsals filled with formulaic melodrama and everybody's-so-wonderful puffery; visits from attractive family members or relatively famous friends; and self-serving interview clips that manage to seem both spontaneous and rehearsed at the same time.

Tuesday nights are even worse: sixty minutes to announce the loser of the previous night's competition, which in actuality takes all of thirty seconds. The rest of the time is filled with even more fluff and manufactured melodrama than the Monday night show.

And yet.... And yet....

I started watching a few years ago because my wife got into it, and let's face it, my choices at that point were either to watch and enjoy, or watch and not enjoy. I enjoy the dancing, what little of it there is, and I enjoy the comments of the three judges, who are all genuinely knowledgeable about the subject of ballroom dance. Carrie Ann Inaba and Bruno Tonioli are choreographers, and Len Goodman is a professional ballroom dancing judge (a what?!?). Inaba is also very pretty, Tonioli is wildly and amusingly exuberant, and Goodman is charmingly curmudgeonly, which strums sympathetic strings in my heart. The host, Tom Bergeron, who also hosts four or five hundred other television shows, has a pleasant delivery and is graceful in his easy humour. He is joined by a co-host, currently some woman named Brooke Burke, who was a competitor on the show before I started watching, so I have no real idea of who she is. She's getting better at her job, but is still no match for the smooth Bergeron, or indeed the woman she replaced in that job (whose name I forget).

Then there's the fact that the show goes out live, so there's always a possibility of something out of the ordinary. When Marie Osmond fainted after her dance, I was as stunned as I was when Roy Carroll threw the ball into his own net and didn't score an own goal (see video, below). It's the only time I've seen an actual faint. (Tom Bergeron really impressed in his handling of the event.) And it's a chance to see an occasional performance by a guest that I might actually want to see, as when Shakira performed on one results show. Plus, the show exposes me to music I wouldn't otherwise hear, since I almost never listen to commercial radio. It was through DWTS that I came to appreciate the music of P¡nk, who is now one of my favourite singer/songwriters, and Lady Gaga, who is one of my least favourite performers.

DWTS is inane, and contrived, and almost all the people on it are affected. But it still isn't as silly as shows like Survivor or Big Brother, where a whole bunch of fatuous people try to act as scurrilously as possible, and pretend that they're not being seen by a camera crew. And, with rare exceptions, the people on the show don't try to pretend that what they're doing is seriously important, beyond the sense of competition. Plus, there's a lot of good dancing.

Favourite Photos, Part 3

2010-12-21T18:32:00.001-06:00

The other day, I was copying some pictures onto a digital frame we're giving somebody for Christmas, and I came upon several sets of pictures that I had never loaded onto my computer. It's like a Pre-Christmas, getting to look at them all for the first time in years. And while most of them are uninteresting or only mildly interesting, or only interesting to us for the sake of the memories, some of them are actually meritorious on their own. Not great art, mind you: but good pictures.

This picture of a couple of clowns taking a break from working the crowd at Main Street Days in Grapevine, Texas, in 2005 gives me a smile.

Grand Teton N.P., October 2005

I don't know what this is supposed to mean....

Grand Teton National Park is the most beautiful place I've seen in an entire world full of beautiful places. This picture is from my first trip there, and unfortunately this is the only shot any of us got when the weather could remotely have been called cooperative.

The terraces at Mammoth Springs, in Yellowstone National Park.

We don't have magpies in Texas. I first saw them in Europe, and was surprised to see them in the American west. I was even more surprised at how close they'd let me get.

This is in Dinosaur National Monument, in Utah and Colorado, in 2005. I love the way the lines of colour run through the rocks.

Terri Hendrix at the Little Carver Center

2010-12-03T23:25:00.003-06:00

Songwriting is a tough craft to master. A few people are born with great natural talent in that direction, honed and nurtured to an art, like Cohan and Gerswin and Paul Simon and Lennon and McCartney (together; separately, neither attained the highest level). Others strive and strain for years, for decades, and are lucky to produce one or two songs where everything comes together. Meanwhile, they create as best they can, and when their work is performed, they're subjected to critiques from people like me, who have some idea of the work involved, but have long since given up the attempt. Still, you don't have to be Paul Simon to recognize quality in the work.

Performing is another tough craft to master. To get up on stage in front of any number of strangers and sing, or play, or both, is too terrifying for most of us to contemplate. Some people are lucky: they are at home on stage. Most of them are better on stage than off, as anyone who's watched very many interview programs can attest.

