Author: Gil

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Whattaya havin’?

Just had a strange realization, while pouring myself some water just now: since I quit drinking soda two months ago, and stopped drinking juices a few years back (Atkins holdover; sue me), it occurs to me now that the only 3 things I drink are water, gin and black coffee.

I have milk in the morning with my cereal (can we get a ruling on that?), and a glass of wine with Amy once a week or so, but I think I’ve sheared down to some sorta essence of what liquids I actually consume.

So my question to you, dear readers, is: Is this weird? That is, do you have more variety in the things you drink, or do you also only consume a couple of types of fluids? (no sexytime responses, please)

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Family album

My family is visiting from St. Louis today. They came out for a friend’s wedding, and are staying up in Tarrytown, NY. Amy & I went over to see them, as did my dad and his girlfriend, and our cousin Lewis from up in Connecticut.

Like you cared. It’s just another excuse for me to post pictures on flickr. Enjoy.

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Are you ready for some shopping?

The Sports Guy’s football picks this week are pretty entertaining for three reasons:

1) A great anecdote about Milton Berle’s natural gifts:

I thought of a new gambling theory after last week’s Denver-Oakland game when the Broncos sat on a 13-3 lead for the entire second half: The Milton Berle Theory. In case you didn’t know, Berle was famous in Hollywood circles for being more endowed than anyone else. Basically, he was the Dirk Diggler of Hollywood. (Note: There’s a hysterical anecdote in the SNL book “Live From New York” about this. Highest of high comedy.) Anyway, the famous story about Berle (maybe an urban legend, maybe not) was that somebody challenged him to a “who’s bigger?” contest once, and Berle soundly defeated the guy, then bragged to someone else in the room, “I only pulled out enough to win.” I’ve heard this story 20 different ways but that’s always how it ends.

What does this have to do with gambling? In the age of perpetual putridity, I feel like we’re seeing these games now where double-digit favorites play bad teams straight up, let them hang around for four quarters, then prevail in an unsatisfying, closer-than-we-thought win that leaves their fans wondering what the hell just happened. Well, why does this happen? Because they only pulled out enough to win.

2) An entertaining rant by his wife, who’s beating him this season in NFL picks:

I’ve seen “Devil Wears Prada” four times already: twice in the movies, then on both ends of a cross-country flight last week. Bill couldn’t understand why I would watch it four times so I tried to explain it to him. They don’t make enough movies where there’s a young girl who has no style and can’t fit in, and then, as the movie goes along, she realizes you need to look the part to get ahead. So she finds somebody non-threatening who’s willing to help her understand how to dress and act, and the whole time, everyone’s wearing great clothes, looking great and going to high-society events. And by the end, she’s cooler and more stylish than anyone in the movie. Pretty Woman worked the same way: Julia Roberts was a hooker with no style, then she found a billionaire boyfriend and a new wardrobe and everything turned out fine. I’m glad she fell in love and it was a nice story, but I really liked her clothes more than anything, especially the brown dress she wore in the polo scene.

Bill joked that, if that’s what I liked about these movies, then they should just keep remaking “Prada” in different environments. Like if, instead of a fashion magazine, they tried a high-class gossip magazine, or a black fashion magazine, or a teen fashion magazine, or they could get out of the magazine industry and use an ad agency or a daytime TV show. It could be the same premise every time — a young girl gets a job in a hectic workplace and has no style, people are mean to her and, eventually, she fits in and succeeds at her job even though she has an evil boss. Then she gets a promotion, falls in love and gets her revenge on everyone who thought she was worthless and didn’t have any style. I thought this was a neat idea until Bill said he was kidding. But why is that a bad idea? Bill has something like 50 favorite sports movies and they’re all the same movie — somebody’s an underdog, nobody believes in them, then they win the big game in the end. That’s every sports movie. So how is that different than making my fashion movie premise 50 different ways? I think Bill is a hypocrite.

