Assorted Nonsense: Straight-Up With a Twist

Can’t get up in the morning? Me neither. I have three different alarms that go off in a sequence that is designed to get me to walk across the room and turn them off. Usually the third one works. Getting out of bed is the worst thing in the world. Wait, I have to get past all that rush hour traffic? Fine, it’s the second worst thing. After years of chasing the school bus, arriving breathless for class in college and skipping breakfast to get to work before noon, I’ve figured out that nature never intended for me to rise before nine.
According to the Boston Globe, People are like birds in that they have one of two chronotypes. You are either a “lark” or an “owl.” Without making this too complicated, you are either a morning person or a night owl. (Unless you are just sleepy all the time in which case you may be a three-toed sloth). You may be programmed to rise at 6 or not until 9. We all know when we are most productive and when we are not and that is the result of our own chronotypes.
But wait, you say. Aren’t people really mammals? Yes, of course we are (your 4th grade teacher is so proud of you right now). It’s what we have in common with other mammals that can explain another important characteristic of our chronotype. Most mammals nap. Humans do this fairly inconsistently after kindergarten, exceptions being some associates on some intense projects. But, like me, they are victims of biology. We are programmed to be drowsy twice a day: late at night and between 12 and 3 in the afternoon. I know what you are thinking. It’s not my most productive time either.
This is all more complicated by daylight savings. Short days are strange. They are made stranger by the sitting in a cubical with only fluorescent lighting. Can this make me more productive? It works for chickens. They can be tricked into laying eggs every day, but there’s still that pesky afternoon sleepiness. Green tea and loads of coffee works for me, but is that addressing the problem? Surely some other solution exists to increase productivity.
A 2008 study of the University of Dusseldorf showed that the mere onset of sleep may trigger active memory processes. These are effective even if sleep is limited to only a few minutes. Aha! I need a quick burst of sleep, but how? Some are taking advantage of new technology to solve this age old need.
Energy Pods are a new machine that helps you get a power nap like never before. The pods consist of a hood that covers a reclining chair. It looks like a first class airline seat of sorts, but much more inviting. There’s a burgeoning trend in napping related businesses in the US. One example is MetroNaps, which lets people come over to their center in New York and pay to nap in these sleep pods. Sound crazy? It’s really just a naturally progression after bottle water and oxygen bars. What’s next in this trend? Bringing these pods into workplaces where employees can improve productivity with a power nap. The Energy Pods, retail for $12,400. The company has installed about 100 of these so far at varied places like Procter & Gamble, Cisco, and Stanford Medical Center. Should my office give this a go? My modest proposal is that we should try it. After all, consultants love adopting best practices, right?

2010-02-24T17:57:00.002-05:00

A program we sorely need are visas for entrepreneurs. They take risks, create jobs and generate wealth. The Startup Visa Act proposes legislation to modify the existing EB-5 Visa in order to drive job creation in the US and increase American global competitiveness. This would enable immigrant entrepreneurs who are creating new companies to secure visas to come to the United States, if there is investment capital available from a sponsoring US venture capital or angel investor of at least $100,000 in an equity financing of not less than $250,000.

Matthieu Ricard on the habits of happiness | Video on TED.com

2010-02-02T13:34:00.000-05:00

Matthieu Ricard on the habits of happiness | Video on TED.com

There is little change to report from last year’s annual report.... Hopelessness quotient up!

2010-01-27T18:07:00.003-05:00

Corporate FDI Plans on Hold for the Next Two Years -- WASHINGTON, Jan. 25 /PRNewswire/ --

2010-01-25T10:53:00.000-05:00

Corporate FDI Plans on Hold for the Next Two Years -- WASHINGTON, Jan. 25 /PRNewswire/ --

Burger Squared... reminds me of why I should eat organic meat

2009-11-25T13:40:00.001-05:00

Bleeding Edge Insight?

2009-11-03T15:36:00.002-05:00

My zany boss says at the end of a presentation on macroeconomic trends buy Chateau Margeux Bordeaux... global warming will destroy the vineyards. Really? This counts as management consulting? Amusing? Yes. Valuable to clients? No.

PE Crisis Coming

2009-10-29T10:39:00.001-04:00

Mad Men Suit by Brooks Bros.

2009-10-20T13:08:00.004-04:00

Seems like selling out a respectable brand with a noble heritage. What's next James Bond suits by Brioni? Still, is it bad if I really want to buy one, because they did such a nice job?

http://www.brooksbrothers.com/madmen/madmen.tem

This Birth Certificate thing is crazy. Thank you Stewart!

2009-07-23T12:04:00.000-04:00

The Daily Show With Jon Stewart

Mon - Thurs 11p / 10c

The Born Identity

www.thedailyshow.com

Daily Show
Full Episodes

Political Humor

Joke of the Day

Brule = Toole

2009-06-30T10:45:00.004-04:00

Finally the annoying Tyler Brule and the pretentious Monocle Magazine have been put in their place by the FT's Michael Skapinker! Bravo to him and the A.T. Kearney folks for their Index!

http://www.ft.com/cms/s/0/f49cd1ce-64d4-11de-a13f-00144feabdc0.html

There is more to city life than convenience
By Michael Skapinker
Published: June 29 2009 18:56 | Last updated: June 29 2009 23:20
Vittorio Colao, chief executive of Vodafone, is moving to London. He has decided that the market town of Newbury in Berkshire is not the place for the headquarters of the world’s biggest mobile phone operator.

The company said last week that, while hundreds of employees would remain at Vodafone’s Newbury premises, the leadership team would be joining Mr Colao in London, where he already lives.

I recall some years back going up to St Helens in the north-west of England to interview another Italian chief executive of a British company – Paolo Scaroni, then head of Pilkington, the glass maker. I asked how he had settled in, expecting warm words about the local hospitality and his new love of rugby league. He looked at me as if I was mad. He didn’t live in St Helens, he said. He lived in London and came up to St Helens for a day-and-a-half a week.

