Daily Office
Friday
My favorite restaurant for lunch, Café d’Alsace. To the extreme right, a sign for Elaine’s, which I’m told is a truly awful restaurant. I’ve never set foot inside. So much for Famous Writers’ School.
¶ Matins: I’m thinking of Die Fälscher for this morning. Writing the movie up may be the last bit of sustained writing that I do for a short spell. And no, I’m not taking a vacation. Rather the reverse.
¶ Nones: One of these days, businessmen are going to have to learn to regard “redundancy” as a form of insurance — a legitimate and necessary cost of doing business. This story about a shortage of favorite Passover treats, “It’s ‘Hide the Matzo’ for Real: Tam Tams Are Scarce,” may be cute, but it’s also an object lesson.
¶ Vespers: This week’s Friday Front visits another part of the subject that I raised two weeks ago. This time, Eric Alterman asks, who’s going to pay for the news that we think we need?
Oremus…
§ Matins. There’s an eleven o’clock showing at the Angelika. Then lunch; and then, on the way home, a stop at Grand Central to rendez-vous with Megan, who will give me a KVM toggle. Do you know what that is? It’s a thingie that allows you to toggle your keyboard, monitor, and mouse between two CPUs.
And why would I want one of those, you ask. Because I’m lazy, that’s why. Lazy and insecure.
I’ve got a new desktop computer. It’s still sitting in its box. Helpers abler than I will set it up on Tuesday. Then they’ll take away the machine that I’m using at the moment, to repair the CD and DVD disc drives, which are unreliable and kaput respectively. The old machine is four years old, and I don’t think that I’ve ever had a computer for that length of time before. It works okay, but, aside from the drives, only okay.
And because it is the oldest computer that I’ve ever worked with, and not broken — or hopelessly corrupted/compromised by spyware, as the last machine was — it is crammed with all sorts of vital stuff that it would take about four days of flat-out copying to back up on flash drives.
The KVM toggle promises a period of peaceful co-existence. (I’m not so naive as to think that it will be easy. Availability is all I’m asking for. ) I didn’t know that such things existed until last Sunday. That’s when, over Easter dinner, I asked Megan and Ryan if such a thing existed. Not only does it exist, but the happy-couple-to-be has an extra one.
Oh! Broadway tonight: We’ve got tickets for November, starring Nathan Lane. Kathleen and I been fans of Mr Lane since his James Taxi days, thank you very much — very nearly twenty years ago.
§ Nones. Remember, fewer than five percent of the professors at the top-flight graduate business schools have actually had the kind of job that they’re supposed to be training their students to perform.
§ Vespers. If young people today don’t read a newspaper, what is to be done? Boomer grandparents to the charge!
I don’t go into this at Portico, but Eric Alterman’s New Yorker piece suggests that traditional journalism is failing today because few people either want or believe in “objective” journalism.
Before Adolph Ochs took over the Times, in 1896, and issued his famous “without fear or favor” declaration, the American scene was dominated by brazenly partisan newspapers. And the news cultures of many European nations long ago embraced the notion of competing narratives for different political communities, with individual newspapers reflecting the views of each faction. It may not be entirely coincidental that these nations enjoy a level of political engagement that dwarfs that of the United States.