I went with a couple of friends to The Brewer's Art last night for a New Year's Eve eve dinner. It seems sensible to go out and do a little bit of celebrating before the drink drivers hit the roads tonight.
In any event, it was a disappointing meal. I started with a Provencal bean dip, then a Caesar salad, and then a dish of Steak Frites. I brought a very nice 1998 Franciscan Cabernet Sauvignon to drink and that at least met or exceeded our expectations.
My dinner companions and I found almost everything underspiced though they liked their Waterzooi (a seafood soup) and venison. My steak frites was quite unmemorable, with the fries a little soggy and over-salted.
All in all, I wouldn't go back and that's quite a disappointment as I'm still looking to add to my very short list of decent Baltimore restaurants.
I've discovered in recent years that I really quite like studying paintings. But it really has to be in person, and not in a book or on the Web.
I recently went down to the National Gallery of Art in Washington, D.C. for my aunt's birthday. At her suggestion we went to a traveling exhibition from the Tate of John Constable's "six footers". So called because later in his life he decided to paint his landscapes on really large canvases (and he did so on location).
I never knew that he had done full-size "sketches" - quickly done in oils - until I went to the exhibition. The Tate had found on loan or purchased all the existing sketches and put them together with the finished paintings and hung them side by side. What a great learning experience. It's a pity I'm not a painter to fully appreciate his work.
They're really quite marvelous.
So I took some time off to go home at Thanksgiving and I realized on the plane that I have been developing the symptoms of carpal tunnel syndrome for some time now. I moved to a new office three or four months ago (and a new chair) and the ergonomics have been completely wrong. I swear, these keyboards with the tabs at the back are designed to cripple you - it's totally wrong ergnomically to have the keyboard higher at the back. It really should be higher at the front so that the wrist can be kept straight, rather than cocked, causing stress on the nerves in the carpal tunnel.
It was getting to the point that any pronation or supination at all of my wrists caused quite a bit of pain and I was having to fend off people wanting to shake hands. Obviously something had to be done.
Serendipitously, I found one of these keyboard mounts under my desk (I inherited the office). Ten minutes work with my Sears cordless and I have it mounted under my Apple laptop stand (I use a MacBook Pro at work and let me say that you need a laptop stand with the first generation Pros).
90-95% of my problems have gone away. The situation isn't perfect - I still have some bend in my wrists but it is minimal. Note the keyboard is now a good foot lower than it was before in the old configuration.
This is a nice little tirade from the folks at MacDailyNews that my uncle turned me on to this morning:
"If HP notebooks had any style, we wouldn't have much of a problem with them, either. The problem is the operating system. Microsoft inflicted garbage on the world and years later still does little to try to improve the situation. The operating system is not supposed to be worked on constantly by users. The operating system is supposed to serve its users invisibly. The operating system is not supposed to feel like it's designed by some dyslexic engineer with a nasty habit of poorly copying Apple. The operating system shouldn't require a manual for its users to accomplish the basics. The operating system is not supposed to exist in order to support a vast economy of technicians, anti-malware software houses, support staff, etc. The operating system is not supposed to waste time and energy, it's supposed to aid its users to be as productive as they can be. It's so nice to have an elegant, intuitive, powerful, secure, and fun - yes, fun - operating system. We want to use our computers, not fight them. With Apple's Mac OS X, we're lovers, not fighters."
I think it very neatly encapsulates the basic switcher argument. Of course, we're fighting against something that is culturally entrenched - that working with computers should be PAINFUL - but I believe we may have reached the tipping point when we see conservative Wall Street types using MacBooks. (The tirade follows on an article for some industry analysts attending an HP briefing and carrying MacBook Pros.)
So this evening I'm in the throes of removing a virus on my PC (I hate PCs, I really do) and I've got the oven warming up. Unbeknownst to me, there is a residue of carmelized sugar and corn syrup on the bottom of the oven from a couple of pecan pies I baked the other day and this residue is getting very hot and smoking.
I hear a little squeak from the kitchen, where Brownie, one of my Siameses is. Now, these little fellows make NO sound - they don't meow the way normal Siamese or cats do.. ever. I think it's a side effect of having grown up feral - and their mom teaching them that noise was a bad thing if they wanted to live.
