This year has seen a number of endings. Bill Gates is retiring from his day job at Microsoft to focus on his foundation. Justine Hénin, the best woman tennis player in the world, retired at the age of 25 while still ranked #1 to focus on the rest of her life. Euromad is moving back to the U.S. after two years in Europe and slowly winding down his blog. And, after eleven years, three jobs, and several hundred plane flights, I am retiring from the business world.
I have been planning to retire for a long time, but didn't want to discuss it here until the announcement to my company, which happened two weeks ago. I will be going to Yale Law School starting in September, with the eventual goal of becoming a public interest lawyer - probably working as a public defender, in legal aid, or for a civil rights organization. I've wanted to make this change for several years now, ever since listening to an episode of This American Life entitled "Perfect Evidence," about four teenagers who were framed by the police for a rape and murder and spent fourteen years in prison before being exonerated by DNA evidence. It's an old cliché, but I want to help people. Of course, there are many ways to help people, many of them more obvious than spending $130,000 in tuition and three years of your life to go to law school, in order to become a member of one of the most despised professions in this country. But my hope - or fantasy - is that as a lawyer you can help people in a very concrete way, one person at a time, when they need help the most. In any case, we shall see.
Of course, the hard part of opening one door is closing the other one behind you. One problem is that we grow up expecting our lives to be a linear progression onward and upward in which we monotonically accumulate skills, work experience, titles, money, and prestige. On paper, I should be staying at my company until we go public, or I should become a vice president at a bigger company, or I should start another company, or I should use my glittering resume to get a job in venture capital or private equity, or, if I have a philanthropic bent, I should get into the burgeoning field of social entrepreneurship.
But there's an opposite perspective, which I heard best summarized in an episode of This American Life called "Quitting." (Yes, I think that virtually every significant life experience can be illustrated by one or more episodes of TAL.) In one segment, a woman who wrote a zine about quitting (this was the mid-'90s - today it would no doubt be a blog funded by AdWords) talks about the central importance of "the quit" to ... well, to everything. Before you can ever do anything new, you have to quit whatever you were doing before. This is most obvious in the case of jobs, but it applies to many other things. Before you can have a child, you have to quit that simpler, easier state of not having children. Before you can be a vegetarian, you have to quit eating animals (and yes, I like eating animals - especially In-N-Out hamburgers, and New York City hot dogs, and roast chicken, and on and on). In many cases, in order to do something new that is good, you have to give up something that is also good. Quitting is empowering. Quitting is door-opening. Without it, your life would be the same thing, over and over.
And so I'm quitting career #3 (business) to start career #4 (law). When I was younger I regretted careers 1 and 2 because they seemed in retrospect like a waste of time and energy. In college I wanted to be come a professional musician, and auditioned for the conducting program at the Curtis Institute of Music (at the time, I was the music director of one of my college's orchestras). I was going to conduct Mozart Symphony #40 at the audition, but when I stepped up to the podium the parts weren't on the musicians' stands, so my slot was delayed until they could get the music. However, my friend Ben was also auditioning that day, conducting Mozart Symphony #39, and I knew that equally well because my orchestra was performing both of them that same night. One of my few regrets about my life is not volunteering to do #39 instead on the spot. But in any case I didn't get into Curtis, and after a couple more years of indecision I gave that up. Instead I got a Ph.D. in history at Berkeley, but by the time I finished I had neither the scholarly track record necessary to get a good job, nor the real interest in and dedication to the field necessary to stick with it. So I became a management consultant at McKinsey, for no particularly good reason other than that they gave me a job, and it was prestigious and well paid. I had no ambition to make a lot of money or start a company or anything, really.
Now, though, I look back and I feel lucky to have spent my college years playing cello and conducting, and I feel lucky to have spent most of my twenties learning about history and living in Berkeley and traveling around Europe. And while I have very mixed feelings about the business world, I feel extraordinarily lucky to have spent seven years at a company that I founded with five friends and that has provided a great working environment to hundreds of people and great products to thousands.
As a result, for the first time that I can remember, I'm back at home with absolutely no business trips planned and, besides a trip to Yellowstone with my father in August, no plane trips of any kind scheduled or even anticipated. I already earned elite status on United and Delta this year, but that will expire in February 2010 and then I'll have to wait in the long line with everyone else - a trade-off I'm more than happy to make. I won't have to get a new passport because there is no room left to stamp mine, like the cool kids. My last international trip was the three-day trip to, appropriately enough, Paris in mid-April, cut short because I wanted to get back to Yale for an admitted student program, and my last business trip of any sort, although I didn't know it at the time, was to our headquarters in late May for my last management team meeting.
I will miss the travel a little, and I will miss my company and my friends there a lot, but that's the price you have to pay to open a new chapter. And I'm grateful that the last chapter was one I will look back on fondly.
Monday, June 30, 2008
Tuesday, June 24, 2008
Traveling with Children
California Tortilla - 0 stars
IAD
La Cascada Taqueria - 1 star
2164 Center St., Berkeley, CA
Loco Pops - 2 stars
431 W. Franklin St., Chapel Hill, NC
I've decided to leave the business world - about which more later. One consequence, though, is that I will no longer be traveling "on business," as we say, which was in fact the original motivation for this blog. One of my colleagues - in fact, the one I was with when I ate the lunch in Columbus, Ohio that led to my first blog post over three years ago - said that she realized I would no longer have the "elite" status of frequent fliers on major airlines (although since I've qualified on United and Delta this year, I'm covered on five out of six legacy carriers through February 2010). To which, I said, I will be more than happy not to have frequent flier status.
Instead, most of my travel will be of the type I'm doing this week, with my family. My wife had two conferences in a week, at Berkeley and at Duke, and since she and my daughter Willow are inseparable, and someone needed to take care of Willow while she was working, all three of us flew first to San Francisco for three nights and then to Raleigh-Durham for three nights, where we find ourselves now. Over the last few years I have gotten quite good at separating myself from my work world, and this time not only did I leave my computer at home, but I didn't even bring a pen.
The week has had its rough spots, like Sunday, when I had Willow from 8 am to 9.30 pm and she threw up three times, which meant not only hand-washing three outfits but also washing the car seat cover and cleaning the stroller, all while keeping an eye on her, or Monday, when she boarded the plane happily, sat down and proceeded to cry inconsolably for 25 minutes straight until the plane took off, when she immediately quieted down. But there's still nothing I'd rather do than take a vacation and spend time with my daughter, even if it's just holding her in my lap as she slept in the plane.
Eating while traveling with a one-year-old is an exercise in finding the most casual option possible, so there were few highlights worthy of this blog. I had the old Dulles standby, a vegetarian burrito at California Tortilla (near gate C22), for perhaps the last time. I stopped at La Farine to get the morning buns, but Willow threw up on the sidewalk so we didn't go in. I did have a pretty good vegetarian burrito at La Cascada, where the rice and beans had a nice smoky flavor and the salsa was rich and spicy without being too hot. But the highlight so far has been Loco Pops, a tiny storefront with nothing but a freezer full of popsicles and a white board with the menu. There are about ten water-based popsicles and ten cream-based ones, ranging from classics like chocolate brownie and strawberries and cream (which Willow loved) to daring combinations like chocolate sesame wasabi (what I had - good, but perhaps wasabi wasn't meant for chocolate-based desserts) or mango chili. All the popsicles are $2, for every eight you buy you get one free, and the service is friendly. Some people order one, eat it in the store, and then order another one, which I would heartily recommend.
As for traveling with kids, I have two pieces of advice. One from my friend David: buy lots of small toys and bring them out slowly over the course of the plane flight. And one from me: don't expect to do or accomplish anything other than spending time with your family. Which is plenty.
IAD
La Cascada Taqueria - 1 star
2164 Center St., Berkeley, CA
Loco Pops - 2 stars
431 W. Franklin St., Chapel Hill, NC
I've decided to leave the business world - about which more later. One consequence, though, is that I will no longer be traveling "on business," as we say, which was in fact the original motivation for this blog. One of my colleagues - in fact, the one I was with when I ate the lunch in Columbus, Ohio that led to my first blog post over three years ago - said that she realized I would no longer have the "elite" status of frequent fliers on major airlines (although since I've qualified on United and Delta this year, I'm covered on five out of six legacy carriers through February 2010). To which, I said, I will be more than happy not to have frequent flier status.
Instead, most of my travel will be of the type I'm doing this week, with my family. My wife had two conferences in a week, at Berkeley and at Duke, and since she and my daughter Willow are inseparable, and someone needed to take care of Willow while she was working, all three of us flew first to San Francisco for three nights and then to Raleigh-Durham for three nights, where we find ourselves now. Over the last few years I have gotten quite good at separating myself from my work world, and this time not only did I leave my computer at home, but I didn't even bring a pen.
The week has had its rough spots, like Sunday, when I had Willow from 8 am to 9.30 pm and she threw up three times, which meant not only hand-washing three outfits but also washing the car seat cover and cleaning the stroller, all while keeping an eye on her, or Monday, when she boarded the plane happily, sat down and proceeded to cry inconsolably for 25 minutes straight until the plane took off, when she immediately quieted down. But there's still nothing I'd rather do than take a vacation and spend time with my daughter, even if it's just holding her in my lap as she slept in the plane.
