For you local foodies:
In cooperation with the Washington D.C. Convention and Tourism Corporation, Restaurant Week will run from Monday, July 28, to Sunday, Aug. 3. Between these dates, Washington restaurants will offer fixed-price lunch and dinner specials. The three-course lunch is $20.03; the three-course dinner, $30.03. Prices do not include beverage, tax and gratuity.
List of participating restaurants here. (Thanks to Tina for the link.)
Interesting tidbit in the Times newsletter on New York style: “The Show before the Show,” on the théâtre verité that occurs outside Broadway venues right before showtime. Here the cast is a bunch of theater-goers waiting to see Take Me Out at the Walter Kerr. The piece is ostensibly a musing on style, but it reads like the beginning of a short story. One of my favorite passages is this:
Four young men in a circle, each treacherously handsome in his own way, compared the sandals they had chosen for the evening with outstretched legs framed by shorts that may have looked casual, but seemed chosen with cold calculation.
Ooh, “treacherously handsome.” What a delicious phrase. Reading this whole thing reminds me that I really need to see Take Me Out. And get a new pair of sandals.
Boy Meets Boy wasn’t as bad as I thought it would be… if you just forget the cruel twist, i.e., some of the “mates” are straight, unbeknownst to the leading man, James. Yeah, the desert-island questions and answers were gimmicky and cheesy. I roll my eyes when people say things like, “That’s what life is all about” or “The most important thing in life is…” Stop speaking in vague absolutes like you’re some fortune cookie or something! However, I think what lulled me into the show is the fact that I got swept up in the search for Mr. Right, right along with him. And really, who doesn’t enjoy a good pool party?
I sincerely want James to find a nice guy, but periodically during the show, I keep forgetting that (dun dun dun) some of the guys aren’t even on his team. So in the end, it’s a cruel twist on all of us: the leading man and us vicarious viewers. Still, you better believe I’m tuning in next week. Did you see the previews? There are cowboy hats. And dancing!
In other TV news, Sex in the City is pulling out all the stops. Ballet icon Mikhail Baryshnikov will join the show as an artist who becomes a new love interest for Carrie. What was up with Berger this week? Punk.
It’s Tuesday night, so of course that means Queer Eye. Speaking of the show, Kyan’s tutorial on shaving (in the second episode) inspired me to put aside my usual can of foaming shave gel, and instead try one of the product samples I got at the Grooming Lounge last month: Jack Black beard lube, “with jojoba and eucalyptus.” Mmm, tingly. I like it. It’s clear, so I can actually see where I’m shaving. I think I’ll go back to either the Grooming Lounge or Sephora to stock up on a whole kit of shaving supplies. (Any product recommendations, ye gentlemen?)
But back to Bravo: Boy Meets Boy premieres tonight. Hm. I’ll withhold judgment until I’ve seen it. Related article on gay-themed TV in today’s Times.
If you’re all Bravo-ed out, go instead to the Independent Film Channel and check out the 1960s French adaptation of Patricia Highsmith’s The Talented Mr. Ripley, entitled Plein Soleil (released in English as “Purple Noon”), with the young Alain Delon in the title role. A classic movie all around. And on BBC America, Ground Force debuts a new series, bringing its magic of landscape transformation across the pond to America’s gardens.
One of the junk e-mails I got yesterday had “Department of Violations” in the “From:” field, and the subject was “Regarding Your Speeding Ticket.” I knew it was bogus, but I decided to check it out anyway. It turns out to be an ad for a police-radar scrambler. And a while back, I got one with a similarly alarming subject line regarding credit ratings or payment or something like that. Yikes. Spammers will do anything to get you to read their e-mails. I mean, honestly. It’s crazy.
Speaking of spam, there’s a good bit in the new Harper’s: a transcript from a May 6 debate in the British House of Lords, first on the issue of injuries from corned-beef cans…
Lord Sainsbury of Turville: My Lords, I totally agree. The statistics on accidents are extremely fascinating; they prove that the British public can use practically anything in this world to hurt themselves with. […]
and then, on junk e-mail (“This Potted Meat, This England,” Aug. 2003). An extended excerpt:
Lord Mitchell asked Her Majesty’s Government: What are their plans to reduce the growth in spam (unsolicited emails).
