mb palaver

RandomPalaver: Scarfing Down the Donuts

While in Paris last week, mysterywriter and I were struck by how 9 out of 10 Parisian women, and some of the men, were wearing scarves when it was chilly out.  Not to be outdone, we both ended up buying the same white scarf with a black floral design.  We put them on and looked in the mirror.  I asked mysterywriter if we might be mistaken for Yasser Arafat.  She assured me we would not.

Rachel Ray wasn't so lucky.  Dunkin' Donuts pulled an online ad because of complaints that Rachel's black and white scarf looked like a kaffiyeh, a traditional headdress of Arab men "popularized by Yasser Arafat" (as one put it) and therefore offered symbolic support for terrorists.  I don't even know where to begin.

TechPalaver: A Couple of Comments about Email Subscriptions

If you'd like to subscribe to mbpalaver via email, just enter your email address into the yellow box on the upper left corner and hit the "subscribe" button.

If you are an email subscriber, you might receive tomorrow or later an email with a post from last night.  Feedburner is supposed to send out emails between 5 and 7 am containing any posts that went up since the day before.  Sometimes they don't.  I don't know why, though it seems most likely to happen when the expiration date of the information is particularly short.

Also, although the subscription emails do include photos that accompany the post, they evidently don't always include an indication that a video clip appeared with it.  So if you want to see a video of Mats and Yannick playing tennis on a minicourt on top of a barge on the Seine, and get some infectious music (including a cover of OutKast's "Hey Ya!") stuck in your head, just go directly to mbpalaver.  (By the way, I replaced the youtube link with one from Dailymotion, as the picture quality is markedly better.)  In the future I'll try to indicate in posts when video clips are included.  I wouldn't want you to feel deprived.

MoviePalaver: Best of the 48 Hour Film Project at AFI Silver Theatre

I regretted in law school that I never took a class with a 24-hour take home exam.  Even if given a month to write a paper I would wait until the last 24 hours to start it anyway, so I figured I'd be at my usual comfort (or agonizingly painful discomfort) level, while most everyone else would be freaking out.  (Actually, I'd be much better off than usual, because I'd be able to forgo the standard "Why did I put this off for so long"/"I hate myself" self-flagellation.)

So if I were to make a film, the 48 Hour Film Project might be just the ticket for me.  Participants are given a character, a prop, a line of dialogue and a genre, and only 48 hours to write, shoot, edit and score a movie based on them. Tonight (Thursday) the AFI Silver Theatre in Silver Spring will show the best of the 2008 Washington 48HFP films.  Different selections of twelve films will be shown at 7:00 and 9:30.  A list of films and other information is available on the 48 Hour website.  Tickets can be purchased online at the AFI website.  (It's a little confusing. Click on "Buy Tickets," then scroll down among the movies and select "The 48 Hour Film Pro," listed alphabetically under "Sync or Swim.")  The 48 Hour website recommends getting there early, saying it is likely to sell out.

SportsPalaver: French Open 2008

Noah 25 - rematch sur la péniche
Uploaded by lecoqsportif

At least since college I've lived in fear that I'd be near a not-to-be missed event but be oblivious and miss it entirely. In college this usually took the form of fearing that I'd pass on tickets to see someone I didn't really care to see at Blues Alley, only to find out the next day that Keith Richards had joined him on stage. I don't recall whether this ever happened, or if it was just an irrational fear.  Whatever the history, that dreaded I-coulda-had-a-V8 feeling came over me when I read this bit in the New York Times Sunday:

On Friday night, Wilander and Noah, longtime good friends and now regular golf partners, picked up their tennis rackets and played a lighthearted rematch of their 1983 final on a miniature makeshift court on top of a barge in the Seine river with Parisians shouting their support from bridges and quays as Noah and Wilander banged balls in their direction.

Mysterywriter and I were not only in Paris Friday evening, but crossed the Seine in a cab on the way from our Saint Germain hotel to dinner in the Marais.  Curses!  Mats has always been one of my favorites. I miss him.  (On a side note, am I the only one who has noticed his uncanny resemblance to Pope John Paul II?)

You won't get to see Mats playing in this year's French Open, but it is underway at Roland Garros.  You can find scores, draws, schedule of play, and other information on the official website.  Check out the U.S. television schedule on tennis.com. The tournament is being carried at different times by the Tennis Channel, ESPN2, and NBC.

LanguagePalaver: Why Didn't I Think of That?

You know when someone says something obnoxious and the perfect comeback hits you too late?  The French have an expression for that:  l'esprit d'escalier.  Wikipedia defines it this way:

L'esprit d'escalier (literally, stairway wit) is a French term that describes the predicament of thinking of the right comeback too late. Originally a witticism of Denis Diderot, the French encyclopedist, in his Paradoxe sur le Comédien.

