Although I do not yet own a Red Nano, I have already begun compiling an iTunes playlist entitled “Red Nano,” and when it gets big enough to fill 8 Gs, I’ll see to it that the name makes sense. The “Red Nano” playlist is comprised almost exclusively of instrumental works from the Baroque. I’m building it up by effectively dumping every Baroque-period CD that I own — and I own quite a few — into my new computer. In idle moments, I move things around, so that, when I’m done, I won’t be listening to two concerti grossi by Heinichen (a contemporary of Bach and Handel) in a row. Not to mention the dozens of Scarlatti sonatas that Scott Ross selected for his three-disc anthology, drawn from a colossal recording of all of them. (more…)

¶ Matins: Jason Kottke is attending The New Yorker Conference — not to be confused with the New Yorker Festival, which takes place in the Fall. The Conference is a pricey event — $1200 last year (meals included); $2000 this. Kathleen has encouraged me to go, but I’ve worried that I’d feel like a rich kid whom the big boys were tolerating even as they milked me. On the other hand, getting in on Davos-for-brainiacs while it’s still cheapish (and requires no serious travel) appeals mightily. So I am following Mr Kottke’s every word.

¶ Nones: I’ve seen a number of movies in the past five years that have made me ashamed to be an American, but The Visitor is the first film to make me ashamed of being a lawyer.

¶ Compline: What I really wanted to do late this afternoon was to start in on the weekend tidying. I’m on a roll in that department: every time the apartment is swept by my attentions, things are not only better-organized, but there are fewer of them. Instead, though, I dutifully digested Thomas Powers’s review of recent books about our Iraqi misadventure, for this week’s Friday Front.

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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: Five movies in one afternoon and evening — I tacked on Rushmore at the end. Even though I still haven’t got to the bottom of the NuLytely literbox, I’m ready for bed, and no longer hungry. The munchies passed at around nine o’clock, long before I started in on the Sauvignon Blanc.

¶ Nones: Well, that’s over — and LXIV and I celebrated with a lovely lunch afterward. Just when I was getting good at remembering Versed, they changed the anaesthetic to something called Propothal, about which I can find nothing very official on the Internet.

¶ Compline: Somehow, I managed to squeak through on the Book Review front. This week’s look, at Portico. (more…)

Just for the hell of it, I’m going with pineapple. Update: Film Festival Details below. (more…)

¶ Matins: A week to look forward to! Close encounters with fiber-optics! The worst will be over tomorrow, when I drain the dregs of a certain four-litre container.

¶ Tierce: “I’m With Stupid”? A Times/CBS poll brings forth my inner Dick Cheney:

While just 24 percent of voters said they thought the Wright issue would matter a lot or some to them in the fall, 44 percent said it would matter a lot or some to “most people you know.” And while just 9 percent of Democrats said the issue would matter a lot to them should Mr. Obama be their party’s nominee, even that small a slice of the electorate could be a problem for Mr. Obama if he won the nomination and the contest against Mr. McCain was close.

“So what?”

¶ Vespers: Working my way through the book pile, I read something that has been sitting around for about year, Joshua Henkin’s Matrimony.

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This lovely Sunday afternoon finds me, I’m sad to say, neither comfortable nor stretched, but stressed. Which is to say, overstretched. I couldn’t get out of bed this morning. Kathleen insists that I must have been tired, because I slept through most of the morning. But when I was awake, I was anxious. I’d pull up the blankets and hide.

Hide from what?  (more…)

Looking toward Midtown on a slightly hazy afternoon.

¶ 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: Today, I ascend to N! Will I regret it?

¶ Tierce: … And they don’t advertise. That’s part of how Steve & Barry’s, retailers with a price cap of $10 $8.98 per item, has become a billion-dollar company. What a chilling prospect for the Mad Men.

¶ Sext: Migs test-drives the latest in Philippine highways, and takes notes.

¶ Vespers: Where’s my hankie? Exxon Mobil’s first-quarter profits are so disappointing! (Other, more interesting news below the jump.)

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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: 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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Looking out the window yesterday morning, we couldn’t believe our luck — Megan’s luck and Ryan’s luck, particularly, of course, but really everybody’s luck. The sky lowered grey and bleak, taking us from early May to late March. Today is rather worse. If the wedding had  been a day later — or the weather a day earlier!

But the bad weather, in its way, is just as well, since my pleasure receptors are shot. I couldn’t be happier that yesterday was my day to tidy up the apartment: little or no thought required. Meanwhile, recollections of the wedding steep. (more…)

Mr & Mrs Ryan O’Neill

¶ Matins: It’s a little late for research, but anyone who wants to follow along with this morning’s festive ceremony can read the manual. If you think I’m going to look at it, you’re crazy. I’d flip out over my own misinterpretation of a (to me) unexpected term, and I wouldn’t be able to enjoy the wedding breakfast.

