Benji walks! And whistles (with a little help).

July Visitors to Pittsburgh

A much-delayed photo report on two visitors to Pittsburgh in July: first, Benji's Grandmom; and then, Mark. With Mom, we went to the Phipps Conservatory for an exhibit by glass artist Dale Chihuly; then walked a few steps to Schenley Plaza for a ride on our neighborhood carousel. With Mark, we spent a rainy day at the Frick Art Museum. (Unfortunately for us, Frick kept his best stuff at his place in New York.)

Chief Justice Roberts, I know you're out there.

Quite obviously, he relies on this blog for reading recommendations:

Referencing the work of acclaimed Montana writer Norman Maclean on Thursday, Chief Justice of the United States John Roberts Jr. sought to inspire and encourage a future generation of lawyers, comparing the fundamentals of their chosen profession to firefighting.

“It might seem that smokejumpers and litigators have nothing in common,” Roberts told an overflow audience at the University Theatre. “But both are willing to jump into an environment that others try to avoid” and that contains a problematic situation.

Drawing on passages from “Young Men and Fire,” Maclean's nonfiction account of Montana's tragic 1949 Mann Gulch forest fire, Roberts settled into a classic Western theme as he delivered the ninth installment of the Judge William B. Jones and Judge Edward A. Tamm Judicial Lecture Series.

OK, but as for his claim that litigators have something meaningful in common with smokejumpers, other than being both mammals? Clearly erroneous!

Yinz gowen dahntahn?

The City Paper has just published this neat city guide, which includes a section on Squirrel Hill: Pittsburgh's Promised Land. Hee hee.

Lord Pratt, R.I.P.

Lord Michael Pratt has died. "[O]ne of the last Wodehouseian figures to inhabit London's clubland and . . . an unabashed snob and social interloper on a grand scale," Lord Pratt was "sent to Eton, having already acquired the rotund shape that would stay with him for the rest of his life." His office career was short:

After graduating Pratt found a position at Lazard Brothers, the merchant bank. Three months into his new job, however, he judged that it would be more agreeable to attend Royal Ascot than to turn up at the office, and his services were dispensed with. He never again sought full-time employment.

The responses, from the letters page of the Telegraph:

Sir - Your obituary (September 8) of Lord Michael Pratt was mean-spirited and, in a number of respects, false. Lord Michael never "pined" for anything so ephemeral as "the days of Empire", and the description of him as an "unabashed snob and social interloper" is a travesty of the truth. Lord Michael certainly treasured his annual tours of Britain, Europe and America, when he visited his vast array of friends, all of whom greeted him with open arms. The allegation that he overstayed his welcome by weeks or months is quite untrue.

The caricature of Michael as a gin-soaked club bore is so far from being true that it would be laughable were the lie anything less than wicked. His quick wit, his charm, his depth of knowledge, his powers of conversation and, above all, his great capacity for friendship were the qualities which all those who knew and loved him will cherish. He was a loyal friend and a genial and generous host at Bayham, in London and in Italy.

— John Bromley-Davenport, London EC4


Sir - Your obituary of Lord Michael Pratt raised my spirits. He seems to have contributed very little of use to the world in his life, and it is only fitting that his obituary should, at least, raise a chuckle.

— Richard Greenfield, Mildenhall, Suffolk

(via Mefi.)

50 book challenge: #39, #40, #41, #42, #43.

#39: Lois McMaster Bujold, Cetaganda. Miles travels to Cetaganda, a thoroughly genetically engineered empire consisting of an upper aristocracy, the haut, and a lower warrior aristocracy, the ghem, and manages to foil a treasonous plot to overthrow the empire.

#40: Evelyn Waugh, Scoop. Based on Waugh's experiences covering the 1930s war in Ethiopia. Strangely, the book was more humorous when it was less directed. The more plot-intensive middle was diverting, but not as funny (and not trying to be, I think) as is usual.

#41: Alphonse Daudet, In the Land of Pain. Moral of the story: do not get syphilis when you are 17, if you live in an age before antibiotics. Otherwise, you will suffer treatments like being hung by your jaw from the ceiling (!) and you will end up addicted to morphine, which frankly is probably the best you can hope for. Daudet had two sons: Leon, a writer and anti-dreyfusard anti-semite, and Lucien, an intimate friend of Marcel Proust.

#42: Richard Dawkins, The God Delusion. Much of this book would not seem too out of place on Usenet, and I say that even as a member of his party. Shorter Dawkins: lolxtians pwnd!

#43: Norman, The Design of Everyday Things. A little on the consultant-speak side.

2007 Ride to Cure Diabetes: at the finish line.

I'm back from Montana, and the ride went great. I raised over $5,000, which is absolutely fantastic. Thank you and thank you and thank you again to everyone who donated. I couldn't have done it without you. You will be receiving personal notes of thanks from me in the near future, and I'll be posting a few pictures from the trip here, too, along with a ride report.

