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April 30, 2005
Sikh it, baby!
I bet you never thought you'd see this picture of Brother Singh. I'm impressed with our resident turbaned Sikh downing a bottle of Jack like this. Oh wait, the cap is on, but still...
Posted by adrianjo at 12:27 PM | Comments (0) | TrackBack
April 29, 2005
Dear old Harvard, say it's not veritas!
Writer Michael Steinberger comments in today's WSJ on Harvard's influence in American politics, business, and life, arguing that it has never been lower (except among journalists). Here is the section on Harvard's influence in business:
Harvard also matters less in the business world. It is true that a few Harvard graduates (and one dropout, Bill Gates) have figured prominently in the digital revolution -- unquestionably the biggest business story in the past decade -- but Stanford is a much more prolific supplier of its brainpower. Google, Yahoo!, Cisco, Sun Microsystems and a raft of other marquee tech firms were partly or wholly incubated on the Stanford campus.Meanwhile, there are fewer Harvard diplomas hanging in corporate boardrooms. According to the executive search firm Stuart Spencer, the percentage of large-company CEOs holding Harvard MBAs declined to 23% last year from 28% in 1998. Of the Fortune 1000 CEOs appointed so far this year, just one, Corning's Wendell Weeks, earned a Harvard MBA. Asked about Harvard's declining presence in the executive suites, Mr. Weeks jokingly told USA Today: "I've yet to see a study that Harvard creates value."
Quite the opposite, actually. Two years ago, famed hedge-fund manager Victor Niederhoffer (himself a Harvard alumnus) and Laurel Kenner did a study measuring the performance of Nasdaq 100 companies run by Harvard graduates, of which there happened to be an unusually large number at the time. The results were not pretty. Mr. Niederhoffer and Ms. Kenner looked at the nine Nasdaq 100 firms headed by Harvard grads and found that they had, over a five-year period, dramatically underperformed Nasdaq firms run by graduates of other Ivy League schools, Ivy League equivalents (Stanford, MIT, Berkeley) and state schools.
Will Harvard become just another run-of-the-mill Ivy League school? Perhaps it will among Americans, but I would argue that Harvard is still the American university best known outside the US, and that won't change soon.
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An afternoon of mushrooms, fairies, and secret doors
While my friend was in town this week, we went down to New York's Chelsea neighborhood for a gallery crawl. (It started at a liquor store, but that's not relevant to discuss!) There were two artists that particularly impressed us.
The first is Barton Benes, who specializes in arranging small objects. HIV positive, Benes is known for a controversial exhibit featuring syringes filled with his blood. His "Petitisfours", currently avaialable, features HIV drugs arranged to look like the small French dessert.
Benes's "Souvenirs" (2003) was a particularly whimsical arrangement of several dozen countries' currency fashioned by papier-mâché into small objects typical of the country, each displayed in a cell on the wall. For example, Latvian Lats were fashioned into a red/orange mushroom (since mushrooms are very popular in Latvia), while Russian roubles became a vodka bottle. Some, like the Latvian mushroom, were more inventive than others, such as an Icelandic krona fashioned into a snowflake. Others made a political statement, such as US dollars turned into a cowboy hat. Although simple, the work provided us with several minutes of speculating why the artist chose particular shapes for particular countries.
The second artist was Dean Byington, who has his first one-man exhibit in NYC at Leslie Tonkonow gallery. Byington produces only 5-10 works a year, each large enough to fill a small wall. Upon first seeing a work like Blue Landscape or Signal, one might think, "boring, next gallery!" My friend had better eyes than me, and she quickly found an imaginary fairy-tale world depicted in the art. Hidden within lush forest landscapes are secret doors, lanterns, mushrooms, signposts, pits that look like bees' eyes, and a parade of small imaginary insects walking upright. We spent several minutes picking out the imaginative but tiny fairy-tale characters in each wall-sized artwork trying to determine the story told in the details. When we visited, Signal was available at $14,000, which means I won't soon be buying it to grace my future daughter's bedroom. Perhaps Byington could produce a few smaller versions? I'll be first in line to buy. (UPDATE: No, mom, nobody is pregnant by me.)
