What an idiot.

I don't know who this Charles Blow moron is, but this is the most facile thing I've read this weekend.

Unless it results in unsafe sex (and Blow concedes from the outset that "hooking up" doesn't), who gives a shit about youth social relationships, beyond a puerile or academic interest? Of all the things I worry about today, the "demise of dating" doesn't even make the fucking list. I'm ashamed that the Times gave him space to write.

Although they did manage to get me ranting about it, so I suppose that might count as a successful op-ed...

Also: Unless they've been living in a closet the last twenty years, anyone under the age of 45 -- not 30 -- probably knows all about "hooking up." Your correspondent most certainly included.

For of such is the kingdom of heaven...

A pair of my friends attend a lovely church in Greensboro, N.C. that recently made the front page of the paper there. (My former employer.)

The church runs a program in which it fills backpacks full of food, and every Friday, hands them out to poor children in some of the schools in the city. The idea is that the kids get free food for themselves and their families, and because it's in a backpack and is discretely distributed, the kids aren't stygmatized for accepting charity.

It boggles my mind that people in this country actually still go hungry. No one in the richest country in the world should ever want for food, no more than they should want for air.  

I am not a religious man. Or even a faithful man, sadly. 

But stories like this one make me appreciate and envy those friends and loved ones of mine who are.  Most are Christians. They are not the sort of Christians who try to tell the rest of the world what to do, and who to do it with; they wouldn't be my friends if they were. They are, rather, the sort of Christians who are unswervingly kind and generous and understanding.

God bless them, if there's a God to be handing out blessings. And give some money to your local food bank this season, if you can spare it.

Our financial crisis could be way worse.

We could be seeing riots in the streets over rampant pyramid schemes gone bad. Awesome.

Remember when I said I love Somali pirates? (By the way, those badasses stole a fucking 1,080 foot Saudi Arabian supertanker the other day.) I love Columbia for similar reasons.

Back to normal nonsense

Apologies for the boring inside-baseball aside, below.

So I came down with kind of a nasty cold this week. Thanks to Google's cool new tool, I know I'm not alone in DC -- apparently there's some kind of bug running around the city that's nasty enough to cause lots of people to Google "flu symptoms," or the like.

New York Times has a good story explaining how it works.

See, there's this guy Jeff Jarvis, and he's kind of an asshole...

Most people I know probably don't care much about the future of journalism as an industry, and I don't blame them; there will always be news, from somewhere, produced by someone, so from the point of view of a consumer, who cares who the someone is?

But those of us who work in the industry kind of obsess over crap like this:

I have heard about this dude Jeff Jarvis for a while, without really paying close attention to what he actually says. He is one of a growing body of "new journalists" who say, generally, that print is dead (probably true) and that all the old ways of doing journalism are defunct (not so sure about that).

People like Jarvis promote things like "citizen journalism," which basically involves news organizations recruiting people off the street to report for them. (For free, of course.) An easy example is CNN's "iReporter" thing, where they encourage viewers to send them video of car crashes or fires or whatever disaster happens to be going on in the neighborhood.

That's fine, as far as it goes. But it's no replacement for professional journalism.

Anyhow, I've long had an uneasy feeling about Jarvis and his acolytes. I wasn't sure why; it just seemed to me, a working journalist, that this dude Jarvis, a former journalist turned consultant, was more talking down to the industry than working with it. While he seemed to know what was wrong with journalism (people don't read papers anymore, duh), he didn't seem to know so much how to fix it, or what was still right with the profession.

"Citizen journalism" ain't the answer, put it that way. It ain't even part of the answer, best I can tell.

Ron Rosenbaum puts my uneasiness into sharp focus in this Slate piece.

My favorite part is this little bitch-slap:

It makes you wonder whether Jarvis has actually done any, you know, reporting. Particularly when he tells you that in doing his book on the total wonderfulness of Google, he decided it would be better not to speak to anyone who works at Google, that instead he's written about the idea of Google, as he construes it, rather than finding out how they—the actual Google people—construe it. What he's done, Jarvis claims, is to "reverse-engineer" the reality of Google. This means deducing how Google got to be what it is and do what it does by conjecturing about its effects from the outside.

