USC Again

Just finished watching USC beat Fresno State. I was really rooting for Fresno State, having grown up down there, but, as one of my previous posts discussed, I have serious affection for USC football that kind of is embarrassing to me. I'm going to have to get over this, though, because USC fans bug me.

Fresno State gave USC a great game in LA. (Fresno State basically plays most of its big games on the road because colleges from major conferences essentially refuse to go on the road to play Fresno State. College football does not have the most equitable system.) USC won because Reggie Bush is freakin' unbelieveable. It is almost impossible to tackle the guy. He had something like 500 all-purpose yards. Plus Fresno State's quarterback made a couple of bad throws. Plus USC got a few calls. Still it was a really good game that wasn't decided until there was about a minute left.

So, what do the USC fans do? Do they respect the quality of the game? Uh, no. They start singing, "nah, nah, nah, nah, nah, nah, hey, hey, hey, goodbye" over and over. So classy. This is after reading the weekly column that a USC student writes for ESPN.com in which she described begging, begging her friend not to go to UCLA. Uh, maybe your friend doesn't have the bucks, honey.

Maybe the fact that I had USC pajamas when I was 10 doesn't necessarily mean that I have to like USC forever.

The Tipping Point

Finished reading The Tipping Point by Malcolm Gladwell recently. It's a very interesting book, although I didn't really buy the author's argument.

The point of the book is that ideas often don't gain acceptance gradually, but rather reach a certain point -- The Tipping Point -- where they zoom from being accepted by just a few people to being accepted by lots of people very quickly.

The really interesting part of the book are the case studies of ideas that really took off. The author gives a whole interesting history of Paul Revere's ride that describes how Revere knew everyone and was very prominent in the Boston community, so, when someone heard British troops talking about going to seize the rebels' guns, they told Revere. He headed out to tell people about it and basically knew everyone on the way to Lexington and Concord, so they listened to him and were ready for the British redcoats. Gladwell contrasts Revere's set uccess with the response to William Dawes, who rode in the opposite direction and basically didn't gmuch response at all. Dawes didn't know everyone, so they didn't respond. Didn't know all of that.

Gladwell describes how the creators of both Sesame Street and Blue's Clues worked very hard to format their shows' presentations so that little kids would pay attention. As someone whose children have absorbed a lot of Sesame Street and Blue's Clues -- we have had very well-loved Elmoes and both kids wore themselves some serious Steve shirts -- I can tell you that they were very successful. There was great joy in our house when Baby Paprika arrived and it was quite an event when Steve went off to college and Joe became Blue's guardian, master, owner, landlord, whatever.

On the whole, though, the book's argument wasn't especially persuasive. It makes sense that ideas take off quickly at a certain point. Things reach critical mass and take off. (I don't know why Gladwell didn't use the term "critical mass" instead of the term "tipping point." I'm guessing that Gladwell wanted to use his own term, although it gets kind of irritating because he insists on capitalizing it. We get it, ideas have Tippings Points.) Gladwell says that three factors cause ideas to take off: (1) unique people who move ideas very broadly (Connectors), who discover ideas (Mavens) or are especially convincing in promoting ideas (Salesmen); (2) the "stickiness" of the ideas, how appealing their presentation is; and (3) the context in which they are presented. OK, all of that makes sense.

But Gladwell doesn't explain very well how these factors all fit together. He seems to say that any one of these things can be enough to make an idea take off. But he never actually says that or argues why it is. He presents all kinds of different Salesmen without much explanation. He presents the world's most persuasive financial advisor and people who look really cool smoking as his main examples of Salesmen. Huh? He presents both the decision of Blue's Clues' creators to show the same show every day for a week and the fact that nicotine affects people's brain chemistry as examples of the "stickiness" of things that becomes epidemics. Huh? I can only remember New York City's emphasis on "broken windows" crimes like subway-fare-jumping and vandalism as a major factor in the dramatic drop in crime there as an example of the Importance of Context (again, capitals) presented by Gladwell.

So Gladwell probably is right that ideas reach a point of acceptance where they take off like rockets and makes an interesting presentation of things that have done so. He doesn't do a great job of explaining why they take off.

