¶ Matins: Of all the outgoing Administrations that I have known, none has excited the prosecutorial zeal of its opponents as keenly as the current one. Bringing the Bush Administration to justice was the main topic in yesterday’s Week in Review section of the Times, with pieces by three visiting commentators and a remonstrance by Frank Rich. Something must be done.

¶ Lauds: The Golden Globes… The Carpetbagger reports.

¶ Prime: Sic transit. Quite a few of the blogs indexed at nycbloggers.com for my subway stop have closed up, or not featured a new entry in a year or two.

¶ Tierce: In a nice gesture, Bernard Madoff apologized to his fellow co-op owners at 133 East 64th Street: Sorry about that scrum of reporters at the door!

¶ Sext: I’ll say one thing for Joe the Plumber, currently “reporting” from Israel: he’s walking proof that a little knowledge is a dangerous thing — in front of a microphone, anyway. If people must be entitled to their opinions, then at least they ought to have the decency to acknowledge that their opinions are uneducated. (via Joe.My.God)

¶ Nones: Good news from Thailand: voters seem inclined to heal the urban/rural rift. Even more, the now-more-powerful government  won’t let itself get carried away.

¶ Vespers: Katherine Anne Porter (1890-1980) has achieved official immortality, in the form of a Library of America volume. The book appeared in September, but William H Gass just got round to discussing it.

¶ Compline: Let’s hope the same can never be said of Barack Obama: “After Receiving Phone Call From Olmert, Bush Ordered Rice To Abstain On Gaza Ceasefire Resolution.” Secretary Rice had carefully negotiated the wording of the resolution, only to have the rug pulled out from under her because of an imperative call from Israel.

(more…)

¶ Matins: It’s as though everyone decided to spend the holidays pretending that things were fine: now that we’re back in the real world, the disasters just pile up like planes over O’Hare. “China Losing Taste for Debt From the U.S.”

¶ Lauds: Once upon a time, the Germans copied the French: Imperial princelings replicated, to the extent that their incomes would allow, Louis XIV’s country house (and stealth capitol) at Versailles. Now the Germans have taken the initiative, and the French are just watching.

¶ Prime: The (only) good thing about Web log awards is the chance to discover sites that you haven’t heard about. I don’t remember the category in which I came across Dizzying Intellect — the categories are utterly spurious in any case — but it doesn’t matter, because I found it.

¶ Tierce: Too big to filch? Bernard Madoff has been making unauthorized distributions of assets, according to prosecutors. His attorneys claim that the Cartier watches are relatively inexpensive sentimental items that Mr Madoff would like his family to have. In the dictionary, under the word “chutzpah”…. Alex Berenson reports.

 ¶ Sext: The thing to note about developer Fred Milani — if you can get beyond the House — is that he is “not very political.” Exactly! No politically-minded person would erect a scaled-down adaptation — “replica” is not the word — of the “President’s House.” The politically-minded person would be interested only in the real thing. And that’s not all…

¶ Nones: Trying to find an update on the violence in Greece that the Times reported the other day — it’s coverage, dismayingly, is better than that of the English papers that I’ve checked, as well as the BBC’s — I discover that the Turkish government has rounded up a bunch of secularist critics and accused them of fomenting a plot. This story does come from the BBC.

¶ Vespers: I’ve done just about nothing today but read Brian Morton’s first novel, The Dylanist. Published in 1991, this is a novel to dust off and re-read in the Age of Obama, not so much for any specific political alignment as for its portraits of people who are too richly principled for cynicism.

(more…)

¶ Matins: Here’s hoping that no regular readers of The Daily Blague were under the illusion that the Cold War was “won” — and by US! Andrew Kramer reports on the cold Cold War.

¶ Lauds: The year in music: Steve Smith sums up 2008.

¶ Prime: The last thing you need is yet another blog to check out, but I’m afraid that you’ll have to make room on your list for Scouting New York — at least if you have any interest whatsoever in this burg of ours. The site is kept by a professional location scout — what a dream job! (There are no dream jobs, but we don’t have to know that.

¶ Tierce: A story that I’m afraid I was expecting to see: “State’s Unemployment System Buckles Under Surging Demand.” That the outage was repaired later the same day is not the point.