Allow me to make a conjecture: Did Jarvis sound out Google informally and get rebuffed, prompting him to "decide" he wouldn't talk to them "on principle"? Of course, I could ask Jarvis about this, but that would be mere "reporting"; it's more fun to "reverse-engineer" his decision.

Jarvis has responded on his blog. And in the first paragraph, his response really crystallizes, for me, everything unlikeable about the man:

I am the honoree of an attempted hatchet job by Ron Rosenbaum in - what’s the name of that site? Salon? no, Slate (I always get them confused).

This crap is straight from The Politicians' Guide to Responding to Criticism.

Step 1: Adopt a haughty, better-than-thou attitude ("I am the honoree...")
Step 2: Dismiss the criticism as a personal attack, or "hatchet job."
Step 2: Denigrate the critic, in this case by pretending you don't know what publication he's from.

What an asshole.

P.S.:

Here's what's wrong with journalism today, in my view. Back in the early 90s, the geniuses who run most of the nation's newspapers -- still the primary source for most of your news, no matter where you think you're getting it -- made the fateful decision to give away everything they produce for free on the Internet.

Now, the entire public is conditioned to getting its news for free. And surprise, surprise, it turns out that giving away everything you produce for free isn't a very viable business model.

Here's my suggested solution: Every newspaper in the land should start charging one cent to read each article it publishes online, or perhaps even just a fraction of a cent. Condition people to understand, like they used to, that news isn't free; it's a product like anything else, and you've got to pay for it if you want it.

Otherwise, good luck with your "citizen journalism."

Update: This guy Simon Owens sent me a nice e-mail the other day with the subject line, "Alex, a news tip for your blog." I am sucker for any kind of tip, news or not. Anyhow, Simon has ripped Jarvis at his own blog and also sends along the work of a colleague, who wrote about something called "crowdfunding" for journalism.

I don't know about this "crowdfunding" stuff as a business model for an entire industry, but I do think that there's a strong possibility all the best journalism in the country will be produced by nonprofits in the near future.

Also: very cool that people other than my mom and sister occasionally read my blog. Not that I don't appreciate my most loyal readers, but still. Thanks, Simon.

My piece of history

I'll try to keep this as apolitical as possible.

So I'm in a bar called Lucky Strike tonight, watching the election returns. It's an upscale bowling alley/bar in Washington's Chinatown neighborhood, which is less China and more The Gap.

When I get there at seven p.m., it's a racially mixed crowd. The returns start rolling in. Every time Obama wins a state, there's applause. So clearly, there's a partisan bent to the place, as you would expect in Washington DC.

When CNN calls Ohio for Obama, there's loud applause.

When CNN calls Virginia for Obama, there's crazy applause.

I look around. Most of the white people have left. The bar crowd is 80 percent black.

I remark to my one of my friends: "I doubt these people have ever cared very much about election returns."

It's a generalization and maybe an unfair one. I don't know.

Shortly after Virginia is called, the polls close on the west coast. CNN calls the presidential election for Obama.

The place goes nuts. There is applause, screaming, an impromptu chant of "yes we can."

A friend of mine goes to the bathroom. He comes back and reports that two grown black men are in the men's room, crying over Obama's election. Crying.

As historic as this moment is, I wonder if something has gone under-noticed here. This is huge for black America. Probably bigger than the media has realized; certainly bigger than I realized.

I walk home from the bar, across the city, up the National Mall and past the Capitol. The Capitol is lit up and is as beautiful as ever. The Mall is quiet. But all around me, in the city, car horns are honking, people are cheering, and the city is alive; it is electric.

It is an amazing feeling.

Addendum: For what it's worth, I thought John McCain delivered one of the most gracious and touching concession speeches I've ever heard last night.