In the view of two recent surveys, however, London is no place to live. Nor is New York. Tokyo perhaps passes muster. Shanghai? Forget about it.

The two surveys – one by Monocle magazine, the other by the Economist Intelligence Unit – rank cities for their “liveability”. This sounds like a dreadful neologism, but the Oxford Shorter Dictionary is quite happy with it, defining liveable as “conducive to comfortable living”.

Zurich is the world’s most liveable city, declares Monocle. My colleague Tyler Brûlé, who is editor-in-chief of that excellent publication, writes that Zurich gets the wink for its “high-quality housing, impeccable public transport network, a refreshing lake at its core, a well-connected and user-friendly airport, cosy little cinemas, well-tended bars and diverse population”. Copenhagen took second place. Neither London nor New York made the top 25.

Vancouver, 14th in the Monocle survey, won top spot in the Economist Intelligence Unit liveability table, which ranked cities for their stability, healthcare, culture, environment, education and infrastructure. Vienna came second, Melbourne third.

Tokyo came only 19th in the Economist table, well behind the third slot Monocle assigned it. But then, as readers of his Financial Times Weekend column know, Tokyo is a personal favourite of Tyler’s. I have visited the city twice, and loved it too. But one FT letter writer declared it “traffic-snarled, polluted and architecturally challenged”. That is the fun of these city rankings. They get people worked up.

Of course, no city is intrinsically better than any other. Which you find more amenable depends on your preferences. If you like to get around by bicycle, London is pretty horrible (so, perhaps as a consequence, are its cyclists). If you want to be on your surfboard after work, Honolulu (11th in the Monocle hierarchy) is a better bet than Amsterdam (ranked 21st).

I can’t, however, help noticing one feature of these supposedly liveable cities. Not that many people live in them. Zurich has a population of only 360,000. Copenhagen has a little over 600,000.

Leaving aside Tokyo, you have to get down to Monocle’s 13th place before you find a city (Sydney) with more than 4m people.

Many people are choosing new cities. Every week, one million people move to cities around the world, according to a study carried out late last year by AT Kearney, the management consultants, Foreign Policy magazine and the Chicago Council on Global Affairs.

They are going to places such as São Paulo, Mumbai and Shanghai, with populations of more than 11m. They are not choosing cities for their liveability, but because that is where the opportunities are. Of course, the quality of life for many in these expanding metropolises is awful.

Is there a way to combine urban dynamism with, if not pristine cycle paths and spotless metro stations, a reasonable quality of life?

The AT Kearney researchers had a go. They looked at cities’ business activity – the value of their capital markets and how many global companies were headquartered there. They examined the number of international schools and the percentage of residents with degrees. They considered how many international news bureaux had set up and how much world news there was in the newspapers. They looked at the cultural attractions, at how many think-tanks were located in each city and how many political conferences took place there.

The result? New York first, London second, Paris third and Tokyo fourth. Of the “liveable” cities, Zurich ranked 26th and Copenhagen 36th. Vancouver did not make it into the top 60, kept out by the likes of Buenos Aires, Milan and Tel Aviv.

The AT Kearney cities are, in its words, those “whose ideas and values shape the world”. I’ll take that over liveability. So, it seems, will Vodafone’s Mr Colao.

michael.skapinker@ft.com
More columns at www.ft.com/skapinker

Copyright The Financial Times Limited 2009

What are you?

2009-06-08T10:32:00.002-04:00

"What are you?" a curious 8 year old asks me on Saturday.

I stammer for a while, realizing that I can't explain myself by saying that I make PowerPoint slides all day. I say that I make these books that our customers read and then they kind of use that to do whatever they do in their company better...

I get a quizzical look during my 3 minute non-answer, followed by "My daddy is an engineer."

"Yes, he is." I reply.

Adults certainly have no idea what I actually do as a consultant. Kids don't either. It takes a little boy to point out to me that what I do for a living makes no sense.

The stuff people post on Facebook

2009-06-03T23:06:00.005-04:00

This guy is clearly posting for douche bag of the year

"Hey there, I think I'm Jay Z, but I'm really an insecure nouveau riche, Jersey desi, wannabe baller who is screaming for attention."

buzzword attack!!!

2009-06-02T17:35:00.001-04:00

As if the words "traction" and "going forward" weren't bad enough... I received the following in an email today: I will organize a call for this group June/ July 2009 (date – TBD) – we can agree cadence of calls thereafter.

Cadence? The rhythm? Is nothing sacred? Certainly not the English language. That, like the Russian age structure, is in dire straits. Cue the music….

Ariana!

2009-04-10T11:57:00.000-04:00

Colbert joins in

2009-03-19T18:25:00.001-04:00

The Colbert Report

Mon - Thurs 11:30pm / 10:30c

The Word - Keeping Our Heads

comedycentral.com

Colbert Report Full Episodes

Political Humor

Mark Sanford

Asian ethnic holiday?

2009-03-18T15:54:00.001-04:00

Alexander Hamilton's Scorn: Reflecting on AIG, Goldman, Hank Paulson and Bob Rubin

2009-03-18T13:54:00.001-04:00

Steve Clemons on Alexander Hamilton

A VC

2009-03-13T10:15:00.001-04:00

I found this fascinating quote today:

I thought about that for a second and decided that I'd talk about the exact opposite. I don't know what the future will hold any more than anyone else. There is no such thing as a crystal ball and I can assure you that I don't have one.A VC, Mar 2009

You should read the whole article.

“Because the math is really complicated people assume it must be right."