3) A link to a good article by Chris Rose of the New Orleans Times-Picayune, defending the decision to get the Superdome opened in time for this season:

The arguments posited in [anti-Superdome letters sent to] USA Today seem to suggest that there be no compartmentalization of funding for recovery. In other words, that repairing the Dome prevents homes being rebuilt in the 9th Ward. Or that patching potholes on Bourbon Street is keeping hospitals from opening. Or that reopening the Aquarium of the Americas — or doing anything with federal dollars that rebuilds our economic engines rather than homes — keeps people homeless.

Read the whole shebang.

That said, this week’s Sunday NFL slate is so bad that I’m willing to take the day off and go up to the big outlet mall so Amy can do some shopping.

It’s up in the Harriman Park area, so I’m hoping we can go off and take some pictures of the fall color, too. Unfortunately, we got hit with Day-After-Tomorrow-style wind yesterday, so a lot of the leaves may be gone by now.

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Unrequired Reading: Oct. 20, 2006

Sorry for the lack of posts this week, dear readers. I’ve been kinda busy in the evenings, and a little outta sorts in the mornings. Fortunately, I’m still up for some Unrequired Reading if you are!

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When the official VM wife became the official VM fiancee, we had to go out ring-shopping. (Since I proposed a little sooner than I had planned, I didn’t actually have a ring for her.) She researched a bunch, and decided that the diamond trade was just too venal for us to get involved with it as a symbol of our love. So we went for a gorgeous aquamarine instead.

Here’s a piece (plus slide show) about shopping for the guilt-free diamond.

(Note that I’ve resisted making any comments about using the term ‘conflict-free’ as it relates to engagement rings.)

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Congrats to the state of Oregon, for upholding a law restricting asset forfeitures. I never really understood how cops were able to seize and sell a person’s assets even if the person isn’t convicted of a crime.

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I admit to letting the Darfur slaughter fall off the VM radar since I first wrote about it in May 2004. This is mainly because I believe the western world has failed to stop the Sudanese government and militia from killing the civilians and rebels in Darfur. By failed, I mean it’s gone past the point of no return. To make up for my lack of coverage, here’s an interview with Paul Salopek, the journalist who was imprisoned in Khartoum for a month on trumped-up charges:

FOREIGN POLICY: What is the biggest misconception about the crisis in Darfur as reported in the Western media?

Paul Salopek: Well, I think it’s been oversimplified as this Manichean struggle between ethnic Arab herders who are armed by Khartoum, and these helpless African farmers who are struggling for their rights in this very desolate, Western region of the Sudan. I think that has a fundamental truth to it, and that has been historically a problem that goes back for generations, if not centuries. But I think that perception has to be overlaid with much more complicated tribal rivalries that are then manipulated at the national level in Sudan. Even internationally, there’s a layer of interests that are tugging and pulling at that area of Sudan.

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Holy crap! Discs of Tron was on the Atari 2600?

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Playing it safe with the design for the NYTimes’ new HQ.

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If you have a Wall Street Journal account, you really oughtta read this article about how Holt & Co. blew more than a million bucks trying to engineer the next Da Vinci Code.

Historical thrillers in particular are hot. One theory says readers are seeking a certainty in these books that since the end of the Cold War they’re having trouble finding elsewhere.

“We’re seeing a return to the past because everything was in its place, and people were recognizably polarized in a way that gives us comfort,” says literary agent Richard Curtis. “In the post 9/11 world, we aren’t clear about our enemies. Is the military officer in an Iraqi uniform a friend, or is he a terrorist posing as one? We need to know who to root for and historical fiction provides us with that.”

So Holt went after a novel starring Freud & Jung. No, seriously. (In what may be a first, it looks like Amazon is actually charging more than a bricks & mortar store, since I saw this book with a 50% off sticker in Borders on Wednesday.)

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The new issue of Men’s Vogue (sue me) has an excerpt from the autobiography of art critic Robert Hughes, Things I Didn’t Know. It centers on Hughes’ awful car wreck in 1999 and the legal problems he had after. He was raked by the “meejah” for being an elitist expat.

