Morning

¶ Sore Bear: You can cluck and tsk all you like, but Russia’s invasion of Georgia is driven by very high-octane belligerence, distilled from humiliated pride. Ideology not only has nothing to do with the case on the Russian side, but is empty rhetoric in the mouths of Westerners who preach that duly elected democracies are blah blah blah. The foolish expansion of NATO has finally met with Vladimir Putin’s freeze-dried resistance.  

Noon

¶ Lunch: Nom de Plume asked  me if I was free for lunch, and Migs asked what I’d be having. Here’s an idea!

Night

¶ Nada: Hey, it’s August. Nothing is going on — niente. That’s why God (in the person of E L Kersten, PhD) invented Despair.com, which, as my friend George wrote to tell me, has changed its Web site a lot since the last time we visited.

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Catching up with a bit of backlog (bit!?) that piled up during this year’s life-threatening bout of spring fever, I finally got round to saying a word or two about the last two shows in MTC’s 2007-8 season, From Up Here and Top Girls.

Morning

¶ Research: Sarah Kershaw’s story about Mark Cellura, a retired Merrill Lynch executive, put a crimp in my morning. With the help of a genealogist, Mr Cellura made contact with the adoptive family of his twin brother, Michael, who died of AIDS in 1987.

In a slightly more cheerful piece, Janet Maslin writes about First Globals, the rising generation that probably can’t wait to see the last of the likes of me.

Noon

¶ Thought for Food: Commodities development specialist Peter Baker asks some apt questions about food production, hitherto unheeding if not quite heedless.

Night

¶ Boycott: Retards of the world, unite — lobby Congress! (more…)

I don’t know what it is, but NYRB’s series of reprinted novels hits me with all the authority of a magisterial curriculum: you must be prepared to defend to the death your decision not to read these books.

Notwithstanding all the intimidation, I’m glad to have read Howard Sturgis’s Belchamber.

I had the most awful sensation the other night, but I think that I ought to get used to it. I was, it seemed — I am — just another craggy, middle-aged man with a lot of strong opinions. I can argue the opinions well enough, but, let’s face it, who cares? And who doesn’t wish that, regardless of the evident world-historical acuity of my pronouncements, I’d just shut up? I’m another one of those bearded autodidacts who make it impossible for this country to settle down.

Seeing myself as just another guy with “brains” was truly unpleasant. And that, I guess, is the beginning of another conversation.

It’s just possible that Pineapple Express requires a special pair of glasses — like 3D glasses, only, in this case, the kind that comes naturally with being totally wasted. Not that it hasn’t got plenty of laughs for the cold stone sober. Only if you’re stoned yourself, however, will it seem to make sense.

A while back, Édouard ran a snap of these hideous, hideous statues, which stand outside a townhouse across Fifth Avenue from the Museum. I had been trying to keep their ugliness a neighborhood secret, but É has outed it.

Morning

¶ Cards: Judith Warner writes with sad lucidity about “playing cards.” As in, “the autism card.”

Now I’m off to the movies. Have a great weekend, everybody!

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Morning

¶ Collage: I’m not sure what made Girl Talk’s “rising profile” newsworthy today, but Robert Levine’s report, “Steal This Hook? D.J. Skirts Copyright Law,” reminded me of James Surowiecki’s Financial Page in this week’s New Yorker.

Noon

¶ YourNameHere: Take a break from the important stuff you’re doing and have a laff, courtesy of Cake Wrecks, Jen’s so-far inexhaustible stream of high-larious professional disasters (these cakes weren’t baked at home, you know).

Night

¶ Book Party: I went to a marvelous party…
 

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The other day, Father Tony wrote, of some opulently nouveaux villas in Forest Hills,

(It’s the sort of thing many of my relatives would have been proud to have built.)

It emerged in subsequent correspondence that Father T meant exactly what he said, and that the second preterite expressed part of his thought. His (dead) relatives would have loved to have built such houses. There is no faulting his grammar, which, in fact, is not what I’d meant to do, anyway.

But… (more…)

Click here for the full Darwin.

I don’t know many people who have seen Mike Judge’s Idiocracy. I heard the other day that Mr Judge wanted to call the film The United States of Uh…merica. Yielding on that point didn’t help his movie, though; it got zip in the way of marketing. Idiocracy has had to make itself known by word of mouth. Maybe it ought to be called American Samizdat. That’s way too brainy a title, I suppose; but then non-idiotic Americans do seem to be the only demographic for the picture.

