in britannia

Also known as Monday. So yeah. We’re doing restaurant week again: a 3-course meal for $30.05, not including tax, tip, and drinks. Sure it’s a bit of a scam, but it definitely gets me out of having to order my filet mignon at $36, and that’s without a tasty appetizer or a dessert. Monday night, we went to Julien, which Mom and I had eaten at last year. It really is a lovely restaurant: it was Mom and me and my brother Matt. We had an extra space at the table (reservation for 4) so I brought Diana. I know that she liked the meal, but it was the first time that we had all sat down for a meal and conversation. It was a truly delicious meal. Last year, I went through the meal in sort of a willy-nilly way. This year, I think that I can be a little less bizarre with my posting style.

First Course:
Chilled Yellow Pepper and Fennel Soup
Chive Crème Fraîche
(add Maine Crab and Green Onion for an additional $8)
- or -
Native and Heriloom Tomato Salad
Sweet Vidalia Onion and Taggiasco Olive Oil
(add Lakes End Farm Goat Cheese Cheese Flan for an additional $6)

Second Course:
Thyme Roasted Chatham Cod Loin
Wellfleet Clams, Native Corn, Chorizo and Young Spinach
(add Fresh Maine Lobster for an additional $14)
- or -
Lavender Honey Glaze Duck Breast
Evva’s Garden Organic Pea Tips, Minted Potatoe Puree and White Peach
(add Sautéed Sonoma Foie Gras for an additional $16)

Third Course:
Passion Fruit Pavlova
Native Strawberry and Mint Consommé
- or -
Chocolate and Golden Raisin Truffle Torte
Chocolate Hazelnut Terrine

So. Diana had the Soup, the Duck, and the Torte. Mom had the Salad, with flan, Duck with Fois Gras, and the Torte. Matt had Soup with crab, then Duck, then Pavlova. And I had Salad, then Cod, then Pavlova. So I got to taste all of them, and I have to say that I think I chose exceedingly well. So the salad was sweet without being cloying, while the cheese flan added some richness. The olive oil was really fresh tasting and fruity and the tomatoes had enough acid in them to bite without being gross. I don’t really know tomatoes very well, but I know what one tastes like, and these were yummy.

As for the yellow pepper soup, I tried some of Matt’s, which was lovely. I didn’t have any of the crab, so I can’t speak to how that worked, but the soup itself was an interesting taste. Unfortunately, the only time I have the taste of chilled peppers is on pizza in the morning, which is what this definitely reminded me of. But after that initial sensation there was a lot of creaminess. It was good, but I think a whole bowl of it would have been a little much.

Diana always orders duck if it’s on the menu. So I was not surprised she did at Julien. I wasn’t wild about the mint potatoe (sic.) puree: it would have gone much better with, oh, lamb. The duck itself was juicy and flavorful but, having been in Europe where meats like duck and lamb are much more gamey, this duck lacked depth of flavor. The foie gras which my Mom got really did add to the richness of the duck (something that was not entirely lacking in the first place), but overall, the dish worked really well. There’s something about sweet honey and salty duck that tastes really really good. The cod loin was excellent: it too was sweet, but not from honey but from the native sweetcorn. The other parts of the dish, the clams and chorizo provided spice, while the spinach was tender but not mushy. I really loved this dish, and I’d totally try it again.

As for the dessert, the pavlova was amazing but the mint in the consommé was less so. There was a little too much astringency in the soup, but when the passion fruit ice cream melted into the soup, the resulting mixture was very well-balanced and creamy. As for the chocolate torte, the torte was delicious but I was hesitant to try the terrine, as I do not like hazelnuts. Overall, a really successful dinner.

