Author: Gil

Well, the MacArthur Grant guys just e-mailed out the list of this year’s “genius grant” recipients: 25 people each get $500,000 over 5 years, plus health coverage. The foundation called me last month to see if I’d be willing to comment in case they were checking on anyone in my professional field (pharma/biopharma stuff), but they never called for any followups.

The list is embargoed till midnight, and I’m going to respect that, geniusly enough. Unfortunately, no one I know personally got tabbed, but a friend-of-a-friend did, so I’m hoping we can cadge some free drinks & dinner off the guy.

Evidently, an ice-cream cone at Burger King offended a Muslim in the UK.

Myself, I’m offended by The King’s showboating after his INT against Bledsoe.

Katrina: The Gathering.

The President just delivered his address about the rebuilding of New Orleans and the gulf coast communities blow’d up by Katrina. He spoke from Jackson Square, which is about 400 feet away from where the official VM fiancee and I plan to get hitched next March.

Yeah, I’m using the present tense. We still plan to get married in the French Quarter in springtime.

My coworkers, family and friends have stared at me goggle-eyed when I’ve told them that we think everything’s going to go off as planned. Maybe they’ve been following the situation more disinterestedly, or just watching and reading different news-sources. They may also have fallen into the trap of reading too much into the present moment. Each day, the city’s been getting better news about the drainage, the pollution, the electricity, and more.

A week ago, you would’ve thought that we were on the verge of suffering a zombie plague. Now the mayor of New Orleans is talking about keeping the city crime-free and violence-free. Things change quickly during a disaster, and I’m betting that we’re going to see more rapid improvements (and, I hope, very few grisly discoveries).

We’ll be visiting her family down there a month from now, and I bet this very blog will tout a photo of your humble correspondent downing a Hand Grenade in the Quarter. And, sure, a beignet at Du Monde.

“There is no way to imagine America without New Orleans”? I’m glad the President and I see things eye-to-eye.

Update: The photographer we booked for the wedding just sent us an update from his first trip back into the city:

Saw Jax Brewery yesterday and even got out to walk around the back. As with the rest of the French Quarter I was very surprised how little damage. It was hard to even find a broken window anywhere in the Quarter and there was no flooding. I couldn’t really even tell if Jax had been looted. The media reports about looting downtown where VERY misleading. (even the Convention Center, that housed the thousands stranded for days seen on the news, didn’t have one single broken window!)

I would guess Jax Brewery will be open within weeks. It lifted my spirits to see the French Quarter and Garden District in such good shape.

What does the President of Belarus do when he’s in New York for the big UN shindig?

Not a lot, according to Peter Savodnik, over at Slate:

If you’re Alexander Lukashenko and you’re the president of a poor, irradiated country and even the thugs call you a thug, with your secret secret police and your thick, peasant patois, then you spend your one night in New York City in your suite at the Waldorf Towers.

I haven’t been watching any of the Senate confirmation hearings for John Roberts’ Supreme Court nominiation, but Dahlia Lithwick’s writeup about it yesterday makes me wonder if Roberts would pass a Turing Test.

Last month, one of my best friends asked me what I plan on doing on Sept. 11. I told her that I was trying to write a longish piece on the Twin Towers and NYC, but the last two weeks have made it pretty tough for me to concentrate on that. I might be able to get to it this month, or maybe I’ll have it finished by next year’s anniversary.

At present, I’m just kinda dazed over the implications of having an entire city just emptied of its inhabitants. Amy & I have wondered about the long-term (as in, generational) implications of a NO,LA diaspora, spurred on by this article about black evacuees being housed on a military base in Utah.

Meanwhile, Winds of Change offers a roundup of 9.11 posts and links.

We’re going to kick back and watch football today. And we’ll cheer for the Saints. (It’s always been futile for Amy, but I bet they’ll have a lot more people cheering them on this season.)

In the interests of making this site a little more interesting to look at, I’m trying to teach myself some web-design stuff. This means there’s a strong likelihood that the blog’s going to get overhauled in the next week or so. It’s really two processes in one: learning technical aspects of design and developing the aesthetic (the look-and-feel) of the site at the same time.

In a sense, they feed off each other. If I get an idea for what VM (and Mad Mix) should look like, I have to go off and learn how to implement it online. So that’s taking up some of my time that I should be devoting to writing. Fortunately, we hired a really good webmaster at my office, and he’s been able to give me some good leads for tutorials and far more advanced stuff.

Meanwhile, I put up a new “cover” page to the site, at www.chimeraobscura.com. Enjoy.

To my regret, I’ve never had a nickname as good as The Hebrew Hercules or The Jewish Tarzan.

Abe Coleman, on the other hand, had both of those nicknames. Abe worked as a pro wrestler in the depression era and beyond, and was reportedly the man who brought the drop-kick to U.S. wrestling (or rasslin’). He turns 100 years old next week. Congrats!