Top 5 Things To Do in March

OK, I don't want to go too far with Top X lists, but how 'bout this one:

1. Dive in and study something.
2. Subscribe to a new magazine.
3. Write a letter to your great-aunt or grandfather.
4. Eat fresh fruit and good vegetables.
5. Take a picture of the first spring flower you see and use it as your wallpaper.
   

Good Books

Check out GoodReads.com. You can share your thoughts on books and get recommendations. Very cool. I didn't know that this is what I've looking for!!

Games!

OK, this isn't quite in the spirit of the Super Bowl, which I'm now watching, but this game is a free on-line city building game in the vein of SimCity: electrocity.co.nz

I read about it on a NYTimes blog last week, which was suggesting that SimCity and other games like that could have more influence on environmental thinking than An Inconvenient Truth by actually demonstrating the pressures and trade-offs of industry, growth, prosperity and agriculture. SimCity will also throw the occasional natural disaster at you as well.

Try out Electrocity - you can play a game in 15-20 minutes. It's addictive.

N'Awlins

I lead a good life, but hey, someone's got to do it.

George had a meeting in New Orleans this weekend, and since I've never been there before I went along. Of course, people say it's not what it once was, but since I can't compare, I'll just say:

I loved it!

I spent all day Saturday wandering around the French Quarter, checked out everything from beignets to a shop that looked like it might fall down, where I bought a lovely lucite vintage clutch, to the fanciest antique store I've ever seen, (we got a peek in the back, upstairs room with the Renoir and checked out the $1/2MM Faberge cutlery set.)

Then, because tomorrow is the championship college bowl game between LSU and OSU, Bourbon Street was crazy-packed and a whole lot of fun as we went from Blues place to jazz place.

So, people, tell me your favorite place to go for a weekend get-away that's not too far.

We're engaged!

George proposed on the 23rd, in Paris no less. In the Place des Vosges he got down on one knee. So Romantic! So, here we are on the park bench about 2 minutes after the Yes.

10 Things to Do This Christmas

1. Skip the shopping
2. Donate to causes important to you loved ones rather than buying another sweater
3. Remember the Peace and Joy
4. Don't get pulled into the hassles and exasperation
5. Have an actual conversation with one of your relatives, find out what they're thinking about, what they're excited about right now
6. Go ahead and drink some eggnog
7. Call an old friend, even if you haven't been in touch for a while
8. Walk the dog, stretch a little
9. Feel good, not guilty, about loafing and wasting a bit of time
10. Eat a good clementine and really taste it
    

In Today's NY Times Pointing out one more reason why Obama is the Guy

December 18, 2007

Op-Ed Columnist

The Obama-Clinton Issue

By DAVID BROOKS

Hillary Clinton has been a much better senator than Barack Obama. She has been a serious, substantive lawmaker who has worked effectively across party lines. Obama has some accomplishments under his belt, but many of his colleagues believe that he has not bothered to master the intricacies of legislation or the maze of Senate rules. He talks about independence, but he has never quite bucked liberal orthodoxy or party discipline.

If Clinton were running against Obama for Senate, it would be easy to choose between them.

But they are running for president, and the presidency requires a different set of qualities. Presidents are buffeted by sycophancy, criticism and betrayal. They must improvise amid a thousand fluid crises. They’re isolated and also exposed, puffed up on the outside and hollowed out within. With the presidency, character and self-knowledge matter more than even experience. There are reasons to think that, among Democrats, Obama is better prepared for this madness.

Many of the best presidents in U.S. history had their character forged before they entered politics and carried to it a degree of self-possession and tranquillity that was impervious to the Sturm und Drang of White House life.

Obama is an inner-directed man in a profession filled with insecure outer-directed ones. He was forged by the process of discovering his own identity from the scattered facts of his childhood, a process that is described in finely observed detail in “Dreams From My Father.” Once he completed that process, he has been astonishingly constant.

Like most of the rival campaigns, I’ve been poring over press clippings from Obama’s past, looking for inconsistencies and flip-flops. There are virtually none. The unity speech he gives on the stump today is essentially the same speech that he gave at the Democratic convention in 2004, and it’s the same sort of speech he gave to Illinois legislators and Harvard Law students in the decades before that. He has a core, and was able to maintain his equipoise, for example, even as his campaign stagnated through the summer and fall.

Moreover, he has a worldview that precedes political positions. Some Americans (Republican or Democrat) believe that the country’s future can only be shaped through a remorseless civil war between the children of light and the children of darkness. Though Tom DeLay couldn’t deliver much for Republicans and Nancy Pelosi, so far, hasn’t been able to deliver much for Democrats, these warriors believe that what’s needed is more partisanship, more toughness and eventual conquest for their side.