Eating while traveling with a one-year-old is an exercise in finding the most casual option possible, so there were few highlights worthy of this blog. I had the old Dulles standby, a vegetarian burrito at California Tortilla (near gate C22), for perhaps the last time. I stopped at La Farine to get the morning buns, but Willow threw up on the sidewalk so we didn't go in. I did have a pretty good vegetarian burrito at La Cascada, where the rice and beans had a nice smoky flavor and the salsa was rich and spicy without being too hot. But the highlight so far has been Loco Pops, a tiny storefront with nothing but a freezer full of popsicles and a white board with the menu. There are about ten water-based popsicles and ten cream-based ones, ranging from classics like chocolate brownie and strawberries and cream (which Willow loved) to daring combinations like chocolate sesame wasabi (what I had - good, but perhaps wasabi wasn't meant for chocolate-based desserts) or mango chili. All the popsicles are $2, for every eight you buy you get one free, and the service is friendly. Some people order one, eat it in the store, and then order another one, which I would heartily recommend.
As for traveling with kids, I have two pieces of advice. One from my friend David: buy lots of small toys and bring them out slowly over the course of the plane flight. And one from me: don't expect to do or accomplish anything other than spending time with your family. Which is plenty.
Tuesday, June 17, 2008
And So It Ends ...
Euro 2008 for France, that is. Although few of my readers will care (or recognize the names below), French soccer is part of the heritage I have gained from my travels around the world, and so the catastrophe of the last nine days deserves a mention. Today France lost 2-0 to Italy, in a match that was not as close as the score indicates (and 2-0 is a rout in soccer, as opposed to baseball) and was eliminated from the quadrennial European championship after tying Romania 0-0 and being obliterated by the Netherlands 4-1.
And like many real French people around the world today, I blame the manager, Raymond Domenech, he of the abstract philosophizing, empty gestures, exaggerated sense of self-worth, and questionable loyalties. He stuck with Lilian Thuram (a great player and a great man, but now 36 years old) at center back although he languished on the bench at his club team, Barcelona, until the disaster against the Netherlands showed to the world why Barcelona left him on the bench; when he finally decided to blame Thuram for the loss and replace him against Italy, he had no one to turn to (having used Thuram in that position in every important match for the last four years) and inserted Eric Abidal, who plays left back for Barcelona, where he is not an automatic starter either, and who played left back against Romania and was replaced for the Netherlands because of his poor performance in that first match. Not surprisingly, Abidal committed an enormous blunder that Luca Toni should have converted into a goal, then committed another enormous blunder against Toni and fouled him so obviously in the penalty area that we had the unheard-of: a penalty that no one could argue against, which gave Italy a 1-0 lead. Abidal was sent off (which was a bit debatable, but is according to the regulations), and Domenech responded by taking off a midfielder for a central defender, leaving France in a 4-3-2 formation that gave Italy complete control of the midfield for most of the rest of the first half, until he finally realized the problem and moved Karim Benzema, probably France's best center forward, back to left wing. (I would have taken off Thierry Henry, who is one of my favorite players of all time, but now flits around the penalty area like a ballet dancer and refuses to play defense, and left Benzema up front - like Arrigo Sacchi, the Italian coach in the 1994 World Cup , did against Ireland when, after his goalie was sent off early, he removed Roberto Baggio, the most talented player on his team but not, in his words, a "fighter" - and Italy won that game, 1-0.) When Italy scored their second on a lucky deflection, the game was over - France needed a win, which meant three goals, to stay alive in the tournament - but Domenech then replaced a winger with Nicolas Anelka, another center forward who doesn't even start for his club team (which is, admittedly, Chelsea), leaving France four defenders, two defensive midfielders, and three center forwards, two of them playing out of position.
Of course, there are many other questions to ask Domenech: why Thuram and Abidal were playing in the first place; why he included Patrick Vieira (great player, great man, but injured most of the year and recently injured again, making him unable to play in any matches) instead of Mathieu Flamini, who had a great season for the 3rd-best team in Europe's best league; why he started Willy Sagnol and Francois Clerc at right back instead of Bacary Sagna (voted best right back in Europe's best league) or Lassana Diarra, who did an excellent job during qualifications; why he played a 4-4-2 in which both central midfielders were defensively minded (although Toulalan had a good game today); why he started Henry, who had a lousy season and a mild injury; and on and on. Perhaps the 2006 World Cup made him feel infallible, although France only had two good matches in that tournament (the only team they beat in the group stage was Togo, and after beating Spain and Brazil they were outplayed by Portugal and drawn by Italy), but overall his record over four years is one of startling mediocrity given the incredible talent at his disposition.
The silver lining is that in all likelihood, France will now look for a new manager, who will start over with a younger team. And although few people expect it now, look for France to be a powerful force in 2010 when the younger generation finally takes over.
And like many real French people around the world today, I blame the manager, Raymond Domenech, he of the abstract philosophizing, empty gestures, exaggerated sense of self-worth, and questionable loyalties. He stuck with Lilian Thuram (a great player and a great man, but now 36 years old) at center back although he languished on the bench at his club team, Barcelona, until the disaster against the Netherlands showed to the world why Barcelona left him on the bench; when he finally decided to blame Thuram for the loss and replace him against Italy, he had no one to turn to (having used Thuram in that position in every important match for the last four years) and inserted Eric Abidal, who plays left back for Barcelona, where he is not an automatic starter either, and who played left back against Romania and was replaced for the Netherlands because of his poor performance in that first match. Not surprisingly, Abidal committed an enormous blunder that Luca Toni should have converted into a goal, then committed another enormous blunder against Toni and fouled him so obviously in the penalty area that we had the unheard-of: a penalty that no one could argue against, which gave Italy a 1-0 lead. Abidal was sent off (which was a bit debatable, but is according to the regulations), and Domenech responded by taking off a midfielder for a central defender, leaving France in a 4-3-2 formation that gave Italy complete control of the midfield for most of the rest of the first half, until he finally realized the problem and moved Karim Benzema, probably France's best center forward, back to left wing. (I would have taken off Thierry Henry, who is one of my favorite players of all time, but now flits around the penalty area like a ballet dancer and refuses to play defense, and left Benzema up front - like Arrigo Sacchi, the Italian coach in the 1994 World Cup , did against Ireland when, after his goalie was sent off early, he removed Roberto Baggio, the most talented player on his team but not, in his words, a "fighter" - and Italy won that game, 1-0.) When Italy scored their second on a lucky deflection, the game was over - France needed a win, which meant three goals, to stay alive in the tournament - but Domenech then replaced a winger with Nicolas Anelka, another center forward who doesn't even start for his club team (which is, admittedly, Chelsea), leaving France four defenders, two defensive midfielders, and three center forwards, two of them playing out of position.
Of course, there are many other questions to ask Domenech: why Thuram and Abidal were playing in the first place; why he included Patrick Vieira (great player, great man, but injured most of the year and recently injured again, making him unable to play in any matches) instead of Mathieu Flamini, who had a great season for the 3rd-best team in Europe's best league; why he started Willy Sagnol and Francois Clerc at right back instead of Bacary Sagna (voted best right back in Europe's best league) or Lassana Diarra, who did an excellent job during qualifications; why he played a 4-4-2 in which both central midfielders were defensively minded (although Toulalan had a good game today); why he started Henry, who had a lousy season and a mild injury; and on and on. Perhaps the 2006 World Cup made him feel infallible, although France only had two good matches in that tournament (the only team they beat in the group stage was Togo, and after beating Spain and Brazil they were outplayed by Portugal and drawn by Italy), but overall his record over four years is one of startling mediocrity given the incredible talent at his disposition.
The silver lining is that in all likelihood, France will now look for a new manager, who will start over with a younger team. And although few people expect it now, look for France to be a powerful force in 2010 when the younger generation finally takes over.
Thursday, June 12, 2008
Another Country
Claude Postel - 2 stars
75, rue Notre Dame Ouest, Montreal
I've always thought Montreal would be a nice place to visit - I could indulge my francophilia and maybe eat some good desserts, without having to fly across the Atlantic. But when I visited last weekend with my wife, our daughter, and my wife's parents, I quickly gave up most attempts to speak French. Not that I couldn't understand Québécois (the accent is a little different from Parisian, but no more so than some of the French regional accents, and a few of the words are different, but nothing you can't figure out), or that they couldn't understand me - it was just that everyone there speaks English so well it seemed pointless. I hear as you get away from the center of Montreal this is less true, but it's an astonishingly bilingual place.
75, rue Notre Dame Ouest, Montreal
I've always thought Montreal would be a nice place to visit - I could indulge my francophilia and maybe eat some good desserts, without having to fly across the Atlantic. But when I visited last weekend with my wife, our daughter, and my wife's parents, I quickly gave up most attempts to speak French. Not that I couldn't understand Québécois (the accent is a little different from Parisian, but no more so than some of the French regional accents, and a few of the words are different, but nothing you can't figure out), or that they couldn't understand me - it was just that everyone there speaks English so well it seemed pointless. I hear as you get away from the center of Montreal this is less true, but it's an astonishingly bilingual place.
With a toddler in tow we were somewhat limited in our restaurant choices, but we did have some very good French-style desserts at Claude Postel in Old Montreal, near the Notre Dame Basilica. For lunch you can get custom-made sandwiches, a selection of panini, salads, pastas, soup, and so on; I had a tomato soup that was almost certainly made on the spot (I could tell by the tiny bits of tomato peel and the little fragment of bay leaf that you wouldn't find in a processed product) and a fresh Greek salad. We had a raspberry tart, a pear-frangipane tart, and a chocolate cheesecake, and the raspberry tart was the best.