This past weekend, I went to Chicago for the wedding of my two friends, Tacy and Graham. Graham and I lived down the hall from each other in both Freshman and Sophomore years, and we became good friends over conversations ranging from the intellectual to the absurd and classes such as music theory. I remember a fun conversation regarding the relative meanings of “adagio” (walking tempo) in Mozart and Brahms, with the conclusion being that Brahms must have walked slower than Mozart, probably on account of his girth. We joined the same eating club and were both active in the campus a cappella scene. Incidentally, a sad note that our eating club is closing forever. sigh…

So anyway, the two of them got married in Chicago on Saturday in a lovely (and blessedly short) service in a church in Hyde Park where Graham’s grandfather was married by Graham’s great-grandfather, who was the preacher at that church. Tacy and Graham even used his grandmother’s ring. It was touching and eloquent and beautiful. This will be two weddings for me this summer (one down from last year), and the difference is striking. Mike and Doreen’s wedding was huge – it was gorgeous, it was lavish, and it was opulent. Graham and Tacy’s was low-key, it was elegant, and it was understated. I would not be so ignorant to pronounce one as better than the other: rather, these two do reflect the divergent tastes and styles of each couple.

I was staying with Peter, another friend of mine, and former roommate of Graham at Princeton. It was fantastic to see Peter and also to meet his wacky and ridiculous music theory friends. Further explanation may be in order: Peter is a PhD. candidate in Music at the University of Chicago and has comprehensive exams coming up in the next two weeks. A huge study-group convenes every Friday evening to have dinner and talk about anything except music, which is what they talk about every other day of the week when they convene to help each other cram. As a stipulation of my staying at Peter’s, I was to provide meat to grill in Peter’s stead while he was off at the rehearsal dinner. As lovely as it all sounded (and it sounded wonderful), I am convinced that we, on a stoop in Hyde Park, ate just as well as they did on the North Side of Chicago. Certainly, we ate more than they did.

The wedding reception was delicious, with a fantastic salad, steak, and salmon, as well as a delicious lemon-crème wedding cake. Incidentally, Graham and Tacy, rather true to form (at least, as far as Graham is concerned), cut the cake after the appetizer and before the entrée. Unfortunately, they seemed to have run out of cake for one of the tables, but my friends seated there were able to mooch off of me. As an aside, I’d like to state that waiters in the United States are a lot less clued in about silverware positioning during a meal than in the United Kingdom. I had to run out to take a phone call about 2/3rds of the way through my entrée and was dismayed to find that it had been taken in my absence, despite the placement of my knife and fork in the ‘hold’ position. How disappointing.

The following morning, six and a half of us: Ray (banker friend from NYC), Peter, Diane (Peter’s lovely girlfriend, vet student at Ohio State, which I, as a Michigander, find appalling), Peter and Sarah M. and Reina (friends of ours from San Francisco, married and with baby in tow) and myself all gathered for brunch at an interesting restaurant called Orange. Brunch at Orange was weird – their concoctions border on the truly absurd (French Toast Kebab? Pancake Fettuccine?) but their food is outstanding. I had the omelet #3: ham, shallot, aged cheddar and garnished with Dijon mustard. Diane had a sublime ham and cheese crepes served with truffled mushroom cream sauce and parsley oil. And then I got to go to a White Sox game. :)

I should mention that Peter and Diane drove me to US Cellular Field but were prevented from going up the off-ramp from 90/94 to drop me off on 35th street. So I got out in the breakdown lane and walked. About half-way up the ramp, I was threatened never to do that again by a policewoman. Oops. But the game was great – fantastic weather and great people in a ballpark I’d never seen before. Expensive but delicious Polish sausage and onions, and great conversation. Oh right. And Randy Johnson giving up back-to-back-to-back home runs followed by two singles and then a home run in the 4th inning. The Yankees never did recover, and Torre left Johnson in for the rest of the game, which was strange. So I’ve seen the Yankees play live on the road twice and they’ve lost both times. Yee Haw.

Oh, and when I went back to Peter’s, his computer crashed, which kind of jeopardized his studying for comps. I wish him the best of luck. Meanwhile, Graham is still looking for a job (anyone want to hire an absolutely brilliant Princeton grad with a Master’s from North Western in Journalism? Let me know – I’ll pass it on. Peter got his computer to ‘sort of work’ by taking the hard drive out and blowing on the connectors, much akin to what many of us did in the early 90’s with our Nintendo game cartridges. Comparing the two provided a much-needed bit of levity. Until Peter had me playing Katamari Damacy, which is just weird and funky and strange and great.