2009-03-10T15:16:00.001-04:00

Excellent article from today's NY Times

Consulting decks and the idiotic pyramid principle

2009-03-05T17:53:00.003-05:00

Today, I declare that I will now be writing long incoherent decks with engineering flowcharts to give the reader the mental feeling of being “full” or at least overwhelmed. The pyramid principle has clearly been a waste of my time.

The Sage Swede explains that his general aim of “intimidate the reader.” He says that "Rightly packaged you can pass on banal conclusions with the reader thinking that he is too stupid to understand the brilliance. And engineering flowchart and obscure graphs is a prime tool for that."

Genius!

Stupid Indicies

2009-03-03T15:47:00.005-05:00

We come up with a bunch of arbitrary indices, but because you quantify something, however arbitrary, and then rank it, people take that seriously. The "Sage Swede" explains it as such: "Any methodology that takes a bunch of vaguely related and inconsistently measured indicators, multiplies them by arbitrary weighting factors and adding them up produces rankings filled with far more assumptions and statistical noise than real insight." Ironically he is the master of creating this stuff!

Life as a Consultant: LIFO World

2009-02-19T11:41:00.004-05:00

Your reward for doing work is to not be doing more work on some inane project....in the sense that you have the gush of relief that you are no longer Sisyphus for a brief moment... until you get a new rock (project) that is.

But with the economy in shambles, having a job is cool. Eye-is-twitching-from-not-sleeping enough is the new black.

Russell peters - About Bollywood Movies

2009-02-14T17:56:00.000-05:00

Awesome bit by Jon Stewart!

2009-02-13T16:19:00.000-05:00

The Daily Show With Jon StewartM - Th 11p / 10c

American Grandstand - Bank Hearings

Daily Show Full Episodes
Important Things With Demetri Martin

Funny Political News
Joke of the Day

Excellent travel writing about Cameroon by Lonely Planet's Adam Karlin on his blog

2009-02-12T14:20:00.009-05:00

http://adamsambles.typepad.com/adams_ambles/2009/01/index.html

how cheap can stocks get?

2009-02-12T14:07:00.005-05:00

PE ratios of 6 like in the early 1980s, could be in the cards in 2009-10! Long term interest rates can only go up, but will earnings rise in real terms first?

source: http://www.econ.yale.edu/~shiller/data.htm

2009-02-12T13:55:00.002-05:00

NEW BLACKBERRY STORM SUCKS

2009-02-10T23:47:00.003-05:00

Can't type well at all on this damn thing!

An MBA in 2 minutes

2009-02-10T17:26:00.001-05:00

1. Finance: A company should return to investors a sum in excess of the risk free rates that is at least equal to their cost of capital as measured by its risk to the relative market.

2. Marketing: Marketing consists of 4 variables: Price, Product, Promotion and Place. The rest is fluff.

3. Organizational behavior: In theory, be nice to people you work with, but in practice be Machiavellian

4. Ethics: Don’t get caught, but when in a pickle, ask yourself “What would Milton Friedman do?”

5. Statistics: In a normal distribution, 2/3rds of the population is 2 standard deviations from the mean

6. Operations: Do it better, cheaper, faster

7. Strategy: Do what is common sense over the long term, if that fails blame competition from China

8. Everything else: Open the solver add-in in Excel and use this to rig figures come out the way you want to

Lac Mystic

2006-08-16T23:38:00.000-04:00

In 1853 a young man decided to move to a cabin in the woods by Walden Pond near the village of Concord, Massachusetts. His name was Henry David Thoreau and his famous book Walden, which was published a few years later, describes what he learned from his two-year experiment and captures the ideas that were crystallized by his solitude in the woods of New England. Going off to be a Peace Corps volunteer is a similarly nutty experiment and every bit as unique for each volunteer as Thoreau’s two years could only have been experienced by him. Thoreau was dismissed for being a nonconformist individual or perhaps just a loser and screw-up, long before Jack Kerouac or James Dean made it cool. I suspect he would be disenfranchised in today’s world where most would only understand “know thyself” to be a bogus, new age quest of the self-absorbed. I would venture that Thoreau was a Hindu yogi or Tibetan Buddhist rampoche without necessarily being conscious of his own status (basically, because he was not too obsessed with what he was, but the kind of person he wanted to be and how he wanted to live). Maybe he would have been a PCV. A hundred and fifty odd years after Thoreau, I’ll try to gather, without pulling anything contrived, some universal understanding from my volunteer existence much as he was able to find wisdom from his own two-year experiment with living.

Coincidently, I’ve found the most peace and reflection when in Foumbot in the handful of trips that I have made to Lac Mystic. The stunning “magic lake” is in a volcanic crater a few miles north of Foumbot and rarely visited by anyone. Aside from the assurances about the “Mami Water” in residence, I know only of a small and standoffish troop of baboons that live up there in the cluster of peaks around Mont Bapit. It is often when I am up at Lac Mystic that things become clearer to me. When drinking a 33 Export at the other kind of local watering hole, I might ask that pointless question: What the hell am I doing here? I say it is pointless, because I am here. It is what I want to make of being “here” (whether in Foumbot, Cameroon or Concord, Massachusetts) that is a more worthy question. Peace Corps service is a damning and yet, also a liberating condition. One has so many constraints or challenges and at the same time carte blanche to completely screw-up or do something extraordinary. The possibilities are exciting and the obstacles are daunting. It is also an opportunity where some can decide to reinvent themselves and where others can actually be themselves. Either way, there is some figuring out of who we are involved in coming here and in staying.

