Category: Brooklyn

“I’m the Taxman… Ye-ah, I’m the Taxman…”

– The Beatles

Well, I already did my taxes, so whatever. 😉 Pity the other poor New Yorkers who are hoofing to the main post office at this hour, probably still figuring out what deductions or whatnot. (one word: TurboTax!)

Then again, what right have we to moan about last minute tax filing? we New Yorkers got the extra 24 hours thanks to Patriot Day in Massachusetts, the state where NY’ers’ taxes get processed. NJ and CT folks were not so lucky.

Hawaii’s little fish with the long name gets to be the state fish again. I still don’t understand how this fish lost its title as state fish in the first place.

Some tv commentary – I’ve taken to watching “West Wing” again (I know, I know, I’m foresaking “The Simpsons” on Sundays to do this, but frankly, “The Simpsons” will be back next season; “West Wing” won’t). Leo’s funeral wasn’t really shown, and it would’ve been nice (but then, NBC’s budget probably couldn’t afford giving all the necessary guest stars speaking lines, so the West Wing producers and writers did what they could). Rob Lowe – where are you already? They couldn’t get Rob Lowe’s Sam Seaborn even an appearance in the Leo funeral portion? But, the preview looks like Sam’ll be on next week, with Josh offering him Josh’s own old White House job (Josh has been offered Leo’s old post, as White House Chief of Staff, and Josh isn’t sure yet about accepting, but he’s sure going through the motions of it anyway; and so he goes and offers his old Deputy White House Chief of Staff job to Sam? Good Lord, imagine if there had been another season (besides that Rob Lowe wouldn’t agree to return, but if he did) – it could have been a return of the old Sam and Josh hijinks? Aww, man! I’m getting the Best of West Wing nostalgia).

And, by the way – ABC’s recent re-make of “Ten Commandments” – umm, sorry, I only caught part of Part one, and it wasn’t very good. I missed the corny yet charismatic vibes of Charlton Heston and Yul Brynner. Plus, the remake only made the gaps of the original that much more obvious (i.e., the re-make’s showing of how Moses went from Prince of Egypt to living in the desert to seeing the burning bush in a few quick scene changes couldn’t get me to suspend my belief in reality at all). Fortunately, ABC still showed Charlton Heston and Yul Brynner anyway, and I managed to catch two scenes (the Red Sea part and the part where Yul Brynner’s Pharoah couldn’t believe that Moses’ God would kill all the Egyptian first-born sons). My annual thing done.
Slate’s tv critic Troy Patterson reviews last night’s Celebrity Cooking Showdown. I caught a glimpse of it – I mean, really, Alan Thicke (of the ex-“Growing Pains” fame) as host? Total turnoff (no offense to you, Alan Thicke, but I can’t go back to my childhood to regain my fondness for your old show). And, they made it look like Iron Chef but with soap stars. Huh?

I watched “How I met your mother” on CBS instead. Very funny show. Neil Patrick Harris (the ex-Doogie Howser) has really stolen the show with his character’s antics (and just a hint of angst).

After a long time away, I’m involved again in a small thespian production. I actually only have about 4 lines, but I do a lot of behind the scenes stuff. The good things about a theater production are that they tend to bring people together, and I think that it will do that here. I really do miss it.

A self-imposed hiatus, wherein life got busy. (and taxes had to be done).

April reading: P.S., I Love You – by Cecelia Ahern (the daughter of the Prime Minister of Ireland; a rookie writer, this having been her 1st book; she’s got two or three since, and she’s still only in her 20’s!). Protagonist Holly is only 29, and her husband Gerry – the love of her life, her soulmate and best friend – has died of a brain tumor. She spends the next ten months trying to live with the grief and love and laughter, as Gerry’s final letters – meant for her to open each month after his death – helps her with the transition. A chick lit book, but not a typical one, where the girl isn’t about getting a love (she had one), but about getting a life. A pretty good subway read.

Ah, too bad Brooklyn Restaurant Week ended. Managed to do Shinjuku on Atlantic Avenue. Pretty good food. Liked the shrimp tempura – very tasty. Me and the fried food thing.

On Monday night, 4/9/06, I was at the Korematsu Lecture, sponsored by the AALSA of the NYU Law School; Congressman Honda (D-Cal.) was the speaker. Very inspiring.