Grrr! So last night before supper I wrote about half of a really long post. Then I accidentally quit Safari as a reaction when it was time to go to dinner. I am, in no uncertain terms, an idiot.

But here's what I was going to say.

Last weekend was a real headspinner... The Tanglewood weekend was a whole lot of fun, with Friday's concert entirely devoted to Don Quixote pieces, Saturday with Gil Shaham, and Sunday with Sir James Galway and harpist Ann Hobson Pilot. It's not often that such music is performed by such luminaries - we were all very lucky.

Overlapping this weekend was the fact that Diana and I got to spend the weekend at Tanglewood, which was a lot of fun. Diana is, as one might imagine me saying, very good company. And since it's rare that we have so much time to spend with each other, it was really nice to be able to set aside a weekend to enjoy being together.

But overlapping that weekend was another interesting adventure: eight of my mother's friends from high school (back in Hong Kong) came to visit. So there were eleven people crammed into a vacation home, Diana and I on bunk beds in one room and the rest of the women all over the house, making it virtually impossible for me to go anywhere by between my room, the bathroom, and the kitchen. But more about this later.

Diana and I drove out to Tanglewood on Friday morning. We arrived and put bits of the house in order before driving down the hill to Orient Express, a restaurant I have described on this site several times before. The owner knows us and has been really nice to us in the past. This weekend, he would not allow me to order the whole fried flounder because the fish that they had received that weekend were too small. I was a bit disappointed, but certainly appreciated the heads-up as well.

After lunch, it was back up the hill for some hard-core laundering and cleaning. Diana graciously offered to help with the vaccuuming while I mopped and dusted. All this in preparation for the hoarde of Cantonese women bearing down on us from out of town. In the meantime, I managed to score a rare reservation (on a Friday night with 3 hours to go?) to Elizabeth's in Pittsfield. Elizabeth's is a lovely restaurant nestled in the wilderness of western Massachusetts across from the GE Special Materials plant and next door to a dingy auto mechanic. However, the restaurant itself is one of the cutest around. The whimsical menu is rife with hyperbole and assorted verbiage and the owner/chef, Tom, makes an almost intrusive habit of talking to his customers, but overall, the food makes it all more than worth it. We started out with one of Tom's bizarre salads, containing (and this is different every time we go) peaches, cheddar, walnuts, raisins, carrot, feta, and other assorted goodies I can't remember, all tossed into some lovely field greens with a yummy balsamic vinaigrette. Our starter was a delicious chevre drizzled with an incredibly fruity olive oil and some walnuts. Finally, Diana had a gorgonzola pasta, which was amazingly creamy. The woman at the table next to ours commented that she couldn't believe Diana was sharing such a fine dish with me. I had a really light eggplant dish with spinach, a touch of garlic, mozarella cheese and a light tomato broth and finished with fresh herbs and basil. It was delicious.

The concert was incredible: we got really lucky, as the weather (it had gotten dark and ominous in a hurry) decided not to rain on us that day. The first half was de Falla's Master Peter's Puppet Show, which actually contained a puppet-show within a puppet-show. (Meta-puppets... woah) There were larger-than-life Don Quixote and Sancho Panza puppets, while the life-sized Master Peter (actually a puppeteer with a mask) and page boy (full-size puppet) put on the show, consisting of smaller puppets in a puppet stage. Three vocal soloists stood to the side and sang very well. The experience was whimsical without getting silly and I loved the music. The second half was Strauss' Don Quixote, which is a masterpiece of brilliance and orchestral contrast. Unfortunately, dinner was catching up to me and I kinda fell asleep for part of it. What I heard, however, was brilliant.