Addendum two: I deleted a piece of information from this post; someone I love and trust thought it might get me into trouble. I disagreed, but removed it anyway. Better safe than sorry, I suppose.

Avast, ye scurvy dogs!

I've come to a conclusion. The reason the world isn't doing anything about the rampant piracy off the coast of Somalia is because pirates are awesome, as this New York Times article clearly agrees.

Every time a seized ship tosses its anchor, it means a pirate shopping spree. Sheep, goats, water, fuel, rice, spaghetti, milk and cigarettes — the pirates buy all of this, in large quantities, from small towns up and down the Somali coast. Somalia’s seafaring thieves are not like the Barbary pirates, who terrorized European coastal towns hundreds of years ago and often turned their hostages into galley slaves chained to the oars. Somali pirates are known as relatively decent hosts, usually not beating their hostages and keeping them well-fed until payday comes.

“They are normal people,” said Mr. Said. “Just very, very rich.”

I can't get enough stories about Somali pirates. (Aside: What idiot sends a freighter full of fucking TANKS through Somali waters without arming the crew?)

Don't ever change, Somalia. I mean, except for all the starving people. That's not cool -- you should change that.

The perils of reporting from Congo...

The New York Times' man in Congo seems to have been carjacked by Congolese soldiers.

Several residents said that vanquished Congolese soldiers were looting shops on their way out of town. A band of fleeing soldiers commandeered a car that had been rented by a team of Western journalists and threatened the journalists at gunpoint to drive them west, away from the rebels. At one Goma hotel, the manager demanded payment for the room up front.

I SO should've been a foreign correspondent.

I agree wholeheartedly

... with this story. This dude Swansburg is my kind of curmudgeon.

Let's take it a step further, though. Let's outlaw all restaurant outings among groups of ten people or more who are unrelated, except under the following circumstances:

• The dinner is held at a restaurant that utilizes paper napkins; and/or
• said restaurant sells beer in cans; and/or
• said restaurant has a jukebox; and/or
• a mechanical bull; and/or
• something other than a fork or chopsticks is used to eat food (i.e.; hands, wooden mallets, shovels).

As a corollary, by the way: If you know of a restaurant that features all of those amenities, you should never go there in a group of less than 10.

C'mon, congressional Democrats -- let's making banning awkward and expensive dinners part of the "Nine for '09 Agenda."

My annual observations on the State of Las Vegas

The state of Las Vegas is strong, my friends.

It's 8 a.m. at Treasure Island, and we did not get up early.

Maybe it was just me and the booze, or maybe fat people just can't fit on planes anymore, or maybe America's actually wising up a bit about its disgusting obesity. Regardless, it was a pretty good-looking crowd in Vegas this year. (VERY good looking, in a few notable circumstances.) Setting aside the degenerate gamblers and assorted desert trash chain-smoking at the slot machines, of course.

Also, it turns out there is an upside to the rotten economy: cheap(er) blackjack tables. All kinds of $10 blackjack tables around, especially at Planet Hollywood (my favorite gambling joint, for the time being).

I was dismayed to see that auto-shufflers have launched a new offensive on the city, however. Please, if you see anything like one of these horrid things crouching on your blackjack table:


Just turn and walk away. Or if you MUST play (confession: I challenged the damn things a few times), be sure to complain loudly to the dealer about how your shitty luck is all due to the auto-shuffler. And for God's sake, don't tip.

So there's some clamor for me to post something

I get that. So here's my latest screed:

I hate old people. More specifically, I hate nearly every employee or former employee of the Long Island Rail Road, who have been egregiously abusing the nation's and New York state's disability systems.

And if you're thinking, "so what, it's New York, I don't live there, it doesn't affect me," you are flat wrong.

The L.I.R.R.’s record also raises questions about why the Railroad Retirement Board approves nearly 100 percent of disability requests from all the nation’s railroads. The board is funded through taxes on railroads and their workers, but Social Security had to contribute $3.6 billion last year to cover expenses.

