¶ Matins:  My idea was to mention the video that we watched this evening, after LXIV reminded us that JKM had strongly recommended it when we visited her in the place where, in the Ealing Comedy, at least, you could get a Passport to Pimlico. It’s an adorable movie, and I’ve just spent £9.95 ($100,000) on shipping to make sure that I have my very own copy of the DVD, which is not available in the U S of Movies, within the next ten minutes.

¶ Lauds: Speaking of Édouard (and this will make sense only to those of you who clicked through at Matins), I was very touched by a comment that Jérôme posted at the latest Sale Bête entry. The end of incognito?

¶ Tierce: Nice fix-it columns in the Times: Clyde Haberman on the Rockefeller Drug Laws, and Andrew Ross Sorkin on Kenneth Griffin, a hedge-fund whiz kid who thinks that Wall Street let the young ‘uns have too much fun with the car keys.

¶ Compline: Another season of  Orpheus at Carnegie ended last Saturday night. At first, I thought I wouldn’t be able to go, so I gave the tickets to LXIV. Then I could go, and he didn’t have a taker for the other ticket — and I went. But I let LXIV play host and sit in the aisle seat.

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¶ Matins: Sunday on Orchard Street, on the Lower East Side, is still a big shopping day, but I have cropped all of that out of the photograph because I was more interested in the bishop’s-crook streetlamp. And we weren’t there to shop.

¶ Prime: You may have heard that the nation of Belgium is on a course to split in two — Flanders (where they speak a kind of Dutch) and Wallonia (where they speak a kind of French — and also, just to keep things simple, a kind of German). Wallonia used to be rich, in the way of extractive economies, but is now poor; while Flanders used to be poor, in the way of rural economies, but is now rich. Brussels, the French-speaking capital, lies within Flanders.

¶ Tierce: Glorioski! We must be back in the Fifties — because that’s the last time that anybody capable of being published on the Op-Ed page (or its equivalent in those days) produced anything as goofily unsophisticated as Edward N Luttwalk’s argument against Barack Obama: “President Apostate? ”

¶ Sext: Earthquake in China: Schadenfreude alert.

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¶ Matins: Lately, I’ve been so busy that I haven’t known where to begin. The answer, I now discover, is nowhere. Do not begin. Take the brilliant time-saving tips of billionaires from all walks of filthitude in Gordon Bennett’s droll report at W. Who would know better than a billionaire what a colossal waste of time merely living can be!

¶ Lauds: Instead of going to bed like a good boy, I get down to working on the Words branch of Portico, something that I’ve been meaning to do for a long time,  by inventing a new page: Workshop.

¶ Tierce: At the moment, it looks as though next week’s primary in West Virginia is actually going to mean something, possibly.

¶ Sext: Kathleen and I have been invited to a fiftieth-birthday party this evening, and we’ve decided that a nice bottle of port is what we’d like to give. So, I’m off to Sherry-Lehmann in a little while.

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¶ Matins: This may be the best dog video ever, probably because it captures, to perfection, the pleasure of being out alone with one’s pooch.

¶ Tierce: What’s this? A war-protest strike by Pacific dockworkers? Yesterday? You tell me why William Yardley’s story isn’t on the front page of the Times — instead of not one but two “stories” about the Obama-Wright rift.

¶ Compline: Although I was tolerably entertained by James Wolcott’s overview of the primary scene in the current Vanity Fair, I had to wonder if it merits all the commentary.

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¶ Matins: On her train ride to Albany, Kathleen missed Sing-Sing. I told her to keep her eyes peeled, but the windows were so dirty that she was glad that she hadn’t brought a camera.

¶ Tierce: RACE STILL A PROBLEM IN US, according to American Presidential Campaign. Barack Obama dissociates himself from Rev Jeremiah Wright. (The New York Times, Front Page.)

¶ Vespers: Alone for dinner tonight, I’m tempted to make a peanut butter and bacon sandwich. Here’s a recipe, in case anyone should need such a thing.

¶ Compline: If I’ve got an excuse for not writing (much less posting) this week’s Book Review review until the tail end of Wednesday, I don’t know what it is.