When I’m at Lac Mystic, I am not deep in contemplation. I just see things without the veil of too much thinking. (Someone taught me to apply the same practice when playing golf: Ignore your brain; it just gets in the way). I feel like Thoreau says he felt at Walden Pond. I’m not farming as he says he might have been otherwise... I’m just there. Je suis la. (It is a good feeling to be reminded of metaphysically, because absently saying it any number of times in passing doesn’t really do it for me). People join Peace Corps for different reasons. I am going to avoid saying too much to justify why Peace Corps exists or what we really do for Cameroon. That is for each of us to consider based on different criteria. I can reasonably say that I haven’t done anything to raise the standard of living of almost anyone in this country and I once naively thought that was the point of small enterprise development in particular and of international development or foreign aid in general. However, my experience has been a great one and that’s why I came here: to try something different and see if I could lend a hand. I think Peace Corps’ slogan should be changed from “The toughest job, etc.” or that new idiotic “…how far will you go?” thing to “Hanging out and helping out.” I think that is a more honest and candid summation of what we do, albeit one that may sound less compelling on a recruiting poster. I have mastered a foreign language, traveled in Africa, shared ideas and given advice, become more marketable to grad schools or employers, and made great friends. I say to people in the US all the time that there’s honestly nothing else I’d rather be doing right now. (It helps that I’ve nothing better to be doing right now). Just as with any other job or any alternate life, you have good days and bad days. However, the bad days tend to be really bad and the good days are incredible. Few things have forced me as Peace Corps service has to experience new things and a live a life less ordinary, because to live a bland, mediocre, and unexceptional life is the greatest sin of all (a notion that was popular with Thoreau’s contemporaries like Walt Whitman… Oh, just watch Dead Poets Society).

I’m not a philosopher (long-winded as I know I tend to be. I’m a bit too simplistic in outlook and not clever enough for that particular métier) and unlike Henry David Thoreau I have nothing to opine about civil disobedience or individual liberty. I am human though (at least after 8 am and a strong mug of coffee) and in feeling human I can say definitively that what I know is less important than what I still do not know. What I believe or think is less illuminating than why that is so. What I have seen and experienced is limited by my imagination and by whether or not I have the guts, inspiration, or the sense to see and do more. I’ll leave it to our friend Henry David to conclude:

“…man’s capacities have never been measured; nor are we to judge of what he can do by any precedents, so little has been tried.”

This orginally appeared in the Febuary 2004 Laughing Cow.

Serving Neglect and Indifference

2006-06-28T11:39:00.000-04:00

I've been to Heritage India many times. Despite being forgotten about by the staff, I return because the food is rather good in a city of generally uninspiring Indian food. However, both Dupont and Glover Park restaurants (but especially Dupont) are understaffed and the wait and bar staff neglects patrons constantly. Superhuman patience is not a virtue, but a dining necessity. The happy hour is appalling since people are served late and the restaurant is less than transparent about what beers count as happy hour specials. The overall sad experience is compounded by arrogant and indifferent management that is confident that its great location will allow it to continue to ignore customers and take them for granted. I've had enough!

Unpaid Internships

2006-05-30T07:18:00.000-04:00

This was reprinted in The New York Times today. Brilliant!

The Original Starbucks

2006-03-13T01:19:00.000-05:00

When visiting the Pike's Place Market in Seattle recently I stopped into the first Starbucks where I was greeted in Japanese. The woman taking my order out of force-of-habit said "Konichiwa!" I responded with "grande latte," which I think is Japanese for "big paper cup of foamy milk and traces of coffee."

Moveable Feasts III : 52 Martinis sec au Tanqueray s’il vous plait!

2005-07-28T08:37:00.000-04:00

On a Friday afternoon following a third day of munching on baskets of brioche and drinking many more thimbles of coffee, dark roasted and brimming with lingering chicory flavor, I was excused for the day.

“What?”
“Yeah, we’re pretty much done hear. Just the arbitration clauses left. You can go.”
“You’re sure?”
“Yeah, absolutely… get out of here.”

I gathered my things and left our lawyers’ offices to stroll down the street and enjoy more of my surroundings. Small French cars whizzed by, their Gallic drivers only barely keeping to any semblance of vehicular order in a predictable way that is almost comforting in some twisted sense.

I eventual stumbled upon the Metro and thought I should give it a go. A hot, non-air-conditioned ride later, I was roughly in the vicinity of my hotel. Fortunately, the third time in a circle around the Opera, I finally found Rue Scribe and Intercontinental Le Grand Hotel. My slightly weathered, leather satchel seemed the only thing capable of gaining weight in France even faster than I could what with the nearly end-on-end feasting that characterized my stay. I dumped the bag and checked email briefly before hesitating momentarily, wanting to take off my tired-looking suit and leather-soled shoes, before I remembered something important. With a renewed sense of urgency and thrill, I put my jacket back on and slipped "Lonely Planet Paris" into a pocket.

A quick check in the mirror to adjust my tie and I was soon down the plush corridor and down the sweeping staircase. A nod to the doorman and a sharp left on the street and I headed across the square and down into the Place Vendôme. I strode into the elegant lobby of the Ritz and asked the bellman who held the door open where was “le ‘emingway Bar.” He told me to head down the hallway. I set off at a somewhat gentler gait, exercising as much self control as possible and remarkably not turning into a small child let loose in FAO Schwartz in New York or Hamleys in London. Here I was about to take a page from Papa’s own biography so to speak and make it my own.

You’d miss it, thinking it was someone’s den or study, if it were not for the gleaming, brass sign that tells you when you’ve past the seemingly endless side-corridor of display windows, hawking Brioni suits and Bulgari jewelry, that you have arrived.

LE BAR HEMINGWAY

And there it was. Like a temple or better yet, a shrine to a great soul. I remember seeing Michael Palin’s Hemingway Adventure, produced in 1999 by the BBC and broadcast in the United States on PBS to celebrate the centennial of Hemingway's birth. In this very fun program, we watch as Palin traces the Hemingway’s life around the world from Spain and Kenya to Cuba and Chicago, we see the truly extraordinary life that Papa, who hated the name Ernest, lived. Hemingway came to Paris a reporter and wrote in cafes staying warm through cold winters on glasses of brandy and handfuls of chestnuts and cool in summers on martinis and the company of Scott Fitzgerald as described in “A Moveable Feast.” As a young reporter, husband, and father there in Paris, Hemingway publishes "The Sun Also Rises."

