Yeah, I know what they meant (after clicking through to the story), but doesn’t it strike you odd, too?

From the start, I was an XM loyalist, and not just because I knew several people who worked at their headquarters in DC (although that was part of it — and I loved the company’s roots in the District itself, where they outfitted studios in a then-ratty neighborhood off New York Avenue NE before it was obvious to everyone else that the gentrification of that part of DC would actually work). XM was the purist’s choice; in their founding narrative, which I’m sure was more than a little true, they amassed a stupefying collection of recordings, hired the world’s best music curators and on-air talent, and set out to make something worth our loyalty, in response to the appalling field of steaming manure that commercial radio had become in the ClearChannel era. Sirius, by way of contrast, always felt like a naked money play.

So XM raised a stunning amount of money (there were satellites involved, after all — and if I recall correctly, one of the early ones went off course toward Mars or fell into the sea or something, and they had to build a new one — I’m sure it’s on the Internet, you can look it up), and over the next several years, they stumbled in the direction of profitability without ever quite losing their soul. I remained a subscriber for 8 years (!), upgrading my radio once or twice. I’m no music snob — I’m not even that much of a connoisseur — but there’s music I just plain like that you can’t hear on commercial radio and that’s too much work to steal off the Internet or rip from CDs. And besides, part of the point of radio has always been that an intelligent editor programs it for you, at least in theory, so that you can learn about things you’ll like but wouldn’t have found otherwise. Services like Pandora achieve a similar aim in a different way, but I find they require too much thinking to make me happy.

With XM, I was able to indulge my love of legitimate bluegrass, and dance and electronica, and even (to my secret shame) kickass Nashville country music. (Anyone who doesn’t like Kenny Chesney after listening to this or this, or Tim McGraw after this, or Trisha Yearwood after this, needs their head examined.) I bought multiple boomboxes and accessories so I could listen in the car and at home and especially in my bookstore (Peachtree Highway Books, in Atlanta’s Candler Park, 2002-2004, R.I.P.), where I spent most of my waking hours for two years. (Yes, XM, I was an occasional terms-of-service violator, as were many, many other intown Atlanta small businesses in those exciting entrepreneurial years.)

When I moved briefly to Little Rock in 2003-4, I discovered other XM loyalists among my friends. So apparently it wasn’t just me! We traded tips and occasionally even shared equipment. XM kept me company on those long, long drives from Atlanta to Little Rock (usually with an overnight in Tupelo). And in 2005-6, as friends and I founded BusyTonight in New York and tried hard to make a go of our technology business, XM was one of the things that kept me sane during that turbulent period.

I ended up canceling my XM for a combination of cost reasons and lack of use — for a period of several months, I just wasn’t home much, in that way you can get in a city like New York before you get your grownup footing. But now I’m feeling the hankering. Among other things, I feel the lack of editorially programmed bluegrass in my life, and the podcasts I listen to aren’t doing it for me. So I think I’m going to resubscribe. I just passed four hours on JetBlue in the past 24 hours with satellite radio playing in my ears continuously — and I like it. I was worried that the Sirius/XM merger would wreck everything, but most of my old favorite channels are still there, so it’s time to give it another try.

Paul Moves Out

This one is the story of a young graphic designer from Montreal in the early 1980s, a time of promise and hope (remember the early 1980s, when I was only a few years younger than Paul) — going to school, first love, first apartment. It’s more than a little arch (despite the deceptively simple happy-face panels), encompassing Adult Themes (or at least Young Adult Themes) as well as lots of detail-filled daily life in Montreal, a city I’ve visited half a dozen times. (There were a few locations in this story that even I recognized.) In many ways it reminds me of Alison Bechdel’s Fun Home: A Family Tragicomic, but with a measure of darkness leached out of it.

I’ve mostly avoided graphic novels in the past because they’ve typically either seemed intolerably preachy or schmaltzy (remember Maus?) or required a concordance to keep the backstory straight (remember, you know, anything ever published with a superhero or an orc in it?). The Boon Companion’s been pushing me to read The Sandman for about three years, and it’s sitting right here behind me. Maybe if I start with something gentle and visually rich like this, I can graduate to the harder stuff.

