Morning

¶ Cool: After a muggy, summery afternoon yesterday, rains cooled things off a  bit, but it’s almost chilly this morning. Which is just fine.

¶ Have It Your Way: A bit of chuckleheaded reporting in today’s Times, about Democratic Party shortfalls in the Convention account: Leslie Wayne’s “Democrats Miss Marks to Finance Convention.”

Noon

¶ Please, Mr Postman: Reading “the personals” for fun is something I stopped doing a while ago. In an idle moment this afternoon, however, I noticed that some advertisers are listing e-mail addresses. This can’t be wise.

Night

¶ Papaflessa: That’s the name of the street in New Erythrea (Ν Ερυθραια) that my old foreign-exchange student friend lives on — or lived on the last time anybody I know had an address for her.

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¶ Matins: Lately, I’ve been so busy that I haven’t known where to begin. The answer, I now discover, is nowhere. Do not begin. Take the brilliant time-saving tips of billionaires from all walks of filthitude in Gordon Bennett’s droll report at W. Who would know better than a billionaire what a colossal waste of time merely living can be!

¶ Lauds: Instead of going to bed like a good boy, I get down to working on the Words branch of Portico, something that I’ve been meaning to do for a long time,  by inventing a new page: Workshop.

¶ Tierce: At the moment, it looks as though next week’s primary in West Virginia is actually going to mean something, possibly.

¶ Sext: Kathleen and I have been invited to a fiftieth-birthday party this evening, and we’ve decided that a nice bottle of port is what we’d like to give. So, I’m off to Sherry-Lehmann in a little while.

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A happy weekend to you all from Skytopia.

The flagstaff at Carl Schurz Park, captured in an impromptu reflection pool.

¶ Matins: How about those bloggers, dropping off like flies? (“In Web World of 24/7 Stress, Writers Blog Till They Drop“) No reader of Michael A Banks’s Blogging Heroes, the Takli Makan of this year’s morning read, will be surprised by the news that technews bloggers live like unhappy hamsters.

¶ Tierce: Zose Mosleys vill neffer learn! Grand prix racing czar Max Mosley‘s grandmother, Lady Redesdale, was inured to reading about her daughters’ antics (especially his mother’s) in the newspaper, but this story would probably have given her a nasty turn.

¶ Sext: Surely the most interesting story in the works right now — far outclassing our presidential election — is the run-up to the Beijing Olympics. If you ask me, Liu Qi was out of his mind when it lobbied for the honor of hosting the games.

¶ Vespers: It’s over when the little man squeaks. Sheldon Silver nixes Congestion Pricing.

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¶ Matins: How much weight will I have to lose to slip into these fetching Milanese outfits?

¶ Tierce: How I wish I’d been blogging ten years ago! Then I’d be able to post a link to my prediction that Sanford Weill’s Citigroup agglomerations, unveiled with much trumpeting at the time, would turn out to be supercalifragilistic. It was obvious that the merger titan had no interest in the hard slog of expialidocious.  

¶ Nones: Goodbye, solo computer, Hello, KVM!

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La grosse Pomme, vu du comté de la Reine. (Le nord à droite.)

¶ Matins: A look at this week’s Book Review.

¶ Tierce: Within a little more than a week — Eliot Spitzer’s scandal erupted in public only last Monday — the complexion of American politics seems to have changed, and the change is marked by two speeches, delivered, respectively, by Barack Obama and David Paterson.

And don’t miss a Great American Car Story by the Ganome.

¶ Sext: Women of the world (not to be confused with Women of the World — although most of them probably are both) discuss Eliot Spitzer’s lapses. “Bad manners,” says Nancy Lee Andrews, at one point Ringo Starr’s fiancée.

¶ Nones: Confused about which way is up in FreeMarketLand? This report in the Times, which, for all I know, may be a daily feature, does a fine job of connected all the dots with a remarkably clear coherence.

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In beautiful downtown Niantic, the splendid Morton Hotel.

¶ Matins: It was great to get out of town, and I really must get out more often — especially to New England. On Friday night, though, I was very glad to be in town. Listening to the Philadelphia Orchestra at Carnegie Hall.

¶ Tierce: So, there’s a Gold’s Gym in Haiti. It’s not for everyone, though. Why does this example of global free-market capitalism seem so totally unprogressive?

¶ Sext: Rah! Rah! Rah! My prep school’s latest claim to fame! Go Cecil! (Blair’s development office must be thrilled by this — development.)

