In celebration of St. Patrick’s day, I will give out the location of my favorite bar. The Landmark Tavern (link) is my favorite bar in Manhattan. It is old, classy, with naked lady sculptures and bas-reliefs meant to mesmerize 19th century gentlemen. The barkeeps are fastidious and silent -the place is never full, usually empty, and nearly impossible to find from just memory, hard to get to by public transit, and there is a Hotel California kind of vibe if you go there at night. The picture above implies that the place is sunny and it is absolutely not -it’s dark and gloomy, and best visited on a rainy afternoon. Its the place to go for solitude, for breaking up (although awkward because there are literally no cabs and the nearest subway is two avenue blocks or so to my recollection, but aren’t they always awkward), for catching up with long lost friends, and for the best shepherd’s pie on the island. I half expect to sit down to a drink with Ullyses S. Grant in the place. There are no college students, and no loud drunk tourists. It’s a serious bar for serious people who want to meditate in the twilight zone.
Category Archives: Naturalism
My Daily Bread
In my quest to master the basics of post-industrial cooking, bread has been a bit of a mystery. I grew up with rice and can tell the basic qualities and provenances of rice with ease, but bread I just like to eat. I think the difference is that I never saw my mother bake bread, and therefore, it is mysterious.
I used a simple no-knead recipe from the NY Times(link here). This is my second try -my first was a gooey mess. The results above are my second effort, and it looks really edible. The crust cracks fiercely and there is wonderful topography to this bread. It took very little effort, and I think this is how we’ll make our bread from here on.
The crust is wonderfuly crisp and the center is fluffy and chewy. It is bread heaven.
What does Bowie’s Major Tom mean?
The David Bowie song has taken a lifetime to decipher. When I first heard it, I though it was a groovy song tuned to the psychedelic times -this is the most common interpretation that I got on the internet. Here are the lyrics.
Ground Control to Major Tom Ground Control to Major Tom Take your protein pills and put your helmet on Ground Control to Major Tom Commencing countdown, engines on Check ignition and may God’s love be with you Ten, Nine, Eight, Seven, Six, Five, Four, Three, Two, One, Liftoff This is Ground Control to Major Tom You’ve really made the grade And the papers want to know whose shirts you wear Now it’s time to leave the capsule if you dare “This is Major Tom to Ground Control I’m stepping through the door And I’m floating in a most peculiar way And the stars look very different today For here Am I sitting in a tin can Far above the world Planet Earth is blue And there’s nothing I can do Though I’m past one hundred thousand miles I’m feeling very still And I think my spaceship knows which way to go Tell my wife I love her very much she knows” Ground Control to Major Tom Your circuit’s dead, there’s something wrong Can you hear me, Major Tom? Can you hear me, Major Tom? Can you hear me, Major Tom? Can you…. “Here am I floating round my tin can Far above the Moon Planet Earth is blue And there’s nothing I can do.”It’s after the passage of 42 years that I understand the true meaning of the song. The song has to do with transformation. The hero is an astronaut. In that era, astronauts were the straightest of straight arrows. Buzzcut illuminati of American manhood, these men were walking statues of virtue, and for Bowie, an easy group to symbolize as the American Everyman, who worked for a large corporation, drove an American car out to a suburb, with a pretty wife and cute children.
The disembodied voice of Houston is in fact the voice of society and her expectations. It is also the voice of authority. When Major Tom leaves his government-issued cocoon, he undergoes a transformation. He’s floating in a most peculiar way, and the stars look different today. It is the awakening of the man, and he understands he can’t go back to the way things were. This happens to some men after they reach the top of the hill and look back and then look forward. Some can’t help themselves and decide to go sideways. The middle-aged man is typically at the height of his powers, but is in essence impotent in the face of the inexorable passage of time, the enormity of the universe, and unbearable blueness of the Earth.
Dreaming in PBS
I dreamt a strange dream tonight. it was my first dream in PBS. I was seeing a documentary play on TV. It featured Yvalisse Sondag, a Brazilian scientist who discovered a parasitic frog (pictured).
translated,
I was walking to my laboratory and it began to rain. I felt a big drop fall on my back and I didn’t pay attention because I was running to the bathroom. in the bathroom I felt something strange between my legs and it dropped into the commode. it was a small green frog but it swam away into the plumbing. I noticed something on myself, a tiny red egg which I recognized as a frogs egg. It was on me.
narrator’s voice
Yvalisse is a professor of vertebrate biology. She placed the egg in a controlled environment. She had a hunch that thus was no ordinary tree frog. the egg was kept in a moist environment at 98.6 degrees Fahrenheit.
