It’s true that I had a wonderful week in Istanbul in 2005. It was a quite unexpected business trip for Kathleen, and I’d never have gone along if it hadn’t been for Remicade, which I hadn’t even been taking for a year at that time. My interest in Turkey, however, pre-dates that junket. Friends remember my muttering ominously that, whatever else happened in the event of a war in Iraq, the Kurdish question would probably prove to be intractable. If Iraq were partitioned, a minority of Kurds would finally have their own Kurdistan, and it would not be long, so one thought, before their Turkish brethren sought to join them, something that would happen, not to speak too frankly, “over Turkey’s dead body.” If nothing else, our geographically illiterate populace overlooks the fact that the headwaters of the Tigris and the Euphrates Rivers – sources of irrigation for Syria and Iraq, but also of hydroelectric power for Turkey – lie in southeastern Turkey, a/k/a Kurdistan.

The wonderful thing about political predictions – about negative, pessimistic ones, that is – is that the world turns so slowly (still) that dire previsions so often turn out to be wrong. It’s much too early to say that the Turks and the Kurds are going to work things out to mutual satisfaction, but, as Christopher de Bellaigue reports in the current New York Review of Books, there are some surprisingly promising signs on the horizon.

¶ Chrisopher de Bellaigue on Turkey, in The New York Review of Books.

Podcasts:

Christopher de Bellaigue on Turkey (RSS)
Christopher de Bellaigue on Turkey (MP3)

This is a test of whatever, and if I don’t take it down in time you’ll be wondering what I’m talking about. I’m reading the last line of a hilarious exchange on Craigslist for which I don’t have URL.*

It ought to be loud enough this time.

Pump (RSS)

Pump (MP3)

* As forwarded to me by the inestimable Fossil Darling:

What am I doing wrong?

Okay, I’m tired of beating around the bush. I’m a beautiful (spectacularly beautiful) 25 year old girl. I’m articulate and classy. I’m not from New York. I’m looking to get married to a guy who makes at least half a million a year. I know how that sounds, but keep in mind that a million a year is middle class in New York City, so I don’t think I’m overreaching at all.

Are there any guys who make 500K or more on this board? Any wives? Could you send me some tips? I dated a business man who makes average around 200 – 250. But that’s where I seem to hit a roadblock. 250,000 won’t get me to central park west. I know a woman in my yoga class who was married to an investment banker and lives in Tribeca, and she’s not as pretty as I am, nor is she a great genius. So what is she doing right? How do I get to her level? Here are my questions specifically:

Where do you single rich men hang out? Give me specifics- bars, restaurants, gyms.

What are you looking for in a mate? Be honest guys, you won’t hurt my feelings. Is there an age range I should be targeting (I’m 25)?

Why are some of the women living lavish lifestyles on the upper east side so plain? I’ve seen really ‘plain jane’ boring types who have nothing to offer married to incredibly wealthy guys. I’ve seen drop dead gorgeous girls in singles bars in the east village. What’s the story there?

– Jobs I should look out for? Everyone knows – lawyer, investment banker, doctor. How much do those guys really make? And where do they hang out? Where do the hedge fund guys hang out?

How you decide marriage vs. just a girlfriend? I am looking for MARRIAGE ONLY

Please hold your insults – I’m putting myself out there in an honest way. Most beautiful women are superficial; at least I’m being up front about it. I wouldn’t be searching for these kind of guys if I wasn’t able to match them – in looks, culture, sophistication, and keeping a nice home and hearth.

It’s NOT ok to contact this poster with services or other commercial interests 

PostingID: 432279810

THE ANSWER

Dear Pers-431649184:

I read your posting with great interest and have thought meaningfully about your dilemma. I offer the following analysis of your predicament. Firstly, I’m not wasting your time, I qualify as a guy who fits your bill; that is I make more than $500K per year. That said here’s how I see it.

Your offer, from the prospective of a guy like me, is plain and simple a crappy business deal. Here’s why. Cutting through all the B.S., what you suggest is a simple trade: you bring your looks to the party and I bring my money. Fine, simple. But here’s the rub, your looks will fade and my money will likely continue into perpetuity…in fact, it is very likely that my income increases but it is an absolute certainty that you won’t be getting any more beautiful!

