I blog about this every year, but this year we live on Atlantic so this street fair will be right outside our door. It’s this Sunday. I can’t wait.
Here’s a picture of everything going on. Great food, great music and plenty of good beer. What could be better?
Like most parents, we have resisted the sugar cereals. Danielle started out only with Cheerios. Then we mixed in a few Fruit Loops (which today she still refers to as “rainbow Cheerios”). Finally we were visiting my wife’s sister and her boys (14 and 18) were eating Captain Crunch. So Danielle tried it.
It’s all over.
The problem is compounded by the parental convenience factor. In the morning we are typically scrambling trying to get Danielle ready for pre-school. She needs to eat breakfast. When it’s Captain Crunch, she doesn’t complain and eats quickly. We augment it with apples afterwards and make sure she brushes her teeth well, but let’s face it, the healthy breakfast just went out the window…
I was at the Women’s finals of the US Open on Saturday. The US Open is a great, if overpriced, event. No annual sporting event attracts more people than the US Open (it is two weeks long, after all). The American Express Gold Card gets you a shot a tickets a bit before the general public (but apparently after anyone with real connections) so we always try to go one night. The last two years we’ve picked the women’s final because it’s on a Saturday night.
The night sessions are fun at the Open. They are much rowdier, and tennis needs a bit of that. I’m not a huge tennis fan. I enjoy it, and follow the majors, but that’s about it.
This year’s women’s final was a bit lame. Henin simply stomped her opponent. At no point in the match did the outcome seem in doubt. And it always helps to have one of the Williams sisters in the final. Love them or hate them, they add a ton of buzz to the match.
But the weirdest thing for a baseball/basketball/football fan about tennis is the total silence. In between points, one person can easily yell something and the entire stadium will hear it. Try that at Yankee stadium. Imagine if at a basketball game, the crowd had to be silent during a free throw.
I was at a Yankee game with a friend of mine recently, and between cheering and general socializing we pretty much talked the entire game (ok, he’s a talker). At a tennis match you make whispered comments and only occasionally lest you offend someone.
I’d like to see golf and tennis players have to deal with distractions. C’mon Tiger, hit a 40 putt with people screaming…
Here’s a very worthwhile link. And a new featured song…
For those that remember the 1983 movie War Games, this is the line that the computer utters after it realizes that Tic-Tac-Toe is unwinnable.
Well, let’s add checkers to the list. Not that it’s true when most humans play, but scientists have proven that the top checkers computer program cannot be beaten.
Another memorable line from War Games (the heros were trying to escape an island):
Well, what kind of an asshole grows up in Seattle and doesn’t even know how to swim?
There’s no point to that quote, it just makes me laugh…
Here’s an interesting iPhone review. While it gets good reviews as a gadget, this is what it said about the iPhone for professionals:
The unhappy fact is that for all the glamorous marketing and positioning, iPhone turns out to be the worst $1,975 investment (iPhone plus two years minimum, mandatory service) you could make in mobile communications. If you put that kind of money into a BlackBerry, Treo, Windows Mobile, or Symbian device, you will be blown away by what a genuine professional mobile handset can do for you, out of the box, through incremental improvement by the manufacturer and wireless operator, and extension by downloadable third-party software.
Ouch.
My Father’s Day present from my wife was tickets to see Frost Nixon on Broadway. I had heard only a little bit about this play. It’s one where your initial reaction is “they’re making a play about that?” The play is about the interviews that David Frost, a British talk show host, did with Richard Nixon after his resignation. Sure, that sounds very entertaining.
But my wife knows that I am very interested in history and politics and she heard from a friend that it was excellent. The actor who played Nixon won the Tony and most other awards for the role. It’s apparently, according to Wikipedia, being adapted into a film to be directed by Ron Howard.
For those too young to remember, here’s the basic overview. The interviews took place in 1977 (Nixon resigned in 1974). The fact that David Frost was the one who landed the first big interview with Nixon after the resignation was quite unusual. David Frost was a British talk show host with a bit of a playboy reputation and not a real political heavyweight. He briefly had a show in the U.S. but it had been canceled. He was looking to jump start his career.
Important note. I am getting much of this history from the play. I know that the play is drama and not completely historically accurate. But I don’t know the actual history well enough to know exactly which parts are totally true and which are drama. This was definitely one of those plays that makes you want to go and read about the history.
Anyway, the Nixon camp was getting offers from mainstream US media for a big interview (the play kept mentioning that Mike Wallace was willing to pay $300K). But they were quite concerned that Nixon would just get attacked. They were looking for a shot at redeeming his reputation. So a lightweight British talk show host seemed perfect. Plus they got more money (again, according to the play).
So the main conflict in the play is the two central characters, both trying to redeem their reputations. Frost hires some serious people to help him with research. But Nixon is a master during the initial interviews and totally takes over, always painting himself in the best possible light.
In the final interview, Frost had some factual ammunition to catch Nixon in an outright lie regarding Watergate and this finally pushes Nixon to the point where he gets the confession/apology that he was truly looking for.
Even reading what I’ve written above, it still doesn’t sound like a great play. But it was. It is very well written and the actors are tremendous. The whole thing was riveting. I don’t know if it will translate to the screen well, because it was the incredible presence of the actors that made the play. It’s just different when you are 40 feet away.
I’m a news junkie. I’ve always needed a weekly news magazine of some sort. I’ve done Time and Newsweek, but they have too much fluff. The Washington Post has a good weekly edition which I read for a while. But I’ve settled in with The Economist for a while now.
