The Once Good Grey Lady, or, here comes USA Today

I am annoyed at my newspaper of record. I have been reading the New York Times since I was a child. I remember the ENORMOUS headline when Nixon resigned. I remember when they went from 8 columns to 6. I remember when it was truly grey - there were no color photographs or advertisements.

Last week, I learned that they had dropped coverage of suburban arts, restaurants, and theater. This is a terrible move. Not only is it a disservice to the institutions that will no longer be covered, it's a disservice to readers who might frequent those institutions.

I grew up in one NYC suburb and now live in another. For all intents and purpose, The New York Times is my local paper. I want to hear about openings at the museum a couple of towns north, and what an objective writer thinks about the new restaurant at the train station down the hill from me. And the flip side is that those institutions need the imprimatur of the Times for their success.

Days after I heard that metro coverage was being curtailed, I spotted a little announcement:

Right. The New York Times is upping their coverage of California, while jettisoning coverage at home. So I can find out what's happening 3000 miles away, but not in my own backyard.

Then, adding insult to injury, I read the really nice New Yorker profile of restaurant critic Pete Wells, only to learn that Pete's gonna be reviewing restaurants in California.

Sigh. They stop covering local venues, and start reviewing restaurants in Santa Monica. It makes me spitting mad.

I think the good grey lady has downwardly mobile aspirations to become USA Today.

End of Summer Vacation Tomato Pasta

I'm still digging out from weeks old emails and putting away the hiking boots and sorting through the many many pictures we took (on one camera and three phones), so the vacation re-cap is yet to come.

The day we got home, there was - predictably - nothing to eat. Except that the pantry had dry pasta, olive oil, garlic, salt and pepper, and the fridge had a tired but serviceable lemon, and the garden had parsley and basil and tomatoes! And so, dinner was had: Jack Denton Scott's Spaghettini Estivi.

This is a pasta dish that I grew up with - my mother had ripped it out of the New York Times and pasted it into her black notebook of recipes, with a note that it was from The Complete Book of Pasta. We used to eat it on summer Sundays, when we'd been at the beach all day (and weren't having a grilled London broil and some fresh delicious buttered corn). It's so easy - chop up a bunch of tomatoes, season them, and toss the uncooked sauce with hot pasta. If we're feeling fancy, we'll do a caprese version of the same - adding cubed mozzarella and subbing balsamic vinegar for the lemon juice. In fact, we eat that version more than this one because there's a guy at the farmers market with fabulous fresh mozz, so when we eat this more spare, lemon juice version it feels revelatory each time we decide to have it.

And even though it's called spaghettini estivi, I usually use a short pasta like rotini or orecchiette because I like eating it with soup spoon. But I still call it spaghettini estivi, just because.

You probably have all of the ingredients already, so try it.

Spaghettini Estivi, adapted from Jack Denton Scott

2 lbs ripe tomatoes, chopped
a few sprigs of flat Italian parsley, chopped
a good handful of fresh basil leaves, chopped
Juice of 1 lemon
3 tablespoons olive oil
1 garlic clove, finely minced
salt and freshly ground pepper to taste
1 lb spaghettini (or whatever shape you want)
Grated parmesan cheese or asiago cheese (optional)

1) In a big bowl, mix together the tomatoes, parsley, basil, lemon juice, olive oil, garlic, salt and pepper. Do not cook! Put it aside.

2) Cook and drain pasta, and add to tomato mixture.

3) Serve, with grated cheese, as desired.

Just Who Is Coming To Dinner Anyway?

I was totally channeling my mother this morning when I ripped a scrap out of the newspaper, sputtering. She'd have done the same, and circled the offending bit in red pen, and left it for me to read the next time I visited.

I'm just sharing it with you.

(And yes, I checked.  The oh-so-egregious error was fixed in the on-line edition of the Times.)

Bad >> Good

This day did NOT get off to a good start.

1) I forgot to set my alarm, so I got up a half hour late on a day I should have been in the office a half hour early.

2) There was nothing to eat for breakfast except frozen English muffins, so I stuck one in the toaster to defrost.  Alas, I burned my left thumb when I picked up the wooden chopsticks that I'd stupidly left on top of the toaster.