We went back up to the house and I made myself a cup of tea to relax. But within 30 minutes, the cars arrived and my Mom and her friends rolled out. They were mostly quiet and kept to themselves that first night. They were exhausted, of course, it being 11:30, and so they just got themselves ready for bed and went to sleep. The next morning I woke up very early to get breakfast started. Thankfully, all they needed was coffee, tea, hot water, juice, scrambled eggs, bagels, toast, and fixings. Nothing much. :P They had brought some chives from someone's garden - delicious in the scrambled eggs. They piled into cars and went to Tanglewood for the open rehearsal while I cleaned up after them, did a load of dishes, and contemplated the day. Diana woke up considerably after I did (about 1.5 hours) and after we got ready we ended up driving to a lovely cheese shop in Great Barrington. I've been eyeing this shop for two summers - I read about it in a Boston Globe profile and have always wanted to go, but the sad fact is that my family is not huge on artisanal cheese and it's rare that any of them would want to make that trip with me. Diana, on the other hand, is huge on cheese, and we very happily sampled our way through their selection, picking three to take home. Oh, and we stopped in on their cafe where we each had a toasted and deliciously cheesy sandwich. I also picked up some of their fig bread, which is not exactly bread as much as it is pressed figs with hazelnuts and walnuts slipped in and then the whole thing is compacted down some more into a brick. So it's like the inside of a fig newton all compressed very nicely.

Dinner that night was interesting. Mom and I had wanted to treat our guests to a Berkshires tradition: a picnic dinner on the lawn at Tanglewood. Unfortunately, as lucky as Diana and I had been the evening before, our luck ran out and the sky opened. And I had already bought meat to throw on the grill! No matter - in a lull in the storm, I pulled out the grill and made nice marinated steak tips and grilled asparagus, along with some store-bought potato salad and noodle salad. Also some salad with tomatoes from the aforementioned person's garden. Mmmm... And no rain on the food - just some damp earth under our picnic tarp.

Gil Shaham played his Mozart violin concerto like the consummate showman he is: he grinned, he gesticulated, and he even winked at the conductor a few times. The second part of the program, Shostakovitch 10, was good but very heavy and forbidding. I'm not such a fan, though I heard things in Saturday's performance that I hadn't before. Upon return to the house, I was forced by my mother to sing for her guests. Then one of her classmates sang. Both of us were right mortified, though I have to think that the several glasses of Pimm's I'd had beforehand helped a bit.

They talked and talked and talked long after I grew tired. Of course, they were a bit late getting up in the morning, but I had already gotten up and brewed a fresh pot of darn strong coffee for them (and for myself). They went off to see Chesterwood (the workshop of Daniel Chester French, the sculptor who created the Lincoln Memorial statue) while Diana and I ate the cheese that we bought the day before and had a lovely morning in. Unfortunately, we were watching the weather stations reporting nickel-sized hail and huge thunderstorms so we packed up the house and hit the road, missing the all-Mozart concert that afternoon (though we caught much of it in the car - it was delightful).

What should have taken 2 hours ended up taking 4: Not only were we dealing with huge amounts of traffic from I-84 (go back to Connecticut, you weirdos!), but then the thunderstorms hit and we were all driving at about 35 MPH with our hazard lights on. We couldn't talk or listen to the radio because of the noise, and it was virtually impossible to see. After I dropped Diana off and went home, I was exhausted and both my shoulders and back ached (much like they do after all of this typing). Still, it was a wonderful weekend and I was really happy to have been able to spend it with family, friends, and my girlfriend.

Oh, and we went back out to Tanglewood on Tuesday to hear Yo-Yo Ma and Emmanuel Ax. Interesting stuff. More on that later. Right now, my fingers hurt from typing.

I just deleted a "comment" message left on my previous post. I can't believe that unsolicited advertisements are now showing up as blogger comments. If it didn't cheese me off so much, I'd almost be impressed with their ingenuity. But I'm not, because it sucks.

mmm... cheese...

So my good friend from college, Alexandra, used to work at AEI, the American Enterprise Institute. She took off for two months to go to China and is currently back at home in California. I miss her and the rest of the crowd from college, and certainly, I wouldn't mind going back down to DC (which I am doing next year with the choir - yay!). Anyway, a fantastic article in today's Washington Post mentioned, specifically, the food from AEI. And, says Alexandra in an IM just now, "AEI's cookies ARE famous" adding, "and fabulous". I'm jealous.