So, in economic terms you are a depreciating asset and I am an earning asset. Not only are you a depreciating asset, your depreciation accelerates! Let me explain, you’re 25 now and will likely stay pretty hot for the next 5 years, but less so each year. Then the fade begins in earnest. By 35 stick a fork in you!So in Wall Street terms, we would call you a trading position, not a buy and hold…hence the rub…marriage. It doesn’t make good business sense to “buy you” (which is what you’re asking) so I’d rather lease.

In case you think I’m being cruel, I would say the following. If my money were to go away, so would you, so when your beauty fades I need an out. It’s as simple as that. So a deal that makes sense is dating, not marriage. Separately, I was taught early in my career about efficient markets. So, I wonder why a girl as “articulate, classy and spectacularly beautiful” as you has been unable to find your sugar daddy. I find it hard to believe that if you are as gorgeous as you say you are that the $500K hasn’t found you, if not only for a tryout.

By the way, you could always find a way to make your own money and then we wouldn’t need to have this difficult conversation.

With all that said, I must say you’re going about it the right way. Classic “pump and dump.” I hope this is helpful, and if you want to enter into some sort of lease, let me know.

¶ It’s great to read, in an AP story from Strasbourg, that Abdullah Gul, the Turkish president who made Turkey’s liberal elites shake in their shoes earlier this year, only to win a handy victory in August, is committed to revising Turkey’s Article 103, the controversial law that criminalizes “insults to Turkish identity” – whatever that means. The international attention that was focused on Turkey during the dark days in which Nobel Prize winner Orhan Pamuk was up for trial for violating 103 appears to have embarrassed Turkish cultural conservatives into reconsidering the law, which is something of a vague but blunt instrument that leaves too much power in the hands of opportunistic prosecutors.

“No one is going to prison for expressing their views freely,” [Mr Gul] told representatives of the council. The Council of Europe, which has 47 member states, seeks to develop common and democratic principles based on the European Convention on Human Rights and other documents.

That’s good to hear. Now, let’s see what actually happens.

¶ Neela Banerjee’s “Panel Says Episcopalians Have Met Anglican Directive” is not, unfortunately, the easiest story to follow, but after sifting through it several times I came to the conclusion that the presiding bishop of the Episcopal Church, Katherine Jefferts Schori, is playing Bushie games when she claims to be “gratified” that the American church’s panel has opted to comply with Anglican Communion strictures on recent liberalizing moves. It pains me to say this, because my sympathies are all with the supporters of W Gene Robinson, gay bishop of New Hampshire – and because I become positively redneck when I think that a gang of African prelates whose not-so-distant ancestors, at least according to Evelyn Waugh, were probably cannibals, are directing the affairs of a venerable American sect. It would appear, however, that the Communion conservatives are right to cock an eyebrow at Bishop Jefferts Schori’s conciliatory utterances. As Ms Banerjee’s editor, I’d have yanked “victory” from her opening sentence.

Fossil Darling sent me a lovely note first thing this morning. “Congratulations,” it was headed. “It was a lovely day, all of which is such a fond memory……….” he wrote. My first thought was that, yes, I enjoyed walking down to the river the other day and taking photographs. But, no: it couldn’t be that. Hmm.

I am pretty sharp, first thing in the morning, but Fossil Darling is a professional. I must live up to his standards. Had I been able to, I’d realized right off, instead of after a few head-scratchings, that he was talking about the twenty-sixth wedding anniversary that Kathleen and I celebrate today.

Nothing could be more conclusive proof of my bourgeois degeneracy than my heartwarmed response to a story in today’s Times about the recaptured grandeur of the Paramount Ballroom in Shanghai. Built in 1933, the dance palace almost immediately began to slide, and the fun stopped completely in 1956, but somehow the building survived, and lived to be restored by a Taiwanese businessman in 2001. Zhao Shichong invested three million dollars in the restoration of the Paramount, (They laugh at me when I predict that Taiwan is going to take over China in a bloodless IPO…)

Howard W French’s story, “Where West Met East, and Then Asked for a Dance,” predictably reports the reappearance, as if from cryogenic preservation, of pre-Communist-era dandies and tai-tais who claim to need no other exercise to maintain their svelte figures. But we hear nothing of young people discovering the ancient glamour on their own. I have a bunch of Yao Li CDs, if anyone wants to get in the mood.

I had no particular desire to visit Shanghai until I read about the Paramount this morning. Now I wish I had a full head of hair just so that I could slick it back with Brylcreem. Pretty soon, I’ll be looking svelte, too. I’m sure that Kathleen will lend me to a respectable matron, particularly since my cha-cha is still in fine form.

