Episode 25: The New Guy

We went to a Barak Obama rally a week ago. It was held in the Grand Hyatt on 42nd Street in Manhattan, and there were two parts. We were in the earlier 6:00 PM event, about 400 people drinking wine and nibbling noshes that were better than expected. The main attraction wasn't due until about 7:30, so we milled about and struck up conversations. It was telling that although everyone there had made substantial contributions to the Obama campaign, many were there to appraise, not anoint. With a more promising slate of Democratic candidates than we've seen in many years and months to go before a meaningful vote, we wanted to take his measure. It was a crowd of listeners, not necessarily convinced supporters. At one point, I found myself in line with a registered Republican who wanted to give an ear to a man who has always been against this horrendous war.
Ted Sorenson gave a long introduction, managing to accelerate from merely dutiful to the kind of stirring imagery we long ago heard from Jack Kennedy's best speechwriter. He was followed by Michelle Obama, who has a resume as impressive as her husband's and a ready wit refreshingly free of the bovine adoration that afflicted many political wives in the past. After pointing out that the Barack she knows can't make a bed or close the wrapper on a loaf of bread, she brought on her husband.
Probably we'd expected - hoped - for a stem-winder of a speech along the lines of his rousing showing at the last Democratic Convention. What we got was calm, measured remarks delivered with both gentle humor and a politician's caution. Perhaps the attendees at the second half of the rally - 2,000 younger urban professional types - got the barn-burner.
Barack doesn't quite have my vote yet, but I like what I've heard and what we know so far. At minimum, he seems to have the capacity to cross ethnic, racial, and social divides, as Bobby Kennedy once did, and he might be able to start refurbishing our national reputation faster simply because he's fresh.

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"I am not opposed to war. I'm opposed to dumb wars." - Barack Obama, 2002

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CLOTTED DICK
Our Vice-President went to the hospital after experiencing pain in his lower left leg, where a blood clot was discovered earlier in the month. But since the blockage was in a vein that normally carries blood to the human heart, Darth was sent home. No problem there.
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PRETENTIOUS TWADDLE CITATION
In a newspaper advertisement, Oxxford Clothes was delighted to announce its 2007 trunk show, whatever that is. It read, in part "With pride and confidence we request your inspection of our spring collections of suitings, jacketings, trousers, top coats, and dress shirtings."
That sent Geezer gaggings.
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CROOK OF THE MONTH CLUB
A burglar jimmied a lock in an apartment in Bettendorf, Iowa and made off with a jug containing about $400 in change. He left behind the Illinois Department of Corrections I.D. card he used to gain entry. Robert Fry had been released from prison in January.
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ELEANOR THE GARDENER
The distinguished wife of the only U.S. president elected to office four times had a rose named after her. Said Eleanor Roosevelt, "I was very flattered. But I was not pleased to read the description in the catalog: 'No good in a bed, but fine against a wall'."
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APPLE FIE (3)
I requested a replacement for my first "corrupted" iPod Shuffle, after struggling with it for five days. It arrived two weeks later. Maybe you can guess: It, too, was "corrupted". Before I simply tossed it and forgot about the whole thing, I was called by someone at Apple. He said they'd sent me the wrong Shuffle.
See, Apple puts a teeny tiny little engraving on each Shuffle. Mine read "GeezerPod". This one said "Please Don't Sing Along". New one arrived in two more weeks. I sent back the last one. Haven't even tried to program it. Might not.
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SISTERHOOD UBER ALLES. OR NOT.
A female judge in Germany has turned down a Muslim's woman's request for a quick divorce from the husband who beat her repeatedly. In her written opinion, the judge noted that the couple was from Morocco, where it is common for husbands to beat their wives, and that the practice was sanctioned by the Koran. That made it okay, in her mind.
There go da judge.

