What I’m really reading….

As Édouard writes, “la danse continue.” Although I absolutely refused to enter into the giddy Obamaphoria that seemed to have infected so many friends over the weekend and beyond, I was looking forward to the simplification that a Clinton defeat would afford. I’ve nothing against Hillary, but her persistent unpopularity in some quarters makes me sad, because it reminds me that in 2000 I was the only person I knew who loathed and feared George W Bush. Where were all the haters then?

But I can’t stay sad for long, because the following scene is stuck in my mind:

Their sidewalk procession had already attracted the stares of passers-by who were startled by the sight of the body flopping from side to side as the two men tried to prop it up, the police said. The late Mr. Cintron was dressed in a faded black T-shirt and blue-and-white sneakers. His pants were pulled up part of the way, and his midsection was covered by a jacket, the police said. While the two men were inside the check-cashing office, a small crowd had gathered around the chair. A detective, Travis Rapp, eating a late lunch at a nearby Empanada Mama saw the crowd and notified the Midtown North station house.

If you ask me, the perps in the case, James P O’Hare and David J Dalaia, both 65 and unemployed, ought to be cleared of all criminal charges and awarded the $355 that they sought to obtain by posthumously cashing Virgil Cintron’s Social Security Check. They have entertained their city no end, and deserve some sort of prize. Whether or not they’re bright enough to remain at large is another question, but jail is definitely not the place for these guys. (Read the story, “Corpse Wheeled to Check-Cashing Store Leads to 2 Arrests,” by Bruce Lambert and Christine Hauser.)

More odds and ends: my favorite reading chair is in pressing need of reupholstery. The patch of sunlight on the right arm sort-of hides a nasty wear, from which stuffing threatens to emerge. I shall miss this gay, Bermuda-colored pattern. But not the French nails.

Is Mahmoud Ahmadinejad rooting for the Republican Party in this year’s American presidential race? It would seem so. Units of the Iranian Revolutionary Guards Corps — the muscle behind the Iranian president’s mountebankery — harassed a convoy of American warships in the Straits of Hormuz, the bottleneck at the entrance to the Persian Gulf. It was a classic case of playing chicken by rattling sabres, but an American destroyer, the Hooper, came very, very close to firing upon one of the Iranian speedboats. It’s all very reminiscent of the Agadir Crisis of 1911. Well, not really — but you know what I mean. (Here is the somewhat hastily-filed story by Thom Shanker and Brian Knowlton.

Almost as old as the Agadir Crisis, attorney Martin Lipton, of Wachtell, Lipton, Rosen & Katz, appears to have been dishing out advice more suited to the run-up to World War I than to our better-ventilated times. The ageing mergers-and-acquisitions consigliere has even become the butt, according to Andrew Ross Sorkin’s column in today’s Times, of one of those Wall Street jokes.

The joke on Wall Street is that companies that hire Mr. Lipton eventually outperform their peers in the stock market because their entrenched C.E.O.’s end up getting fired. Call it the Marty Index.

Two stories from today’s front page would make me gloat if I were into Schadenfreude. Or if Schadenfreude were even on offer. The first, about warning-signs of a subprime lending fiasco that were repeatedly dismissed by libertarian boytoy, Alan Greenspan; the second, about black New Orleanians who have more or less finally cut the cord with their native city in the past year, giving the white population a majority that is not unwelcome to establishment movers and shakers. Way to go, Bushies!

For further information on the appropriated image of Nicholaes Ruts, to the left, check out Sir Gawain’s very provocative remarks about the novel at Heaven Tree. 

It is very tempting to stick out my tongue at the good people of Omaha and jeer, “I told you so.” Especially as my blood is up about a good woman’s implication* that people who aren’t Midwesterners might not be “strong and solid and sensible.” We’re pretty strong and solid and sensible in the Northeast — even in Manhattan. Forget the gun control issue. We believe that “lost pound puppies” are an unfortunate civic responsibility. And when people get “so depressed,” we tend not pay much attention to nonsense about “target practice.”

* See the end of the story.