For of course I am completely an elitist in the cultural but emphatically not the social sense. I prefer the good to the bad, the articulate to the mumbling, the aesthetically developed to the merely primitive, and ufll to partial consciousness. I love the spectacle of skill, whether it’s an expert gardener at work or a good carpenter chopping dovetails or someone trying a Bimini hitch that won’t slip. I don’t think stupid or ill-read people are as good to be iwth as wise and fully literate ones. I would rather watch a great tennis player than a mediocre one, unles the latter is a friend or relative. Consequently, most of the human race doesn’t matter much to me, outside the normal and necessary frame of courtesy and the obligation to respect human rights. I see no reason to squirm arond apologizing for this. I am, after all, a cultural critic, and my main job is to distinguish the good from the second-rate, pretentious, sentimental and boring stuff that saturates culture today, more (perhaps) than it ever has.

Here’s a review of the book in the Telegraph.

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Why is NYC losing financial jobs? Relocation, relocation, relocation.

The city and state bear some responsibility for the space shortage. A nearly ten-year effort to rezone Manhattan’s Far West Side for commercial development wound up getting bogged down in Mayor Bloomberg’s plans to build a stadium there and lure the Olympics to New York. Potential construction of office towers in the area is thus still years away. The city has now missed two real-estate expansions, going back to the late 1990s, in trying to rezone the Far West Side.

Meanwhile, state and city officials haggled for years over the plan to redevelop Ground Zero, with some observers, including Mayor Bloomberg, pessimistically calling for a reduction in the office space planned for the site, assuming that it would be unneeded. As a result of the delays, only one building, 7 World Trade, is nearing completion — developer Larry Silverstein could rebuild it quickly because it wasn’t part of the site that the government controlled. Other Ground Zero towers won’t be ready for years.

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VM bleg: Anybody know a gin snob who can tell me if Cadenhead’s Old Raj Gin is worth the $44 for a 750ml bottle they want at Wine Library?

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The official VM wife sends word that Cameron Diaz looks like crap.

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Whatcha really get’s a box of Newports and Puma sweats (damn!)

(I just felt like making a 3rd Bass ref; sue me)

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We should go to the Chihuly exhibit at the New York Botanical Gardens next Thursday night! Who’s with me?

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Congratulations to the Cardinals for pulling the upset on the Mets, earning the right to walk into a buzzsaw.

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This week’s non-web reading: Chronicles Vol. 1, by Bob Dylan. The first chapter, covering the period he first arrived in New York, is fantastic. The chapter discussing losing his mojo in the late ’80s, and rediscovering it while playing with the Grateful Dead? Not so much.

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More congrats!

First, Official VM just-about-closest-friend-in-the-world Ian gets his chief petty officer pin, and now he goes off and pops the question to his One True Love! Much congratulations are in order! Go, Ian!

In additional friends-of-VM news, my buddy Faiz reveals the true reason he couldn’t meet up with me & Amy in Paris: he and his wife are expecting their first kid! (And Paris is evidently inimical to developing life!) Also, I’ve been insanely remiss in not mentioning Faiz’s first children’s book, My Alien Penfriend! Go, Faiz!

That’s the extent of the super-wonderful news. In not-so-wonderful news, it looks like I’ve got an upper respiratory infection, so I’ve got some antibiotics working on that. Go, azithromycin!

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Let Them Eat Tort

(here’s the From the Editor column from my magazine this month)

Sometimes, writing this column requires compulsive news-trawling, and my paranoid-detective method of reading people’s quotes. It can be a painstaking process, involving market and biographical research, trend analysis, and interpretations of government health statistics. And sometimes there’s a Vioxx trial, in which case this column pretty much just writes itself.

Recently, Merck won a federal Vioxx suit in New Orleans. The plaintiff, Robert Smith, took Vioxx for four months and suffered a heart attack. Or we could say that Mr. Smith was obese, had high blood pressure and atherosclerosis, took Vioxx for four months, and suffered a heart attack after shoveling snow for nearly an hour. After the verdict, Merck’s lead lawyer on the trial, Philip Beck, commented, “Unfortunately, Mr. Smith would have suffered a heart attack whether he was taking Vioxx or not.” After a few hours of deliberation, the jury agreed with Mr. Beck.