“Everyone in America is going to contribute to that,” said Rick Lifto, assistant vice president of general claims for B.N.S.F., a large freight railroad. B.N.S.F.’s disability rate is lower than the L.I.R.R.’s, but even so, Mr. Lifto said, disabilities still cost his company millions of dollars.

By the way, this is just one more reason why the New York Times is the best source of news in the nation, regardless of what you might hear from certain political quarters.

I'll post something more fun about my summer vacation(s) soon. Also: suck it, Phil Fulmer.

UPDATE: I totally lied about posting anything about my summer vacations. Here's the short version: I went to the Adirondacks, paddled around in a canoe, camped and went on a brutal hike. I also went down to Florida and got caught in a tropical storm. Yawn.

Blow up the Olympics

So my uninformed assumptions about the Olympics have largely proved correct. Nonetheless, I have found myself watching some of it. The swimming is great. The rest of it, eh. (Synchronized diving is a particularly stupid "sport," I've decided.)

But especially bad is the "women's" gymnastics.

Let's call this for what it is: "prepubescent girls'" gymnastics. It's obscene and shouldn't be an international sport, as Buzz Bissinger explained pretty convincingly in the New York Times. Worst of all is this Chinese "women's" gymnastics team, which clearly doesn't include a single athlete who would qualify as a "woman," under generally accepted principles of womanhood. They are girls. If any of them are 16 years old, I'm 25.

Go beyond stripping the Chinese of their team gold medal, which absolutely should be the result of their cheating. Get rid of the sport entirely. Or at least raise the minimum age of participation to 18 -- generally accepted as adulthood -- and enforce it by requiring documentation more substantial than a passport.

If it's going to be called "women's" gymnastics, require the participants to BE women. I'd feel a lot more comfortable watching them prance around in makeup and leotards.

Taking down the Olympics

I'm not a big fan of the Olympics. Honestly, I'll probably be paying more attention to preseason NFL activities and plotting my fantasy football drafts than I will to NBC's tape-delayed, inevitably obsequious and credulous broadcasts of the Beijing Olympics.

But I do enjoy an outraged rant about how the International Olympic Committee and its corporate partners have sold their souls (as if they had any, duh) by staging the games in a pollution-choked city where the government is apparently cracking down harder than ever on its political opponents.

Sally Jenkins of the Washington Post delivers. Hey, if she wants me to respond by boycotting NBC -- no problem. As long as a football game isn't on.

We're #1

The University of Florida is the best party school in the country, again.

As a graduate of the place, I wonder how we don't win this thing every year.

In the news

Yet another edition of stuff I'm reading and enjoying.

• For some reason I like articles about crazy, indulgent parents and their spoiled children, a seemingly growing phenomenon. The Weekly Standard calls the country a "Kindergarchy." The article's long and tedious, to be frank, but I'm with this Joseph Epstein guy: What happened to just having kids and letting them grow up? Nowadays, they're pruned and pampered like showdogs, to the detriment of both children and parents.

• Going to the Olympics this summer? You might want to read up on how to use the local facilities. "Rule One: Exhaust all other possibilities." I started laughing hysterically at that sentence and didn't stop until the end of the piece. A friend of mine who's in the Marines was kind enough to send me a picture of one of these from Iraq; I'll be kind enough not to post it on the blog. Suffice to say: Nasty. And he reports that he did, in fact, have to use one.

• The National Enquirer claims to have caught former Sen. John Edwards (D-N.C.) visiting his "mistress" and "love child" at a Los Angeles hotel. This story raises all sorts of interesting issues for us in the so-called MSM. First, is it believable? The Enquirer isn't exactly known for its truthiness. But in this example, they appear to have legitimately caught Edwards skulking around a hotel late at night where a female acquaintance of his was known to be staying, and where he was not a registered guest. Edwards had no ready explanation for his behavior and freaked out when confronted. Given all that, the second issue for us MSMers is: Should we pursue this as a news story? Edwards holds no public office and is no longer a candidate for one. I say it's a story because he is a public figure, though not an elected one. Third, how do you pursue such a story? "Illicit sex" stories are notoriously difficult to report. I doubt Edwards, his wife, or his lady friend are talking, and I doubt he'll be caught in circumstances like these ever again. So short of citing the Enquirer's work -- which most news organizations are loathe to do -- there are few sources to work with. That's why you haven't read much about it.
  

