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The Official VM Girlfriend‘s birthday was on Thursday, so I did some nice stuff for her this weekend. First, I picked up the first season of Deadwood, a show she loves. The new season started earlier tonight, so we spent the weekend watching the first season (I hadn’t seen it): all 12 one-hour episodes.

It’s a heck of a show, with its Hobbesian portrayal of frontier life. For some reason, critics harped on the excessive profanity of the characters’ speech, but I really didn’t notice it. Of course, I tend to curse like a sailor, to the point at which I made it a routine question when I was interviewing potential associate editors last year: “Do you take offense at profane language? Because if you do, this is not a good working environment for you. I can just about guarantee that you’ll get offended and quit before I get around to changing my ways.”

So the language on Deadwood wasn’t too shocking to me. The means of exploring “the city and man,” on the other hand, was pretty vibrant and compelling. Ian McShane’s performance as Al Swearengen is amazing and complex. Amy & I talked about it Saturday night, during a conversation about how this show was sorta impossible before The Sopranos, and it reminded me of that show and how I realized that it was about an evil man who loves his family (at least, in the first season: I heard subsequent seasons of The Sopranos sucked ass, so I never watched them).

It’s so hard to get depth out of evil characters in our art, as opposed to simply justifying their evil by bringing up their hard childhoods or something. But portraying the complexity of an evil person is heck of an accomplishment; those two shows do it in different ways, while also tackling larger subjects. Deadwood, as I said, really seems to go after Hobbes’ view of reality, the way that law and governing arises out of lawlessness and chaos. I TiVo’d the first episode of the new run tonight, and will give it a whirl tomorrow, I figure.

As I mentioned, I did some nice stuff for my girlfriend. In addition to spending twelve hours on the sofa watching the DVDs with her, I also treated her to dinner at one of the finest restaurants around: Café Matisse. My publisher had told me about this place for years, but I’d never gotten around to it. Saturday night, I realized the error of my ways.

I had one of the finest dinners I’ll ever eat. Here’re the details:

Gil’s appetizer: Lump Crabmeat Croquette – orange glazed seared scallop and shrimp with citrus salad vanilla oil, chili oil and cilantro

Amy’s appetizer: Thinly Sliced Rabbit Tenderloin – roasted braised garlic and caramelized shallot manchego, thyme timbale with sour dough crostini and balsamic burgundy butter sauce

Gil’s entrée: Parmsean / Olive Crusted Veal Loin Medallions – with roasted garlic potato confit, grilled artichoke hearts with tomato infused demi glace

Amy’s entrée: Roasted Venison Loin – with carmelized foie gras, cardamom infused parsnips, candied pearl onions & currants with red wine date demi glace, zinfandel syrup

My dessert was a chocolate/marshmallow/espresso ice cream confection that nearly finished me off. Amy went with the vanilla cr�me brulee. We also had a bottle of Ristow Cabernet Sauvignon (2000).

Now, those of you who know me can attest to my near-inability to discriminate, when it comes to food. I don’t have high tastes, and I have a propensity to eat whatever’s in front of me, or nearby. That said, as my girl realized Saturday night, “You really are a Foodie! It just needs to be some of the best food ever prepared!”

So it was a learning experience for both of us. I seriously advise, if you’re in NJ (or close enough), have some money to spare, and are looking for an unforgettable meal, to get thee to Caf� Matisse. I have spoken.

In other weekend news, I bought a new bed (frame only) last Saturday. It was supposed to arrive in about 6 weeks, but the retailer called mid-week and explained that they were ready to deliver the same model to another place, but were informed that that house wouldn’t be finished for 2 more months. “Would you mind if we delivered the bed to you on Saturday?”

“You’re going to get me the bed ONE WEEK after I ordered it?”

“Yes, sir.”

“Sure thing!” So they did. I managed to heft the king-sized platform bed out onto the balcony, a last remnant of Dad’s mid-life crisis, back in 1981. It’s a legendary platform bed: alternating stripes of matte & gloss black, plus a fluorescent light tube under the overhang of the platform. I think Rick James used to own it.