This, and a lot more like it, is published by Montreal-based Drawn & Quarterly Books.

There’s a piece of the project that isn’t about the World Trade tower reconstruction, isn’t about the memorial, that’s much more important than these to those of us who live down here. And that’s the Fulton Street Transit Center construction, which is just over halfway through its nine-year construction. It got a kick in the pants from the WTC project, and a $424-million-dollar jolt of energy from the stimulus, but we needed it in any case.

Being built mostly by Skanska USA, the Swedish construction behemoth you’ve never heard of but that dominates civil engineering projects here in New York, the project will link 13 underground train lines that currently pass through about six unconnected station complexes, serving hundreds of thousands of people a day. These train lines currently run through infrastructure that’s as old as the subway system itself, and they all have to continue running throughout the duration of the project, so this constitutes a massive project from the standpoint of both capital investment and logistics.

We see the logistics everywhere in Lower Manhattan, where we’re constantly detouring around construction equipment, Skanska employees, and Jersey barriers on the sidewalk and in the street. Fulton Street has been torn up, for this and other projects, the entire time I’ve been living in New York. (DeLury Park opens next month!) But the project is sorely needed, and those of us living and working down here are trying to be patient. When it’s done, we’ll have a shiny new station and vastly improved transit usability down here in Manhattan’s original dense urban neighborhood.

No, no, kidding, kidding! Class notes may be the raison d’etre of an alumni magazine, but I do flip through every issue of Harvard Magazine, and I usually end up looking through some of the features. Unlike your typical alumni-office house organ, HM is editorially independent, and the editorial staff put out a thoughtful product, which reads a little like The Atlantic with a bit less politics and foreign affairs and a bit more science.

This month the editors graced us with something exceptional: “Dropouts,” a feature in which they tracked down three people who dropped out of the class of 1969, at a turbulent time and each for his or her own reasons, and reported on their lives. It’s not entirely surprising that people who had the means and the mojo to make their way to Harvard managed to build thoughtful and interesting lives despite not staying around for the degree — one of the things that struck me when I was there was that it seemed a lot harder to get into the place than to get through it. But it’s still interesting to read about how they did it, each in his or her own way.

As someone who’s had a career path that is in many ways nontraditional, who walks a narrow line between careerism and self-directedness, and who is periodically saddled with doubts originating on both sides of the line — would I benefit, on balance, if I were more conventionally career-oriented? Should I chuck it all and go move to [place of the moment]? — I find stories like these reassuring. These people stepped off the straight-and-narrow, but still wound up okay. They still have the same kinds of doubts that I have — which is part of why the stories are reassuring. They wonder about how things would have been different if they’d made different choices — as I do. And yet they’re content in their uncertainty, knowing that the lives they ended up with are blessed with good fortune and love and self-actualization and other things worth having.

An impossibly tall, grinning, heron-like woman clothed in a matte black trapezoid shimmered in the light of the sloppy sun and waved from behind a barricade. My shirt smelled like ramen seasoning powder in the humid wind. She was standing in front of one of those walls with patterned logos on it that awful people pose before to be photographed at momentous occasions like the launching of a handbag line. I remembered last summer, when L___ told me about his friend’s fundraiser for “nightlife preservation” in New York—is there any way to place something like that in more than one set of quotation marks? I imagine there were a lot of red carpet logo walls there. I thought of this now and closed my eyes and faced the gut-punching sun and thought about how it’s supposed to burn out in a trillion years or whatever, and how maybe that could come a little sooner and it wouldn’t be so bad.

I was laughing out loud at “heron-like,” coughing at “trapezoid,” and steeling myself against diarrhea by the end of that sentence. Imagine fifty paragraphs of this and you start to get the idea. Whoever this guy is, he’s got a writing career ahead of him.

