Rich Mintz  

Matt Yglesias’ post “The Nordic Passion for Coffee” observes that the Nordic countries don’t just drink a lot of coffee — they drink more than their neighbors, more than anyone else in the world, by a statistically significant margin. He excerpts this map, which is striking:

I happened to read this while on an enforced coffee “fast” (during my long weekend in the country with a large group, where our sleep/wake schedule didn’t make it convenient to have coffee at the times and in the dosages I normally do). I really, really felt the lack. Consequently I am having a cup of strong coffee now that I’m home, at 11pm on a school night, despite knowing that it’ll put me to sleep late and mess me up in the morning. But it is delicious, especially with these cookies that my houseguest left me as a hostess, er, host gift. Thanks, houseguest!

WaterFire returns to Providence, Rhode Island this Friday evening with the first lighting of the season, and we’re taking a quick overnight trip to the Creative Capital to enjoy this incomparable nighttime festival event that we first experienced during last year’s National Arts Marketing Project annual meeting.

If you’re new to WaterFire, here’s what happens: after night falls, volunteers in small boats light and tend wood fires in 100 braziers placed in the middle of the three rivers that flow through downtown Providence. Music plays, and thousands of people from Providence and the surrounding area converge on the waterfront to stroll, eat street food, and enjoy the sights, sounds, and scents of a large and memorable public event. At our last visit, we were fortunate enough to be guests in a gondola, which floated past three dozen of the braziers, upriver and then back down again, amid sparks and smoke and autumn drizzle. But even from shore, WaterFire is a thoroughly impressive sensory experience.

I particularly like WaterFire because it’s emphatically not a commercial event; it’s a spontaneous gathering of people from across the community to participate in a cultural happening (with free admission, courtesy of commercial and institutional sponsors, of the City of Providence and the state of Rhode Island, and of the dozens of volunteers who tend the fires, staff the boats, and advise and assist attendees on land).

Friday’s lighting starts at 8:16pm (sunset) and the fires will be burning until midnight. Bring a jacket; the evening will be breezy. If you’re within travel distance of Providence, consider making the trip; and if you enjoy what you see, please make a contribution to WaterFire.

I know that’s a strong claim. But after watching The Room last night (in a group of film nerds who called my attention to every plot hole, continuity lapse, and character problem in the film’s 90 minutes, I’m not sure it isn’t justified. This movie is the biggest hodgepodge of bad acting, appalling directing, unbelievable dialogue, and implausible plot points I’ve ever experienced, despite the fact that it apparently cost $7 million to produce and promote — and yet it’s watchable and even endearing. After seeing it I understand the cult following, I understand why it has a professional following in Hollywood (and why Paul Rudd, when asked for comment by Entertainment Weekly, declined to “mock someone else’s stuff”).

Somehow I missed this film when it came out in L.A. (disclosure: I was really busy in 2003, running a money-losing small business), and missed it when it hit New York (disclosure: I was a partner in a startup at the time, and living in the office), and missed it last year when it started to go cult (disclosure: I work a lot, and don’t go to of movies). But I’ll be ever grateful to our friends for bringing it to my attention, and I’ll be at the next “participatory screening” (think Rocky Horror) in Brooklyn.

The EW story and the Wikipedia article are worth reading in full. The movie’s available from Netflix; if you’d like a YouTube clip or two to give you a sense of what you’re in for, start here and here.

Just back from a long country-house weekend in Dutchess County, about 90 minutes north of the city, with friends and family. Since I like reading these kinds of travelogues, I’ll subject you to mine, or at least an abbreviated version, complete with some photos of the high points, two of which were Pawling village, and the Stormville Flea Market. (I’ll cover our Sunday night movie, The Room, in another post.)

The village. We were staying just outside the village of Pawling, home of Norman Vincent Peale as well as a wartime cryptography school, more recently the home of McKinney & Doyle, the beloved bakery and highfalutin’ restaurant.