Unfortunately it was the same weekend as the Grand Prix of Montreal (a Formula One race), so the downtown hotels were wildly expensive, and we stayed in Laval, which in French must mean, as my wife pointed out, "the land of great shopping malls." As an American I'm used to having the biggest of everything, but I have never seen an expanse of strip malls like this, just planted in the middle of an enormous field around the intersection of two highways. But luckily, to prevent us from getting too homesick, Ronald McDonald was in town for a convention.
My daughter and I visited the enclosed mall one afternoon so my wife could rest, and when she started to melt down I bought her a soft-serve ice cream, and she sat down on the floor to eat it, just like at home.
The main event was our friends' wedding in a little town called Oka, northwest of Montreal, out in the middle of an apple orchard. The bride and groom were both bilingual, so the English-speaking officiant read the vows in English and the groom repeated them in French, and the French-speaking officiant read the vows in French and the bride repeated them in English - translating on the fly, I might add. It was a hot but beautiful day in an isolated, quiet place, just like the day and the place that my wife and I were married, nine years ago.
Wednesday, June 11, 2008
Baiji, R.I.P.
I was reading my news feed and saw this article saying that the Caribbean monk seal, last seen in 1952, has been formally declared extinct. The article also pointed me to a story I had missed back in December 2006: the baiji, or Yangtze River Dolphin, last sighted in 2004, can no longer be found and is effectively extinct. Robert Pitman, a scientist who participated in a search for the baiji, wrote:
"We came to say goodbye to baiji, but after its being in the river for 20 million years, we apparently missed it by two years. Sorry if I got a little emotional here, but the disappearance of an entire family of mammals is an inestimable loss for China and for the world. I think this is a big deal and possibly a turning point for the history of our planet. We are bulldozing the Garden of Eden, and the first large animal has fallen."
His full letter is here.
I am very sad.
Tuesday, June 10, 2008
Where's Your Bumper Sticker?
Well, the Democratic primary is finally over, and in commemoration I replaced the John Edwards sticker on my car (although I will continue to drink my tea out of my John Edwards mug and wear my John Edwards T-shirt).
More significantly, I finally maxed out my primary election contribution to Obama, although I haven't yet decided whether or not to give him money for the general election campaign; at this point, he's competing with MoveOn and the national congressional and senatorial campaigns for my wallet.
Loyal readers will know that I am not the most fervent Obama supporter. Oh, I think he would make a wonderful president, but I think Hillary Clinton would have been just fine, and my preference was for John Edwards anyway. I just think he's a weak candidate in an election we have to win (Stevens - 88; Ginsburg - 75; Souter - 68). He has the oratorical skill and the tremendous charisma, but he has trouble connecting with "ordinary" Americans (read: speak zero foreign languages, don't eat arugula, watch NASCAR, ... what does it mean that people like me aren't considered ordinary Americans?). He has the issue-that-shall-not-be-named. Most tellingly, he was unable to close out Hillary Clinton, who actually won the last three months of the campaign, which is simply not supposed to happen. Once there is a front-runner, everyone is supposed to jump on the bandwagon; they even jumped on John Kerry's bandwagon simply because he won Iowa, and there was a losing cause if I ever saw one. Instead, on Tuesday after Tuesday, the Obama campaign managed to snatch prolonged agony from the jaws of victory.
Now of course there is the drama of whether or not to make Hillary Clinton the vice-presidential nominee. On which I come down on the side of ... I don't know. Most people I know are emphatically against the idea, saying he needs a nice white man, preferably a governor, preferably with military experience, preferably from the South or the Midwest or the West, preferably with foreign policy credentials ... But there is a case to be made that this year, given the massive Democratic advantage handed to us by President Bush, Iraq, and the recession, all we need to do is to shore up our base and get out the vote, and choosing Clinton would come close to guaranteeing that every natural Democratic voter will vote Democratic.
In the end, it probably doesn't matter. While the Republicans cleverly managed to avoid nominating a nasty, paranoid megalomaniac who separated from his wife by press conference, a pathological flip-flopper who ran as a liberal in Massachusetts and an arch-conservative everywhere else, a lazy second-rate actor, and a man who claims to believe the earth is six thousand years old, they were left with a man with no charisma and no ability to raise money and not even the ability to deliver a joke line, and they are now forcing him to kowtow to the lunatic fringe of their own party, having decisively squandered a three-month advantage in the nominating process. So my prediction is a race that is unprecedented in its mindless inanity, ending with a 52-48 Obama victory.
But just in case, MoveOn is giving away free bumper stickers. So get yours now.
More significantly, I finally maxed out my primary election contribution to Obama, although I haven't yet decided whether or not to give him money for the general election campaign; at this point, he's competing with MoveOn and the national congressional and senatorial campaigns for my wallet.
Loyal readers will know that I am not the most fervent Obama supporter. Oh, I think he would make a wonderful president, but I think Hillary Clinton would have been just fine, and my preference was for John Edwards anyway. I just think he's a weak candidate in an election we have to win (Stevens - 88; Ginsburg - 75; Souter - 68). He has the oratorical skill and the tremendous charisma, but he has trouble connecting with "ordinary" Americans (read: speak zero foreign languages, don't eat arugula, watch NASCAR, ... what does it mean that people like me aren't considered ordinary Americans?). He has the issue-that-shall-not-be-named. Most tellingly, he was unable to close out Hillary Clinton, who actually won the last three months of the campaign, which is simply not supposed to happen. Once there is a front-runner, everyone is supposed to jump on the bandwagon; they even jumped on John Kerry's bandwagon simply because he won Iowa, and there was a losing cause if I ever saw one. Instead, on Tuesday after Tuesday, the Obama campaign managed to snatch prolonged agony from the jaws of victory.
Now of course there is the drama of whether or not to make Hillary Clinton the vice-presidential nominee. On which I come down on the side of ... I don't know. Most people I know are emphatically against the idea, saying he needs a nice white man, preferably a governor, preferably with military experience, preferably from the South or the Midwest or the West, preferably with foreign policy credentials ... But there is a case to be made that this year, given the massive Democratic advantage handed to us by President Bush, Iraq, and the recession, all we need to do is to shore up our base and get out the vote, and choosing Clinton would come close to guaranteeing that every natural Democratic voter will vote Democratic.
In the end, it probably doesn't matter. While the Republicans cleverly managed to avoid nominating a nasty, paranoid megalomaniac who separated from his wife by press conference, a pathological flip-flopper who ran as a liberal in Massachusetts and an arch-conservative everywhere else, a lazy second-rate actor, and a man who claims to believe the earth is six thousand years old, they were left with a man with no charisma and no ability to raise money and not even the ability to deliver a joke line, and they are now forcing him to kowtow to the lunatic fringe of their own party, having decisively squandered a three-month advantage in the nominating process. So my prediction is a race that is unprecedented in its mindless inanity, ending with a 52-48 Obama victory.
But just in case, MoveOn is giving away free bumper stickers. So get yours now.
Monday, June 09, 2008
If It's June in an Even Year ...
I'm just back from a weekend in Montreal, on which more later, but while in the hotel I managed to steal a few minutes watching bits of some early matches of Euro 2008 (Switzerland-Czech Republic, Germany-Poland, and Croatia-Austria) - the quadrennial championship of European national soccer teams. The European Championship always falls halfway between two World Cups, and so every even year there is world-class soccer (or an approximation thereof, given how tired all the players are, following a nine-month competitive season with another month in the heat of the summer) to watch in June. Although I am one of those people who prefer club soccer to international soccer - I think Man United or Chelsea could beat any national all-star team, and for that matter the Celtics or Lakers could beat any basketball all-star team, including the American one - the latter draws more television coverage, and hence is more accessible in the U.S.
Since I began following soccer in 1994 when I lived in France, I adopted that country's soccer team along with its food and its language. France was not actually in the 1994 World Cup, having failed to qualify by somehow managing to lose to both Israel and Bulgaria at home in its final two qualifying matches, the latter in the final minutes0. But during the 1996 European Championship I was touring Southern Italy as a writer for The Berkeley Guides, watching matches in bars packed with Italian fans (Arrigo Sacchi, then coach of the Italian team, played with "very tight lines," one man explained to me), as an ultra-defensive French team made it to the semifinals. Then, of course, there was 1998, when the World Cup was played in France, and I spent the whole time in London working on a consulting project so brutal that I missed virtually every game. But I made it back to my hotel room for the last half hour of the France-Croatia semifinal, when Lilian Thuram scored the only two goals of his entire international career (over 100 matches and counting) to salvage a 2-1 win, and that weekend in McKinsey's Toronto office we photocopied the final binders and I headed straight to a bar to watch most of the final, when France stunned Brazil 3-0. In 2000 I was in California, nine hours behind Europe and working all the time (this was Ariba at the peak of the boom), and I don't think I had any TV coverage anyway, so I missed watching France come from behind to beat Italy 2-1 in the finals. Then there were the embarrassments of 2002, when I stayed up late to watch France fail to score a goal in the first round (against Senegal, Uruguay, and Denmark, if my memory serves me), and of 2004, when an aging, tired team got booted out in the quarters by Greece. By 2006, I had a DVR, so I watched most of the World Cup, suffering through the painful final against Italy and the media's maddening obsession with Zinedine Zidane, who was at best the fifth-best player on the team, after both central defenders and both defensive midfielders - all of whom were black, by the way, but one shouldn't hold that against Zidane, who is an admirable person who has spoken out against racism on many occasions, and did not cost France the final - that was David Trezeguet, who is a great player, but who missed his penalty kick. But I digress.
