Action is being taken today in the Middle East by the Moro Islamic Liberation Front–or, as they call themselves in their signage, the MILF.
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I am in Athens, a wide-eyed tourist until my EMBA International Emerging Markets Global Study Tour kicks in tomorrow evening. So far I know the whereabouts of only one of my three dozen colleagues, and she’s asleep, so I spent the day meandering the city on my own.
First, the fun: Greece is visually stunning. The ruins and archaeology are awesome, in the classic sense of the word, and staring at the Acropolis from below is a thrilling experience. I had a nice lunch, spanakopita and all, and I like my hotel for the night, the Grecotel Athens Plaza. Tomorrow the class checks into the Grand Bretagne, which appears to be Athens’ equivalent of the Plaza in New York City.
However.
When packing, I opted for comfortable-American gear instead of mesh-in European attire, figuring I’d be traveling in packs of 30ish Yanks most of the time, so why not wear my jeans and Nikes instead of khakis and Campers?
Here’s why: I am a mark.
In four hours of strolling around Athens, I was approached no less than three times by opportunistic locals. First up was a chatty middle-aged man proud of his English, and his son goes to school in Texas, and why don’t you come see the car, jingle jingle, complete with following me halfway down the street when I declined and turned away. Next came the homeless man who nearly walked into me and tapped my shoulder as I went by, followed not long after by a trio of youngish women–nearly girls–the middle one of whom held her leering eye contact and talked Greek as I walked past. Not to mention our cabbie from the airport, a friendly and responsible man who drove us to our hotel without issue, then demanded a 25-euro fee when the meter read 10.63, to cover “toll, and tip, and you know.” And the FUCK BUSH graffiti on side streets (not that I blame them). And the yes-we’ll-help-you-but-notice-our-indignation tones of voice of most of the retailers I encountered, from the newsstand staff to the spanakopita woman.
Within 24 hours I will be reunited with my class, and I expect things to go more smoothly once we’re working as a group. For now, though, I feel like quite the Ugly American.
(P.S. Email and phone contact will be spotty until October 21. Have a great week.)
In New York, location is everything. Apparently, when the location is unavailable, piggybacking a name from another neighborhood will do:
~ The New York branch of London’s Soho House is not in Soho, as it is in the UK, but rather the Meatpacking District. One assumes Meatpacking House wouldn’t quite connote the right aura.
~ DT/UT, the “downtown uptown” coffeehouse on Second Avenue that brings the East Village to the East 80s, is opening a second branch—downtown.
~ Chelsea Paper is in fact in Midtown, on East 57th Street. There is a Chelsea Paper in Chelsea, but we won’t get into that here.
Let me know if I missed any. I assume many more exist.
A summary article on the NASA explorer Galileo, Magnifico! is a perfect example of why The Economist is the most insightful, wise, witty and acerbic publication in the English language.
- After a shaky start, the craft has been one of NASA’s most successful enterprises, and an example of what America’s space agency does bestâpushing back the frontiers of understanding, both literally and metaphorically, rather than keeping underemployed astronauts in low Earth orbit, and occasionally killing them.
Oh, and the sub-headings in the article are all lines from “Bohemian Rhapsody.”
A few years ago I won a TiVo, then sold it on eBay when I decided I didn’t want to pay the monthly fee. I wasn’t enough of a television wacher at the time to justify it.
Three years on, my television-commercial-producing wife and I watch a fair amount of television, and a DVR would make our lives much easier. But we weren’t about to pay $300 for a new TiVo box. Amy spent a decent amount of time ribbing me for selling something so good without considering the long-term ramifications.
The silver lining in our TiVo-less apartment is that Time Warner Cable is a remarkably savvy company, and as a result, we got our first DVR cable box Saturday. The future is now: the “clicker” has now evolved into a programmable system with a 50-gig hard drive and one-click recording.