What’s heart-warming about the return of the Paramount is the rediscovery, in so many places around the world, of good old-fashioned fun. Fun was so not Mid-Twentieth Century – and don’t let them tell you otherwise. Maoism was so pervasive in those earnest days that I was genuinely shocked, when I began paying attention to the lyrics in the early Sixties, that Queen Victoria had not ordered Gilbert and Sullivan to be burned at the stake for committing the sacrilege of The Mikado.

I don’t know how many Shanghainese actually call the ballroom “Paramount.” It wouldn’t be the easiest thing to say. Mr French has been kind enough to supply the Putonghua (Mandarin) version: “Bai Le Men,” or “Gate of a Hundred Pleasures.”

No sooner do I discover the comfort of writing my Book Review review with the wireless laptop in my cozy bedroom chair than I discover that wireless works better at some times than at others. I don’t understand why, not really, but I expect that it has something to do with a lot of network demand. At least, that’s why I hope it is. I can go for hours without signal interruption most of the time, but early in the evening (to name one egregious time of day) I can hardly hold onto a signal for thirty seconds. Also, I haven’t yet downloaded an HTML text editor onto the laptop. So life remains hard, and I’m sure that you feel very sorry for me.

PS: Late at night, when traffic drops off precipitously, is a great time for reeading everyone else’s blogs. Lookinat photographs, reading longer entries, following comment threads – all stuff that I can hardly bear to do when I’m preoccupied by churning out my own content during the daylight hours.

¶ Stanley, I Presume?

On Sunday, Kathleen and I walked down to the river. I wanted to try my hands, now considerably less shaky, at photography. The results were mixed, but I liked this picture of the river, which, as you can plainly see, is not a river, but a swatch of turbulent water churned by ever-shifting tides. I am very fond of rivers; I like their inexorability. The water keeps coming from one direction and running off in another. “Time, like a never-ending stream,” as the hymn has it. But if the East River were a river, time’s sons would still be floating back and forth perpetually.

Last May, The New Yorker published an article, “The CSI Effect,” by Jeffrey Toobin, about the really rather shaky foundations on modern forensic science. It turns out that hair, for example, is usually pretty uninformative as evidence. Fibers shed by clothes and upholstery aren’t much better. Aggressive prosecutors (pardon the tautology) are past-masters at finessing the doubts that crime lab technicians might have about their own findings. It turns out that the triumphs of dispositive clues on TV crime shows are about as realistic as your basic Seventies sitcom.

I was heartened, therefore, to read this morning that states are buckling down, not only on crime labs, but on lineup procedures and the use of DNA evidence. According to Solomon Moore’s sotry, “DNA Exoneration Leads to Change in Legal System,”

Nationwide, misidentification by witnesses led to wrongful convictions in 75 percent of the 207 instances in which prisoners have been exonerated over the last decade, according to the Innocence Project, a group in New York that investigates wrongful convictions.

The great thing about all of this is changes are being mandated by state legislatures, not by courts. I’m second to none in believing that judicial activism is our ultimate bulwark against profound social injustice, but in a well-run democracy that fallback is rarely if ever necessary, because legislatures do what they’re supposed to do: pass intelligent laws.

Cheering as this news is, it oughtn’t to deflect our attention from the fact that the far dirtier blot on American justice is the shameless exploitation of unconscionably broad drug laws to incarcerate African Americans.

The American knack for reinventing the procedural impediments of medieval Europe – how to keep anything from happening – never fails to force a little gasp. How could the land of the free and the home of the brave be the depot of the dumb? For eight days, according to William Yardley’s story in the Times, Tania Rider lay pinned in her Honda at the base of a ravine in a Seattle surburb after sliding off the road. For eight days, her husband, Tom, tried to enlist local authorities in a missing-person search. But rules and regulations vitiated his appeals. It was not until Mr Rider offered to present himself as a suspect, knowing that he was innocent of any guilt, that investigators paid attention. They turned on their cell-phone tracing thingies and eventually found his wife within five miles of a transmission tower. Her kidneys were failing, and there were a few broken bones, but youth and good health promised a solid recovery – assuming that Ms Rider will ever be able to overcome the horrible memory of lying helplessly and unhelped at the base of that ravine.  It’s true that the police cannot be expected to open investigations every time someone doesn’t make it home for dinner. Men presumably still tell their wives that they’re just going down to the corner store for a pack of cigarettes,  knowing in their hearts that they plan never to return. But hard and fast rules governing the opening of investigations are inappropriate. Police officers need to be better listeners; and I have no objection to helping them out with obligatory GPS transmitters on all vehicles. When a man comes into the precinct house to report that his wife and her car are missing, attention ought to be paid, because the guy is either telling the truth or he’s a murderer. Either way, it’s a big deal, and no time for parsing the rule book

