Morning

¶ Posh: My good friend Yvonne just tipped me off to a fantastic send-up of cooking shows, starring Richard E Grant at his twitissime, “Posh Nosh.” The show is a hundred years old, so you’ve probably see it already…

Noon

¶ Mad Max: Poor Max Mosley — so to speak. For my part, I can’t imagine anything more in keeping with Formula 1 racing than recreational sado-masochism. One does wonder, though, what Lady Redesdale would have said. “Every time I see “Peer’s Daughter” in the newspaper…”

Night

¶ Cartographic: Is it or isn’t it? An optical illusion, that is. How big is England?

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This week’s rather shaky images were taken on the Fourth of July from the rooftop of a building in Chelsea where a good friend of ours lives. The weather was awful, and it didn’t take long for the fireworks to disappear into the clouds of their own smoke. My photographs, therefore, are to be viewed as studies in impressionist color.  

Morning

¶ Lift: Now that Kathleen has her very own personal computer (her first, amazingly; until now, her laptops have always been the property of a law firm), and now that we have conquered the Wi-Fi problem (I didn’t say that!), my dear wife has been discovering all sorts of things online, among them a whimsical New Yorker cover that might have been, by Bob Staake.

Noon

¶ Clock: I’m a sucker for gizmos like the World Clock, which whir along fantastically if somewhat meaninglessly. What kind of triumph will it be if the number of items of email spam exceeds the number of dollars of US debt?

Night

¶ Mad ! Following a link from kottke.org, I came across a blog devoted to Mad Men. It’s called A Basket of Kisses, and it comes from “the highly creative, occasionally obsessive computers of Roberta and Deborah Lipp.” (more…)

Morning

¶ Sixth: Why not ask about Sixth on the Fourth? Sixth Avenue, that is, known only to Idiocrats as the Avenue of the Americas, its streetlamps bedecked with dinky tinpot medallions honoring, if that’s the word, the nations of the Western Hemisphere (not to  be confused with “the West”). Few medallions remain, and David Gonzalez asks why.

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Morning

¶ Tower of Eiffel: Now, here’s something I didn’t know: Gustave Eiffel worked on the construction of the Statue of Liberty, thus, according to Edward Berenson’s Op-Ed piece in today’s Times, “allowing him to test certain techniques he would use for his great tower in 1889.

Noon

¶ Attention! Yikes! “Google told to hand over millions of YouTube user details to Viacom in $1 billion case.” From the Telegraph.

Night

¶ Oops! When everyone but you is looking at your screen. Because you’ve already left for the holiday weekend.

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Morning

¶ Mean Money: Leona’s money is going to the dogs — and so is Dicky Grasso’s.

Noon

¶ DIRL: What with following one link to another, I came across a nice, long comment thread (at Marginal Revolution) proposing books to take to Africa on a research project that will take a year, with only visit home. Somebody asked for advice.

Night

¶ Pectavensis: How’s your Latin? It doesn’t have to be very good, to read Gregory of Tours, a Sixth-Century bishop who wrote pretty good history, considering it was the Dark Ages and all. Plus, he writes about a scandal at a convent in Poitou (in monasterio Pectavense). Nudge, nudge!

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Morning

¶ Marble: What I’d really like is a cast-marble copy (whatever “cast marble” is) of Houdon’s Louvre bust of Voltaire — the one with the perruque. The new Scully bookshelf, with its rows of Library of America spines, seems to demand a completing cliché. But the one Web site that seems aware of a decent copy no longer offers it.

Meanwhile, I came across this site. which I would rename Glad I Don’t.

Noon

¶ A Little Learning: Hand-wringing in the UK about making school easy for kids.

Night

¶ Harris Pat: Spooky! Fossil Darling, on the phone with me but talking to LXIV as he often does, said to his companion, “I’ve always been true to you in my fashion.” About two beats later, I heard LXIV reciting the same Cole Porter lyrics that were coming out of my mouth:

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This week’s Daily Office photos were taken last week in Carl Schurz Park, by the East River. Last week’s pictures, as I hope Friday’s would make quite clear, were taken the previous week in Santa Monica, at the Huntington Museum, and in the Cathedral of Our Lady of the Angels.