My brave quest to procure ... an iPhone

Readers will recall my regret last week over not lining up with all the other idiots outside my local Apple store on July 11 to buy an iPhone 3G the day it came out.

I'm happy to report that my quest is complete. I have acquired an iPhone.

It was an arduous, yet heroic journey. It began late on July 18, when I saw on Apple's Web site that the store at the Fair Oaks Mall in Fairfax County, Va. would have iPhones in stock the next morning.

I woke up at 7:15 on July 19, thinking the store opened at 10. I got there at 8:30. A line of roughly 250 people stretched out the door. The store had been open since 8. They sold out by 9, but thought they might get another shipment. An employee finally told the crowd at about 9:30 that "if you're in line here" -- gesturing to about where I stood -- "you're probably not getting a phone today."

I left, despondent. For the next two days, Apple's Web site showed that every store in Virginia and Maryland was sold out. But I read some message boards. People were saying that the Web site wasn't correct -- that stores sometimes got shipments early in the day, after the Web site was updated. You had to call.

On Tuesday, I called the Clarenden store. They had iPhones. The line was about 20 people long. I dropped what I was doing and ran to the Metro. I missed the train to Clarenden. Heartbreak. Plan B: I took the train to Rosslyn, then got off and flagged a cab to Clarenden. I ran to the store. The line was only maybe a dozen people long. The store employees told us that they only had one model in stock: black, 16 gigabytes. Exactly what I wanted. I waited.

And waited.

And waited.

An hour-and-a-half later, I bought an iPhone.

A friend of mine who's too smart for these stupid lines and instead ordered an iPhone from an AT&T store (delivery takes about two weeks) asked me for a review today. Here's roughly what I sent him; warning, it may bore you if you're not a gadget freak:

So it goes without saying that the iPhone is the greatest advance in personal communications technology ever, and it makes my six-month-old BlackBerry (top 'o the line at the time) feel like a goddamn pager.

It's an amazing feeling to have your music, your phone and your e-mail all on one device -- and to have an Internet browser and GPS thrown in there too, and to have it all run on a fairly quick network.

The good:

• Phone clarity is fine, much better than my Razr, and reception in DC seems to be pretty good. Deep inside buildings and elevators, the signal goes out, but everywhere else I have at least a few bars, including, crucially, my basement apartment.
• Music sounds fine, as good as any iPod, even on the tinny earbuds that are provided with the phone.
• The maps function works pretty well. For a while the phone was convinced that I was in Six Flags over Georgia, near Atlanta. Don't ask me why. I instructed it to look for me in DC a few times and that problem seems to have cleared up.
• The apps I've played with so far are okay. There are some crucial apps still missing, like a good chat client (AIM for iPhone sucks, apparently) and a voice recorder that allows you to download recordings. I haven't been blown away by any that I've downloaded, so far. I do have this funny one that makes use of the accelerometer to slide a pint of beer down a bar (called iPint), but I wouldn't say that it's real useful.
• AT&T's 3G network isn't broadband, by any means, but it's reasonably fast. NYT Website loads in maybe 15, 20 seconds; Google in maybe 5 seconds, tops.
• Safari browser is okay. Size is a severe limitation; even zoomed in on Web pages, it's difficult to read on an iPhone -- you have to constantly move the page around with your finger, AND you have to be careful not to click on any links or ads while doing so.