Going to the movies within days of discharge from the hospital – a good idea? Because I was determined, for safety’s sake, not to leave the neighborhood, there were only two possibilities, but one of them, Eastern Promises, just looked too uncongenial for a convalescent, chipper though I’ve been. In the Valley of Elah didn’t start until one, which would ordinarily be a mark against it, but my time is a little more flexible now that I’m forbidden to do 90% of the things that make this apartment bearable. In the event, Elah was showing at two, and the theatre that lies in the other direction. I spent the intervening hour cleaning the desk in the bedroom, which was dustier than the most neglected corner.

I’d promised to call Kathleen when I got to the theatre at one. Instead, I called when I got back to the apartment, promising when I got to the theatre at two. This I forgot to do. I called the moment I was back out in the street, but the damage had been done. “I finally gave up being sick about your lying in the street, thinking that somebody must have called.” Ouch. I really deserved that.

The movie that I did see was, I think, just about the perfect film for me today. I’ve been a fan of Tommie Lee Jones since The Eyes of Laura Mars. He was more promising than great in that extravagant portrait of New York City’s Titanic period, but he has borne forth more and more of his promise with every film that he has added to his list. In the Valley of Elah puts him, without a doubt, in the company of Newman and Redford – men who can convey all the sorrow and disappointment of American life without opening their mouths.

¶ In The Valley of Elah.

You can’t say that the top brass never learns. After the failure of the Deepwater project, in which eight cutting-edge patrol boats were hauled out of the water because they were riddled with design and structural flaws, the Coast Guard decided to take an unusually early look at its new line of ships, called “national security cutters.” It was not pleased with what it found. Eric Lipton’s update, “Early Flaws Seen in New Coast Guard Cutter,” of a story scooped the other day by Wired is not his most lucid, but it does convey the man in the street’s dilemma. Ought we to be pleased that problems have been detected before billions have gushed into Lockheed Martin sinkholes, or should he lament the American soi-disant “advanced technology company” is supporting our troops and our nation with vessels compromised by “design flaws and improper installation of cables for its classified communications systems”?

Half full, or halp empty?

The physical therapist who will pay four visits at the insurer’s expense but who says that there’s not really going to be any need for that many, doesn’t want me walking out in the streets unaccompanied until she gets to take a stroll with me on Monday down to Carl Schurz Park. While I observe the flora and the fauna, she will observe me.

But she did tell me that I must walk, and walk a lot, so I enlisted the help of Nom de Plume this afternoon. She’d had a long, all-day meeting, and I’m sure was hoping just to sit by the virtual fire and sip tea, but she readily agreed to walk me the two blocks up 86th Street to the “better” Barnes & Noble – better than the one across the street. I was looking for audiobooks, because sometimes my eyes just can’t take any more reading. The problem was, I’d either read the book, owned the book, or knew from the Book Review that the book wasn’t for me. I did find two titles, though, more about which later. I’m too tired to cross the room to fetch the shopping bag. We were out between five-thirty and six-fifteen. Yorkville High Street was very crowded, and I was lightly afraid of being jostled from behind. But our trip passed without incident. Somewhere between Wu Liang Ye and Laytner’s – both on the north side of 86th between Third and Second – I said to Nom that I felt that we’d walked halfway to midtown. I needed to walk!

I feel sure that I’ll sleep tonight. I don’t count on it, quite, not after I don’t know how many years of steering clear of bed until a few drams of alcohol have lulled my senses. Increasing numbers of drams. Right now, Valium is doing alcohol’s job, and I have every confidence that I’ll be able to cut back on the relaxant. Over the years, the doctors have prescribed every manner of sleeping potion (except the big guns, such as Ambien), but only one has worked, and I was dumbstruck when it was taken off the market as a recreationally-abused drugs. Qaaludes, which I started taking the day after they hit the market, worked perfectly for me, and I was amazed that they didn’t work for everyone. Typical, really. Want to know which one of a half-dozen proposed china patterns won’t sell very well? Just ask Kathleen and me to tell you our favorite. That’s the one.