As always, France enters this year's European Championship as one of the favorites, which means that all of her fans are expecting her to self-destruct, either early or late. And to be aided in the process by the current coach, Raymond Domenech, who has always seemed out of his depth and has compensated by being not only illogical but vague and inscrutable. He is best known for reaching the finals of the 2006 World Cup, but under his direction France barely qualified for that event (squeaking by Ireland, Switzerland, Israel thanks to a tremendous goal by Thierry Henry in Ireland), needed to beat Togo just to get out of the group stage, and only qualified for Euro 2008 thanks to Georgia defeating Scotland in one of the last matches. On top of that, Domenech insists on starting players who have served him well in the past but are no longer good enough even to start for their club teams, for example playing Willy Sagnol at right-back despite his missing virtually the whole season due to injury and not even including Bacary Sagna in the team, even though he was voted the best right-back in the English league. Most shockingly, Domenech left off the team David Trezeguet, the second-highest scorer in the Italian league and one of the deadliest strikers in the world (and the focus of Adidas's promotional campaign), in favor of two players who don't even start for their club teams (Henry at Barcelona and Nicolas Anelka at Chelsea).
Which is a long way of getting to the point, that today France drew 0-0 with Romania, the weakest team in their group, and no one knows where the offense is going to come from. So it could be a long few weeks.
Since I began following soccer in 1994 when I lived in France, I adopted that country's soccer team along with its food and its language. France was not actually in the 1994 World Cup, having failed to qualify by somehow managing to lose to both Israel and Bulgaria at home in its final two qualifying matches, the latter in the final minutes0. But during the 1996 European Championship I was touring Southern Italy as a writer for The Berkeley Guides, watching matches in bars packed with Italian fans (Arrigo Sacchi, then coach of the Italian team, played with "very tight lines," one man explained to me), as an ultra-defensive French team made it to the semifinals. Then, of course, there was 1998, when the World Cup was played in France, and I spent the whole time in London working on a consulting project so brutal that I missed virtually every game. But I made it back to my hotel room for the last half hour of the France-Croatia semifinal, when Lilian Thuram scored the only two goals of his entire international career (over 100 matches and counting) to salvage a 2-1 win, and that weekend in McKinsey's Toronto office we photocopied the final binders and I headed straight to a bar to watch most of the final, when France stunned Brazil 3-0. In 2000 I was in California, nine hours behind Europe and working all the time (this was Ariba at the peak of the boom), and I don't think I had any TV coverage anyway, so I missed watching France come from behind to beat Italy 2-1 in the finals. Then there were the embarrassments of 2002, when I stayed up late to watch France fail to score a goal in the first round (against Senegal, Uruguay, and Denmark, if my memory serves me), and of 2004, when an aging, tired team got booted out in the quarters by Greece. By 2006, I had a DVR, so I watched most of the World Cup, suffering through the painful final against Italy and the media's maddening obsession with Zinedine Zidane, who was at best the fifth-best player on the team, after both central defenders and both defensive midfielders - all of whom were black, by the way, but one shouldn't hold that against Zidane, who is an admirable person who has spoken out against racism on many occasions, and did not cost France the final - that was David Trezeguet, who is a great player, but who missed his penalty kick. But I digress.
As always, France enters this year's European Championship as one of the favorites, which means that all of her fans are expecting her to self-destruct, either early or late. And to be aided in the process by the current coach, Raymond Domenech, who has always seemed out of his depth and has compensated by being not only illogical but vague and inscrutable. He is best known for reaching the finals of the 2006 World Cup, but under his direction France barely qualified for that event (squeaking by Ireland, Switzerland, Israel thanks to a tremendous goal by Thierry Henry in Ireland), needed to beat Togo just to get out of the group stage, and only qualified for Euro 2008 thanks to Georgia defeating Scotland in one of the last matches. On top of that, Domenech insists on starting players who have served him well in the past but are no longer good enough even to start for their club teams, for example playing Willy Sagnol at right-back despite his missing virtually the whole season due to injury and not even including Bacary Sagna in the team, even though he was voted the best right-back in the English league. Most shockingly, Domenech left off the team David Trezeguet, the second-highest scorer in the Italian league and one of the deadliest strikers in the world (and the focus of Adidas's promotional campaign), in favor of two players who don't even start for their club teams (Henry at Barcelona and Nicolas Anelka at Chelsea).
Which is a long way of getting to the point, that today France drew 0-0 with Romania, the weakest team in their group, and no one knows where the offense is going to come from. So it could be a long few weeks.
Thursday, May 29, 2008
Time to Get a Mac?
Today is my wife and my ninth wedding anniversary. (I think that's correct; I know it's not "my wife's and my," because together we only have one anniversary, and calling it just "my" wedding anniversary feels wrong.) Most of our presents to each other these days have to do with our children, so I wanted to make a very simple slideshow/movie of our daughter, showing how she grew up over the last 20 months. I know you can just put all the images in one directory and use any number of techniques to display them as a slideshow, but I wanted one file so it would be easy to move around, and maybe even convert to 3gpp2 to play on a cell phone. I used Picasa to pick the photos and edit them, but I didn't like Picasa's create movie feature. I did a quick search on the web, and Windows Movie Maker seemed to be the simplest way to do it, and besides I already had it on my computer and I've used it before for basic tasks.
So I launched Movie Maker, imported my pictures, and put them in order on the storyboard. But I wanted transitions from picture to picture - not hard cuts - and my transitions palette was empty. I looked in the help files, but they all assumed the transitions were there, and there was no information on how to import transitions. So I Googled the problem, and found a number of web pages, of which the most useful was this one. Apparently, a lot of people have had this problem, going back almost three years, but there is still no fix from Microsoft; the Microsoft support page on the issue just pointed people at the link above I had already found.
One problem is that Movie Maker, like Internet Explorer, is "part of Windows." So you can't just uninstall it and reinstall it. It doesn't even show up as a "Windows component" in the add/remove programs control panel. The only way to reinstall it is to find the right INF file in a Windows directory and reinstall from there ... but to do that you need to have a set of Windows XP SP2 disks, or the files from your upgrade, and I couldn't find either. (I believe that computer already had SP2 when I bought it.)
Another problem is that the transitions are not stored as, say, FILES IN A DIRECTORY CALLED "TRANSITIONS," which would be the logical way to do things. So you can't find that directory and look inside it to see if your transitions are there, or copy in the files from some other source. Instead, the transitions are stored as a set of ... wait for it ... registry keys!?! Luckily, one helpful person had taken the commands you need to insert the right keys and put them together in a REG file (like a batch file, but for registry changes). So I ran the REG file, restarted Movie Maker, and my transitions were still missing. Following some advice in the forum, I retried it after turning my security software off (and disabling my Internet connection just in case), but that didn't work, either.
Then I read further down the thread, and it turns out that you can put the necessary keys in registry, but the next time you start Movie Maker, it somehow deletes the keys! I opened up my own registry using Registry Editor and confirmed that that was in fact happening on my machine. The fix for this is to manually open the appropriate registry key folders and edit the permissions so your own user account cannot delete them. This eventually did solve the problem, but it is the first time I have ever manually edited the registry, and it is something that you are generally are never, never supposed to do unless you know exactly what you are doing.
Now, I am reasonably adept at using a computer. I can reformat a hard disk and reinstall Windows, I can add more memory, my home desktop is a dual-boot Ubuntu/Windows machine, I do lightweight programming in my company's scripting language, I can do a little SQL in a pinch, I know my way around a raw HTML page, ... I'm no developer, but the fact that it took me an hour to get Microsoft's basic movie editing program to behave properly in order to make the world's simplest movie is ridiculous.
Like many people, I'm sure, I've had my eye on the MacBook Air for a few months now, especially the $3,000 solid-state version. Unfortunately (or fortunately), though, I'm also very good at not buying things that I don't actually need. But I'm sure in iLife my home movie would have been a snap, and it probably would have ended up looking better, too.
Oh, and if you want to see the movie, and your email can handle 25 MB attachments, let me know.
So I launched Movie Maker, imported my pictures, and put them in order on the storyboard. But I wanted transitions from picture to picture - not hard cuts - and my transitions palette was empty. I looked in the help files, but they all assumed the transitions were there, and there was no information on how to import transitions. So I Googled the problem, and found a number of web pages, of which the most useful was this one. Apparently, a lot of people have had this problem, going back almost three years, but there is still no fix from Microsoft; the Microsoft support page on the issue just pointed people at the link above I had already found.
One problem is that Movie Maker, like Internet Explorer, is "part of Windows." So you can't just uninstall it and reinstall it. It doesn't even show up as a "Windows component" in the add/remove programs control panel. The only way to reinstall it is to find the right INF file in a Windows directory and reinstall from there ... but to do that you need to have a set of Windows XP SP2 disks, or the files from your upgrade, and I couldn't find either. (I believe that computer already had SP2 when I bought it.)
Another problem is that the transitions are not stored as, say, FILES IN A DIRECTORY CALLED "TRANSITIONS," which would be the logical way to do things. So you can't find that directory and look inside it to see if your transitions are there, or copy in the files from some other source. Instead, the transitions are stored as a set of ... wait for it ... registry keys!?! Luckily, one helpful person had taken the commands you need to insert the right keys and put them together in a REG file (like a batch file, but for registry changes). So I ran the REG file, restarted Movie Maker, and my transitions were still missing. Following some advice in the forum, I retried it after turning my security software off (and disabling my Internet connection just in case), but that didn't work, either.