Fascinating NY Times reading: Fibonacci poetry. Sort of like haikus, but even odder.
The passing of Rev. Williame Sloane Coffin, a former chaplain of Yale/Vietnam War protester/Civil Rights advocate – and one who inspired Garry Trudeau to create Rev. Scott Sloan of “Doonesbury” (the too-cool-for-coolness pastor who counsels the Doonesbury gang).

Speaking of “Doonesbury,” Mike Doonesbury’s daughter, Alex, has been accepted by all the colleges she applied (the tech schools: Cal Tech, RPI, RIT, MIT, the Ivies, Mike’s alma mater the somehow accredited Walden, etc.). Now, it’s just a matter of Alex’s deciding. She might even shock Mike by not going to any of the schools – since she dropped the bombshell on Saturday’s comic that she might want to take a few years off. Oops… 😉

The curious nature of the incidences wherein the Supreme Court Justices blab to the public – Slate’s Dahlia Lithwick worries about what this means:

Because the Supreme Court justices want to be a part of the national conversation—and especially where that conversation pertains to Supreme Court justices—they often launch these little speech bombs into the ether. Since there is no Supreme Court blog, no cable television show about them, and no way to insert “Shut up, Tom DeLay” into a written opinion, the justices are left with the most roundabout modes of communicating: O’Connor talks to John Cornyn through the students at Georgetown, with an assist by Nina Totenberg. Scalia talks to Stephen Breyer and John Paul Stevens through the students at the University of Freiburg in Switzerland. And Justice Kennedy talks to editorialists through international lawyers.

This is not the smartest way to conduct a national dialogue about policy. It’s how parents fight in front of the children. (“Tell your father the litter box is full. Again.”) [….]
The problem with these accumulated extrajudicial comments is that they often happen in such liminal political spaces: in foreign lands, or unpublished formats, assailing unnamed adversaries, and through indirect channels. This sort of shadow-dialogue only fosters more resentment and criticism. Justices wishing to take part in the national conversation must stop pretending they aren’t really speaking, or that nobody’s really listening, or that their words don’t have consequences.

Perhaps it’s unfair to ask that Supreme Court justices speak openly and directly if we simply plan to call for their recusals whenever they do. But judicial attempts to speak from the shadows are plainly backfiring. If they want to be a part of the conversation, it’s time for the justices to step up to the mike and talk. [internal link is Slate/Lithwick’s]

Checked out the Macy’s Flower Show. Quite nice.

Great weather; happy Easter and Passover and spring!

The big news this week in the computer world was on the Intel Mac’s Boot Camp, which lets you run Windows on a Mac natively for the first time, if you don’t mind repartitioning your computer.

The behind-the-scenes news is virtualization. Microsoft is giving away for free their Virtual Server (which is really their repackaged versionof VirtualPC). To top that, also for free, I ran VMWare Player and the Red Hat Enterprise AS 5 virtual appliance on Windows XP. You need like 6 GB of space on your hard drive, and the more memory, the better, but I got about 3400 bogomips on a 1.5 GHZ Pentium 4, which isn’t fantastic, but it’s way more than enough to get the GUI fully operational and browing the X Windows version of Firefox without hesitation, without messing up my partitions, and with full sound support. This is the new frontier in computing!

NY Times’ William Grimes reviews a book on Julia Child, or rather, Julia’s memoirs that her grandnephew Alex Prud’homme, wrote with her and completed.

According to an article by Jesse Sheidlower in Slate, apparently it was very bad for NY Times to have the word “scumbag” in the crossword, in response to the clue “scoundrel,” as it turns out that “scumbag” has vulgar implications (i.e., its early English origins as the word for condom). Times puzzle editor, Will Shortz, himself said he was surprised. The article notes:

So, how did “scumbag” make it into the puzzle? Simple: No one realized it could be offensive. Evidence suggests that many people, especially younger speakers, are unaware of the sexual meaning (the Times’ 1998 allusion to Burton’s remark was particularly confusing to such people). All major general American dictionaries—Merriam-Webster’s Collegiate Dictionary, the American Heritage Dictionary, Webster’s New World College Dictionary, the New Oxford American Dictionary, the Random House Webster’s College Dictionary—include the word only in its “despicable person” sense, without any “vulgar” label or acknowledgment of its origins. The “condom” sense can be found only in the largest dictionaries, such as the Random House Unabridged and the Oxford English Dictionary, not out of ignorance or prudery, but because the sense isn’t very common. And it’s not even clear why “condom” is such an offensive concept.