Things That Don't Work

Have you noticed in the last 10 years or so that things don't work? Way too frequently, you get something home and, some incredibly ridiculous short amount of time later, it stops working. Or you buy a service and, when the first monthly bill comes, it has some charge on it that was not explained to you.

The most recent incident of this kind in my life has been with a cell phone recharger that had to buy in Washington. (I somehow lost the one that came with my phone two years ago or so -- no idea where it went.) I got a recharger that was not the same brand as my phone, but was supposed to work with it. And it did. For about five days. Now it will go in the recharger slot, but it doesn't do anything. There's $27 down the tube. (I haven't decided yet whether to fight with Cingular about it.)

Unfortunately, this is just way too common these days. After The Muse and I switched cell companies (so I could get the phone that needs to be recharged), the first monthly bill had a $20 charge on it to have a second phone on the account. Was this explained to us when we signed up for our whiz-bang, new and improved, 1,000-minute a month plan? Hell, no. I screamed at several representatives of the cell phone company about this. They were apologetic. Did anything change? No.

As you may know from reading The Muse's blog, the hinge on her old laptop broke after less than two years. When I called the computer company about it, they said that it wasn't under warranty anymore and, even if it was, the warranty wouldn't cover the problem because we must've let something get into the hinge and that's not a mechanical problem. When I asked the representative how she could possibly know this given that she had never seen our laptop, she said that they build their laptops to withstand being moved around a lot. So the warranty wouldn't cover the broken laptop because the laptop was made so that it wouldn't break. (It reminded me of invading a country, allowing a bunch of terrorists to move in and then saying that the whole thing was justified because the country is the frontline in the fight against terrorism. Okaaaay.)

It's just unreal how things don't work. Our toaster doesn't toast. One upstairs TV has a yellow spot in the bottom left corner of the screen. My old car, a Toyota Solara that I bought because it was supposed to never break down, blew its water pump out about 2,000 miles after the warranty ran out and the ABS warning light flicked on and off periodically for no apparent reason. My Toyota, for God's sake! Our 2004 Mazda minivan makes a funny sound when the car is cold and you're backing up. The CD drive on our desktop broke less than a year after we bought it (the rewriter drive will run CD's though). The "p" key on my firm's laptop stopped working less than a year after we bought it.

When these things happen, I call the customer service and yell at people. Our office manager does the same thing at work. I know that customer service people aren't the ones responsible. I know that they are cannon fodder meant to receive hostility and not provide any solutions. I'm sorry, customer service people (especially the ones in India), but your bosses stink and they hired you.

Why are we willing to tolerate this kind of BS? It's because everything has gotten cheaper. You can buy desktop computers for something like $300 or $400. They just give some cell phones away when you sign a service contract. I think our upstairs TV cost something like $50. They give AM/FM radio headsets away with magazine subscriptions. You can buy burnable CD's for like $20 for 50. (You remember that scene in Sixteen Candles when Farmer Ted asks Samantha if he can borrow her underwear because he bet his friend a box of floppy disks that he would sleep with her and needs her underwear as proof because floppies are really expensive? It is for to laugh.)

At some point, we culturally decided that we want things to be really cheap and are willing to sacrifice a great deal of quality to get cheap things. The technology industry in particular seems to have taken that to heart. They keep pushing the price of computers down and keep pushing the quality of customer service down too.

For example, our firm just bought new computers. This is, I think, the third time we have done this in the six years since I started there. Did law firms change computers three times in six years 15 years ago? Uh, I think not. Computers are much cheaper now. My new computer, however, basically was a piece of trash as soon as it came out of the box. It basically didn't want to start some mornings. It would lock up so badly that I couldn't give it the three-finger-salute (Control-Alt-Delete) -- not the third-finger-salute, though that is what I wanted to give it -- and couldn't even turn it off by pressing the CPU's power button. I had to turn off the power at the surge protector. What was our computer provider's response? They wanted me to sit on the phone with them for some undetermined amount of time conducting troubleshooting exercises before they would agree to do anything else. Now, as you may know, attorneys' services are monetized by the amount of time that they work on a matter. So, our computer provider, having made a lemon, having not caught that lemon in their QA/QC process, having allowed this computer to be installed in our office, now wants me to blow off my billable work time talking on the phone with them before they spend any money fixing the problem. This made me rather angry. I refused. I was out of the office the next day. Our very kind office manager agreed to try to do the phone troubleshooting while I was out. The day I was out of the office, however, our office manager couldn't even get my computer to turn on. When she called the troubleshooting line, she told them she couldn't do what they wanted because the computer wouldn't even turn on.