Oscar Sosa/New York Times

The doctrine of Felony Murder is one of those troglodyte ideas that have come down to us from the Bad Old Days. It has been abolished in most of the other major Common Law markets (so to speak) — England in 1957; India and Canada thereafter. According to the aggressive version of this doctrine that holds in Florida, accessories to murder share full culpability. The guy who drives the getaway car, notoriously, is as guilty as the shooter.

Even the guy who lends the getaway car, it seems. If Adam Liptak’s story about Ryan Holle’s bad luck doesn’t put your bowels in an uproar, then you have no conscience.

Did I say “bad luck”? Ho ho! Could it be that Mr Holle, a black man, was unlucky to be charged with felony-murder in Florida?

The Duce of Duck? (Darren McCollister/Getty Images)

Senator Joseph Biden quipped last month that there are only three components in a Rudy Giuliani sentence: a noun, a verb, and “9/11.”

To that formulation, Times reporter Michael Cooper suggests that we qualify the former mayor’s statistical claims as “incomplete, exaggerated, or just plain wrong.”

Call it the Biden-Cooper rule for short: every claim by Rudy Giuliani involving 9/11 is wrong.

Sarah Krulwich/The New York Times

The stagehands’ strike is over at last — at any rate, it’s “over”; the settlement has to be ratified by the rank and file. So. Who won? What was accomplished? Let’s see what the Times has to say.

But among the changes the league was able to achieve, according to officials involved in the talks, was a daily minimum of 17 stagehands on the load-in, the lengthy and costly period when a production is loaded into a theater. In the recently expired contract, producers would set a number of stagehands needed for a load-in — say, 35 — and all of them would have to stay every day for the entirety of the load-in, an arrangement that producers said often left large groups of stagehands with nothing to do.

Now, I’m sure that this means something. Campbell Robertson, who wrote the story, is one of the newspaper’s great stylists. If I worked in the theatre world, I’d know exactly what the “league” of theatre producers obtained in these negotiations. As it is, I have the vague idea that they don’t have to pay as many stagehands (for doing “nothing) while a new show is mounted. I can’t see, thanks to my lack of professional expertise, is the missing sentence that says (I think) something like this: “Having hired as many as 35 stagehands at the beginning of the load-in, the producers are free fir the first time to reduce that complement later to a number that suits their needs, or to a minimum of 17, whichever is higher.” 

The strike cost everybody millions of dollars. Broadway revenues were a trickle of their seasonal gush. The City alone is said to have lost about $40 million in indirect revenues. So we’re all glad that the strike is over, and that the lights will be shining brightly on the Great White Way. Mr Robertson’s story captures the euphoria of the moment, as bitter opponents smile, shake hands, and make nice. I just wish I had a clearer picture of what happened.

Ozier Muhammad/The New York Times

While the nincompoops in charge at Citigroup contemplate another, more extensive round of layoffs, putting thousands of people out of a job while remaining cushily compensated themselves, the Manhattan district attorney’s office has announced the indictment of Anthony Marshall, Brooke Astor’s son. You have to have been living under a rock not to hear tell of Mr Marshall’s alleged misappropriations; in the course of administering his failing mother’s estate, Mr Marshall is said to have channeled “millions” of dollars into pockets closer to his own than was fit and proper. Together with a rapscallion-sounding amigo, formerly disbarred attorney Francis X Morrissey — with a name like that, one is either a cardinal or a criminal — the late doyenne’s octogenarian son appears to have chased thrills only guessed at by Max Bialystock (of The Producers), mounting at least two very successful shows on Broadway.

Priorities in order — check.

Surely this matter ought never have gone beyond the civil-trial stage. Mr Marshall has undoubtedly made the mistake of allowing his self-interest to do his accounting for him. It also seems that he was a bit churlish about taking care of a mother whom, unlike her circle of friends, he neither idolized nor sentimentalized. And it is almost irresistible, finally, to attribute the collapse of such respectability as he possessed to a scheming younger wife: Charlene Marshall’s ample figure appears to be an apt symbol of her willingness to consume her husband’s largesse (source: his mother’s property). This is Harry and Leona all over again, no? She‘s the one who ought to be indicted. Let the doddering old man enjoy his last years in peace!

