“Happy New Year,” I heard someone say to someone else in the restroom this morning, and for the first time, I heard the words echo into a corridor of years, past and future. I pictured the same two people in an endless, annual succession of New Year’s greetings. This is how people find themselves staying in jobs forever. This is how ten, twenty years pass so quickly. One simple greeting to acknowledge the passage of time, another click along the wheel, and then life continues.

I don’t want that to be me.

Perhaps one of my New Year’s resolutions will be to resume my search for a goal.

I just took an online quiz and it turns out I’m my favorite Peanuts character.

You are Schroeder!

Which Peanuts Character are You?
brought to you by Quizilla

Worthwhile reading: Daniel Mendelsohn analyzes the TV production of “Angels in America.” The articles from a year ago but I stumbled upon it yesterday.

Mendelsohn is the author of The Elusive Embrace, which I loved.

On “The West Wing” this season, the current vice president (played by Gary Cole) and the former vice president (played by Tim Matheson) are running against each other for the Democratic presidential nomination. I can’t look at Gary Cole without picturing him as Mike Brady in the “Brady Bunch” movies. Even weirder, Tim Matheson played Carol Brady’s first husband, Roy, in “A Very Brady Sequel.” I’m looking forward to some scenes between the two of them, so I can imagine them fighting over Carol. Now if they could only get Shelley Long on the show…

You go, Jon Stewart! CNN is cancelling “Crossfire.”

[CNN president Jonathan Klein] said he wanted to move CNN away from what he called “head-butting debate shows,” which have become the staple of much of all-news television in the prime-time hours, especially at the top-rated Fox News Channel.

“CNN is a different animal,” Mr. Klein said. “We report the news. Fox talks about the news. They’re very good at what they do and we’re very good at what we do.”

Mr. Klein specifically cited the criticism that the comedian Jon Stewart leveled at “Crossfire” when he was a guest on the program during the presidential campaign. Mr. Stewart said that ranting partisan political shows on cable were “hurting America.”

Mr. Klein said last night, “I agree wholeheartedly with Jon Stewart’s overall premise.”

Whether or not that’s the real reason “Crossfire” is being cancelled, it’s still nice to hear.

Matt and I had the great pleasure last night of meeting up with David, who was visiting from Missouri. We hadn’t seen him since his last visit a year ago. Matt, David, Jere and I had dinner at the Heartland Brewery in Union Square (incidentally, Heartland Brewery is owned by my third cousin or something), where I had a buffalo burger. It wasn’t much different from a hamburger, really. Afterwards, we walked through the cold night all the way to Marie’s Crisis, which is one of David’s favorite haunts (in fact, the last time I was there was when he last visited), and eventually, Mike joined us.

By 10:30 Matt and I were ready to go home. Well, I was ready to go home; I was tired and didn’t want to push things too much — I’m still getting over being sick last week. And Matt’s still recovering, too. So we played the “old Jewish couple” trump card and made our goodbyes. We went back to Matt’s place, I had some ice cream, we watched “The Daily Show” (Howard Zinn seemed pretty nutty), and we went to bed. The end.

Andrew Sullivan (and some others) have been criticizing the late Susan Sontag for not being forthcoming about her same-sex relationships. Today, Sullivan posts a couple of letters from readers who disagree with him. I’m excerpting one of them here, because I think it’s terrific.

Perhaps the best explanation actually is the one she provided (and not — imagine that! — the fervid projections of someone with a political agenda) — that she didn’t think it was interesting or relevant to her job as a writer who she happened to be sleeping with at the moment (and, remember, this reticence applied to her male as well as female lovers). That her “identity” might not have been first and foremost “lesbian.” That perhaps she felt she was beyond being labeled as “gay” or “straight” and had no desire to be pigeonholed as such. Perhaps, as a public figure, she wanted to protect the privacy of some part of her life. Who really knows? Honestly — and maybe this is because I’m a straight man who admired her for her mind, as a human being, and not as a member of some sexual-political group, I don’t really care. I don’t really understand why, even though she never denied having relationships with woman and certainly did her part for the gay community, you consider her a coward — presumably because she didn’t discuss her sexual life in confessional detail?