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24 HOURS IN MANHATTAN
Here's a scenario: Get down to Irving Place, an appealingly antique short street leading south from Gramercy Park. Pete's Tavern, one of the oldest in New York, is on one corner, but go another block to Casa Mono (52 Irving Place, 212-253-2773). This is Mario Batali's evocation of a Spanish tapas bar, which needs only a pall of cigarette smoke to be truly authentic. Most of the small plates are straightforward and very tasty replications of Spanish original recipes, using imported ingredients when necessary. Pimientos de Padron are on the card, for example, and they are only grown in northwestern Spain. Jalapeno-sized green peppers grilled simply in oil and sea salt, most are mild in flavor, but about one in ten is a spicy little firecracker. Chefs prepare everything behind the bar, just as in Madrid. Even the tile floor looks like the real thing, but it was left over by the previous tenant, a Moroccan eatery. Arrive at noon to avoid the crowds that pack the place tighter and tighter as the day wears on. Figure about $100 for two, all included.
For an apt cultural tie-in, head uptown after lunch to the Metropolitan Museum of Art (5th Ave. at 82nd St., 212-535-7710) where the featured temporary exhibition is Barcelona and Modernity: Gaudi to Dali (until June 3). If it's Friday or Saturday, linger long enough among the galleries and you can have drinks and bar snacks on the balcony overlooking the palatial Great Hall. There is live classical music to underscore the ambiance. You will feel terribly civilized. Two martinis cost $20. The hours are from 4:00 to 8:30.
If you have tickets to a Broadway show (or even if you don't), consider dinner at Lidia Bastianich's Becco (355 W. 46th St; 212-397-7597). This isn't the star PBS chef's only restaurant, and she is involved with her son Joseph and Mario Batali in several other enterprises. This one is understandably popular with theater-goers, given its $21.95 fixed-price dinner that includes antipasti or a Caesar salad followed by all-you-can-eat servings of three different pastas. In addition, there's a long list of Italian wines that cost only $25 per bottle. Many of them are barely a few dollars above retail, and some appear to be loss-leaders, such as the excellent 2004 Valpolicella Classico Brigaldara. Lidia's 1993 baby is one of the best deals in the Times Square district. With three courses and entrees like the veal chops, figure about $150 for two.
Then to bed.
In the morning, get to ABC Carpet (888 Broadway, 212-473-3000), Geezer's candidate for the most fun department store in town. Far from mere floor coverings, it is several floors of marvelously quirky, off-kilter antiques and accessories, many of them Asian and from the Indian sub-continent. Wandering through will occupy at least an hour, and there's a cafe on premises. When sated, walk down two blocks to Union Square, where a highly successful farmer's market has been operating (and expanding) for years. The awninged booths are occupied by farmers and artisanal food craftspeople from the region, mostly the Hudson Valley. Find plants and flowers, fragrant cheeses, organic vegetables, jams and preserves, nubby breads and baked goods, wines and ciders, free-range meats and poultry - a foodie's wet dream.
That all gets the juices going, and you're only one long block east of Mesa Grill (102 5th Ave., 212-807-7400). You should make a prior reservation, because even though it's a vast space with several rooms on two levels and has been around for over 16 years, it's nearly always full to the walls, especially at Saturday and Sunday brunch. This is where Bobby Flay introduced himself to the gastronomic world and swiftly established his reputation for clever takes on Southwestern food. Sip a cactus-pear margarita while steadily changing your mind over a menu that includes sixteen-spice chicken, shrimp tamales, trout tacos, and the signature shredded barbecued duck wrapped in a blue corn pancake. It's open daily from midday until late. Figure about $130 for two, all in.

Episode 24: Give It A Shot

Just for a minute, believers, put aside those deeply-held convictions you haven't really thought about too much. Attend to these excerpts from Letter to a Christian Nation by Sam Harris (Knopf):

"The idea that the Bible is a perfect guide to morality is simply astounding. God's counsel to parents is straightforward: whenever children get out of line, we should beat them with a rod. (Proverbs). If they are shameless enough to talk back to us, we should kill them (Exodus). If a man discovers on his wedding night that his bride is not a virgin, he must stone her to death on her father's doorstep (Deuteronomy). We must also stone people to death for heresy, adultery, homosexuality, working on the Sabbath, worshiping graven images, practicing sorcery."

"A three-day-old human embryo is a collection of 150 cells called a blastocyst. There are more than 100,000 cells in the brain of a fly. If you are concerned about suffering in this universe, killing a fly should present you with greater moral difficulty than killing a human blastocyst."

"While missionaries do many noble things at great risk to themselves, their dogmatism still spreads ignorance and death. Christian missionaries have been known to preach the sinfulness of condom use in villages where no other information about condoms is available. (Given the rampant AIDS epidemic) this kind of piety is genocidal."

"Norway, Iceland, Australia, Canada, Sweden, Switzerland, Belgium, Japan, The Netherlands, Denmark, and the United Kingdom are among the least religious societies on earth. They are also the healthiest, as indicated by life expectancy, adult literacy, per capita income, educational attainment, gender equality, homicide rate, and infant mortality. Conversely, the fifty nations now ranked lowest in terms of the United Nations' human development index are unwaveringly religious."
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Good Ol' Boys
*The salesman called the front desk in his Kentucky hotel and said "I've gotta leak in my sink." The guy says "Go ahead."

*An Arkansas state trooper pulled over a pickup truck and asks the driver "Got any ID?." The driver said "Bout what?"