I cannot bring myself to agree that this family tragedy without actual victims warrants the attentions of the Elder Abuse unit of the district attorney’s office. Slaps on the wrist, disgorgements all round, and a blitz of humiliation for the vicar’s ex-wife — the public circus deserves no less. But criminal sanctions betray a lack of sense, specifically a sense of humor. From the very beginning, I have found the Marshall Affair to be rich in dark humor, the tale of a geriatric Pinocchio. I’ll have to stop laughing, though, if Mr Marshall is clapped behind bars.

Unidentified blossoms hanging from a pergola: pergolaniums?

Here at the Buccaneer, excerpts from the New York Times are stapled to the back of a daily calendar. The little items are always the keenest.

Every year at about this time there is a story about the crazy things that big law firms are doing in order to hold onto talented associates. Lynnley Browning’s report on the latest nonsense put Kathleen’s eyelids on the fritz. She looked amazingly stroke-like.

Even lawyers need a hug. When workdays stretch into worknights and the pressure to meet the quota for billable hours grows, lawyers and staff members at the firm of Perkins Coie can often expect a little bonus.

In Perkins Coie’s Chicago office, members of the firm’s “happiness committee” recently left candied apples on everyone’s desks. Last month, the happiness committee surprised lawyers, paralegals and assistants in the Washington office with milkshakes from a local Potbelly Sandwich Works, a favorite lunch spot.

Another story had me sighing over the simplicities of youth.

“We are pack rats who are evolving,” said Matthew Birnbaum, a 33-year-old chef who lives in the West Village, cocking an eyebrow at the acrylic desk organizers, storage containers and place mats he and his wife, Jennifer, 28, were carrying through the crowd at the Muji SoHo store on Friday.

“We’re reducing clutter and selling all our stuff on eBay,” Ms. Birnbaum added, explaining that they would continue selling their possessions until their apartment held nothing that wasn’t used daily.

If only it were that simple! Unfortunately, as I expect this bright young couple will discover (probably after a painful break-up), one must be living the life of a gerbil in a cage in order to do without the household impedimenta that aren’t “used daily.”

A better idea, which I have found to be very successful, is to gather up the contents of the kitchen drawers and lay them out on trays. Put the trays in a room other than the kitchen. As you take things from the trays in order to use them, put them back in the drawers. At the end of a week, or two weeks, or whatever period seems right to you, stash whatever’s left on the trays in a “special item” box. You can store this box out of the way, as long as you remember where it is. Over the next two years, transfer any “special items” that you actually use to some other place. Then get rid of what’s left. Admit that you’re never going to get serious about cake decoration. After all, isn’t that why you live in New York City? Where there are hundreds of people who decorate cakes full time?

Yes, I really did say “two years.” Patience!

At last: a news item from our own corner of the Blogosphere, not yet reported in the Times.

Mig at Metamorphosism has made a queasy discovery. Clicking on the link in his entry, “I was afraid of this,” (“Welcome to the canon”) will take you to a sort of Internet syllabus for the Fourth Grade Marine Biology Unit at the Wilmette [Illinois] public schools. You will find a table filled with the names of various fish. Click on “Flying Fish 2,” and you’re back at Metamorphosism, for Mig’s drolly mock-scientific entry. Among the “facts” noted about the flying fish:

This sounds an awful lot like surfing, which is done for fun, not to escape predators, man.

As the entry proceeds, it becomes ever more mired in yearning existential uncertainty.

[The flying fish] wonders, did walks calm its father this much? Walks at night? Are they as good as walks at dawn, the flying fish wonders. Because the light at dawn, not bad man. The clarity, the shine of the world. The swans. The way ducks look small and insufficient next to a swan, although they probably think the swans are way too big and prone to bird flu and a bad color – white – that gets dirty way too easy, while the swans maybe think, eat my wake, duck.

Let’s see, do any of my law school friends have kids in these schools? It’s a possibility – although grandchildren are getting to be more likely. Or we could try to get a saving note to Mr Elman.

Gail Collins is absolutely right.

