¶ Matins: What I wouldn’t pay to witness an encounter between Joe the Plumber and Joe the Jervis.

¶ Prime: Who knew? New York has five, count ’em five, Main Streets: one per borough! (Can there be but one Wall Street?)

¶ Tierce: Pakistani and Afghan elders are getting together for a jiragai (a “mini” council), to talk over the increased violence in both countries. Right at the start, however, an Afghan official throws a spanner in the works:

Afghan Foreign Minister Rangeen Dadfar Spanta said last week his government was at the start of a dialogue process, but it would only negotiate with those who lay down arms.

Can anyone tell me the source of this crazy condition, which pops up over and over again when states feel obliged to deal with internal opponents?

¶ Sext: Business as usual: An Army intelligence report notes that terrorists could make use of Twitter. Nobody’s asking why they would want to. Want to be terrorists, that is. Hell, no! What’s the Army without terrorists? (via JMG)

¶ Vespers: Margaret Talbot writes in The New Yorker about recent research into red state/blue state family values. The red state family values — this will come as no surprise to attentive observers — are largely eyewash.

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¶ Matins: The other day, writing about The Seagull, I came across a commercial term paper site. I had forgotten that they’re out there. This morning, I see that Jason Kottke set up a poll yesterday about paying for term papers in high school — an option that didn’t exist in my day. What would I have done?

¶ Tierce: In honor of Joe Wurzelbacher and the American Dream, I think it’s best to take a break from the Blogosphere — lest I say anything that I’ll regret.

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¶ Matins: “No sex please; we’re not finished with the story: Joe Jervis of Butterfield, New York, attributes his longevity to virginity. He’s 105 today.”

— What? Oh! Sorry!

¶ Tierce: Looking into my crystal ball, I foresee a wave of circumspect austerity sweeping the affluent areas of the world (or what’s left of them) in the coming years, as the costs of energy and food are moralized into a kind of green vegetarianism. Here’s how it starts: “Pint-Size Eco-Police, Making Parents Proud and Sometimes Crazy,” by Linda Foderaro.

Bon weekend à tous!

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¶ Matins: The land of opportunity? Not so much. The Polish community in Greenpoint, Brooklyn, is moving out as the gentrifiers move in — back to Poland, though. Kirk Semple reports.

But Poland’s admission to the European Union sharply accelerated that trend, business owners and residents say. They note that the momentum has increased as the dollar has weakened against the Polish zloty, the American economy has faltered and the United States has been more aggressive in enforcing immigration rules. (Similar reverse migrations have occurred recently among other New York immigrant populations whose homeland economies have improved, like Brazil and Ireland.)

¶ Lauds: In “The Art of Darkness,” novelist Jonathan Lethem muses on the mirror that The Dark Knight holds up to the nation.

¶ Prime: Sergey Brin’s new blog, Too, begins with the announcement that he carries the G2019S mutation of gene LRRK2. That’s Genomic for saying that he stands a very high risk of developing Parkinson’s. One can only imagine what it must be like for one of world’s most successful knowledge workers to contemplate the degradation of his brain.

¶ Tierce: Brent Staples writes about “uppity,” “disrespectful” people of color, and how Congressman Lynn Westmoreland (Rep, GA) must have been perfectly well aware of the implications of applying the “U” word to Barack Obama.

¶ Compline: Did you know that Cauliflower Cheese is a British alternative to Macaroni & Cheese? I’m going to give it a try one of these days.

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¶ Matins: Midnight finds me unprepared with an interesting link, so I have to go with this nonsense, which I link to as such. (Laff riot!) I’ve been chatting with a friend about the election, more and more convinced that the United States is a broken wheel, an idea that will never work again.

¶ Lauds: I knew about Stella, but not about Mary, who, like her mother, Linda Eastman McCartney, is a photographer. I came across her name at the Guardian site, where she talks about her best shot (below).

