Saturday, February 17, 2024
What sort of day was it? A day like all days, filled with those events that alter and illuminate our times. And it’s Michael Jordan's birthday and Adam Fox's birthday, among others.
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We saw a preview tonight of a new play with the all-encompassing title “Corruption", giving no hint of time or place. It's a docudrama about the telephone hacking scandal that surrounded Rupert Murdoch's British newspaper empire a dozen years ago. I enjoyed the play very much, although, while the actual events stirred righteous indignation, they soon were overtaken by greater perfidy.
Sunday, February 18, 2024
Now that you have acquired a splendid primary residence and a comfortable getaway home, you can look for a vacation rental to generate some spare change.
What I found interesting about this list is how unfamiliar many of the top locations were. Why do you go there if you never heard of them?
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Operating in “the most linguistically diverse metropolis on earth,” the Endangered Language Alliance tries to keep languages alive. This is a review of a new book about their heroic efforts.
https://www.nytimes.com/2024/
https://www.nytimes.com/2024/
Monday, February 19, 2024
Leaving the gym (sounds so much better than physical therapy) this morning, I came across a gaggle of Girl Scouts selling cookies at the corner of Broadway and West 68th Street. As a supporter of youth and carbohydrates, I bought a box of Adventurefuls®, a recent addition to the cookie lineup, “brownie-inspired cookies topped with caramel flavored crème with a hint of sea salt.”
As it happens, Girl Scout cookies were on my mind, because I had just heard about a line of personal care products, such as deodorants, “inspired by some of the most popular Girl Scout Cookie™ flavors.”https://www.
Can you imagine walking around smelling like brownie-inspired cookies topped with caramel flavored crème with a hint of sea salt?
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It’s Monday, so I had the Monday special at Pastrami Queen, 138 West 72nd Street, pastrami on rye with a can of Dr. Brown’s diet black cherry ($19.95, about 30% off). Stony Brook Steve stuck with the mushroom barley soup.
Tuesday, February 20, 2024
Kind Ken Klein joined me for lunch at El Mitote, 208 Columbus Avenue, a casual Mexican restaurant, although it has tripled its size with a sidewalk shed and a curbside shed. I had the Bisteca platter, grilled steak chopped into small pieces, carmelized onion, Mexican rice, black beans, mixed greens, guacamole and tortillas ($22). Generous quantity, average quality. On the other hand, the glass of sangria made with a shot of tequila enhanced the entire experience ($13).
Wednesday, February 21, 2024
Terrific Tom and I could be counted as two roosters having lunch at Three Roosters, 792 Ninth Avenue. This is a Thai restaurant offering chicken, chicken or chicken, grilled chicken, fried chicken or poached chicken. We both ordered The Basic, a dark meat chicken cutlet, beautifully fried, sliced into half-inch strips ($13.95). It came with a portion of carefully cooked French fries, dusted with Zab seasoning, described as combining “spiciness, citrus notes, saltiness, and a touch of sweetness.” It made an excellent meal, matched with a Diet Coke.
Thursday, February 22, 2024
Doing the Right Thing isn’t necessarily hard, figuring out what it is might be. This century has seen a rejection of standardized testing as the gateway for admissions to more prestigious educational institutions. Stuyvesant High School, my nurturing mother, has maintained this exclusivity policy, while the Ivy League and other top colleges and universities turned towards other, presumably more democratic, selection methods.
I was skeptical of this trend, more on practical than theoretical grounds. Apples are more like apples than cellists to basketball players. That is, judging kids with disparate skill sets is inevitably rife with subjectivity. “Quality” is harder to measure and maybe more difficult to explain.
Yale University just announced that it is returning to the use of standardized test scores in its admissions process, because “our researchers and readers found that when admissions officers reviewed applications with no scores, they placed greater weight on other parts of the application. But this shift frequently worked to the disadvantage of applicants from lower socio-economic backgrounds.”
Better (richer) schools provided applicants with a better platform to display subjective skills, so says Yale. Without test scores, disadvantaged schools did little to advance their students.
Friday, February 23, 2024
In the good old days, the graduate student population of Cornell University’s Government Department on campus was under 50, 15-20 new students admitted each year. So, it was remarkable that we had a reunion of sorts today of five of us who entered the program in 1962. We met virtually on Zoom, David Mervin from England, three guys from the Washington area and me. I had not seen David Boesel since 1965; I visited Larry Storrs’s home in 1990; I ran into John Fox near the United Nations 30-something years ago; David Mervin was just here for a family celebration.
While the gathering might be an excuse to feel old, as if we need another reminder, I found it rejuvenating. It was a chance to bring back memories, reliving a critical time when careers were launched or sunk. Where there was hair, it was white. Otherwise, we looked pretty good for seriously old men.
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Tonight, the Upper West Side’s Power Couple are leaving for a one-week visit to Madeira, an autonomous region of Portugal. Why Madeira, you may ask? The best answer is that it’s not Florida and it’s not Israel. Perched in the Atlantic Ocean, several hundred miles off the coast of Africa, we are seeking some temporary comfort and mild temperatures. It has the provocative motto: Das Ilhas as Mais Belas e Livres (Of all islands, the most beautiful and free). Take that Capri, Catalina and Coney.
Saturday, February 24, 2024
I'll bet that this is the first e-mail that you ever received from the airport at Ponta Delgada, Azores.
"Carmelized" onions - obviously a product from an otherwise obscure hamlet in Northern Putnam County, New York. The onions are grown by the nearby Lake Carmel.
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