I took a high level American literature class in college, where unintelligible, dreadlocked kids from Westchester wafted ridiculously about nonsense, refering to literature I'll probably never hear of to prove something to each other. Bullshit develops a rather distinct pungency in the afternoon that while others would do away with, is only appropriate to the confused and tortured mind of an English major. Most of the books sucked and I managed to avoid reading them and got the B+ I would have received anyway had I bust my ass, not that I was lazy, but because the books were unappealing. I was asking for trouble when I took that class with a persuasive roommate, who simply defied academia’s dictates our senior year to rarely, perhaps never, actually crack open a book and happily so. The only authors I read from the course with any seriousness were Fitzgerald and Hemingway, because they were good. I wrote what was one of my greatest papers in college on, yep, you guessed it, “The Sun Also Rises.” My thesis was quite simply put that mankind having satiated his basic need to survive was summiting Maslow’s hierarchical pyramid and then only like Sidhartha distraught afterwards. What was the point of it all? Death visits us all, like the bull in “The Sun Also Rises”. Some who walk and breathe among us have already “died.” Others have never “lived.” Like the matador, who is truly alive, we must “live,” in a contemporary sense, like a rock star.

I checked to make sure I was not wearing leather pants and looked unfamiliar to the readership of Rolling Stone. I then steped down into the room. walked past the small tables and modest booths to take a seat at the polished Oak bar. A white linen-jacketed barman placed a weighty looking napkin in front of me and we exchanged "bonjours." I often can't order drinks well in French and this evening was one such case. Granted it doesn't take too much to say bierre or whiskey sec (Scotch neat). Overcome, perhaps, by my surroundings I muttered something about Tanqueray and a martini in disjointed French that could have come from a bush taxi driver in Bafoussam, Cameroon. The barman dispensed with any more French for "Monsieur l'Etranger."

"O-liv, Monsieur?"
"No, perhaps a twist of lemon?"
"Yes Monsieur, Martini wiz limon"
"Yes, thank you."

A familiar green bottle was produced and enough of its contents poured into a shaker with a little vermouth and a after a moment of percussion of ice and steel, an art deco glass was filled with a crisp, chilled libation--a twist of lemon slipped in and decended to the bottom.

I had first read about this bar in Forbes FYI some years before. The bartender was a somewhat balding Englishman named Colin. Clearly, judging from the two rafish, woolly-haired frogs working there now, he was on leave. Perhaps he's in Key West or Havana.

I raised my glass and took that first timid sip that one takes with a cocktail. Not with beer, not with wine, not even so much with cognac--every bar and every bartender is different, and so we taste with more trepidation than we might hold out for other beverages. Remarkable. The bartender grined.

"Alright?"
"Perfect!"
"Good."

Clearly, this was a craftsman who knew he had a solid product. He had turned his attention to my right where two not quite middle-aged American women--one especially attractive for her years--were thinking about having a glass of wine. They wanted a chardonnay. He recommended a nice burgundy. They explained they wanted "char-don-nay." Too gracious or perhaps too fatigued to explain wine regions, he simply found the burgundy in question and poured tasting quantities of white wine.

"Oooh, that's good"
"Yes, we'll have that!"

I had been glancing around the room, taking-in the atmosphere and importantly the decor of this room as well as the neighbors. Around the shelves behind the bar were pictures of the Man. Some from his Parisian days, but most were from later years. The weathered face of a man spending his days fishing in Cuba and other weeks in the Spanish hills during the Civil War was more familiar. The Shelves on the adjacent wall had books and bric-a-brac, including a very curious CIA mug. Large fish hung on the walls and hunting photos looked as glamorous as taken from the pages of "Green Hills of Africa" Cigar smoke faintly wafted from the across the room. A Japanese businessman was enjoying the first of what would no doubt be many great evenings. He had just purchased four boxes of Montecristos, he said.

I ate some more almonds from the silver dish in front of me and took another sip of my martini. The bartender asked me if I wanted a newspaper or magazine. I decided not to be another cliché American in Paris, International Herald Tribune in hand, and declined; however tempting. “Ah, yes. Just want to enjoy a nice drink.” he replied. This made me think of the story of how Papa rode into Paris in a tank as a war correspondent after the Nazi occupation and set about liberating its cafes. He started with the wine cellar of the Ritz. Hemingway, his friends, and his fictional characters are usually found drinking all sorts of things. Brandy, grappa, Scotch, gin, Campari, the list is endless. Thinking about my “nice drink” I asked the logical next question.

“So, what did Hemingway drink here?”

“Hemingway? He drank lot of whiskey, Cognac, Bordeaux and Tanqueray.

“In fact, when he liberated the Ritz, that night he is said to have drank 52 dry martinis!”

[Merde! I checked and it appears to be accurate.]

I gushed with pride. I finished my martini, paid the bill (let us hope I don’t find many other places where I’m willing to pay 25 euros for a drink), and headed out the door with a happy spring in my step. I walked south to les Tuilleries and headed left to the Louvre.

Movable Feasts II

2005-07-10T17:22:00.000-04:00

Gliding down the streets of Paris in a Mercedes taxi from Place Vendome to Rue Kleber, I marveled at the extraordinary elegance of that city. The architecture is simply wondrous and yet perhaps a bit delicate looking, but in a sense ultimately substantial in form, not unlike a soufflé. I had woken-up after four hours of sleep and serendipitously put on my only “French” tie, a blue, cashmere Yves St. Laurent that I had semi-absently packed. Another day was spent with our outside counsel poring over documents that lawyers have the gift for making either nauseating, deathly boring, or often both. The fare during the day was fairly modest (relatively speaking). We were drinking seemingly thimble-sized coffees to stay awake and washing down shrimp and salmon sandwiches, that were heavily-laden with mayonnaise (but of course!), with bottles of sour, Vichy, mineral water—something I’ve never acquired the taste for.