Then I read further down the thread, and it turns out that you can put the necessary keys in registry, but the next time you start Movie Maker, it somehow deletes the keys! I opened up my own registry using Registry Editor and confirmed that that was in fact happening on my machine. The fix for this is to manually open the appropriate registry key folders and edit the permissions so your own user account cannot delete them. This eventually did solve the problem, but it is the first time I have ever manually edited the registry, and it is something that you are generally are never, never supposed to do unless you know exactly what you are doing.
Now, I am reasonably adept at using a computer. I can reformat a hard disk and reinstall Windows, I can add more memory, my home desktop is a dual-boot Ubuntu/Windows machine, I do lightweight programming in my company's scripting language, I can do a little SQL in a pinch, I know my way around a raw HTML page, ... I'm no developer, but the fact that it took me an hour to get Microsoft's basic movie editing program to behave properly in order to make the world's simplest movie is ridiculous.
Like many people, I'm sure, I've had my eye on the MacBook Air for a few months now, especially the $3,000 solid-state version. Unfortunately (or fortunately), though, I'm also very good at not buying things that I don't actually need. But I'm sure in iLife my home movie would have been a snap, and it probably would have ended up looking better, too.
Oh, and if you want to see the movie, and your email can handle 25 MB attachments, let me know.
Monday, May 26, 2008
Even the Airport Food Is Better
Tomokazu - 2 stars
SFO, United concourse
SFO, United concourse
Fung Lum - 1 star
SFO, United concourse
If you read this blog, you may already realize that I love California, or at least the part of it around San Francisco. The weather is like paradise, the food is unmatched, the flowers smell better in the night air, and even the airport food is better. The United section of Terminal 3 has a food court that has five restaurants that are better than anything you can find in most restaurants, all of which are branches of small local chains that first established themselves in the real world (not in airports). The Mexican omelet at Andalé is my favorite airport breakfast in the world, Boudin has better fresh sandwiches than you can find most places, and I have a weakness for the pasta at Firewood. When I landed on Tuesday night I was actually looking forward to dinner in the airport (there would be no good choices in or around my discount hotel), and I got a bowl of veggie udon at Tomokazu, where they also have fresh sushi and good wakame, the green seaweed salad with sesame oil you find in Japanese restaurants. The udon was more Californian than authentic, filled with broccoli, green beans, red peppers, mushrooms, seaweed, zucchini, and very thick, almost square, chewy noodles, but all the fresh vegetables are good for you and the broth was good. On the way out on Friday I had lunch at Fung Lum, which has not only the usual airport-Chinese selection, but also various kinds of dim sum. The spring rolls were mediocre, more roll than filling, but the sautéed vegetables were fresher than usual, and the noodles were not the usual slightly sickening greasy mass you see in most airports. (Travel karma note: On the flight from Dulles to SFO I gave up an aisle seat for a middle seat - the middle of five seats in the central section of a 777 - so that a husband and wife could sit together. On the return flight I got an upgrade - which virtually never happens, now that I'm only Premier Executive and not 1K.)
I was visiting the office for our quarterly company meeting and management team meetings, which comprised an afternoon and a morning of debating a long list of topics with my eleven colleagues, five of whom I have been working with for over five years. The meetings themselves can be challenging: there are too many people who want to talk at once, too many good ideas we won't have time to implement, too few concrete action items (as we say in the business world). But they remind me how lucky I am to work with people who are so smart, so rational, so able to analyze problems and break them into their key issues. I used to work at McKinsey, probably one of the two most prestigious places to work in the business world (after Goldman Sachs), and the discussions there were clichéd, abstract, and just plain slow by comparison.
In the middle of the festival of meetings, we were supposed to go out to dinner at a nice restaurant, but we canceled that and ordered pizza in instead. The original plan was to eat the pizza in the Wii room and play video games, but that part got lost somewhere. We sat around a table in a corner conference room as the sun set and ate pizza (Amici's in San Mateo, 2 stars) and talked about our company and how we could make it an even more unique and special place. It was work, but it also felt like a comfortable dinner party with some of my best friends.
Monday, May 19, 2008
Chicken Blogwich at Home
Alice Waters, The Art of Simple Food - 2 stars
I spent all of last whole week at home - for the fourth time out of nineteen weeks so far this year, which really isn't all that bad. So instead of eating fake Mexican food in airport restaurants, I've been cooking. Or "cooking" might be a more appropriate way to put it, as any new parent probably knows. After a day in the basement office, with a dog to walk and a daughter to play with, there is rarely time for a three-course meal. On top of that, I'm a vegetarian, and we think our daughter may be allergic to eggs and may have celiac (an intolerance for gluten, which is part of wheat among other things), which severely limits the available options.
The sad thing is that I actually love to cook. I started cooking one summer during college when I lived at home but my mother was away, but I really learned when I lived in Berkeley. When people ask me why Berkeley graduate students in the humanities take so long to get their Ph.D.'s, I always say, "Because the food is so good." You are short on money but long on time, the fresh produce is the best I have ever seen (including in France), and you are surrounded by the inspiration of countless good restaurants. Perhaps most importantly, cooking and throwing dinner parties is one way of declaring that there are more important things in life than getting a real job and making lots of money, and thereby pushing back the dark thoughts telling you that you should have gotten a real job to make lots of money.
When I'm in a cooking rut, sometimes I buy a new cookbook. Now, cookbooks have gotten all out of control in the last fifteen years, with every celebrity chef pumping out beautiful volumes with lusciously photographed food porn and touching anecdotes accompanying every recipe. I'm a comparative minimalist when it comes to cookbooks; I only own about fifteen, and in my lifetime I've bought fewer than ten myself, typically of the "classic" variety, like Marcella Hazan's Essentials of Classic Italian Cooking or The Professional Chef from the Culinary Institute of America. But sometimes a new cookbook is the way to find some new ideas, and more importantly to remind yourself of the little things that make cooking such a pleasure.
So my new purchase is The Art of Simple Food by Alice Waters, the founder of Chez Panisse and, according to many, of California cuisine. I loved Chez Panisse when I lived in Berkeley, although the last two times I went recently I was disappointed. And although her books tend to be overly precious, they are surprisingly useful for a home kitchen chef within limited time and limited access to fancy ingredients. The Art of Simple Food is organized a bit as a how-to book, with chapters on many foundational techniques and components (sauces, salads, sautéing, simmering, grilling, etc.), and it appealed with knowing precision to my culinary aesthetic (shared by many yuppies today, I know): I would rather do something small and simple, perfectly, than something big and ambitious, imperfectly. It's an ideal that I sacrifice every day - I know how to substitute canned beans for dried and frozen vegetables for fresh, I usually do my prep work on a just-in-time basis, and I can cook perfectly good dinners without measuring a thing. But I still wish for the time to quietly prepare everything just the right way.
Since getting the cookbook, I've made broccoli with lemon and garlic butter, a rice pilaf with tomatoes, green beans with a vinaigrette, sweet potatoes with lime juice, and a Greek salad, and everything was good. More importantly, the book reminded me to take the time to do everything carefully and to enjoy the simple process of peeling, washing, slicing, salting, and so on. Because enjoying the things you have to do anyway is another step further on the path to happiness.
Greek salad, in progress
Sunday, May 18, 2008
Paris Saint-Germain
One of the things I acquired during my travels a long time ago was a love of European soccer. I suppose that going to soccer games was part of my general desire at the time to fit in with what real Parisians did. The first game I went to was a Champions' Cup match between the Paris team, Paris Saint-Germain, or PSG (European team names are not plurals, like New York Yankees or Boston Red Sox, but the names of the organizations themselves, like Arsenal Football Club or Futbol Club Barcelona), and either Bayern Munchen or a Hungarian team from a town called, I think, Vac. The cheapest tickets were (and are) the ones in the virages ("bleachers" is probably the best translation) at either end of the field. At the Parc des Princes, PSG's stadium, the two ends are called Auteuil and Boulogne, and when the salesperson asked which one I wanted, I said "Boulogne," not caring. This was actually a bad idea, since Boulogne is known for having the more "ultra" fans, including the skinheads; the Boulogne Boys club was recently banned for displaying a racist banner during a recent match. The virages are anarchic zones semi-policed by the fan clubs themselves; the main role of the police is to protect the rest of the spectators from the people in the virages. Luckily for me, PSG won handily, everyone was happy, and I got home safely.
I went to four matches that year in Paris, and I was hooked. Although you can only see part of the field well from the cheap seats, you can see the game much better than on TV, and the atmosphere is like nothing in the United States, even at a second-tier club like PSG (more on that later), with the flares, the smoke bombs, the riot police, the chanted insults, and the constant singing (mostly to classical tunes, like Radames's aria from Aida, or the bullfighter's aria from Carmen, strangely enough), which can feel like an enormous wall of raw sound.
Although I have not been back to the Parc des Princes since - they always seem to be playing away from home when I am in Paris, and the one time I thought I could see them I had to postpone my trip because of my dog's illness - I've tried to follow PSG from afar. This can be difficult, because most easily-available television coverage here is of the English Premiership and the Champions League (which PSG is almost invariably not part of), but thanks to trips to Paris and Internet video I've been able to watch most of their matches this spring, climaxing in last night's match against Sochaux, which was perhaps their most important match in the last 35 years.