Terri Hendrix

I took in a performance tonight by Terri Hendrix, a local singer-songwriter that my Significant Other happens to like. Myself, I was never that wild about her work, though a couple of songs made it into the mix of a thousand or so pieces that I carry in my cars to listen to on the road. She has a very good voice and a tremendous range, and shows it off to good effect in her performance. Her songwriting is good, even if it lacks a certain lyricism and uses more spoken lines than I would like. And on occasion, she is at the top of her craft and gets everything just right.

Watching her, I'm amazed how comfortable she is while singing and playing, yet how uncomfortable she is between songs. Her voice quavers as she talks -- mostly to fill the time while instruments are tuned, but it'd be nice if she didn't give away the whole story of the upcoming song; it ruins the mystique -- and she fidgets with equipment and instruments to distraction. Still, the effect is to bring the audience closer to her, as if she's just the neighbor's kid instead of some kind of Performer With A Capital P.

I don't know if the Little Carver Center theater is a good venue for her, I think. It's clearly a step up in class from roadhouses and dance halls, but I'm not sure if that's a step she really wants to take. With its Rotary International chairs and cocktail tables, it makes even this sandal-clad audience a tad reserved. I suspect that seeing Terri Hendrix at a place like Casbeer's would be a whole lot more fun, for her and for her audience. Still, there are those of us who would never go to a place like Casbeer's, or Gruene Hall, or Floore's. And maybe it's a nice change for her to play to an audience that isn't rowdy and unrestrained. I don't know.

Lloyd Maines on guitar, John Silva hiding behind him, Terri
Hendrix, and Glenn Fukunaga hiding behind her.

One other thing: she should get a better photographer. (Not me, obviously.) When she came out on stage, I thought, having seen her photo in the program, that the woman at the mike was some hot young '09-er come to make the introduction, and to be seen.

Another Simple Approach

2010-12-02T22:20:00.001-06:00

Congress has a real knack for complicating relatively simple things. The current self-generating controversy is the effect of the automatic tax increase Congress itself voted into being in the orgiastic Bush years. As you may recall, they included a "sunset" provision in order to get the tax cuts through. For Democrats, it saved face by making the tax cuts they opposed temporary; for the Republicans, it saved face by making the budget numbers seem more palatable.

Now the sun is setting, and both parties -- are there any greater collections of self-serving nitwits anywhere? -- are fumbling around trying to gore other people's oxen. It resembles nothing so much as a Monty Python sketch, except that it's not, when you get right down to it, really funny.

I hope the sun does set on the Bush tax cuts, especially the travesty of the Estate Tax reductions. Some of us recall that our ancestors -- well, not mine, specifically, but "ours" in the national-history sense -- fought hard to get the Estate Tax put in to end the era of the Robber Barons, who accumulated wealth and passed it on intact from generation to generation. Admittedly, the tax scheme it evolved into over the course of decades of Congressional tinkering at the behest of one special interest after another was incoherent, unfair, impractical and barely effective -- it didn't so much break up great estates as ossify them in "charitable" foundations that operate, as much as anything else, for the aggrandizement and comfort of the would-be heirs -- but it was, at least, better than nothing; which is what we now have (at least until January 1).

Here, Congress, is what you do: Democrats, especially in the Senate, where you still have a majority, let the Bush tax cuts expire. Most people won't see a really significant rise in their tax liabilities, just as they didn't really see a great decrease in liability back when the tax cuts took effect. Most people didn't make enough to benefit much from the cuts back then, and they don't make enough to be hurt much by the coming tax increase. Then, after the sunset provision has done its laudable work, undoing the mess y'all made of things eight years back, you can introduce a more targeted tax cut bill. Raise the zero-bracket amount; that will benefit everybody, rich and poor, equally. Raise the tax brackets across the board, so that most people see lower rates on their last dollar earned. Tax unearned income -- dividends and interest and capital gains -- at the same rate as earned income. (I'm shooting my own horse, there, but fair is fair.) Keep the mortgage-interest deduction if it's politically necessary -- it's not, but we can pretend -- and the child-care credit and the earned income credit. All those things are expensive sops that allow us to pat ourselves on the back and say what good people we are, taking care of poor folk and all.

Then -- and this is the kicker -- do two more things.

First, limit the amount of compensation -- not wages or salary, mind you, but all compensation -- to any one individual that a business can deduct as a necessary business expense. Businesses can still pay exorbitant salaries to important people, either because they're actually that much in demand in the labor market or because they own the company; they just won't be able to make the rest of us finance their generosity. It may be simplest to peg the allowable deduction to median income, but it'd be better, I think, to make it a multiple of the lowest compensation amount a company pays. Thus, the more they screw their janitors and security guards with low wages (and wages paid by subcontractors count), the less they'll be able to write off as compensation to the Vice-President of Overseas Graft. There really is no reason why V-POG should make thousands of times what the night janitor makes; a hundred and fifty times as much should suffice.