Working my head off, I’m catching up faster than I expected to. It must be the fact that my body is as dry as Moore County. Here’s my review of this week’s Book Review. That leaves just one issue to deal with – the one that I ought to have spent the afternoon writing up, instead of going out on a tout and coming home so that I could break my neck.

¶ Meet the Supremes.

Fossil Darling plays nurse’s aide.  He’s new at it, though, and doesn’t realize that what’s called for here is a spoon. I bear up well, don’t you think? Not a crease of impatience.

On second thought, maybe the knife was less lethal.

All the nurses and techs at the Hospital for Special Surgery are great (the doctors, of course, are gods), but if it weren’t for the indefagitably cheerful Colleen, I’d still be waiting for my release paperwork.

Not that I’d mind looking out the window. Built directly over the FDR Drive, the new wing of the Hospital for Special Surgery makes the most of its views. That’s Roosevelt Island across the East River – home of “Main Street, New York.” The river is the real star of the show, because it’s always up to something different. It can lie still as a lake, or boil like a tidal bore. It flows north; it flows south. Unfortunately, the strait is so long that tides alone are incapable of flushing it clean.

Anyway, you can see why I hated to trade the scene of such lively frolics for the routines of home life.

Ho, my hearties! Don your foul-weather gear! Our shores are about to be swept by Hurricane Tania – not a weather system, but a Force Five Scandal, all the deadlier for appearing, at present, to be free of pecuniary drag. The sentimentality about “9/11” (a semi-mythical event, replete with more heroes than the Iliad, but with tenacious roots in fact) is about to clash with the too-long leashed hounds of critical thinking.

Until just the other day, Tania Head, one of the very few survivors from a tower at or just above the point where the jetliners struck, was the president of the Survivors’ Network. There is no sugggestion that she has done anything wrong (such as misappropriating funds – it’s not even clear how she has supported herself) in this office, but there is also no suggestion, beyond her own, that her story of what happened on the 78th floor of the South Tower bears an iota of truth.

In their Times story, “In a 9/11 Survival Tale, the Pieces Just Don’t Fit,” David Dunlop and Serge F Kovalevski portray a woman who exploited the city’s psychological disarray to create a new identity for herself. Heartwarming and heartbreaking in equal measure, Ms Head’s story worked like an “open, sesame,” to give her entrée to a ring at the circus of grief that became our obligatory entertainment for a few months before it was decided by harder heads that it was time to “move on.”

Ms Head claims to have attended Stanford and Harvard, but her multiple CVs suggest a fabulist without benefit of university training. Eventually and inevitably, a couple of journalists got interested in trying to patch her anecdotes into a coherent quilt. They couldn’t. Let’s see if, say, Rudy can.

Because I know next to nothing about Asperger’s Syndrome, but believe that I present a few of the symptoms; and, furthermore, that reviewing my life in terms of cognitive gaffes, which appear to be the most striking aspect of the malady to healthy people, seems to explain a good deal of hitherto obdurately inexplicable behavior; and, finally, because I’m mindful that there are many sufferers whose lives have been crippled by the disorder, while mine has merely been inconvenienced, I have decided not to talk about Asperger’s at all. While I was in the hospital - under the influence of morphine, no doubt - I ran into many language labyrinths. I could never say “Percoset” right off. First of all, I had to reject “Prednisone.” Then I would thrash my way through verbal salads of “Penobscot,” “Pemaquid,” finally landing on “Butternut.” The Butternut phase was followed by an easy ability to say “Percoset.” All the while, I was thinking, in this or that connection, “That’s my Wellsperger’s talking.”  

In the essay that I linked to a couple of weeks ago, Tim Page makes the extraordinary claim that he learned how to interact with people from Emily Post’s handbook of etiquette. I had the advantage of direct tutorials from my mother, who would take me out to dinner before a Philharmonic concert every now and then. (As always, I went overboard. I wasn’t supposed to like the music; I was there to learn to sit still.) Ordinarily contentious, our relations during these evenings were almost playful. I was learning a game, and the object of the game was to fool waiters and headwaiters and other adults into regarding me as a well-behaved teen-ager, a “young man.” In the ad-libbed environment of high school free periods, with no script to work with, I was hopelessly clumsy. Every once in a while, I came up with a clever remark, but that made me tolerable, not admirable. Having absolutely no lust in my own breast, I couldn’t explain the knack that classmates had – especially the attractive, popular ones – for making themselves miserable because their passions were not satisfactorily requited. I hope it won’t offend readers to learn that I sailed through adolescence – and the rest of my life – untroubled, if that’s the word, by “nocturnal emissions.”