The earliest settlers came to Quaker Hill in the 1720s, and the area is still home to families of long standing, along with country-house professional people from the city and the odd plutocrat or two. Pawling village has the sheen of a place that has remained continuously prosperous, despite being a shade too far off the beaten track to attract tourist traffic in volume, and some new businesses have opened since last season. Here are a few photos to give you a sense of the village:

The Stormville Airport Flea Market. I can’t stomach Stormville — the biggest gathering of antique, junktique, junk, and funnel-cake vendors on a dusty plain I’ve ever experienced — more than about twice a year. But a couple times a year, it’s worth it. In my apartment in the city I have nifty midcentury side tables and a midcentury orange swivel desk chair that came from Stormville, and every time I go, I hope for another find.

I didn’t really score this year, although I did pick up this fascinating how-to crafts guide (and I assure you that the inside pages are just as creepy as the cover), sold to me by a very earnest woman:

The real winners were our comic-collector friends, who came along in search of comic books and were not disappointed:

Here are a few more shots I took:

The Washington Post’s Ellen McCarthy introduces us to the online dating ghostwriting industry, which, no, I wouldn’t have believed this existed either. But especially in this economy, where there’s a niche, there’s an unemployed opportunist (oops, sorry, “Virtual Dating Assistant”) to fill it. And so you get anecdotes like this:

Richard, a 39-year-old marketing executive who uses the service, would like to say, for the record: “It’s not like I really have a lot of problems dating people in the real world.” It’s just that he’s busy, splitting time among four cities, including Washington and Miami, and he figures it’s best to meet as many people as possible.

Online dating has worked for Richard, “but it’s all time-consuming,” so when he heard about Virtual Dating Assistants, it seemed like a convenient solution for an on-the-go guy. “Just from a cost-benefit analysis — me spending all this time on doing things that are purely almost secretarial doesn’t make any sense for me,” says Richard, who asked that his last name not be used because he doesn’t want colleagues or potential dates to know he uses the service.

And because he doesn’t want to advertise to the whole world what a douchebag he is. Seriously?! A “cost-benefit analysis”? There’s a reason why guys like these aren’t batting a thousand out on the market. Read the whole thing, then go take a shower.

So here I am blogging again, for the fourth time in one day. I guess I just decided that if I’m going to get into the rhythm, there’s no time like the present. Plus I now have this iPad, which makes it incrementally easier to just do it (cf. my post from earlier this evening). Plus I spent 7 hours on a train today, and there’s only so much email a guy can answer. So there you go. Hopefully I’ll be able to keep it up — if you comment and tweet you’ll give me the social feedback I need in order to feel obligated to keep it up.

I suppose I can blame Hagan Blount for this one, too.

Finding myself at home unexpectedly for dinner, approaching 9pm (at which point delivery starts to get complicated in this neighborhood), I remembered that I now live next door to Zaitzeff, the home of one of Manhattan’s best quasi-gourmet burgers and fries. I ate at Zaitzeff a few times shortly after they opened several years ago, back when I was in full startup-company mode and couldn’t really afford 15 bucks for a burger and fries. It still feels like a lot of money, but I remember the experience fondly, and so tonight I said, “What the hell?”, and I dug the menu out of the menu box and gave them a call.

They were backed up on deliveries, but they cheerfully accommodated a pickup right away, so I walked next door to pick up my greasy and aromatic brown paper bag and brought it home.

Here are the contents, unloaded onto a plate in my kitchen:

And here’s the same photo with something added that I really think it needed:

I got the 1/4-pound sirloin, well done, with cheddar, and an order of Idaho fries. The burger came with a generous hunk of iceberg and a slab of tomato and a mound of well-sauteed onions, on which was melted a lump of high-quality white cheddar. The burger itself was done to my taste, well-seasoned and flavorful. And the whole thing was served on a big sweet chewy Portuguese muffin. No complaints here.