Like everyone, I’ve watched a few minutes of Jersey Shore here and there to see what all the fuss is about, and I don’t really care for it, although the people who are offended by the whole thing are missing the mark. If you grow up the daughter of an auto salvage dealer, and someone wants to pay you $100,000 a year and put you on TV and get you talked about on the Internet, well, why not? These kids are harmless, and for the most part they seem to mean well. Sure, Mike Sorrentino has a somewhat higher opinion of himself and the options facing him in the future than “the Situation” warrants, but that’s not a crime, and if he actually is able to hold a career together for a while, it wouldn’t be the first time that sheer force of will was the deciding factor in someone’s American media success.

All that aside, it was kind of a relief to read in this surprisingly engaging report on the Jersey Shore contract talks that Sally Ann Salsano, the show’s creator, has no illusions about the longevity of these kids’ fame, and does her best to keep them focused so that when the opportunities dry up, some of their savings will still be left.

Well, here’s a fun fact: the baseball game near the end of the movie was filmed in Encino Park, across from my elementary school — on the very same baseball diamond where we once played a “students vs. teachers” softball game when I was in the sixth grade — which was, incidentally, right about the same time the movie was made. In fact, if you squint, in one scene you can see my school across the street.

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Also filmed in and around Encino Park: parts of Where Have All the People Gone (1974), an unjustly forgotten low-rent sci-fi flick.

Incidentally, while Googling for that, I found this gem (click for more), courtesy of Encino realtors Marsia and Eugene Powers:

The last meaty novel I read, back in the spring, was Olivia Manning’s Fortunes of War, really six novels, comprising her Balkan Trilogy and her Levant Trilogy. Spanning the years from just before the Second World War through roughly the end of it, these books are the thinly fictionalized account of what she and her husband lived through as British citizens in Romania, Athens, and Egypt as the war coursed through the region. But the war came to an end, and so did the books, and I went back to my regular diet.

I tried a couple of novels in the intervening months, but nothing seemed to stick.

But last week in Providence, at Myopic Books in Wayland Square — along with a biography of Alexander the Great and a book on Southern culture — I picked up a copy of Martin Amis’s London Fields, which I’ve been meaning to read for the better part of a decade. I started it and quickly got drawn in, and am finding myself carving out a little extra reading time every day. Now I’m 200 pages in, and well immersed.

The experience of a long-form novel is something you don’t get on the Internet (although, of course, you do get other things from the Internet), and it’s only in the most immersive nonfiction (like Piers Brendon’s The Decline and Fall of the British Empire, which I loved) that you get anything that approaches it. You build around you a personal perspective on the venues and trajectories in the novel, come to inhabit the characters’ motivations and to see them from all sides, to anticipate and fear their interactions. You live for a time in someone else’s world. And if (as I did with Manning’s six novels) you come to be comfortable there, it’s a moment of great sadness when you come to the end, especially if you’re reading a dead author who’s not going to be producing any more.

Until I finish, I won’t say any more about London Fields itself, except to say that it takes place in London and it’s more substantive than I expected from the playful Amis (son of Kingsley Amis, whom I can’t endure).

As a devotee of The Big Bang Theory, Matthew was curious about the Cheesecake Factory. As someone who’s game for anything, I agreed, and (bracing ourselves for the ridicule of our mutual friends, which did indeed forthwith rain down upon us), we met in front of the Prudential Center branch of America’s favorite sitdown gorgefest about 8:30 the other night.

The last time I set foot in a Cheesecake Factory was about 7 years ago for lunch at the Sherman Oaks Galleria, and the last time I ate in one for dinner was, what, 20 years ago? I hail from that suburban-escapee American social stratum in which the people over 60 (and a few of the younger set who never quite grew up and broke away) enjoy the Factory non-ironically, and the people under 60 sneer at it ceaselessly and set foot in it only when invited by an elderly relative. But I might have to change my tune.

Commercialized? Sure. My cocktail was watery. The menu was too long, covered in advertising, and a bit pretentious for what they’re serving (which you might call “large-portioned high-middlebrow American festival cuisine”). But I’m afraid that with those, I’ve now exhausted my complaints.