So I learned how to make friends and influence people from the outside in. I whistled happy tunes.

I whistle a happy tune
And ev’ry single time
The happiness in the tune
Convinces me that I’m not afraid.

Make believe you’re brave
And the trick will take you far.
You may be as brave
As you make believe you are….*

Eventually, I didn’t even have to whistle. This was a mistake, of course, because I still had much to learn  about people, and the memories of mistakes and inadvertent insults that I compounded during my twenties (when I was also a lobster out of water in Houston) can still make my blood run cold.

In any case, the idea of “acting naturally” strikes me as totally outlandish. I can fake acting naturally, but only after I’ve had thirty or so minutes to study my environment.

Here is the note that I want to close on, this morning: the time and effort that I have put into honing antennae and sizing up a roomful of people have cost me, if not a Nobel, then at least a MacArthur grant. Am I resentful? Certainly not! It’s a relief to know why.

* Rodgers and Hammerstein, The King and I.

While my neck was broken and then under repair, I read a great deal, although my reading comprehension was occasionally impaired by Dilaudid. The stack of books to write up gets higher every day. Like every book that I’ve read since Edward Luce’s In Spite of the Gods: the Strange Rise of Modern India, Alex von Tunzelmann’s Indian Summer:The Secret History of the End of an Empire presents a territory in which massive inertia inevitably thunders calamitous slippages, and the bloodletting of the summer of 1947 makes celebrated disasters such as the Mutiny of 1857 look like backwoods honor-feuds. Ms von Tunzelmann definitely belongs to the historiographic tradition that holds that different players would probably have yielded different outcomes. Hers is not a book for Gandhi venerators.

I’ve started in on Tim Blanning’s huge The Pursuit of Glory: Europe 1648-1815. Despite its title, this is a book fond of facts and figures, but it’s readable in moderate doses. I expect it to tell the story of how Europe managed during those two-and-a-half centuries to put itself in the way of the Industrial Revolution. The period also saw the birth of that most noxious of modern inventions, nationalism. (It’s interesting to note, reading Indian Summer, that India “caught” nationalism from the British. What had been benign and constructive on England’s island turned fratricidal in the Subcontinent.

Ms G, who together with Ryan was a perfect angel about visiting me the night before my surgery and packing a bag of very handy items, brought me her copy of a book that she had enthused about at dinner recently: Norman Doidge’s The Brain That Changes Itself: Stories of Personal Triumph from the Frontiers of Brain Science. At the frontiers of brain science, the principal activity seems to be the demolition of long-established but probably erroneous assumptions about how the brain is set up. For all the “stories of personal triumph,” this is not a flightly or sensational book. Now that my drugs and venue are back to normal, I’m getting back into the book, some of which is familiar from other sources and all of which is fascinating.

As for fiction, I’m just in the right mood for Alice Munro’s The View from Castle Rock.

And as for the Book Review that I wrote over a week ago, with a broken neck,

¶ Lust for Numbers.

The Times is probably the same paper every day; it’s I who change. Most mornings, I can’t get the turnip to bleed; the very newsprint seems to be reverting to its aboriginal sawdust in my hands. This morning, however, is different.

¶ Sharing page A18 are stories about Fundamentalist Mormons and Liberal Episcopalians. Warren F Jefffs, son of the redoubtable Rulon, has been convicted as an accomplice to rape. All he did was arrange the marriage of a fourteen year-old girl to a cousin whom she didn’t care for. He wasn’t even in the room! But he wasn’t allowed to hide behind the fig-leaf of religious expression, either.

The prosecutor, Brock Belnap, said religion was not only irrelevant, but also a deliberate distraction that he said the defense was trying to inject to cloud jurors’ judgment. He said after the verdict that he expected an appeal.

As for the Episopalians, they seem prepared to bury their hatchets (if not very deeply) to repel the obnoxious intrusions of primarily Third-World brethren within the Worldwide Anglican Community.