¶ Vespers: How cool is that: your cell phone is your boarding pass! (The airline sends you a message containing a two-dimensional bar code that’s very hard to counterfeit.)

¶ Compline: Souvenir of the Weekend Past: a song that I had never heard in my life. I even thought that Riann was making it up. But Kathleen sang it lustily when I asked her about it last night. In her day, “boppin'” was replaced by “bashin’.”

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¶ Matins: This week’s Friday Front, at Portico. It may be that the question is not: how important are newspapers? But rather: how else can their vital functions, if any, be performed?

¶ Nones: I wonder if we’ve gotten any better at forecasting. Here’s an amenity that New York surely ought to have boasted by now…

¶ Vespers: He came in wanting to be the new McKinley, but he’s going to go out as a second Hoover. Oh, let’s hope not — no matter how hard he doesn’t try.

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¶ Matins: I’m going to the country this weekend….

¶ Sext: What a coinkydink! There I was, chatting with the ganome about Jane Austen, when an advance-fee scam letter, as crabbedly composed as if the writer had been sweating over Mansfield Park, popped into my mailbox.

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¶ Matins: A look at this week’s Book Review, at Portico.

¶ Tierce: Spitzer still governor; Albany paralyzed. Aw, shucks. “Albany Paralyzed” is about the happiest headline that I’ve read since I moved back to New York in 1980. Can we think of something stronger and more permanent than “paralyzed”? “Nuked,” maybe? No; “nuked” is politically incorrect. How about “razed and salted,” like Carthage?

¶ Sext: Well, that’s that. All hail Governor Paterson…

¶ Vespers: Oy, the (no) pressure! Look for the Leisure Economy.

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Jolly Bowery chef

¶ Matins: What a lot I’ve got to do today! Two pages to write, and at least five other significant items on the To Do list (kept in my head — and here, too, I guess), including making a recording of Mig’s text. I wonder if I still know how to use the equipment.

¶ Tierce: Mr Spitzer is still the governor; I may be losing friends faster than he is.

¶ Sext: A word or two about Lieutenant Governor David A Paterson, soon to be New York’s first African-American (and legally blind?) chief executive.

¶ Nones: Henrik Hertzberg leads off this week’s Talk with a surprising propostion.

¶ Vespers: William Inge’s Come Back, Little Sheba, at MTC — with the amazing Ms Merkerson.

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¶ Matins: A look at this week’s Book Review.

¶ Prime: Two stories show the superiority of Gothamist to The New York Times for local reporting — and one of them involves a Times writer!

— Building Collapse in Harlem Stops Metro North

— Ceiling Collapse in Broadway Dings Reporter’s Friend.

¶ Sext: Which would you rather have, a dollar or a dollar-fifty? Don’t be too sure!

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On 57th Street

¶ Matins: I’ve got my physical at 9:30 this morning. I remember when a “physical” was something that you got when you were drafted.

¶ Prime: This just in: The Earth is round, and, also, by the way, putting a television set in your child’s bedroom is not a great idea. (They might pick up the wrong values from Real Housewives of New York City.) 

¶ Nones: Today, on Ew! Factor: Koran Flushing. What’s with the community service? They ought to throw the bum out of school!

¶ Vespers: A few words about Tom Meglioranza’s cabaret recital at Weill Recital Hall last week.

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Thanks to Fossil Darling.

If so, the market’s not to worry.

Two stories from today’s front page would make me gloat if I were into Schadenfreude. Or if Schadenfreude were even on offer. The first, about warning-signs of a subprime lending fiasco that were repeatedly dismissed by libertarian boytoy, Alan Greenspan; the second, about black New Orleanians who have more or less finally cut the cord with their native city in the past year, giving the white population a majority that is not unwelcome to establishment movers and shakers. Way to go, Bushies!

For further information on the appropriated image of Nicholaes Ruts, to the left, check out Sir Gawain’s very provocative remarks about the novel at Heaven Tree. 

It is very tempting to stick out my tongue at the good people of Omaha and jeer, “I told you so.” Especially as my blood is up about a good woman’s implication* that people who aren’t Midwesterners might not be “strong and solid and sensible.” We’re pretty strong and solid and sensible in the Northeast — even in Manhattan. Forget the gun control issue. We believe that “lost pound puppies” are an unfortunate civic responsibility. And when people get “so depressed,” we tend not pay much attention to nonsense about “target practice.”

* See the end of the story.

Sarah Krulwich/The New York Times

The stagehands’ strike is over at last — at any rate, it’s “over”; the settlement has to be ratified by the rank and file. So. Who won? What was accomplished? Let’s see what the Times has to say.

