The Last Time

Qdoba - 1 star
PIT

Au Bon Pain - 1 star
PIT

Andale - 2 stars
SFO

French Meadow Cafe - 2 stars
MSP

This week I took my last business trip. Which was nice, because otherwise my last trip to my company's headquarters would have happened back in May, and I would not have realized it at the time.

As usual, I bought the cheapest ticket I could find, which involved taking the US Airways 6.45 am flight to Charlotte. But the night before I got an automated phone call telling me that flight had been cancelled, so I switched to the 6.15 flight to Pittsburgh - the one I took so many times back in 2003 and 2004 when traveling to Michigan for our first customer.

Although I've never been to Pittsburgh itself, I've been to the airport dozens of times, and I think it is actually quite underrated. It is reasonably compact and has enough power outlets, decent shopping (I once bought a pair of shoes at the Johnston & Murphy because I forgot to pack dress shoes for a meeting), and one of the better food courts around (including a Ben and Jerry's). For breakfast, I had a breakfast burrito of scrambled eggs, potatoes, cheese, "ranchera" (tomato) sauce, and salsa, which is one of my fake-Mexican favorites. Then I got a sandwich for the plane from Au Bon Pain, which has occupied a special place in my heart ever since college. Before cafés were commonplace in this country, there was a large Au Bon Pain right on Harvard Square, and in the summer before my senior year I read most of Being and Nothingness there (my senior thesis was about French intellectuals, including Jean-Paul Sartre, and the Algerian War). I've always thought their bread was pretty good, and the fact that you can order a sandwich with whatever you want is always welcome in an airport. I had Swiss cheese, cucumbers, tomato, red onions, and aioli on a baguette, and it tasted very good somewhere over Nebraska.

On the way home I ate at two of my favorite airport restaurants, Andalé in SFO (the best airport Mexican restaurant and the best airport breakfast I have ever had) and French Meadow in MSP (although this time I had a green tea vodka martini that can only be described as bad), which must be one of the nicest airports in the United States (in case you don't know, there is a second floor above the central shopping area with comfy chairs, electrical outlets, and peace and quiet). I've reviewed both of them before, so I won't repeat myself more than I already have.


Sitting on the two planes, I also tried to reflect on the last seven years, since we founded my company in California just one week before I moved to Massachusetts (what was I thinking?), and, indeed, the last eleven years, since I flew from California to New York to start my first job, as a McKinsey consultant, with a training session at Williams College. I tried to remember the person I used to be and, not surprisingly, failed. What are you supposed to feel when you quietly close the door on a chapter in your life? Of course things didn't work out exactly like I expected - actually, I had no expectations at the time - and I probably wasn't as good at the whole business thing as I thought I would be. But I enjoyed myself more than I expected, I learned a lot about myself, I worked with people I feel lucky to have known, and I'm extremely proud of everything we accomplished together. I couldn't have asked for anything more.

Right Back Where We Started from

China Best - 0 stars
883 Hamilton Ave., Menlo Park, CA

I'm taking one last trip to the office in California before starting law school in September. Since I'm a sucker for nostalgia, I took a drive down to Menlo Park to take a look at our first office, where we started the company back in September 2001.


Our first meeting there was on September 17, six days after you-know-what. We were renting a few cubicles from Autodaq, a company founded by three of Ken's business school friends. I don't think I had been back since we moved in with our VCs in the middle of 2002. We've moved twice since then, and our new offices are in a big glass building that used to house one of Silicon Valley's most prominent companies.

Back then we used to eat either at one of the local taquerias where most of the other customers were Mexicans (and the jukeboxes were full of Mexican music) or in a mini-strip mall off of Willow Ave. I was hoping to go to the Vietnamese place, but it's no longer there, so instead I went to the Chinese place. It was never very good, and if anything it got worse; the broccoli with garlic sauce tasted both undercooked and stale, and even the rice was weirdly oversized (long grain?) and dry.

I doubt I'll be going back to that particular strip mall. But it was one more place I wanted to say good bye to.

(The title of this post, of course, is a reference to the theme song of a TV show that I liked - at least for the first seasson.)

Down on the Farm

Riverland Farm - 2 stars
Sunderland, Massachusetts

I've been doing more cooking than usual, first because I'm not traveling much these days for child care reasons, and second because of our farm share. Each week we visit our farm to pick up our fresh, organic vegetables, some of which we have to pick ourselves out in the fields (brilliant idea, making your customers do your work for you). We usually split the share with my wife's parents, but with them out of town we've been eating it all ourselves, which takes a lot of dedication and planning.