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¶ Matins: Kathleen is off to Albany this evening, for an overnight trip. Shame about the awful weather; if it were nice, she could pretend that she was in North By Northwest. As, er, one of the extras — not Eva Marie Saint.

¶ Tierce: Today’s Metro Section (The New York Times’s regional coverage) is full of complicated stories: it’s hard to decide, not so much right from wrong, as who ought to prevail.

¶ Sext: The delightfully inimitable George Snyder writes a bit about the people in one of my very favorite pictures, which is mine, all mine — or, at least, in the neighborhood.

¶ Vespers: God, I’m complicated. Do I go to the movies tonight, and, if so, where; but, if I go tomorrow, then to which one? And what about Friday? Yikes! But here’s the deal: Roman de Gare tomorrow, at the Angelika. Then She Found Me on Friday morning, at the Sunshine.

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¶ Matins: This afternoon, I’ll be spending tea-time at Ruptured and Crippled: it’s time for an infusion of Remicade.

¶ Tierce: A very strong story, by Andrea Elliott in the Times, about the demonization of Debbie Almontaser, founder of the Khalil Gibran school in Brooklyn.

¶ Nones: Even without the April showers, we’ve got plenty of flowers. But we’ve got plenty of April showers, too — today, anyway.

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¶ Matins: At lunch yesterday, Édouard told me that, while he used to read the Book Review religiously, he never looks at it now, because it’s so clearly the inside job of a self-interested coterie. If it were really that precious, it would be far more interesting. In this whirlwind week, I have to ask myself why I read the Book Review, and the answer is clear. I wouldn’t read it at all, if it weren’t for this weekly feature of mine.

¶ Tierce: Good news on the goofball front: the late Virgilio Cintron’s buddies won’t be going to jail for wheeling his corpse to a Pay-O-Matic in order to cash his Social Security check.

¶ Sext: In today’s Morning Read, I came across the very pithy expression of a truth that I learned to the limit in the last presidential election: “There is no reasoning someone out of a position he has not reasoned himself into.”

¶ Vespers: A treat for anyone who bothers to click through.

¶ Compline: We had theatre tickets for this evening, but I was able to make a last-minute change, freeing the evening for — in a word — stargazing. (more…)

¶ Matins: What a weekend! I was about to say that it left me in need of a rest cure, but then I did a little research.

¶ Tierce: How sweet it is: Robert Crandall, the daimon of American Airlines during the glory days of deregulation, declares that only government intervention can save the airlines.

¶ Sext: The lost art of diagramming sentences: Sister Bernadette’s Barking Dog, at Portico.

¶ Vespers: Now that the Wi-Fi is working fairly reliably in the living room, I’m running the household from the secretary desk and staying on top of the paperwork.

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¶ Matins: In a column in Saturday’s Times, Gail Collins ended a characteristically wry roundup of geriatric Senatorial candidates (“The Revenge of Lacey Davenport“) with the following bit of common sense:

My theory is that the age issue is not all that huge a deal when it comes to legislators. If you’re old and in good shape, the big problem is that it’s hard to think about things in new ways. You tend to get better and better at a narrower and narrower set of skills.

Yes, but does this mean me?

¶ Tierce: The publisher to watch: Philip M Parker, compiler of more than 200,000 titles. They’re all available through Amazon, not that you’d want to read any of them quite yet. There’s a method to his madness, though…

¶ Sext: I’m contemplating a trip to Sleeve City.

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¶ Matins: JR continues to roll out his incredible pictures of Manhattan. I thought that this shot was some sort of “architect’s rendering,” but it’s really just the new Westin, on 42nd Street, there for anybody who will look.

¶ Tierce: Next Friday, the Pope outide my window.

¶ Sext: It’s only a movie — or is it? Set-designers re-create the 9/11 Tribute at St Paul’s.

¶ Vespers: Even though it didn’t start until 12:30 — an afternoon-denting time to go to the movies — I stayed uptown and went to see Smart People. I almost made a new friend at the concession stand…

¶ Compline: This week’s Friday Front, at Portico: Tony Judt on American Amnesia, in The New York Review of Books.