That evening we hit the proverbial brick wall of fatigue and everyone went out to dinner in the colorful quarter of La Marais. Finding a lively little Moroccan restaurant that came highly recommended, we sat around two large brass trays and drank Algerian wine and some strong mojito-inspired drinks that the barman said was his own specialty from among his repertoire of aperitifs, as magical dishes were brought out. First, we feasted on a plate of off-the-menu merguez sausages, each bite of which was a sublime wave of piquant seasoning and equally fine lamb. This was accompanied by flaky pastila pies of chicken baked with a particularly sweet infusion of cinnamon. Small pots of lentils and lamb soup and sardines farci were next. To this day, my mental image of sardines, like that of most people, is of an unexciting can of rather pathetic, oily globs that imitate fish—sometimes unconvincingly so. Oh, but then, one is reminded that the world need not be just a bleak and unsatisfying place. Slightly crispy, stuffed sardines of a substantial length and mass appeared and I devoured them as slowly as I could, drawing on all the powers of restraint I’ve ever had, if only to savor the different textures in each bite: skin, flesh, and greens, and then finally in an encore of sorts the zesty lemon juice that clung to the crust like the last veneer of morning dew. Finally, big ceramic pots of chicken, fish, and lamb tanjine were presented. Large mounds of superb cous cous were also at hand. The lamb was tender and artichokes were suitably rich with the flavor of the tanjine broth. Eating can sometimes feel like an endurance sport of sorts. This means that sometimes pacing, some amount of discipline, and always will power are required for excellence. I was in rare form: with a few breaks and enough wine, I polished off most of the pot. I then ate a little of the almost perfumed fish tanjine, which was a real treat: the softness of the stewed fish absorbing some extra notes of mint. As some needed to sit and digest, others stood and danced to the now quite loud Arabic music, puffing on Marlboros, and not at all feeling confined by our cramped seating circumstances. Glasses of fragrant tea were served and dinner had to be walked off by a leisurely midnight stroll back to the hotels. La Marais was abuzz with street life as restaurants and bars overflowed into the streets that Thursday night. The cool night air and the moonlit buildings added a certain “I don’t know what.” There, my enchantment with Paris was fairly complete.

What if we're still doin' this when we're 50?

2005-07-10T17:11:00.000-04:00

Peter Gibbons: What if we're still doin' this when we're 50?
Samir: It would be nice to have that kind of job security.
Peter Gibbons: Lumbergh's gonna have me work on Saturday. I can tell already. I'm gonna end up doin' it, because, uh... [nods]
Peter Gibbons: because I'm a big pussy... which is why I work at Initech to begin with.
Michael Bolton: Uh, yeah, well, I work at Initech and I don't consider myself a pussy, OK?
Samir: Yes, I am also not a pussy.

“Office Space” 1999

It’s been a whole two minutes… is it time to check email yet? Some of us in my program are clearly having some great adventures around the world. Others are left behind and forgotten like forlorn Kerry/Edwards bumper stickers in that sticky, stinky backwater called DC. I am one of those people. I felt I had “graduated” in a sense with my internship this summer from my status last semester as a part-time, government peon. However, I’m becoming reacquainted with that once feared and now forgotten institution called work. Other interns, like me, live Dilbertesque lives begging a grad-student-proletariat-uprising worthy of the seminal motion picture “Office Space.”
I’m blundering through my summer at a small, sort of under-the-radar outfit (that I suppose I need not name), which allegedly specializes in a particularly innovative form of corporate welfare by providing a unique brand of moral hazard for some of the world’s biggest businesses and banks to invest in emerging markets. I, however, am sort of happy that I’ve sold my soul, because astonishingly, I got a free trip to Paris last month. I was, at first, perplexed and even stressed about why I was going, because I’m in a job I don’t really understand. I wish it were just about bullshiting one’s way through something you kinda don’t understand or just not give a shit about, because that I can handle (how else can you write IR papers?). Instead this summer feels like my Trade class last year with Prof. Fox: general confusion paired with the unwelcome sensation of being kicked in the nuts. To avoid reading about projects that we are funding and working on the Gigantic Excel Model From Hell (file name: s:/cluelessintern/fuckwit_model_666.xls), I check my email every two minutes. Hotmail is particularly great, because you can thoughtlessly click on these MSN links and be really pathetic by reading about “Ashlee Simpson in a New Spat with Lindsey Lohan” or “Is an Adjustable Rate Mortgage Right for You?” Sure, I have sunk to new lows, but anything is better than confronting work. God bless the Internet!
Now, I face another week of work, which could hardly be more depressing, because I think I should be fired for illusions of competency. I understand every third or fourth thing that is said in the meetings I attend (roughly 30% of my day is spent on conference calls where I feign comprehension and scribble/doodle on my notepad). I gave up after Excel goal seek couldn’t compute the changes in project costs after 300+ iterations and overrode the macros. What does that mean? $20 million give or take. I don’t really know truly, well, except that I’ve done something very wrong—a recurring theme. (My very patient boss should be speedily cannonized). But, I guess that’s alright, because I figure everything turns out OK à la “Office Space,” as long as I remain indignant in an aloof way, occasionally feign concern, and ignore something until it either goes away or I go back to school. Ultimately, I’m an intern: I’m not here to add value; I’m here to learn or at least embellish things later on my resume. In the meantime, I’ve found a baseball bat. Now, where’s that pesky printer?