We aren’t going to solve the problem [of child care] during this presidential contest, but it is absolutely nuts that it isn’t a topic of discussion – or even of election-year pandering.

Do read her column in today’s Times, “None Dare Call It Child Care*.” It got me to thinking. Let’s get out a piece of paper and pencil and try to write down ten reasons why “child care” is such an open sore. Everybody recognizes the cause of the problem (few middle class families can support themselves on one spouse’s income alone), and its side-effects (poorly paid, unlicensed caregivers) are certainly well known. What’s the problem?

(Continue reading at Portico.)

Actually, this isn’t about Jersey drivers so much as it is about driving in Jersey.  

What is it with Jersey roads? Drive around the state for a few days, and you won’t wonder why insurance premiums are among the highest in the land. From Richard G Jones’s “2 Truck Drivers Die in Crash in New Jersey.”

The chief said the eastbound lanes had recently been resurfaced. “This is a typical accident out here,” he said.

Asked how often his department responded to serious accidents in the area, he replied, “Daily.”

People who live near the highway are also familiar with the sound of sirens and the sight of traffic tie-ups while accidents are being cleared. Some residents, though, said the crash on Monday was especially unnerving because of the amount of smoke and flames and the sound of the collision, which reverberated in homes half a mile away.

New Jersey needs its own ministry of ponts & chaussées.

From an article about Russia’s slide “toward a more authoritarian system” in today’s Times.

Tanya Lokshina, the chairwoman of a Russian human rights organization, the Demos Center for Information and Research, was among those who met with Ms. Rice on Saturday. She said that given the focus on security matters, the meeting with rights campaigners had been mostly symbolic.

She contended that the United States had “lost the high moral ground,” and thus should join with European countries to make it clear to Mr. Putin that a drift further away from democracy was unacceptable diplomatically.

“The American voice alone doesn’t work anymore,” she said after the meeting. “The Russians are not influenced by it.” She said Ms. Rice had bristled at the criticism, replying sharply, “We never lost the high moral ground.”

Whatever you say, Condi.

Fifteen years ago, the cinquecentennial of a certain “discovery” in 1492 was brushed over by pundits everywhere: Columbus had become an embarrassment to a militantly post imperial age. I couldn’t help thinking that it was just bad timing, and today I am proved right, by a story in the Times by Amy Harmon, “Seeking Columbus’s Origins With a Swab.”

In 2004, a Spanish geneticist, Dr. Jose A. Lorente, extracted genetic material from a cache of Columbus’s bones in Seville to settle a dispute about where he was buried. Ever since, he has been beset by amateur historians, government officials and self-styled Columbus relatives of multiple nationalities clamoring for a genetic retelling of the standard textbook tale.

The Times lists, in graphic form, the five most likely theories of Columbus’s background: the Genoese, the Catalan, the Portuguese, the Majorcan, and the Jewish. At the bottom of this list, there’s a lovely bouquet of other possibilities, one that ends with the Times’s own Manhattan-inflected whimsy:

Columbus may have been the son of Pope Innocent VIII or the King of Poland. He may trace his origin to the Balaeric island of Ibiza, or the Mediterranean island of Corsica [!!!!!]. He could be from Greece or Norway. Or. for that matter, from anywhere that people have DNA.

D’you see what I mean about timing? in 1992, Columbus was the European oppressor of indigenous Americans. But, just as there was hardly any Internet in those long-ago days (1992, not 1492), so the sleuthing possibilities of DNA had hardly begun to register on the popular consciousness. Now, however, having discovered for certain that “Anna Andersen” was not the Archduchess Anastasia of Russia, the world is clamoring to establish the true nature of Columbus’s own indigenuity.

¶ It’s great to read, in an AP story from Strasbourg, that Abdullah Gul, the Turkish president who made Turkey’s liberal elites shake in their shoes earlier this year, only to win a handy victory in August, is committed to revising Turkey’s Article 103, the controversial law that criminalizes “insults to Turkish identity” – whatever that means. The international attention that was focused on Turkey during the dark days in which Nobel Prize winner Orhan Pamuk was up for trial for violating 103 appears to have embarrassed Turkish cultural conservatives into reconsidering the law, which is something of a vague but blunt instrument that leaves too much power in the hands of opportunistic prosecutors.

