34

Yay for work .

Well, I'll probably keep this as the new home to 34 , if nothing else to to calm the markets. If being a semi-Economics major taught me anything it's that the markets like certainty. Strikes against Blogger include the fact that it's part of the well-documented Google megaplex that will, mark my words, own all information everywhere inside of five years. Also I don't think there's a convenient way for me to blog from my nerd-phone –at least not yet, but I do have some ideas for programming a solution to that. I also miss the ability to categorize posts into different sections. How will you know that a recipe I post is food-related if it's not marked Dining In ? And here's a little blogging secret: I used to come up with the category first, and the actual content second when writing a new post. Now who knows what I'll have to resort to for inspiration. But anyway, here we are. You can update your bookmarks to point to http://thirtyfour.blogspot.com/ , and...

This may or may not be the new home of 34 . Updates to follow...

To sate your spectatorial urges whilst waiting for the start of the baseball season (or, you know, the Spectator to come out of suspended production), you could watch Banana, Sarahs and me play Scrabble . Slowly.

Times military/culinary reporting of the day : "As in a civilian restaurant, it's challenging to serve so many different important people," said Sergeant Green, who serves in the Pentagon. "Like when all the Joint Chiefs of Staff went on Atkins and we had to take all the starch out of every recipe."

I finished Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close yesterday. It is sad, sad, sad. It's also quite short and extremely funny in places. But enormously sad. I am looking forward to going back to Tim O'Brien's book about the Vietnam War as a pick-me-up.

Whenever there are news vans lined up outside of my office I figure something's going on at the Federal Courthouse across the street; turns out that today it was a police-cum-mobster indictment . Fun.

Mao II has been sitting around for a while, not getting read, and despite (or perhaps because of) that I ordered The Things They Carried and Oracle Night . I started reading The Things They Carried and like it, but I just bought Extremely Loud & Incredibly Close from what's really a great bookstore on Court St. on my way home, somewhat to prove to Scotter that it had been released already, but primarily because I am looking forward to reading it. I don't buy hardcover books as a general rule, but exceptions are made. The New Yorker was some sort of fashion tripe this week.

Sometimes I drink tea, and sometimes I drink beer. I buy my tea from Upton Tea , because I am in the know. Get yourself a teapot with a built-in infuser and buy loose-leaf tea. I can recommend the Jasmine Flower by way of Greens, and you probably need an Earl Grey (taken with milk and sugar/honey, of course) as well as an Irish Breakfast . Jasmine Pearl tea is fairly expensive, but worth keeping on hand to impress the sort of folk who are impressed by tea brewed from jasmine flowers wrapped by hand into tiny little pearl-shaped nuggets. As for beers, I am very much partial to the Brooklyn Brewery line. Wintertime brings with it Brookyln Monster Ale , a Barleywine, which means no one likes how it tastes except for me and Adam (and I think Adam is just humouring me). During the rest of the year I'm partial to Brooklyn Brown Ale . I just bought some Brooklyn Chocolate Stout from the beer shop down the block (I love Cobble Hill) and that's a nice seasonal brew as well. It doe...

I sat around catching up on my New Yorker s last night. This week's issue wasn't terribly noteable apart from the god-awful Sasha Frere-Jones piece on ringtones masquerading as a Pop Music column. The cover is kind of cute, with Adam and Even being banished from Manhattan across the Brooklyn Bridge to... my neighborhood. Hey! Then there was last week's issue, the highlight for me being the Jim Holt piece about Einstein and Gödel. I'm really interested in time , and the piece has a nice outline of some of the questions about time that Gödel pursued as a follow-up to Einstein's work. When I get the time I'll write up some of my own thinking about, erm, time. Jonathan Lethem also has a fairly well-written (if not terribly interesting) Personal History piece in the issue.

According to tonight's Daily Show, Pynchon references in blogs are to be avoided as they're "so pre-post-mid-post-modern." If anyone even knew that "Interested in sophisticated fun?" was a Pynchon reference I'll give you a cookie, unless you owe me money, in which case I'll demand that you pay me money.

President Bush Makes Surprise Visit to the C.I.A. . I am tired of the C.I.A. being surprised by things. If they're caught off guard by a visit from one of the most visible people in America, a man who'd have difficulty outwitting a dead halibut, I don't feel good about their ability to track the comings and goings of terrorists.

I like Interpol. I like Interpol in concert. The first time I saw them, at the Hammerstein Ballroom back in, say, November, they really rocked. They played a long set and the place was small enough I had good seats even from the top of the mezzanine. I saw them again last night at Radio City Music Hall and that show was not quite as good--not as long at least, and the acoustics in Radio City aren't as good as in Hammerstein for some reason. It's hard to complain too much about song selection at an Interpol concert because all their songs fundamentally sound the same (yes, I know that that's not true, but yes, I know it is). The Pixies show back in... Decemeber? Whenever. That was my favourite show of the year. It was the first night of the weeklong set at the Hammerstein. I'm not the most knowledgeable Pixies fax, not being familiar with much beyond their Best Of album, and it so happened that that's all they played. Score. The R.E.M. show back in October at Madison...

Times ontological-puzzler-deflty-inserted-into-a-take-away-food-review of the day : JENNIFER RAAB, the president of Hunter College on the Upper East Side, said: "We order from the office once or twice a week from Neil's Coffee Shop," 961 Lexington Avenue, at 70th Street; (212) 628-7474. "It looks like an old-time diner, with stools and stuff. It's cute. How come you still exist? I order a grilled chicken salad."