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April 28, 2005
Ending radio silence
There has been radio silence from Transatlantic Zeppelin this week, and I have 131 emails in my inbox. But the silence is for a good reason. A friend was in town, and we spent the days enjoying what makes New York City so wonderful. Here are a few things to enjoy in NYC:
1) Baptist services at Abyssinian Baptist. Abyssinian, founded in 1808 in response to segregated downtown churches, is Harlem’s oldest black church. There were three things that particularly surprised us about Abyssinian.
a. The lines. Before services, there were two lines of people waiting to enter. The first group was dressed to the nines, primarily suits and ties. Members of the second line (which stretched two blocks) were shabbily-dressed and primarily wore jeans and t-shirts. The first line was 100% black folk (i.e. parishioners), and the second was almost all white tourists. What an embarrassment. It’s deplorable that hundreds of white tourists would turn up at someone’s church and act like it was a visit to ESPN Zone. In fact, the preacher was so offended that he even mentioned it during services.b. The sermon. The Rev. Calvin Butts III is one of Harlem’s best-known preachers, for good reason. If Chris Rock were a bit more religious, he might have been a preacher at Abyssinian. I was particularly impressed that Butt's sermon was nothing like the race-baiting diatribes of Jesse Jackson or Al Sharpton. Butts’s sermon explicated Psalm 15 for an hour, but it focused on practical ways of living.
On looking good: “I was walking down the street and saw a man who was dressed like a preacher. Now I’m supposed to know all the preachers in Harlem. But I didn’t know this preacher, so I asked him, ‘Brother, are you a preacher?’. He said: ‘No, I’m a bus driver.’ Even though he was a bus driver, he looked his best.”
On speaking no evil: “I may not agree with the administration’s policies overseas, but we have a black Secretary of State. So often we fall into the ‘crabs in a tank syndrome.’ As soon as one crab starts to escape, another crab reaches up and pulls him down. If you don’t like someone, keep it to yourself.”c. The gospel choir. The choir was a group of perhaps 30 men and women, ranging in age from teenagers to the elderly. The singing was amazing four-part harmony and very technically difficult.
2) Lunch at the Delegates’ Dining Room. The UN opens its diplomats’ lunchroom to the public, though few people know it. After getting security credentials, one proceeds to a fourth-floor cafeteria with a 270-degree view of Brooklyn, where a long buffet features international food like Japanese dumplings, shrimp ceviche, French duck pate, and a carving station. It’s quite a civilized place. The service is faster than a speeding bureaucracy, the wine good, and the diplomats quite elegant. My friend and I were by far the youngest people there, which drew some looks from puzzled diplomats. And the best part? No sales tax, since this is technically international territory and therefore not subject to the laws of New York.
In fact, lunch was so good that we forgot to eat dinner that night! Not until we were sitting in Marquee around midnight did we realize that somehow we forgot to do something.3) The Tribeca Film Festival. We saw a screening called “The American Ruling Class,” which follows two Yale 2004 graduates through soul-searching as they want to change the world but are torn as to whether to take their job offers at white-shoe investment bankGoldman Sachs. The two grads follow a Harper’s editor, who introduces them to celebrities like Walter Cronkite, Larry Summers, and Barbara Eherenrich. Although it occasionally falls into shorthanded Farenheight 911-style demagoguery (like one-second clips of Rummy), the point slowly emerges that there is an American Ruling Class and that one can do more as a member of it than outside. For all but the most extraordinary people, having money, clout, and connections makes it much easier to change the world. The people playing bongos in the street might have their heart in the right place (or so the film would argue), but they are largely ineffective. Unfortunately, at the same time, many of the natural members of the American Ruling Class are hypocritically complacent. One fictional heiress proclaims during a game of tennis on her estate: "The world is dying and you're going to go work for a f---ing bank?" She, however, has done nothing to stop the world from "dying" (which it is not). Although it is provocative, I doubt that the film has widespread potential, as it has many esoteric references like 85 Broad Street (the unlabeled headquarters of Goldman Sachs).
