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Will I never learn?

Oh, sure, I know you all think it’s easy being me. I know how you envy the dashing, romantic, debonair life of a pharmaceutical trade magazine editor who lives in a quiet, no-restaurant town a little beyond the suburbs. But it’s not all wine and roses, I tellya!

Take today, for example. Last night, I crashed at a friend’s apartment on 13th St. so I could get to an 8:30am presentation at the Waldorf. No problem, except that the presentation went on till noon with a short coffee break. That ran out of coffee. So I grabbed some scorched Starbucks in the lobby and figured I’d get something to eat on the way back down to the garage where I’d parked the night before.

Unfortunately, it was awfully cold out, and I’d forgotten that there aren’t any restaurants up around the Waldorf. I figured I’d pass on the street-meat kiosk, since I wouldn’t have anywhere to sit down and eat, and caught a cab down to 13th St.

Perhaps I was getting a little punchy with hunger, but I thought, “Well, as long as I’m in the area, I may as well stop in at the Strand on the way back to the car.”

And that’s where my troubles began.

See, dear reader, it’s one thing for me to go without food (and with crappy coffee) for a while. It’s another to be in a low blood sugar mode while walking around a giant used bookstore.

Now, I’ve never been a huge fan of the Strand, in part because it’s not a very serendipitous bookstore for me. For some reason, I can’t just meander around, pick something up, and start unspooling creative threads all around the labyrinth of the mythocreative mind. Maybe the shelves are too tall in the sides of the store, or the selections are too extensive. I’m not sure. But I have far greater luck when I go to a place like the Montclair Book Center.

That said, I usually find books to buy at the Strand. I just don’t find inspiration.

So I picked up a bunch of books today, including a collection of journalism about Chechnya by Anna Politkovskaya, some gifts for friends, and a couple of discounted comic collections. I began my trek to the checkout line, resigned to carry both a bag of books and my work-bag (laptop inside) a few blocks along 13th to my friend’s place, where I would pick up my overstuffed overnight bag (Amy stayed last night too, which cut her morning commute from 2 hours to 10 minutes) before walking back down the block to the car.

And that’s when I saw it:

Yep: 11 volumes of the 20-volume Complete Works of George Orwell edited by Peter Davison (reviews here). Never released in the U.S., and exorbitantly expensive to order from the UK.

So, minutes later, I found myself slinging my work-bag over my shoulder and hauling 2 enormous bags of books down 13th St. Where the overstuffed overnight bag awaited. Somehow, I got back down the block with all 4 bags; my slanted shoulders were not happy and kept shrugging the non-Strand bags off. But I got to the garage, picked up my car, and figured I’d just get out of NYC and get something to eat back in NJ.

I spent the next 45 minutes sitting in various stages of traffic and regretting that decision. Only two things got me through the trip home: the promise of White Manna and Howard Stern playing an audio clip of David O. Russell flipping out on Lily Tomlin. And $125 in Orwell books. Okay, so maybe it is pretty easy being me. I’ll shut up now.

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Be funny for me!

As longtime readers (and friends) know, I can be tremendously boring. Fortunately, my readers (and friends) are plenty funny. Writes my buddy Tina, “Read a news article today. I don’t know if I’d believe this particular advocate. . .”

A self-inserted vaginal ring that protects from pregnancy for three weeks straight goes on sale in Australia from Tuesday.

The ring can be removed for up to three hours at a time but specialists say it’s better that women get into the habit of leaving it in.

“NuvaRing can be left in during sex and most guys won’t even notice that it’s there,” said GP and reproductive health advocate Dr Sally Cockburn.

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Emissions test

BusinessWeek reports on suspect portions of the carbon offset market:

Done carefully, offsets can have a positive effect and raise ecological awareness. But a close look at several transactions — including those involving the Oscar presenters, Vail Resorts, and the Seattle power company — reveals that some deals amount to little more than feel-good hype. When traced to their source, these dubious offsets often encourage climate protection that would have happened regardless of the buying and selling of paper certificates. One danger of largely symbolic deals is that they may divert attention and resources from more expensive and effective measures.

I’ve done my part to reduce global methane emissions by ceasing to eat at White Castle. Why won’t TerraPass return my calls?

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Axis of Green

Happy St. Patrick’s Day, my drunken Irish readers! It’s not yet 9am local time, so I’ll assume you only have a good buzz on at present!

It’s a hectic weekend here at stately VM Manor. I’ve got plenty of writing to do for my magazine — two articles (regional bio-investment and disposable bioprocessing systems) and an overhaul of our 20-page annual glossary of pharma & biopharma terms — so expect little by way of posting.

Still, I couldn’t let the “running of the green” go by without a wacky article. In this case, it’s a piece from Der Spiegel about how much trouble the German automakers are having building hybrid cars:

[Toyota representatives] told [Porsche CEO] Wiedeking that they could help him, but only by providing the full package — in other words, the platform for the entire vehicle. The Japanese insisted that merely buying the individual components, as Wiedeking had envisioned, made no sense. The Asians politely advised the Porsche boss not to underestimate the complexity of hybrid engines. Wiedeking’s talks with Toyota quickly came to an end.

Today Porsche’s engineers know that the Toyota executives were by no means trying to make fools of them two years ago. The engineers discovered first hand just how sincere the Japanese had actually been when they set out to develop, in a joint effort with Volkswagen, a hybrid engine at Volkswagen’s research center in the town of Isenbüttel near VW’s Wolfsburg headquarters. But the project failed to progress as smoothly as the Germans had expected.

Enjoy. And go drink yourself stupid.

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Drugs’re bad, mmmkay?

Scot Pollard hasn’t had a distinguished career in the NBA. He has shown off some tremendously bad haircuts, which I give him credit for, because not a lot of white guys go with crazy styles in the league.

Although he had a bright yellow mohawk going earlier this season, he has a more conservative look now. He also made one of the funniest in-game comments, um, EVER:

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Explain that to St. Peter, mon General

It’s all a bit of a blur after I invented wine.

–Bacchus

Doing the Islands with Bacchus, a collection of comics by Eddie Campbell, is one of my all-time faves. Consisting of a travelogue of Bacchus and friends around the Greek islands, the comics relate the “real” stories behind some of the Greek myths, along with digressions on the history of fashion, the art of vinoculture, the discovery of champagne, and the nature of the afterlife (or afterdeath, as it turns out). Importantly, Campbell achieves this while keeping his characters as characters. That is, they don’t simply recite facts, but rather bring different perspectives and styles.

The Last of the Summer Wine, a 24-pager narrated by Bacchus’ companion Simpson as he, Bacchus and Hermes travel to Naxos by boat, is a marvel. The story manages to convey the glory of ancient Greek culture, make wry observations (verbal and visual) about the power of myth, and lead to a wonderfully poignant conclusion about the essence of love. Maybe it’s that inner classics-geek I’ve been referring to lately, but the final page of that comic always chokes me up.

I bring all this up because Campbell recently wrote about one of his major influences on those comic strips: the books of Walter James. I’d never heard of James before this, and with good reason. Sez Campbell, “He was an Australian wine maker who wrote several volumes of diaristic thoughts on just about everything, but mostly about winemaking and his enthusiasm for reading. They were published between 1949 (Barrel and Book,) and 1957 (Antipasto) and amounted to six volumes, of which I’ve managed to find four.”

Give Eddie’s post a read, take some delight in the excerpts of James’ writing, and tip a little libation to Bacchus, wouldja?