The fries were hand-cut and well-done, fried in peanut oil (I’m guessing), streaked with dark brown and salted just right. The closest fries I can think of are those at Five Guys, but I always roll out of there feeling like I ate way too much; these fries were satisfying but not heavy, so maybe there’s a trick of some kind.

All in all, another satisfying fast-food meal, about a 15-second walk from the front door of my building — and more evidence that the living down here in the Financial District is better than you think it is.

A quick iPad followup — yes, the screen gets smeary. Get over yourself. Why do you think God gave you shirtsleeves? Also, go wash your hands — this isn’t a kindergarten.

I’m not the earliest of iPad adopters, but I turned out to be a pretty early one (basically what happened is that as soon as I touched one, I decided I wanted one, and as soon as I read the 3G reviews, I was sure). At this point I’ve had the thing about 2 weeks, maybe a bit more — not long enough that I’ve stopped worrying about denting or scratching it, but long enough that I’ll take it out on the subway platform without a second thought. It’s not fully integrated into my life, but I’m well on the road to that point, so i figure it’s time to take a minute or two and share some impressions of the thing.

1. Gosh, it’s pretty. A visual and tactile pleasure to hold and use. About every other time I take it out in public, someone wants to talk about it. Etc.

2. Touch-typing on it, as I’m doing now, has a grace, like playing a musical instrument. It has the same issues with accuracy as typing on the iPhone — but the spell-correct is pretty good (once you learn the quirks), and anyway, you’re typing at near-desktop speed, so it’s very different than typing on a phone. Drawbacks: some of the non-alphanumeric keys are oddly located; spell-correct seems to miss some obvious corrections; copy-editing and cut/paste are a pain in the ass; the case is so smooth that it’s hard to get purchase on your lap, especially if you’re wearing shiny businessman pants as I am today. For typing, you want the thing tilted up about 30 degrees, which the folding Apple case (which is weeks backordered) apparently achieves. You may be able to achieve something similar with a wedge of Styrofoam, or with Velcro, keying off this video. No joke, I’m going to attach some heavy-duty Velcro to the back of mine. It supports Bluetooth keyboards, which I do own, but I haven’t bothered, which is as good an indicator as any that the built-in data entry mechanism is pretty good.

3. It’s both smaller and larger than I expected (although by now I’m getting used to it). Smaller in square inches — it feels like the “right” size after having used it for a while, but before I touched one I anticipated something closer to 8 1/2 x 11. And larger in weight — it felt heavy at first, but I’m now accustomed to it and compensating.

4. It has very quickly become my favorite personal Internet consumption device in the home. It’s pleasant to hold, intuitive to use, very quick to respond, and much more comfortable than the iPhone to read long stretches of web copy on. When i want to look something up, if it’s handy, it’s what I reach for. Streaming video looks good. The web looks good. E-books look good.

5. I understand why the e-ink technology in the Kindle is an advance, understand why people say the shiny iPad screen gives them eyestrain… and I don’t care. Unlike the Kindle, which is the e-reading equivalent of the dot-matrix printer, the experience of long-form reading on the iPad is — well, it’s easy. It’s easy to get mentally lost in an e-book on this thing, just like in a real book. E-books look good, and PDF documents and other highly “composed” and visual reports (think-tank stuff, annual reports, etc.) are GORGEOUS. As a result, those mid-length documents — shorter than a book, but too long to toss onto the printer, which as a result you never bother with — have returned to my reading queue, and I’ve gotten in the habit of transferring PDFs onto the thing for leisure reading. (I use GoodReader, from the App Store.) It’s also very easy to jump from a book on post-colonial America to, say, the Wikipedia article on the Louisiana Purchase for deeper background, and i do so frequently.