4. Amateur Night at the Apollo. The Apollo's legendary Amateur Night, which helped launch the careers of Ella Fitzgerald, James Brown, Michael Jackson, D'Angelo, and Lauryn Hill, is a weekly Harlem event on Wednesday nights. Two hours long, it is guaranteed to cause one's voice to go hoarse from either cheering or trying to boo the bad contestants off the stage. Frankly, the "executioner", who comes out to take away the bad contestants, is the best part of the show.
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April 22, 2005
At Ruby Yacht Falls, by Omar Khayyam
I finally downloaded the pictures from last Saturday's party at Ruby Falls, a ghetto-sounding name for a cool place. I love the ridiculous review of the place from Citysearch: "the cool kids from high school have merely moved their parties to a more grown-up venue." As much as people think of NYC clubs as being like high school, they are nothing of the sort. Unlike getting into the popular crowd in HS, one can get into almost any club in NYC by turning up early and dressing well. This was a big surprise to me; I expected that bouncers were generally far bigger assholes than any bouncer I've ever encountered. The people who moan about clubs being too exclusive are the hoardes who turn up at 1AM when the club has reached maximum legal occupancy and then complain that the bouncers keep out their 10-man sausage-fest.
Here are three pictures, the first of which is me with one of Ale's Italian friends. I hestitate to post it, because keen readers will notice that I'm wearing the same outfit from wine tasting in Sonoma. But decent clothes are not free and it makes sense to get a few wearings before the trend moves on.
Here is a good way to look cool: have your picture taken with hot bar staff. I wish I had thought of it. The giveaway that she's bar staff? His hand barely touches her shoulder.
If a guy really wanted to look cool, he'd come take a picture with our Hong Kong twins. I wish I had thought of it!
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April 20, 2005
Send out the clowns
Quick, name a black leader! Jesse Jackson? Al Sharpton? Cynthia McKinney? Or my own congressman, Chuck Rangel?
Why not Alphonso Jackson? Sure nobody knows who the HUD secretary is. But at least he talks some sense, unlike the rest of those clowns. Or so it seems from 122nd St. in Harlem.
In 1925, when Alain Locke edited The New Negro, he wrote, "I believe that the Negro's advantages and opportunities are greater [in Harlem] than in in any other place in the country, and that Harlem will become the intellectual, cultural, and the financial center for Negro peoples."
He was right on the "intellectual" and "cultural center" claims. But financial center? Hardly. Less than 20% of Harlem today is actually owned by blacks. My landlady is one of few blacks who own their houses in Harlem. She bought the place 40 years ago (presumably quite inexpensively) and now has retired in financial security with a $1.5M house with two white guys paying her rent. Had she not became an owner in the 1960s, she likely never would have joined the black upper class. Locke expected that there would be more of her. So does Alphonso Jackson.
While the benefits of improving black homeownership has been discussed in many forums, the benefits of social security reform for blacks have not been publicized. Jackson makes a good case in yesterday's Wall St Journal:
But blacks receive far less in return for their Social Security contributions. One in three will get no benefit at all because he will die before he is eligible to collect benefits. After a lifetime of paying into Social Security, nearly 30% of black seniors are left in poverty, compared to 7% of white seniors. And while the average black male lives to age 67.8 -- after collecting less than one year of Social Security -- the average white male will collect seven years of benefits. In effect, black workers are subsidizing the retirement of whites. The inevitable results of not reforming Social Security -- raising payroll taxes or reducing benefits -- would only worsen the situation for blacks....
An individual can work for 20, 30 or 40 years, but if he dies without children under 18 or a spouse over 65, none of that Social Security money is passed on.
...