Anyway, I hefted it out and it’s now been replaced with some Zen.

And I got an estimate for a new garage door; after 37 years, it’s time to retire the current one.

So here’s the weekend: watched a ton of Deadwood, ate one of the best meals ever, and got a new bed. It ain’t a bad life.

Barry Bonds, rambling about steroid abuse without ever saying, “No, I don’t use steroids”:

Bonds even brought up another alleged side affect of using steroids, a reduction in size of genitalia.

“They say it makes your testicles shrink,” he said. “I can tell you my testicles are the same size. They haven’t shrunk. They’re the same and work just the same as they always have.”

I like that the article’s sidebar reads, “Canseco: Steroids help staying power”.

Vegas, as long-time readers know, is among my favorite places in the U.S., basically because it doesn’t even pretend to be real.

Over on Drudge this morning, there was a link to this story about LV’s mayor speaking to a room of 4th graders:

Las Vegas Mayor Oscar Goodman told a group of fourth graders on Monday that if he was marooned on a desert island the one thing he would want to have with him is a bottle of gin.

And when a student quizzed Goodman about his hobbies he replied that “drinking” was one of them, said Mackey Elementary School Principal Kamala Washington [. . .]

Goodman was unapologetic for his comments [. . .] “I’m the George Washington of mayors. I can’t tell a lie. If they didn’t want the answer, the kid shouldn’t have asked the question,” Goodman said. “It’s me, what can I do?”

I wish I could follow this up with a joke or a quip.

I was pretty ecstatic this morning when I read the news that the parliament of Lebanon chose to dissolve, facing popular protest against Syrian occupation/influence. Good article today in the Wall Street Journal (subscription only, so no link) about the history of the Syrian occupation. It somehow manages to avoid mention of the Israeli invasion, so maybe it’s not that good an article. Still, it helps explain a lot of the current dynamic among the politico-religious factions in Lebanon. I hope that Syria follows Israel’s lead and withdraws its troops (along with its secret service) from the country.

I’m not quite as sanguine about the news out of Egypt, where Mubarak is pledging to institute democratic reforms for a multiparty election. Still, to hear him even pay lip service to this concept is amazing.

Wonder what prompted the change of heart?

Official VM buddy Mitch Prothero has an update from Beirut:

In a land where civil war is endemic but political protest is almost unknown, long-feuding Muslims, Christians and Druze are camping out just blocks from the parliament saying they will not leave until either Syrian troops leave their country or the government falls.

The latter goal could come as early as Monday, after pro-Syrian Prime Minister Omar Karami agreed to a no-confidence vote in parliament that had been demanded by the opposition parties.

Neat article in the Nation about the Deism predominant among America’s founding fathers. I’ve always had a chuckle when I’ve heard America referred to as a Christian nation.

Here’s a snippet from Ben Franklin, a few weeks before his death:

As for Jesus of Nazareth, my opinion of whom you particularly desire, I think his system of morals and his religion, as he left them to us, the best the world ever saw or is likely to see; but I apprehend it has received various corrupting changes, and I have, with most of the present dissenters in England, some doubts as to his divinity; though it is a question I do not dogmatize upon, having never studied it, and think it needless to busy myself with now, when I expect soon an opportunity of knowing the truth with less trouble.

It seems to me (and I never really pondered on it before, so cut me some slack, or ramble about it in the Comments section) that the remarks made by the framers regarding tolerance of “Mohametans” are consciously designed to cut the Gordian knot of the Crusades, by directly removing the Christian/heathen conflict from America’s mythology.

They envisioned a world that sidestepped those conflicts, avoiding the example of Christian Europe. Unlike Henry IV, there is no Jerusalem chamber.

Read and let me know what you think. I’m still formulating (and procrastinating on the parenteral outsourcing article for my mag).

Last August, a group in Sweden flew me over to Stockholm and Malmo for a week, to tour me around the country’s biotech industry, so that I could write about it in my magazine. I wrote all about it and posted some good pix:
here, here, here, here, here, and here.