But Obama does not ratchet up hostilities; he restrains them. He does not lash out at perceived enemies, but is aloof from them. In the course of this struggle to discover who he is, Obama clearly learned from the strain of pessimistic optimism that stretches back from Martin Luther King Jr. to Abraham Lincoln. This is a worldview that detests anger as a motivating force, that distrusts easy dichotomies between the parties of good and evil, believing instead that the crucial dichotomy runs between the good and bad within each individual.

Obama did not respond to his fatherlessness or his racial predicament with anger and rage, but as questions for investigation, conversation and synthesis. He approaches politics the same way. In her outstanding New Yorker profile, Larissa MacFarquhar notes that Obama does not perceive politics as a series of battles but as a series of systemic problems to be addressed. He pursues liberal ends in gradualist, temperamentally conservative ways.

Obama also has powers of observation that may mitigate his own inexperience and the isolating pressures of the White House. In his famous essay, “Political Judgment,” Isaiah Berlin writes that wise leaders don’t think abstractly. They use powers of close observation to integrate the vast shifting amalgam of data that constitute their own particular situation — their own and no other.

Obama demonstrated those powers in “Dreams From My Father” and still reveals glimpses of the ability to step outside his own ego and look at reality in uninhibited and honest ways. He still retains the capacity, also rare in presidents, of being able to sympathize with and grasp the motivations of his rivals. Even in his political memoir, “The Audacity of Hope,” he astutely observes that candidates are driven less by the desire for victory than by the raw fear of loss and humiliation.

What Bill Clinton said on “The Charlie Rose Show” is right: picking Obama is a roll of the dice. Sometimes he seems more concerned with process than results. But for Democrats, there’s a roll of the dice either way. The presidency is a bacterium. It finds the open wounds in the people who hold it. It infects them, and the resulting scandals infect the presidency and the country. The person with the fewest wounds usually does best in the White House, and is best for the country.

College for Free

Really one of the coolest things on the web has to be MIT Open Courseware. These are actual course outlines, lecture notes and even exams from MIT courses, and they're all for free. You can get amazing-sounding classes like:

Geopolitics and Geoeconomics of Global Energy
Managing the Innovation Process
Modern Poetry

The first one sounds exactly like something I would love to work through. Let's see if I actually do. I'll keep you updated.

Net-Net

In a conversation with Bonnie today, she told me her company's worst biz-glish offender is "Net-Net". I'd never even heard of that before. It means, "and the result was...."

Example: We implemented X, Y and Z. Net-net: we signed the client.

Low-hanging Fruit

I was at a day-long meeting today, sharing best practices across the company, which is great. I heard the phrase "low-hanging fruit" at least twice an hour.

What's your favorite over-used biz-glish?

Crackberry addiction

Has it gone too far when I'm making blog posts from the jungle via Blackberry? I'm sort of tickled and sort of embarrassed.

Jungle eats

Ok, I'm not quite in the wilds yet. Dad & I are in Manaus waiting to get picked up to go by boat to our jungle lodge for the rest of the week. So, in our very non-exotic hotel in .anaus, I had Piranha soup for breakfast! It is a spicey fish soup with lots of green onion that you squeeze a good bit of lime into.
Piranha, by the way, is a Tupi-Guarani word that means fierce fish.

Only in Japan

I was addicted to Tetris in college. This was found by Maria, my college roommate who watched me waste many hours playing it.

Meet and Greet around the world

From the International Herald Tribune, so apt and so funny

Tyler Brûlé : The best and worst in meeting venues

By Tyler Brûlé

Friday, October 12, 2007

If you live in the northern hemisphere October means autumn, if you're south of the Equator you're in early spring and if you reside in that special place called "medialand" it means the season of the list. At this very moment on editorial floors stretching from Taipei (my current location) to Melbourne across to Santiago and back up to Vienna, writers are busy compiling their year-end lists for December and January issues.

Not to be outdone, I've been working on a list of my own. But instead of making you buy this paper sometime between Christmas and New Year's, I'm going to save you the suspense and give you my ranking of the world's most and least hospitable places to conduct business meetings. The following criteria were gathered over the course of the past two months while on assignments in Asia, Europe and North America:

1. Venue. The meeting had to be held in the client's place of business.

2. Friendliness of reception staff. Points were deducted for offices that had laid off their receptionist in favor of a staff list stuck to the wall and a lonesome looking phone.

3. Security procedures. Points were deducted for silly measures like having your photo taken.

4. Waiting time from the moment the receiver was replaced to the time someone came out to greet guests.

5. Waiting time from being placed in holding room until the moment the host materialized.

6. Greetings. Points deducted for not having a business card. Further points deducted for avoiding eye contact, fishy handshakes and untucked shirts.