Since the creation of Social Security 70 years ago, our nation has made great strides in closing the gaps of racial equality.... But to remove the final obstacles to equality, black Americans need to start building the equity -- through ownership that their white counterparts have been accumulating for generations. The homeownership gap is closing. If we allow black Americans to build wealth through personal retirement accounts, another gap will close.
While it is abysmal that less than 20% of Harlem is owned by blacks, 0% of blacks own their social security, like 0% of whites. Forget clowns like Jesse Jackson. The black leaders who should be followed and supported are out pushing to give blacks (and whites) ownership: homeownership, ownership of retirement funds, ownership of one's financial future. My landlady shouldn't be such an exception.
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Lessons learned
I should not have tried to find this product at a Harlem grocery store.
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April 19, 2005
Te conozco bacalaos, aunque venga disfrazado
In consulting, it's important to keep client identities confidential. Sometimes just disguising the name isn't enough, as this Wall St. Journal article shows.
For Kimberly Krizelman, 28, moving from the Chicago area to comparably low-cost Bentonville, Ark., for a job as a buyer at a major retailer allowed her to afford a three-bedroom house and hire a professional decorator.
Hmm... is that like the major aerospace company in Chicago, the major brewery in St. Louis, or the major operating system designer in Redmond?
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April 18, 2005
Pope John Paul II, Longtime Owner Of Popemobile, Dead At 84
The Onion has an interesting obit of John Paul II:
Pope John Paul II, Longtime Owner Of Popemobile, Dead At 84VATICAN CITY—Pope John Paul II, who owned the Popemobile for more than a quarter of a century, passed away last Saturday. "The Popemobile was known the world over," said Peter Egan, a writer for Road & Track. "A fine example of European craftsmanship, the hand-built, 4.3 litre, V-8 powered, pearl-gray vehicle was exceptionally well-loved, even more so after the bulletproof bubble was added in 1981 to safeguard its passengers against assassination attempts. During the time he owned the Popemobile, John Paul II visited more than 120 countries. He loved the open road." The specially altered Mercedes-Benz ML-series off-road vehicle has been maintained by papal staff since the pope fell ill in August 2004. The pope's will is expected to grant its use to either the next pope or John Paul II's young cousin Zbigniew.
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April 17, 2005
That line at Whole Foods pays dividends
I wrote earlier this week about the 15-min check-out lines at the local grocery store, the Columbus Circle Whole Foods. Today those long lines finally paid off. As my order was being scanned, a 20-something blonde with un-organic bright orange skin appeared with a little $6 bag of all-natural organic oatmeal cookies:
Blonde:I'm in a big hurry; I'll give you this $10 if you'll pay for these cookies with your order. [cookies are scanned] See, $5.99!
Me: Um, yeah, you want change? [pulls out wallet]
Blonde: No, you just made $4. Bye.
I also got 46 more cents to write-off from my taxes next year. I've decided to itemize since I'll have lots of educational expenses and charitable deductions. Starting in 2005, one can also write-off state sales taxes or income tax, whichever is less. They figure your sales tax paid based on your income, unless you keep track yourself. Since I'll have little income but lots of spending, I will have to keep a record of all sales taxes I pay if I want to write-off that amount. To borrow from Warren Buffet: if you can eliminate the Federal government as a 35% partner in your financial life, do it. Meanwhile, I'm thinking of starting a line-waiting service for rich New Yorkers at Whole Foods.
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Rats in the belfry, the subway, and on the sidewalk
New York City has at least one rat per person, perhaps even 12 rats per person. After a few days in New York, one will see some rats. As Letterman notes:
Letterman: How many rats do you believe are in New York City now?
Sullivan: They say it's 8 million -- one per person. Don't believe them.
Letterman: Well, that seems fair don't you think? Everybody gets a rat.
Sullivan: It's not true. It's not true. 1949, Dave Davis from Baltimore comes. Traps. Disproves the one-rat-per-person theory. Shows that there are 256,000 rats in the city at that time.
Letterman: Aw, so we can sleep a little easier. There's only a quarter million rats.
Sullivan: Right.
