Author: F C

Did a lot of driving today (more accurately P did a lot of driving, I just tagged along) — picked up P’s mom at Starrett City, went to the Ave. U chinatown to buy hotpot supplies. Lunch at Pho Hoai Restaurant, 1906 Avenue U (recommended!); back to Starrett; back to Brooklyn Heights to pick up pies and my folding table and the Christmas gifts. Back to Starrett City for the actual hotpot dinner. Back to Brooklyn Heights for Midnight Mass. Suffice to say, a lot of travelling. Tomorrow, I’m cooking a very Puerto Rican Christmas dinner — I’m going to try to pull of a pernil (roast pork marinated with garlic), Spanish rice, and a few Chino-latino dishes. P’s family is coming over also.

Best wishes to all for a healthy Christmastime, and time to start working on my traditional end of the year entry…..

Day 2 of the strike. P is riding into the city now with a coworker who is driving in at 3:30 am to avoid the HOV-4 rule. It took her 3.5 hours to get home yesterday: upper East Side to Penn Station, LIRR to Jamaica, then Flatbush, then a walk downtown. P’s brother-in-law is a subway conductor who is going on the picket line today not for the money, not for the pensions, but against “sharecropper managers” (his term) that don’t know how to treat their workers well. He’s going without the support of the union’s parent organization, the International.

I like to think that I’m a pretty sympathic guy, and I don’t like people enduring unnecessary hardships. I also understand how people in the public view tend to suffer the slings and arrows of their critics (and how every president since Reagan ends up picking up an independent counsel or two in their second term whatever they do). However, I have not seen so many instances of skirting responsibility in the last 24 hours:

• One co-worker: “All my friends that could give me a ride moved to New Jersey, so I can’t get to work.” Just about everybody else at work came up with a plan.
• Another co-worker: “I can’t find a taxi that will drive me over the bridge.” My boss walked all the way from Grand Central over the Brooklyn Bridge – 6 miles.
• TWU Union Leader: “we won’t sell out our unborn”, meaning snatching defeat from the hands of victory after the MTA started caving from their “final offer”. Could have kept on pressing….
• governor: “the professionals at the table will resolve this”. What professionals? What table? He’s kidding, right?
• president: to paraphrase — yes we wiretapped without warrants, even though previously we stated a warrant was always necessary. We didn’t break the law, and even if we did, we told a handful of Congresspeople, so that made it all good and legal, right? Do they have a problem with it? They can’t tell you, and you can’t find out.

This is ridiculous.

We’re T+1 hour and still no call for a strike from the transit union leadership. From what I can gather, the union doesn’t really want more salary — they just want to be treated better by the middle management. The MTA doesn’t want to cut any benefits for current employees, just for future employees. NY1 reports that the MTA sweetened the final offer of 3% each year for the next three years to 3, 4, 3.5% for the next three years, and moved the retirement age to 60 from 62. There must be some clever negotiator that can come up with a place where they can agree?

The Bush administration is taking it on the chin with the domestic spying scandal by members of his own party. It’s hard to think that members of a party whose core belief is in smaller, non-intrusive government can go along with unlimited warrantless clandestine wiretaps. The legal reasoning behind the wiretaps, as described in the PBS Newshour, is basically the Constitution gives inherent authority to the President as commander-in-chief, and that Congress ratified that in the Afganistan resolution, and that the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act is outdated and not responsive to modern needs. The opposing side is that the Fourth Amendment is still applicable in wartime, and the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act, by its own terms (50 USC sec 1822) is the exclusive statutory authority for this type of search. The fact that one searching “under color of law for the purpose of obtaining foreign intelligence information, executes a physical search within the United States except as authorized by statute”, commits a felony (50 USC 1827) raises the stakes even more in this political battle.

Now that I have heard the Attorney General’s articulation of the legal reasoning, I don’t believe that it survives the “laugh test”. The ultimate judgment will be when Congress holds its hearings on the matter — I seem to recall in one commercial Con Law outline that the power of the President is strongest when Congress is acting in concert, and weakest when he is acting in opposition to Congress.

Time’s People of the Year goes to the Global Givers: Bill & Melinda Gates and Bono for their work for the poorest countries (the Time website has it “Bono, Melinda and Bill Gates”, which kind of looks like Bono was adopted into the Microsoft family), and “Partners of the Year” to Bill Clinton and George H.W. Bush for their tsunami and hurricane relief efforts.

Saw the Brooklyn Youth Chorus in their annual holiday performance. Someone at work had tickets that were shared with us. They were magnificient. Pictures on the flickr strip above.

Excellent Turkish food on Montegue Street: Kapadokya Turkish Cuisine, 142 Montague Street. Our old sushi favorite Nanatori on 162 Montague Street was great as usual. I guess I’ve officially became a regular there because I get recognized by the manager, and we always get seated in the window (business always picks up for her after we sit there).

Off to the boss’ holiday party tonight…

Comments on previous posts:
1. Caught Narnia on Sunday. Very good, although P- asked, “Where’s Gandolf?” at the battle scene. Cute triple entendre on J.R.R Tolken’s influence on C.S. Lewis. (Some people have been having problems with Wikipedia — that comes with an enterprise that is so extravagant, but having access to such a compendium of knowledge is worth the growing pains that it has.)

