34

I'm a little behind on my New Yorker s, just like I'm a little behind on blogging, and on my RSS feeds, and on the books I'm reading, and on pretty much everything except World of Warcraft, in which I'm progressing quite nicely through the Burning Crusade , thank you very much. I did get to some of last week's issue before this week's came, and thought the piece on Putin's Russia was well worth reading. I had a general idea that things were corrupt in Russia, and Colbert's cries for Putin '08 were appropriately biting, but the article gave a seemingly thorough account of just how bad things are there. The parents of one of Sheryl's friend are planning a trip to Moscow for some unknown reason. (Maybe they're assassins?) The father was nervous about his daughter moving to NYC because of a bad experience he had in the city in the '70s, when he said someone chased him down the street holding a board with a nail in it. I can just imagine wha...

Tonight was cook-y night at Shay Gordon-Posnick. I finally opened up the pasta maker that Sheryl got me for Chanukah and gave it my best. Making pasta is uncomfortably close to baking, something that I avoid at all costs, but damned if I didn't want to eat dinner tonight. Sheryl was a big help, as using the pasta machine is a two-person task: one to feed the sheets into the cutting rollers, and the other to catch the resultant strand of pasta before they touch our icky countertop. Despite approaching the endeavor with that less than generous attitude, I guess I fared all right. I'll definitely be less stressed out the next time I use the machine. The pasta was a good texture, but perhaps a bit too thick and definitely too eggy. Sheryl picked up the slack and made a wonderful dessert: chocolate pudding . Did you know that you could actually make chocolate pudding? The wonder.

We went to Europe to eat. I like buildings and museums and stuff, but I went to Europe to eat. Sheryl went to Europe to eat too, I’d assume. Maybe I should ask her. Going to London to eat is recommended, but only if it is the sixteenth century (and only then if you like your mutton charred). Inhabitants of the past half-millennium are better served by any culinary option available in the neighborhood of their particular space-time. I lived in London for 18 weeks and knew this to be true, but I was foolish and let my desire to show Sheryl My London trump my stomach. (You’re going to have to forgive any accuracies in this retelling; I’ll remember as best I can, but some details might be changed for the sake of edible drama. Take it all with a grain or two of salt.) Our first meal was the one I spent four years looking forward to: a return to Japan Centre. While training in London I worked with some kids from the Tokyo office, and someone back in Japan must have told them about this place...

So this is the plan. 34 is set to retire at age 34. We’re going to spend our lives traveling around the world from city to city. Once there, we’ll wake up around noon, walk for hours and hours and then more hours, fall into bed exhausted and full of local cuisine around 8, and then muster up enough energy to play a game or two of Travel Scrabble. Repeat the next day, and then next. That’s the basic summation of our European jaunt over the holiday, so you’ll have to excuse me if sitting behind a computer for 8+ hours just isn’t cutting it, at least for this week. London and Paris are of course lovely cities, but become even lovelier when you’re newly engaged with not an obligation or care in the world. All was even more golden as soon as I calmed the eff down and realized that every day didn’t need to be supermegachockfull of plans (I may be extremely lazy when it comes to, say, opening my mail or returning phone calls, but when it comes to planning my fun it is SERIOUS BUSINESS). Also...

I took my sweet time about it, but our London and Paris pictures are finally fully titled and tagged on the Flickr site. Some point down the line I'm going to blog about our culinary experiences in Europe, but I want to wait a bit until I forget everything first.

While I don't bother much with the Science Times anymore, this past week's piece on free will (which is to say, the lack thereof) is of obvious interest. Google's Blogger site search doesn't work very reliably, and works not at all for articles I imported from the old blog, but here are some links to previous treatments of free will and determinism: Late night metaphysics , Late night follow-ups , In which I horrify just about everyone . (And then Must see TV .) There were quite a few comments going back and forth on that first post, but unfortunately they were lost in the site migration.