To understand why, you first need to understand the structure of European soccer leagues. Each country has a hierarchy of divisions, from top (elite professionals) to bottom (amateurs): Serie A, B, and C in Italy; Premiership, League Championship, League One, and League Two in England; and so on. For obvious reasons, clubs in higher divisions bring in more money and can afford to buy better players. (The role of money is even more transparent in European soccer than in North American sports, for reasons I won't get into.) And each year, under rules that vary slightly from country to country, the top teams in each division are promoted to the next-higher division, and the bottom teams are relegated to the next-lower division. (The top teams in the top division, get to play in the Europe-wide Champions League the next season, which is the ultimate moneymaker because of its lucrative television contract.)
The other thing you need to understand is that PSG is one of the most embarrassing clubs in the world to support, even leaving aside the occasional right-wing fans. Imagine the New York Yankees - largest city, big budget, widely hated - with a lousy record. In most countries, the big-budget teams win over and over; in England, Manchester United, Chelsea, Arsenal, and Liverpool finish in the top four every year, and no other team has finished first since 1995. In France, PSG is supposed to be part of the elite club, and in most years they have the payroll to match - Ronaldinho, who a few years ago was considered the best player in the world, played at PSG before moving to Barcelona - but their record is mediocre at best, without a league championship since 1994 (the year I lived there, I might add). And this year, for the second year in a row, PSG was struggling desperately against relegation, and the financial catastrophe that would mean.
For most of the last two months PSG was 18th out of 20 teams in a league where the bottom three teams are relegated, thanks to a string of late-game defensive breakdowns. Only because the 16th- and 17th-placed teams were equally inept did PSG have any hope at all, and by virtue of a draw at home against St.-Etienne last week, they even climbed into 16th place, one point ahead of Toulouse and Lens; but because of cumulative goal difference, PSG would lose a tiebreaker against either club. So if PSG lost and both other clubs drew, or if PSG drew and both of them won, we were sunk.
The pressure in match like this is much higher than in, say, a cup final, because if relegation can literally kill a team. Without the income of playing in the top division, you can't field a very good team, and with only three teams out of twenty promoted each year, there's no reason to believe you'll ever make it back, especially for a generally dysfunctional club like PSG. So it was a relief when Amaré Diané drilled in shot for PSG in the first half, and Toulouse was tied by Valenciennes, and after 65 minutes Lens fell behind to Bordeaux. But over the next ten minutes everything started to fall apart. First Lens tied Bordeaux, then PSG gave up a goal to Sochaux on a corner kick, and then Toulouse took the lead in their match, and at that point a goal by Lens (against Bordeaux) or by Sochaux (against PSG) would have put my team in the second division, and our defense was looking more and more desperate.
But then, with less than eight minutes left, Diané had the ball in the penalty box, got hit hard by a defender with the goalie rushing out, and somehow bumped the ball with his right foot, between the defender's legs and just past the goalie, the ball rolling slowly, slowly, interminably slowly while the goalie switched directions and raced back toward the goal line, just a split-second too late. It was a pretty pathetic goal, but it counted, and the defense hung on to the end, and finally PSG was still in the top division. So when I do go back to Paris, I can still hope to see my team again.
Tuesday, May 06, 2008
Save Our Taco Trucks
dell'anima - 2 stars
38 8th Ave, New York, NY
Spice Market - 2 stars
403 W 13th St, New York, NY
A food pushcart - 0 stars
W 28th St, New York, NY
Those who do not have their finger perpetually on the pulse of the Zeitgeist may not realize the epic cultural battle going on today. Actually, I didn't realize it either until my friend Viviane called attention to it on her Facebook page: the epic battle for the taco truck being waged in Los Angeles, which was featured in a New York Times article a few days ago and even made NPR's Morning Edition yesterday. NPR played it as a battle between restaurant-owning Mexicans and taco truck-owning Mexicans, but Viviane explained that it was a generational thing - a first generation of now-established immigrants (who own restaurants) trying to use their organizations and political power to beat back a newer generation of less-established immigrants (who own taco trucks, and eat at taco trucks because they don't have much money).
My only horse in this race is that I used to really like tacos and I really like eating cheap food from street vendors. I didn't discover what for me is a "real" taco until we founded my company on the fringe of Menlo Park between 101 and the bay, which is basically East Palo Alto, where the taquerias have Mexican music in the jukeboxes and the tacos are just slightly charred beef, onions, cilantro, hot sauce, and lime juice on a small, round corn tortilla. Those tacos, along with New York City pushcart hot dogs (with ketchup and onions) and McDonald's hamburgers, are probably the thing I miss most about being a vegetarian.
Viviane also told me that there are now taco trucks in Manhattan, which when I lived there was much more Puerto Rican, Dominican, and even Cuban than Mexican. And sure enough, I passed a taco truck on 28th St. this morning leaving my hotel. But sadly enough, there was nothing I could eat there. Instead, I did the next best thing; I got a falafel sandwich from another pushcart, also on 28th St., but it was, sadly, not very good - the falafel was dry and uninteresting, the bread too soft and bland, the fillings limited to uninspired lettuce and tomato - nothing like the falafel masterpieces of the Marais in Paris, and not even as good as the falafel place in my town, which is owned and run by Latinos. I'm sure if I had ordered the chicken kebabs, or a hot dog, it would have gotten at least 2 stars.
At the opposite end of the spectrum from the New York taco truck is the New York trendy specialty cocktail, which can cost as much as a meal for four at the aforementioned truck and which was the theme of the previous evening. Viviane and I started out with sidecars and three kinds of bruschetta (chickpeas, avocados, and ricotta - I liked the avocados the best, but they were all good, and the bread itself was close to perfect) at dell'anima, and took a stroll over to Spice Market for dinner, in what is affectionately known as the meat-packing district but should really be known as The Most Self-Consciously Trendy Block in the World, following my friend Marcus's rule that any superlative relative to New York applies, by extension, to the whole world. I had a ginger margarita (like a margarita, but with a stinging layer of ginger that lingered in the aftertaste) and she had a kumquat mojito (a little sweet, and in my opinion not as good as a classic mojito, which is one of my favorite cocktails) in the lush "orientalist post-colonial" atmosphere - her description, but she is a professor who has studied these things. Oh, and we had food, too, which was good, but Spice Market (by the way, the 42nd-best restaurant in New York according to New York Magazine), like Jean-Georges Vongerichten's other restaurants, is a place where it pays to eat animals.
In the early 1990s before I actually lived in Manhattan, I always wanted to live in the West Village, but unfortunately as I've made more money the price of actually living in the West Village has increased proportionately, so I've finally resigned myself to being a country mouse. But even though we have safe streets and small-town values out here in rural America, it's pretty hard to find a good cocktail.
38 8th Ave, New York, NY
Spice Market - 2 stars
403 W 13th St, New York, NY
A food pushcart - 0 stars
W 28th St, New York, NY
Those who do not have their finger perpetually on the pulse of the Zeitgeist may not realize the epic cultural battle going on today. Actually, I didn't realize it either until my friend Viviane called attention to it on her Facebook page: the epic battle for the taco truck being waged in Los Angeles, which was featured in a New York Times article a few days ago and even made NPR's Morning Edition yesterday. NPR played it as a battle between restaurant-owning Mexicans and taco truck-owning Mexicans, but Viviane explained that it was a generational thing - a first generation of now-established immigrants (who own restaurants) trying to use their organizations and political power to beat back a newer generation of less-established immigrants (who own taco trucks, and eat at taco trucks because they don't have much money).
My only horse in this race is that I used to really like tacos and I really like eating cheap food from street vendors. I didn't discover what for me is a "real" taco until we founded my company on the fringe of Menlo Park between 101 and the bay, which is basically East Palo Alto, where the taquerias have Mexican music in the jukeboxes and the tacos are just slightly charred beef, onions, cilantro, hot sauce, and lime juice on a small, round corn tortilla. Those tacos, along with New York City pushcart hot dogs (with ketchup and onions) and McDonald's hamburgers, are probably the thing I miss most about being a vegetarian.
Viviane also told me that there are now taco trucks in Manhattan, which when I lived there was much more Puerto Rican, Dominican, and even Cuban than Mexican. And sure enough, I passed a taco truck on 28th St. this morning leaving my hotel. But sadly enough, there was nothing I could eat there. Instead, I did the next best thing; I got a falafel sandwich from another pushcart, also on 28th St., but it was, sadly, not very good - the falafel was dry and uninteresting, the bread too soft and bland, the fillings limited to uninspired lettuce and tomato - nothing like the falafel masterpieces of the Marais in Paris, and not even as good as the falafel place in my town, which is owned and run by Latinos. I'm sure if I had ordered the chicken kebabs, or a hot dog, it would have gotten at least 2 stars.
At the opposite end of the spectrum from the New York taco truck is the New York trendy specialty cocktail, which can cost as much as a meal for four at the aforementioned truck and which was the theme of the previous evening. Viviane and I started out with sidecars and three kinds of bruschetta (chickpeas, avocados, and ricotta - I liked the avocados the best, but they were all good, and the bread itself was close to perfect) at dell'anima, and took a stroll over to Spice Market for dinner, in what is affectionately known as the meat-packing district but should really be known as The Most Self-Consciously Trendy Block in the World, following my friend Marcus's rule that any superlative relative to New York applies, by extension, to the whole world. I had a ginger margarita (like a margarita, but with a stinging layer of ginger that lingered in the aftertaste) and she had a kumquat mojito (a little sweet, and in my opinion not as good as a classic mojito, which is one of my favorite cocktails) in the lush "orientalist post-colonial" atmosphere - her description, but she is a professor who has studied these things. Oh, and we had food, too, which was good, but Spice Market (by the way, the 42nd-best restaurant in New York according to New York Magazine), like Jean-Georges Vongerichten's other restaurants, is a place where it pays to eat animals.
