a blog by Ian Kennedy
Meanwhile in Hawai’i – Pat Campanella gave his wife Mimi driving lessons and she overcompensated to avoid an oncoming car sending their Toyota Highlander through a neighbor’s fence, across the patio and into the 80-year old’s pool. The couple got out fine, a little shaken and wet but otherwise uninjured.
I can imagine the husband shouting as they flew across the yard, “The brake! The brake! No the the left pedal, LEFT!”
Apparently this is a thing.
There’s a profile of a guy on Friendster making the rounds with the most over-the-top About Me section that it’s worth posting in its entirety:
I am a dynamic figure, often seen scaling walls and crushing ice with my bare hands. I have been known to remodel train stations on my lunch breaks, making them more efficient in the area of heat retention. I translate ethnic slurs for Cuban refugees, I write award winning operas, I manage time efficiently. Occasionally, I tread water for 3 days in a row. I woo women with my sensuous and god-like saxophone playing, I can pilot bicycles up severe inclines at unflagging speed, I cook 30 minute brownies in 20 minutes. I am an expert in stucco, a veteran of love, and an outlaw in Peru. Using only a hoe and a large glass of water, I once single- handedly defended a small village in the Amazon Basin from a horde of ferocious army ants. I play bluegrass cello, I was scouted by the Mets, I am the subject of numerous documentaries. I enjoy urban hang gliding. On Wednesday afternoons I repair electrical appliances free of charge. I am an abstract artist, a concrete analyst and a ruthless bookie. Critics worldwide swoon over my original line of corduroy evening wear. I don’t perspire. I am a private citizen, yet I receive fan mail. I have been caller number 9 and have won the weekend passes. Last summer I toured New Jersey with a traveling centrifugal-force demonstration. I bat 400. My deft floral arrangements have earned me fame in international botany circles. Children trust me. I can hurl tennis rackets at small moving objects with deadly accuracy. I once read Paradise Lost, Moby Dick, and David Copperfield in one day and still had time to refurbish an entire dining room that evening. I know the exact location of every item at the supermarket. I have performed several covert operations with the CIA. I sleep once a week; when I do sleep, I sleep in a chair. While on vacation in Canada, I successfully negotiated with a group of terrorists who had seized a small bakery. The laws of physics do not apply to me. I balance, I weave, I dodge, I frolic and all my bills are paid. On the weekends, to let off steam, I participate in full-contact origami. Years ago, I discovered the meaning of life but I forgot to write it down. I have made extraordinary four course meals using only a mouli and a toaster oven. I breed prize-winning clams. I have won bullfights in San Juan, cliff-diving competitions in Sri Lanka, and spelling bees at the Kremlin. I have played Hamlet; I have performed open-heart surgery, and have spoken to Elvis. But I have not yet been to Australia.
UPDATE: I have learned that this was lifted from essay written by someone named Hugh Gallagher in 1998. Hugh is now a writer.
I’m not normally a muscle bike type of person but the image of the new 1800cc Honda Valkyrie caught my eye. I think I feel a mid-life crisis coming on!
Poking around to look for the latest Krugman column in which he illustrates the arrogance of President Bush’s one page request for an additional $25 billion for adventures in Afghanistan and Iraq, I see that he’s also brought together the best of his writings on Japan into one place.
The state of Japan is a scandal, an outrage, a reproach. It is not, at least so far, a human disaster like Indonesia or Brazil. But Japan’s economic malaise is uniquely gratuitous. Sixty years after Keynes, a great nation – a country with a stable and effective government, a massive net creditor, subject to none of the constraints that lesser economies face – is operating far below its productive capacity, simply because its consumers and investors do not spend enough. That should not happen; in allowing it to happen, and to continue year after year, Japan’s economic officials have subtracted value from their nation and the world as a whole on a truly heroic scale.
Bottles of the first ever Vintage (1921) of Dom Pérignon, 1929 Château d’Yquem, 1934 Romanée Conti (pictured), all these and more from the cellers of Doris Duke, the tobacco heiress that made her home several miles up the road in Somerville on a 2,700 acre estate. The bottles will be auctioned off at Christies in NYC to benefit the Doris Duke Charitable Foundation on June 2nd.