I ordered corn fritters, and a chicken cutlet dish with a fake Italian name that came with a football of mashed potatoes and a garden’s worth of asparagus. Matthew had the hibachi steak — which came with a like portion of potatoes — and a ten-pound vegtable salad. And I must say that everything was delicious. The portions were gargantuan, with enough chicken and potatoes on my plate to feed three hungry adults. The corn fritters were absolutely perfectly done, light and fluffy — the sort of dish I’d try and fail to duplicate at home. The chicken cutlets were pan-fried light and floated on an unimpressive but inoffensive sauce. In fact, there was nothing served to either of us that I wouldn’t consider ordering again, which is actually pretty rare when you think about it. In fact, typing this right now, I’m getting hungry.

Incidentally, we skipped the cheesecake, having each consumed about 2,000 calories by the time the dessert menus came. So I guess I’ll have to go back.

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I don’t know why I shouldn’t have days like this — and weather like today’s, nasty and oppressive and miserable, is the perfect day to stay indoors in the A/C and have one — but I feel vaguely guilty about it, as though there’s something More Important I should be doing. But there isn’t; it’s Sunday, so why not? Besides, this is life, as much as the stuff we do weekdays from 9 to 6 is. Right?

Bonus photos: current game of Civ IV. I’m playing green.

I’ve enjoyed every published word of Goodman’s, from her stories in the New Yorker to the most recent Intuition — she is one on that short list of authors whose books I’ll order in hardcover the moment I hear about them. If I had to pick one novel to take to a desert island, it might well be Goodman’s Paradise Park, the raucously funny yet serious and thoughtful story of a young woman hungry for spiritual meaning. I liked that one so much I gave it as a gift to a dozen people that year. Aside from the stories themselves, I always learn about something new from Allegra’s books — about the Jewish communities in Hawaii and Brooklyn and the Catskills and Miami, for example. (This is something Goodman has in common with Philip Roth, an author you wouldn’t otherwise associate her with — I learned more about the glove industry in Newark, New Jersey from reading Roth than probably everyone who will ever read this blog post put together has ever known about it.) So go buy her new book right now!

I’m not actually of the mind that Target is the beginning of the end — I’m a Target shopper when not wearing my New Yorker hat, after all, and I’ve even been known to stock up at the big spacious store in Jersey City — but there’s definitely been plenty of carping this week among trendy big-box haters. And if you’re going to put a Target in New York City, isn’t there a place more convenient than 116th and the FDR, four l-o-o-ong blocks from the 6 train?

It got a six-hour rising, and consequently is soft and crumby despite being heavier on the whole wheat (proportions roughly 2 cups King Arthur whole wheat flour, 1/2 cup cornmeal, 1/2 cup toasted buckwheat groats [kasha], 3 cups King Arthur white bread flour). I wasn’t sure what the kasha would do — in the dough, it was a little lumpy, and I was afraid it would interfere with the rise — but it’s fine; it gives the bread a nutty overtone without hurting it at all.

The Boon Companion (who is the one who deserves the credit for “groaty to the max”) said “this bread tastes really… er… healthy… and that’s sort of a compliment” — but I’m happy with it. And if I do this 50 more weeks in a row, I’ll be a master of flavors and textures.

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This comment made me laugh: “I have often said that if we are what we eat, then I may very well be 70% cheese dip.”

Watch and enjoy.

“In Queso Fever: A Movie About Cheese Dip” from Nick Rogers on Vimeo.

Sensationalistic, of course. If you actually read the story, what they blame is radio, which is the opposite of social media.

Other comments:

(1) They use the orderly crowd at the Old 97s concert on July 4th weekend as evidence that the new crowd control measures are working. Hello — the Old 97s were a college band, what, 17 years ago? (Evidence: I own their albums. And paid money for them. On physical media. And listen to them on my old-fashioned crank-activated gramophone.) If there is a riot at an Old 97s concert, something has gone Horribly Wrong.

(2) What is a “Canadian rapper”? (Sorry, couldn’t resist.)