In the early 1990s before I actually lived in Manhattan, I always wanted to live in the West Village, but unfortunately as I've made more money the price of actually living in the West Village has increased proportionately, so I've finally resigned myself to being a country mouse. But even though we have safe streets and small-town values out here in rural America, it's pretty hard to find a good cocktail.
Friday, May 02, 2008
The Center of the World
Cafe Spice - 1 star
Grand Central Station
Two Boots - 2 stars
Grand Central Station
Today I passed through Ground Zero for the first time since it became Ground Zero. I looked at it once in early 2002, when there were still crowds of people lined up against all the fences and pictures of victims plastered to those fences, but this was the first time I was actually down in the pit itself. Because, you see, the World Trade Center sat on top of a major station for short-haul trains to and from New Jersey, and even though it appears that absolutely no work has been done on whatever will someday occupy the site, the train station does work. Although there are literally millions of people for whom passing through this station is no big deal, for me it was a little eerie. Imagine a typical train or subway station buried thirty feet underground; then take away everything on top of that station, so you have just the framework of the tracks and the station, surrounded by thirty-foot-high concrete walls, on top of which you can see the surrounding streets. That's what it's like.
I was coming back from a meeting in the waterfront skyscrapers of Jersey City, just across the river from where the World Trade Center once stood, and on my way to Grand Central for train back to my parents' house in Chappaqua. Once some researcher posed the following question: You have to meet a friend in New York City on a given day, but you don't know when or where. Where should you go? The most common answer, by a wide margin, was the information desk in the center of Grand Central Station (the one with the little analog clock on top of it), at noon.
For a long time, Grand Central has been the metaphorical center of the city (and by extension, as Marcus would say, the world). Now after the major renovations of the 1990s, it's also a great place to get a quick lunch, with multiple sit-down restaurants and a food court with something like twenty places where you can grab a bite in the ethnic variety of your choice, their lines of waiting businesspeople snaking past each other in some elaborate abstract design.
For lunch, I had a vegetarian combo from Cafe Spice, including a vegetable curry and another dish of potatoes with peas, which was not particularly distinguished but which I would happily eat again. And before catching my train home I couldn't resist getting a slice of pizza from Two Boots, even though I wasn't hungry and I had a huge home-cooked dinner ahead of me. Two Boots is quintessentially New York pizza - which is to say it's not as good as the pizza in Naples or New Haven, but it reminds me of growing up. The crust is thin, but without body - not the chewiness of real Neapolitan pizza, nor the blackened surface produced by the coal-fired ovens in New Haven. Confronted with the tomato sauce and cheese, the crust just ... gives up, which is why most New Yorkers fold their pizza in half (the long way) before eating it. But still, there are few things more comforting, especially since I no longer eat the hot dogs from the pushcarts (one of the few things I really, really miss now that I no longer eat animals).T
Friday, April 18, 2008
Little Green Bag, R. I. P.
Lamen Restauration Rapide - 1 star
Rue des Petits Champs and Rue Ste.-Anne, 75002 Paris
Best Saveurs - 2 stars
Passage de Choiseul, 75002 Paris
Exki - 1 star
Boulevard des Italiens, 75002 Paris
Little Georgette - 2 stars
Impasse Gomboust, 75002 Paris
Last week I left my suitcase in my hotel in Paris so I didn't have to carry it to the United States and back over the weekend - especially important because I insist on taking the train in and out of Paris rather than a taxi. When I unpacked it on Tuesday, I couldn't find my little green toiletries bag - the one with my razor, shaving cream, toothpaste, nail clippers, hair brush, and so on. I probably forgot to pack it last week, and the hotel didn't have any record of anyone finding it. So I had to buy a new set of supplies at Monoprix, perhaps my favorite supermarket in the world.
Losing my little green bag made me sad. It wasn't particularly nice - I suspect it cost me about $15 - but I had had it since at least 1996, and it had been all around the world with me. I bought it before I went backpacking all over southern Italy for The Berkeley Guides that summer, because it was big, expandable, and waterproof, and since then it made it to Rome, Florence, London, Paris, Berlin, Toronto, Singapore, Seoul, Bilbao, San Sebastian, Manchester, Wales, Dublin, Moscow, Rio de Janeiro, and dozens of cities large and small in the United States. It was part of the travel routine, and I will miss it.
It was one of those weeks when you never catch up from spending a night on a trans-Atlantic red-eye, but the eating was not bad, thanks largely to the proliferation of varied casual options in Paris's second arrondissement, home of the Paris stock market and a large Asian population. The first night I wasn't feeling well so I had a large bowl of ramen at an authentic-seeming Japanese noodle house on the corner where half the staff didn't speak French or English, just Japanese. The service was fast, the broth was comfortingly salty, and the noodles were just right for a tired and hungry traveler.
The next day we want to Best Saveurs, one of dozens of casual places where you can get a fast, cheap (by Parisian standards) lunch to eat there or take back to the office (once a taboo in French companies, now becoming more and more common). If they have the hot couscous I usually have that, which is very good, but this time I had three salads - couscous with vegetables, carrots, and chick peas - and an apricot tart. For dinner I went to Exki, which is the closest thing to Pret a Manger I've found in Paris. Everything is laid out neatly for you to choose from and clearly labeled with ingredients and a convenient "vege" for vegetarian, and there's an emphasis on organic ingredients. The food itself - chervil and coriander soup, tortellini with artichoke hearts and tomato sauce, and real French whole-milk yogurt in a glass jar - was mediocre (except for the yogurt, of course), but the place gets a star for trying to provide a cheap, casual dinner for people who just want to eat and get to bed.
The last day after the client meeting we went to lunch at Little Georgette, a whimsical nouveau-French restaurant that specializes in small dishes. For example, I ordered the "Dolce Vita" and got a salad of mixed green vegetables, lasagna with diced vegetables and tomato sauce, a risotto with parmesan cheese, and a tomato-basil-mozzarella salad, all arranged on a large tray. The food was good, and the "Very good au chocolat" (that's really what it was called) was an excellent warm, meltingly soft chocolate cake. It was a fun way to relax with the team after a hectic few days.
But the high point of my trip was the day before the demo, when we walked out of the client's office after the final run-through at 6 pm, with no more work to do. I sat in the sun at a cafe with my friends Alex and Sigrid, who are leaving in a few days for Tokyo, and thought back to the day in October when they had just arrived in Paris and we sat in the sun on a grassy hill in the Buttes Chaumont and watched the dogs playing. Yes, we talked about work, but it still felt like time had stopped and we could sit there forever, and it was the most natural thing in the world.
Wednesday, April 16, 2008
The Romance of Air Travel
Panini Express - 1 star
Terminal 1, JFK
Terminal 1, JFK
Growing up in a suburb of New York, Manhattan was the ultimate symbol of the urban adult world. And John F. Kennedy Airport, or JFK, as the most important airport of the world's most important city, was the symbol of air travel and all the romance it promised.
Today, New York area air travel is pretty evenly split between JFK, LaGuardia, and Newark, and when I actually lived in New York as an adult I flew much more often out of LaGuardia, like most business people. But JFK is still the main international airport, its terminals surrounded by rows of 747s painted in the colors of every major airline in the world.
I rarely fly through JFK, because it's too far to drive (about 3-1/2 hours if traffic is OK) and it's too close to my home airport for a connection. My only other flight from JFK in the last seven years came in the summer of 2006, when I drove to Hartford, found out my flight to London was canceled, re-booked on Aer Lingus, and drove to JFK to catch my plane. But this time circumstances conspired to force me there. First, I decided to come home from Paris for the weekend - flight home on Friday, flight back on Monday night. Ordinarily I wouldn't voluntarily take two long flights in coach, one overnight, that I didn't need to, but I didn't want to spend two whole weeks away from my daughter. And second, this Thursday I have a meeting from 10 to 1 in Nanterre (outside Paris), but I need to be home on Friday, and the only flight back I could still catch on Thursday returns to JFK.
Air France is in the old Terminal 1, which is largely empty, with only a smattering of stores, a paucity of eating options, and almost no working power outlets - overall, a letdown compared to some of the gleaming commercial centers like the Munich or Amsterdam airports, or even compared to domestic hubs like the Northwest concourse in Detroit or the Delta concourse in Cincinnati. I ended up eating the vegetarian standard, a tomato-mozzarella-basil "panini" - a kind of sandwich I first ate in Paris at a place around the corner from the BN way back when. It was surprisingly good - decent fresh mozzarella, a bit of balsamic vinegar to give it flavor, and most importantly bread that was grilled to the point of being slightly blackened and crunchy on the outside. And with that I boarded the plane, settled in for a night of 3 hours of sleep, caught the RER from the airport to Paris, and showed up at the office at noon the next day.
Saturday, April 12, 2008
My coffee place
Café San Jose - 2 stars
Rue des Petits Champs, Paris 75002
Rue des Petits Champs, Paris 75002
I've already pointed out that my company's Paris office is just a block from the old Bibliothèque Nationale (National Library, known to the regulars as the BN) where I spent most of my days when I lived in Paris back in 1994. I just spent a week in the office, and although everything else has changed, my favorite coffee place hasn’t.