If you didn’t know the word’s dubious history, you might be hard-pressed to discover it. And you wouldn’t be alone in your ignorance. In a New York Times forum, puzzle editor Will Shortz wrote, “The thought never crossed my mind this word could be controversial.” Lynn Lempel, the author of the puzzle, wrote in a crossword blog, “I’m dumbfounded—and also just plain dumb I guess. I was totally ignorant of its vulgar side.” Shortz said he would not include the word again.

The Times, of course, has every right to ban the word. As the Times‘ own style manual advises, “A larger concern is for the newspaper’s character. The Times differentiates itself by taking a stand for civility in public discourse, sometimes at an acknowledged cost in the vividness of an article or two, and sometimes at the price of submitting to gibes.” But the incident raises interesting questions. How offensive can a word be if people don’t realize it’s offensive? How many people have to object? Is gyp meaning “to swindle” OK to use if you don’t know it’s derived from Gypsy? And what about the opposite scenario, in which people are offended by something that’s not actually offensive? Niggardly is unrelated to the racial epithet it sounds like, and squaw is not actually derived from an Algonquian word for the female genitalia; does that mean we can dismiss objections to the use of these words, exemplified by the recent campaigns by activists to strip squaw from U.S. place names?

There’s a tendency among cautious folk to regard anything that might be offensive as offensive. But context should help us make these decisions. A nipple may be vulgar if displayed by a stripper, but it’s surely not if it’s being used to feed a baby. And in this case, the sense is unquestionably not vulgar. How do we know? The Times gives us the definition! If, once you come up with the seven letters, you’re still bothered, well, you’re the one with the dirty mind.

Rather good points were made in the article. (links within the blocked passage are Slate’s own links).

Sunday’s World News Tonight had Dan Harris as the anchor. He tries very well as the straight man anchorman, but he has this undercurrent of sarcasm I find amusing.

I really enjoy watching these reruns of the second season of “Alias.” This late Sunday night, the local channel showed the episode of the Bristow Family Vacation – that is, the episode where Secret Agent Sydney and her erstwhile CIA dad Jack, and her mom, the enemy agent Irina, are stranded in India and had to jointly shoot their way out of the situation – when, not long before, Jack warned Irina that he’ll kill her if she does anything, and Syd had to snap at her quarreling parents to quit quarreling. Quite an episode.

Asian Heritage Month continues – it’s in April in the wonderful world of academia anyway, even if the rest of America celebrates it in May. I went to the Undergrad Alma Mater event. Quite something. Free food – as the law students said last night and the undergrads confirmed – is all good. Dessert – yummy again. And, here I am, thinking of trying to get on the boat of Brooklyn Restaurant Week tomorrow night. I’ve been very, very bad this week!

And, speaking of the Undergrad Alma Mater, that favorite hangout institution of Alma Mater has new ownership – and may soon be even more different than, say, how poet Allen Ginsberg would have remembered it.
Must do exercise this weekend. Somehow.

Substituting for Charlie Rose Thursday night: NBC’s Brian Williams interviews Newsweek’s John Meachem on religion and politics in America, plus Marian Wright Edelman of the Children’s Defense Fund – wow. Cool stuff. Yes, me geek, but me like. Brian (if I may be on first name basis with him, as I have been with the Dan/Tom/Peter trio in the past) has his good moments.

Sad but true – Conan O’Brien did this very funny gag on “What if the Katie Couric to CBS News saga was made into a movie and so who would play everybody?” He has NBC’s Ann Curry played by… Steven Segal (and the picture he had was scary (for Segal, anyway); NBC’s Walter Scott played by Terry Bradshaw; NBC’s Matt Lauer played by Natalie Portman in her “V for Vendetta” bald look (poor Matt; losing the hair is a hard thing); CBS’ Bob Schieffer played by… Emperor Palpatine of Star Wars (bit harsh on Bob Schieffer there, Conan!); NBC’s Stone Phillips played by Star Trek’s Data (with a picture of Data’s pasty paleness matching Stone’s pasty paleness); NBC’s Brian Williams, Couric’s soon-to-be competitor, played by Sesame Street’s Guy Smiley (so funny – the picture Conan had of Guy Smiley demonstrated that Guy Smiley has a similar jaw line as Brian – tee hee…); and last but not least, Couric played by… Jack Nicholson’s Joker (something to do with their matching smiles – quite scary to think about!).
The coverage on the released study of the Gospel of Judas. Interesting.

