Morning

¶ Golden Rule: If I wanted to be “hilariously misogynistic” (a controdiction in terms that only frat boys miss), I’d remind Democrats that it’s not too late to nominate Hillary Clinton! Why? Because unattractive, power-mad executives are never assassinated in this country. Only the appealing idealists, such as Lincoln and Kennedy, draw the shooters’ malice. Why, they’re already out to kill Barack Obama!

Noon

¶ Rich: Richard Reeves reviews a new hate-the-rich book, in the Telegraph.

Night

¶ Faber Finds: They’re here! As predicted years ago, by Jason Epstein: books on demand. You may have to wait a couple of weeks — and I don’t know if the titles are available here at all. But if Faber & Faber is doing it, the serious American publishers will follow suit. (via kottke.org) (more…)

Morning

¶ Bar Code: In typical Times fashion, John Schwartz’s story doesn’t spell out what two graduates of a private school here actually did in connection with their “freelance science project” to expose the mislabeling of fish in New York markets and restaurants — beyond shopping, dining, and marinating morsels of fish in alcohol — but Harriets the Spy everywhere are in for a technology upgrade.

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Morning

¶ Settlement: The $2.7 million payout with which New York City settled lawsuits brought by fifty-two individuals who were arrested, allegedly without reason, during a 2003 protest against our Iraqi misadventure reminds us that the much bigger group of cases generated by similarly groundless police conduct during the 2004 Republican Convention must not be settled.

Noon

¶ Surprise: Imagine that! The Chinese Ministry of Culture has reneged on a promise to help out the Asia Society with a massive show of Chinese revolutionary art, up to and including the Cultural Revolution. I’m breathtook!

Night

¶ Wheeze: The Mayor sure knows how to get a conversation going. Topping the city’s bridges and skyscrapers with windmills is a very bad idea. Wasn’t the PanAm Building helipad closed for a reason? (more…)

Morning

¶ Mind the Gap: Five years ago today, Sergio Vieira de Mello, along with twenty-one other people, was killed in a Baghdad bombing that targeted his United Nations mission. Samantha Power considers the consequences.

Noon

¶ Entwistle: Do you remember the Entwistle case? (Brit murders American wife and child in Massachusetts, then flies to Nottinghamshire, where he settles in with his parents.) No, I don’t either. But Jonathan Raban makes it digitally interesting (as distinct from ghoulishly interesting), at the London Review of Books.

Night

¶ Nearby: Young upwardly-mobile Asian-Americans are not awayly-mobile. They’re cutting out the historic suburban stage; their bright new places are nearby their parents’ dumps.

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With a muted thunderclap, Walter Kirn’s review (in today’s issue of The New York Times Book Review) of James Wood’s new book (How Fiction Works) announces the terms of engagement between two literary camps that, until recently, have not had to recognize one another in public. So far, they’ve been able to get away with snubbing — ignoring — one another. Only recently have they taken to showing up at the same parties, or at least on the same coffee tables.

Surely no two of this country’s periodicals have shared a readership for longer than The New Yorker and the Book Review; but until this decade their differences were blurry, kept politely out of focus. Now, perhaps goaded by the frightening challenges that big-time media face in the age of the Blogosphere, the parties are slipping off their gloves. Mr Kirn’s piece crystallizes a long-settling distinction: where The New Yorker (Mr Wood’s outlet) argues for coherence, the Book Review (and, arguably, the newspaper behind it) plumps for fashion. That these alliances — the glossy, Condé-Nast-owned magazine’s with the long view and the long-lasting; the only-lately Painted Lady’s with what Mr Kirn so wonderfully calls “a mess, a mystery or a miracle” — are exactly the opposite of what might have been expected adds exactly the Jovial note that was wanted. (more…)

The second of the lectures at the 19 July session of One Day University here in New York, delivered by Stephanos Bibas, a professor of law at the University of Pennsylvania Law School, did not promise to teach me anything that I hadn’t learned in Criminal Procedure, the first-year law course that Mr Bibas teaches now. But “Law and Justice in America — A 250 Year History” had nothing to do with the intricate pleasures of law school. If anything, it was a presentation befitting a courtroom — not surprising, perhaps, given the Mr Bibas’s experience as a federal prosecutor. “When ninety-five percent of criminal charges are disposed of by plea bargains,” he intoned, “the criminal justice system is broken.”

That may sound like a vaguely interesting topic to you, but Mr Bibas placed it within such a soundly-based historical context that he wound up explaining a great deal more than what’s wrong with criminal justice in America.

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Morning

¶ Sore Bear: You can cluck and tsk all you like, but Russia’s invasion of Georgia is driven by very high-octane belligerence, distilled from humiliated pride. Ideology not only has nothing to do with the case on the Russian side, but is empty rhetoric in the mouths of Westerners who preach that duly elected democracies are blah blah blah. The foolish expansion of NATO has finally met with Vladimir Putin’s freeze-dried resistance.  