But then, I never understood how you could name a vile “award” after her for saying something (that the terrorists were demonstrably not cowards; that they had motivations beyond being “evil” and that we, as a nation, deserved better than the baby-talk the Bush administration put out after the attacks) that, while tough for many people — including you — to hear at the time, had the virtue of being absolutely, clarifyingly right, and is now conventional wisdom (well, except to the people responsible for our disastrous policies). Which isn’t to say she was right all the time — or never mis-spoke. But then again, who is? Certainly — as I’m sure, as a relatively intellectually honest pundit would be forced to agree, not even you.

I’m fascinated by the Lower Manhattan Expressway, which never got built. Initiated by Robert Moses in the early 1960s, it would have cut a huge swath across lower Manhattan from the Holland Tunnel to the Williamsburg Bridge. It would have destroyed parts of the West Village, SoHo and its many wonderful cast-iron buldings, and Chinatown. Here’s a tour of the route it would have taken.

I think of this because of what I saw on TV yesterday. If you love New York City history, you’ve got to watch New York: A Documentary Film, a 17.5-hour documentary by Ric Burns. There were originally seven episodes, but after 9/11, Burns created an eighth episode, covering the rise and fall of the World Trade Center. This weekend I re-watched Episode 6, which happened to be on TV. Episode 7’s on this week, which I’ve also already seen but plan to watch again.

The center of Episodes 6 and 7 is Robert Moses, the man who utterly transformed the city through his massive construction projects. The Power Broker is essential reading on Moses, but Episodes 6 and 7 of the documentary are sort of a Cliff’s Notes to the book and include much commentary by its author, Robert Caro.

Robert Moses is still relevant today — his name has often come up in discussions of the proposed West Side redevelopment and Jets stadium and of the redesign of lower Manhattan.

Here’s a good condensed description of the battle over the Lower Manhattan Expressway.

When Moses looked at Manhattan he saw pavement. There was also the proposed Mid-Manhattan Expressway, which would have gone across 30th Street. Robert Stern derided it: “Can you imagine an elevated expressway at 30th Street just so Long Island guys could get to New Jersey?”

One of the best things about Manhattan is being able to walk along its streets and experience the spontaneity of city life. Had Moses had his way, this would be impossible today.

Movie trailer for “Starbucking,” about a guy who’s trying to visit every Starbucks in the world.

One of these mornings I’m going to have to count the number of hot guys I see during the eight-minute walk between Matt’s building and the train platform at the World Trade PATH station. The number seems to be highest when I walk along Maiden Lane. It’s unreal.

I agree with this letter in the Times today:

To the Editor:

The theological anguish of religious apologists like William Safire over natural disasters like the tsunami always makes me wonder why they don’t just accept the obvious conclusion that God does not exist.

To be sure, there are always convoluted theological explanations for why predictions of a benign universe ruled by a loving deity are so often violated. But when scientific theories fail to agree with observation, they are modified or replaced by better theories.

The accurate atheist prediction that such tragedies are natural occurrences, bound to happen in a morally neutral universe, has the virtue of avoiding such unnecessary psychological pain.

Amen (as it were). It reminds me of Ptolemy and epicycles. You create a system of explanation that clearly doesn’t work, but instead of scrapping the system, you keep adding corollaries and exceptions and complicated additions onto it until it all just collapses under the weight of its own ridiculousness.

In fact, thanks to Google, here’s this:

It’s an attempt – a ridiculous attempt – to bring all the resources of a profound intellect to bear on something that won’t bear that weight. So it’s an epicycle. It’s a way of accounting for something. Whereas if you make the sort of Copernican jump and think, “Well, instead of trying to account for the fact that God is everywhere but you can’t see him, so what’s he doing?” say, “Well, God isn’t there.” The need for epicycles vanishes. It’s a smooth, easy cycle. Take God out of it and you don’t need epicycles.

Maybe I’ll convert to Mac…

Ooooh! The Apple iProduct!!!!!

Salon.com has a great article about why “Alias” is so great.

