Morning

¶ Vincit Max: Max Mosley won his libel suit against The News of the World. The Judge, Sir David Eady, found that the newspaper’s imputation of Nazi-themed sadomasochism was bogus. He also found that Mr Mosley had a “reasonable expectation of privacy” when submitting to bodacious discipline. John J Burns reports.

A good (and cooler) weekend to everyone!

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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…)

Morning

¶ Manners: Whether or not there is any truth to the story that Senator John Edwards has fathered a “love” child with documentarian Reille Hunter (thanks, Joe), I’m far more distraught by David W Chen’s report on the bad workplace conduct of Representative Anthony Weiner of New York (Brooklyn and Queens).

Noon

¶ Quilts: Ian Hundley designs quilts that look like World War I aerial photographs of the French countryside. Well, that’s what they look like to me.

Night

¶ Moses: Wow! Joe Lieberman, who addressed John Hagee’s Christians United For Israel Washington-Israel Summit yesterday, compared Rev Hagee to Moses! To think that Senator Lieberman might be our Vice President today! D’you think he’d be cuddling up to the man who blamed the devastation of New Orleans on the Big Easy’s having hosted a Pride parade?

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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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Morning

¶ Waste: The story is so depressing that I can barely bring myself to read it, much less post about it; but there’s no getting round its importance: In what I hope will turn out to have been the grossest civic failure of this decade, Seattle has scrapped its pay-toilet system.

Noon

¶ Yeastless: Catch up on all the new slang from Sloane Square.

¶ Rope: Jon Stewart’s montage of Talking Heads denouncing The New Yorker cover (you know which one) as tasteless, offensive, &c &c, ought to be enough, my friends, to convince you that watching any news program other than his own is bad for your brain.

¶ Department of Ahem: Just the other day, Perry Falwell of Booksaga, the Internet’s favorite bookselling blogger, solicited guest entries. It seems that “solicited” was the key word, as the last word in the entry’s first paragraph makes clear.

Night

¶ Tacet: What’s interesting about Rachel Cathcart’s story in the Times, “Donation to Same-Sex Marriage Foes Brings Boycott Calls” — aside from the story itself, which is, in the end, depressingly not-so-interesting — is the newspaper’s colossal discretion: the hotels that would be the object of the boycott are not named. Nor is a link provided. Anyone who wants to act on this story is going to have to do a little Googling.

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Morning

¶ Poll: Behind the brouhaha about The New Yorker‘s Barack and Michelle Obama spoof cover, entitled “The Politics of Fear,” there’s the deepening impression that “race” (skin color) is still a matter about which black and white Americans don’t share a perspective.

Noon

¶ Turner: I took another look at the Turner show at the Met this afternoon. It’s growing on me!

Night

¶ Stone: Incidental to the Museum visit, there as a bit of book-buying, both at the Museum itself and at Crawford-Doyle, the favorite-bookstore that happens to be right around the corner on Madison, between 81st and 82nd. I could have bought this at C-D, but I’d already fallen for it at the Museum.

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Morning

¶ Deck Chairs?: Something in Joshua Rosner’s tone, in “Goodbye capitalism,” his piece in the Financial Times,  makes me think of a cranky gent on one of the Titanic‘s lifeboats, complaining that passengers are no longer dressing for dinner.

Noon

¶ CrocEatDog: Sometimes, a picture is worth a thousand giggles. All right, ten giggles. Okay, a chuckle.

Night

¶ Lawn: This internal-exile/vacation thing is working so well that, after I dealt with the Book Review, I sat outside on the balcony and read. And read. And read. And then I decided to watch a movie…. But you know that prayer that Jewish men are said to begin the day with? My version goes like this: “Thank God I don’t own a car.” If I’m being really thoughtful, I add, “or a lawn.”
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This week’s images were taken one afternoon not too long ago; they show the storefronts and other edifices on the south side of 86th Street between Second and Third Avenues.

Morning

¶ Rental: From Sam Roberts’s story in the Times, this morning, about the dodginess of “1625” as the founding date of our fair city (Nieuw Amsterdam):

The first settlers apparently arrived in 1624 (or 1623) and encamped on Governors Island. In 1625, they shipped their cattle to Lower Manhattan, where more land and water were available, and a fort was planned there. In 1626, Peter Minuit made his famous purchase of Manhattan (except that he bought it from Indians who did not own it and that in their view, he was, like many subsequent residents of Manhattan, merely a renter, not an owner).