The rats so far haven't bothered me. In fact, they come out and forage at the subway stops, going about their daily life crawling through the litter that covers the trackbeds of most subway stops. Sometimes they find some bread to take to their lair. They particularly amuse the tourists at the Times Square stop. There is a particular rat that lives about 60 feet south of the turnstile on the downtown 125th 2/3 stop; I see him a lot when I take the train downtown. Some workers sprayed rodenticide two days ago, but I saw the rat again today, so apparently the rodenticide has yet to work.
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April 16, 2005
Maturity sucks
Inevitably all technology matures, but that doesn't always mean that it improves. For instance, gopher was a perfectly good way of finding documents easily, and it had no problems with spyware, cookies, and the other maladies that infect today's WWW. E-mail used to be simple text and spam was almost unheard of. Napster 2.0 had all the songs I needed but has been supplanted by the fancier ITunes that still won't let me download my favorite French pop songs.
Now blogging is growing up. Recently my favorite blog, Powerline, recreated its site, added ads, and eliminated trackbacks. Worst of all, the lawyers who write it have eliminated their nicknames: Deacon, The Big Trunk, and Hindrocket. Frankly, I'd much rather read the writings of a mysterious owl named "Deacon" than a boring "Paul Mirengoff." It's understandable: Paul, Scott, and John deserve to benefit from the name recongition that their 40,000 daily visitors earn them. Still, give me the fun old days of Deacon, Trunk, and Rocketman.
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April 15, 2005
The City of Flaming Lights
When in Paris in June, I made the mistake of checking into a miserable flophouse a few blocks from the office on the 9eme/1er frontier. When I plugged in an iron, I took down a small part of the central Paris electrical grid and, after the juice was still off for an hour, fled the scene. After a nearby hotel burned down today and killed 20 people, I'm glad I left for safer quarters.
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"Here is sister"
I didn't think that taking a Supply Chain Management class would teach me so much about relationships.
"Intermediaries play an important role in supply chains. For example, in my village in India, you get married through an intermediary, the village priest. His job is to know all the boys and all the girls and finds you compatible girl. If arranged marriage not work, nobody use village priest anymore, so priest has to find you good match. Online sites don't work. If you find bad girl on adultfriendfinder.com, who you complain to? Customer service?"
"When dealing with clients, they need same person available whenever they call. Like in relationship, if you call girlfriend's house and mother tells you, 'She not here anymore, but sister is available.' You don't want sister; it's not same with sister. In supply chain, you cannot say to clients, 'your person not available anymore, but here is sister."
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April 13, 2005
The food, the Whole Foods, and nothing but the food
Gothamist has reviewed the new Whole Foods in Union Square. I've been a Whole Foods fan since I lived a few hundred feet above a Whole Foods in Chicago. Now I have to trapsie 66 blocks down to the building that houses Time Warner's headquarters, where Whole Foods has one of its largest stores worldwide. Still, it's worth it, as Forbes describes the store:
At New York's posh Time Warner Center the new Whole Foods is a 59,000-square-foot temple to culinary obsession. The prepped-foods section is laid out like a pungent open-air bazaar. Along the walls are: a full sushi bar; an open brick oven where chefs make fresh pizza at $7 a pound; a "comfort food station" that serves beef stew and tuna noodle casserole; a pasta area offering mushroom goat cheese lasagna and eggplant rollatini; and a deli that sells 850 sandwiches a day. Every week the Indian foods hot bar sells two tons of vegetable korma, aloo mattar and the like at $7 a pound.It's great business. Retail rents in the Time Warner Center reportedly go as high as $450 per square foot, or $27 million a year if applied to Whole Foods' space. ... The company won't disclose the specific rent, or the store's total sales, but says sales more than cover expenses, even without jacking up prices beyond those charged outside of the city.
I got some gentle ribbing for contrasting the Chicago Gold Coast Whole Foods with the Midtown New York Whole Foods. So what I can say is this: Whole Foods is a great place to find an exaggerated stereotype of the people who live in a particular area. Chicago's Gold Coast skewed towards old rich people, plus midwestern naturalists and the moneyed hippies who came for the organic stuff that is at Whole Foods' roots. Occasionally the hot young 20-something could be found, but people-watching was not a reason to go regularly.