So I walked down a short corridor filled with Long Islanders and their Long Island ways, followed a cryptic sign reading “C-E Downtown Street” up an unpromising-looking back stairway, and there I was standing in front of a subway turnstile as the downtown-bound E pulled in. What luck! Not only that, I’m at the front of the train, at the closest exit to my house.

I’m guessing I was on some mid-level north-south cross-corridor on the Eighth Avenue side, somewhere near the 31st Street corner. But God knows I’ll never find it again. Maybe next time, it won’t even be there anymore.

Aside from being the birthplace of (allegedly) the Frisbee, and of Subway, and a major brassiere manufacturing hub, I learned nothing much about the industrial history of Bridgeport from Wikipedia, except that there was a lot of it for a long time and now there isn’t so much. Nothing mentioned about a shipyard. So presumably once upon a time, maybe even 15 or 20 years ago, there was just a lot of supply and trade shipping going on along that west channel (which appears to be the mouth of the Pequonnock River, although it’s hard to be sure).

But there isn’t now. So what gives? That elevated highway must have cost a fortune, and doesn’t look that old, so there must have been a reason…

Update: It’s not old; the project didn’t even start until 1996. Here’s lots of detail from Construction Equipment Guide (yes, that’s a thing).

This game, which I played as Gandhi (whose color on the board is that lilac purple) was by far the longest, most involved, and most interesting game I’ve played so far. I did win a time victory (when the clock ran out, I was at around 3500 points, more than 1000 ahead of my next rival, and almost triple the score of my sworn enemy Montezuma. Great game, with several active civilizations and a dozen zones of triple or quadruple cultural influence.

I concentrated this time first on territorial advance and consolidation, second on cultural dominance, and only after that on research and on militarization, which may explain why I ended up in a hundred-year war of attrition with Montezuma. It didn’t affect my lead, but it sure did consume a lot of resources. Lesson learned: arm earlier, arm everywhere, and think carefully about how remote colonies will be supplied and protected.

Speaking of which, it was the first game in which I ended up with three or four completely separate and significant areas of influence, including most of the northern icecap, due to two things: an early bid to range as far as possible and plant colonies early, as soon as I got oceangoing transport; and the success of my long campaign against Montezuma (who, it must be said, declared war on me and not the other way around), who lost two large cities on his home continent of Montezumaland, and would have lost more if the clock hadn’t run out. Montezuma harried my polar cities, but only took two of the remotest ones (razing one and keeping the other); I’m not sure why, but I’m assuming he was just overextended.

It was my first game with such a heavy sea component, and because the icecaps effectively divided the world into a western sea and an eastern sea (with my continent at the middle, of course), I had to run two completely separate sea supply and defense operations, which I didn’t get figured out for a while. That cost me. In the early days, I depended on an alliance with Mao for an outlet to the eastern sea, and after he closed his borders I briefly had to go to war with him (with the help of Peter, who took Chengdu and opened the sea lanes again), but we made peace right after that. I tend to play the way I live, which is to say relatively amicably with almost everyone — that may explain why at the end of the game, despite my victory, I was rated with the strategic prowess of Ethelred the Unready (worst of all save Dan Quayle), but I think it makes the game interesting.

To my amazement, I held Darjeeling throughout the hundred years’ war, despite light defenses, a century of bombardment, and a land border with Montezuma (at a city he’d taken from me). This was for the same reason that it had originally been hard to settle: the city itself was cut off by a mountain from the adjacent lands, so it would have had to have been attacked by sea, and he must have not had marines or the capacity to use them. (See the bottom photo below.)

Here are a couple of photos. Click through to see larger images, or to see the whole set, which is also here.

I also marvel at the Silver Line, which seems to be some sort of magical underground BRT that whisks people from the airport into the CBD. I know it isn’t fair to expect New York to be the best at everything, but jeez, we already have the infrastructure — would it have been that hard to run a train from Penn Station right into JFK? (No, Jamaica doesn’t count. I put up with it, have even learned to like it, but it’s not the same.)

And, on a more mundane note, the trolley buses with the overhead wires are still pulling into the underground bays at Harvard Square station that were (re-)built almost 30 years ago, still tying the near northern and near western suburbs right into the central city’s transit network more tightly than any diesel bus ever could.