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¶ Matins: Did you know that Forsythia is a kind of olive? No, I didn’t, either.

¶ Tierce: Three items in the morning news, about: Googlegänger, people who have the same name as yours whom you contact or at least find out about via Internet search engine; the Tee-Pee Motel, in Wharton, Texas, restored by a Quick Pick winner (using $1.6 of his $47 million in winnings); and “the administration’s relentless antipathy for effective government,” this time manifested in a Census fiasco.

¶ Sext: Because I was running early, and the place hadn’t started to fill up for lunch, I got a table for one at JG Melon’s.

¶ Vespers: Goofing off most of the afternoon — but for a good cause. (Here’s a bit of Nanentertainment.)

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¶ Matins: The damned thing is: he’s right. “The offence seems to be not what I did but the fact that it became public.” Max Mosley on his forays into Sade-en lusts.

¶ Tierce: The state of play in neuroscience: we still learn most of what we know from brain failure. Frontotemporal dementia, for example, teaches art.

¶ Sext: I knew about the subway reefs, but not that they’d make such a big splash. (“Growing Pains for a Deep-Sea Home Built of Subway Cars,” by Ian Urbina.)

By the way, we’re having a gorgeous day here.

¶ Compline: Jason Kottke actually got in to Momofuku Ko.

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¶ Matins: James Wolcott isn’t feeling well. First he describes the symptoms. Then he evokes them, with descriptions of the bad movies that he has been watching from his sickbed.

¶ Tierce: The luxury branding crisis continues at the Ivies: “Elite Colleges Reporting Record Lows in Admission.” Catchy title, what? What they meant to say was “Record Highs in Rejection.”

¶ Nones: Grand & Brilliant Entertainment, starring (who else?) Nathan Lane: November, at Portico.

¶ Vespers: Off to Carnegie Hall this evening for Orpheus, with Felicity Lott.

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As they say in Texas: “All awning and no produce.”

¶ Matins: Pretty soon, Manhattan’s square footage will be too pricey for groceries. We shall be forced to subsist on caviar and foie gras. Bottled water? Forget it! Dom Perignon or die!

¶ Lauds: Kathleen and I were to check in, I thought, at about seven. By the time we actually connected, at about eight, I’d been through a full cycle of dread and despair. It turned out that Kathleen thought that we would talk when she got back from a cocktail party. The moment I heard her voice, of course, I forgot my worries.

¶ Tierce: Gail Collins predicts that Barack will lose interest in the fight before Hillary does: “I say her strategic desire to keep fighting trumps his strategic desire to put the lid on it.” Read her hilarious Op-Ed piece, in which “The Uncle Al Show” has nothing to do with a former vice-president.  

¶ Nones: Édouard visits Foxwoods in the universal language of photography, so you can see the nightmare for what it is. Scroll down a bit, through the sylvan pictures, until you find yourself asking, “What the hell is that?” It’s a casino, that’s what. In the middle of a forest. Una selva not nearly oscura enough.

¶ Compline: This isn’t news, I don’t suppose, but I just heard about it: all of Mad Magazine on two DVDs.

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Rob Bennett for the Times

While the rest of us are frazzled by spotty Internet connections, people too grand to know what a keyboard is have their own problems, too. For example, if you’re a top French businessman, your office is probably done in some sort of Louis XV style. (Luis Buñuel shared this information with everyone in the world in Le charme discret de la bourgeoisie.) How anxious-making, therefore, to learn that the “kingmaker” of Le Club des Cent (a roundtable of mercantile talons rouges) goes in for the seriously regal style of Louis XIV. Not only less comfortable but much, much more expensive.

¶ No Guillotines, Please; We’re Énarques.

And on this side of the pond, new neighbors at the Plaza are pining for the gilded backyard fence. Canasta, anyone? (You ought to have heard Kathleen snorting over this story, seen her roll her eyes. “Are these people mad?” she bellowed.)

¶ Condos at the Plaza.