Morning 

¶ Weekend Reading (Babies): I had a look, yesterday, at the Times Magazine for a change, intrigued, against my better judgment, by Russell Shorto’s cover story. As a piece of journalism, the piece embodies unfortunate trends in general-interest reportage, especially the whiff of apocalyptic gunsmoke (“No more European babies! No more Europeans!”) that is inevitably dissipated by gusts of common-sense exposition later on. Editors seem to like to front-load the drama and shove the useful information to the back end, whether to spare lazy readers or to reward diligent ones it’s hard to say.

Noon

¶ JVC Jazz: On Friday night, Kathleen and I went to a sold-out jazz concert at Carnegie Hall, featuring (first) Dianne Reeves and (then) Al Green.

¶ BookSaga: Down in Georgia, a fellow by the name of Perry Falwell runs an on-line bookshop. He scours the thrift shops for finds that he speeds along to interested customers. (Somebody’s got to do it, if Goodwill won’t.) His new Web log, BookSaga, is compulsively readable. I plan to stay tuned.

Night

¶ Gondry:  A few weeks ago, at brunch, a friend insisted that I rent and see Michel Gondry’s Be Kind Rewind. This evening, I got round to it. A great, great train wreck!

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Morning

¶ Blinking Lights: It’s obnoxious to look at, so I won’t set to blinking the following passage from today’s Times editorial on the disgraceful Supreme Court strike-down of the District of Columbia’s gun-control law, announced yesterday:

This audaciously harmful decision, which hands the far right a victory it has sought for decades, is a powerful reminder of why voters need to have the Supreme Court firmly in mind when they vote for the president this fall.

¶ Have a great weekend!
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Morning

¶ Chant: What is it about Gregorian Chant? Why is it one of those things that are always, it seems, being “rediscovered”?

¶ Encyclopedia: In the Telegraph, the obituary of Wilf Gregg, a personnel manager with a sideline in murder. The late Mr Gregg co-edited The Encyclopedia of Serial Killers.

Noon

¶ Turner: The Turner show at the Metropolitan Museum of Art hasn’t formally opened yet, but I was able to take advantage of a members’ preview this afternoon. As I always do, the first time I see a show, I breezed through the galleries. I didn’t see any of the really famous late paintings, but still…

Night

¶ Civil Pleasures: My new Web site, which will replace Portico, has been launched.
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Morning 

¶ Croque: I divide restaurants into two groups: those that serve croque monsieur, the great if not grand French ham-and-cheese sandwich, and those that don’t. Guess which group gets more of my business. Alex Witchel coaxes a recipe from Bar Boulud.

Noon

¶ Ray: Our friendly ichthyologist, Mig Living, reports today on the cownose ray. As usual, some of the “little-known facts” are more whopping than others.

Night

¶ Madeleine: Remember Madeleine White, Jodie Foster’s character in Inside Man? It was, without a doubt, the most intoxicating role that I have ever seen the actress play, because, instead of pretending to be the usual ordinary schlub, Ms Foster was a glamorous fixer who could arrange almost anything with a few phone calls. Now I know where she trained. 

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Morning 

¶ Bye, Bye, Bruno: New York State Senator Joseph L Bruno seems to have knocked all of Albany on its ear by announcing that he will not seek re-election.

Noon

¶ One Lump or Two?: First, the good news: U S Sugar will restore 187,000 acres of Florida land to the Everglades.

Night

¶ Sprawlwrong: Even more quickly than I’d expected, suburban sprawl not only looks like a bad idea but costs like one, according to Peter Goodman’s story from Denver. Between transport and heating, many Americans face a dismal, possibly dangerous winter. Suddenly, the way that I live (apartment footage in the three-digits squared; no car) looks like a far more viable template.  
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Morning 

¶ Murcans: Send this clip to every friend that you have. Every enemy. Every body! A vote for the Democratic Party is a vote against the Republican Star Chamber. 

Noon

¶ Carlin: Social critic and funny man George Carlin dead of heart failure, aged 71.

¶ Housebroken: Even the House at Goodwood is a course — something of a steeplechase.