¶ Prime: Feeling jazzy? Dreaming of kidney beans? Well, then, download some Mad Men-inspired wallpaper. (via kottke.org)

¶ Tierce: David Gonzalez writes about the “morality” of double-parking — the theory being one of justification by acclamation: “everybody does it.”

¶ Vespers: Boy, do I need to lie down! I’ve just scrolled through all fifty-four pairs of New York’s then-and-now photos showing recent changes in local streetscapes. (via kottke.org)

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Dear Daily Blague Readers,

As part of some sort of Outreach Program for the Blogless or something – I don’t know what he’s thinking, exactly – R J has kindly invited me to guest blog from time to time.

After a giddy twelve seconds of pride in this wondrous achievement – from my humble beginnings in the mail room, I have ascended to the rank of contributor  to The Daily Blague! – I began to fret that R J would ask me to write an inaugural post “introducing myself” to Daily Blague readers.  I apologize for whining – already! – but an introduction would be difficult for me.  I have issues.  Not the least of which is this one:  in the real world, introductions are a near-phobia of mine.  The truth is, you do not want to be introduced to me.  As a woman with a warm heart, I feel great compassion for people who are introduced to me.

Because I have really, really cold hands.  There are worse afflictions, but this one is weird, and a little funny, I think.  When a person offers a hand to me for shaking, I must immediately compose my face so that he or she can’t detect the involuntary inner cringe – that  would surely be misunderstood…!  This poor stranger doesn’t know what’s coming, but I do. (more…)

Although I am not a prescriptivist, I find the sloppy misuse of sophisticated words very annoying. It is not often that Michiko Kakutani annoys me in this way, but she did so yesterday, in a review of Curtis Sittenfield’s new novel, American Wife.

Ms. Sittenfeld’s portrait of Charlie Blackwell, however, quickly devolves into caricature.

Wrong. The portrait descends into caricature. Devolution is the opposite of evolution: it means turning backward instead of forward. Responsibilities and sovereignties devolve, falling back on the shoulders of a person (or a sovereign) when something else doesn’t happen to keep them from doing so; as, for example, when superiors leave it to cubicals to make a deadline. Devolution may be regrettable, but it has nothing to do with the deterioration that Ms Kakutani imputes to the portrait of Charlie Blackwell. You may wish that your boss did his own work, and stopped leaving it for you to finish up, but that doesn’t mean that the work itself had been made less worth doing by his irresponsibility.  

Here, then, is what Ms Kakutani ought to have written.

Ms. Sittenfeld’s portrait of Charlie Blackwell, however, quickly descends into caricature.

When you’re writing about something getting worse, steer clear of devolution.

Morning

¶ Denver: We can’t say what the most interesting thing about the Democratic Conventional will have been, but we can expect that it might have something to do with the media and the unmediated. On Friday, the MSM scooped (and thereby foiled) Barack Obama’s attempt to name his running mate directly to supporters’ cell phones.

Noon

¶ Safe Conduct: Anna Post, great-great-granddaughter of Emily Post, offers sensible rules of order at The Etiquette Effect, in collaboration with Hyatt Place hotels. On “Using Technology Appropriately”:

Just because you can bring your phone with you wherever you go, doesn’t mean it’s appropriate to use it. Don’t walk into a meeting or building while still on the phone and don’t bring your cell phone into a business meeting unless you are expecting an urgent call. If a client starts using their PDA during a meeting, you may choose to ignore it. A riskier proposition would be to confront him and say, “Bill, should we reschedule? This doesn’t seem to be a good time for you.” But this is the best way to send the message that you’re not going to tolerate this breach of manners.

Night

¶ Teach: David Olivier (that’s Slimbo to you) has embarked on a truly heroic adventure: teaching math to middle-schoolers in New Orleans. The (first) Week in Review.
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Morning

¶ Collage: I’m not sure what made Girl Talk’s “rising profile” newsworthy today, but Robert Levine’s report, “Steal This Hook? D.J. Skirts Copyright Law,” reminded me of James Surowiecki’s Financial Page in this week’s New Yorker.