Asian-Americans in the newspapers:

A South Asian-American chick lit book: Kaavya Viswanathan, who’s only 19 and a sophomore at Harvard, writes about her protagonist, Opal Mehta, tries (extremely hard) to become a Well-Rounded Person to get into Ivy League School of Her Dreams (Harvard, of course). Sounds like a book I’d read. 🙂

Actress Lucy Liu (Queens native) has been doing the tv talk show rounds to promote “Lucky Number Slevin.” Not necessarily my kind of movie. Then again, I felt squeemish when Lucy Liu got on “Ally McBeal”; as much as I’d like seeing Asian-Americans on tv, her character was… rather broad for a broad…

NY Times’ Mark Bittman profiles David Chang, chef:

TO listen to David Chang, you might think he is an utter failure. Mr. Chang, a 28-year-old Korean-American, talks about his difficulties before, during and after college; of watching friends get rich in the dot-com boom while he was bussing tables; and of walking around “with a chip on my shoulder” because “other guys could cook circles around me.” And finally, of becoming disenchanted with the behind-the-scenes world of fine dining.

He is a young man the size of a small football player who takes up even more room with his mixture of energy, passion, joy and anger.

But an outsider hearing his story can see steady progress, progress that has resulted in Momofuku Noodle Bar, his unusual restaurant on First Avenue in the East Village. It draws near-constant crowds and even the limo set, despite the fact that it is far from luxurious and takes no reservations, making longish waits routine.

Mr. Chang was born in northern Virginia, where his father worked in the restaurant industry, eventually opening a restaurant. Both his mother and grandmother were “great” cooks, he said. His grandfather, now 96, speaks Japanese and taught Mr. Chang to appreciate Japanese food as well as Korean.

His family hoped that Mr. Chang would go into law or finance, but he studied religion in college and graduated with no particular goal. In his early 20’s, he lived in London, taught English in Japan and had a variety of jobs in New York, from bussing tables to working in the finance industry. “That taught me I could never sit at a darned desk,” he said, using a slightly stronger adjective. Finally, he enrolled in culinary school, another venture about which he has little positive to say. [….]

As the tide began to turn, thanks to good decision making, luck, perseverance or most likely a combination of all three, Mr. Chang added complicated dishes that were based on his background but influenced by his training. The pickles, for example, an integral part of many Japanese and Korean meals, became increasingly varied: the restaurant now serves 8 or 10 different types at any given time. A bowl of pickles at Momofuku is a mosaic of bright colors and has a gorgeous range of flavors and textures.

“We use five or six different pickling methods, from a simple brine to a full-blown kimchi,” he said. The simple brine here features Asian pears. His kimchi method produces a super-flavorful result that has the distinct advantage of being delicious the instant it is done.

He also added far more substantial dishes, including slow-cooked ones that integrate Korean and French flavors and techniques, like the slow-cooked short ribs here, a traditional dish that Mr. Chang finishes with buttery potatoes and carrots.

“It’s a much easier style of braising than they do in French restaurants,” he said, “but the flavors are strong, deep and intense.”

He might as well be speaking of himself.

Interesting article, Mr. Bittman.

In the alternative, regarding the outlook for people of color: how diverse is it behind the scenes of high end cooking? “Black Chefs’ Struggle for the Top” is a fascinating article.

The architectural wonders of Meji Mura that we visited last year were described by the New York Times in their coverage of this year’s exchange musical exchange program between Brooklyn, and Inuyuma, a suburb of Nagoya in Japan.

Had a satisfying meal at the alumni dinner with SSW and P this past night. The new space is twice as big and twice as spectacular as the prior space. Chicago singer-songwriter Cynthia Lin made a soulful guitar performance during the intermission – I bought her CD. She will be performing again at the APA festival in Union Square the first Sunday in May.

A late night; should be in bed shortly (funny thing is, I get home more or less at a decent hour after the Alma Mater Law School Asian Alumni dinner, and I end up watching Ben Kingsley on the Tavis Smiley show, and Craig Ferguson cracking Katie Couric jokes, and then not moving onto bed. Yeesh).