But among the changes the league was able to achieve, according to officials involved in the talks, was a daily minimum of 17 stagehands on the load-in, the lengthy and costly period when a production is loaded into a theater. In the recently expired contract, producers would set a number of stagehands needed for a load-in — say, 35 — and all of them would have to stay every day for the entirety of the load-in, an arrangement that producers said often left large groups of stagehands with nothing to do.

Now, I’m sure that this means something. Campbell Robertson, who wrote the story, is one of the newspaper’s great stylists. If I worked in the theatre world, I’d know exactly what the “league” of theatre producers obtained in these negotiations. As it is, I have the vague idea that they don’t have to pay as many stagehands (for doing “nothing) while a new show is mounted. I can’t see, thanks to my lack of professional expertise, is the missing sentence that says (I think) something like this: “Having hired as many as 35 stagehands at the beginning of the load-in, the producers are free fir the first time to reduce that complement later to a number that suits their needs, or to a minimum of 17, whichever is higher.” 

The strike cost everybody millions of dollars. Broadway revenues were a trickle of their seasonal gush. The City alone is said to have lost about $40 million in indirect revenues. So we’re all glad that the strike is over, and that the lights will be shining brightly on the Great White Way. Mr Robertson’s story captures the euphoria of the moment, as bitter opponents smile, shake hands, and make nice. I just wish I had a clearer picture of what happened.

Actually, this isn’t about Jersey drivers so much as it is about driving in Jersey.  

What is it with Jersey roads? Drive around the state for a few days, and you won’t wonder why insurance premiums are among the highest in the land. From Richard G Jones’s “2 Truck Drivers Die in Crash in New Jersey.”

The chief said the eastbound lanes had recently been resurfaced. “This is a typical accident out here,” he said.

Asked how often his department responded to serious accidents in the area, he replied, “Daily.”

People who live near the highway are also familiar with the sound of sirens and the sight of traffic tie-ups while accidents are being cleared. Some residents, though, said the crash on Monday was especially unnerving because of the amount of smoke and flames and the sound of the collision, which reverberated in homes half a mile away.

New Jersey needs its own ministry of ponts & chaussées.

From an article about Russia’s slide “toward a more authoritarian system” in today’s Times.

Tanya Lokshina, the chairwoman of a Russian human rights organization, the Demos Center for Information and Research, was among those who met with Ms. Rice on Saturday. She said that given the focus on security matters, the meeting with rights campaigners had been mostly symbolic.

She contended that the United States had “lost the high moral ground,” and thus should join with European countries to make it clear to Mr. Putin that a drift further away from democracy was unacceptable diplomatically.

“The American voice alone doesn’t work anymore,” she said after the meeting. “The Russians are not influenced by it.” She said Ms. Rice had bristled at the criticism, replying sharply, “We never lost the high moral ground.”

Whatever you say, Condi.

Fifteen years ago, the cinquecentennial of a certain “discovery” in 1492 was brushed over by pundits everywhere: Columbus had become an embarrassment to a militantly post imperial age. I couldn’t help thinking that it was just bad timing, and today I am proved right, by a story in the Times by Amy Harmon, “Seeking Columbus’s Origins With a Swab.”

In 2004, a Spanish geneticist, Dr. Jose A. Lorente, extracted genetic material from a cache of Columbus’s bones in Seville to settle a dispute about where he was buried. Ever since, he has been beset by amateur historians, government officials and self-styled Columbus relatives of multiple nationalities clamoring for a genetic retelling of the standard textbook tale.

The Times lists, in graphic form, the five most likely theories of Columbus’s background: the Genoese, the Catalan, the Portuguese, the Majorcan, and the Jewish. At the bottom of this list, there’s a lovely bouquet of other possibilities, one that ends with the Times’s own Manhattan-inflected whimsy:

Columbus may have been the son of Pope Innocent VIII or the King of Poland. He may trace his origin to the Balaeric island of Ibiza, or the Mediterranean island of Corsica [!!!!!]. He could be from Greece or Norway. Or. for that matter, from anywhere that people have DNA.

D’you see what I mean about timing? in 1992, Columbus was the European oppressor of indigenous Americans. But, just as there was hardly any Internet in those long-ago days (1992, not 1492), so the sleuthing possibilities of DNA had hardly begun to register on the popular consciousness. Now, however, having discovered for certain that “Anna Andersen” was not the Archduchess Anastasia of Russia, the world is clamoring to establish the true nature of Columbus’s own indigenuity.