7. Coffee, tea or? Extra points for additional catering. Points deducted for not offering anything. Automatic failure for showing up with your own beverage but not offering anything to your guests.

8. Pacing of meeting. Automatic failure for starting the meeting with: "Just so you know, I'm a little pressed for time so I'm going to have to be out of here in less than 20."

9. Focus and engagement. Extra points for putting your mobile phone on silent and placing it face down and disqualification for taking a call in the middle of a presentation.

10. Farewells. Full marks for seeing a guest all the way to the exit and marks deducted for leaving them to get lost in a maze of partitions and desks.

Over the past few weeks I've visited the following countries: France, Switzerland, Germany, Italy, Britain, Denmark, Sweden, the United States, Japan, Hong Kong, Malaysia, Finland, Singapore, Spain, Belgium and now Taiwan. While you'd think there'd be a global corporate standard for receiving and hosting guests, the following reveals that a few countries need to enroll in finishing school. Here's how five of the 16 fared.

GERMANY German receptionists tend to be efficient and to the point. Hosts usually show up promptly and security is kept to a minimum, though some banks have started to behave like American companies with their security measures. Business cards are the norm rather than the exception and coffee, two types of water and apple juice tend to feature at the center of the table. In wealthier companies there might be chocolates too. Mobile devices are kept at a distance and ignored. The host will usually escort you to the lift and offer a firm handshake goodbye. Score: 9/10

SWEDEN Blame it on efficiency or cost cutting but many Swedish firms have resorted to the "call me on my mobile phone as you enter reception and I'll come down and get you" school of meeting and greeting. Sometimes a meeting that was supposed to be attended by three will only feature one person because one is off sick with a cold and another is home looking after a child with the flu. Meetings start on time and there's always fizzy Ramlösa on the table. Mobile devices are peered at occasionally. Meeting rooms are always well equipped with extension cords and full wireless and chairs tend to be ergonomic. The host will show you to reception and will often ensure your transport is sorted. Score: 6.5/10

UNITED STATES Receptionists increasingly seem to be off-brand and might be better suited to running their own nail bars than greeting visitors. Security measures are too heavy-handed - passports are required for crossing borders, not riding in elevators. It's become industry standard to make guests wait before sending an assistant out to fetch them and an all-too-common practice to make them sit while the host paces around the office on the phone. Guests are seldom offered drinks but the host(s) usually show up with towering coffee thermoses or water bottles that indicate they know something about a looming drought that you don't. Meetings are prefaced with odd sayings like "I'm going to have to jet in about five minutes but my colleagues will fill me in after" or "I'm glad you reached out today and came to see us." Blackberries will be consulted throughout the session and quite often the visitor will have to repeat main points several times. Guests leave meeting rooms parched and bewildered. Score: 4/10.

JAPAN Hosts are occasionally waiting in reception already and there's always a juggling act of dealing with shuffling umbrellas and bags while pulling out business cards. Meetings occur in rooms that are uniformly gray on gray on gray and tea (hot or cold) or coffee (hot or cold) will be brought in by a young girl teetering on Vuitton heels while balancing her tray of beverages. If there are four to six hosts, one will usually nod off during the presentation but this will be compensated for by colleagues who will make all kinds of grunts and gasps. You won't be quite sure when the meeting has ended, but eventually everyone will put hands on thighs, bow and visitors will be escorted to reception and hosts will bow till the visitor is out sight. Score: 7/10

ITALY Reception is often a man's job and the mood can range from personable to not particularly interested. Waiting times in Italy get longer the further south you go but are never as bad as you might expect. A good coffee is always a feature, more so than even water. Mobile phone calls will be taken and callers will be told off accordingly for ringing during a meeting, and visitors shouldn't count on meeting rooms featuring a broadband cable let alone Wi-Fi. Guests will be sent off with much animation and excitement. Score: 7/10.

If I were to draw up another list, it would be for business opportunities in 2008, and a global chain of workplace etiquette schools would top the ranking. My first campuses would be in New York, San Francisco and Los Angeles.

Free Rice

So here's a website, where you can do good for yourself (improving your vocabulary) and good for others (donating rice.) Check it out, it's fun.

Free Rice

Ma and Wally

My godson and his great-grandmother. So cute.

The Rhubarb Trilogy - Jam

The things you can find on YouTube! How to make rhubarb jam, every step including picking it in the garden. I found this after watching the clip above.

Pick your candidate

If you haven't seen this yet, it's a short quiz on your political beliefs, which gives results of which political candidate you most closely agree with. Select a Candidate 2008

Peace Prize

I have to say I'm disappointed with the choice of Al Gore for the Nobel Peace Prize. I've spent my career in the areas of environment and alternative energy, so a number of people approached me on Friday morning, smiling, to talk about it. Yes, it brings further attention to issues of the environment, which is good. But Al Gore's Inconvenient Truth is misleading and emotive. He lacks scientific rigor and just goes for the heart-strings. I'm not a big fan.