Noon

¶ YourNameHere: Take a break from the important stuff you’re doing and have a laff, courtesy of Cake Wrecks, Jen’s so-far inexhaustible stream of high-larious professional disasters (these cakes weren’t baked at home, you know).

Night

¶ Book Party: I went to a marvelous party…
 

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Click here for the full Darwin.

I don’t know many people who have seen Mike Judge’s Idiocracy. I heard the other day that Mr Judge wanted to call the film The United States of Uh…merica. Yielding on that point didn’t help his movie, though; it got zip in the way of marketing. Idiocracy has had to make itself known by word of mouth. Maybe it ought to be called American Samizdat. That’s way too brainy a title, I suppose; but then non-idiotic Americans do seem to be the only demographic for the picture.

One friend duly rented the film on my say-so but couldn’t get past the first fifteen minutes. She was too horrified, not by Mr Judge’s vision of a bleak dystopian future, but by his cinéma vérité treatment of the world outside her window. If my generation of Boomers has anything to answer for (aside from living forever on medical miracles, which is not really our fault, thank you very much), it is the empowerment of morons.

The Flikr photograph made me laugh my head off. Really, I couldn’t get over it. Still can’t A moment of truly superb folly.

Regular riders of these BMT lines affectionally refer to them as “N”ever, “R”arely, and “W”henever. As discerning observers may deduce, the W is a relatively recent creation, as MTA routes go.

Morning

¶ Guest: Perry Falwell has been soliciting contributions to his great new site, Booksaga. The other day, I wrote to him to explain that, while I wished I had some interesting stories for him to post, my times in old bookshops have been happy but dull.

The real purpose of my note was to encourage him to stick with blogging. I think that he has a natural gift for the form. He could write about any old thing, and I’d probably want to read it. But I did throw in a few proofs of “happy but dull.”

¶ Subisdy: When you hear of “foreign subsidies,” you probably think of agricultural supports and turn over to go back to sleep. This story, about foreign subsidies of fuel consumption, may wake you up.

Noon

¶ Soin de soi: Further proof, if needed, that habits (good and bad alike) are contagious: Stephanie Plentl finds her inner Frenchwoman, in the Telegraph.

Night

¶ Up: Chris and Father Tony went up, up, but not away, in a balloon in the middle of Central Park.
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For a Tuesday, I had a big day. I got through all the important jobs — reviewing the Book Review, writing up the One Day University program for my second note on the subject, lunching alone at Café d’Al  — and most of the small ones as well. On top of all that, though, I took what I had read in Mark Hurst’s Bit Literacy to heart, and purged the bulk of my email in my inbox.

It feels, shatteringly, like my own private Protestant Reformation. (But enough about Les Huguenots, which I’ve been watching in the furtherance of my understanding of Verdi’s immensely more important grand operas. The DVD of Joan Sutherland’s farewell performance at the Sydney Opera is a lot cheaper than the Decca CDs. It may be wildly off-topic to point out, in the middle of this discussion of computer hygiene, that Dame Joan drifts through Lotfi Mansouri’s staging as if she were Dame Edna’s older, dafter sister, but I write under the protection of the Geneva Convention’s Droit de la Parenthèse.) Piff Paff! No more nasty email!

Of course most of what I didn’t delete was simply transferred to folders that I set up on the spot. That’s okay with Mr Hurst. You may ask, what difference does it make where you stash your email? but I know better, or at least enough to commit to the Bit Literacy credo of the Daily Emptied Inbox. 

Tomorrow (or whenever), I’ll bone up on “todos.” No point in quibbling: the younger people are comfortable, for the time being, with this brutalist appropriation of the Spanish plural for “all.” Which, to them, means, “to-do lists.” If you’re going to hold out against “hopefully,” you really need to know how to pick your fights.