3) When I finally got on the train, and the conductor came 'round to check tickets, I realized, after rooting around in my bag for awhile, that I'd left my wallet home - meaning, no money and no train ticket. Happily, the conductor said "I'll come back", and then when she did come back, she studiously ignored me. I mouthed a "thank you" at her, but I'm not sure how I'm getting home tonight.

But a close reading of the first section of the New York Times came to the rescue.

1) Above the fold on the front page was the story about Newt Gingrich's campaign "imploding" - excellent word. This is going to be one hell of a campaign season.

2) Also on the front page was a teaser paragraph about the endangered Great Hamster of Alsace, which France has to hop to and protect. But Great Hamster of Alsace! Doesn't that sound like something out of Monty Python?

3) Frankly, I didn't know that Prince Philip was such a feisty old crank, but I laughed out loud at some of his thoroughly inappropriate quips:

• To the president of Nigeria, resplendent in traditional costume: “You look like you’re ready for bed.”
• To the singer Tom Jones: “Do you gargle with pebbles to sing that way?”
• To a museum curator in the Cayman Islands: “Aren’t most of you descended from cannibals?”

4) Leona Helmsley's dog died six months ago. Who cares, right? I scratched my head as to why this out of date "news" was reported with 883 words and a color photograph, and was nauseated to learn that the dog's security detail ran $100,000 a year.

Oh, don't get me wrong - there was plenty of bad news, legitimate news, sober news, in the Times, but the outlandish stuff was just what I needed to be reading.

North Korean Rockettes

I was mesmerized this morning by a photo in the Times which someone saw fit to give a half a page to, in color.



Look at them! Look at the toes of the standing legs, all lined up just so. The working legs, all extended at precisely the same angle. The heads, slightly tilted to the right.

But why are all their ankles taped?

From the Rain Comes Hope

It's overcast again, just like it was last year. Actually, it's more than overcast; it's raining and drizzling, stopping and starting. And once again, I'm glad that it's not that shockingly brilliant bright blue sky punctuated by smoke and horror.

This past April, President Obama signed legislation to recognize September 11 as a federally observed National Day of Service and Remembrance. How does one participate?

Just set aside a little time this 9/11 to plan or perform at least one good deed that helps someone else who may need assistance, or to support a cause that you care about. You choose.

As my contribution, I'd like to first point you towards the August Just Posts, as rounded up by Holly and Alejna. As ever, they've compiled some good posts to read, including, if I may pat myself on the back, my post about the cost of a colonoscopy.

Second, if you missed it, there was a special issue of the New York Times Magazine last month, focused on women, and "how changing the lives of women and girls in the developing world can change everything". The centerpiece was an article by Nick Kristof and Sheryl WuDunn, excerpted from their new book Half the Sky.

There’s a growing recognition among everyone from the World Bank to the U.S. military’s Joint Chiefs of Staff to aid organizations like CARE that focusing on women and girls is the most effective way to fight global poverty and extremism. That’s why foreign aid is increasingly directed to women. The world is awakening to a powerful truth: Women and girls aren’t the problem; they’re the solution.

Kristof and Wu, helpfully, included a sidebar labeled Do-It-Yourself Foreign Aid, and so, in the spirit of this National Day of Service and Remembrance, I am going to send a donation to the Friends of Edna Maternity Hospital, in support of the Edna Hospital in Somaliland, and with the hope of helping to alleviate obstetric fistula.

How will you participate?

Four Random Things

How's this? A YEAR ago, She She tagged me for a meme. A whole year ago.

And six months ago, Cold Spaghetti did too.

Obviously, I never get anything done, though I am good at making to do lists. Cold Spaghetti wanted six random things, and She She wanted thirteen. Thirteen plus six is too many; here are four:

1. Growing up, my mother always used charge cards - she had a card for every single department store in the area, before the wide spread development of credit cards that could be used anywhere. I was shockingly old before I realized that you could go to Macy's or Lord & Taylor and pay cash. I didn't know they took cash. I thought they only took charge cards.