The great:

• Size and weight is perfect. Fits in a pants pocket fine, and feels great in the hand.
• The touchscreen is simply a piece of art. I could swipe through my contacts or my music all day long.
• The e-mail client is tremendous. Takes gmail or Yahoo!, both fine e-mail clients by themselves, and scales them down without losing any functionality that I notice, except for gchat. I prefer using Yahoo! mail on the phone, in fact -- it's faster than Yahoo!'s interface (one reason I'm trying to migrate most casual e-mail to gmail).
• Texting is easier on this thing than on any other phone I've owned. And the text interface is pretty cool.
• The phone can sync with my Outlook calendar and contacts at work, and with my music at home. Calendar and contacts work great.

The surprising:

• The keyboard is smarter than I thought. I had a lot of problems typing on it when I first got it, but either I'm improving really fast or the thing is actually somehow learning to adjust to my finger pokes and produce more accurate results. It's also got a built-in, on-the-fly spellchecker that works well, once you put your trust into it. I don't think I'll ever type as fast on iPhone as I can on a BlackBerry, but it's possibly not going to be as painful as I thought.
• Battery life hasn't been a problem. I intentionally ran the battery down to zero yesterday, and to do it I had to leave music running most of the day, even when I wasn't listening to it, and needlessly surf the Web and send e-mails even when I was sitting in front of my computer. 3G was on all day long, as was wireless network detection. It finally konked out at about 6:30 p.m., and it hadn't even been charged the previous night except while I was transferring music.

The bad:

• No Flash or Java. That means no StatTracker. [A little Java applet by Yahoo! that tracks NFL stats in real-time on Sundays -- ed.] Sucks.
• No copy-and-paste is a pain for things like filling out contact info.

The really bad:

• [Here, I went on a long and profane diatribe about a little problem I'm having with my employer's IT department, the upshot being that they inexplicably won't let me connect my iPhone to the company's Exchange server and thus I have to continue to use my BlackBerry to fetch my corporate e-mail when I'm out of the office. It's a real pain.]
  

So for the time being, I'm still stuck carrying two devices around. Major bummer.

In the news

A round-up of good stuff I read today. Enjoy.

• Comeuppance: I remember reading about this douche bag a few years ago and immediately hating him. Now he's broke, and that's awesome. No surprise; first expense he ditches is child support. Jackass.

• Would you buy a house from this man? One thing I love about mafiosos is how they always complain that they're just being stereotyped because of their name and their nationality and their appearance. It's never because they're engaged in slimy, criminal-sounding activity.

• Here's a story on people who are saddled with massive amounts of consumer debt. No doubt, credit card companies are largely evil, predatory enterprises that don't give a damn about their customers' financial well being. But I'd be a lot more sympathetic for people caught in the current economic downturn if they didn't do things like buy houses they couldn't afford or whip out the plastic every time they saw a knick-knack on QVC.

Enjoy, and good night.

Blown away

My 15-second review of the latest Batman movie:

"The Dark Knight" is the best summer action movie I've ever seen, and should at least be nominated for Best Picture in next year's Academy Awards (right now, it just barely beats WALL-E on my scorecard). Heath Ledger is a shoo-in for Best Supporting Actor. Aaron Eckhart might deserve a nomination in the same category.

Also, it's nice to know that they'll never have to re-make the Joker-Batman movie again. Christopher Nolan's version is the definitive one.

Go see it, if you haven't already.

Bathe it, and bring it to me

I want an iPhone 3G. I want one so bad my teeth hurt. But I can't get one. Why? Because every single store in Virginia and Maryland is sold out of the model I want (16GB, black).

If I had known THIS was going to happen, I might've been crazy enough to do THIS last Friday:

Photo credit: ABC News

But I didn't. So now all those crazy fuckers have iPhones, while I -- who thought I was sooo smart for waiting a couple days, when I'd be able to stroll into an empty store and grab a new phone -- I'm sitting here with my thumb up my ass and a shitty, three-year-old Razr in my hand.

Don't I feel stupid.

God bless Southwest Airlines

I don't like flying Southwest much more than flying generally, but it's sure no surprise that they're the only airline not losing piles of money ...