You gotta love it.

Noon

¶ Supreme: Try to make some time — this evening, perhaps, or first thing tomorrow morning — to read the envoi of Times Supreme Court commentator, Linda Greenhouse. After nearly thirty years on the beat, she is retiring (to Yale).  

Night

¶ Warrant: Luis Moreno-Ocampo, the prosecutor of the International Criminal Court at the Hague, has submitted a warrant for the arrest of Omar Hassan al-Bashir, president of Sudan, charging him with genocide. It’s a first.
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Morning

¶ Mean Money: Leona’s money is going to the dogs — and so is Dicky Grasso’s.

Noon

¶ DIRL: What with following one link to another, I came across a nice, long comment thread (at Marginal Revolution) proposing books to take to Africa on a research project that will take a year, with only visit home. Somebody asked for advice.

Night

¶ Pectavensis: How’s your Latin? It doesn’t have to be very good, to read Gregory of Tours, a Sixth-Century bishop who wrote pretty good history, considering it was the Dark Ages and all. Plus, he writes about a scandal at a convent in Poitou (in monasterio Pectavense). Nudge, nudge!

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Morning 

¶ Bye, Bye, Bruno: New York State Senator Joseph L Bruno seems to have knocked all of Albany on its ear by announcing that he will not seek re-election.

Noon

¶ One Lump or Two?: First, the good news: U S Sugar will restore 187,000 acres of Florida land to the Everglades.

Night

¶ Sprawlwrong: Even more quickly than I’d expected, suburban sprawl not only looks like a bad idea but costs like one, according to Peter Goodman’s story from Denver. Between transport and heating, many Americans face a dismal, possibly dangerous winter. Suddenly, the way that I live (apartment footage in the three-digits squared; no car) looks like a far more viable template.  
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Morning

¶ Transport: Joe Sharkey, who follows business travel for the Times, writes about the increasingly “upstairs-downstairs” nature of domestic air travel. The “commercial” airlines have lost nearly half of their “premium” customers to “business aviation” — smaller, upscale jets that used to be the preserve of jillionaires and corporations — since 2000.

Noon

¶ Panic: Within the past twenty minutes, I have drifted from a calm inattentiveness into a vortex of panic. How on earth am I going to be ready to leave New York by 1:30 tomorrow afternoon? And how did I manage to forget the Morning Read this morning? Must have been the McChouffe at lunch.

Night

¶ Bronx Cheer: Sex kitteness Dr Ruth Westheimer inducted into the Houston Bronx Walk of Fame, even though she has never lived on Westheimer Boulevard in the Bronx.

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Morning

¶ Suddenly, It’s Summer: The window unit in the blue room, necessary because the HVAC service is always sluggish there, is keeping the room with the most books cool and dry, which is good for them and good for me, too. But I’m sitting in the living room, with the balcony door open, keeping comfortable with a Vornado fan.

¶ Heather Does Not Have Two Mommies: RomanHans slays me with his parody of political correctness. Part I, Part II. We must all pester our favorite booksellers for the other titles in Roman’s “Heather” series, thus creating demand, and, perhaps, the books.

Noon

¶ Crackdown in Dujiangyan: A demonstration by grieving parents, protesting the shoddy construction that killed their children in classrooms, was more or less peaceably broken up by a swarm of intimidating policemen. Edward Wong reports.

¶ Under Construction: Ha ha ha, that’s what most of the pages say at the Web site of New York Crane and Equipment.

Night

¶ Clinch: You’ve got to love the headline: no Dewey Beats Truman! this time!

¶ Prima la musica: Listening to Mr Mozart (as Florence Foster Jenkins appropriatingly called him, making him one of us), K 516. Music one has known better (much better) than the back of one’s hand for over forty years. And tonight it sounds as though I’d never heard it before. The amazing Mr Mozart.
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Morning

¶ White. Here in the United States, it is now Summer. There’s nothing official about it, and it’s certainly not astronomically correct. But we Nice Folk have entered the time of White Shoes, and, in terms of blogging, that means Less is Easier.