This gave me a great deal of enjoyment. Their attempt to foist the burden of their ineptitude on to our firm was thwarted by the very extent of their ineptitude.

Is this cycle of things get cheaper and lousier unstoppable? I sure don't see it stopping. We like things cheap. We -- I -- will stand in gigantic lines at Costco because things are cheap. Communities welcome WalMarts, though they know they will hurt local businesses. WalMart sells things cheaply.

Don't know quite what to say about all of this, except that I will really try hard not to be nasty to Indian customer service representatives.

The Godfather and Al Pacino

For some reason, I have been watching a lot of the Godfather movies lately. The first two, of course. I saw Godfather III on Christmas break whatever year it was that it came out. Man, it stank. In light of the quality of the first two movies, memories of Godfather III should be repressed. Just pretend it didn't exist.

I made a project of watching The Godfather and Godfather II during the summer between my freshman and sophomore years of college while back at home (I was all cultured from having gone to college and was renting all kinds of arty movies -- fell sleep during Last Temptation of Christ). I hadn't seen them in a long time, but recently caught a lot of both of them, first on WGN and then on our local WB affiliate. I'm guessing that these movies are highly appealing to channels with a lot of time to fill and not much quality TV to put on because people like me will watch some of them if we catch them and they're probably cheap to show at this point. Plus they're looong (especially if you show commercials every 3 minutes, like WGN). Anyway, I watched about 1/2 of The Godfather last week when The Muse was out of town and then, for some ungodly reason, stayed up until 1:30 last night watching Godfather II. Don't ask me why, I can't really tell you. But I did really enjoy it.

Two things struck me about the movies.

First, and this is no insight at all, but they're both really good. And The Godfather II is even a sequel. I think that my favorite part is the part of the first one between the time that Vito Corelone gets shot and the time that Michael Corelone shoots the guys responsible in the Italian restaurant. Here's where Michael commits to being part of the family business. Until then, he resisted it. He went to college. He was dating Diane Keaton, not someone like Talia Shire. He enlisted in the Marines when the Japanese bombed Pearl Harbor (to Sonny's dismay, as shown at the end of Godfather II -- everything was to Sonny's dismay).

But then his father is shot and, really, all he wants to do is prevent his father from getting shot again. At the scene at the hospital, you can see how Michael would be much better at running things than Sonny. He quickly figures out that someone's going to try to come kill Vito from the absence of anyone around. He convinces the nurse to him move Vito. He drafts the baker Enzo to pretend that he is a bodyguard with Michael when the hitmen come (there's that brilliant shot of poor Enzo's hands shaking so much that he can't light a cigarette after the hitmen leave). Then he's the one who decides that he needs to kill Solazzo and the dirty cop when no one else thinks he should and he's the one who explains how to spin it for the newspapers. He is very decisive and smart and is willing to go to the mat to protect his father.

Then you get the scene at the restaurant. There is so much good stuff in that scene. Solazzo wants to talk in Italian and Michael goes along, having a hard time finding the words because he isn't that fluent. He's going along with the old ways. Finally, he says in English that he just wants to make sure that no one tries to hurt his father again. He's doing it his own way. Solazzo says he just wants a truce. OK, here is the point when everything changes. Michael could have just said OK, that would have accomplished his goal, apparently. But now he's committed, he's going to be this person hadn't meant to be. He goes in the bathroom and he gets the gun. Then he stops and smooths his hair and heads back out. He disappears from view and then we see him through the mirror, kind of like it's not really him, like when he disappeared from view, he became someone else. He goes out, waits for a minute, then shoots the two guys dead. Now, when Clemenza told Michael what to do, he said to just let the gun fall from his hand. Instead, he starts out the restaurant, still with the gun, then he eventually throws it to the floor, like he had forgotten what to do. He kind of holds his hand up, too. (Jeff Goldblum basically ripped this move off in The Fly after he arm-wrestled the guy in the bar and broke the guy's arm.)