What I didn’t write about at the time was my first day touring the businesses. I talked about social conditions in Sweden with my guide, a friendly, middle-aged woman who represented the economic development council that was sponsoring my trip. We talked about the social support network of the state, the economic incentives for IP/IT industries like bio-drug development, and generally chit-chatted.

Then I said, “In my guidebook, it mentioned that there’s a pretty significant percentage of immigrants in the country. Is that an issue, with integration and such?” Actually, I was even more polite and diplomatic in my phrasing, not wanting to come off as the cowboy-Amurrrrcan.

She replied plainly, “Arab immigrants are destroying our country and we need to deport them.”

I didn’t write about this at the time, because it would’ve wrecked the otherwise pleasant mood/mode I was in, bloggging from Scandinavia. But it prepared me for the responses I got when I asked the same question in Amsterdam in December. At the time, I was surprised by the plainspokenness of her response, that it was such a matter of course by now.

At the Weekly Standard, Christopher Caldwell writes about Sweden’s immigration issues:

Not all of these things are necessarily threatening. It is important to distinguish between, on the one hand, cultural shifts (like the presence of a mammoth mosque that stands across from the ice-skating rink in Medborgar Square, smack in the middle of southern Stockholm, or Bejzat Becirov’s Islamic Center, or the “Rosengard Swedish” that linguists detect among the urban newcomers, from which the sing-songy, heep-de-deep-de-doo intonations of the language have been purged), and civilizational outrages on the other. The latter include the dispiritingly steady stream of “honor-killings” that occur among the country’s immigrants, most of them committed by Kurds. These have generally involved girls executed by their brothers or fathers for wearing short skirts or dating Swedish men. Stockholm and Malmö both have a number of safe houses, of the sort that have long existed for the wives and companions of violent men, but which are now mostly inhabited by Muslim women fearing honor killings or domestic violence.

But in a country where, as the sociologist Ake Daun puts it, “people like being like each other,” there is evidence of profound exhaustion with immigration, whether the reasons for this exhaustion are rationally well-founded or not. In the moral-superpower context, it is the equivalent of “imperial overstretch.” Swedes tell pollsters they want no more asylum-seekers. (A common complaint is that prospective arrivals have figured out how to “game” the rules of asylum applications, and that the best way to render one’s story unchallengeable under the law is to destroy one’s identity papers.) A very low rate of mixed marriage is an indication that Swedes may not have been crazy about this immigration in the first place.

Read more.

I read an article in the NYPost [link defunct] detailing the story of a woman who cut off her boyfriend’s schlong:

The attack occurred around midnight Saturday, after the 44-year-old man argued with alleged knife-wielder Kim Tran about their impending breakup.

It seems he was already married to her aunt, the Anchorage Daily News reported, and apparently made the decision that three’s a crowd.

At some point, he agreed to have sex — and allowed his soon-to-be-ex to tie his arms to a windowsill.

The 35-year-old woman severed his penis with a kitchen knife, cops said.

She then untied him, drove him to a hospital and was cleaning up the scene when police arrived.

Part of “cleaning up the scene” appears to have involved flushing the severed organ down the toilet.

No one’s ever accused Alaskans of being the smartest people in the world, but “I’m having an affair with you; I’m married to your aunt; I’m breaking up with you; sure, you can tie me up for one more round of sex” should put you in the stupid hall of fame.

Hunter S. Thompson shot himself to death yesterday.

I enjoyed some of his writing, but a lot of times he was a figure I appreciated more in theory than in practice. Terry Gilliam’s adaptation of his work generated a frustrating question for me: What causes a really talented journalist to pursue such a bizarre life-path?

That is, coming out of an era where there were pretty respectable careers to be had in his field, what made this guy go ’round the bend in terms of drugs and guns while still working as a journalist?

Gilliam’s answer, very briefly, seems to be contained in a few flickering TV images of Vietnam, but that raises the question of why so many other talented journalists didn’t pursue that path.

Anyway, my condolences to his family.