2. I love driving with the windows open.  I love driving with the music up loud.  I hate air-conditioning.  All of this means that I really prefer to be alone in the car, because windows open + loud music = conversation is impossible.


3. Flannel sheets are never as plush as the day they come out of the package - it's just all downhill from there. On the other hand, good 100% cotton percale gets better and better, and finally, when it's perfect? It disintegrates. I prefer percale.


4. The secret to nonagenarian lucidity is Red Bull, at least as evidenced by one Ruth Cummins, who was quoted on the front page of today's New York Times.
   

Daily Sex

Why am I not surprised that the most emailed article on the Times site today is the one about two recently published books about married people having sex every day? As in, every single day. As in, 365 days in one book and 101 nights in the other.

What I’d love to know is who’s sending it to whom. Is it wives to husbands, or vice versa? Is it woman to best friends, or men to co-workers? Hell, is it wife to wife, husband to husband?

Did you send it to your spouse? Will you now that you've seen it?

Hardwood in Burma

Today's Times had a front page story about the cyclone in Myanmar - a story that ran without a by-line because the reporter was in the country undercover. It included the following passage:

It will not take much to get villagers back on their feet in these areas because they had so little to begin with. Being wealthy in the delta means having some furniture and a house made of concrete or hardwood instead of bamboo.

Farmers till their fields with buffaloes pulling a plow. Now they lack both buffaloes and rice seed. During this reporter’s time in the delta, several times as many buffaloes could be seen floating dead on the water as were grazing on land. The villages often have dedicated ponds and large ceramic jars to store drinking water. Many of those jars have broken and the pond water has been blackened from the hay and foliage rotting in it.

I don't know about you, but I think the statement "it won't take much to get villagers back on their feet" smacks of first world arrogance. A house is a house, whether it's made of reeds or bricks. A buffalo is a buffalo, a jar is a jar. Where's that buffalo going to come from? Where's the water bottle going to come from? This is a country that is completely controlled by a military dictatorship, and is hiding the breadth of this natural disaster from the rest of the world. It's going to take a hell of a lot to get those villagers back on their feet.

More Frozen Wonderfulness

At least once a summer when I was growing up, we dug out the old-fashioned hand-cranked ice cream maker. My mother would assemble the base, and the kids would take turns crushing ice and sprinkling rock salt and cranking cranking cranking. When it was done, some lucky soul got to lick the dasher, and then the whole caboodle got wrapped up in a wool army blanket to wait until dinner was over.

Sometimes we'd make peach ice cream, but more often than not, we made tutti-frutti. It wasn't actually called tutti-frutti in the original recipe - the Times called it "fruit ice cream" - but we always called it tutti-frutti. It's a mutt, a mix of lemon, orange, pineapple and banana. It tastes a little like bubblegum, but in a good way, and if you offer a taste to someone and ask them to identify the ingredients, they often can't - it's one of those things where the mix takes on a life of its own.

This recipe makes a huge amount - if you've got a one or two quart ice cream maker, you probably want to make a third or a half.

---

Tutti-Frutti Ice Cream

3 cups milk
3 cups sugar
1 ½ cups heavy cream
1 13 ½ ounce can of evaporated milk
1 t. grated lemon peel
¾ cup lemon juice
2 t. grated orange peel
1 ½ cups orange juice
3 ripe bananas, mashed
1 ½ cups undrained canned crushed pineapple
Ice cream maker (and ice and rock salt if it’s an old-fashioned one)

1. Heat the milk and sugar, stirring until the sugar dissolves. Add the cream and evaporated milk, and chill the mixture for at least a few hours.
2. Mix all the fruit ingredients together, and chill.
3. Pour the milk mixture into a prepared ice-cream maker. The container shouldn't be more than three-quarters full to allow for expansion.
4. Set the machine going (or start cranking) and freeze for about 30 minutes or until the mixture is partly frozen. Add the fruit mixture and continue to freeze until the machine slows or stops.
5. Eat.
   

Makes one gallon. You’ll want to follow your own ice cream maker’s instructions as to the preparation and freezing and ice and rock salt and yada yada yada. Recipe from the New York Times, 1972.