For two or three years, I’ve had a copy of David Allen’s Getting Things Done on my desk. Literally, right next to Robert Graves’s The Greek Myths. It would be difficult to say which book has impressed itself more palpably upon my daily life. It is true that I grasped Mr Allen’s “two-minute rule” right away (it’s recommended, without credit, by Mr Hurst), but the fate of King Pentheus has had a much greater impact upon my behavior both in public and at my sites. In other words, Getting Things Done has left my stables pretty much in their Augean originality.

Whereas one night alone with Mr Hurst was all it took for me to light virtual bonfires of the vanities — the vanities of thinking that I would ever progress in a leisurely way through the bilgy backup of my unclassified email. Not that the inbox is empty. I saved the headaches for tomorrow. I know that I wasn’t supposed to; I ought to have gotten rid of everything in one fell swoop. My consolation, which I hope is not fatal, is that I didn’t plan to do anything today.

Seriously, folks: Bit Literacy. May I live to hail the fifth edition!

Morning

¶ Polish Joke?: We begin the week with news of — drag racing in Łodz, Poland (pronounced “Woodge,” according to the Times). Now with legal status! Nicholas Kulish reports: “Where the Street Racing Is Fast And the Police Aren’t Furious.”

Noon

¶ No, Your Leader:  Below the jump, a picture of HM the Extraterrestrial, pointing to her spaceship, at the RAF Fairford flypast.

¶ Paradise Unpaved: From one little house in Toronto, may a great idea fly throughout the denser parts of suburbia. Franke James’s My Green Conscience.

Night

¶ Cake Wrecks: This just in, from my good friend Y—: Cake Wrecks. Celebrating disasters crafted by professional bakers and paid for with cash American! Blinded by tears of hilarity, I can hardly type. What was I saying about frivolous Mondays?

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Morning

¶ Beady: Is there any language quite so jaundiced as the English in which the British discuss the French Revolution? In the Telegraph, Anthony Peregrine conducts readers on tour of Parisian Revolutionary sites, from Tobias Schmidt’s harpsichord shop (home of the guillotine) to La Fayette’s tomb.

Americans in contrast, might be less informative on the subject, but much more interesting, as, for example, La Maîtresse.

Bon week-end a tous!

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Mars attacks!

Morning

¶ AntErnauts: It looks fussy, with the capital ‘E’ and all, but it’s easy to say: anternauts. It’s my coinage to describe people who don’t know enough about the Internet to be able deal with it intelligently. Combine such ignorance with police power and watch out!

Librarian William Hallowell, sadly for him, knows a thing or two about the type. He was held for thirty hours, among other affronts, because police officers lacked the basic Internet competence to know that they had picked up the wrong man. Benjamin Weiser reports.

 Noon

¶ Cool: I just bought one of these. Now I wonder if I needed it.  

Night

¶ Patience: How did flounder evolve, with both eyes on one side of their head? Slowly but surely, that’s how.

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This week’s rather shaky images were taken on the Fourth of July from the rooftop of a building in Chelsea where a good friend of ours lives. The weather was awful, and it didn’t take long for the fireworks to disappear into the clouds of their own smoke. My photographs, therefore, are to be viewed as studies in impressionist color.  

Morning

¶ Lift: Now that Kathleen has her very own personal computer (her first, amazingly; until now, her laptops have always been the property of a law firm), and now that we have conquered the Wi-Fi problem (I didn’t say that!), my dear wife has been discovering all sorts of things online, among them a whimsical New Yorker cover that might have been, by Bob Staake.

Noon

¶ Clock: I’m a sucker for gizmos like the World Clock, which whir along fantastically if somewhat meaninglessly. What kind of triumph will it be if the number of items of email spam exceeds the number of dollars of US debt?