Yvalisse translated
The feeling of a raindrop on my back that day did not feel like the rain we were getting at that moment. I suspected that it was the frog that landed on my back. I found the frog as I was wiping myself. I incubated the egg in the conditions found in a vaginal canal and it hatched a very strange looking tadpole that didn’t survive long.
pan to picture of tadpole with no visible eyes, row of very sharp teeth.
narrator
Dr. Sondag thought she was onto something -a parasitic vertebrate. She postulated that the frog is a short lived adult form whose purpose is to mate, and then jump onto the backs of females and deposit the egg in the vagina. on hatching, the tadpole swims up the canal and bites down and forms vascular attachments to the host, deriving it’s nutrients. When the time came it would complete it’s development and exit to lay eggs on other hosts.
Dr. Sondag, translated
The key was finding the host. There are native tapirs in the forests around the university and we captured several. for a long time, we came up with nothing but last year we found a young female.
narrator
A fiberoptic camera was inserted and revealed a clutch of tadpoles attached to the cervix. Serial images show the deveopment of these into a small green frog with small orange spots. It is the first instance of parasitism involving vertebrates as host and parasite.
Dr. Sondag, translated
we have discovered the frog secretes a topical anesthetic – that’s why it felt like a rain drop. We’re developing the chemical it secretes as a pharmaceutical.
The right side of history
It is the right thing to do -to get health care available to those with pre-existing conditions, to avoid the situation of modern indentured servitude for the sake of healthcare, to avoid bankruptcies in the name of healthcare, to bring order to what is a patchwork of coverage, to bring science to bear. Health care is like clean public tap water -we chose to offer the clean water to all, and those who wish to, can pay for bottled. A nation is held together by its institutions, and healthcare has always been absent as a force compared to defense, agriculture, and commerce. The promise of a healthy life is part of the bounty that we are compelled to share if we are to call ourselves a United States of America.
The Circle of Certitude
The circle of certitude is the area defined by the radius within which you have a 90% chance of making it into the cup within 2 shots. For the average bogey golfer, this is about 10 feet. For the single handicapper, this is anywhere near the fringe. For a tournament pro, this circle is out at the wedges. To win major tournaments, this circle spans the 150 yard marker.
In daily life, we have many such circles of certitude where results are likely to occur. It may be only as far as the arm’s reach, or the driveway. Careful cultivation of friends and communication skills brings this circle out to across town, state, nation, and globe.
Cast your circle of certitude wide. Live with no doubt.
Yale Is Burning
This made the rounds a few weeks ago, including a nice article on The New Yorker. Watching it, I had to smile. As a Harvard Alum, I can tell you there is no amount of glee at 86 Brattle Street that can match this gleeful video. You either get it or you don’t. They want to select for an even creamier crème de la crème. This goes beyond being able to understand and appreciate pink polo shirts, munching on pistachios, grapes, and brie with a Gewurztraminer, or liking to sing show tunes in the shower while being completely heterosexual.
If you don’t get it, you will snigger at this video and apply to Princeton. If you really don’t get it, you’ll stop watching when the singing starts and you’ll apply to a Big Ten School. If you get it, but don’t get in, you’ll be perfectly happy at Amherst. And so on.
This inspires me to hark back to college, to the time when I hijacked the microphone at Naples Pizza in New Haven and proclaimed, “Yale Sucks!” And now, we have proof.
The Hookup -UPDATED
UPDATE –
As if to drive home the nail between the eyes, the NYT (link) writes about how colleges are over run with women, and the guys can basically stop shaving, stop bathing, stop talking, and get harassed for dates just by occupying space on a campus bar stool. If this isn’t more evidence that Generation X has some terrible purpose, I don’t know what, because we our timing is cosmically off. We miss the sixties and we get to pay for and take care of the baby boomers while everybody behind us gets to play.
Original Post from 12/17/2008
In the New York Times, Op-Ed man Charles M. Blow writes about the current state of dating -declaring there is no dating (link here). Apparently, teens and college students have sex first then consider dating after several rounds, maybe days, of guilt-free and consequence-free sex.