(Incidentally, you can skip the ads and go straight to any Salon.com article by going here first.)

I was watching “The West Wing” last night and saw a familiar name in the list of guest stars: Karis Campbell, with whom I went to high school in Japan. I played Mayor Shinn in our school’s production of “The Music Man,” and she played my wife, Eulalie Mackechnie Shinn. I hadn’t seen her in nearly 14 years, and it took me a while to recognize her last night, because she first appeared on screen wearing a hat. But later on I finally picked her out — she plays Ronna, an aide to presidential candidate Matt Santos (Jimmy Smits). Since he’s clearly the eventual Democratic nominee, I imagine she’ll have a recurring role. If he gets elected, maybe she’ll become a regular cast member.

I’m not sure what I think of Jimmy Smits playing the president. It will be hard for anyone to fill Martin Sheen’s shoes, but Smits doesn’t have the same wit or erudition that Sheen has as Jed Bartlett. Matt Santos is still a good guy, though. In fact, he’s as much an idealized candidate as Bartlett is — the integrity, the unfailing honesty, the desire to buck the system. But it will be a very different show. And I wonder which current cast members will still be around a year from now. (I hope C.J. stays.)

The assignment for Mrs. Stanfill’s eighth-grade social-studies class was to pick a year in U.S. history and live for a week as if it were that year, without any of the conveniences available in today’s modern society. I chose 1992, and for extra credit I persuaded my family to participate in the experiment along with me.

That’s the beginning of a humor piece, 1992 House, that appears in this week’s New Yorker. Though it’s a parody, for some reason it resonated with me. The year 1992 feels like yesterday; it’s shocking to realize how many things I take for granted today didn’t exist a mere 13 years ago.

Linguists Gone Wild!, about how the The American Dialect Society chooses its Words of the Year.

It’s always nice to see santorum get greater publicity. (By the way, that site gives new meaning to “splash page.”)

My favorite quotes from the article:

The suffix -based, as in faith-based or reality-based, was widely disliked. “It’s its own opposite,” said Bill Kretzschmar, editor of the Linguistic Atlas of America. “If it’s reality-based, it’s not real.” …

But carb-friendly — when used to mean “not containing carbohydrates” — took the prize. “It’s meaningless,” said phonetician David “Not the Rock Star” Bowie, “unless you’re saying you’re a friend of carbs by not eating them.”

I just posted the following on a comment thread about gay marriage, in response to a couple of people who made the usual arguments about gay marriage leading to polygamy and incest and such. My response:

Suppose the slippery slope argument is true? What if gay marriage *does* lead to legalization of polygamy, incestuous marriage, and so forth?

So what?

If you don’t have a good reason to ban polygamy, then polygamy should be allowed. Likewise for incestuous marriage.

My point is that if there *are* good reasons to ban polygamy and incestuous marriage, those reasons will still exist regardless of what happens with gay marriage.

Think about it.

Now that long-held view of mammalian meekness is being challenged by two nearly complete fossil skeletons, newly discovered in China, of mammals that lived some 130 million years ago. One mammal was the size of a 30-pound dog. The other was smaller, the size of an opossum, but – here’s the delicious part – its last meal had been a juvenile dinosaur, as evidenced by tiny dinosaur limbs, fingers and teeth still lodged in the mammal’s rib cage eons later.

That’s just gross.

Did you ever think too hard about what there would be if there were no universe, and suddenly find yourself in a total mindblow? I do this sometimes. I did it earlier today. My thoughts go:

What would there be if there was no universe? There would just be… nothing. So the foundation of our universe rests on… nothing. All of our history, everything that’s ever happened, is… nothing.

But how can there be no existence of anything at all? Not even a universe? Not even nothing?

Which is too much for my brain to wrap itself around. So then I start to feel that I myself don’t exist, that my identity and every memory I’ve ever had and every care I have is not just insignificant but non-existent, or even something there’s no word for, and I feel completely foreign to myself. I feel like a figment of my own imagination. This usually takes a few seconds to wear off; I have to seek refuge in the famliar — the world around me, my everyday thoughts — for it to do so.