In New York, we have our own innovations on their way — BRT coming to my beloved M15 on 1st and 2nd Avenues next year, the 34th Street transit mall, the very successful Broadway road diet at Madison and Herald and Times Squares — but I’m still always impressed with Boston, which seems to pack an incredible amount of livability into a relatively small number of square miles.

I’ve also taken notice of one particular voice at Newark Penn Station (male, with obvious Philadelphia-area origins) and one at Philadelphia. These are all live people, calling train arrivals and departures in real time, and let’s hope they’re paid well and have good union job security, as they’re as much part of the journey as the Amtrak logo or the hot underground platform.

But what of Boston, where (unless I am grievously mistaken) trains are being called in South Station by a synthesized voice, a highly advanced robot with almost-but-not-quite-human cadence and a credible-but-not-perfect American accent? This can’t be good for the future of humanity, can it?

On that note, iOS just spell-corrected “humanity” (or a close approximation thereof) to “inanity.”. Oh, the inanity!

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It would be a very rare occasion when someone confesses to putting on weight, but we’ve got spies all over the building. We don’t refer to it as putting on weight; we just say someone has “changed.”

Yeesh! “Spies”?

In both cases, he found for the plaintiffs, and in what language! The decisions, with Chris Geidner’s commentary, are here.

I just finished reading Gill, and I can’t remember being so buoyed by a federal court decision since Lawrence v. Texas.. The defendants’ arguments were absolutely demolished; they were pulverized, in language about as blunt and absolute as I can ever remember reading in a court decision (perhaps save the Orly Taitz ruling). Judge Tauro went through every asserted justification for the law (and some that were not asserted) and just knocked them down, concluding that the only possible motivation for the law was “animus” (well, duh — as he quoted, the animus was on display right there on the floor of the House), and that in such a case, the law runs directly counter to elementary Constitutional protections.

This is all just common sense to gay people, but to hear it bluntly and matter-of-factly affirmed by a federal judge, in the impersonal language of a court opinion, is thrilling. Read the decision. It’ll make your day!

Place about a tablespoon of yeast (about 1/3 of an envelope) in a big heavy bowl. Add about a cup of warm water (not too hot, just warmish), a spoonful or two of honey or sugar, and a teaspoon of salt. (You probably want to add more salt than you think you do.) Maybe a splash of olive oil if you feel like it. Stir and wait a few minutes.

Pour in about a cup of flour and half a cup of cornmeal. You can use all white flour, or half whole wheat flour if you like. If you want to add any herbs, like parsley or rosemary or chervil, or pepper or other spices, do it now. Stir to combine.

Add 1 1/2 to 2 cups of additional flour or so, in 5 or 6 portions, stirring to combine after each portion. When the dough gets too massy to stir, start mixing with your hands. When it starts to form a ball, start kneading in the bowl. (“Kneading” means: fold over in half, press hard with the flat of your hand, rotate 90 degrees, repeat.) The dough should clean most of the loose flour and bits off the edge of the bowl as you work. Try to add as little flour as you can, so that the dough stays moist without being sticky.

Knead for 5 to 10 minutes, until the dough starts to feel like dough rather than batter (i.e., it has some springback when you poke your finger into it).

Form the dough into a ball, roll it in a tiny bit of olive oil so it’s not dry, put it back in the bowl, cover it with a wet paper towel, put it in a warm place (e.g., on top of the refrigerator), and forget about it for an hour.

When you come back in an hour, it should be roughly twice the size it was. Punch it down to its original size, stretch it into a slightly loafier shape, and set it on a cookie sheet that you’ve prepared with a thin coat of olive oil and a little cornmeal. Cover it with the wet paper towel and go away for anywhere between 15 minutes and another hour.

Put it in the oven on an upper shelf, then turn the oven on to 425 degrees. (If you put it in before you turn on the oven, the loaf will continue rising a bit while the oven heats.) Go away for about half an hour (bake it a little longer than you think you should; it’s moist in the middle), then come back and take it out of the oven. It’s bread!