I remember the chocolate chip cookies available at the P. school, my former employer. They were fantastic. They were buttery and rich and everything that says "I'm totally bad for you but eat me because I'm yummy." They cropped up at receptions, lunch desserts, and most importantly, faculty meetings. Every single faculty meeting, we'd get cookies. And not just a few - a couple hundred. The chefs were brutal with the cookies and I ate it up. I miss them, really. They were fantastic and wonderful and typically American. I wouldn't be able to find them in England if I tried.

That said, there's a delicious cookie company in Oxford called Ben's Cookies, which makes delightfully yummy and gooey cookies as well. They used to be able to warm up a cookie for you, but the owner got mad at the staff for wasting oven space. As a result, the best way to get a warm Ben's cookie is to ask at the counter for whatever's the most fresh. Kind of like what one does at Krispy Kreme. If one is a traitor. Being from Boston, where Dunkin' Donuts rules, it is difficult for me to imagine Krispy Kreme as anything more sophisticated than a fried lard-ball. I dated a girl from Winston-Salem once. Winston-Salem is the home of Krispy Kreme. Note that I datED her. No longer. We also got into fights about grits and their merits (none).

A fun article in today's NY Times puts an interesting spin on Christianity and addiction. It's a profile of Gov. Mike Huckabee of Arkansas, who lost a huge amount of weight (he doesn't actually know how much, but at least 100 pounds) after being fraked out by a physician who said he'd hardly last ten years at his then-current weight. He says this: "When you don't have very much money, you're not going to be able to buy a movie ticket or go to a Major League ballgame, but you can have a second helping of potatoes. One acceptable way for a good Christian kid to delve into a chemical addiction without being thought of as inappropriate or evil is to go to the pizza buffet. Pizza, well, that's O.K." I'm amused by his candor, and certainly we were taught not only that it was the good child who finished his plate, but that wasting food, be it at the restaurant whose portions are triple what they ought to be, or at home when mom or dad cooks too much, is a sin.

On the other side of things, a medical school classmate of my brother's never finishes his plate at a restaurant, no matter how little food he is given. Being allowed to send food away uneaten makes him feel wealthy, even if the plate contains a few fries and a quarter of a burger from the local diner.

Yesterday I took to the stage again with the Boston Symphony Orchestra and the other members of the Tanglewood Festival Chorus for three little-known choral works by Johannes Brahms, led by Maestro Rafael Frühbeck de Burgos. By the way, I'm amused by the maestro's program booklet biography, which opens with the sentence "Rafael Frühbeck de Burgos was born in Burgos." Insightful.

We sang the first half of a Brahms-Beethoven concert: Nänie, Gesang der Parzen, and Schicksalslied by Brahms, then Beethoven's 5th symphony. It was really very moving. Not a lot of people know Schicksalslied, even fewer know Nänie, and fewer still the Gesang der Parzen. I can say that I didn't know any of them except Nänie, and that was because it was the extra track on a favorite CD of mine: Brahms Symphony No. 1, and incidentally, Nänie as well. So it was a new rush of activity trying to learn and memorize all of the German for the concert. Got it done though, as did my two brothers, my father, and the rest of the chorus.

No reviews have been posted online or printed yet, but I'd like to see what they have to say about these very little-known choral works. Brahms is a master of choral writing, I think, and it's a shame that there's not a lot of it. The music was really very moving, and it was a treat to perform it. One thing that I have missed about being in Boston is singing these massive choral works: I sing a lot of small works with the choir at Queen's or with Magdala, but I don't get an opportunity to sing things like this.

As an aside, I didn't give the name of the LA Times Columnist who had died: it's David Shaw.

Also, RIP Peter Jennings, who I always liked, even though he was Canadian.

And finally, because ending a post on two mentions of death is depressing (even considering the oddly coincidental lyrics of the three Brahms pieces all having to do with fate and the fate of all humans being death), here's a fun email I just received from the University Club in Oxford.

"The final of the Jack Cox Memorial Trophy Interdepartmental Cricket Competition will be played between Pathology and Medicine at the University Club tomorrow (Tuesday 9th) starting from 5.30. It promises to be a great final between two exciting teams and the weather forecast is warm and sunny. All members are welcome to either cheer on your favourite department or simply enjoy the atmosphere."