It is, to be honest, one of the scariest mindblows you can do to yourself. Every so often I worry that I’ll get stuck in that mindfuck and never be able to snap out.

But it’s also quite a trip.

Wow.

Happy four-year bloggaversary to me.

Media consumed this past (three-day MLK) weekend:

Theater: The 25th Annual Putnam County Spelling Bee, William Finn’s newest musical. (He wrote Falsettos.) I loved it, and if you’ve enjoyed watching the National Spelling Bee or “Spellbound,” you will, too.

(And I’ve now got a little crush on Jesse Tyler Ferguson, which Matt predicted would happen.)

Film: “The Aviator.” I really enjoyed this. I didn’t know much about the movie beforehand and was surprised to see both Alec Baldwin and Alan Alda in it, but only somewhat surprised to see John C. Reilly (since he was also in “Gangs of New York,” also by Martin Scorcese and also with Leonardo DiCaprio). I also didn’t realize that the movie only goes up to the late 1940s, so I was surprised when it ended. Despite the 165-minute running time, I wasn’t bored once.

TV: Matt and I have been making our way through reruns of “The West Wing” on Bravo. I’d never seen much of seasons 3 through 5, and he’d never watched the show before October, so we decided to start from the beginning. In the past two nights we’ve watched seven episodes, spanning the end of season 3 (the Qumari defense minister, the re-election campaign, C.J.’s bodyguard) to the beginning of season 4 (the two-part “20 Hours in America”).

Books: I’ve been dipping into Life Stories: Profiles from The New Yorker, a collection of 75 years of profiles from that magazine. So far I’ve read terrific profiles (some of which are also online) of magician Ricky Jay; the pi-obsessed Chudnovsky brothers (the piece is also a sort of profile of pi itself); and Johnny Carson (whose profile isn’t online, although it turns out there’s a database of every guest who appeared on “The Tonight Show” during Johnny’s 30-year reign).

Overall, not a bad weekend.

(By the way, I wonder if there are any standards for how to represent book, movie and show titles online: italics, quotation marks, or what? And do the rules change when the title is within a hyperlink?)

An excellent, excellent article from Sunday’s New York Times Magazine explains something: There is no Social Security crisis. I learned so much from this piece – great information about the history of Social Security and the debates surrounding it. Bottom line: the Bush people are manufacturing a crisis in order to build support for a radical ideological goal. Sound familiar? (*koff* Iraq *koff*)

In this case, their goal is to privatize Social Security. If they want a debate on whether privatizing Social Security is a good thing, fine — let’s have that debate. But let it be an honest debate. Bush likes to say that he trusts the people, but if he trusted the people, he’d tell them straight out what he wanted to do, and then he’d let them decide. By inventing a crisis, he’s showing that he really doesn’t have faith in his own beliefs, or that he doesn’t think most people would agree with private accounts if they knew the truth. He hopes that people are uninformed enough to accept his lies.

So he thinks people are dumb enough to accept his lies, but smart enough to invest their own Social Security money wisely? I don’t get it.

It saddens me how much truth and logic has gone out the window these last few years. I’m so sick of it. That’s the worst thing about this administration — not the policies (though they do suck), but the lies used to advance them.

Joshua Micah Marshall has some good stuff as well.

Oh my god. Why have I never seen this? It’s a blog that makes fun of the New York Times wedding announcements. (via my boyfriend)

I have to admit I looked at this photo for a long time yesterday. That guy’s rather intensely handsome.

I need help from someone who knows WordPress. On my archives page, below the links to the monthly archives, I have a list of all the individual entries. But I can’t get WordPress to print the entry date next to each entry! Can anyone help me out here?

We’re finally halfway through.

Four years ago, I wrote:

“As I write this, we’re 28 hours and 20 minutes into the Bush II era. How is everything so far? Planet Earth: check. United States: check. Me: check. Charismatic presidential speechifying: well, I guess we can’t have everything. Still, maybe this won’t be so bad after all. Oh, the soft bigotry of low expectations.”

Boy, was I naive.