2. Choya Umeshu – Japanese Plum infused liquor – Absolutely delicious! They had a sale at Astor Wine – we picked up a 750ml bottle of Dento grade for about $20. 100% worth it.

3. Deluge part 3: the handyman finally got wallboard to cover the hole after spending 2 months finding the hole where the upstairs tenants were having a waterpark experience, but one of the tenants had a sudden urge to reinact Singing in the Rain, and we ended up with another warm bucket worth of water in our bathroom. At 12:30 in the morning, P and I are having a shouting match with this Japanese chick in her twenties. Her argument basically went, “I took a shower, and you’re wet, but it’s not my problem. Take it up with the landlord.” P inspected her bathroom, and detected a cover-up — she found where it was leaking again, and it was damp, even though it looked like it was wiped up. This is going to be fun tomorrow with the landlord.

I went with P- to her friend’s b-day party Thursday at Paprika, in the East Village. P and I didn’t really know many of the birthday girl’s friends that were at the table, they weren’t particularly interested in me — maybe they were, but no one could hear each other — and the ones that we did know were at the other end of a table for 20. That really left the food for entertainment.

With a name like Paprika, you’d be expecting Eastern European food, but it’s supposed to be rustic northern Italian cuisine. It’s probably not fair to judge a restaurant when they are hosting two 20 person birthday parties, but it pretty much felt like the 4 train at rush hour with dim lighting and a row of cocktail tables. The women on the bench were literally crawling over each other. The kitchen is not much bigger than mine, which is not saying much in my 550 square foot jr. one bedroom. I passed on the gnocchi this time because I knew based on what I saw was happening at the other birthday table that they had no chance of pulling it off without turning it into chewing gum.

I went instead with the hearty “Homemade Pappardelle with Braised Oxtail Ragu”. I’m sure if I got the dish when it was finished, it would have been fine and toothsome, but after being held while the other plates came out, it came out like a deconstructed ravioli, with a pile of cold, dry wonton skins hiding maybe 2 tablespoons of oxtail meat residue. Disappointing, but probably the reason why professional food reviewers go two or three times before writing their articles.

Some shots from the USS Arizona at Pearl Harbor (you can also see them in the photo strip above also). We went during low season, so it wasn’t as crowded as would be normal, but because of the size of the facilities, there is a limited number of people that can go per day — something like 5,000 people. Last time I went there was no way I could get there early enough to get tickets (by the way, admission to USS Arizona is free — there’s no need to book a tour).

Mentally ill man is killed on jetway in Miami after claiming he had a bomb. Lots of guessing followed by conclusions of “sorry, but the right thing done” on the news programs tonight. The entire incident appeared to have taken only a minute from the man’s run off the plane and the air marshals’ pursuit and takedown. Apparently, the marshals were on high alert for a 50-year-old Egyptian claiming to be an Iowa university student that was inexplicably released even after his shoes tested positive for explosives. In any case, if I’m on a plane and some dude with a bag yells that he has a bomb, forget the marshals – given half a chance I and every other able-bodied passenger would pummel the guy like they did with sneaker-bomber Richard Reid.

Reading this month’s Wired magazine about rising oil prices, ads today have almost as many words as the articles that they accompany. During the dot com boom, ads had few if any words — the ideal would be a big picture coupled with 3 to 5 words. In Wired, a car maker ad on the inside cover has over 270 words. A major bank even has a whole board game for improving your credit. I don’t know if it’s an attempt to blend in with the content, people nowadays have increasing attention spans, products are just way more complicated to sell, or maybe marketeers are just shooting in the dark.

I’ve been listening to a lot of podcasts lately. This is my aural “watch” list:

ABC’s LOST: The Transmission
Adam Curry’s Weblog
Catholic Insider
Coast to Coast Program Feed
Engadget Podcasts
HawaiiDiner.com
HawaiiUP
Little Gray Books
Misadventures in Taiwan
NewsHour with Jim Lehrer Podcast | PBS
NPR: Food
NPR: Most E-Mailed Stories


Podchef Show
Reality TV Podcast – RFF Radio
Slashdot Review
Slate Explainer Podcasts
Slate Magazine Podcasts
The World: Technology from BBC/PRI/WGBH
To the Best of Our Knowledge
WNYC’s Please Explain with Leonard Lopate

On television:
Science Channel show “Hot Rocks: Geology of Civilization”: imagine Ringo Starr pronouncing the phrase
“domesticated cereals”: the first thing I thought of was Captain Crunch going legit?

Embattled PBS news show “The Journal Editorial Report” ended its run today to move to Fox Network. The right say that PBS affiliates either are not running the show or are putting it in late night time slots. The left points to the alleged unethical push for the show by ex CPB Chair Kenneth Tomlinson. I think that its always refreshing to check out different perspectives, for the same reason it isn’t redundant to read both the New York Times and the Wall Street Journal.

But what does this country want? TV is no longer just a dozen or less broadcast channels; it is now hundreds of channels. Do we get diversity of opinion on each and every network, or do we get it by offering a diversity of channels, each with well-defined points of view?