¶ Sext: Will nonbelievers spend eternity at the back of a bus? 800 London buses will begin bearing “atheist” messages, such as “There is probably no God. Now stop worrying and enjoy your life.” Sarah Lyall reports.

¶ Nones: Oops! Another I-Lied accounting story, this one involving Satyam, the outsourcing firm that provides back-office services to “more than a third of the Fortune 500 companies.” Heather Timmons reports, with Bettina Wassner.

¶ Vespers: Don’t ask what has taken me so long, but I’ve gotten round at last to adding Koreanish to the blog roster. It is kept by novelist Alexander Chee, author of Edinburgh. Yesterday, he posted an entry from this years MLA convention in San Francisco.

¶ Compline: Stanley Fish lists his favorite American movies of all time. Of the ten, only Vertigo makes my list. I don’t begin to understand the appeal of John Wayne, and I could never omit Katharine Hepburn, Bette Davis, Cary Grant, or Fred Astaire, not to mention Preston Sturgis.

(more…)

¶ Matins: Mark my words: this is the beginning of something good: Web/House calls by physicians in Hawaii.

¶ Lauds: When I was growing up, art was something that fruity, suspect men couldn’t help producing — the  byproduct of diseased minds. The people around me wished that art would just stop. Even I can hardly believe how unleavened the world was in those days. How nice it would have been to have Denis Dutton’s new book come to the rescue: The Art Instinct: Beauty, Pleasure and Human Evolution.  

¶ Prime: My friend Jean Ruaud, who happens to be the best photographer I know, spent the holidays in Houston, the city where I lived for almost a decade but haven’t visted in seventeen years. Even though most of the pictures — all of the ones that don’t feature Downtown — are completely unfamiliar, they’re also distinctly More of the Same.  

¶ Tierce: It’s official.

For those New Yorkers who wondered what the Manhattan real estate market might be like without the ever-rising bonuses of Wall Street’s elite, the answer is now emerging: an abrupt decline in transactions, tottering prices and buyers who are still looking but unwilling to sign a contract.

Josh Barbanel reports.

¶ Sext: The reported discovery of a circle of standing stones forty feet below the surface of Lake Michigan is more than a little intriguing. Quite aside from what the site tells us about prehistoric society, there’s the matter of protecting the site. How do you restrict access to an underwater location? (via kottke.org)

¶ Nones: “Activists” have become “gunmen” in Greece. Anthee Carassava reports.

¶ Vespers: At Maud Newton, Chad Risen mourns the shuttering of the Nashville Scene book page. Hang-wringing news, certainly. I can’t say, though, that I agree with this:

Blogs are great, and in some ways better than book sections, but there’s nothing like a book page in a local, general-interest publication to “cross-pollinate” interest among people who might otherwise never come across serious discussions of the printed word.

This sounds like a paper fetish to me.

¶ Compline:There are two items about the Catholic Church in today’s Times, and although they seem to tell very different stories, I’m not so sure that they do. The first is Abby Goodnough’s report on “rebellious” parishioners who have occupied their church in order to keep the Boston diocese from selling it off. From Spain, meanwhile, Rachel Donadio writes about an impending showdown between observant Catholics and government secularists.

(more…)

¶ Matins: What an upside-down world we are in, when Congressional Democrats bashfully support the Israeli attacks at Gaza but the Times dismisses them as “a dismal coda to the Bush administration’s second-term push for Middle East peace.”

¶ Lauds: Ever since Ghost Town, I’ve been a huge fan of Kristen Wiig. Knocked Up was the movie that ought to have taught me, but her role in that film — as the infamously snarky production assistant — struck me as just another Hollywood bitch. As a colonoscopist, however — well! Regular readers will know why I sat up and paid attention.

¶ Prime: Muscato strikes gold — or perhaps, since he always strikes gold, we ought to call it vermeil — with a collection of TV ads for Konsum, the konsumer emporium of the DDR. Who can resist ein tausend kleine Dinge? Don’t tune out before that starts. It could have been called New York Confidential.

¶ Tierce: How do you spell “Idiocracy”? A-r-p-a-i-o. David Carr writes about the showboating Arizona sheriff who may, one hopes, find his true calling as a reality-show fixture — and put a stop to his travesty of public service.