Angel Franco for the Times

You’ll have to trust me on this, but I have long maintained that, in an era of cheap and fast communications, rivers leave much to be desired as political boundaries. Deserts and mountain wastes make much better frontiers, because distance trumps even the best-maintained stone walls when it comes to good neighborliness. Now, fresh evidence of my thesis comes straight from Ohio. Or is it Kentucky?

With any luck, the major Democratic Party candidates will take opposing positions on the future of the so-called Portsmouth Rock, thus introducing a healthy if novel note of substantive debate into the ongoing campaign.

As Guy Trebay’s piece in today’s Times points out, these gents ought to be getting their suits in the boys’ department.

Forget skinny models. Forget theories about the appeal of the undernourished silhouette in an age of obesity. Boomers have been dressing like boys since they were boys.

I suppose I’m just lucky that, when I was a boy, coats and ties were required, pretty much all the way through.

Suddenly, things are simpler. We’re down to four serious presidential candidates, two for each party. Once upon a time, their intramural competition for the two election spots would have taken place pretty much out of sight. Modern television news hadn’t discovered itself, hadn’t learned how different it was from print journalism. The process of self-discovery is still ongoing. Consider Fox News’s bundling of the Super Bowl on Super Sunday with the nationwide primaries on Super Tuesday. Super!

My aunt, like everyone I know, is very excited about Barack Obama. I would be, too, if it weren’t for Hillary Clinton. And if we weren’t seven or eight months away from the Democratic Party’s convention. Seven or eight months of fratricidal structure, conducted in full view of friend and foe alike! The prospect is so curdling that I take positive comfort in the “suspension” of John Edwards’s campaign. Perhaps, when the “black” candidate and the “woman” candidate have knocked each other out with their croquet mallets, Mr Edwards will return, to pose a serious threat to the Republican Party contender. Now that he is out of the race, however, the one thing that I am prolbablyh not going to do is follow my aunt’s advice and watch tonight’s debates.

Clearly I have become a deep-dyed cynic in my old age, like the Adolphe Menjou character in Frank Capra’s State of the Union — a film that I urge everyone to see every time a presidential election comes round. I really don’t care who’s in the White House so long aa it (a) is a Democrat but (b) is not Jimmy Carter. You would think that we don’t have to worry about the second part anymore, but Democrats have an alarming ability to bloom into Jimmy Carter hybrids. Mrs Clinton is just as tedious to listen to as the Georgia president, while Mr Obama has all of those outsider’s disadvantages.

If I were a normal person, I would find a candidate that I liked — at this point, with John Edwards out of the race, it would probably be Hillary Clinton (my mistrust of Barack Obama is as visceral as everyone else’s dislike of Hillary) — and content myself with hoping that she’d win in November. But I left that kindergarten behind a long time ago. I don’t allow myself to think how grand my favorite candidate would be in the White House any more than I waste my time plannint how I’d spend lottery winnings (it helps in the latter instance that I never buy tickets). I save that for the happy January day a little less than a year from now when, if things go well, a Democrat walks through the White House door.

Happily, I’ve got the victory party covered. My daugher has fixed the date for her wedding, a few days after the election. She may think that she’s just getting married, but if the right candidate wins, her nuptials will certainly be sailing a great wave of euphoria. And if not, I’ll still be happy as can be.

It will take a while, I expect, for a clear narrative to explain Jérôme Kerviel’s disastrous trades at SocGen. All we know now is that nobody can figure out how the young man contrived to hide his balloon of unauthorized bets. Well, we do know one other thing. It is mentioned in almost every news story, even though it has nothing to do with the wrongdoing. Mr Kerviel did not attend one of the Grandes Écoles — those redoubtable institutions that the Times this morning compared to Harvard and MIT. No; he attended a “business college in Lyon.” We all know that.

Isn’t it interesting that we all know that — that Mr Kerviel’s education (or lack of it) has been established as an integral part of his story? I wouldn’t want to be a French outsider trying to follow in the Breton clerk’s footsteps anytime soon, not while the portcullis of privilege, clattering shut even as we speak, bars entry to the Elysian fields of French advanced placement. It would be interesting to know the identity of the gatekeeper who made sure that early reports of SocGen’s losses gleamed with a detail that, however irrelevant, no journalist would be able to resist.