Contrary to recent news reports that the conservatives were close to forming a unified new structure, Bishop Minns said there were no plans to announce the formation of a new Anglican body that would consolidate all the conservative groups that have broken with the Episcopal Church under one umbrella.

¶ Then, there’s the “What Can We Do About Protecting Our Kiddies From These Sociopathic Rap Lyrics” perennial. This would not be a particularly interesting story if it were not for the craven self-interested testimony of “industry” executives.

Under questioning, Mr. Bronfman and Doug Morris, chairman of the Universal Music Group, stood by the industry’s existing method of handling explicit content, including the voluntary labeling of graphic CDs with parental-advisory stickers. Though they defended the industry’s practices, Mr. Bronfman and Mr. Morris lamented that efforts to restrict young listeners’ access to explicit music had become futile amid the proliferation of copyrighted songs and videos online.

In other words, it’s the government’s fault for not granting the “industry” even more rapacious intgellectual-property rights than it already rather feudally enjoys.

¶ The only story with no sex oomph – and this is odd, considering the source, is Marc Santora’s “Candidates Battle the Slow Season for Fund-Raising.”

Mr. Giuliani seems to have outdone other campaigns with his effort in Kazakhstan, a country made famous, or infamous, by the movie “Borat,” starring the British comedian Sasha Baron Cohen. Though only Americans can contribute to presidential campaigns, Kazakhstan has many American oil and gas workers in addition to an office of the law firm where Mr. Giuliani was a partner, Bracewell & Giuliani of Houston.

He will appear in a videoconference, the campaign said.

His fund-raising there is raising eyebrows among human rights activists, primarily because President Nursultan Nazarbayev has been accused of being antidemocratic and abusing individual rights.

I’ll bet you anything that Mr Nazarbayev has an excellently-stocked humidor.

One begins to suspect that, if anyone can keep Rudy Giuliani out of the White House, it’s Times columnist Clyde Haberman. In today’s piece, “Call Him an Oddball if You Must, but Do Call,” Mr Haberman recounts the following extraordinary lapse in common sense – “extraordinary,” except that it has already happened once before on the campaign.

Non-New Yorkers got a taste of it the other day when Mr. Giuliani interrupted his speech — a very important speech — to the National Rifle Association in Washington. His cellphone rang. It was his wife, Judith. Smack in the middle of his talk, he whipped out the phone.

“Hello, dear,” he said in a syrupy voice. “I’m talking to the members of the N.R.A. right now. Would you like to say hello?” He listened, and laughed. “I love you, and I’ll give you a call as soon as I’m finished, O.K.?” he said. He listened a bit more. “O.K., have a safe trip. Bye-bye. Talk to you later, dear. I love you.”

Campaign aides said it was a spontaneous moment, with Mrs. Giuliani calling just before she boarded a plane.

Granted, lots of people call loved ones before a flight. But a presidential candidate doesn’t shut off his phone, and instead takes a call, in the middle of a major speech? The episode was so bizarrely cutesy-poo that more than a few people in the audience went, Eeeww! Nor was it an isolated incident; the same thing happened in Florida three months ago.

Mr Giuliani is behaving as ridiculously as the reformed-roué papa in Sandy Wilson’s The Boy Friend.

Incredibly, I’m at home. Thanks to everyone who sent so many good wishes; I hope to return the favor with a few good stories. But what a whirlwind! A week ago today, I was seeing a spine surgeon for the first time – and he was thinking that it was unsafe to let me go home to pack a bag. The next day, the surgery took either five hours (according to the MASH surgeon) or eight (according to the much more sober anaesthesiologist). Neurologists were on hand, continuously testing the integrity of my spinal cord.

Let’s not talk about Recovery (Thursday); it seemed to take place in a different country, one in which any high-tech support was well-hidden. They meant well, though.

The three days that I spent hanging around my double room made a story in improvements, and, just when I’d worked out all the right routines, it was time to go. Don’t worry – I wasn’t tempted to stick around.

I will leave you with the three Blessed Miracles:

1. When I take the neck brace off in March or sometime around then, my head will stand more erect than it did before the fall.

2. Unlike that of most ankylosing spondylitis victims, the constitution of my vertebrae is robust. For that reason, I’m not sporting a halo.

3. I can now undergo a CT scan without major ingestion of painkillers. Why it didn’t hurt in the least. The third one, I’m talking about.

God bless the good people – the very good people – at the Hospital for the Ruptured and the Crippled!