Second, limit still further amounts paid in compensation to persons, subcontractors, or subsidiaries outside the United States. This, combined with current foreign-investment provisions, will prevent the flight of capital to foreign countries in the form of excessive payments. Exceptions could be made where a particular necessary service or product is only available from a foreign source, but the truth is, payments for commodities and foreign production wages aren't really a problem; nor will they be under this scheme.

Carpe Shotgun

2010-12-01T16:48:00.001-06:00

The Bush tax cuts are set to expire at the end of this year. Let's hope the biennial recrudescence of our representative democracy are able to give some thought to issues larger than themselves in considering extending some or all of those cuts.

But whether they do or don't -- and they won't -- I see an opportunity. One of the vile changes made by those tax cuts was the gradual reduction of the Estate Tax, to the point where anyone dying in 2010 (that's this year, y'all) has no federal estate tax liability, no matter how much their estate is. If this enactment is not extended, on January 1, 2011, the Estate Tax top rate goes back to where it was ten years ago; if memory serves, it topped out at 55% for large estates.

So:

Do you have a rich ancestor, from whom you expect to inherit at least eight figures when he or she kicks the bucket? Then you may want to take advantage of this offer. For a price, sufficient to cover my bail and pay my lawyers through trial, appeal, and re-trial; grease a few palms down at the capitol; and endow a bank account in St. Kitts and Nevis, I'll knock off the old buzzard before the end of the month, saving you, potentially, millions of bucks in Estate Tax payments. All you have to do is give me cash up front, send the servants out for the evening, and leave the front door unlocked and a nice car in the driveway with a full tank and the key in the ignition. I'd prefer Porsche, but any European luxury roadster will do.

Place your orders now; there's not a lot of time before Uncle Sam gets to take his share again, and I expect a lot of action as the deadline -- tee hee --- gets nearer.

The Value of a Dollar: Convenience

2010-11-20T21:15:00.001-06:00

I was just about to order two tickets to a concert coming up next month. It was going to be my wife's birthday present. It's a performer that I know she likes, albeit one that I couldn't care less about. But the timing of the show is almost perfect, so I figured I could sit through a few hours in a crowded theater listening to so-so music, because I love her and we do things like that for people we care about.

Then I clicked on the "price details" for the tickets, and my curmudgeon kicked in.

In addition to the $20 price of the show, there is a $1 charge per ticket, a "facility charge." This, I suppose, is the added cost of holding the concert indoors. OK, a buck a ticket, I can live with that. I object to it on principle, but it is just a buck. Each.

Then there's the $5.80 "convenience charge." Don't kid yourself: this isn't the charge for your convenience, buyer. This is the charge the theater imposes for the convenience to it of not having to mess with all that ticket-selling stuff on its own. It's the commission paid to a third-party ticketing company.

I object to that on principle, too. If the theater want to charge $26.80 for the show, that's fine; I will decide based on that price whether I want to pay it ... and I probably would. These days, it's not so much for a show, even one that I don't really want to see.

But knowing that the show is really only worth $20, and the "facility" in which it's held is only worth another dollar, I object to paying $5.80 above the value of the show. Per ticket.

I also object to paying a $2.50 premium for the privilege of printing the tickets on my own printer, when standard mail is free.

So now I'm having a hard time reconciling myself to buying two tickets for $26.80 each, because I know they aren't really worth that.

Why We Can't Trust Government To Do Things Right

2010-11-03T16:07:00.000-05:00

I had jury duty today. I know a lot of people pull faces at the very thought, but I take the chore seriously. I would actually like to be a juror, but I know that no lawyer is going to want another lawyer on his jury. I'll never get on an actual jury, and that knowledge dims the glow of the experience somewhat. Still, I go, I sit and read for a day, I earn my six bucks, and I go home.

When I got downtown to the courthouse area, I parked in the county's parking garage. I parked on Level Three and walked down the stairs. When I left this afternoon, I got in the elevator and pushed the button for Level Three. I stepped out and saw a sign to my right that said "Stairway B, Level 2." I turned around, thinking I'd gotten off on the wrong floor, and there was a sign at the elevator that said, "Remember that you parked on Level Three."

I was confused. Where was I? Far off to the left I could see another sign, "Stairway C, Level 2." Then I remembered that, where I'd parked, the floor was only half-covered by the floor above. This clearly was not Level Three. I walked up the stairs and found my car on Level Three.