The movies are just exceedingly well put together and the stories are good.

The second thing that struck me about the movies is just how good of an actor Al Pacino is, or used to be. Marlon Brando's performance of course is really famous, one of the most famous ever. The movies, though, are Al Pacino's movies. They are mostly about his character and he carries them, particularly Godfather II, which is almost completely about Michael.

Since these movies, Pacino has become a yeller. I haven't seen a lot of his movies, but he has some pretty famous loud lines -- "Say hello to my little friend!" "Hooah!" -- and he seems to like to play the obnoxious guy.

And he wasn't like that at all in the Godfather movies. About 75% of his lines are almost whispered and he gets a lot of mileage out of not saying anything. By The Godfather II, there's a lot of menace in him being silent. It also makes the few tines that he blows up that much more effective. I think that the only time that he really detonates is in Godfather II, when Kay -- Diane Keaton -- tells him that she didn't lose their third baby to a miscarriage, but instead had an abortion because she didn't want to bring another one of his children into the world. He's really frightening in that scene because he's out of control and he's always been totally under control before. Even when he tells Fredo that he knows that Fredo was the one who tried to kill him, he doesn't come off as crazy, he comes off as intense and terrifying. Given Pacino's later acting choices, he seems like he is almost consciously trying to not do Michael.

So I guess the Godfather movies deserved their Oscars. They're awfully good. Plus they've got Abe Vigoda.

Autism

There's an interesting article about autism in today's S.F. Chronicle Magazine. Specifically, it's about a 10- or 11-year-old boy in Marin who is presented as essentially cured of the autism with which he was diagnosed when he was two. The boy began having serious digestive and intestinal problems almost as soon as he was born and he had no language when he was two. (He wouldn't swallow anything and had blood in his output frequently.) Upon receiving the autism diagnosis, his parents, and especially his mother, began the intensive research about how to improve his condition that you hear about a lot of parents doing. They talked to lots of people with lots of theories, converted a room in their room into a therapy room and started with nutritional therapies. They put their son on a gluten-free diet and a wide variety of supplements. Now, he apparently presents as just about autism-free, although he has a helper in class who seems to help very lightly. He reads a lot, which is interesting to me at least. Judging by the quotes in the article, though, the boy retains a little bit of Aspergerian behavior. For example, he is quoted as explaining to the writer how the remote control fan in his room works. That's not something that a lot of non-autistic-spectrum kids would do (although my brother Guitar Guy, who was anti-Aspergerian in his socializing as a child, was known to explain that kind of thing to strangers -- sorry, Guitar Guy, it's just true).

We of course have heard a lot about dietary and vitamin-related therapies over the years as we have listened for ways to help The Mermaid. There are a lot of parents of autistic children who believe that these things can be very helpful and, apparently, they have been very helpful for the boy in the article.

The main thing that I took out of the article, though, is that there seem to be some very distinct patterns in autistic children's case histories. While there is some mention in the article of the boy having a somewhat adverse reaction to his MMR vaccination, his history is not the classic story that you hear, namely that a children was more or less non-autistic unless he or she got the MMR and then, shortly after the MMR, became quite autistic. The boy's history seems to involve some serious digestive issues. The boy did not seem to regress, but rather had significant communicative issues from the start.

None of these histories, however, is anything like The Mermaid's. The Mermaid was a happy little girl who just didn't talk. She didn't have any serious digestive issues (although she doesn't eat any meat -- she has never eaten much meat, although she ate pepperoni for a while). She didn't regress around the time she turned two -- that was just the time that we realized something wasn't quite what we expected. She responded well to language-related interventions almost as soon as they were used with her (she was the star of a video made by the San Luis Obispo County Office of Education for the use of PECS - a picture-based communication system that helps kids learn how to exchange ideas with others).