Café San Jose is not your typical Parisian café with little tables on the sidewalk, a bar with an assortment of drinks, and the black-and-white-clad waiters immortalized in Jean-Paul Sartre's Being and Nothingness, which I remember reading, largely at Au Bon Pain (in Cambridge), the summer before my senior year of college. It's a tiny place with a counter, a couple of stools, an espresso machine, and, around 1 pm, a crowd of people drinking coffee with tiny little squares of chocolate. When I arrived at the BN, my friends who already lived in Paris introduced me to the Café San Jose as the place to go - if you wanted something other than the coffee that came out of the machines in the library, which was so bad it appealed to that feeling that you were supposed to suffer during graduate school - and I introduced it to my friends who came later.
I was there to help teach a training program for our European employees, based in London, Paris, and Munich. From a quality-of-life standpoint, it was one of my worst trips ever - late nights at the office, missing the Liverpool-Arsenal game, eating the same box lunch from Casse Croute every day (it's the best lunch in a box I've ever had, but it got a little old), and not a single side trip to Berthillon, Mulot, Poilâne, or any of the other culinary landmarks of my Paris. But from another standpoint, it was a great experience to work closely with a small team of highly capable and intelligent people who all get along and have fun together. It also allowed me to do perhaps the two things I enjoy most of all in the business world: explain things and give advice. And when I needed a break, I would go to the Café San Jose with Eileen to gossip and complain.
There are few things more rewarding in the business world (or any world) than the feeling of being part of a community that you actually want to be part of, and I would rather have that than a good croissant au beurre. Of course, the croissants au beurre from the place on the corner were better than anything you can find in the United States.
Thursday, April 03, 2008
Passport Number 2,906
If this blog is about anything, it's about travel and nostalgia. So this week, as I sit at home, I'm going to go much, much further back.
This is my father's Korean passport, issued in 1953. It's passport number 2906, which, I believe, means that it is the two thousand, nine hundred and sixth passport issued by the
It's a truly remarkable story, much more so than anything I will ever be able to tell. Two years ago I recorded his recollections as we were driving across the country, and I've transcribed the recordings, but I haven't gotten around to writing them down in narrative format. But it includes dodging the conscription efforts of the North Korean Army, going months if not years during the war without word of his family, applying to a handful of American colleges picked more or less randomly out of Peterson's Guide, finding an American guarantor by pure chance through a family friend living in the Netherlands, getting into a one-year program at Wesleyan, and leaving on the aforementioned boat with neither the money nor any intention to return after that one year. When he finally arrived at Wesleyan it was mid-November; when he hadn't shown up for the beginning of the year the college had sent him a letter saying not to come, but he had never received it. It was many years before he would go back to
I think of my father sometimes as I jet around the world, occasionally even in business class, complaining about airport food. He still insists on flying coach, even though I always offer to upgrade him.
Wednesday, March 26, 2008
The Routine
The Last Resort - 0 stars
Hartford airport (BDL)
Waffle House - 2 stars
All over the South
Panera - 1 star
Your friendly local strip mall
Musashi - 0 stars
Detroit airport (DTW)
One week the JW Marriott in Copacabana, the next week (after a short break) ... the Comfort Inn in Birmingham, Alabama, after eating a disgusting piece of pizza (barely any tomato sauce, slightly sour-tasting cheese that had none of the properties of mozzarella) in the Hartford airport for dinner.
This blog is mainly about travel, and business travel in particular. In airports, you see happy couples, tired families with too much equipment, lost-looking kids on their first trips alone ... and then you see neatly dressed, single people with computer bags and expensive-looking carry-on suitcases, walking directly to wherever they are going, usually checking their Blackberries or looking for power outlets - that's us (or "that's we," which I believe is actually correct).
And the typical business trip is not to Rio, or Paris, or any of those fun places - it's to Birmingham, Alabama, and it goes something like this:
- 5 pm (Eastern): Arrive at airport. Go up and down escalator with 1-year-old daughter who just came home on a flight from visiting her cousins for a week. (OK, that's not typical.)
- 6.30: Aforementioned disgusting piece of pizza.
- 11 pm (Central): Arrive at Birmingham, by way of Charlotte. Take bus to rental car, which turns out to be a hulking Jeep Patriot. Drive 3 miles to Comfort Inn, where the bed is mushy and the heating/cooling system is too loud - but it could be a lot worse.
- 12 midnight: Check email.
- 12.30 am: Go to sleep.
- 8.30 am: Wake up and get ready for meeting. (Note the eight hours of sleep!)
- 9.30: Breakfast at Waffle House!!! (Grilled cheese instead of egg and cheese - because of something I read in Michael Pollan's book - and a double order of hash browns. Yummy.)
- 11.00: Pick up colleague at airport. Drive to prospective client's neighborhood, which is a sprawling mass of strip malls just like thousands of others all over the country. Eat lunch at Panera (tomato soup and Greek salad) because of the free wireless Internet access.
- 12.30: Arrive at prospect. Do meeting. Talk about company and product for 19,378th time.
- 4.30: Arrive back at Birmingham airport for a 5.05 flight.
- 8.30 pm (Eastern): Dinner at Musashi in the Detroit airport (cold, rock-solid vegetable sushi and a limp, greasy, characterless vegetarian egg roll - and a banana).
- 11.00: Arrive at Hartford airport and drive home. Check email. Play with dog.
Tuesday, March 25, 2008
Breaking News
Euromad discovers why croissants au beurre are so much better than croissants ordinaires (which are now, apparently, in a perversion of the French language, called croissants a la nature)! Click here for the shocking answer!
Saturday, March 15, 2008
Copacabana in the Rain
Fasano al Mare - 2 stars
Ipanema, Rio de Janeiro
Fagulha - 1 stars
Rua Santa Clara 18, Copacabana, Rio de Janeiro
In many ways, I am a very fortunate person. You know those articles about jet-setting executives who get to go to exotic places and stay in nice hotels? Well, that's me ... if only a tiny bit. At home I drive a 1999 Chevy Prizm, I wear the same suits I bought 11 years ago when I started my first job, and most of my trips are to places like Louisville, Birmingham (Alabama, not England), and Gainesville. But this week I got to come to Rio de Janeiro, the kind of city that many people dream about but few Americans ever get to visit.
I got to live a little bit of "the life:" I stayed in the J. W. Marriott hotel on Copacabana Beach, which is one of the most expensive hotels I've ever stayed in in my entire life (including McKinsey), the others being in London and Moscow. The first night, our host took us out to dinner in his BMW 540 - which would be unremarkable, except that it was the first time in my life that I rode in an armored vehicle with bulletproof glass. We went to Fasano al Mare, one of the best restaurants in Rio, and the most expensive restaurant I've eaten at since I went to Bouley back in 2004 (the lobster, for example, was about $100 US). Unfortunately, it was a restaurant that specializes in seafood, and I considered using the excuse that I didn't want to insult our host by not eating seafood, but in the end I had gnocchi with tomato sauce and tiny cubes of breaded and fried eggplant, which was pretty good (the eggplant was much better than it sounds) and was only $35 or so. I also had a decent tomato-basil-mozzarella salad, and an unexceptional lemon pie ($14). The prices, of course, are partly due to the collapse of the dollar, which now buys about 1.7 reais, or less than half what it used to.
Besides that, though, it was basically all work: 9 to 6 at the client's offices in Centro (downtown), a quick and mediocre dinner (pizza one night, a strange rectangular tomato-mozzarella crepe the next, and a grilled cheese sandwich in the airport the last), work in the hotel room until midnight, and then up at six the next day to work some more while looking out the window at the gorgeous, enormous, nearly-empty beach and the waves rolling in from the Atlantic. I even started drinking coffee again, not only because I needed it, but also because waiters kept bringing little cups of espresso into our conference room. Apparently it is impossible to have a meeting in Rio without coffee, and there was a camera in the room that they used to see when anyone might need one. (The whole executive floor is continuously surveyed by cameras, less for security than so the executives can be tracked down by their assistants easily.)
I had a list of exactly three things I wanted to do: (1) walk on the beach, (2) go to Corcovado or Sugarloaf (two famous hills around the city with great views), and (3) go to a soccer game at the Maracana - and I did exactly none of them, except a quick walk down to the water one night with my colleagues. There were not one but two soccer games at the Maracana on Wednesday night, one with Fluminese and one with Flamengo, and our hosts even found a set of VIP seats that we could have used, but I decided to work instead - one of those decisions that is easy to criticize, but meant the difference between 6 hours of sleep and 2 hours of sleep. I planned an extra day in Rio after our meetings, but it rained all day, and besides I had a conference call all afternoon.
The food overall was OK at best, due to a combination of not speaking the language and not eating animals. There are a bunch of kiosks right on the edge of the beach in Copacabana where you can get beer, snacks, or meals, but despite (or because of) the fantastic location the food seemed unremarkable. The highlight for vegetarians is probably the restaurants that sell food by weight, like Fagulha in Copacabana, where I had lunch the last day. There's a big buffet, and everything is the same price per kilogram, so you can pick whatever looks good. Unfortunately, most of what looks good has meat in it, and you have to do some guessing as well, but you can still make a decent meal out of black beans, rice, various potato dishes, and salads.
But I shouldn't complain, and I am glad I came, even though I'm about to get on a 9.5-hour flight in coach back to the U.S. All the people we met were incredibly friendly and welcoming, and did everything they could to make our stay enjoyable. I walked around downtown Rio and look out over the bay. I watched people playing beach soccer at night and making moves you rarely see in the U.S. I learned a tiny bit of Portuguese. And I drank a caipirinha (sugar cane liqueur, lime juice, and sugar - too sweet) at one of the shacks on the edge of the beach, even if it was in the rain.
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