“No one is going to prison for expressing their views freely,” [Mr Gul] told representatives of the council. The Council of Europe, which has 47 member states, seeks to develop common and democratic principles based on the European Convention on Human Rights and other documents.

That’s good to hear. Now, let’s see what actually happens.

¶ Neela Banerjee’s “Panel Says Episcopalians Have Met Anglican Directive” is not, unfortunately, the easiest story to follow, but after sifting through it several times I came to the conclusion that the presiding bishop of the Episcopal Church, Katherine Jefferts Schori, is playing Bushie games when she claims to be “gratified” that the American church’s panel has opted to comply with Anglican Communion strictures on recent liberalizing moves. It pains me to say this, because my sympathies are all with the supporters of W Gene Robinson, gay bishop of New Hampshire – and because I become positively redneck when I think that a gang of African prelates whose not-so-distant ancestors, at least according to Evelyn Waugh, were probably cannibals, are directing the affairs of a venerable American sect. It would appear, however, that the Communion conservatives are right to cock an eyebrow at Bishop Jefferts Schori’s conciliatory utterances. As Ms Banerjee’s editor, I’d have yanked “victory” from her opening sentence.

Nothing could be more conclusive proof of my bourgeois degeneracy than my heartwarmed response to a story in today’s Times about the recaptured grandeur of the Paramount Ballroom in Shanghai. Built in 1933, the dance palace almost immediately began to slide, and the fun stopped completely in 1956, but somehow the building survived, and lived to be restored by a Taiwanese businessman in 2001. Zhao Shichong invested three million dollars in the restoration of the Paramount, (They laugh at me when I predict that Taiwan is going to take over China in a bloodless IPO…)

Howard W French’s story, “Where West Met East, and Then Asked for a Dance,” predictably reports the reappearance, as if from cryogenic preservation, of pre-Communist-era dandies and tai-tais who claim to need no other exercise to maintain their svelte figures. But we hear nothing of young people discovering the ancient glamour on their own. I have a bunch of Yao Li CDs, if anyone wants to get in the mood.

I had no particular desire to visit Shanghai until I read about the Paramount this morning. Now I wish I had a full head of hair just so that I could slick it back with Brylcreem. Pretty soon, I’ll be looking svelte, too. I’m sure that Kathleen will lend me to a respectable matron, particularly since my cha-cha is still in fine form.

What’s heart-warming about the return of the Paramount is the rediscovery, in so many places around the world, of good old-fashioned fun. Fun was so not Mid-Twentieth Century – and don’t let them tell you otherwise. Maoism was so pervasive in those earnest days that I was genuinely shocked, when I began paying attention to the lyrics in the early Sixties, that Queen Victoria had not ordered Gilbert and Sullivan to be burned at the stake for committing the sacrilege of The Mikado.

I don’t know how many Shanghainese actually call the ballroom “Paramount.” It wouldn’t be the easiest thing to say. Mr French has been kind enough to supply the Putonghua (Mandarin) version: “Bai Le Men,” or “Gate of a Hundred Pleasures.”

Last May, The New Yorker published an article, “The CSI Effect,” by Jeffrey Toobin, about the really rather shaky foundations on modern forensic science. It turns out that hair, for example, is usually pretty uninformative as evidence. Fibers shed by clothes and upholstery aren’t much better. Aggressive prosecutors (pardon the tautology) are past-masters at finessing the doubts that crime lab technicians might have about their own findings. It turns out that the triumphs of dispositive clues on TV crime shows are about as realistic as your basic Seventies sitcom.

I was heartened, therefore, to read this morning that states are buckling down, not only on crime labs, but on lineup procedures and the use of DNA evidence. According to Solomon Moore’s sotry, “DNA Exoneration Leads to Change in Legal System,”

Nationwide, misidentification by witnesses led to wrongful convictions in 75 percent of the 207 instances in which prisoners have been exonerated over the last decade, according to the Innocence Project, a group in New York that investigates wrongful convictions.