“Moveable Feasts” I

2005-06-20T23:26:00.000-04:00

If you are lucky enough to have lived in Paris as a young man, then wherever you go for the rest of your life, it stays with you, for Paris is a moveable feast.

E. "Papa" Hemingway, "A Moveable Feast"

Well it appears there’s no light ahead of me to walk towards…. Oscar Wilde said that all Americans that are good, when they die, go to Paris. Indeed, the literary culture of the Twentieth Century is rife with bored and drink-deprived yanks spending decades in Paris. The “Lost Generation” that was immortalized in Hemingway’s “A Moveable Feast” and in “The Sun Also Rises” clearly could have done much worse. I never understood Hemingway’s love of Paris and his dislike of London, which he did not think really compared with Paris. In “True at First Light” (edited by grandson Patrick and published posthumously), he largely ignores, when stalking lions in the Kenyan Highlands, the discussion of the joys of city life in London between his second wife and his English hunting guide. A consummate and if somewhat reluctant anglophile such as yours truly cannot get excited about most things Gaullois, but yet people change.

Going through tumultuous and traumatic job change brings out all kinds of new resolutions and resolve, well, that or a drinking problem. Despite what my Mother will tell you, I’ve avoided the latter. In the Barnes and Nobles bookstore at West 66^th and Broadway in New York, I decided to get serious about something I enjoyed most about the Sunday paper, namely the travel section. I felt I needed to immerse myself in another place. And so I picked-up Peter Mayle’s seminal book, “A Year in Provence.” Most days-spent-at-the-beach and commotion-at-the-bazaar travel writing I’d known before was trite and dull in the end, despite the authors good intentions to make something interesting of it. I have always thought of Mayle’s books the way Tom Wolfe described the Sunday New York Times in that reading his books is like “slipping into a warm bath.” Mayle has an extraordinary gift. The first part is that he has a masterful command of the elements of wit and an expatriate Englishman’s bemused attitude albeit stiff upper lip for the idiosyncrasies and dry irony of life in the South of France. The second is a love of food and drink that he approaches with enormous zeal: part anthropologist, part adventurer, but mostly glutton (which without question is what I find to be a most endearing characteristic). The third is a benign, yet sincere affection for his subject; for Mayle loves Provence, loves the Seasons loves the olive trees, and even loves his neighbor with the unruly dogs and the perfect recipe for stewed fox. Having been influenced by nuances of Asian cuisine, my appreciation for the rich heritage and unique craft of French cooking came to me later in life than for most.

A Year in Provence was the first of many books by Peter Mayle that I have had the great pleasure to read. All of them have wonderful things to say about le gastronomie francais. A perfect storm arose that first year out of college. I was young, stupid, living in New York, and had for the first time something called disposable income. I like the term ‘disposable income,” because that’s oh so appropriate for young person in New York. Pissing away the product of one’s ungainful employment is unavoidable. So after years of dinning hall food and bad booze, I dined out and enjoyed the dimensions of street food and different world cuisines—both high and low--that as far as I’m concerned make New York the culinary capital of the planet. But France? That was genesis. That was the primordial ooze from which came fourth the basis for the existence of great food. Now I can’t tell you much about the great triumphs of Escoffier or Bocuse, but I’ve read some M.F.K. Fisher, Jeffrey Steingarten, and Alan Richman and that represents my “education” or lack thereof.

Finally, whether ignorant or enlightened, it doesn’t really matter much. The palette knows the truth that the mind can only yearn to understand. My first meal in France was, in retrospect, rather cliché: escargots and coq au vin followed by almond and caramel meringue. Oh and there were several bottles of a superb ‘98 Chateauneuf-du-Pape. The escargots happily surrendered their garlic, buttery flavor. The chicken, mushrooms, shallots, and wine produced a sublime symphony that made my side of potatoes the luckiest spuds to ever get puréed. The evening ended after a what seemed like several stout efforts to drain a bottomless glass of wine and stories about eating exotic invertebrates in China from a business development guy who picked-up the tab. I went to bed happy, my brain swimming in sulphates and arteries reveling in what could only have been good cholesterol.

To be continued…

Mad as Vindaloo about DC Dining Scene

2005-06-07T00:16:00.000-04:00

Why are they no good Indian restaurants in Washington? Well, that's being a wee bit unfair. There are after all a few mediocre ones that to the undiscerning palette, such as that of most newspaper reviewers, are somehow acceptable. I, however, beg to differ: Indian restaurants in DC are cheap or expensive and all specialize in disappointing food and/or poor service. The wait staff varies between being completely negligent to patronizing, assuming that you don't know what you are doing. The result is that in search of up-market dining and presumably the quality one might find in New York per se, one is led astray to expensive renovated steak houses or Greek meza/tapas joints that have dug-up the best prints from the Raj on this side of the Atlantic and left the witless, bourgeois, tandoori-and-paneer crowd to their own ignorant and finally destructive devices.

Perhaps this tragic story wouldn't be so bad if it weren't for the fact that the penultimate guide--yes, Zagat's!--leads one astray and displays a shameful disregard for authenticity in this cusine. If the oily spoon curry houses were any better, then I'd feel better about things, but they aren't. They just are not ripping you off for their low-grade, too often buffet-style fare.

I said I was being a tad unfair? Well, yes after trying some of the better restaurants (Bombay Club, Heritage India, and Indique; and no I shan't speak of the really bad places I have had to endure), I've given a nod of approval to Indique and a grudging acceptance of Heritage (Dupont). Pending further investigations, I must accept that there is at least one that is worth my money.