¶ Sext: The nice thing about the juggling LaSalle Brothers, currently wowing audiences at the Big Apple Circus, is that they give credit where credit is due.

According to Jake, the act is more about genetics than balance. “Juggling is such a difficult discipline to perfect,” he said. “You have to be so precise. There are very few good team juggling acts out there now. I think everyone has an individual internal rhythm.

“There’s a difference in internal rhythms,” he added. “With my brother, we’re exactly on the same page. When I watch other professional teams perform, it seems much more forced. There’s a fluency from our luck in being twins.”

¶ Nones: The post-mortem will be interesting, and resurrection oughtn’t to be ruled out; but Waterford Wedgwood has gone into “administration” — receivership. Among the many causes, there is a sad truth:

Waterford Wedgwood has suffered from falling demand for its high-quality crystal, china and other tableware, and has recorded a loss for the last five years.

¶ Vespers: Just when my bibliotechnical energy was failing, I encountered an encouraging entry at Anecdotal Evidence, where Patrick Kurp shares a poem by David Slavett.

“What will I re-read, or even consult?
Let us admit that, for all their heft on the shelves,
books are flighty, become souvenirs of themselves,
appealing no longer to intellect and taste
but playing to sentiment. Why else keep on hand
Look Homeward, Angel, except in the in the hope that the schoolboy
who turned its pages may show up some afternoon?”

¶ Compline: A proper dinner at our house ends not with dessert but with a reading from Harold McGee’s On Food And Cooking. One or the other of us wants to know why such-and-such a thing happens in the kitchen. Our curiosities — Kathleen’s and mine — have very different motivations. I usually want to know What Went Wrong. Kathleen, in contrast, wants to know How Things Work. These are two sides of the same coin, the flip being whether or not you actually spend any time in the kitchen making meals. Tonight, in a rare congruence, we both wanted to the skinny on how something works: the substance known, very unscientifically, as “cream of tartar.”

(more…)

¶ Matins: Is English really the indispensable tongue of the Internet? Maybe not anymore.

¶ Sext: Don’t ask me where he finds the time, but our Joe gets around.

I had pondered actually going to Times Square tonight, until a dozen or so of my friends collectively threatened to have me committed.

(more…)

¶ Matins: Bubbles beget bubbles: the housing-price bubble appears to have inspired some pipe dreams of easy divorce that burst along with the market, at least according to John Leland’s report, “In Housing Fall, Breaking Up Is Harder to Do.”

¶ Tierce: The other day, Fossil Darling urged us to read one of Bob Herbert’s columns in the Times last week, “Stop Being Stupid.” I’ll have more to say about that anon, but I thought of it this morning — and hopefully, too — when I read Joe Sharkey’s “In Flight” column this morning. It would appear that Kip Hawley, the outgoing director of the Transportation Security Administration, has actually been learning on the job. I like heaps of scorn as much as anybody, at least if I’m doing the heaping; but the TSA is an organization that I would almost desperately like to praise.

¶ Nones: Now it’s the red shirts who are trying to gum up the Thai government. The new Prime Minister managed to make his maiden speech today, in a different venue. But taking to the streets in the colors of your party is tantamount to suiting up for civil war.

¶ Compline: Bob Herbert’s column today, “Add Up The Damage,” argues for some sort of formal condemnation of the Bush Administration’s attack on the Republic. I especially agree with Mr Herbert that the president “would give the wealthy and the powerful virtually everything they wanted. He would throw sand into the regulatory apparatus and help foster the most extreme income disparities since the years leading up to the Great Depression.” But I would refer Mr Herbert to his last Op-Ed piece, referenced earlier today. It’s more important to stop being stupid Americans than to punish the officials who were empowered by that stupidity.   (more…)

¶ Matins: The sickest thing about the United States today is undoubtedly the fact that prisons are a growth industry. The processing, so to speak, of prisoners newly minted by the nation’s preposterously discriminatory penal codes, can’t be outsourced to China, so failing rural towns try to rally by competing for prison contracts. Central Falls, Rhode Island, a town that combines plenty of illegal immigrants with plenty of cells in which to incarcerate them, lives in the shadow of what sounds, from Nina Bernstein’s story, like a Stalinist terror.