Excellent.

LA Times food columnist died earlier this week. I'd been wondering why his Matters of Taste column hadn't been seen for some time. It was one of the best written food columns I've enjoyed reading. He was witty, charming, and totally up-front. His column was elevated enough to discuss fine wines and olive oils from Tuscany but still down-to-earth enough to talk about basic hamburgers or the idiots who sell food at baseball games. The appreciation article is now up on the LA Times website. If you can, jump on Proquest or something and download some of his articles. They're hilarious, they're touching, and it's really sad that they're not going to be popping up weekly or biweekly anymore.

Change comes in many different ways: sometimes change emerges out of adaptation to a particular problem: think all of those security patches in Windows or Macintosh operating systems. Sometimes it emerges out off brand new technology, like the demise of Polaroid corporation (hastened, I'm sure, by its inexplicable decision to, in essence, delete its digital imaging division). And sometimes change emerges simply out of having nothing better to do but tinker.

Our case in point is a little ice cream shop in Rehoboth Beach, Delaware, profiled this week in the food section of the Washington Post. This is a guy whose passion for ice cream and probably for freaking people out has now found its calling in inventing some of the weirder flavors seen in ice cream. Barbeque? Bacon? Mushroom-Pumpkin? There's a place near Boston that does things like wasabi and other spices.

Tanglewood is changing too. I came out here two weeks ago for a Sunday afternoon concert, which was bright and sunny (a bit too sunny, frankly) and quite good. Unfortunately, the giant tree in the middle of the lawn got really sick during the winter and was pruned down to its bare essentials, which makes it appear gaunt and thin. But the real shocker was last night, when I saw and evening concert for the first time this year. They've permanently installed video screens for the lawn patrons (the video screens are there for Sunday afternoons, but the light outside makes them impossible to see). The video screens were first used a couple of years ago for a John Williams film night. Then they were used for the Boston Pops, the Popular Artists Series, and then the larger, more visually tantalizing programs (the flamenco dancer in De Falla's La Vida Breve two years ago comes to mind). For the first time this year, they're being used permanently: it reduces the Tanglewood experience to that of watching a televised broadcast. Already the speaker system used on the lawn delivers music that is only marginally better than listening to a decent radio. Now it's accompanied by video? Not only this, but Tanglewood uses the video screens for its own advertisements before the concert and during intermission.

Diana and I were amused on Tuesday during our trip through the bookstore when we pulled out a sort of fine-living epicurean magazine (I honestly forget which one - perhaps if Diana would be so kind as to refresh my memory) and opened directly to an article entitled (loosely remembered) "A list of things to serve on toast." As I recall, the article claimed that there are very few things which are not improved by serving atop bits of toasted bread. It named grilled vegetables and goat cheese as two. To that list I would also add peanut butter, jam, egg salad, and very thinly sliced rare roast beef. Of course, in the south, there's cream chipped beef, and also some delicious poached eggs. Welsh rarebit comes to mind as well.

It got me thinking about the useless lists that people produce. A few months ago, I took it out on the Chicago Tribune for publishing a list of the top 50 magazines in the country. Also, the Boston Globe for wanting to know people's top ten desert island CDs. E! routinely runs list shows of the 101 top celebrity whatevers, and even good TV has a show called "Top 5", which would be fun to watch if the host, Bobby Rivers, didn't have such a horribly grating nasal voice.

I wish I could say that I have a top five of top ten lists, but I don't.

I know I haven't posted much recently: it's not that I'm getting lazier (though I am), and it's not that blogging is getting to be a chore (it's not): it's that I'm bored. I mean, if anything fun would happen, I'd throw it up there on the blog. But not much is happening, so there's not much to share with the world. I feel kind of silly just having one experience and throwing a single, sad-looking paragraph up here. I should probably do that rather than hold it all in and hope that my little bits and pieces of a blog entry form a coherent and understandable storyline or thread.