Noon

¶ Lunch: Nom de Plume asked  me if I was free for lunch, and Migs asked what I’d be having. Here’s an idea!

Night

¶ Nada: Hey, it’s August. Nothing is going on — niente. That’s why God (in the person of E L Kersten, PhD) invented Despair.com, which, as my friend George wrote to tell me, has changed its Web site a lot since the last time we visited.

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Morning

¶ Research: Sarah Kershaw’s story about Mark Cellura, a retired Merrill Lynch executive, put a crimp in my morning. With the help of a genealogist, Mr Cellura made contact with the adoptive family of his twin brother, Michael, who died of AIDS in 1987.

In a slightly more cheerful piece, Janet Maslin writes about First Globals, the rising generation that probably can’t wait to see the last of the likes of me.

Noon

¶ Thought for Food: Commodities development specialist Peter Baker asks some apt questions about food production, hitherto unheeding if not quite heedless.

Night

¶ Boycott: Retards of the world, unite — lobby Congress! (more…)

A while back, Édouard ran a snap of these hideous, hideous statues, which stand outside a townhouse across Fifth Avenue from the Museum. I had been trying to keep their ugliness a neighborhood secret, but É has outed it.

Morning

¶ Cards: Judith Warner writes with sad lucidity about “playing cards.” As in, “the autism card.”

Now I’m off to the movies. Have a great weekend, everybody!

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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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Morning

¶ Siné: It’s a tough case: Siné (Maurice Sinet), the Charlie Hebdo cartoonist and, ipso facto, socio-political troublemaker, has been fired over a cartoon whose cynicism might be taken for anti-Semitism. I find myself on Siné’s side. Steven Erlanger reports.

Noon

¶ Mont-Saint-Michel: In Le Figaro: Who owns Mont-Saint-Michel? The French state has owned the abbey since the Revolution, but as for the village nestled on its flanks…

¶ That’s all very well, dear, but what about the Pines?: At a restaurant in Cherry Grove, on Fire Island, you can enjoy a drink called the “JoeMyGod.”

Night

¶ Boredom:  Here’s a valiant attempt to make boredom sound creative. It doesn’t quite fly.

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Morning

¶ A6: Page A6 of today’s Times (a/k/a “International Report”) features three stories. The one without a picture discusses the “covenant” that the Archbishop of Canterbury has coaxed from his colleagues at the Lambeth Conference. The one with a black-and-white picture concerns the legacy of the reviving Zeppelin industry in Friedrichshafen — one so complicated that I long to read a book about it. The story with the horrific picture, showing a stairway littered with colorfully-clad dead people, recounts the melee that broke out at a hilltop temple in Naina Devi when rumors of a landslide set off a stampede, killing 150 — or 148, at the newspaper’s presumably more up-to-date Web site.

Noon

¶ Pie/Sky?: Two stories (CNN, ABC) about really cheap source of power.

Night

¶ Smooth Guide: BBC’s Jennifer Pak presents video guides to getting around in Beijing, in case you’re going to the Games. Even if you’re not, you can see how spanking everything — and hear about how hot it is.

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Morning

¶ Antikythera: I’m not sure what prompted the report in Nature (which prompted the Times), but the Antikythera Device is always cool. Hey, it’s the world’s first analog computer!

Noon

¶ Uncle Bobby: Jamie Larue, a librarian in Colorado, was recently asked to reconsider the shelving of Uncle Bobby’s Wedding, by Sarah S Brannen.  Aimed at children between the ages of two to seven, Uncle Bobby’s Wedding deals with a little girl’s fear of losing her favorite uncle when he gets married. Incidentally, Uncle Bobby is marrying another man.

Mr Larue’s thoughtful — and effectively all-purpose — reply appears at his Web lob, Myliblog.com. I urge all Daily Blague visitors to read it.

Night

¶ Lordly Hudson: Among New York City’s totally unfair stack of natural advantages is the mighty Hudson, an estuary posing as a highly scenic river that, for most of the Twentieth Century, was treated as a giant sewer. John Strausbaugh’s update on improved conditions features a flabbergasting image of the deserted  castle on Bannerman’s Island, which seems second only to Chicago’s Merchandise Mart in square footage.  

(more…)

Morning

¶ Intellectual Property: A core tenet of free-market capitalism is that the best product or service wins. On the level playing field, blah blah blah, consumers beat a path to buy the better mousetrap. The brouhaha over Scrabulous, however, shows just how bent our markets have become, as corporations have pushed for expansive application of intellectual property laws — yet another instance of socialism for the rich.

Noon

¶ Wallonia: The march toward breaking up Belgium inches forward. In a poll, half of the nation’s Francophones (or Walloons) say that they’d be happier as Frenchmen — and an even higher percentage of Northern Frenchmen agreed!