¶ Sext: In this morning’s Times, Susan Dominus writes up Chelsea Technologies, hitherto “a small operation that specializes in providing information technology services to hedge funds and small investment funds around the city.” And, now, to their former employees who have “wrapped things up” and are “looking for alternatives.” Which is French for: they’re out of work and need high-quality Internet access at home. There is a slightly snarky smile behind the placid surface of Ms Dominus’s report, but you won’t hear any chuckling from me — oh, no!

¶ Compline: Here’s a story that’s getting a lot of attention in the Blogosphere: Elisabeth Rosenthal’s “No Furnaces but Heat Aplenty in ‘Passive Houses’.”

(more…)

¶ Matins: Oh! It’s China’s fault! “China, some economists say, lulled American consumers, and their leaders, into complacency about their spendthrift ways.” This is the moral equivalent of blaming the gin and vermouth for not being a fountain of youth.

You have to love the story, though, because it preserves a founding American myth: the people of our fine country are guileless rubes in a world of wicked con men.

¶ Vespers: Here’s a great idea: revoke Robert Merton’s Nobel Prize. Remember LTCM? That was his plane crash.

(more…)

¶ Matins: The Nation, Thailand’s English-language newspaper, runs a Web site that holds its own as a contemporary news site. Here, for example, is the page of business leaders. It’s better than what one might expect of a South Asian kingdom where English is not really the second language that it is in, say, India.

And here is its capsule report of the king’s exhortation to the newly sworn-in government of Abhisit Vejjajiva. Did I say “capsule”? It’s the entire story. No comment, no color, no links to related stories. Just the royal admonition. I give it entire:

In his speech given before Prime Minister Abhisit Vejjajiva and his Cabinet, HM the King said: “If you work well, the country will be in good order and it will be a blessing. If you can ensure happiness and public order, the country will go ahead as wished by all Thais.”

¶ Tierce: The shooting death of a police officer is always a hot-button crime, so it’s especially heartening to see juries pulling back from felony murder convictions in connection with the deaths of Daniel Enchautegui and Russel Timoshenko, two policemen who were shot last year while trying to deter criminal activity. The doctrine of felony murder, which holds individuals to be guilty of any murder committed in the course of a crime to which they are accessories, is a blot on our system of justice.

¶ Sext: Read about the Ultimate Paper Airplane, at Brainiac. It is rocket science!

(more…)

¶ Matins: I wish I were still in law school! I wish I were that young. Then, the idea that Bush v Gore is a precedent-laden decision would have intrigued me.

¶ Sext: How could they do it? That’s what everybody I know is talking about. How could they give all their money to Bernie Madoff? They begged him to invest it for them, dazzled partly, it’s true, by the fantastic returns that he boasted; but dazzled to the point of blindness by his reluctance to take their money. (His initial reluctance, that is…) 

Natalie Angier explains it all to you: “A Highly Evolved Propensity for Deceit.”

(more…)

¶ Matins: Much as I admire Frank Rich’s commentary on public affairs, I think that yesterday’s piece was a tad too populist.

We’ll keep believing, not without reason, that the whole game is as corrupt as the game show in “Slumdog Millionaire” — only without the Hollywood/Bollywood ending. We’ll keep wondering how so many at the top keep avoiding responsibility and reaping taxpayers’ billions while relief for those at the bottom remains as elusive as straight answers from those Mumbai call centers fielding American debtors.

And what’s wrong with “populist”? It ignores (or, worse, forgives) the colossal inattentiveness with which Americans have been going about their business since the tail end of our Vietnam Misadventure. I can’t tell you how many times I’ve encountered this passive-aggressive self-indulgent excuse: “Why should I pay attention to the news when there’s nothing I can do about it?”

¶ Tierce: It’s A Wonderlife Life comes to the Times this morning, in the form of a very moving Op-Ed piece by Ted Gup. “Hard Times, A Helping Hand.” Bring Kleenex.

(more…)

¶ Matins: It’s time to pay up. You’re reading this for free, and, for the time being, that’s fine. I don’t need the money right now. But The New York Times, from which I draw so many of my links, does. It’s teetering on the edge of bankruptcy. Handwriting on the wall:

• James Surowiecki in The New Yorker. Moral of the story? You get what you pay for; or: you pay nothing, you get nothing.
• Richard Pérez-Peña in The New York Times. The incredible shrinking Washington press corps.