The Midtown New York Whole Foods is very Midtown New York: a mix of young businessmen, harried UES mothers, and model-gorgeous/rail-thin UWS girls trying to stay that way. The food is nice--Whole Foods allows me to make substantial cuts in my intake of sodium, fats, preservatives, and pesticides--but the most interesting aspect of Whole Foods is the people-watching. Whole Foods is one of the few places I go during the day in NYC where women outnumber men. While a woman typically checks out a man starting with his clothes and then makes eye contact, the check-out at Whole Foods starts with one's basket. I find myself doing it, too. I get a lot more looks when I put some fresh broccoli in there, but TV dinners (even organic ones) are a turn-off, so they have to be hidden. Verily, it is quite impressive that a woman's first screen would be a man's food choice. Maybe they should start listing food choices on those dating websites? Like this: "find me someone who likes organic califlower and arugula but not cabbage."
Speaking of check-outs, how about the checkout counter? The line is typically 15 minutes or longer, even with every register open... and this is a bit too New York for me.
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April 12, 2005
Want some mumps?
The University has been sending me threatening letters saying that they'll ban me from summer courses if I don't prove to them that I have rubella vaccine (which I do but don't feel like proving). However, the business school uses a different system:
The bidding process in BOSS is completely separate from the University's registration system. So go ahead and bid for your elective.
Finally the lack of coordination of computers has come to my benefit.
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April 11, 2005
Whose blog is this?
Anyone know whose blog this is? It's a Japanese Columbia J-termer... that leaves only three of you!
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April 06, 2005
It's not easy being a Republican in this ivory tower
The folks next door in the Journalism School, which is in a brick building and not really an ivory tower, have awarded the Pulitzer Prizes for 2005. From looking at the winners, the nominations must have made for slim pickings. Consider the winner of the prize for cartooning, which Powerline dissects here.
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April 04, 2005
Precipitating humanity's golden age
One of George Will's most brilliant columns ran in today's WSJ. Gracefully avoiding the cliches on which barrels of ink have been spilled since the Pope's death, Will touches on the importance of the 1978-1981 period in changing world history and the role of John Paul II, Solidarity, Reagan, and the Polish nation in advancing the cause of human freedom:
WASHINGTON -- In Eastern Europe, where both world wars began, the end of the Cold War began on Oct. 16, 1978, with a puff of white smoke, in Western Europe. It wafted over one of Europe's grandest public spaces, over Michelangelo's dome of St. Peter's, over statues of the saints atop Bernini's curving colonnade that embraces visitors to Vatican City. Ten years later, when the fuse that Polish workers had lit in a Gdansk shipyard had ignited the explosion that leveled the Berlin Wall, it was clear that one of the most consequential people of the 20th century's second half was a Pole who lived in Rome, governing a city-state of 109 acres.Science teaches that reality is strange -- solid objects are mostly space; the experience of time is a function of speed; gravity bends light. History, too, teaches strange truths: John Paul II occupied the world's oldest office, which traces its authority to history's most potent figure, a Palestinian who never traveled a hundred miles from his birthplace, who never wrote a book and who died at 33. And religion, once a legitimizer of political regimes, became in John Paul II's deft hands a delegitimizer of communism's ersatz religion.
In an amazingly fecund 27-month period, the cause of freedom was strengthened by the coming to high offices of Margaret Thatcher, Ronald Reagan and John Paul II who, like the president, had been an actor and was gifted at the presentational dimension of his office. This peripatetic pope was seen by more people than anyone in history and his most important trip came early. It was a visit to Poland that began on June 2, 1979.