I went to church on Sunday down in Cambridge: lovely place. A few years ago, I was working a summer job in a Christian social services organization, and one of the pastors at CCFC (Cambridge Community Fellowship Church) really helped me out. I've been talking to her for a couple of years now, and each time I come back I seek her out to say hi and let her know that I'm doing OK. She has, unfortunately, since resigned her position as a pastor in order to go back to school for a masters in psychology. She'll be fantastic when she comes out and I wish her all the best.

Yesterday, Diana and I played hooky and didn't go to work. Well, to be fair, *she* didn't go to work. I don't really have work in the traditional sense, though to be sure, I have work to do. We went mini-golfing and walking around Cambridge. I had forgotten exactly how bad I am at mini-golf. So much so that I wasn't actually that bad at all. ;) I think the last time I was mini-golfing was with my friend Ray on the boardwalk at Atlantic City. Strange... I shot a two over par: Diana had a rougher outing. Fun, however, was had by all. :)

While we were in a book shop yesterday, we heard a conversation between the two desk clerks. I should explain that this was not your typical book shop: it had much more of that hippie sensitivity that one finds in a traditionally independent bookstore. The question from one clerk to the other: should the South Beach Diet book be filed under fiction? I couldn't resist: I offered that it should be filed under humor (I know; behold my astounding wit). Good question, though. With both of my parents at Canyon Ranch for those few days, I had some time to contemplate health and the illusion of it. National Public Radio ran a commentary from a physician about whether the president should actually undergo a yearly physical or whether he, and the rest of America, might be more effectively served in having risk screenings and illness-specific care. Some days I wake up and I feel awful. Other days I wake up and I feel fine. But is health all in one's head? Additionally, there was that report last week that echinacea does nothing against colds. Another story on NPR evaluated why some people have a hard time believing science when it contradicts their personal experience. So is your health best left to you? I shudder to think what my health would be like if I disregarded science altogether.

Finally, some relaxing thoughts from the world of technology. (How many times could I possibly say that, really?) Today's New York Times has two related articles in its circuits section. A Technology Special Edition page devoted to the digital student had some salient points thrown in among all of the funny garbage. I was amused considering that I am someone who has recently entered (in my case, re-entered) the ranks of student. When I went to college, I bought a desktop into which Apple Computer had kindly installed a faulty ZIP drive. It erased most of my high school documents in a flash. I bought a different one from a friend of my parents and used that for a couple of years. I still have it: it's old and almost entirely useless now. Then, summer before Junior year, I bought a tangerine iMac. During Senior year, I bought a G3 Powerbook. I used those two machines (and, in fact, also the Power Mac from 1997) until I left my apartment in New Jersey last summer, bolstered by a Mac G3 Cube which was lent me by the P. school and a Dell Latitude which was also lent (but in actuality forced on me in an unsuccessful attempt to get me to change from Macs to PCs). I bought this delightful G4 Powerbook last summer: it's served me well and it's gorgeous. Only one small problem, and that was with the screen not closing properly.

So today's article, Packing for the 'net generation, was amusing all around. But especially noteworthy was a tidbit inserted at the very end. My youngest brother will be attending Dartmouth College after a gap year, so this applies to him most of all. Dartmouth has something called "Laundry View": a program which allows users on the network to see what laundry machines or laundry rooms are busy and even to reserve specific machines online. This, of course, harkens back to the days of the very first webcam: the Trojan Room Coffee Pot, now sadly offline (it was unplugged for good in 2001).

Also, check out this technology profile of the über-pampered and über-wired (indeed, they are usually synonymous) students across the country. Particularly gawk-worthy is one Eddy Leal, who utilizes 3 computers and records his lectures on his iPod. I mean, I never ran three computers at once. Ever. I just can't bear to part with them, that's all.

I've been stealing my younger brother's CDs. Or, rather, what CDs of his I can find. With the invention of the iPod and iTunes software comes the eventual demise of the hard CD collection. Mine are in two nice glass cases because I'm a bit scarily anal retentive about certain rare things (an alphabetized CD cabinet is one of those things). His are scattered in his car, two CD wallets, one of those clear CD spindle-packs, and all over his room. I'm always pretty surprised when I reach for his U2 Joshua Tree CD only to find that the disc itself is nowhere to be found. Different world, I guess.