Now, I’m a paid-up subscriber who gets everyday delivery of the paper. Your cost could be much, much lower. Who knows how low? The problem is, nobody’s really asking.

(more…)

¶ Matins: Wouldn’t it be nice if Arianna Huffington’s wish comes true, and the Madoff Affair puts an end to the faux-cluelessness of modern management?

¶ Tierce: Today’s verse of the Madoff chapter: New York’s commercial real estate developers. This mess begins to look like one of Stanley Milgram’s disturbing behavioral experiments. While there’s no doubt that the SEC blew this one, it’s hard to feel sorry for investors who overrode commonsense basics in the stampede to “invest.” Especially when Mr Madoff appears to have mirrored their own way of doing business.

The outsize impact on the industry may have resulted largely because Mr. Madoff (pronounced MAY-doff) managed his funds much the way that real estate leaders have operated successfully for decades: He provided little information and demanded a lot of trust.

¶ Nones: Thailand seems to have turned a corner, as defectors from the People’s Power Party in support of a coalition government headed by Abhisit Vejjajiva.  

¶ Vespers: In 1618, the Defenestration of Prague launched the Thirty Years’ War. (Catholics threw some Protestants out the window.) In 2008, the ? of Baghdad ended the American Misadventure in Iraq. (Wouldn’t that be nice!)

¶ Compline: Something I’d written myself: Lee Stranahan’s plea for large-mindedness from folks unhappy with President-Elect Obama’s invitation to Rick Warren to deliver the invocation on 20 January.

(more…)

¶ Matins: In this time of PETA and no-foie-gras, George lawmakers want to make it easier to secure a death penalty. Save the animals, kill the people: is that the American Way? It does seem so. You could polish up an argument that the nation’s early settlers underwent the harrowing ordeal of crossing the Atlantic because they were pathological misanthropes.

¶ Tierce: Comparing China’s economy to ours, this morning, Tom Friedman reminds us to be careful about what we ask for:

But while capitalism has saved China, the end of communism seems to have slightly unhinged America. We lost our two biggest ideological competitors — Beijing and Moscow. Everyone needs a competitor. It keeps you disciplined. But once American capitalism no longer had to worry about communism, it seems to have gone crazy. Investment banks and hedge funds were leveraging themselves at crazy levels, paying themselves crazy salaries and, most of all, inventing financial instruments that completely disconnected the ultimate lenders from the original borrowers, and left no one accountable. “The collapse of communism pushed China to the center and [America] to the extreme,” said Ben Simpfendorfer, chief China economist at Royal Bank of Scotland.

¶ Sext: Yet another droll site that everybody knew about before I finally stumbled upon it, in the usual way — thanks to Joe or Jason (in this case, Joe).

¶ Vespers: Have you heard of Maria Semple’s This One Is Mine? I hadn’t either, but after reading about it at Three Guys One Book, I’m ordering a copy.

(more…)

¶ Matins: The Cutup-in-Chief is unflappable: ““I’m pretty good at ducking, as most of you will know…”

President Bush ducked — and didn’t get it. He seems to have thought that Muntader al-Zaidi’s outrage was a party prank gone awry, and certainly not representative of any widespread feelings about Duckya’s screwups in his homeland. Who knows what kind of an afterlife the episode is going to take on? Will Mr al-Zaidi one day head Iraq, in the manner of dissident playwright Vaclav Havel?

¶ Tierce: In yesterday’s “Deal Book,” there was a squib about what John Kenneth Galbraith’s study of the 1929 Crash has to tell us about the Madoff Fraud: the first is not the worst.

¶ Vespers: Joseph O’Neill writes! Well, of course…but don’t hold your breath between publications. How exciting, then, to read, at Maud Newton, that Mr O’Neill is a contributor to the current issue of Granta! I rush to yesterday’s mail, and there it is, “Fathers.” Turn to page 76, “Portrait of My Father” — a common title in the book. But what’s this, only three pages! 

(more…)

¶ Matins: Even though it’s Christmas and everything, and we’re in between presidents who get shoes thrown at them and who won’t, let’s take a moment to wish Thailand well. It’s hard for an outsider to tell, at this point, whether the choice of Oxford-educated Abhisit Vejjajiva is a good thing, but the fact that a coalition is now in charge seems like a step forward.