Smart.

The alexwayne.com endorsement: Ray's the Steaks

That, dear readers, is the Ray's the Steaks "cowboy cut" ribeye. It is at least 28 ounces of muscle and fat and bone. It does not fit on the plate. It is not to be trifled with. It is delicious.

Washington is a city of steak. Most of our top restaurants -- places you've heard of, like The Palm and Charlie Palmer Steak (duh) -- revolve around beef. That's probably why there's so many fat men here.

But the best steakhouse in town isn't even in Washington proper; you'll find it in Arlington, just west (or is it south?) of Rosslyn on Wilson Avenue. Ray's isn't a secret, really -- all the local pubs have written fairly glowing reviews. But if you ask me, these reviews aren't glowing enough.

Ray's makes the best steak I've ever had. And I make a pretty mean steak myself. Yes, it's loud and there aren't any pictures on the walls to look at. So what. The service is better than most places in Washington, which is a town of shitty service. Add in the fact that it's relatively cheap -- like $30 for their best cuts -- and it's like the Greatest Restaurant Ever.

Okay, that's hyperbole. But still: if you come to Washington, and you want steak, forget Morton's or Ruth's Chris or Smith and Wolensky or whatever and just go to Ray's.

Only thing is, they don't take reservations. So here's what you do: Go by about 3:30 in the afternoon and wait for them to open. Walk inside and there'll be a nice woman with a pad of paper and a pencil standing at the hostess station. Tell her what time you want to eat. Come back a little before that time.

And be sure to do two things: save room for dessert, and take home leftovers.

P.S. Why the random post? Because my girlfriend is actually nagging me to blog more often. Sheesh. You'd think she'd nag me to go to they gym or something.

New York City in (cold) spring

Here's another collection of photos, this time preceded by restaurant reviews.

Over the weekend I visited New York City for the first time. (Yes, I'm too old to have never been to New York. Call me provincial.) I did what is probably the usual walking-eating-seeing tour ... hit the Empire State Building and the Met; wandered through Central Park at night and didn't get mugged; rode the #6 subway line; stumbled on a taping of a "Law & Order: SVU" episode. (Look for Robin Williams to guest-star later this spring.)

Quick reviews:

We stayed at the Club Quarters at Rockefeller Center. Small, but really quite nice, and well located.

Sarge's Deli in Murray Hill is fantastic. I never knew what New York deli food was about -- I figured big sandwiches and soups, ho-hum. Sarge's has all that, but also this crazy beef brisket on a potato pancake with gravy thing that probably upped my cholesterol 30 points. "Sarge's favorite," it's called. Sarge probably did not live a long life.

Hatsuhana (warning: annoying Web site) in midtown served me the best raw fish I've ever had, and I understand it's not even the best sushi joint in New York.

Swift in East Village is a cool little Irish bar. Apparently regulars are starting to turn on it because the bartenders don't give away enough free drinks, or something. All I know is after the bartender messed up my food order, he gave me and my buddy a free round without us asking. Nice.

Josie's on the Upper West Side is to be avoided. Their schtick is organic ingredients. Whatever. They made a decent steak for me, but the "smashed" potatoes sucked, and everybody else at my table left food on their plates. Here's a tip, Josie's: salt and butter are good things, even crucial things.

The Algonquin hotel is a fine place for a $16 cocktail. Some famous writers used to drink there. Comfy and quiet and damn near empty. Couldn't be the prices, I'm sure.

Ray's Pizza is probably not representative of NYC pizza, but we were on our way out of town and hungry. It served. (We went to the location at 8th and 51st; unclear whether it was "Original" or "Famous," but didn't taste like it.)

Some pictures ...

Central Park, just north of the zoo looking south

Seward Square, with the most famous building on Earth in the background

Central Park, at the duck pond on 5th south of the Met looking north

Some ski pictures, to leaven my half-drunken rants about modern journalistic practices

I've decided that I love skiing. (To clarify: In snow, for my Floridian/southern fans out there.) I'm not very good at it, mind you. But it's a blast nonetheless.