The Disconnect

Okay, my hometown paper, and probably yours, is full of stuff about Eliot Spitzer today. Understandably.

But a comment from Alan Dershowitz rather puts the whole thing in perspective:

“I always thought he was somebody who would come down on crimes with real victims,” Mr. Dershowitz said. “Prostitutes aren’t victims — they’re getting paid a thousand dollars an hour, and the johns aren’t victims. What upset me the most was that they wiretapped thousands of e-mails and phone calls. In an age when terrorism needs to be stopped, they’re devoting these kinds of resources to a prostitution ring?”

I'm in no way condoning Spitzer's behavior. But was this really a good use of taxpayer dollars?

* * * * * * * *

In a weird synchronicity of disconnect, yesterday's Times had an article on getting married with no one present, and another on making a baby with no one there.

In Montana, it's possible to have a double-proxy wedding. The groom is hither, the bride is thither, and random strangers say the vows for them in a Montana courtroom. It's one thing to have a wedding where one of the parties appears by proxy - it lets a soldier marry a hometown sweetheart while deployed. But two proxies? It boggles the imagination.

And in India, commercial surrogacy is legal and, because of the (low) costs involved, is attracting foreigners. So you get scenarios like this one:

Yonatan Gher and his partner, who are Israeli, plan eventually to tell their child about being made in India, in the womb of a stranger, with the egg of a Mumbai housewife they picked from an Internet lineup.

There's no relationship, no connection, no contact, nothing but a contract and some consideration. I have no problem with surrogacy, but this too boggles the imagination.

I'm not condemning either of these practices; I find them fascinating examples of a lack of barriers engendered by the global economy, the internet and modern technology. And I read both of those articles word for word, reveling in the fact they were both in the same section of the same paper on the same day.

* * * * * * * *

Back to Spitzer: he is suffering from a disconnect. From his wife and family, from his own high-minded ethics, from his constituents, from common sense. What was he thinking?

Guiliani. NOT!

In today's paper, the good grey lady issued her endorsements for both of the presidential primaries, blue and red. What was striking and wonderful was the complete indictment of Mr. Guiliani - I do so love some schadenfreude on my morning commute.

It's been a conundrum to me, and to many other New Yorkers, to see how well Guiliani had been playing in the middle of the country. Happily, he's crashing and burning, and the anti-endorsement in the Times can only add fuel to that funeral pyre:

Why, as a New York-based paper, are we not backing Rudolph Giuliani? Why not choose the man we endorsed for re-election in 1997 after a first term in which he showed that a dirty, dangerous, supposedly ungovernable city could become clean, safe and orderly? What about the man who stood fast on Sept. 11, when others, including President Bush, went AWOL?

That man is not running for president.

The real Mr. Giuliani, whom many New Yorkers came to know and mistrust, is a narrow, obsessively secretive, vindictive man who saw no need to limit police power. Racial polarization was as much a legacy of his tenure as the rebirth of Times Square.

Mr. Giuliani’s arrogance and bad judgment are breathtaking. When he claims fiscal prudence, we remember how he ran through surpluses without a thought to the inevitable downturn and bequeathed huge deficits to his successor. He fired Police Commissioner William Bratton, the architect of the drop in crime, because he couldn’t share the limelight. He later gave the job to Bernard Kerik, who has now been indicted on fraud and corruption charges.

The Rudolph Giuliani of 2008 first shamelessly turned the horror of 9/11 into a lucrative business, with a secret client list, then exploited his city’s and the country’s nightmare to promote his presidential campaign.

Reading the Paper

They keep saying that the printed newspaper is going to go the way of all things. If that really happens, I will be in a saddened condition, because reading the physical paper is a far different experience than reading the news on a computer screen. I know that I would never have seen this gem of an AP story had I not been holding the good grey lady in my hands on the train this morning:

When the meal a man was cooking at his aunt’s house in Hartlepool caught fire this week, he grabbed the nearest thing from a pile of laundry to put it out: his aunt’s billowing, powder blue, size XL underpants. He ran them under the faucet and tossed them onto the flames, smothering the fire and saving the kitchen, according to a spokesman for the local fire brigade. The fire official said that using a large, wet cloth to cover a grease fire was a sound principle and that with underwear, “clearly it depends on what size you are.”