First of all, it amuses me that I read a magazine called The Economist. I mean, if you were starting a magazine from scratch and wanted to make sure that not too many people read it, calling it The Economist would be a good plan. I guess Integral Calculus Weekly was already taken.
It is definitely an intellectual news weekly. Paris Hilton has yet to be covered. There was an interesting article about The Sopranos in last weeks edition (it came out before the final episode), but the article tied The Sopranos to international perceptions of America. No predictions about who would get whacked in the final episode.
It is very international. The editorial staff is both in London and New York, so you get a much more US and British view than you get from Newsweek or Time. There is the occasional article about Sri Lanka that I honestly couldn’t care less about, but overall I like the international view.
It does have a more economic focus than most. I’ve probably learned more about economics just by reading it. The latest edition has an article titled Goldilocks tests the Vindaloo. This is hilarious to me. The title wittily implies that the Indian economy is in danger of inflation. That was obvious, right?
The US has often been referred to (at least recently – particularly under Greenspan at the Fed) as the Goldilocks economy. Not too hot, not too cold, just right. Vindaloo, for those who don’t know Indian food, is a very spicy type of food. Clearly if Goldilocks tried Vindaloo she would say “this porridge is too hot”, so the title implies that the Indian economy is too hot, meaning in danger of inflation. Obvious, right? OK, it wasn’t to me either, but after reading the article I had to chuckle.
And in the same edition there’s a very good article discussing how crime rates are dropping in New York, Chicago and LA, but not in other cities.
There just aren’t many other weekly magazines with such a variety of very intelligent discussion of issues. That’s why I like The Economist.
I haven’t blogged in a while (my brief font post doesn’t count). I’ve been a bit busy and stressed. Normally it’s work that stresses me but lately it’s been stuff outside of work.
Our adoption is stalled with the Guatemalan government. It’s in that black hole mode where we have no idea what is going on. So that’s stressful.
The big one lately was our home purchase. This was very much a city event. We are buying a loft style co-op. The previous owner took a two bedroom apartment and added a wall to make it a three bedroom. We liked that. After our offer was accepted our lawyer put some language into the contract making sure that the current owner delivered the approvals to have that work done. That seemed like a formality since the work was done two years ago.
Oops.
It turned out the official approval had never happened. No problem, just get it done before the closing. Oops. It turns out that they couldn’t get it approved as a three bedroom because one of the bedrooms didn’t meet city regulations. No problem, just do the work to meet the regulations before the closing. Oops, can’t be done.
Suddenly we had a legal two bedroom. Well, even if the space is identical, I don’t think a two bedroom is worth the same money as a three bedroom. So negotiations went back and forth. Finally we had resolved the issue. So now we are buying a two bedroom with a storage room (for less money).
Does this sort of thing happen in Amarillo?
On another note, we spent a very city style Memorial Day weekend. We had no plans so we stayed in the city. It’s always interesting spending a holiday in the city. Everyone else leaves, so the city is pleasantly quiet. Traffic is light. Parking is plentiful. It’s quite remarkable.
On Friday we had a barbeque at a friends apartment in Brooklyn (they have a nice deck). On Saturday we needed to go to our storage unit to switch winter and summer stuff. This too, is a city thing. If you don’t have an attic or a basement or a garage, you need a place to put stuff. Storage units are common. So twice a year we go, mainly to switch my wife’s wardrobe.
On Sunday my wife needed to organize the stuff we got from storage. So it was me and Danielle. We spent the whole day together at various playgrounds. We call them parks, but I grew up in the Midwest and to me “park” implies grass and trees. These are asphalt, swings, jungle gyms and sprinklers. Where we live there are easily ten playgrounds in walking distance. You pick the playground to go to based on what you want to do (playground A has the best swings, but B is better for riding bikes and C has good sprinklers). So in the morning we took Danielle’s bike to the close playground (bikes). Then we grabbed swim suits, went to McDonald’s for lunch and hit the next playground (sprinklers) with her scooter. After getting soaked we went for Italian Ices and went up to our roof deck to blow bubbles. And then we all went out for dinner. All in all a very good Brooklyn day. Then Monday my wife took Danielle to a baby shower and afterwards we went to Jersey for another barbeque. Not bad for a weekend with no plans.
Hopefully I’ll have an adoption update soon…
A loft is really just an apartment that is a big rectangle space. It is often created when an industrial or other type building (school, etc.) is converted to apartments. Lofts are favored by artists because you get a bunch of big space. But apartment dwellers also like them because you get to decide how the apartment will look by adding walls where you want them. They also typically have high ceilings which add to the spacious feeling. Our building is the original headquarters and factory for Ex-Lax (insert joke here). The building was converted to apartments about 30 years ago.
A co-op is similar to a condo, but different. Co-op is short for cooperative. In a co-op the building is owned cooperatively by all the apartment owners as a corporation. Each apartment owner has a certain number of shares in the corporation which determine voting rights, etc. The building is typically managed by a co-op board and each owner pays a certain monthly maintenance fee which covers the mortgage on the building and all common expenses. Co-ops are very common in New York City.
OK, that may seem like an oxymoron to most, but this web site agrees with my general distaste for MS Comic Sans. It seems like every person who first discovers fonts other than Ariel and Times New Roman goes first to MS Comic Sans. It is definitely a pet peeve of mine. The name should tell you that it is not a serious font. If you are using MS Comic Sans in an Excel spreadsheet, there is something seriously wrong.
Of course that’s just me…
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