One friend duly rented the film on my say-so but couldn’t get past the first fifteen minutes. She was too horrified, not by Mr Judge’s vision of a bleak dystopian future, but by his cinéma vérité treatment of the world outside her window. If my generation of Boomers has anything to answer for (aside from living forever on medical miracles, which is not really our fault, thank you very much), it is the empowerment of morons.

The Flikr photograph made me laugh my head off. Really, I couldn’t get over it. Still can’t A moment of truly superb folly.

Morning

¶ Abandon Hope, Ye Who Can’t Enter Here: The big moment, the major rite of passage in the life of an upper-middle-class child in Manhattan (and parts of Brooklyn and even the Bronx) occurs long before the agonies of adolescence: it’s the move from preschool to kindergarten. An old story! Now, at last, a few of the elementary schools are expanding. Winnie Hu reports.

Noon

¶ Introvert: A quick glance at Jonathan Rauch’s essay on introversion in The Atlantic suggests that the Blogosphere might be the hidden-in-plain-sight venue in which the introverts of the world — “a minority in the regular population but a majority in the gifted population” — conspire to take over the world.

Night

¶ Split: From next Sunday’s Times Magazine, Matt Bai’s report on the reservations that prevent the elder statesmen of the Civil Rights movement from more forthrightly supporting Barack Obama.

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Alan Brinkley’s review of Jane Mayer’s The Dark Side almost makes up for the indifference of the rest of this week’s issue.

Morning

¶ Siné: It’s a tough case: Siné (Maurice Sinet), the Charlie Hebdo cartoonist and, ipso facto, socio-political troublemaker, has been fired over a cartoon whose cynicism might be taken for anti-Semitism. I find myself on Siné’s side. Steven Erlanger reports.

Noon

¶ Mont-Saint-Michel: In Le Figaro: Who owns Mont-Saint-Michel? The French state has owned the abbey since the Revolution, but as for the village nestled on its flanks…

¶ That’s all very well, dear, but what about the Pines?: At a restaurant in Cherry Grove, on Fire Island, you can enjoy a drink called the “JoeMyGod.”

Night

¶ Boredom:  Here’s a valiant attempt to make boredom sound creative. It doesn’t quite fly.

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Morning

¶ A6: Page A6 of today’s Times (a/k/a “International Report”) features three stories. The one without a picture discusses the “covenant” that the Archbishop of Canterbury has coaxed from his colleagues at the Lambeth Conference. The one with a black-and-white picture concerns the legacy of the reviving Zeppelin industry in Friedrichshafen — one so complicated that I long to read a book about it. The story with the horrific picture, showing a stairway littered with colorfully-clad dead people, recounts the melee that broke out at a hilltop temple in Naina Devi when rumors of a landslide set off a stampede, killing 150 — or 148, at the newspaper’s presumably more up-to-date Web site.

Noon

¶ Pie/Sky?: Two stories (CNN, ABC) about really cheap source of power.

Night

¶ Smooth Guide: BBC’s Jennifer Pak presents video guides to getting around in Beijing, in case you’re going to the Games. Even if you’re not, you can see how spanking everything — and hear about how hot it is.

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Writer Joseph O’Neill had two grandfathers, just like everybody else. After that, it gets unusual. Grandfather Joseph (above, left) was a Syrian who found himself living in Turkey when that country came into existence. Grandfather Jim was born in that part of the United Kingdom that is known today as the Republic of Ireland. Shifts of sovereign boundaries contributed to putting both men in prison during World War II. Beyond that, the men had nothing in common — except grandchildren. Joseph O’Neill’s reconstructive memoir of their lives, Blood Dark Track, is a classic of modern life.

It’s taking a while to get back down to earth. I’m still spinning in Mad Men orbit, having watched the new season’s second episode twice, something that I haven’t done since the show’s introduction last year. I’m glad that I did, because I caught a lot of things that I didn’t quite get the first time around. That’s partly because the volume was a little too low, and partly because I was trying to decide on what to do about dinner — at ten o’clock! I was also a bit twitchy about recording the show so that Kathleen can see it when she gets back from Maine. (more…)

Tannishtha Chatterjee goes straight to the top: Brick Lane.

Morning

¶ Fits: The interesting thing about Chris Irvine’s little story in the Telegraph is that it’s doubly true: the Chinese government will spy on Olympian cell-phone calls, and it will be furious that anybody accused it of doing so.

It’s a Remicade day — I’ll be to-ing and fro-ing from the Hospital for Special Surgery for my now quarterly infusion (down from six a year!). I won’t be getting much done on any other fronts, which is why I went to the movies last night and saw Brick Lane. Tune in tomorrow… Meanwhile, a great weekend to everyone! Hey! It’s August!

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