What all of these histories suggest to me, at least, is that it may be futile to search for a single cause of autism. Given that we now accept that there is a spectrum of autism disorders, it wouldn't seem to me to be much of a surprise if it turned out that there were a spectrum of causes. Because The Mermaid has never had serious digestive problems, I have never really felt that a dietary approach would work for her. Because she responded well to pretty intensive school-based programs as soon as she started them -- she was going to school something five hours every weekday when she was three -- and has always been in some kind of school several hours a day since, it has always seemed to The Muse and I that she needed some time to rest when she gets home. Accordingly, we haven't ever tried intensive at-home programs with her. And she is doing well -- mostly B's and an A in spelling in her mainstream 5th grade class and her teacher told us that, at one point when she was out of her class, the teacher asked the other students who would like to be The Mermaid's buddy and everyone in the class raised their hands.

The article in the Chronicle just sorted deepened the mystery of autism to me. Kids with different histories producing the same basic spectrum of communication problems. Huh? It doesn't make a lot of sense. We are just lucky with The Mermaid. I don't know a lot else to say.

The HBO Effect

Do you have HBO? We have satellite, so we get six HBO channels. One is in Spanish, although it's pretty entertaining to watch movies in Spanish with bad dubbing sometimes.

Anyway, HBO plays the same movie multiple times in any given month, of course. It's always been that way. I remember going to my aunt's house in town in about 1982 or 1983 and checking out her HBO monthly guide and seeing that Risky Business was on about every four hours (this was around the time that the original ESPN was still showing aerobics in the morning). So now that we have six channels of HBO, the same movies are on over and over again every month.

This is an unadulterated good thing. If there is some movie you don't like, then change the channel. (We have like 100, including the BYU Channel. We don't watch that one much.) Ah, but, if there is a movie you like or even mildly interests you, then you can catch 15 or 20 or 30 minute swatches of it just about every day, if you want. For me, a liberal arts/attorney type guy who deconstructs stuff for fun and for a living, being able to watch little pieces of movies over time rocks.

This month is great. HBO is showing L.A. Confidential, which is one of my favorite movies of the last ten years or so. (Here's my very quickly prepared list of the best 12 movies of the 1990's -- couldn't get down to 10 -- in no particular order:(1) The Crying Game; (2) Pulp Fiction; (3) Dazed & Confused; (4) L.A. Confidential; (5) There's Something About Mary; (6) Schindler's List; (7) The Matrix; (8) Saving Private Ryan; (9) Toy Story; (10) Babe; (11) Fargo; and (12) Being John Malkovich. The Fugitive and The Shawshank Redemption are pretty close, too.) I've caught about an hour of it twice so far. I'll probably check out little bits of it several more times. (I highly recommend James Ellroy's book L.A. Confidential, on which the movie is based. Ellroy's L.A. Quartet of books are great, though they take a little getting used to.)

When you watch little bits of a movie a whole bunch of times, you catch all kinds of things that you didn't catch when you first saw the movie or even you saw it on video or DVD. So, for instance, Collateral was on HBO a few months ago and I caught 15 or 20 minutes of it a whole bunch of time. (After being into Miami Vice back in the 80's, I'll pretty much go see any movie that Michael Mann makes. The ones about crime and cops all have that after-dark, wet-streets kind of look that Miami Vice had and are pretty good film noir. See Collateral, see Heat, they're good.) Collateral is about a taxi driver (Jamie Foxx) who is hired for the night by a hit man (Tom Cruise -- playing a freak, got to give him credit for not always demanding to be a good guy) to drive him around while he shoots people (the taxi driver doesn't do it willingly once he finds out Cruise is a hit man, of course). I saw the movie in the theater and liked it, so, when it showed up on HBO, I was pretty happy.

At one point in the movie, Tom Cruise forces Jamie Foxx to go into a bar and tell them he's the hit man to get some information. Foxx asks Cruise some questions about him just in case Foxx gets asked. Foxx asks him, "How long you been doing this?" Cruise says, "Private sector, six years." (Foxx's next question is something like "So, do you like get benefits, you know, health care, stuff like that?") Now, when I saw the movie in the theater, I caught the "six years" part, but not the "private sector" part. The "private sector" part puts a whole new spin on the line and, to some extent, Cruise's character. The "private sector" part tells us that he was an assassin with the CIA or the military or something before hanging out his own shingle. Interesting. Wouldn't have noticed that without the joy of HBO.