¶ Vespers: What a lovely day! From breakfast at ten — meeting Ryan’s delightful parents was nicer than anything on Balthazar’s boffo menu — to getting married at, gee, I don’t know, about one in the afternoon? And then walking down Broadway on the most radiant spring afternoon and having a nice long lunch under umbrellas overlooking New York Harbor (Statue of Liberty included). Home just before seven!

Mr & Mrs Ryan O’Neill….

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¶ Matins: When Kathleen heard what I wrote for Compline last night, she paid me the highest compliment by asking to listen to Vaughan Williams’s Serenade to Music.

¶ Tierce: A little story on the Times’s Web site about losses at Motorola made me wonder what could have gone wrong at the company that gave us the RAZR phone. A little googling turned up this entry at Engadget, in which a former employee, who worked for the late Chief Marketing Officer, Geoffrey Frost (did they really work him to death?), gives an inside view.

¶ Compline: Good news! Everything fits. My glen plaid suit and my fancy new shirt, which was only half as costly as the suit. I was a bit nervous about the shirt; maybe I wouldn’t be able to close the top button. I decided not to wait until tomorrow to find out. I shall sleep better as a result.

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¶ Matins: Friday’s plans have firmed up: we’re to be at Balthazar at ten. (Yes, Fossil Darling, that means you. I didn’t want to wake you up with the news.) Then we’ll troop down Centre Street to the Municipal Building and get hitched, those of us what aren’t. (I hereby promise: the next time Megan refers to our destination as “City Hall,” I won’t correct her.)

¶ Prime: My reward for going through all the mail this afternoon was discovering that I’m two weeks late to ensure that, when I renew our Orpheus subscriptions, we’ll get the same seats. I almost broke down and wept. First thing tomorrow!

¶ Tierce: I was going to bore you to death with remarks about Bob Herbert’s column in th Times (Dept of Idiocracy), but LXIV sent me a very entertaining link.

¶ Compline: The server that stores this site was down for a few hours this afternoon. When I was assured that The Daily Blague was “intact,” I shuddered to think of my extremely underdeveloped backup procedures.

Regular readers may want to make a note of Portico in their browsers’ “favorites” folders, because Portico runs from an entirely different server. If the outage had lasted much longer, I’d have posted a message at Portico. These things happen from time to time, and it’s when they do that the virtues of redundancy shine. (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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At La Grenouille, for Kathleen’s 55th.

We were very extravagant. A bottle of Gevry-Chambertin followed by a bottle of Margaux. Dover sole for Kathleen, the filet mignon special for me. The chocolate soufflé for Kathleen; pour moi, le pistache. They actually asked Kathleen where we’d been. If they’d asked me, I’d have had my answer ready: on était basquais. But Kathleen simply told them how her mother went there for lunch, and my mother went there for lunch, and how good everything was.

And it was good.

What a fleet of black, black cars swept down 87th Street this afternoon!

It’s a lovely day to be outside — really more like May or June than April — and while I can’t say that there were throngs of onlookers, there was enough of a crowd to make a big noise when the Papal stretch (not the Popemobile) drove by.

 

His Holiness had arrived at St Joseph’s by this point. First Avenue (a stretch of which can be seen between the crosswalks) was blocked for fifteen minutes or so, on a Friday afternoon. What a perishing jam that must have created.

I thought of that Italian movie, where Sophia Loren and Marcello Mastroianni spend the afternoon on a Roman rooftop during some big event during the Mussolini period. I, however, was for all but five minutes alone on our vast roof. Tenants who could have come up for a spacious, big-sky kind of experience (not to mention a better view of the goings-on) craned over their balcony railings for a passing glimpse. It’s true that the management does not encourage people to go up on the roof. But there’s a crowd every Fourth of July.

Una giornata particolare.  

Ah, more crying and screaming and shouting. The Pope must be on his way to wherever he’s spending the evening. The official part of the day is over.

¶ Matins: Le jour de mariage va arriver! Here, a week from tomorrow.

¶ Sext: If I were not more than a little distracted by happy family matters (see above and below), I’d search my sites for mentions of “Democratic Party, Death of.” That would be the index heading, if I had an index. Nicholas Kristoff’s Op-Ed piece shows how this demise was brought about by more than the Democratic Party’s candidates’ warring blows. Their candidacies reveal an ever more clear-cut split between “working people” Democrats and “progressive” Democrats. When I think what the postponed recognition of this divide spells for American justice, I weep.

¶ Nones: Wow! A friend just sent me a link to moo, and within half an hour I placed an order for mini-business cards, exactly what I’ve wanted and have been putting off designing. For a tad over $25 net, I’ll be getting one hundred cards.

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