Anyway, they never make a peep. So when he squeaked, I reacted.. thinking that maybe he had gotten into something he shouldn't have. I come into the kitchen and find the oven smoking heavily.. I'm surprised the smoke alarm hasn't gone off.
I turn everything off, open the windows and clear the place out, and clean out the oven (as I should have done the first time).
Saved by "the squeak of life". :)
It's stuff like this that makes me wonder where this climate of political correctness will have us end up.
Basically, the city of Sea-Tac (which runs just the Seattle international airport) decided to remove its Christmas trees rather than accede to the demand of a local rabbi that they add a menorah to the display.
I think people used to be much more thick-skinned than they are today. Certainly they weren't more litigious.. perhaps they just have Maslow's basics covered and they've moved on to suing so they can feel better.
What on earth did the Rabbi think would happen when he threatened to sue? That they would cave in and put up a menora? Puuuuhh-lease. It's like negotiating with terrorists. Play their game and you'll never stop.
It's a very interesting question. I refer to the soon-to-be acquisition of the ownership of Liverpool FC by the Sheik of Dubai. Leaving aside questions of foreign ownership of perhaps England's most storied franchise, I and a lot of other fans see the opportunity for Liverpool to compete with the richest teams in Europe (aka Chelsea) in the transfer market.
So who would I buy? I've thought for a while that our problem has been service to our forwards. I think that Kuyt, Bellamy and Fowler are all the sort of forwards that need service - as opposed to those who track back into midfield and pick up their own balls.
If we had a decent right winger, I think that would allow Steve Gerrard to play at the top of the midfield diamond right behind the strikers and I think that would really pay dividends. I agree that Benitez needs to leave him on the wing to have any open of service from the right-hand side. Gonzalez doesn't necessarily seem to be working on the left side of midfield but if memory serves me Riise has proved excellent in that role in the past.
So I might buy a really good left back, allowing me to move Riise to the left side of midfield. Then I would buy a really good right winger, allowing Gerrard to move to central midfield and have Sissoko play the holding role that Dietmar Hamann has so ably played in recent years.
Oh, and maybe a striker who can dig the ball out of midfield. Shevchenko looks like he might be leaving Chelsea soon. Shaun Wright-Phillips looks to be available for 12 million pounds or so.
It has been said that Time magazine removed this article from its archives a few days before the start of Iraq 2 - the Sequel. I thought it might be illustrative to read it before hearing the Iraq Study Group's recommendations today. Would that Bush II had heeded the prophetic warning in this article. (Credit to Mark Perkel Rantz for providing the long-lost text of this article.)
The end of effective Iraqi resistance came with a rapidity which surprised us all, and we were perhaps psychologically unprepared for the sudden transition from fighting to peacemaking. True to the guidelines we had established, when we had achieved our strategic objectives (ejecting Iraqi forces from Kuwait and eroding Saddam's threat to the region) we stopped the fighting. But the necessary limitations placed on our objectives, the fog of war, and the lack of "battleship Missouri" surrender unfortunately left unresolved problems, and new ones arose.
We were disappointed that Saddam's defeat did not break his hold on power, as many of our Arab allies had predicted and we had come to expect. President Bush repeatedly declared that the fate of Saddam Hussein was up to the Iraqi people. Occasionally, he indicated that removal of Saddam would be welcome, but for very practical reasons there was never a promise to aid an uprising. While we hoped that popular revolt or coup would topple Saddam, neither the U.S. nor the countries of the region wished to see the breakup of the Iraqi state. We were concerned about the long-term balance of power at the head of the Gulf. Trying to eliminate Saddam, extending the ground war into an occupation of Iraq, would have violated our guideline about not changing objectives in midstream, engaging in "mission creep," and would have incurred incalculable human and political costs. Apprehending him was probably impossible. We had been unable to find Noriega in Panama, which we knew intimately. We would have been forced to occupy Baghdad and, in effect, rule Iraq. The coalition would instantly have collapsed, the Arabs deserting it in anger and other allies pulling out as well. Under those circumstances, furthermore, we had been self-consciously trying to set a pattern for handling aggression in the post-cold war world. Going in and occupying Iraq, thus unilaterally exceeding the U.N.'s mandate, would have destroyed the precedent of international response to aggression we hoped to establish. Had we gone the invasion route, the U.S. could conceivably still be an occupying power in a bitterly hostile land. It would have been a dramatically different--and perhaps barren--outcome.