I haven't caught a lot new in L.A. Confidential yet, except that it's kind of unbelieveable that, of everyone in that movie who was brilliant -- Guy Pearce, Russell Crowe, James Cromwell (the subject of a post here soon), David Strathain, Kevin Spacey -- the only one who won an Oscar was Kim Basinger. Apparently, the Academy that she didn't scream in the movie. There's three weeks left this month, though.

A Crack In The Edge Of The World

Just finished reading A Crack In The Edge Of The World, Simon Winchester's new book about the 1906 San Francisco earthquake. It was really good, although a little repetitive of Winchester's last book about Krakatoa in that it is about, at its root, plate tectonics and their effects. In places, it also is a little repetitive of Assembling California, John McPhee's book about how California came together geologically, although Winchester does acknowledge the debt.

The book mostly describes the plate tectonics associated with the North American Plate, which starts in the east at the Mid-Atlantic Ridge, which is as far out as Iceland, and ends in the west at the San Andreas fault and in Alaska. (In Oregon and Washington, a small plate named the Juan de Fuca Plate is subducting under the North American Plate, which creates the volcanoes in those states. Subducting plates are one of the most common reasons why volcanoes occur. Krakatoa existed and exists due to a subducting plate.)

There's a pretty substantial discussion of mid-plate events like the 1880's earthquake under Charleston, South Carolina, and the three 8.0+ earthquakes that occurred in 1811 and 1812 under New Madrid, Missouri. The New Madrid quakes were so big that they were felt in New York and Chicago and made the Mississippi River -- a mile wide -- run backwards. These things really shouldn't have been happening in the middle of the plate, rather than at its edge, where people expect earthquakes. Apparently, because the plates move around due to the convection currents in the Earth's magma, there are some scientists who think that the New Madrid and Charleston quakes and other mid-plate events indicate that the North American Plate is in the process of splitting up. Great.

Of course, as a California native and junkie, the parts of the book about the San Andreas fault and the San Francisco earthquake were the ones that most interested me. I wasn't aware that the San Andreas basically has three parts: (1) from Cape Mendocino to somewhere around San Juan Batista; (2) from San Juan Batista down to the Tehachapis; and (3) from the Tehachapis down to the Salton Sea. The northern and southern parts are locked. They don't really move much, except with big earthquakes. The middle part, however, is pretty continuously moving north, which is why Parkfield gets so many earthquakes. (Got to get to Parkfield at some point. Barely anyone lives in that part of the world -- Parkfield, Cholame, the Carriza Plain -- but it not only features the San Andreas fault, but also the place where James Dean was killed. L. Ron Hubbard lived out there at some point, too. As a kid, I knew that we were driving past the James Dean spot every time my family drove from Lemoore to Pismo Beach, but I didn't know that we were crossing the San Andreas Fault every time too. I would have complained until my dad pulled off to look at the Fault at some point if I had known. Instead, I complained about getting lunch at the Black Oak in Paso Robles.) This movement causes the tension in the northern and southern parts of the fault that cause earthquakes in the Bay Area and LA. Accordingly, it's basically statistically certain that California will get more large earthquakes.

I also didn't realize what the geologic reason for the Tehachapis is. Generally, the Pacific Plate slides past the North American Plate. California's big bend to the east that begins around Lompoc and the Tehachapis are caused because, beginning at the bend and running down to about LA, the Pacific Plate pushes north into the North American Plate. This northern push pushed up the Tehachapis and causes earthquakes in the middle part of the fault, like the great big Tejon earthquake in 1857 and the big Tehachapi quake in the 1950's that my mom remembers.

It's quite a place where we live here. Of course, the book ends with a discussion of Yellowstone that describes how it exists because it sits on top of a volcanic hot spot (like Hawaii) and has been the site of two absolutely gigantic eruptions in the last few million years. Apparently, there'll be another one at some point. So, between Florida getting several hurricanes every single year and Yellowstone being bound to erupt gigantically at some point in the next couple of million years, California's issues may be a decent compromise. Plus you can wear shorts in October and even in November, at least this year.