This was this week's haul. Roughly from left, there are five ears of corn, two heads of lettuce, a small bag of cilantro, a large bag filled half-and-half with bok choy and an Asian green whose name I forget, two large zucchini, three cucumbers, a large bag of green, purple, and yellow beans, two eggplant, two onions, a small bag of sugar snap peas, a large bag of lemon basil (for pesto), a small bag of purple basil, and a large bag of kale, arugula, and mizuno.

So, the menus have gone something like this:

• Thursday dinner: corn, sugar snap peas with sesame oil, stir-fried beans (green, purple, yellow), rice, salad
• Friday lunch: pasta with pesto
• Friday dinner: fried rice with leftover vegetables, stir-fried bok choy, greens with Korean seasoning
• Saturday dinner: pasta with pesto, sautéed kale
• Sunday dinner: pasta with pesto, sautéed arugula, salad
• Monday dinner: ratatouille with eggplant, zucchini, and onions (and red peppers from the store); rice pilaf
• Tuesday dinner: quick cucumber salad, green beans with vinaigrette, and pizza from Bertucci's

The trick is to prepare vegetables simply, so you don't spend a lot of time chopping additional ingredients or making sauces. That way you taste the vegetable itself, not a lot of other stuff.

Community-supported agriculture is a growing movement across the country. The selection you get any particular week may not be exactly what you want (for example, there are no tomatoes up here in Massachusetts yet), and it can be a lot of work, but it's good for the environment and it gets you eating fruits and vegetables. To find a CSA near you, go to http://www.localharvest.org/csa/.

A Little Piece of Italy

Caffè dello Sport - 1 star
Hanover St., Boston

Yesterday we took Thomas to the North End in Boston to see some of the historic sites, like Old North Church (of "two if by sea" fame) and Paul Revere's house. The North End, of course, is Boston's Italian neighborhood, a maze of old red-brick buildings dotted with cafes, pastry shops, and gelaterie. Like many such neighborhoods across the country, it is rapidly becoming gentrified, and boasts more than its share of expensive, nouveau Italian restaurants.

Fortunately, though, Caffè dello Sport is as authentic Italian-American as they come ("sport" is an Italian word, by the way). It has an absolute minimum of decor, the tables covered with clear plastic tablecloths and the walls dotted with random pictures of obscure Italian soccer stars, which makes it the same as every small-town cafe in southern Italy. On the middle of a Sunday afternoon, the large-screen TV was playing not baseball nor NASCAR, but a group-stage soccer match between the under-19 teams of Italy and the Czech Republic (Italy won, 4-3). The panini were mediocre - ordinary fillings on a thick and uninteresting baguette - and they weren't toasted; only after ordering did I remember that panino is just the Italian word for sandwich, and only outside of Italy is "a panini" flatted and toasted in a George Foreman-like grill. But it was the first place in the U.S. I've seen where you can order a latte macchiato - milk stained (macchiato) with espresso - the breakfast drink that my friend Giulia taught me to order for breakfast back in 1996. And any place that can make a decent, fresh cannoli - filled with pastry cream on the spot - deserves a star, even if they weren't quite as good as the ones we get in Northampton.

Invest Your 401(k) Wisely

My company just switched to a new 401(k) administrator in the U.S., so a lot of people will be thinking about their portfolio allocations around now. I decided to put my advice on this blog (rather than the internal blog) because a lot of my friends tend to ask me for investment advice periodically.

A 401(k) is a tax-advantaged retirement savings account. Put another way, it is a government subsidy; the more money you put into your account, the bigger the subsidy. (As an aside, it is another one of those subsidies that helps the rich more than the poor. Rich people can afford to put the maximum into their accounts, and they have higher tax rates, both of which increase their subsidies; poor people can't save much for retirement, and they have lower tax rates, both of which decrease their subsidies. People who think government subsidies go only to the poor and minorities - generally Republicans - are dead wrong for hundreds of similar reasons.)

401(k) plans are taking over from traditional pension plans (where your retirement benefit is an annual percentage of your final salary, or something like that) for one simple reason: they are better for employers. They are cheaper (essentially free if the company doesn't provide a match, like mine) and less risky (because your costs are completely predictable). There is a strong case to be made that our country would be better off with the old pension system (see this Fresh Air episode), but that's what most of us are stuck with.

401(k)s place the responsibility on the employee to, first, make the choice to participate and, second, manage his or her money by deciding which mutual fund(s) to put that it in. On the first point, you should save absolutely as much as you possibly can. Remember, the more money you save, the more money the government is giving you for free. End of story.