The great thing about all of this is changes are being mandated by state legislatures, not by courts. I’m second to none in believing that judicial activism is our ultimate bulwark against profound social injustice, but in a well-run democracy that fallback is rarely if ever necessary, because legislatures do what they’re supposed to do: pass intelligent laws.

Cheering as this news is, it oughtn’t to deflect our attention from the fact that the far dirtier blot on American justice is the shameless exploitation of unconscionably broad drug laws to incarcerate African Americans.

You can’t say that the top brass never learns. After the failure of the Deepwater project, in which eight cutting-edge patrol boats were hauled out of the water because they were riddled with design and structural flaws, the Coast Guard decided to take an unusually early look at its new line of ships, called “national security cutters.” It was not pleased with what it found. Eric Lipton’s update, “Early Flaws Seen in New Coast Guard Cutter,” of a story scooped the other day by Wired is not his most lucid, but it does convey the man in the street’s dilemma. Ought we to be pleased that problems have been detected before billions have gushed into Lockheed Martin sinkholes, or should he lament the American soi-disant “advanced technology company” is supporting our troops and our nation with vessels compromised by “design flaws and improper installation of cables for its classified communications systems”?

Half full, or halp empty?

Ho, my hearties! Don your foul-weather gear! Our shores are about to be swept by Hurricane Tania – not a weather system, but a Force Five Scandal, all the deadlier for appearing, at present, to be free of pecuniary drag. The sentimentality about “9/11” (a semi-mythical event, replete with more heroes than the Iliad, but with tenacious roots in fact) is about to clash with the too-long leashed hounds of critical thinking.

Until just the other day, Tania Head, one of the very few survivors from a tower at or just above the point where the jetliners struck, was the president of the Survivors’ Network. There is no sugggestion that she has done anything wrong (such as misappropriating funds – it’s not even clear how she has supported herself) in this office, but there is also no suggestion, beyond her own, that her story of what happened on the 78th floor of the South Tower bears an iota of truth.

In their Times story, “In a 9/11 Survival Tale, the Pieces Just Don’t Fit,” David Dunlop and Serge F Kovalevski portray a woman who exploited the city’s psychological disarray to create a new identity for herself. Heartwarming and heartbreaking in equal measure, Ms Head’s story worked like an “open, sesame,” to give her entrée to a ring at the circus of grief that became our obligatory entertainment for a few months before it was decided by harder heads that it was time to “move on.”

Ms Head claims to have attended Stanford and Harvard, but her multiple CVs suggest a fabulist without benefit of university training. Eventually and inevitably, a couple of journalists got interested in trying to patch her anecdotes into a coherent quilt. They couldn’t. Let’s see if, say, Rudy can.

One begins to suspect that, if anyone can keep Rudy Giuliani out of the White House, it’s Times columnist Clyde Haberman. In today’s piece, “Call Him an Oddball if You Must, but Do Call,” Mr Haberman recounts the following extraordinary lapse in common sense – “extraordinary,” except that it has already happened once before on the campaign.

Non-New Yorkers got a taste of it the other day when Mr. Giuliani interrupted his speech — a very important speech — to the National Rifle Association in Washington. His cellphone rang. It was his wife, Judith. Smack in the middle of his talk, he whipped out the phone.

“Hello, dear,” he said in a syrupy voice. “I’m talking to the members of the N.R.A. right now. Would you like to say hello?” He listened, and laughed. “I love you, and I’ll give you a call as soon as I’m finished, O.K.?” he said. He listened a bit more. “O.K., have a safe trip. Bye-bye. Talk to you later, dear. I love you.”

Campaign aides said it was a spontaneous moment, with Mrs. Giuliani calling just before she boarded a plane.

Granted, lots of people call loved ones before a flight. But a presidential candidate doesn’t shut off his phone, and instead takes a call, in the middle of a major speech? The episode was so bizarrely cutesy-poo that more than a few people in the audience went, Eeeww! Nor was it an isolated incident; the same thing happened in Florida three months ago.

Mr Giuliani is behaving as ridiculously as the reformed-roué papa in Sandy Wilson’s The Boy Friend.