Night

¶ The Awful Truth: As Avenue Q taught us, the Internet is primarily good for porn. With Google as a yardstick of community standards, expect a lot of bugs-under-a-rock-squirming.
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Morning

¶ Blot: Any hope that, having attained the age of reason (ie sixty), I might have grown up to be a steady, sensible man, finally, was shattered yesterday when I almost landed George and myself in the LA clink, or at least loaded us both with $200 fines.

¶ Hallelujah: While we were at breakfast, the hotel did a bit of recomputing…

Noon

¶ Unfunny: It’s Friday, but I’m not going to the movies today. What would I have seen if I’d stayed home? Not these turkeys.

Night

¶ Homebound: Time to head down to LAX and eastward. Home for breakfast! More anon…

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Morning

¶ Arrivés: We’re here. Here in Santa Monica, that is; far from the Navy Terrace, from which I took the snap of the Bethesda Fountain the other day. Pictures to follow, probably much later today, if and when I can turn on the camera. Everything was “much later,” yesterday, and it will take a while to catch up.

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Morning

¶ Bananas: Any day now, I’m going to hear that some friend or other has given up bananas, and not because they’re green. Because they’re not green. And that’s just the beginning. Consider Dan Koeppel’s report.

Noon

¶ Departure: I’m off for California, Santa Monica to be exact. In the event of zero connectivity, I’ll be back on Saturday morning.
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Morning

¶ Transport: Joe Sharkey, who follows business travel for the Times, writes about the increasingly “upstairs-downstairs” nature of domestic air travel. The “commercial” airlines have lost nearly half of their “premium” customers to “business aviation” — smaller, upscale jets that used to be the preserve of jillionaires and corporations — since 2000.

Noon

¶ Panic: Within the past twenty minutes, I have drifted from a calm inattentiveness into a vortex of panic. How on earth am I going to be ready to leave New York by 1:30 tomorrow afternoon? And how did I manage to forget the Morning Read this morning? Must have been the McChouffe at lunch.

Night

¶ Bronx Cheer: Sex kitteness Dr Ruth Westheimer inducted into the Houston Bronx Walk of Fame, even though she has never lived on Westheimer Boulevard in the Bronx.

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Morning 

¶ Oregano: Having seen Melvin Frank’s A Touch of Class when it came out, in 1973, and liked it very much, I remembered two things about the film very clearly: the assignation that Steve Blackburn (George Segal) and Vicki Allessio (Glenda Jackson) achieve during a performance of Beethoven’s Seventh, a symphony that ever since has trailed a rather unwonted allure. The other was “oreGAHno.”

Noon

¶ Apron: There’s a movie, don’t you think, in Dan Barry’s story about the West Virginia Mason who was expelled because he advocated reforms that would put an end to archaic discriminatory practices.

¶ Gidget: George Snyder — whom I hope to spend Thursday with, in Los Angeles — sent me a link to Peter Lunenfeld’s delightfully polymathic look at Gidget, in The Believer. Who knew she was Jewish?

Night

¶ Tornado: If you haven’t seen the most amazing close-up of a tornado ever, be sure to check out Lori Mehmen‘s ticket to the photographers’ hall of fame. (via JMG)
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Morning

¶ Santa: After Top Girls at the Biltmore Theatre last night, we headed over to Restaurant Row for an after-theatre dinner at Le Rivage, only to find that they were closing.

Noon

¶ Walkabout: If I have ever walked across Central Park to do something on the West Side and then walked back through the Park on my way home, I’ve forgotten about it. Today’s back-and-forth felt like a first.

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Morning

¶ Cosmopolitan: It is difficult to know what to expect of people who genuinely lack cosmopolitan aspirations.

¶ Tracking: My very peachy son-in-law has let me in on a way of following my daughter’s flight from Amsterdam to New York. I must be the last guy on the block to know how to know about FlyteComm.com.

Noon

¶ Satrap: All morning, I’ve been thinking about James A Johnson, the Obama campaign aide who just resigned in mild disgrace. What is it with the Democrats? Republicans do the same thing, but that’s their religion…

Night

¶ Flippi: Does anyone have one of these Vornado Flippi fans yet? They are the  coolest! (more…)