I spent the weekend appreciating the novelty of the DVR system, hitting the instant-replay button countless times on George Steinbrenner saying “Oh!” in his latest Visa ad. But the true promises of the system were exposed Sunday night, when Amy got called to work and missed the “Sex and the City” finale.
It occurred to me that at last I could set the TV to tape a show without any aggravation (after years of not learning how to program my VCR). And indeed, it couldn’t have been easier:
- Hit the Guide button like I do every day to check the listings.
- Zoom to the listing for “Sex and the City”—by station, time, title, or theme—and press the Select button as though I were jumping to view it right now.
- Press the Select button again on “record this show.” Done.
I watched the show live (even paused it at one point), and the missus watched it on the DVR when she came home. Bingo bango.
I’m sure this sounds like basic stuff to anyone comfortable with a VCR, but the quantum leap here is in the simplification. For once, technology actually makes a process shorter. No more seeking out the right sub-menus to enter start date, end date, time, and channel. No more setting the digital cable box to jump to the channel that matches the VCR. No more looking for the right videotape wound to the right spot. Terrific.
The DVR itself creates some trade-offs with the cable service. The menus and channel switching are slow, and TWC has a new menu font that’s not as easy to read as the old system’s. The remote is huge.
The additional features, though, far outweigh the drawbacks. In addition to its DVR functionality, the box has two tuners, so it’s an automatic watch-and-record box. The cable box has picture-in-picture. The sound and picture quality seem a little more crisp, too; I remember griping about the jpeg-style pixelization of my first digital cable box.
The DVR cable box costs $7 more than a standard digital cable system. After two days, I can already tell that it’s money well spent.
Scene: The Pahu i’a Restaurant at the Four Seasons Hualalai on the Big Island of Hawai’i, six nights into the honeymoon. David is wearing a green linen shirt and light-colored linen pants. Amy is wearing a black sundress with small red and yellow flowers.
The new Mr. and Mrs. Wertheimer are seated at an ocean-view table just before sundown. The maitre d’ gets the newlyweds comfortable and places menus and a wine list on the table. He then addresses Amy:
“Mrs. Wertheimer, I see you are wearing a black dress this evening. Would you like a black napkin this evening so you don’t get any lint from our white napkins on your dress?”
—
Needless to say, we had a terrific vacation. Our wedding was just about perfect. More tales in the coming days.
Consulting project: done.
Other consulting project: done.
Dance lessons: done.
Dog-sitting: arranged.
Newspaper: stopped.
Apartment: cleaned.
Pre-event massage: ahhhh.
Homework assignments: some done, some packed (sigh).
Clothes, music, reading, and personal effects: packed.
Car service: ordered.
Table assignments: finalized.
Rehearsal and breakfast: organized.
Speech: written.
Tuxedo: tailored.
Tuxedo shirt: pressed.
Tuxedo shoes: tied.
Hand-tied bow tie: getting there.
And away we go. See you in September.
Long before the advent of peer-to-peer file sharing, I was taping my friends’ LPs and CDs onto cassette to sample in my car. I have hundreds of classic rock albums on Maxell XLII90s in storage in my parents’ house.
I bought a CD burner in 1998 and burned scores of albums in the years since. When Napster hit I had a field day finding music I hadn’t heard in ages.
I am 30 years old and my music collection now includes more than 150 records, 500 cassettes and 1200 compact discs. The vast majority I bought retail or used. I once estimated that I have spent more than $10,000 on music in my lifetime.
Ten grand.
The unquantifiable portion is what I would have spent had I not had free access to music. It easily could be less. Would I have shelled out $60 for the first Led Zeppelin box set had I not taped their studio albums years earlier? Would I own six Morphine albums if I didn’t possess a burned copy of their debut first?
I do not disagree that file sharing has hurt the RIAA’s sales; a 25 percent decline in three years is severe. But the argument cuts both ways.
Nifty graphic of New York’s power supply and demand for Thursday. Can you spot the discrepancy?