The private cellar of Doris Duke is without question one of the most superlative collections of Fine and Rare Wines to come to market in the nearly forty years of dedicated Fine Wine auctions at Christie’s. This sale ranks as the most unique offering of pre-war vintages ever sold in North America; both in its impeccable provenance and its depth of some of the best wines of the twentieth century.
The cellar highlights a period of wine-making and vintages whose like will never be repeated and is a true “time capsule” of bottlings spanning 1904 to 1934 and encompassing the great châteaux and domaines of France from Bordeaux, Burgundy and Champagne as well as ports and madeiras.
The quantities here speak to an era of grand entertaining long-since passed, the vintages to yields and wine-making techniques changed by technological advancement and in one case to a vineyard now included in another by the appelation controlée laws.
Not only are the wines themselves remarkable, but the quality of the archival material associated with them is equally astonishing. No collection of this era can have been so meticulously catalogued by its owners, so that today’s collector can be assured of the provenance. Researching this collection has brought this cellar to life; tracing the wine’s journey from initial invoices (in old French francs) and shipping dockets, through cellar inventories, entertaining records and through to NY Wines Christie’s recent cataloguing and inspection.
Christie’s Lot Description
Oh yeah, they’re also hawking a 20-carat Tiffany diamond ring too.
Just when I thought I was going to close out my posts for the day, a colleague sent me a link to an eBay auction for his ex-wife’s wedding dress. “One Slightly Used Size 12 Wedding Gown. Only worn twice: Once at the wedding and once for these pictures.” is closing it’s bid in 3 hours but I’m told the listing will remain for the next 30 days.
The commentary alone is priceless and after 4.5 million hits, he’s formed a little community around the fate of this dress. Chalk this up to another demonstration of the spontaneous networking power of the internet!
Sony has just released it’s LIBRE e-book based on the Boston-based company, E-Ink technology which they have licensed. This is a recycling of an old concept that Sony has tried before (remember their custom-sized CDROM Databook?) and hope to make a successful go of it this time.
At 40,000 yen a pop with 300 yen to rent an e-book for 60 days, it’s questionable this can beat the incumbent technology. It’s hard to improve on a technology that allows for rapid access, can accept scribbles in the margin, can be loaned to friends, can be used to swat flies and protect you from the rain, supports full color, and runs on no batteries. I’m talking about the plain old paperback.
Rummy Blustered on Face the Nation
SCHIEFFER: Well, let me just ask you this. If they did not have these weapons of mass destruction, though, granted all of that is true, why then did they pose an immediate threat to us, to this country?
Sec. RUMSFELD: Well, you’re the–you and a few other critics are the only people I’ve heard use the phrase “immediate threat.” I didn’t. The president didn’t. And it’s become kind of folklore that that’s–that’s what’s happened. The president went…
SCHIEFFER: You’re saying that nobody in the administration said that.
Sec. RUMSFELD: I–I can’t speak for nobody–everybody in the administration and say nobody said that.
SCHIEFFER: Vice president didn’t say that? The…
Sec. RUMSFELD: Not–if–if you have any citations, I’d like to see ’em.
Mr. FRIEDMAN: We have one here. It says “some have argued that the nu”–this is you speaking–“that the nuclear threat from Iraq is not imminent, that Saddam is at least five to seven years away from having nuclear weapons. I would not be so certain.”
Sec. RUMSFELD: And–and…
Mr. FRIEDMAN: It was close to imminent.
Sec. RUMSFELD: Well, I’ve–I’ve tried to be precise, and I’ve tried to be accurate. I’m s–
Mr. FRIEDMAN: “No terrorist state poses a greater or more immediate threat to the security of our people and the stability of the world and the regime of Saddam Hussein in Iraq.”
Sec. RUMSFELD: Mm-hmm. It–my view of–of the situation was that he–he had–we–we believe, the best intelligence that we had and other countries had and that–that we believed and we still do not know–we will know.
Thanks to Stephen Berlin Johnson and the Center for American Progress