Latest Parries
April 2012
From Nokia N95 to iPhone 4S
Annoyances and upsets with the iPhone 4S have been more than offset by its screen, the silkiness of its surfaces, the camera, and the third-party market for both software and hardware.
February 2012
2001: A Space Odyssey: Dry, Juicy, Linear, Luminous
After they finished watching the Bond movies, I figured the next series John Gruber and Dan Benjamin would discuss on The Talk Show would be Stanley Kubrick’s oeuvre. But Gruber refused — too personal for podcasting, he said. Disappointed, I rewatched 2001.
January 2012
A Scheme of a Number of Friends
Instead of acknowledging the wisdom of leading from behind, the Right jumped on the Obama administration’s handling of Libya as yet another example of at best incompetence. They lost me there.
October 2011
The Mouse and the Cantilever
Steve Jobs we lost at the age of 56; when Frank Lloyd Wright reached that age it was still only 1923, the time of merely his second comeback with Tokyo’s Imperial Hotel.
March 2010
Friendship is for Weenies
It’s amazing, given the adulation he enjoyed elsewhere, that the Israeli public knew from the start not to trust this US President.
Before the Setup
Nobody from usesthis.com has asked me what my setup us, nor is likely to anytime soon. So I’m just going to mouth off here about it. But first, some background.
February 2010
Walter Russell Mead steps gingerly into the Wieseltier/Sullivan imbroglio
On the Leon Wieseltier/Andrew Sullivan spat, Walter Russell Mead seems to want to have his strudel and eat it too.
October 2009
My Hope: Obama’s Change
Defeat in the Olympics bid may focus the mind in the Oval Office where it should be: Afghanistan.
July 2009
At Modi’in Mall
There’s nothing else around here except empty desolate pretty hills. The Israel Trail passes by a bit to the west. It’s a hot July Wednesday morning. Things are reasonably busy. The shops are mostly franchises, almost all homegrown — Super-Pharm, Aroma, Tzomet Sfarim, Cup O’ Joe’s, LaMetayel, Mega, Fox, Castro, H&O.
Israel, the Bad So Far
I’m surprised at the general appearance of Tel Aviv folks. Yes, it’s hot, but people appear dressed as if they’re in, I don’t know, Be’er Sheva. And the people in Be’er Sheva, last time I was there, looked to me like they’re dressed for Gaza.
I t’s a misty morning here on the highways of southern England, 6:46am according to the red italicized digital clock at the right-side front of the bus. Two episodes of Star Trek on this here MacBook — “Tomorrow is Yesterday” and the impressive “A Taste of Armageddon” — are enough for one morning. With the squeaks from the front and the clatter from the bulkheads and the smell from the toilet, there’s a reason to prefer Gatwick and the train over Heathrow and the bus. It’s very misty but we’re here. Korean Air Cargo. A parking lot.
It’s been a while since I was at Heathrow. The departure area here at Terminal 3 is impressive, with nice parquet flooring and a variety of coffee places selling at more or less high street prices. Check-in at Virgin was a breeze — almost no line. Is it the time of day? Was I early or late? So far it’s been a smooth airport experience — no sweating, no rushing — though I’m quite exhausted nonetheless due to having slept 3.5 hours only. But I don’t really feel like more coffee. I’d eat something but I don’t know how soon after boarding the plane we’ll be fed. Heathrow does seem to have less eateries with views of the runway than doth Gatwick. Five minutes to boarding.
8:05am. A swarthy Muslim-looking woman wearing a headscarf is manning the airport security desk. I roll my eyes at her, at the irony, the ridiculous political correctness; then at myself, my unfair assumption that she herself is likely to have jihadi and murderous leanings. I shouldn’t do that. Very rude.
Is this mad and overkill and destructive, travelling all this way to work on a web site? At Amdocs the client paid for the team visits.
4:10pm and as good a transatlantic flight as the previous one on Continental was bad. A generous breakfast, the fanciest entertainment setup I’ve seen on a plane, with a wide choice of movies to watch at your whim, rather than rotating through a cycle. But a couple of small complaints. The headphones I got may have come sealed in a plastic bag, but their felt smelled of grimy human hair oils. Saving grace: the headphone jack is standard 3.5mm so I could use my own phones. The yogurt was a bit peculiar, smelling like the coat of one of the older geezers on the bus to the airport. Saving grace: the breakfast came with two yogurts, or rather, a yogurt and a cute muesli package from Ireland with a sealed tub of yogurt to pour onto it when ready to eat. And remarkably enough, the little fruit salad seemed perfectly fresh despite being cut up and served en masse. It couldn’t have been cut more than an hour before I ate it.
I’ve watched two movies here on the plane: Fantastic Four: Rise of the Silver Surfer, which was better than their previous outing (Jessica Alba should have gotten first bill for this one); and The Good Shepherd, better than expected, much more exciting than Matt Damon’s only-slighly-less-asinine-and-empty-than-its-predecessors Bourne Ultimatum. Angelina Jolie playing against type. Restrained performance by Damon works well. Some harsh scenes there, and Pesci with a great cameo, though Damon gets that punchline:
Joseph Palmi: Let me ask you something. We Italians, we got our families, and we got the church. The Irish, they have the homeland. Jews, their tradition. Even the niggers, they got their music. What about you people, Mr. Wilson? What do you have?
Edward Wilson: The United States of America. The rest of you are just visiting.
Nice that even up here in the friendly skies they show this and all the movies unedited — even the scene where our hero has a beautiful woman hurled out an airplane by the pilot and crew!
All these movies though, and sitting in one’s seat with the blinds down to see them, you of course lose the magic of flying. It takes me a period of standing in the bulkhead passage to rediscover that magic. It’s like looking down the center of a train carriage and seeing the panorama of the scene, moving but blocked in the middle with the rest left to the imagination to complete. Standing there at the bulkhead you get something. You see less but you feel more, because golly gosh, we’re participating in the modern miracle of commercial air traffic up here. Plus, we’re up in the sky! It’s a great place to have thoughts.
Previously
A Drop in Time
Nextly
The Big and Easy