*A new Alabama law declares that when a couple gets divorced, they're still brother and sister.

*How can you tell if a Texan is married? There's dried chewing tobacco on both sides of his pickup.

*What do a divorce in Alabama, a tornado in Kansas, and a hurricane in Florida have in common?
Somebody's fixin' to lose them a trailer.

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A Dose of History
Senators don't become President. The last one was Jack Kennedy, 47 years ago. The only other senator to move directly from the Hill into the Oval Office in the 20th Century was Warren Harding, the very model of corruption and incompetence until the current occupant, who broke the mold.
If history is predictive, then, the 2008 campaign will be between Giuliani or Romney and Richardson or Edwards (a former Senator).
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Pity the Poor Reactionaries
You have to feel for the drumbeaters of the far right, such champions of tolerance and understanding as Jerry Falwell of Liberty University, Paul Weyrich of the Free Congress Foundation, James C. Dobson of Focus on the Family, Grover Norquist of Americans for Tax Reform, Wayne LaPierre of the N.R.A., and free-form freedom fighter Gary Bauer.
See, all the leading Republican candidates seem to them to be suspiciously...moderate. Oh, sure, Giuliani, Romney, and McCain have been sucking up to these influentials every chance they get, but are they sincere? These are the issues that roil the closed-door discussions at the Council for National Policy, the highly secretive cabal to which these guys and like-minded fellow travelers
belong.
They're forced to consider candidates of the second and third tiers - that is, the ones who haven't a prayer of election but might satisfy the demands of more than one or two of the several factions of the ultraconservative wing of the Republican party. There's Senator Sam Moss - um - Brownback, who's against any new concept of morality advanced since the 11th Century, but who supports (gasp!) a temporary guest worker program. Mike Huckabee has impeccable evangelical Southern Baptist bona fides, but as governor of Arkansas he allowed (eek!) tax and spending increases. Governor Mark Sanford has impressed many members of the Council, but he hasn't made a move to run, perhaps because nobody outside South Carolina has ever heard of him.
Lordie, what's a right-wing nut job to do? It's enough to make a feller vote for some liberal like Elizabeth Dole.
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The Soup & Vodka Diet
Geezer wants to take this opportunity to announce that he has lost 26 pounds. Given that he recently entered his 73rd year and his metabolism slowed to a crawl a couple of decades ago, this was no small personal achievement. It was also the first time that his withdrawal from the very edge of morbid obesity was motivated by explicit threats to his health, not his ego. He is now prepared to reveal his secrets of weight loss to an anxious, avid public. They are:
1. Diet 2. Exercise.
He has abandoned, for all practical purposes, white food - sugar, bread, potatoes, pasta, rice.
This is easier than it used to be, given the availability of a widening variety of fairly persuasive fake foods - 35-calorie bread, 25-calorie mayo, 40-calorie hot dogs, 20-to- zero-calorie salad dressing, and 100-calorie soup. Keeping daily totals under 1200 calories is marginally less painful. It helps that he is no longer departing on week-long research trips that involve eating in two to three fancy restaurants a day.
The worst part is daily - yes, daily - visits to the health club. Thirty to 45 minutes every time, aerobics and weights, religiously. Geezer hates it, especially the locker room - all those hairy, flabby, sweaty, smelly guys. He is assured that the women's locker room doesn't resemble the grotto at the Playboy Mansion, either, but that is little compensation.
Never mind. Geezer is working on a four-pack. He can once again sneer silently at the cart in front of him in the checkout aisle that contains donuts, frozen crinkle fries, Cheese Doddles, Twinkies, and Ben & Jerry's Chocolate Mudslide.
His salvation comes with all that Progresso soup and his nightly vodka martini. There's hardly any sugar in vodka, did you know?
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Episode 23: Changing Direction

It isn't easy being red. While his support of The Surge is far more robust than that of other leading candidates, John McCain says Rumsfeld was the worst Defense Secretary in our history. In the 2000 campaign, he expressed disdain for Christian conservative leaders, but now he's snuggling up to Jerry Falwell. It probably doesn't matter. He's old.
When running for governor of Massachusetts, Mitt Romney professed to be all for Roe v. Wade and supportive of gay marriage. Now he's trying to take it back. It probably doesn't matter. He's a Mormon.
Conservatives distrust Rudy Giuliani. He's pro-choice, pro-gun control, pro-gay rights, and the first of his three marriages was to a cousin. Still, America's mayor seems to be for the war in Iraq. But it probably doesn't matter. He's bald.
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"The people of England have been led into a trap from which it will be hard to escape with dignity and honor. They have been tricked into it by a steady withholding of information. The Baghdad communiques are belated, insincere, incomplete. We are today not far from a disaster"
- T. E. Lawrence, quoted in the Times of London in 1920 (provided by my good bud Mike)