¶ Lavish. The longer our misadventure in Iraq goes on, the greater the alignment between troops and opponents of the war. So far, it’s a lopsided alignment, to be sure, with opponents doing all the aligning.

Noon

¶ Long Weekend: The long Memorial Day weekend comes to an end, and we’ve had such a nice one, enjoying the fine weather out on the balcony, that Kathleen was surprised by an old nagging worry: all too soon, she would have to pack up and take the ferry back to the city. That’s how far away she felt — even though she was very much in the city. At home, in fact.

¶ Job Opp’ty: Looking for a career with a future? How about all those foreclosed houses, abandoned and falling into ruin? Plenty more where they came from! “Business Is Booming for Contractors of Foreclosed Homes.”

Night

¶ Indian Melon Salad: The official dish of summer in our house, an intensely American chicken salad, juxtaposing the flavors of table grapes, soy sauce, and curry.

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¶ Matins: This week’s Friday Front is brevity itself. The article by George Packer to which it links has enough intelligence for two.

¶ Tierce: David Brooks gives kottke.org a nice nod in today’s Op-Ed piece, “The Alpha Geeks.”

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¶ Matins: Just my luck. Coming across an unattributed line of Latin in Joseph O’Neill’s Netherworld, I google it and discover that, not to my surprise, it comes from Virgil’s Georgics:O fortunatos nimium, sua si bona norint,
agricolas.
It’s a typical bit of aristocratic sentimentality: how happy the peasants would be if they only knew how lucky they are to be peasants. Yes, well. It took a moment to track down the source, though, because the first return at Google took me to a discussion of Tacitus’s Dialogue on Oratory. It was only by checking out the next couple of links that I discovered Amerloque: A Long-Term American Expatriate Resident in France Shares His Views.

¶ Sext: I tip my hat to Guy Trebay, who says a number of things that I’ve been thinking about the Thom Browne look.

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¶ Matins: A look at this week’s Book Review, which is just about as disappointing as last week’s was inspiring.

¶ Tierce: Is there anything as compulsively readable as oral history? Florent, the pioneering restaurant in the meatpacking district that has finally, some might say, reaped what it sowed, will be closing late next month, and a number of habitués, including Calvin Klein and Roy Lichtenstein’s widow, join Florent Morellet and members of his staff at Frank Bruni’s microphone.

¶ Sext: How about a $150 burger? (Price subject to market fluctuations.) Where but at the Wall Street Burger Shoppe would you expect to find ground Kobe-style beef?

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¶ Matins: The curious thing about seeing Reprise on Friday was having seen The Four of Us on Wednesday: peas in a pod, if you ask me. A great deal of what I said about either one of these pieces works as a description of the other.

¶ Tierce: Take it from me: because I am older, I am wiser. Don’t be deceived by the fact that I’m, er, slower. Sara Reistad-Long reports.

¶ Nones: If I were young, and had the ambition that I so conspicuously lacked when I was young, I’d want to take this course, coming soon to NYU. Just imagine — that voice coming to you several times a week from the other side of the lectern.

¶ Compline: RomanHans, at World Class Stupid, is almost always very funny, but today he really tickled my funny bone. “The Hipster’s Guide to Starting a Home-Based Business.”

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¶ Matins: The latest Indiana Jones movie opened yesterday in Cannes, and here’s what BBC reviewer Mark Savage had to say:

It is a load of old nonsense, of course, but the journey is worth the price of admission.

¶ Tierce: The big story in this morning’s news is a Times study of the subway system’s elevators and escalators. If you live in New York, but don’t think that this is a big story, then you are part of the problem.

¶ Sext: It’s hardly a matter of general interest, but I’m tickled nonetheless that the Supreme Court has decided Kentucky v Davis in favor of the status quo. Municipal bonds retain tax-exempt status within issuing states.

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¶ Matins: This week’s Book Review is without a doubt the best issue in all the time that I’ve been peering at it through my reproving lorgnette.

¶ Tierce: The good people of Juneau cut power consumption by 30% — because they had to. There’s nothing like an avalanche to get everybody’s attention.

¶ Sext: At her apartment on Sunday, Megan handed me a bag of books that I had given her years and years ago: time to make room for Ryan’s library. I was very glad to get my second copy of this back.

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