From the Little-Known History Department:

Besides Federal Hall, there’s one other place in New York City where a president took the oath of office: 123 Lexington Avenue, at 28th Street, where Chester A. Arthur was sworn in as president on September 20, 1881, after James A. Garfield was assassinated. (“Garfield had been shot in July by Charles J. Guiteau, a disgruntled job seeker, as your fifth-grade social studies teacher probably described him without saying what job would have made him gruntled.”)

You know what this means, right? Road trip! (Fine – subway trip.)

Non-Errors: “Those usages people keep telling you are wrong but which are actually standard in English.” Most of these are a big relief to me. (I’ve always felt guilty when using hopefully in its nontraditional sense.)

But I’m still going to use among instead of between when I’m referring to three or more entities. That is the only sort of English up with which I will put.

Our trivia team was on MSNBC. Unfortunately, we appeared onscreen as the reporter said the word “nerds.”

Apparently you need to use Internet Explorer when watching the clip. The “MS” in MSNBC does stand for Microsoft, after all.

Here’s Posted in General

I’m shocked, given that I just read an old New Yorker profile of him last week and he was on my mind. I thought he’d live to be 100.

Read “The Man Who Retired,” by Bill Zehme, from Esquire, June 2002.

R.I.P., Johnny Carson.

A couple of articles about “The West Wing,” both with some tidbits:

• Executive Producer John Wells claims he hasn’t decided who will win the presidential election: Republican Vinick (Alan Alda) or Democrat Santos (Jimmy Smits).
• The season will end with back-to-back episodes set at the Republican and Democratic conventions.
• Santos does’t have to win in order for one or more current castmembers to continue with the show.
• Martin Sheen is still in negotiations about returning to the show “in some capacity” next season; the Times says he will definitely be back next season.

Incidentally, the Times says that the show’s ratings are up slightly this year from last year, that the show has received a creative jolt due to the ending of Bartlet’s administration, and that it will likely be renewed for at least another season.

The American Prospect is running a contest to enunciate the values of liberalism in 30 words or less. One of my favorites so far:

“I am my brother’s/sister’s keeper but not his/her judge.”

I can’t believe Paul Giamatti got screwed out of an Oscar nomination for Sideways.

Hey, the New Yorker has posted its great 1978 profile of Johnny Carson by Kenneth Tynan.

I’ve decided to start a meme. I want to see what’s on your clipboard.

In the comment section of this post, I want you to press Ctrl-V (or Command-V or whatever the “paste” command on your machine is) and post the contents as a comment. I think it might be fun to see the results.

I’ll start.

I’ve been on a New Yorker kick lately. I’m reading About Town: The New Yorker and the World It Made, by Ben Yagoda. It’s filled with wonderful anecdotes (including some about pieces/authors that the magazine rejected), excerpts from correspondence, excerpts from New Yorker pieces, some famous cartoons, and summaries of famous articles and stories that originally appeared in the New Yorker (such as “Silent Spring,” “Hiroshima,” “In Cold Blood,” some Salinger and Updike stories, etc.). Great stuff.

Bookmarked for future reading: The Rape of Ma Bell and The Decision to Divest: Incredible or Inevitable?, about the court-ordered breakup of “Ma Bell,” AT&T, in the early 80’s. For some reason I’ve long been interested in this topic. This is a fantastic site about the pre-breakup Bell System. (It’s so weird that you used to have to rent your phone from AT&T – you couldn’t just go to the store and buy one.) Here’s a great primer of how today’s current phone companies derive from AT&T (it has maps, ooh) and here’s a chart.

I’m such a nerd.

When I was 13 I learned the following song in summer camp:

If, after flushing,
The flow of water fails to stop,
Please give the handle
A short, sharp jerk

And you know what? It works.

Obituary of William Shawn, eccentric New Yorker editor (1952-1985), printed in 1992.

From my latest high school class newsletter:

“I guess the most exciting news is that I am expecting baby number 5 in June (another boy!). It was a shock at first but I know children are a blessing from God and am truly grateful for all the blessings he has given me. (However, I do plan on getting my tubes tied this time.)”