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Our eagles have been busy along the valley these last two weeks. Every afternoon near sunset, we see three or four of them flap mightily upriver, one after another, as if someone rang a dinner bell. Since our house sits on a bluff about 100 feet above the river, we actually look down on them as they fly by.
Our favorite, though, is the young eagle that has taken up an observation post at the top of a hemlock about 70 yards from our living room. At only two or three years, he hasn't achieved the full black-and-white pattern of his elders, but he's plenty regal enough, and he stays there for hours, to our delight.
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Our Allies At Play
A kite festival is a joyous event, colorful and spirit-lifting. They held one in Pakistan last week. Apparently such things are more competitive in the Punjab. Players use sharpened kite strings to do damage to competing kites. Two people had their throats fatally slit by such wire strings. Five more died to falling bullets from celebratory gunshots. Two more were electrocuted when trying to untangle kites from power cables. Two others fell to their deaths from roofs. Police arrested 700 people for firing guns or using the sharpened strings.
And a good time was had by all.
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Luddites On Parade
Julie Amero was a substitute teacher in Norwich, CT. She asked a colleague if she could use the booted classroom computer to e-mail her husband. But first, she visited the restroom. When she returned, the other teacher was gone and her students were watching a hairstyling Web site. Amero tried to close the site, but instead brought up clusters of pop-up ads for porn sites. They stayed on the rest of the day because:
She didn't know how to turn off the monitor.
She didn't know how to shut down the computer.
She didn't think to pull out the plug.
"I have absolutely no clue about computers," she said later.
Convicted of exposing her students to pornography, she faces a prison sentence of 40 years.
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Fie on Apple (Part Deux)
Curious: Geezer has been writing on this blog about injustice, war, torture, atheism, sleazy politicians, corporate depredations, and thuggish religionists for over two years. Yet what caused the greatest flurry of protests and responses? That I held Apple and its demi-god Jobs to be
no improvement over Windows and Gates. Interestingly, there were as many respondents as unhappy with their Apple encounters as those who were smugly supportive.
Today, over two weeks later than promised, my replacement Shuffle arrived.
By the way, all you computer literates are aware, are you not, that when you punch "REPLY" on my e-mails announcing new episodes of Geezer Wisdom your messages get sent to every address on my mailing list?
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Whatever It Takes
That was the title of a recent New Yorker article profiling Joel Surnow, the creator of the semi-hit TV serial, 24. That's the work of art that features graphic depictions of torture in more than one out of every two episodes and, in large part, tacitly endorses a crypto-fascist vision of patriotism. Surnow, a fast friend of fellow cigar-smoker Rush Limbaugh, happily describes himself as a "right-wing nut job". He is behind an alleged new comedy show on the Fox News network called "The Half Hour News Hour", meant to counter "The Daily Show" with John Stewart. A laugh riot, it isn't, unless you accept the deranged conservative view that Hillary, Teddy, and their fellow travelers control Washington and all media to the detriment of all good right-thinking Americans.
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Tilapia with Mango Salsa
With every fragile hint of Spring - peeks of emerging crocuses, wisps of fragrant breezes - Geezer summons images of tropical fruits and Southern swimmers. Braised meats and beef stews are so January. He cribbed this recipe, with minor alterations, from the USA Today Weekend Magazine. It's low-calorie and takes about 45 minutes from start to table. Serves 4.

FOR THE SALSA:
1 ripe mango, peeled, seeded, and diced
1 small red onion, minced
1 ripe avocado, peeled, pitted, and diced
3 plum tomatoes, peeled, seeded, and chopped
Zest of 1 lime
1 jalapeno, seeded and minced
1 tablespoon fresh ginger root, minced
One-quarter cup fresh cilantro, chopped
1 teaspoon salt

FOR THE FISH:
2 tablespoons olive oil
One-and-a-half tablespoons orange zest
One-quarter cup orange juice
Salt and pepper to taste
Crushed red pepper flakes to taste
4 4 to 6-ounce tilapia fillets

Preheat oven to 400 degrees.
Combine all salsa ingredients in a bowl. Stir gently to blend and set aside.
In a shallow baking dish large enough to hold the fillets in a single layer, combine the olive oil, orange zest, orange juice, salt, pepper, and red pepper flakes.
Rinse the fillets and pat dry. Place them in the baking dish and turn several times to coat. Bake for 10 minutes in the preheated oven until the fish can be flaked with a fork.
Place the fillets on a platter and spoon the salsa over. Serve.