So: if we can't trust our county government — and by extension, all levels of government — to correctly do something as simple as counting to three, twice, why should we trust them to do anything right?

It's a question I don't have an answer to.

Message to Obama: Unemployment

2010-10-28T18:37:00.000-05:00

So...we've got nearly ten percent unemployment. Worst hit is the construction industry.

We're spending billions of dollars on "shovel-ready" projects, which turn out to require lots of materials and not much in the way of labor.

Why don't we just re-institute the Civilian Conservation Corps? Remember that old program from the Great Depression, which took unemployed young men to the nation's parks and forests, and put them to work building roads and bridges and facilities, and planting trees, and landscaping. It got them out of the cities, started them on an adventurous life, gave them some skills, and kept them out of trouble. Most of them found other careers, outside the construction industry, but all of them learned something, and did something, and our country was better for it.

These days, of course, we'd have to let the girls play too, but that's OK. And there's lots of work to be done in our national parks, and forests, and monuments, much of which can be accomplished by young people just learning how such things are done. And surely it couldn't cost much more than we're already laying out for next to nothing.

Let's Pretend We Don't Know

2010-10-20T14:36:00.002-05:00

candidate Sharron Angle

I heard a clip this afternoon on NPR's program, Talk of the Nation, of Sharron Angle, who is running for U.S. senate from Nevada, telling a group of Hispanic law students, "I don't know if all of you are Hispanic; some of you look kind of Asian."

Neal Conan, the program's host, reported that the Hispanic law-students' organization has demanded an apology; and his interlocutor, one John Ralston, columnist for a Las Vegas newspaper, characterized the remark as being incomprehensible in its meaning and intent. (I think he said, in a bewildered tone of voice, "I don't know where that was coming from.")

Here's what I wonder:

First, why are Hispanic students insulted by being told that some of them look "kind of Asian"? Is that some weird post-modern ethnic slur? What, exactly, should this woman apologise for?

Second, is this John Ralston unaware that there are physical resemblances between some Hispanics and some Asians? Is that real-world observation now so outré that we are no longer able to acknowledge it? I've observed it myself, on occasion, in photographs on the internet of people who I took to be Asian but were then identified as either Hispanic or Native American (meaning persons of aboriginal origins, not just people born in America). This woman is stating an obvious fact that, yes, probably originates with her being brought up in an area bereft of persons of one or the other ethnic persuasion.

I'm told that Asians can differentiate between various Asian nationalities. I don't know if this means that a Korean, for example, can tell by looking at another person if they are Korean or Chinese or Japanese or whatever; it might mean that, or it might only mean that they can distinguish between "us" and "them." It might only be true of some Asians, or it might not be true at all. Me, I can't really tell. I kind of get the sense that there is a subtle physical distinction between the various nationalities, maybe something to do with the eyes, but not having a great deal of interaction with Asians, I don't really know. I do know that Margaret Cho, whose family is Korean, looks different from George Takei, whose family is Japanese, and from an old friend who is Filipino, and from a not-as-old friend whose family is Chinese. But I don't know that the distinctions I see between Margaret and George and my friends are representative of their ethnic groups.

But I also know that all of them, together, are discernibly different from the European root-stock that I mostly interacted with growing up. And so are many of the Native Americans, mostly Lakota, and some -- not all, less than half -- of the many, many Hispanics that I see.

Growing up in New Orleans, and later in North Texas, the people I knew were almost exclusively either European or African in origin. I never learned to differentiate among other ethnic groups based on physical characteristics, and maybe that's why I can't always tell a Korean from a Mexican or a Lakota. (I have similar problems with accents: they all sound "English" to me, though I've found that most of them are not.) Likewise, most of my friends in central Mexico tell me that they can't really tell one "Anglo" from another, and they're amazed when we say somebody looks "Italian" while somebody else looks "Irish." To my friends who grew up in places where there were no Irish or Italian communities, they're all just hueros (or gueros).

We all do this. We can all tell "us" from "them." We can't always further differentiate some "them" from some other "them."

But I have to wonder about this reporter, who could not conceive of what a person could possibly mean when she said that some of the Hispanic law students she was looking at looked "kind of Asian." Either his own upbringing was so deep in the melting pot that he is instantly able to tell a person's ethnic origins simply by looking at them, or he was being disingenuous in order to belittle the candidate under discussion, while making himself out to be entirely sensitive, yet paradoxically undiscriminating, in matters ethnic.

My money is on the latter.

I guess things have gotten so bad in this country that even the well-known host of a popular NPR program can't find people who are able to simply report the political situation, without trying to advance their own views, and so he has to fall back on "columnists" instead of "reporters." A shame.