But that’s not the part of this trial that so lends itself to my mean-spirited but occasionally entertaining tirades. No, that honor is reserved for Mr. Smith’s lawyer, Christopher Seeger, who is the plaintiffs’ co-lead counsel for federal Vioxx suits. According to the Reuters report for the trial verdict, Mr. Seeger didn’t exactly put his heart into this one:

“This was a defense pick. . . . It was an impossible case to win going in,” said Chris Seeger, . . . referring to the process of selecting which lawsuits go to trial.

He said Merck could have settled the suit for far less than the $10 million to $15 million it cost them to take it to court, but the company’s “scorched earth strategy” leaves no room for such calculations.

Got that? Provided his definition of ‘impossible’ is the same as mine, it would seem that Mr. Seeger, who co-represents 39 law firms across the country in federal Vioxx suits, pursued a case that he knew he had no chance of winning. From that second quoted paragraph, I infer that he pushed this ‘impossible case to win’ because he wanted to get paid off by Merck to make Mr. Smith go away. A shakedown like this would embarrass the mafia, but it seems that Mr. Seeger and the 39 law firms figure that enough of these $10–$15 million price tags for victories (could it really have cost Merck that much?) will lead Merck to start settling, which will bring them contingency fees without the risk of going to trial. Merck, on the other hand, seems to have the mindset that forcing the Contingency Corps to walk away with empty pockets will cause the ‘impossible cases’ to go away on their own. And that might be the biggest tort reform of all.

While I think there is a benefit that comes from trial lawyers’ discovery processes, I have to wonder about the ethics of a person who told Robert Smith, “You may be entitled to compensation from Merck!” Scorched earth, indeed.

Gil Roth
Editor

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To the Manor

Spent yesteday at a barbecue/party with friends in Wappingers Fall, NY. The scenery was pretty on the drive up, but I didn’t feel like stopping to take a picture. There were all sorts of great opportunities for pix at the party, but I brought Amy’s super-camera with me and never took it out of the car. It sorta highlights my dilemma with upgrading my digital camera: I really don’t want a camera that will be hanging from my neck or shoulder, but I don’t know if I can get really good shots with a camera that fits in my pocket.

The party was great, albeit overrun with at least a dozen kids under the age of 4. A bunch of us childless people hung out in the cold on the front porch, bantering while avoiding parental responsibilities.

Anyway, to make up for the lack of pix yesterday, Amy & I (she stayed home Saturday with a cold) drove up to Ringwood Manor this morning and she played with the settings of her camera. She tested the high-color RAW file settings, which yielded some tremendous images. The ones we uploaded to flickr are shrunk and converted to JPG, so some of the detail and color is lost. But the original files are about 14 mb each, so it’s a tradeoff.

Enjoy.

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Don’t win Ben Stein’s money

Ben Stein on making money:

You make money by making money for people who already have money. This is another reason finance is such a well-paid field. One good day’s work for a man who has a $100 million account you are trading is worth far more than a lifetime’s work at the checkout counter at Wal-Mart. Yet, amazingly, managing wealthy people’s money is far less difficult and stressful than checking out customers at Wal-Mart. It’s not even close. As my smart sister Rachel says, you make money by making money. It’s tricky, but it’s right.

Oh, and don’t study African feminism in the 19th century.

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They call him the Gambler

In honor of Kenny Rogers’ sterling performance in yesterday’s MLB playoff game against the A’s (but let’s not forget Kenny’s run in the 1996 playoffs for the Yankees, where he managed an ERA of 13.13, even though the Yanks won every game he started), the official VM wife offers us the following quote from Rep. Barney Frank, following Congress’s idiotic passage of a bill banning internet gambling:

If an adult in this country, with his or her own money, wants to engage in an activity that harms no one, how dare we prohibit it because it doesn’t add to the GDP or it has no macroeconomic benefit? Are we all to take home calculators and, until we have satisfied the gentleman from Iowa that we are being socially useful, we abstain from recreational activities that we choose? . . . People have said, ‘What is the value of gambling?’ Here is the value. Some human beings enjoy doing it. Shouldn’t that be our principle? If individuals like doing something and they harm no one, we will allow them to do it, even if other people disapprove of what they do.

Well said, Rep. Frank, no matter what Dick Armey calls you.