On the other hand, I probably would have read Marie-Jeanne's obituary with or without newsprint in hand, just because she was a Balanchine dancer and I pay attention to that sort of thing. In case you missed it, she had rather a marvelous entry into this world:

Marie-Jeanne Pelus — she dropped her surname professionally because she thought balletgoers might find it awkward — was born in Manhattan on her family’s kitchen table after her mother, a French milliner, went into labor while her father, an Italian chef, was preparing dinner.

I wonder, though, what happened to the placenta?

Wordless Wednesday: Dancing

One day last week, the above photos were in the Times accompanying that day's dance reviews - three different reviews, three different companies (click on the photos to get to the reviews). I was struck by the similarities in the poses. You think the photo editor was having fun?

(I thought of posting pumpkin pictures because it is, after all, Halloween - but they came out terribly, and surely everyone else is doing it.)

Delurk, And The Perils of Tonic

Tomorrow, the 3rd of October, is delurking day - as decreed by Schmutzie, Sweetney and Jenandtonic. So delurk tomorrow! Here and elsewhere. And, as a refresher, delurk means getting up the gall to post a comment to a blog where you've been reading posts without commenting (a/k/a lurking). You don't need an account. Go ahead. Try it.

Jenandtonic's blog name reminds me of a little piece I read in the Sunday Times Book Review, about the remaining one of the Two Fat Ladies and her penchant for gins and tonic:

About Wright’s heft, The Daily Mail’s interviewer comments: “It wasn’t the alcohol that damaged her health. It was the quinine in the tonic water she added to her gin — two pints of gin a day for 12 years, which I calculate as roughly 9,000 pints of gin and over 50,000 pints of tonic water. The quinine destroyed her adrenal gland, and now she can’t lose weight, even if she lived on lettuce — which I doubt she ever would.”

Imagine. It's not the gin that's hurtful, it's the tonic. Who'd have thunk it?

The Good Grey Lady Has Gone Colorful!

Imagine my surprise, while reading the newspaper of record this morning, to discover, in the front page article about the phone call made to Eliot Spitzer's father, that the New York Times had printed the word shit. I believe that the world has just shifted on its axis.

Amanda Hesser is stalking me!

There's no other explanation. A few months ago, I posted about David Eyre's pancake...soon thereafter she wrote about it in the Times magazine "Recipe Redux" column.

On Wednesday, 7/26 I posted about our summertime staple pasta dish - something we invented together, W. and I. On Sunday 7/29, Hesser had another "Recipe Redux" column featuring "Pamela Sherrid’s Summer Pasta" - almost identical to mine, yet way fussier.

Skip hers. Try mine.

More Reviewing of the Reviewer

Yesterday, Alastair Macaulay reviewed a performance of Hell's Kitchen Dance in which Mikhail Baryshnikov danced. Macaulay's reviews are all so personal; he always references other performances he's seen, other performers, other art forms. It's all about him.

But the review yesterday included a parenthetical that was just over the top:

(Trivial footnote: At no point in his career have I known him not to have the most beautifully cut hair.)

Really. Misha may indeed have great hair, and may have always had great hair. But, this is a DANCE review. Not a hair review, and especially not a personal recollection that "every time I've seen him, Misha's had great hair". Doesn't Macaulay have an editor?

Mrs. Astor's Mink

Yesterday's Times had a story about Mrs. Astor's will, complete with excerpts and selected bequests. My favorite part was that her daughter-in-law would get a diamond necklace and "my good mink coat and my chinchilla short coat".

It begs two questions: 1. who gets the lousy mink coat(s), and 2. aren't there any beaver coats? After all, the Astor money started with John Jacob Astor and the beaver-pelt trade.

Sobeit?

Okay - you'll have to click on this here image and check out the upper right paragraph headed "Seasoning". What I want to know is, since when is "sobeit" a word? It's "so be it", people. It's THREE words.

The New York Times is going to hell in a handbasket.