This is all terribly wrong. I missed the sixties and seventies. My coming of age was during the 80’s, a notably sexless decade which produced Urkel, Alf, Joanie and Chachi (which means something funny in Korean). I got married in the 90’s, and then spent my remaining twenties and thirties indoors in sterile environments, constantly washing my hands. All of a sudden I wake up in my forties from 34 years of schooling to see this going on. Instead of yammering away about school and homework while out on dates, the kids are hammering away while out on hookups. Mr. Blow goes on pontificating about how tilted the playing field is towards men, especially in college where they are often outnumbered 2 or 3 to 1. I’m really upset about this article, because CM Blow just has it all wrong.
When I was in college, my happiest times were going down for breakfast at certain women’s colleges and hoping to get set upon by all those hungry girls. Instead, I got corn flakes and maintained a strictly monogamous relationship destined for a messy breakup –because I refused to have any relations until I met my wife to whom I am married. I digress. This bodes ill for civilization. What’s next ? husband time sharing arrangements by educated professional women who find it more convenient to share the few educated, employed, professional men left in the world? Craigslisting of said arrangements? I can imagine the listing -Englewood, NJ: Have a man, MBA, needs walking daily, will share for cost of feed and grooming.
Absolutely not. I will not let J rent me out to her lady friends in some sort of tawdry and trendy new lifestyle arrangement just for her convenience. I have my scruples. If any of J’s lady friends needs to discuss my views on this, they can reach me through Facebook, or just text me.
Augmented Reality -how to tell fake boobs
Every time I watch Mad Men, I get floored by Christina Hendricks. She captures the vavoom esthetics of the late 50’s and 60’s as personified by Sophia Loren. The standards of beauty shift and change over time, but 
the large mammaries and the male obsession with them are unique to humans among terrestrial mammals.
Neolithic hunter-gatherers, when they figured out how to shape stone into figurines, created an industry around figures of women with curves.
Breast augmentation is a large industry driven by not only popular tastes but probably something innate in our psyche. When I was an intern, the plastic surgery clinic was an eye opener, with perfectly healthy patients willing to undergo an operation at some risk to their health to sculpt themselves.
It was a time of transition away from silicone implants which were popularly (and erroneously) believed to cause autoimmune disease, to saline implants, and the quintessential moment for me was in filling what were plastic bags to the “correct” volume which was a subjective process. The whole OR got to voice their opinion with the surgeon having veto power.
With the recent red carpet productions, Christina Hendricks came up and it hit me that she looked different from when she was on Firefly, my favorite cancelled science fiction series. In it, she is incredible as an interplanetary highway robber and grifter. Five years later, she presents an entirely different profile.
At first, I thought she achieved her transformation with girdles and a few extra doughnuts a day, but the picture at the very top convinced me that some augmentation has occurred. When I mentioned this among my Facebook friends, TW, an old buddy from high school and a physician, categorically felt that these were real.
After intensive research, I would have to disagree. The tipoff are the bald men hiding in her dress. The placement of prosthetics causes a lifting of the skin and sometimes muscle which changes the profile from the “natural” which in profile looks like a nice sledding hill to the “augmented” which looks like a bald pate. 
This convexity is a giveaway, and with the lift and separate presentation bras, this convexity is enhanced. Gravity flattens this top area with time and no convexity is seen in latter day images of the all natural Sophia Loren who looks like she underwent some reduction.
That said, Hendricks is amazing in bringing her character to life, a Sad Woman among Mad Men.
docpark’s Nice Tea! and my picks
Football playoffs and lazy Sundays mix wonderfully in this iced tea creation. I make a typical Southern sweet tea using double density of P&G Tips tea bags, steeped extra long for that extra bite of tannins. I add a tablespoon of sugar for every two cups (may add more for more traditionally sweet tea) and if I have them, I crush and muddle in spearmint leaves. At this point, this drink is fine for drinking after mowing lawns, but if you want a super smooth Nice Tea -you add a shot of Amaretto and a half shot of Grand Marnier along with a dash of Angostura Bitters. The result is a very smooth concoction that makes you think about spring -sunny, cool, and stirring to the spirit.
I won’t talk about the Vikings because it may curse them. I will root for the Jets in the same way I would root for the drunk Irish guy on St. Patrick’s Day who picks a fight with a bunch of yobby out of town college kids from an SEC school. He may go down, but he’ll be defending the honor of New York in his own special way.
Golfism -life is a metaphor for golf 