The phrase can be used to describe a riposte to an insult, or any witty, clever remark that comes to mind too late to be useful—when one is on the "staircase" leaving the scene.

This expression dates from a time when the word esprit, which now means "spirit" or "mind", meant more commonly "wit" (though mot d'esprit still means "witticism").

I prefer the definition in my old college French dictionary (defining "avoir l'esprit d'escalier"):  "to be slow on the repartee."  I love the fact that Wikipedia refers to "The Comeback" episode of "Seinfeld:  "the jerk store called and they're running out of you."

RandomPalaver: Widgets!

So I'm heading out soon for a trip to France.  Last night I had the kind of long, pre-vacation to do list that only a procrastinating overachiever can appreciate, and I was feeling a bit overwhelmed.  I'd already done three loads of laundry and worked out, but had yet to finish watching the first episode of "Cranford," eat dinner, watch "Band of Brothers" for pre-Normandy study, hand wash a bunch of clothes, brush up on the plus-que-parfait tense, start packing, and scour my closets for the photos I took on my last trip to Paris in 1998 to remind myself of the name of the restaurant with the owner's Great Dane lying in the doorway.  Then I noticed that the thing in my dining room that's been a prop for other things in my dining room was Egbert's sister's cooler, which I used to hold beer at my St. Patrick's Day party.  Assuming the ice had melted, that means the beer had been soaking in water since March.  I realized I should empty it out, for two reasons:  Egbert's sister might want it back, and the beer had been soaking in water since March.

Without getting into a lot of detail, evidently when you take a bottle of Guinness equipped with a Rocket Widget that's been lying on its side since March and stand it upright, and then open it, even holding it low in the sink, which you're doing because you're a good building citizen and don't want to leave full (but damaged) bottles for the trash guy to deal with, there's a bit of an explosion.  Suffice it to say I wound up not only with my clothing drenched with Guinness, but also brown streaks all over my face.  I'm considering selling this story to Swiffer, which I used to clean the ceiling.  It pivots like nobody's business.

From now on, my favorite curse word, in case James Lipton ever asks, is "widgets."

BookPalaver: Ted Sorensen at Politics & Prose

Ted Sorensen, JFK's close advisor and speechwriter, will read from his new book, Counselor:  A Life at the Edge of Mystery, this Wednesday, May 14, at 7 p.m. at Politics & Prose.  As with any author event, the book will be discounted 20% for members during the month of May.  If anyone goes, and Mr. Sorenson takes questions, please ask him about the nature of his rhetorical style, which is my Achilles Heel when trying to crack cryptoquotes.  I can crack nearly every quote within 30 or 60 seconds, but certain quotes elude me, and 9 out of 10 of those turn out to be Kennedy's.  (I would ask him this myself, but there's no need to display my nerd bravado quite so publicly.)

Here are the publisher's comments:

In this gripping memoir, John F. Kennedy's closest advisor recounts in full for the first time his experience counseling Kennedy through the most dramatic moments in American history.

Sorensen returns to January 1953, when he and the freshman senator from Massachusetts began their extraordinary professional and personal relationship. Rising from legislative assistant to speechwriter and advisor, the young lawyer from Nebraska worked closely with JFK on his most important speeches, as well as his book "Profiles in Courage," Sorensen encouraged the junior senator's political ambitions--from a failed bid for the vice presidential nomination in 1956 to the successful presidential campaign in 1960, after which he was named Special Counsel to the President.

Sorensen describes in thrilling detail his experience advising JFK during some of the most crucial days of his presidency, from the decision to go to the moon to the Cuban Missile Crisis, when JFK requested that the thirty-four-year-old Sorensen draft the key letter to Khrushchev at the most critical point of the world's first nuclear confrontation. After Kennedy was assassinated, Sorensen stayed with President Johnson for a few months before leaving to write a biography of JFK. In 1968 he returned to Washington to help run Robert Kennedy's presidential campaign. Through it all, Sorensen never lost sight of the ideals that brought him to Washington and to the White House, working tirelessly to promote and defend free, peaceful societies.

Illuminating, revelatory, and utterly compelling, "Counselor" is the brilliant, long-awaited memoir from the remarkable man who shaped the presidency and the legacy of one of the greatest leaders America has ever known.

tvPalaver: Tina Fey on Baby Panic

This morning NPR ran a story about women waiting too long to have children.  It was irritating for a host of reasons, but it reminded me of one of my favorite Tina Fey'Weekend Update segments on "Saturday Night Live."  I made a mental note to do a post on it tonight.  I lost the mental note, but tonight's "30 Rock" episode (in which Tina's character Liz Lemon thinks she's pregnant) reminded me. Here's a transcript of the Weekend Update bit, based on one posted on snltranscripts.jt.org:

Tina Fey: The cover story of New York Magazine this week is "Baby Panic". This goes perfectly with the other magazines on my coffee table - "Where Are The Babies?", "Why Haven't You Had A Baby?", and "For God's Sake, Have A Baby!" Thanks, Time Magazine, just what I need - another article so depressing, I can actually hear my ovaries curling up.