Night

¶ Mad ! Following a link from kottke.org, I came across a blog devoted to Mad Men. It’s called A Basket of Kisses, and it comes from “the highly creative, occasionally obsessive computers of Roberta and Deborah Lipp.” (more…)

Morning

¶ Tower of Eiffel: Now, here’s something I didn’t know: Gustave Eiffel worked on the construction of the Statue of Liberty, thus, according to Edward Berenson’s Op-Ed piece in today’s Times, “allowing him to test certain techniques he would use for his great tower in 1889.

Noon

¶ Attention! Yikes! “Google told to hand over millions of YouTube user details to Viacom in $1 billion case.” From the Telegraph.

Night

¶ Oops! When everyone but you is looking at your screen. Because you’ve already left for the holiday weekend.

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This week’s Daily Office photos were taken last week in Carl Schurz Park, by the East River. Last week’s pictures, as I hope Friday’s would make quite clear, were taken the previous week in Santa Monica, at the Huntington Museum, and in the Cathedral of Our Lady of the Angels.

Morning 

¶ Weekend Reading (Babies): I had a look, yesterday, at the Times Magazine for a change, intrigued, against my better judgment, by Russell Shorto’s cover story. As a piece of journalism, the piece embodies unfortunate trends in general-interest reportage, especially the whiff of apocalyptic gunsmoke (“No more European babies! No more Europeans!”) that is inevitably dissipated by gusts of common-sense exposition later on. Editors seem to like to front-load the drama and shove the useful information to the back end, whether to spare lazy readers or to reward diligent ones it’s hard to say.

Noon

¶ JVC Jazz: On Friday night, Kathleen and I went to a sold-out jazz concert at Carnegie Hall, featuring (first) Dianne Reeves and (then) Al Green.

¶ BookSaga: Down in Georgia, a fellow by the name of Perry Falwell runs an on-line bookshop. He scours the thrift shops for finds that he speeds along to interested customers. (Somebody’s got to do it, if Goodwill won’t.) His new Web log, BookSaga, is compulsively readable. I plan to stay tuned.

Night

¶ Gondry:  A few weeks ago, at brunch, a friend insisted that I rent and see Michel Gondry’s Be Kind Rewind. This evening, I got round to it. A great, great train wreck!

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Morning 

¶ Croque: I divide restaurants into two groups: those that serve croque monsieur, the great if not grand French ham-and-cheese sandwich, and those that don’t. Guess which group gets more of my business. Alex Witchel coaxes a recipe from Bar Boulud.

Noon

¶ Ray: Our friendly ichthyologist, Mig Living, reports today on the cownose ray. As usual, some of the “little-known facts” are more whopping than others.

Night

¶ Madeleine: Remember Madeleine White, Jodie Foster’s character in Inside Man? It was, without a doubt, the most intoxicating role that I have ever seen the actress play, because, instead of pretending to be the usual ordinary schlub, Ms Foster was a glamorous fixer who could arrange almost anything with a few phone calls. Now I know where she trained. 

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Morning 

¶ Oregano: Having seen Melvin Frank’s A Touch of Class when it came out, in 1973, and liked it very much, I remembered two things about the film very clearly: the assignation that Steve Blackburn (George Segal) and Vicki Allessio (Glenda Jackson) achieve during a performance of Beethoven’s Seventh, a symphony that ever since has trailed a rather unwonted allure. The other was “oreGAHno.”

Noon

¶ Apron: There’s a movie, don’t you think, in Dan Barry’s story about the West Virginia Mason who was expelled because he advocated reforms that would put an end to archaic discriminatory practices.

¶ Gidget: George Snyder — whom I hope to spend Thursday with, in Los Angeles — sent me a link to Peter Lunenfeld’s delightfully polymathic look at Gidget, in The Believer. Who knew she was Jewish?

Night

¶ Tornado: If you haven’t seen the most amazing close-up of a tornado ever, be sure to check out Lori Mehmen‘s ticket to the photographers’ hall of fame. (via JMG)
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