Kitchen Confidential

I read Kitchen Confidential a while ago. It's by Anthony Bourdain, a pretty high-powered chef in New York. It doesn't have a consistent narrative, but instead is kind of an anthology of Bourdain's stories, insights and thoughts about the restaurant business. He describes how he got started as a vegetable chopper or something like that at a restaurant in Providencetown, Massachusetts, I think, and how he basically got humiliated out of the joint the first time he burned himself and was yelping and asking for Band-Aids and the big, old, mean cooks started showing him their nearly disfigured hands and calling him profane names.

He also describes how he liked some of the local cooking that was done there because the cooks incorporated influences from the local "Portagees." As a half-Portuguese guy, I found this use of "Portagee" striking. I don't think that I have ever seen the word in print in any sort of non-fiction. I think that Steinbeck used it some, maybe in Tortilla Flat, but it was interesting to see it used loosely in something about the present. The word, like many ethnic generalities, inspires disparate reactions. I have never had a problem with it or with being called a "Portagee," or at least a "half-Portagee." My family used and uses the term frequently. Some Portuguese kids with whom I went to school for a long time -- mostly ones whose families had come to the US more recently -- really disliked it and did not want people using it to refer to them. Accordingly, I was surprised to see it used pretty loosely and somewhat admiringly in print. I wonder if Bourdain called the cooks "Portagees" to their faces. I guess that I would be surprised if he did.

Kitchen Confidential sold pretty well, so quite a bit of it is pretty well-known. For instance, I had already heard about how it explains why you shouldn't order certain foods on certain days of the week. Apparently, you shouldn't eat seafood at Sunday brunches or order seafood specials Sunday or Monday nights. Basically, the chefs order seafood for the weekend on Friday. If they haven't sold it by Sunday morning, they incorporate into brunch. If they haven't gotten rid of it during brunch, then they concoct something to get it sold before they have to throw it out and before they buy more seafood on Tuesday. There's other stuff like that in the book, like how chefs think that people who order chicken basically think those people don't know what they want. I was kind of offended by that. I usually order a BBQ chicken sandwich within the first couple of trips to a restaurant that has them (although obviously not at Thai places, or Morton's, or someplace where ordering a BBQ chicken sandwich would be stupid). I figure that I can compare restaurants by ordering that at different places. It's a test, not an indication that I'm lame (I think).

The other thing that struck me about the book was how brutal cook culture is. I cooked pizzas for a couple of summers and can attest that a kitchen pretty much turns into a locker room if populated by a bunch of guys. Of course, that's probably true of almost any place where you get late teenage guys together (like the pizza kitchen where I worked). Apparently, at least as described by the book, things just devolve when you're talking about long-time cooks. The story that really got me was the one about how Boudrain was working in a kitchen where some higher-up -- the supply guy, the expediter (who reads the orders as they come in), someone like that -- was constantly grabbing Boudrain's butt. Boudrain had enough of this one day and, as the higher-up approached to grab his butt, he grabbed a knife, arranged it so it was immediately available and, as the guy came to grab his butt, held out so that the guy would jam his hand into it. When that happened, he then pushed it into the guy's hand further. The guy was howling and spurting blood all over. He went off to the hospital and came back to work within a couple of days. Apparently, this incident earned Boudrain major props in the kitchen. Yikes! Good thing I got out of the restaurant business. Did pick up how to toss pizza dough, though.

Washington, D.C.

I was out of town because I was in Washington, D.C. This was kind of a big deal for me because I'm a pretty big law/poli si/history junkie and, baby, that's all there in Washington. Got into the Supreme Court for five minutes of argument. That was pretty impressive, but, next time, I'm figuring out a way to stay all day. Other than going to the Court, I went (usually with my mom and some with my mom and my dad) to the American History Smithsonian, the Natural History Smithsonian, the Air and Space Smithsonian, the Lincoln Memorial, the WWII Memorial, the Vietnam Memorial, the Korean War Memorial and Arlington National Cemetery. Walked under the Washington Memorial, didn't go in.