Heritage (Dupont) is determined to ignore its customers and without fail, I get the same waiter who is compelled somehow to never write down my order. He brings me the alternative to whatever I actually did order (i.e. the other lamb or chicken dish) and then when I ask whether it is chicken makhani, he says "No, this is chicken tikka masala. "Is this what I ordered?" I ask increduously. "Yes," he replies "it is a tomatoe-based, blah, blah, blah..." This is where I cut the bugger off since he is trying to explain, and not well either, food I've been eating for ages. I know what I ordered and I know what's in front of me, but without fail, I'll get the wrong thing and utterly no comprehension from that nitwit that he's brought me the wrong dish--again! Most of the high brow clientele, however, doesn't know any better, so they get away with this all the time, no doubt. Pathetic. However, the decor, tapas-styled appetizers and lamb vindaloo are excellent and largely redeeming and the only things that stop me from hurling a brick through the window and instead I return, if infrequently.

Bombay Club manages to turn the food entirely bland and closes it's kitchen by 9 pm on a Sunday. That the Clintons liked this place should have been reason enough to avoid it. Two words: Don't bother.

Indique: In a nutshell: No cliches and competant staff make this place a true diamond in the rough. An oasis in the nearly barren wasteland of the DC scene I've described. Chicken chettinad reminiscent of my mother's Tamil cooking and the alarmingly rare kind of understated elegance that one finds comforting to dine in. Still sitting there? Go!

Choices

2005-01-12T23:21:00.000-05:00

Three weeks ago I left the damp, gray pseudo-winter of Washington, DC for what was meant to be a little more than two weeks of glorious sloth in Iowa. I was going to spend the Holidays at my parents home in the heartland and get in touch with daytime television while discovering new flavors of potato chip. Before leaving, I was sitting at home, drinking coffee and casually reading online rubbish on lesser web sites (oh, you know, the New York Times, the Atlantic, etc.). As I often do, I had NPR on in the background. While not the soundtrack to one's life, NPR is good for me to have on in the daytime. This is because of the shrewdly calculated risk that I may involuntarily learn something interesting or at least important sounding. There was this professor of some kind of fluff-ology from Swarthmore talking about the research he has been doing on choices and happiness. He said that while people have more choices than ever, they are overwhelmed and stressed out by them and not any happier for having wider decision-making scope. He decided to tell anecdotes (the pithy kind that are usually used by people hawking books) to kill an hour. I thought this all sounded pretty good, but quickly dismissed this idea to the recesses of my brain as I grabed my carry-on, duffle bag and headed out to the airport.

It was a beautiful day and a splendid little drive heading out to Reagan Airport. The sun shone, the birds sang, and the squirrels were throughly confused, no doubt thinking that spring had arrived three months earlier this year as I was wisked past the Potomac by my charming chauffeur. I self-checked-in with my E-ticket and glided through security, now like most people a pro at rapidly sliping on and off my shoes so that the nice people from the TSA can study with ernest the worn-down heels and half-disintegrated soles of my nearly prehistoric brown shoes.

I found my gate, bought a burrito for lunch, and started reading the very banal "Longitudes and Attitudes" by Thomas Friedman. Several announcements about my flight to Cincinatti were made. Delays were announced and revised departure times were timidly offered by the Delta staff. I understood that there was some kind of storm hovering over Cincinatti/Northern Kentucky Airport and they were expected to get a trifiling few inches of snow. Well, if it turns out to be OK to leave for Cincinatti, then great.

My plane took off for Cincinatti and all abord were told that if anyone got up within a 30 minute radius of Reagan Airport, the pilot would divert the plane to whatever undisclosed location where the aliens from Roswell are hanging out and watching re-runs of Three's Company on Nick at Nite. Landing in Cincinatti, almost two hours late I rush to my gate to find that my connecting flight for Moline, Illinois had never left. This was to become a recurring problem.

The flight to Moline was continually delayed in the kind of 15 minute increments that prevent you from feeling free to leave the boarding area to find the restroom or whatever re-heated, once-manufactured combinated of calories is loosely called food in the kind of modest airport terminal reserved for the "puddle jumper" aircraft that seat a couple dozen passengers and are inevitably bound for such places as Moline. A 6:30 pm departure evolved into an 10 pm departure and finally a cancellation. All but a few flights were cancelled from Terminal C. These other flights were those whose crews were still on the clock and hadn't left for the evening. The planes that would have taken myself and others to places such as Appleton, Wisconsin and South Bend, Indiana were stuck. As they landed they turned to icsicles. The sleat and wet snow were too formidable for the efforts of the ground crews that were spraying the planes with de-icing liquid, albeit not for long as the airport ran out of essential de-icing fluid in a matter of hours. it was later learned that the airport also did not have the emergency vehicles needed for this kind of situation gased up and ready to go. Long lines formed as people prepared to rebook their flights for the next day.

I got in line behind a wild-haired guy with a guitar case slung over his shoulder. He was with an angry-looking woman, who looked equal parts Alanis Morritsette and Greenwich Village artist/actress/waitress, whose cell phone was glued to her ear and who was unamused by her companion's antics as he was trying to goof around and be a general annoyance. Things took a decidely bad turn when he started loudly singing "I'll be home for Christmas" to the general waiting area. I had to stand directly behind him smiling and praying that he would stop or at least not break out the guitar that threatened to be used against us all for a midnight rendition of "Jingle Bells."

When he was done singing, seeing that no one had joined in, he started to tell everyone his political opinions and grips with the airline industry. It is perhaps one of my greatest problems with modern discourse that every damn fool wants to be Bill bloody O'Reily. Whether it is the taxi driver with the large phone bill or professor whose idelology is as fashionable as his groovy shirts, there's a clown out there who wants a soap box. My neighbor (I'll call him Kato) was intent telling every one about how the airline industry, Governor Arnold Schwarzenegger, and his agent in LA were responsible for his life's problems. Certainly, he was, he believed, the only one with any problems there. Of course we were there among a sea of people, all with problems, all unhappy, and no one there by choice.