According to author Sylvia Hewlett, career women shouldn't wait to have babies because our fertility takes a steep drop-off after age 27. And Sylvia's right; I definitely should have had a baby when I was 27, living in Chicago over a biker bar, pulling down a cool $12,000 a year. That would have worked out great. But Sylvia's message is basically that feminism can't change nature - which is true, alright. If feminism could change nature, Ruth Bader Ginsberg would be all oiled up on the cover of Mac - but she's not.

Ladies, there's no reason to panic, though. It's out of your control, anyway. Either your cooter works, or it doesn't. My mom had me when she was 40, and this was back in the 70's, when the only fertility aid was Harvey's Bristol Creme. So, waiting is just a risk that I'm going to have to take. And I don't think I could do fertility drugs, because, to me, six half-pound translucent babies is not a miracle. It's gross. I'd rather adopt a baby, I don't need a kid that looks like me. I was an ugly kid. I looked like a cross between that chick from the Indigo Girls and.. the other chick from the Indigo Girls. Not a cute kid, alright.

Dratch, Poehler, Maya? how do you feel about author Sylvia Hewlett?

Together: We hated Sylvia Hewlett!!

Rachel Dratch: Yeah. Sylvia, um, thanks for reminding me that I have to hurry up and have a baby. Uh, me and my four cats will get right on that.

Amy Poehler: My neighbor has this adorable, cute little Chinese baby that speaks Italian. So, you know, I’ll just buy one of those.

Maya Rudolph: Yeah, Sylvia, maybe your next book should tell men our age to stop playing Grand Theft Auto III, and holding out for the chick from "Alias".

Rachel Dratch & Amy Poehler: Yeah.

Tina Fey: You're not gonna get the chick from "Alias"!

WebPalaver: Googling Within

Although most websites these days include search functions, occasionally I'll come across one with no search function or one that just returns gobbledygook. Here's a trick to using Google to search within other sites.  In the Google search box, just type:

site:www.whatever.com search terms

Google then shows a list of hits in that familiar, helpful, google format.  I can't think of a good example to give of a site with a bad search function because it wouldn't be nice to mention my employer, so here's an example of a search within a site with a perfectly good search function, but that shows how you can use Google as a short cut. To find comments that Tom Sietsema, The Washington Post restaurant critic, has made about Cork, the popular new wine bar on 14th Street, NW, you can type something like this:

site:www.washingtonpost.com sietsema cork

The search returns a list of Washington Post articles and chat discussions that mention Cork.  You can also sometimes use this trick to circumvent the requirement on some sites that you register before being able to use the search function.

Alternatively, you can use Google's advanced search form and enter the site name into the "search within a site or domain" field.  But once you get used to typing "site:" it seems to cut out a step in your searching.  Which allows more time for watching "Law and Order" reruns.

Speaking of Tom Sietsema, in tomorrow's Post he reports that a new Belgian restaurant, called Et Voila!, is opening in the Palisades neighborhood in northwest DC. Check out his May 7 Dish column.

tvPalaver: Cranford

 

Tonight at 9 Masterpiece will begin airing "Cranford," a three-part series based on three novels by Elizabeth Gaskell.  It stars the always excellent Judi Dench and has received good reviews.  But that's not why the very thought of it gives me the warm fuzzies.  It's because I spent much of my childhood in Cranford (New Jersey).  The photo above, of a carnival on the Rahway River, dates from 1910 -- long before my time.  But the Cranford Canoe Club, below, looks like it hasn't changed a bit since we left New Jersey for West Virginia in 1972.

Back to the point, if you missed the first episode of "Cranford" tonight, check your local PBS listings for repeat airings, or watch it online -- a new feature on PBS.  [Edited 5/27/08 to add:  The "watch online" feature was short-lived; it's no longer available.]  Here's a description from their website:

Welcome to Cranford, circa 1840...a rural English town where etiquette rules, undergirded by a healthy amount of gossip. Modernity is making a move in town as construction of a railway comes harrowingly close. Cranford's eclectic residents, among them Matty Jenkyns (Dame Judi Dench) her sister Deborah (Dame Eileen Atkins), and Miss Pole (Imelda Staunton), stay immersed in the sweet pleasures and sometimes heartbreaking realities of simple village life. But when a handsome, young doctor arrives with cutting-edge new techniques, it rapidly becomes clear that as the world changes, so Cranford will change with it. Based on three Elizabeth Gaskell novels (Cranford, My Lady Ludlow and Mr. Harrison's Confessions), and boasting an all-star cast, Cranford breathes life into one town during one extraordinary year.