On the second point, which is the one I usually get questions about, there are only two concepts you need to understand: indexing and asset allocation.

An index fund is designed to give you the same returns as some market index, most often the S&P 500, which follows some large segment of the market as a whole. In its opposite, an actively managed fund, a fund manager tries to guess at which stocks or other securities will perform better than the market as a whole and buy those. You should never invest in an actively managed fund.

There are mountains of evidence that index funds are better than actively managed funds. First, in any given year, a large majority of actively managed funds do worse than the appropriate indices. But then people think that they should find the fund managers who do well and entrust them with their money. But the fund managers who do well are just lucky - they are the equivalent of people throwing darts at the stock pages of the Wall Street Journal and buying the stocks they hit. Of course some of them will beat the index by luck, but you have no reason to believe they will beat it next time.

But, people say, what about fund XYZ that has beaten the index 10 years in a row? Well, out of 1,024 funds, each with a 50% chance of beating the index each year, 1 of them will beat it 10 years in a row. And there are many more than 1,024 funds out there, and the relevant sample is far larger than that, because fund companies tend to shut down the funds that don't do well in their initial years. In fact, statistical analysis demonstrates that virtually all apparent ability to beat the market can be written off as pure random variation.

Many people refuse to believe this. To them, stock picking should be like any other endeavor - some people are good and some are bad - so the whole argument makes no sense. But there is a reason why the statistics show what they do, and that is the theory of efficient markets. Stock picking is trading on information - you buy a stock because you have information that makes you think the price will go up. In an efficient market where information flows freely, however, all public information is already reflected in the stock price. That is, by the time you find out that some pharmaceutical company had its drug approved by the FDA, thousands of other people already know, and they have already bid the stock price up to fairly reflect the value of that approval. So when you buy the stock, you have no advantage, and it could go down just as easily as it could go up.

The stock market was not always efficient, which is why stock picking used to work for some people. And there are markets that are not efficient, like the market for timber forests. But all the markets that all the mutual funds in your 401(k) invest in are efficient, because there are thousands of investment banks and hedge funds with very large computers trading instantaneously whenever new information becomes available. There is a lot of math that makes the same argument, but this is why stock picking doesn't work. It just creates transaction costs (every time anyone buys or sells a stock he loses a small amount of money) and increases taxes, and you also have to pay the salary of the stock picker, which is why most mutual funds do worse than indices.

(Yes, there are still ways to beat indices. You can take on more risk, which is basically what hedge funds and investment banks did for the last 10 years, but that's not something you should do. You can also trade on insider information, because it isn't priced into the stock price yet, but that's illegal.)

So all your money should go into index funds. In fact, I think it's negligent that any company - including mine - even offers any other kind of fund in its 401(k) plan, but that's beyond my control.

Asset allocation is a more complex topic. Different asset classes (US stocks, international stocks, US corporate bonds, US Treasury bonds, commodities, etc.) have different risk/return profiles; in general, the higher the expected return, the higher the risk (the variance around that expected return). Unlike with indexing, there is no mathematical proof that one allocation is better than another. The important thing is to pick one and stick with it, because otherwise you could fall into the trap of buying more of your funds that are doing well (otherwise known as buying high) and selling your funds that are doing poorly (otherwise known as selling low). A common recommendation is 70% stocks and 30% bonds, or maybe 50% US stocks, 20% international stocks, and 30% bonds, and that's probably a good enough recommendation for these purposes. (Mine is 38% US stocks, 25% international stocks, 11% real estate investment trusts (a kind of stock fund), 13% traditional US bonds, and 13% US inflation-indexed bonds, not counting cash.) But just pick one and stick with it, meaning every six months or so you should trade a little bit of money between your funds to get back to your original allocation. (As things appreciate or depreciate at different rates, your allocation will change slightly.)

And finally, do not withdraw money from your 401(k) and pay a penalty if you can possibly avoid it. That's like giving your entire subsidy back to the government, and then giving them an additional 10% of your money on top.

For people at my company, the only funds you should even consider putting money in are:

• Spartan U.S. Equity Index Fund (tracks S&P 500 Index)
  
• Spartan Extended Market Index Fund (tracks Wilshire 4500, essentially all US stocks other than the S&P 500)
• Spartan International Index Fund (tracks MSCI EAFE Index, essentially most stocks outside North America)
• Fidelity U.S. Bond Index Fund (tracks Lehman Brothers Aggregate Bond Index)

The Fidelity Freedom funds are designed to change your asset allocation as you approach retirement, but you should avoid them, since they invest in actively managed funds (and they have the high expenses to prove it). Vanguard has a similar set of funds that invest in underlying index funds (duh!) ... but Fidelity, like any company, is looking out for the interests of its shareholders, not your interests. Which is a point you should remember for virtually the entire financial services industry.