¶ Tierce: The curious thing about trickle-down economics is that, while it doesn’t work so well when times are good — hmm, wonder why? — it kicks in nastily when there’s a slump. New York’s doormen are here to tell you about it.

¶ Sext: The Minimalist Chef, Mark Bittman, writes about the size of his kitchen, which is not unusually small for a New York City apartment but, at six feet by seven, tiny by American standards.

(more…)

¶ Matins: An unpleasant story about layoffs from today’s Times. I cite it not as news but as fodder for thought: consider how poorly the philosophy (so to speak) of de- or unregulated free markets has served smart men and women — in particular, what an infernal idea it has been for the ever-fewer occupants of the ever-more-massive pinnacles of American business.

¶ Tierce: Rapacious enough when things are going “well,” the Republican Party shows its fangs — and its tail — when the going gets rough. Currently presiding over an American economic disaster for the second time, they stand forth as the Take The Money And Run Party.

Boy, does Mitch McConnell not get it.

End of Afternoon Update: Even more shamelessness, as conservative senators attempt to break the UAW as part of any bailout deal.

¶ Compline: I’m off to Grace Rainey Rogers Auditorium at the Museum, for a chamber concert to be given by Musicians from Marlboro. Will there be yet another Elliott Carter centennial celebration?

(more…)

¶ Matins: Murder will out — especially, it seems, when the criminal has been goaded by his wife. Janet Blagojevich, herself the daughter of a political mogul, “appears to be an influential and demanding partner to her husband’s schemes.”

And, in a blast of vulgar language, Ms. Blagojevich eggs on her husband when he reportedly threatens to prevent the Tribune Company from selling the Chicago Cubs and Wrigley Field unless The Chicago Tribune fired editorial writers who had called for the governor’s impeachment. Ms. Blagojevich is quoted in the complaint as saying that the state should “hold up that [expletive] Cubs [expletive] … [expletive] them.”

¶ Tierce: A suit that ought never to have been entertained has been resolved more or less correctly. “Princeton Settles Money Battle Over Gift.” The heirs of 1961 donors, themselves heirs (of A & P money), challenged Princeton’s use of a $35 million gift (since considerably ballooned). The case ought to have been thrown out on its merits.

(more…)

¶ Matins: Novelist and former prosecutor Scott Turow has a very readable piece online about the arrest of the Illinois governor who appointed him to a state Ethics Committee… but the last paragraph requires more parsing than I’m up to.

This astonishing state of affairs persists 32 years after the Supreme Court, in Buckley v Valeo, recognized “the actuality and appearance of corruption resulting from large individual financial contributions” in approving limits on such donations to candidates for federal office. One can only hope that even in Illinois we are too ashamed now to tolerate business as usual.

¶ Prime: “Why I Blog,” by Andrew Sullivan: an endearing, utterly characteristic piece. Mr Sullivan manages to make keeping a blog sound like NASCAR racing, reinvented for writerly types. (via Farmboyz)

You end up writing about yourself, since you are a relatively fixed point in this constant interaction with the ideas and facts of the exterior world. And in this sense, the historic form closest to blogs is the diary. But with this difference: a diary is almost always a private matter. Its raw honesty, its dedication to marking life as it happens and remembering life as it was, makes it a terrestrial log. A few diaries are meant to be read by others, of course, just as correspondence could be—but usually posthumously, or as a way to compile facts for a more considered autobiographical rendering. But a blog, unlike a diary, is instantly public. It transforms this most personal and retrospective of forms into a painfully public and immediate one. It combines the confessional genre with the log form and exposes the author in a manner no author has ever been exposed before.

¶ Vespers: Sam Jordison writes about “The Tyranny of the To-Read Pile,” at the Guardian. 

Bibliophiles everywhere will be only too well acquainted with the demons of guilt and shame that such explorations would conjure. The to-read pile is more than just a physical stack of books: it’s a tower of ambitions failed, hopes unrealised, good intentions unfulfilled. Worse still, it’s a cold hard reminder of mortality. Already, I have intentions to read more books than I can hope to manage in a normal lifetime. How will this pile of books taunt me when I’m 64?

(more…)