6. The built-in utility apps are quite good. Safari on iPad is a pleasure. Your index finger feels like it owns the world. The Mail app feels like it was designed by someone who knew he/she would have to use it every day — it’s optimized for iPad in ingenious ways. The third-party apps are lagging, but the best of them are good already, and the rest are on their way, I’m sure. (I’m writing this on the WordPress iPad app, which I give a grade of “good,” although it has the same “oops, I lost your recent work” problem that it does on the iPhone.). Haven’t tested the Apple office apps (Pages, etc.) but I’ll get around to it. Oh, and there’s a genius ssh client available.

7. As a business tool, it fills a narrow niche, which happens to be one that helps me: in cramped or uncomfortable spaces (like this train seat I’m in now), or at home after dinner, when you just want to answer some email or review a spreadsheet or draw up a quick planning document, and the thought of dragging the MacBook out of your bag and powering it up makes you tired, and you aren’t in the mood for iPhone eyestrain, well, the iPad is there. It wakes up in half a second, the battery lasts forever, and it probably does most of what you need.

8. It just works — Wi-Fi, 3G, syncing — just like your iPhone. (Syncing via iTunes is clunky, but if you have an iPhone you’re already used to that.)

9. I thought the lack of multitasking would bother me more than it does. Turns out there are times when I only want to do one thing at a time, and if someone tweets about Rand Paul while I’m watching “Monarch of the Glen,” well, i guess I’ll just find out about it later.

So, all in all — if you’re thinking about it, do it. If you are the sort of person who can imagine a legitimate, non-gimmicky use for this thing, you can probably make it real… I did. More news as it develops.

In “Life in New York — Then and Now” (referenced by Urbanophile), John Podhoretz evocatively discusses how New York, and specifically the Upper West Side, has and has not changed over the past 40 years.

To those of us who came to live in the city in the last decade, it’s sometimes difficult to imagine the Upper West Side, and New York City generally, as Podhoretz (like Saul Bellow, and a parade of others) assures us it was: physically neglected and crumbling, the social fabric frayed, at times menacing to the point of anarchy. Neighborhoods that today are overrun with $900 strollers and yoga studios and some of the most expensive brownstone real estate in the city can be difficult to imagine otherwise. But it was not always this way, and the documentary evidence exists of how it used to be: in the Times, in contemporary news footage and in the photo archive of the Museum of the City of New York (seen in the current exhibit and in the “Lindsay Years” documentary recently shown on WNET), in the memories of three generations of people born between 1920 and 1980. All those people didn’t move to Westchester and Merrick (and, on the coast I grew up in, to Northridge and Anaheim and Walnut Creek) for nothing; they were searching for a place where they could be free of the weight of a place where (in their view) the social contract seemed to have broken down. I knew a family of Brooklyn refugees in the San Fernando Valley in my early childhood; they obviously longed for the sweet place they had known, but they longed for it with (as I inferred) the resolution of people who knew that, at least for now, it was gone.

Even I am old enough to have had experience of New York in its anarchic and menacing days, or at least the tail end of them, in the 1980s, when the chattering classes were unified in the sense that something had to change — that the old responses to the breakdown of the old ways weren’t going to work — but nobody was yet quite sure how to pull it off. When I first visited the city in 1982, the overwhelming impression was of a place where people had lost the daily experience of routine social order, though they never lost the hope of regaining it. A city where armed guards sit in the entranceways of college dormitories is a city that is gritting its teeth in the face of an onslaught it can’t quite marshal the resources to defeat, waiting for a savior to come along.

We all know what happened: the city bounced back, changed in some ways but not in others. Podhoretz seems pretty emphatic that all the changes are for the better; I’m not so sure. The corporatization and homogenization of the city have exacted their costs (most notably in pushing popular cultural activity out of the central core). But, re Podhoretz, what right have I to expect otherwise from someone who in childhood was serially mugged, grew up in a world where assault was routine, watched a generation of failed attempts to tame the chaos in his own neighborhood? If you’re the one being punched in the face and knocked to the ground, it’s hard to take the long view.