We discussed at length forcing Saddam himself to accept the terms of Iraqi defeat at Safwan--just north of the Kuwait-Iraq border--and thus the responsibility and political consequences for the humiliation of such a devastating defeat. In the end, we asked ourselves what we would do if he refused. We concluded that we would be left with two options: continue the conflict until he backed down, or retreat from our demands. The latter would have sent a disastrous signal. The former would have split our Arab colleagues from the coalition and, de facto, forced us to change our objectives. Given those unpalatable choices, we allowed Saddam to avoid personal surrender and permitted him to send one of his generals. Perhaps we could have devised a system of selected punishment, such as air strikes on different military units, which would have proved a viable third option, but we had fulfilled our well-defined mission; Safwan was waiting.
As the conflict wound down, we felt a sense of urgency on the part of the coalition Arabs to get it over with and return to normal. This meant quickly withdrawing U.S. forces to an absolute minimum. Earlier there had been some concern in Arab ranks that once they allowed U.S. forces into the Middle East, we would be there to stay. Saddam's propaganda machine fanned these worries. Our prompt withdrawal helped cement our position with our Arab allies, who now trusted us far more than they ever had. We had come to their assistance in their time of need, asked nothing for ourselves, and left again when the job was done. Despite some criticism of our conduct of the war, the Israelis too had their faith in us solidified. We had shown our ability--and willingness--to intervene in the Middle East in a decisive way when our interests were challenged. We had also crippled the military capability of one of their most bitter enemies in the region. Our new credibility (coupled with Yasser Arafat's need to redeem his image after backing the wrong side in the war) had a quick and substantial payoff in the form of a Middle East peace conference in Madrid.
The Gulf War had far greater significance to the emerging post-cold war world than simply reversing Iraqi aggression and restoring Kuwait. Its magnitude and significance impelled us from the outset to extend our strategic vision beyond the crisis to the kind of precedent we should lay down for the future. From an American foreign-policymaking perspective, we sought to respond in a manner which would win broad domestic support and which could be applied universally to other crises. In international terms, we tried to establish a model for the use of force. First and foremost was the principle that aggression cannot pay. If we dealt properly with Iraq, that should go a long way toward dissuading future would-be aggressors. We also believed that the U.S. should not go it alone, that a multilateral approach was better. This was, in part, a practical matter. Mounting an effective military counter to Iraq's invasion required the backing and bases of Saudi Arabia and other Arab states.
I saw the new James Bond last week, Casino Royale. It's actually the third time the movie has been done: once in the '50s for CBS as a TV movie (I have to find this!) and once in 1967 in what became a complete spoof (starring Woody Allen, David Niven, and a host of Hollywood personalities). Brilliant but truly weird comedy that I first watched with my cousins in Ottawa in French (largely unintelligible to me then) on New Year's Eve.
All the history aside, this was a wonderful deconstruction of the Bond mythos. We see a younger Bond (he is the youngest to play the role I believe) growing into being 007 - rough around the edges, still not entirely cynical though already a tough guy.
The film has some nice pacing, hearkening back to the early Sean Connery films (with whom he compares quite favorably), and the action scenes are very well done and thankfully wholly free of the gadgets that have come to dominate the current films.
This was the 21st in the series and to my mind the best since the third or fourth Bond. I will definitely buy it.
You cannot tell me that global warming isn't happening when we see Seattle getting 15+ inches of snow in a weekend, followed by Baltimore hitting 76F on November 30th.
Not that I mind the weather but I'm going to run out this weekend to get a couple of hundred pounds of sand for my trunk so that my car if functional in the snow. Way too much horsepower/torque at the rear wheels to be a safe snow-driving car (a Q45). I nearly died a couple of times (ok, a minor exaggeration) coming home from the airport last year in Seattle with 1" of snow on the ground. Took me two hours to drive the 20 miles back from the airport.