Night

¶ Naughty Bits: Father Tony went to a wacked-out art show in Chelsea. So far, it seems, none of Robert Fontinelli’s furniture designs have been executed in three dimensions, but that may change.

(more…)

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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In twenty-three years of personal computing, I have never encountered a truly useful To-Do list facility. Every tool that I’ve picked up has quickly turned out to be ineffective for one reason or another, usually by failing to realize the dreams of hyperproductivity that automated To-Do lists by nature inspire. After all, if your To-do list can take care of itself, then why can’t it actually do the work that it outlines?

In twenty-three years &c — until today. Today, I read Chapter 5 of Mark Hurst’s Bit Literacy , “Managing Todos.” Given my long experience with frustration, I wondered what the guru was going to come up with. When what he came up with turned out to be an online service that his outfit, Good Experience, Inc, provides for a small monthly fee, you may be sure that I blinked. In his opening pages, Mr Hurst is eloquent about the flimflammery of most “productivity solutions”:

Although we need hardware and software to work with bits, no technology company has the solution to bit overload. It’s far too rarely stated that the technology industry is not in the business of making people productive. It is only in the business of selling more technology. Granted, some companies make better tools than others, and users can be productive with some of today’s tools. But in the technology business, users’ productivity is secondary to profitability. No matter what a company claims, feature lists and upgrades are designed for the company’s success, not the users’. This isn’t a judgment against technology companies; to the contrary, they are a vital part of the economy and do the world a service by creating new and useful innovations. The point is merely that users should not look to the technology industry to deliver the solution to their overload. Doing so cedes control to companies that, whenever they have the choice, would rather have paying customers than productive customers.

([Gnash!] No wonder I was invariably disappointed.)

Now here was Mr Hurst, turning around and presenting himself as a “technology company” in search of paying customers! I blinked, as I say, but then I forged on. The faith that I had already placed in Mr Hurst’s advice had earned me, within an hour or so, a totally empty inbox, with all the email that I chose to save stashed in handy folders that I already had the wit to set up according to the way my mind works. By the time I read about Gootodo.com, I was fairly sure that the $18 investment (for six months) would not be a waste of money. The secret of Mr Hurst’s To-Do list lies in a blend of its simplicity and its interaction with email: to add a To-Do item that’s due next Wednesday, for example, you write an email addressed “wednesday@gootodo.com,” summarize the task in the subject line, and add any details in the body of the email. Done! (Assuming, of course, that you have set up a Gootodo.com account, and that you are writing from the email address that the service recognizes as yours — in case you have several [and who doesn’t?]. And don’t forget to hit “Send.”) You can work with the service from outside its interface. Pretty cool.

Mark Hurst has apparently been a computer person since childhood, and he has two degrees from MIT. More importantly, perhaps, he is a shrewd psychologist. He prescribes that computer users read personal mail first, not that they wait to get their work done before hearing from friends and family. The only people who will abuse this liberty at work probably don’t merit their jobs for other reasons. About To-Do lists, Mr Hurst’s eye is gimlet:

The truth is that many users just don’t want to do their work. Given a choice between completing a todo or spending several minutes deciding what color it should be, lots of people — especially techies, who love playing with software — would choose the latter. Color are fun, and don’t require much thought. Doing the actual work in the todo requires time and energy, risks railure, and might not be any fun. Users are best served by a tool that encourages the discipline of actually getting the work done, rather than endlessly tweaking the system.

Let’s hear a bit “GOTCHA!” for Mark Hurst! After all, instead of getting round to my first To-Do item — organizing my in-box — I’ve been merrily blogging away!

Morning

¶ Reserves: Help me out here: While Times Op-Ed writer Timothy Egan hails T Boone Pickens for his windfarming campaign against the idea that drilling for oil will lead to lower gasoline prices, Jad Mouawad reports, in Business Day, that the “Arctic may contain as much as a fifth of the world’s yet-to-be-discovered oild and natural gas reserves,” according to the United States Geological Survey. Which way are we going, here?

Noon

¶ Pathetic: We interrupt our non-political coverage to link to Jacob Heilbrunn’s comment at HuffPost: “Bush Bans State Department Officials From Obama Rally.” 

Night

¶ Manipulation: If you read just the top of the story, it looks as though the pipe dreams of demagogues have come true, and speculators are making fortunes by manipulating the price of oil. (more…)

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

¶ Verdigreen: Two stories in this morning’s Times sound a retro-green note. Kim Severson writes about locavores who want to grow their own produce but can’t — or oughtn’t to — do their own gardening.* And John Tagliabue reports on the windmill revival in the Netherlands.

Noon

¶ Communion: Communion is a good thing, generally, but in the case of the Anglican Communion, I think it’s time for a sundering. (Not that it’s any of my business.)

Night

¶ Disguise: War criminal Radovan Karadzic has been arrested in Belgrade, after years of disguising himself as me. “For Bosnian Serb, a Life of Hiding in Plain Sight.”
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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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