¶ 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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Shortly before noon, while I was finishing up the weekend papers, the phone rang. It was Fossil Darling, calling from Midtown on his cell phone. Reluctantly shopping — the Fossil hates shopping — he would be having lunch at the Brasserie for lunch afterward. He’d talk to me again when he got home.

He called back two minutes later. Syms wasn’t open yet, so he and his party were heading straight for lunch. Fossil said that he was famished.

— Why don’t you jump in a taxi and join us.
— I thought you were never going to ask.
— Well, I didn’t know what time we’d get there.
— Here I was, asking myself what kind of friend, knowing that I’d been alone for the entire weekend, wouldn’t ask me to join him for lunch, but then I know the answer to that: the kind of friend I’ve been putting up with for over forty years!

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St Joseph’s Church, site of a Papal visit (not, one hopes, a visitation!) this coming Friday.

¶ 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: Ms Cornflower is not as lucky with her new dishwasher as I have been with the new computer. Even if it didn’t work — and it does, just fine — the new computer would not flood the blue room with suds. My heart do go out.

¶ Sext: Kathleen, expects to fly on American Airlines to North Carolina this weekend, to visit her parents. I wonder if she’ll be able to get there.

¶ Vespers: After a quiet day of reading and minding the domestic front (isn’t that a nicer way of referring to “paperwork”?), I’m going to try to finish watching Ha-Buah (The Bubble), an Israeli movie that I rented the other day. Whose idea was it to print the subtitles in yellow?

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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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The flagstaff at Carl Schurz Park, captured in an impromptu reflection pool.

¶ Matins: How about those bloggers, dropping off like flies? (“In Web World of 24/7 Stress, Writers Blog Till They Drop“) No reader of Michael A Banks’s Blogging Heroes, the Takli Makan of this year’s morning read, will be surprised by the news that technews bloggers live like unhappy hamsters.

¶ Tierce: Zose Mosleys vill neffer learn! Grand prix racing czar Max Mosley‘s grandmother, Lady Redesdale, was inured to reading about her daughters’ antics (especially his mother’s) in the newspaper, but this story would probably have given her a nasty turn.

¶ Sext: Surely the most interesting story in the works right now — far outclassing our presidential election — is the run-up to the Beijing Olympics. If you ask me, Liu Qi was out of his mind when it lobbied for the honor of hosting the games.

¶ Vespers: It’s over when the little man squeaks. Sheldon Silver nixes Congestion Pricing.

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¶ Matins: Good News! 81% of Americans think that We Have a Problem, Houston. Bad News: 100% of my new computer is dead.

¶ Vespers: As I thought, it was the power supply — and I didn’t break it. (Not that I’m going to put the waste-paper basket next to the CPU a second time.) Now maybe I should try to get into Momofuku Ko.

¶ Compline: A nice photo to look at, late on a Friday night — another one of JR’s super black-and-white shots of New York, taken on his visit here last fall (je crois). Kathleen used to work across the street, at 599 Lex.
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¶ Matins: How much weight will I have to lose to slip into these fetching Milanese outfits?

¶ Tierce: How I wish I’d been blogging ten years ago! Then I’d be able to post a link to my prediction that Sanford Weill’s Citigroup agglomerations, unveiled with much trumpeting at the time, would turn out to be supercalifragilistic. It was obvious that the merger titan had no interest in the hard slog of expialidocious.  

¶ Nones: Goodbye, solo computer, Hello, KVM!

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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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¶ Matins: Kathleen’s off to Flah-dah in the morning. She’s staying at 100 Chopin Plaza.

¶ Prime: I was so busy over the weekend that I still haven’t read the paper. I had to come across a link to this at kottke.org. In the Times, the article is entitled “A Guide to the French. Handle With Care.” My own title: When Seven out of Eight of the Following Propositions Hold True Here, New York Will Finally Be More Civilized Than Anglophone.”

¶ Tierce: Didn’t you love The Kite Runner, by Khaled Hosseini? No? Meg Wolitzer may be able to tell you why.

¶ Sext: Father Tony agonizes over apostrophes. Is the plural of “CD” CD’s or CDs? I’m resolutely for the latter, but it makes my friend uncomfortable. He has found a link to “the rule,” which is correct so far as it goes.

¶ Nones: The Hong Kong of the Hudson? You’re joking! This is Gotham City, surely! Be sure to click through Gothamist to the Big Apple list of no fewer than ninety-eight nicknames for Old Nieuw Amsterdam. What’s this? “The Frog and Toe“?

¶ Vespers: The reviews appeared side-by-side in the Arts section of yesterday’s Times; how curious it was to have been to both evenings of chamber music. To give some idea of how different they were, in their wonderful ways, I’ve written them up together.  

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¶ Matins: Now with 200% more 1929! Let’s live it up with Doubledown!

¶ Sext: Has anyone ever sent you a Jacquie Lawson card via an e-mail attachment?

¶ Nones: Once again, JR (mnémoglypes) shows that he really “gets” America.

¶ Compline: Books on Monday: The Learners, by Chip Kidd, at Portico.

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Kathleen’s Aunt Marcia peered into my kitchen a few years ago and said to me, “I don’t know how you cook all that in here.” My father-in-law still says the same thing.

Today, I said it myself. We had Julia Child’s mushroom soup; a Hollandaise course (salmon soufflé with steamed asparagus); roast leg of lamb, with Mrs Crumb’s “mint jelly” and a rice dish that might have been a risotto but, by the time I served it, was more of a soubise; and chocolatey desserts from Greenberg’s.

(Damn! I forgot to divvy up the chocolate chip cookies! )

I tried to defend my having gone to see College Road Trip — Fossil Darling called it (my having gone) a “disgrace” — by arguing that I have to compensate for “these snobby things” that “I have.” Megan almost burped. “‘These snobby things’? You make it sound as though they could be contained!”

We did have a lovely afternoon, and I am the luckiest father of the bride in the world. That’s to say that Megan is very lucky — at least as lucky as I was when I met Kathleen.

How’s that for white on white? Sky owns a regular reader of The Daily Blague, and lives in the vicinity of Pittsburgh. Perhaps his pet will tell us a little about him…

Landscape with the Ashes of Phocion (detail), by Nicolas Poussin (1648)

A few weeks ago, Édouard paid a visit to the Poussin and Nature show at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, where he took a very good look at the picture from which I have extracted a detail, above, Poussin’s Landscape with the Ashes of Phocion. Who, Édouard asked, is that man in over on the right, holding on to a tree?

Pourquoi a-t-il une telle tête de fou ou de psychosé ? On ne sait pas.

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In beautiful downtown Niantic, the splendid Morton Hotel.

¶ Matins: It was great to get out of town, and I really must get out more often — especially to New England. On Friday night, though, I was very glad to be in town. Listening to the Philadelphia Orchestra at Carnegie Hall.

¶ Tierce: So, there’s a Gold’s Gym in Haiti. It’s not for everyone, though. Why does this example of global free-market capitalism seem so totally unprogressive?

¶ Sext: Rah! Rah! Rah! My prep school’s latest claim to fame! Go Cecil! (Blair’s development office must be thrilled by this — development.)

¶ Vespers: How cool is that: your cell phone is your boarding pass! (The airline sends you a message containing a two-dimensional bar code that’s very hard to counterfeit.)

¶ Compline: Souvenir of the Weekend Past: a song that I had never heard in my life. I even thought that Riann was making it up. But Kathleen sang it lustily when I asked her about it last night. In her day, “boppin'” was replaced by “bashin’.”

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