None of those featured the oddest thing that I saw. That honor goes to Larry's Homemade Ice Cream on Connecticut Avenue. They had pretty good ice cream there. They also have a wall-size mural of Picasso's Guernica. You know, this is the Picasso that features people in various states of geometric fracture looking like they're howling. It is Picasso's protest of the firebombing of the Spanish town of Guernica by the Fascist army of Generalismo Francisco Franco (who is still dead, BTW) during the Spanish Civil War. So I'm looking at this mural and thinking "Why in the world is there a mural of Guernica in this ice cream place? That's a pretty big downer for this kind of place." Then I notice that all of the wide open mouths of the people (well, as close as Picasso gets to depicting people) have colorful scoops of ice cream in them. Ah, there it is, it's irony. I thought it was pretty funny personally, but I can see where other people might be pretty appalled. They did have good Oreo Cookie and Mud Pie ice cream. I did a lot of walking, so I felt entitled to some ice cream.

I wasn't particularly impressed by the American History Smithsonian when I first went in with my mom and dad. We didn't look at much, but just went through to get to the cafeteria because it was convenient for lunch. This was a little distressing because I was really looking forward to it. Anyway, it kind of had that look of an antiseptic and worn-down academic building built in 1962. My mom and I, however, went back a couple of days later and, boy, it's cool. The thing about the Smithsonian is the amazing stuff in it. It looks like a pretty basic great big museum, but, then, hey, there's the actual Brown v. Board of Education decision that the Supreme Court issued. There's the actual Supreme Court voting record for Plessy v. Ferguson, the 1896 decision that said "separate but equal" was OK. There's Muhammad Ali's gloves that he used to knock out George Foreman in the Rumble in the Jungle. There's Jerry Seinfeld's puffy shirt. There's Judy Garland's ruby slippers. There's a piece of plutonium and the Nobel Prize that Glenn Seaborg won for deriving it. There's the speech that helped stopped the bullet when someone tried to shoot Teddy Roosevelt. It just goes on and on. And we skipped the big exhibition on America's wars. The Natural History Museum was similar -- there's the Hope Diamond, there's a piece of the oldest rock in the world, there are real dinosaur artifacts -- and pretty cool. I just went through the lobby of Air and Space, but I did get to see the Campbell Soup cans that we used to send the Mercury and Gemini astronauts into space. You would not have caught me getting blasted into space in those things.

Going to the Supreme Court was a pretty big deal to me. I mean, this is the top of the top in my profession. The building itself is more or less built like a temple (they have marble busts of all of the Chief Justices, like they were from Rome or something). I did not make it into see a whole case get argued and ended up sitting in for about five minutes of argument. Arguing there is something that I would like to do -- I'm an attorney, after all -- but it would be a daunting prospect. Usually, we argue in front of one judge. A good judge may ask quite a few questions even in a 15- or 30-minute motion hearing and you should try to anticipate them. If a case goes up on appeal, it generally is argued in front of three judges in both the federal and California courts. I externed with a California Court of Appeal and sat in on a number of oral arguments. They could get pretty involved if more than one judge decided to start asking questions. The U.S. Supreme Court has NINE judges! In the five minutes that I watched, I think five of them -- Scalia, Roberts, O'Connor, Kennedy and Breyer -- asked questions. Justice Thomas apparently never asks questions at oral argument, so you'd only have to really worry about 8 of them asking questions. Still, 8 judges asking questions would be something. And these are supposed to be pretty much the best judges in the country and, even if you don't like them, they are undoubtedly very sharp. Then you would pile that on top of the facts that, one, arguing there would be a career highlight for nearly all attorneys, two, you probably would take your family along to see the argument and, three, your clients would be fired up for the experience, too. It would be quite an experience, no doubt.

Finally, something that really struck me was how tightly packed all of these institutions are. I mean, you can pretty much stand in the middle of the Mall and see both the White House and the Capitol and, if the Capitol wasn't so big, you could see the Supreme Court, too. Meanwhile, the Mall is lined by these huge buildings that house various federal agencies and courts. I guess that I knew intellectually that all of these places are all packed tightly, but, seeing it in person, I can see how people can lose perspective if they live and work in Washington for a while.

The Drought

OK, I know that I owe you some posts. Hey, I was out of town and stuff. Anyway, here they come.