Good to see FC and P and various mentees and classmates and others.  Dessert at the dinner was spectacularly good. Yum, I like good cake. And pastries. And caffiene to clean the palate off. Maybe there should just be a thing for desserts alone. Maybe I’m just weak and w/o discipline because I’m a sucker for dessert and caffiene.

Though I must say – seeing the interior of the new law school building was very nice. Nice view and everything. It didn’t leave me with the feeling I still get, five years and running, when I see the Undergrad Alma Mater’s new student center (yeah, that’s right, my class was the class w/o a student center for three years because they just had to build the new one after razing the old one, leaving us with the tin can temporary building… but, not that my class is bitter about it. Really).

Oh, and Wednesday’s snow: Seeing the snow had me in a tailspin, since it’s not something you expect to see in April. And, yeah, like FC said, those were big snowflakes. Or, as I saw it: Big Ass Mutant Snowflakes. Almost made me morbidly wonder if we were having a nuclear winter. Or global warming really making bad things. Bottomline: very strange weather.

A very funny Slate article – and very correct. The whole problem with couples on tv series is that, no matter how much sexual chemistry there may be between the characters, you can never ever have them together until the series finale (assuming you have a network that allows you to get to a series finale). The rule is, you cannot have a happy couple on tv or at least one that is happy while still dealing with the ups and downs of life.

Like, how on “The Practice,” Bobby and Lindsay could not enjoy one moment of happiness and their divorce/separation takes it toll on everyone (made for ugly tv, not good tv, which may explain why I stopped watching “The Practice” when the characters got too sanctimonious for their own good).

Like, as cited in the article, Mulder and Scully on “X-Files” really couldn’t take their chemistry very far on-screen (leaving the rest of us with overactive imaginations to come up with something).

Heck, I’ll even note how on just about every incarnation of Star Trek, long-term romantic relationships aren’t handled very well. On DS9: Worf and Jadzia’s relationship ends due to her death (didn’t help that the actress was leaving the show and Worf has a poor streak of women dying on him); on The Next Generation, Picard and Crusher with their whole “Jean-Luc, I have something to tell you…” and Crusher never getting to tell him because… red alert on the Enterprise…; Janeway and Chakotay on Voyager letting their subtext and longing get to them but for her stubborn refusal to stray from her vows of duty; and the ultimate frittered-away relationship in Star Trek: Trip and T’Pol on “Enterprise.”   As Spock would say, highly illogical indeed.
“House” – this Tuesday’s “House” continues the saga of the Housian Odd Couple – Drs. House (played with perfect zing this week by Hugh Laurie) and Wilson (played with the usual puppy dog cuteness by Robert Sean Leonard) continue to drive each other crazy, although House is a bit more realistic about it than Wilson (i.e., doesn’t it occur to Wilson that Mrs. Wilson ain’t coming back? Although, I still think Mrs. Wilson should make one appearance, even if it’s the camera watching her from behind as she turns away from the Perfect Oncologist Cutie Pie Man (whose big weakness is consoling with women who aren’t his wives)).

Meanwhile, Dr. Cameron makes the nasty quips at the men; methinks she’s getting tired of them not taking her seriously (she made a real zinger at Dr. Chase, which made me wonder if it was a rather unkind reference to their one-night stand, or she has spent way too much time with House).

Drs. Foreman and House had their own Odd Couple moment: sarcastic WASP House is the Leader who usually writes on the white board with the marker, and he (in his lovely un-PC way) tells off African-American Foreman with a not-veiled remark of “There’s a reason why they call it the white board…” and Foreman grabbing the marker and snapping, “There’s a reason why they call it a black marker…” Good for Foreman for not backing down on House’s idiotic moments (he does have them – and boy did he have a lot in this episode!).

Actress Michelle Trachtenberg, the ex-Dawn of “Buffy the Vampire Slayer” (i.e., Buffy’s supernaturally-derived kid sister), plays the patient of the week, with a mysterious illness. I didn’t think she’d still play the teenage kid roles by this point, but I guess it makes sense since she’s still a teenager. Nicely done, though (most of the time, the patients are just irritants).

We’re having a blizzard in the City right now! Gorgeous flakes of snow, many of them the size of a quarter, are completely making the sky white. Check out some photos from my phone cam on the flickr bar!