This year, I made two trips to a place called Whitetail, in southern Pennsylvania, and one to a joint called Timberline, in nowhere West Virginia. Here are some pics:

Whitetail is really more of a hill than a mountain. Surprisingly steep, though.

From the top of the biggest "green" slope (=easy) at Whitetail, clearish.

Same slope, in fog.


Base of Timberline. It's almost a genuine mountain.


Top of Timberline, looking over the Canaan Valley.


Top of Whitetail, on the second trip.
I'm about to ski my first-ever Whitetail "blue" slope (=intermediate), behind me.
I did not fall.

What is wrong with the public discourse?

This post is going to brush right up against -- but, I think, not quite violate -- the rules I've set for this blog.

(See to the right, about how I won't opine on Congress or the president, etc.)

So here goes:

Since when did presidential candidates have to bear responsibility for every last word that ever sprang from the mouth of anyone even tangentially connected to their campaigns?

For the last couple weeks, it seems like the only campaign "news" -- I use the word lightly -- drawing attention from us media is when some campaign flunky or another says something stupid. The result is predictable: a two-day story, followed by the person's "departure" from the campaign.

To recap:

First we had what's-her-name, some Barack Obama "advisor," telling a Scottish newspaper (aside: hell, I don't even know where to begin -- why is she talking to a Scottish newspaper, for starters) that Hillary Clinton is a "monster." Two-day story, and she quits the campaign.

Then we had Geraldine Friggin' Ferraro, making "news" for the first time since 1984, speaking some kind of gibberish that some people took as racist. Two-day story, and she quits the campaign.

Back to Obama, where we've got his former pastor, who apparently said some mean things about white people and Clinton on tape, quitting Obama's campaign. It's not even really clear to me that he was a substantial part of the campaign. But whatever, now he's off, and Obama is turning cartwheels "distancing" himself from the guy, as they say.

Who gives a shit about any of this?

There is some serious shit that we media could be discussing in our campaign coverage. Like I don't know, how exactly are Clinton and Obama going to make good on promises to withdraw from Iraq? Or how are any of the candidates, McCain included, going to get the economy righted? Or literally a hundred other serious policy issues, with health care and education and crime probably leading the list.

Instead, we're focusing on dumb statements by people who don't fucking matter, and forcing the candidates to waste time "denouncing" or "distancing themselves from so-and-so" or whatever. Seriously: Geraldine Ferraro is completely fucking unimportant in the scheme of things. And she's probably the most important of any of these people who have said dumb shit.

So I'd like all of this to stop, please. Unless it's the candidate him or herself saying dumb shit, I simply don't care. And I don't think anybody else does either. (Probably not even the reporters covering it.)

Worst. Local. Commercial. Ever.

I consider television commercials for local businesses an art form all their own.

In Washington, D.C., the local car dealer chain Eastern Motors has pretty much owned the genre, with a long-running series featuring players from the Washington Redskins lip-syncing the firm's theme song (At Eastern Motors / Your job's your credit, credit) and generally looking stupid. The spots feature all the hallmarks of a superior local commercial: dumb catch song, famous-for-the-local-area celebrities, senseless narratives and mildly offensive. Here's an example:



However, we have a new contender in Washington for worst local commercial. In fact, these guys might just have produced the worst local commercial EVER, anywhere.



For those of you not hip with the kids, the owners of the store attempted to set their diddy to the tune of "Back That Azz Up," by Juvenile. The spot obviously takes incomprehensible and offensive to whole new levels, but I think filming the lead actors/owners shirtless really iced the cake.

Hello again

Due to popular demand (i.e., my mom and my sister), I'm back.

Apropos of nothing, here is John Travolta's giant-ass airstrip near Ocala, Florida, where he lands his personal 707.

Photo by Marty Wayne aka Dad

Travolta's house is in the background, in the little square of trees off the taxiway.