In nine days a quarter of that nation's population saw him. Marx called religion the opiate of the masses, but it did not have a sedative effect on the Poles. The pope's visit was the nation's epiphany, a thunderous realization that the nation was of one mind, mocking the futility of communism's 35-year attempt to conquer Poland's consciousness. Between 1795 and 1918 Poland had been erased from the map of Europe, partitioned between Austria, Prussia and Russia. This gave Poles an acute sense of the distinction between the state and the real nation.
Igor Stravinsky, speaking with a Russian's stoicism about Poland's sufferings, said that if you pitch your tent in the middle of New York's Fifth Avenue, you are going to be hit by a bus. The Poland where John Paul II grew to sturdy, athletic manhood was hit first by Nazism, then communism. Then, benignly, by John Paul II.
It was said that the fin de siecle Vienna of Freud and Wittgenstein was the little world in which the larger world had its rehearsals. In the late 1970s, the Poland of John Paul II and Lech Walesa was like that. The 20th century's worst political invention was totalitarianism, a tenet of which is that the masses must not be allowed to mass: Totalitarianism is a mortar and pestle for grinding society into a dust of individuals. Small wonder, then, that Poland's ruler, Gen. Wojciech Jaruzelski, visibly trembled in the presence of the priest who brought Poland to its feet in the face of tyranny by first bringing Poland to its knees in his presence.
John Paul II almost did not live to see this glorious consummation. In 1981 three of the world's largest figures -- Ronald Reagan, Anwar Sadat and John Paul II -- were shot. History would have taken an altered course if Sadat had not been the only one killed.
Our age celebrates the watery toleration preached by people for whom "judgmental" is an epithet denoting an intolerable moral confidence. John Paul II bristled with judgments, including this: The inevitability of progress is a myth, hence the certainty that mankind is wiser today than yesterday is chimeric.
Secular Europe is, however, wiser because of a man who worked at an altar. Europeans have been plied and belabored by various historicisms purporting to show that individuals are nullities governed by vast impersonal forces. Beginning in 1978, Europeans saw one man seize history by the lapels and shake it.
One of G.K. Chesterton's Father Brown detective stories includes this passage: "'I'm afraid I'm a practical man,' said the doctor with gruff humor, 'and I don't bother much about religion and philosophy.' 'You'll never be a practical man till you do,' said Father Brown."
A poet made the same point: "A flame rescued from dry wood has no weight in its luminous flight yet lifts the heavy lid of night." The poet became John Paul II.
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Springtime? Is that when they close the bars an hour early one Saturday night?
The leaves aren't quite out, but after the bars closed an hour early Saturday night (on account of the time change), it's time for a round of springtime pictures. When I get back from Wine Country next week, I'll have more.
***
The "Sunny Side" of Copenhagen's Nyhavn Street was formerly the domain of sailors and prostitutes, but today has been taken over by cafes occupied Scandinavian blondes and their tourist admirers (April 2004).
Flowering trees bloom outside a bastion of the walls of Maastricht, in the far southern Netherlands near the border with Germany and Belgium. The walls date to 1229 and are some of the best-preserved in Europe. (April 2004).
The South Foreland Lighthouse in Kent, England, watches over sandbars in the English Channel just beyond the white cliffs of Dover. This lighthouse was used to conduct the first transmission of Marconi's wireless.
Mustard flowers bloom in the Punakha valley of the Himalayan Mountains in Bhutan, near the Temple of the Divine Madman. I visited the temple in Feb 2003 to be blessed by a Buddhist monk holding a wooden effigy of the Divine Madman's "divine tunderbolt of wisdom," as he called his male organ.
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April 02, 2005
Ringing in Spring
I am in Indiana this weekend for the Ringing in Spring 5K, a 3.1 mile foot race that is now the local YMCA's largest fundraiser. Fortunately it all went well... no deaths, and only one crazy guy... though there is always one!
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April 01, 2005
Happy April Fools Day
I took over the city today:
The now-deposed mayor, who is in DC with Congressman Pete Visclosky, received an e-mail of the picture from his assistant. He told the press: "I always knew Jones had a political career ahead of him, but I didn't think he would start by organizing a coup in Valparaiso City Hall."
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