What Am I Eating?

Hei La Moon - 1 star
88 Beach St., Boston

We went into Boston on Sunday to pick up my nephew Thomas, who is visiting for a few weeks. Thomas is a pretty adventurous eater, especially for a 14-year-old from Southern Virginia, so we went to Chinatown for dim sum (Sunday, remember?). We went to Hei La Moon, one of the more popular places in Boston, which is the classic Chinatown Sunday dim sum experience: huge (probably seating 300 people at once), packed with mainly Chinese families, devoid of decor, loud, and bustling.

Dim sum is a wonderful idea - people circulating through the room with rolling steam tables of all sorts of yummy stuff, so there's no deferral of gratification. And having lived in New York, Cambridge, and Berkeley, and having eaten dim sum dozens of times, you would think I would be an expert. But this was my first time since becoming a vegetarian, and the old strategy of just pointing at things and eating all of them didn't work so well. The strategy of asking what's in them doesn't work either, since most of the waiters barely spoke English.

But they had all the staples, and I found enough things to eat, although most of the dishes had some combination of pork, chicken, and shrimp. In the end I don't think there's such a wide quality range when it comes to dim sum. But someday someone will open a dim sum-style restaurant where they serve Spanish-style tapas, and the circulating waiters also have bottles of wine to pour by the glass, and and make a killing.

Telecom Hell

Most non-bloggers don't realize how much work it is. Every week or so you have to come up with something that you care about and that other people might find interesting enough to write about. When short of inspiration, though, you can always call a telecom company.

One of my projects for the summer is to rationalize my telecom situation. Right now I pay about $45/month for fixed line, $125/month for mobile (4 lines), $46/month for cable Internet, and $54/month for standard cable TV. So I'm switching to digital cable for $30/month for the first year, and I decided to try out DSL.

So I went to Verizon's web site and added DSL, which should have been $25/month without contract and with a free modem and router. Disturbingly, the confirmation had no indication of what I had actually bought. First they sent me an installation package without a modem, so I called (that in itself took about 5 phone calls - first I talked to tech support and they said I should go to a "Verizon store" and buy a modem) and they said they would ship me one. When I got the modem and set it up, I logged into my account and saw that I was signed up for a 1-year contract at $38/month. So I called billing, where a very helpful person said I had an $8/month discount, so my net price was $30/month, and I had a $0 early termination fee, so it was like having no contract, and I had a 30-day money back guarantee anyway. $30, $25, whatever. But when I asked about the impact on my fixed line discount, she said that she couldn't see my fixed line bill. (She also said that she had no way of seeing what offers were available on the web site - so not only are orders not correctly transferred from the web to the back office, but the back office has no idea what thoses orders might have been.) So Verizon, which is trying to tell all the analysts that it has these great synergies between all its products, doesn't even have call center people who can see information about multiple products at once.

But this comedy pales in comparison to Verizon's tech support. I got DSL working with my laptop plugged directly into the modem, but I wanted to put my wireless router in the middle. With Comcast, you just plug the router into the cable modem and everything works. With Verizon DSL, it doesn't. I did some searching on their support pages and found out that I needed to program the router to use PPPoE with a username and password. It still didn't work, so I decided to call tech support. After about 6 minutes navigating the phone tree, I got an error message saying the number I wanted was not in service. I called again and the same thing happened. This is the phone company, remember.

So I did some more searching online, and discovered I needed to put the modem into bridge mode. I could find the instructions for how to do this on the Westell 2200, but not on the 6100F, which is what I have. I found instructions for the 6100, but the first page of instructions had no Next button. Through more searching I found page 7 of the instructions, from which I was able to navigate to the page I wanted, but the page was out of date because Verizon had changed the user interface for the modem configuration (which I discovered after guessing the default password for the modem, since nowhere had they given it to me). I found other instructions in non-Verizon-affiliated forums, but they also did not account for the new UI. Finally through enough clicking around I discovered how to configure the modem properly and got it to work with the router.

So now it works. I am probably going to cancel on principle because of Verizon's inability to connect me to a tech support person (who probably would have been useless). If not, I need to decide if $16/month in savings are enough to compensate for the 2001-era speed of Verizon DSL (1.5Mb down, 400Kb up - I get over 15Mb down with Comcast).

Quitting

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

Even the Airport Food Is Better

Tomokazu - 2 stars
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.

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

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.

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.

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