Lord Sainsbury of Turville: My Lords, I hope noble Lords will appreciate how I move seamlessly from corned beef to spam. […]
Lord Renton: My Lords, will the Minister explain how it is that an inedible tinned food that lasted forever and was supplied to those on active service can become an unsolicited email, bearing in mind that some of us wish to be protected from having an email?
Lord Sainsbury of Turville: My Lords, I am afraid that I have not been able to find out why the term “spam” is used, but that is the meaning it now has. It is a matter that should be taken very seriously because it not only clutters up computers but involves a great deal of very unpleasant advertising to do with easy credit, pornography, and miracle diets. That is offensive to people, and we should try to reduce it.
Lord Faulkner of Worcester: My Lords, I can help the Minister with the origin of the word. It comes from aficionados of Monty Python, and the famous song, “Spam, spam, spam, spam.” It has been picked up by the Internet community and is used as a description of rubbish on the Internet.
Lord Saulton of Abernethy: My Lords, do the Government have any plans to restrict unsolicited faxes? My fax paper is always being wasted by people who send me faxes I do not want. I do not know whether they could be called “corned beef” or something, but I have had enough of them.
And it goes on like that. Spam seems to make an even more bizarre topic of conversation when you preface your musings with “my Lords.” Ah, if only Congress were as entertaining. (Thanks to Adam for loaning me his copy of Harper’s. Good luck getting it back.)
In this week’s New Yorker financial page, an economic look at the myth of the box-office weekend (“Open Wide,” Aug. 4, 2003). My favorite phrase from the article is “non-informative information cascade.” Use that instead of “buzz” the next time you refer to all the Hollywood promotion that gets rolled out several months, seasons, human gestation periods, before a movie actually opens.
And if you really want to read more in this vein, I found a paper entitled “Movie Stars, Big Budgets, and Wide Releases: Empirical Analysis of the Blockbuster Strategy” (PDF, 584k), complete with the kind of mathematical-symbol-laden econometrics that I see everyday at work and pretend to know something about. (It’s all Greek to me. Literally.)
The Times reports that the upcoming issue of Bride’s magazine features an article on same-sex weddings (“Outward Bound,” Sept./Oct. 2003), a first among the major bridal magazines. Reactions:
Cathy Renna, news media director for the Gay and Lesbian Alliance Against Defamation, said every such article is an important step. “Maybe a cynical person would say they just want our business,” Ms. Renna said. “But if you want to have a wedding, these are the publications you’ll read. A story like this really energizes the gay and lesbian community.”
Same-sex ceremonies have been covered for some time on Internet wedding sites. “Wow, they finally caught up,” said Carley Roney, editor in chief and a co-founder of one such site, TheKnot.com, which claims more than two million visitors a month. The Knot has covered same-sex weddings since it began operating in 1997.
A new edition of the Chicago Manual of Style is out. No kids, not Dolce-and-Gabbana kind of style; I’m talking grammar-and-punctuation kind of style. How geeky is my excitement over this? I think the part of my brain at work here is the same one that made me so interested in reading etiquette books as a kid. I couldn’t catch a baseball to save my life, but boy, did I know which fork to use at dinner. Interesting to see I was cultivating my inner snob early on. Not that I ever had occasions to display my learned social graces. Even now, I love the immediacy of the internet, but instead of firing off e-mails, I long to write hand-written notes on fine stationery. “Mr. J. T– regrets that he is unable to accept the kind invitation of…”
A related note: is there a word out there meaning nostalgia for a time period in which one never lived? I was looking at a photo on the Library of Congress website, of the 1925 Big Game (the annual football game between Stanford and Berkeley), and it occurred to me that practically everyone is wearing a hat (American Memory Collection link via LYD). I’ve often said that I miss those days when everyone wore hats. And often I am reminded, oh wait, I wasn’t around then.