Photoblogging of Benjy and other subjects will be delayed for a brief time, since our camera got lost on Jeanne's trip to Los Angeles. Of course, as usual, it's not the value of the object that matters but the pictures of Benjy with great-grandparents and our friends that can't be replaced. A little sad.

Still, we have some photos in the hopper, so stay tuned!

50 book challenge: #34, #35, #36, #37, #38.

#34: Edward Tufte, The Visual Display of Quantitative Information. Though revised a few years ago, the second edition seemed pretty dated, relying mostly on the same graphs that were in the original. Still, this book is a classic for a reason, and helped me think better about the topic, but like many classics it is also slightly nutty - for example, Tufte's focus on counting up graphic elements (each line, word, dot, etc.) and minimizing that number as a sure indicator of quality is a little hobby-horsish. I'm willing to believe that that may be a decent proxy for certain aesthetic values, but several graphs he deemed superior after eliminating all "unnecessary" elements I found harder to understand and interpret. In this he has something in common with modernist architecture.

#35: Annie Dillard, An American Childhood. Memoir of a child growing up in Point Breeze, an upper-middle class neighborhood just next to Squirrel Hill. Dillard has a good understanding of childhood as a series of awakenings, or maybe that's just how it's recalled by adults. Ask a child, I guess. Being a resident here myself, of course the intensely local flavor of the book was great. You can see all the places mentioned in five minutes on a bike - and, of course, this being Pittsburgh, they are all still there, 50 years later.

#36: Bujold, The Vor Game. I devoured this and was hungry for more.

#37: Audrey Niffenegger, The Time-Traveler's Wife. Sadly, I had taken this book with me to Montana in the expectation that it would keep me occupied for the weekend. No such luck. I enjoyed reading it so much that I had almost finished it by the end of the plane ride into Missoula and polished off the little remaining by that night. I was a little sorry to have read it so quickly, thus reducing the amount of time during which I was deriving pleasure from actively reading the thing, but the story has stayed with me so that pays dividends. In a way, I was glad to read it so quickly because it more impact had more proactive impactfulness that way and also made it less confusing, what with all the switching back and forth between time periods. Highly recommended.

#38: Norman Maclean, Young Men and Fire. I bought this on my way out of Missoula and only wished that I read it a little earlier, before getting to Montana. Yes, by the author of A River Runs Through It, and a former forestry student and even firefighter, before becoming a professor of English at the University of Chicago. Maclean didn't publish his most famous works until late in life; this book, in fact, was unfinished at his death, but it holds together surprisingly well for being something of a patch job. And anyway, the story has a kind of meditative discursive quality that probably lends itself to a bit of assemblage. His investigation, both scientific and moral, into the Mann Gulch fire of 1949, which killed 13 smokejumpers who were overtaken and killed by a wildfire in a matter of minutes after landing in the area. It was also an essay on how history gets written and why it matters, and the fact of the smokejumpers' death, and Maclean's reconstruction of the moments shortly before and at the moment of their death had a lot to do with his own advanced age, and with the past death of his wife from esophageal cancer. The section on the scientific studies of fire spread had a little of the "throw everything left in the writer's file into the book" about them, but overall that quality added to the book's charm. An unusual work of nonfiction.

50 book challenge: #32, #33

#32: Tolkien, The Return of the King. Good guys win. Yay. Strangely, the scouring of the shire totally works in the book yet would have been terrible in the movie. When movies are done, you just want them to be done. There's no patience for noodling around after the climax.

#33: Bujold, Warrior's Apprentice. Bone-damaged Miles fails entrance exam for Barrayan service academy; smuggles to kill some time and accidentally finds himself head of the non-existent Dendarii mercenaries. Wins a war at 17 years old, upon returning home avoids execution for violating Vorloupulous's Law. Bothari dead?

OPEC: Organization of Petroleum Pizza Exporting Countries

From a Times article called "A Neighborhood Balks at a Chain Restaurant," about the resistance from local pizza shops in a Brooklyn neighborhood to a new Papa John's franchise (to be owned by 23-year-old Sandeep Singh). The most interesting sentence was in the last paragraph.

Some of Johnny’s competitors who signed the anti-Papa John’s petition are not taking the news any better. For years they worked in friendly rivalry, helping each other through tight spots.

“If we get short on cheese or tomatoes, we go to him or he comes to us,” said Gino Campese, the owner of Scotti’s Pizza. “When it’s time to raise prices, we get together. There’s room for everybody. But not for Papa John’s.”

I don't know. Maybe everyone would be better off if Papa John's stays out, because the entrance will trigger a race to the bottom of lousy pizza, albeit at cheaper prices. Maybe pizza-eaters don't know what's good for them, or at least aren't willing enough (from quality-pizza-makers' perspective) to pay for it.

But there's at least another story you could tell her about what's happening: it's a classic price-fixing cartel, which depends for its survival on enforcing barriers to entry. I was surprised to see the story take that turn at the end. But maybe I'm naive. Anyway, good luck with that, fellas!