Thanks to the current NYC subway chaos, I’ve learned a new subway term:

When the system is working normally, rush-hour trains can run so frequently that one seems almost to ride another’s tail.

Now on the A tracks at Canal, Mr. Capone said, a rare condition occurs known as “absolute block.” That means that before a train can pull out of the station, there can be nothing on the tracks between Canal and Chambers. No trains. No workers. The only exceptions to the rule scurried along the track bed on four hairy legs.

I actually experienced this last night, while riding the A from the Village down to Matt’s place. We were stalled at Canal Street for a few minutes. Guess this’ll be the norm for a little while.

Cheney Criticized for Attire at Auschwitz Ceremony

Other leaders at the event in Poland on Thursday marking the 60th anniversary of the death camp’s liberation, such as French President Jacques Chirac and Russian President Vladimir Putin, wore dark, formal overcoats and dress shoes or boots.

“The vice president, however, was dressed in the kind of attire one typically wears to operate a snow blower,” Robin Givhan, The Washington Post’s fashion writer, wrote in the newspaper’s Friday editions.

Between the somber, dark-coated leaders at the outdoor ceremony sat Cheney, resplendent in a green parka embroidered with his name and featuring a fur-trimmed hood, the laced brown boots and a knit ski cap reading “Staff 2001.”

I usually don’t read too much into fashion decisions, but… come on, Dick.

On the other hand, what does he care – he’s already been re-elected.

Here’s a histogram of the best movies of 2004. (Note to self: refer to this list often.) [via]

North Korea is the most secretive country in the world today, with its main railway lined with walls so high that its foreign passengers can’t see the countryside. It is also, as Bradley Martin’s book makes clear, the most repressive and brutal country in the world, with entire families sometimes executed if one member gets drunk and slights the Dear Leader. It is at the same time by far the most totalitarian, with nearly every home equipped with a speaker that issues propaganda from morning to night.

– From a great book review by Nicholas Kristof.

Yipes.

I’d been avoiding “Desperate Housewives.” When I first heard of the show in late October, it had already become a hit. Now, the surest way to keep me from watching a show is to tell me that all of America loves it. I watch too much TV as it is (it didn’t used to be that way, but when you have a TV-addicted boyfriend, it’s easy to slide into sloth – although my lack of protest might be telling), and I’m not about to let the great unwashed masses determine how I use the remainder of my valuable time. A couple of years ago I finally watched 10 minutes of “CSI.” I was at my parents’ house and they had it on. I can’t remember what I thought of the show; I was too busy feeling smug.

Snobbiness wasn’t the only reason I avoided “Desperate Housewives.” I’m hesitant to begin watching a show with complicated plotlines if I’ve missed several episodes. I hate jumping in mid-stream. I’m pop-culturally tone-deaf as it is, and not understanding the plot just makes things worse. That’s why it took me so long to start watching “Buffy.”

Then the whole Nicolette Sheridan/NFL thing happened, which shot “Desperate Housewives” into the pop-cultural stratosphere. My resentment at the show (and at myself) only increased. There was no way I’d begin watching now.

But a couple of weeks ago I was at my parents’ house and they were watching it. So I sat on the couch and, for the first time, I saw it. And I liked it. It was smartly-written, well-acted, and funny, and there are hot guys. How stupid I’d been!

Since then I’ve seen a couple of episodes. And now (sigh) I’m going to have to watch the rest of the season, including repeats. By May, I should be caught up enough to appreciate the season finale.

And then I can engage in conversation around the proverbial water cooler at work.

I guess just because America likes something doesn’t mean it sucks.

At least, not always.

We saw “Bad Education” this weekend. Wow. I love Pedro Almodóvar’s movies – though other than this one I’ve only seen “Talk to Her” and “All About My Mother.” The characters in his films are so dramatic, the plots so fanciful, the colors so brilliantly beautiful. This one was particularly haunting – the trying on of selves, of genders; the world refracted through the art of storytelling. It was reminiscent of “Vertigo,” in both plot and music. In fact, I loved the music so much that I’ve just ordered the soundtrack. The movie’s definitely worth seeing.