I was pleased to see that they tempered it by sharing the prize with the UN's IIntergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, but the whole thing strikes me as political and Hollywood.

Duck Fat

I have a feeling this new job is going to keep me running. On the morning of my 3rd day, Wednesday, my alarm was set for 4 o'clock so I could make a 6:30 flight to Los Angeles, where I met a colleague from the Washington, a major client and a whole scad of other people. That said, I haven't had a chance to give you any edifying posts until now. This one will only be useful to those of you in/near Chicago, but it's worth it.

Saturday, George and I went to Hot Doug's (The Sausage Superstore and Encased Meat Emporium) for lunch. It's a sausage/hot dog joint in the middle of industrial/commercial nowhere on the NW side of the city. You drive along these empty streets until you see a place with a line out the door and around the corner. Now I had heard great reviews of their homemade specialty sausages and the Fri/Sat specialty of Duck Fat French Fries, but I had no idea I'd be spending 40 minutes in line waiting for them. It was worth it. We waited in line, mostly with folks who looked like hip Bucktowners getting over their hangovers. We were the only ones with combed hair and un-ironic shirts. We got recommendations from the 20-something bleach-blond guy in skinny jeans in line behind us, and ordered from the list of daily specials. Our favorite was the Saucisse de Toulouse with carmelized onions and brie.

Cooking for One

I recently picked up a book called, "Alone in the Kitchen with an Eggplant: Confessions of Cooking for One and Dining Alone." There's great freedom in cooking for yourself - you have no one to please, you don't have to sit at the table, use a fork or turn on the stove.

When I'm alone I eat one of the following:

• Pasta, with a sauce made from what's in the cupboard or freezer
• Bread and cheese
• A huge pan of roasted asparagus

One time I had some hard boiled eggs on hand, so I spent the entire evening making empanadas to use them up. (I'm sure there's an easier way.)

So, what do you eat/cook when no one else is looking?

Politics, Religion & Theater

Mom and I saw a very interesting play on Sunday, Passion Play by Sarah Ruhl at the Goodman Theater. It presents plays within the play, showing the towns, actors and politics around putting on Passion plays in Elizabethan England, early Nazi Germany and post-Vietnam US.

Elizabeth was anti-Catholic, but mostly just trying to get both politics and religion under her control. In Nazi Germany, Hitler visits the passion play in Ober Ammergau, and congratulates the town for its emphasis in attributing blame for Jesus' death on the Jews rather than the Romans. In post-Vietnam US, the actor playing Pontius Pilate wonders why Pilate doesn't take responsibility, and Ronald Reagan says he, like the play, will bring hope to the country.

How much of politics is theater? How is the theater used for political ends? How is religion used in the discourse of politics, now and through the ages? How does politics influence religion, in a time when pulpits have been used to endorse candidates? Is there a separation between religion and theater in the Passion Play?

What does the most recent famous version, Passion of the Christ by Mel Gibson, say about our time? He has been accused of anti-semitism, and indeed his portrayal of Pilate and the Jewish crowd are similar to the one portrayed in Nazi Germany. He emphasizes blood, gore, death and suffering, not resurrection, hope and rebirth.

I'm reading a book review in last weekend's WSJ of The Stillborn God by Mark Lilla. The book explores the history of political theology, noting that Thomas Hobbes (1588-1679) was the first one to try to separate politics and religion. In the 1960's books were being written predicting the end of religion altogether, but the last quarter of the 20th century to the present has seen religion take a major role in politics in Iran's Revolution, the Christian right in the US, and the Hindu nationalist BJP party in India, to name just a few.

Salade Nicoise

Here is a beautiful blog entry with pictures and recipe for a Salade Nicoise. It really is the perfect meal, combining so many of my favorite things - green beans, tuna, tomatoes, potatoes, and olives. (Admittedly, sometimes I skip the hard-boiled egg.)

George made a confession a while ago, that he had thought for many years that Nicoise was a misspelling of Nicosia, the capital of Cyprus where he grew up. So, he never tried it because, of course, he already knew what a salad from Nicosia would taste like.

Terracotta Warriors in London

For any of you who have not been to China, but might be going to London any time soon, be sure to go to the British Museum, where the largest ever exhibition of the terracotta figures outside of China will be held until April 6.

I visited China in the summer of 2000 with my mother. It included a few days in Xian, where the army was discovered. When the figures are first unearthed, they are quite vividly colored, but the paint quickly fades with exposure to the air. They are leaving some portions of the army unexcavated, in the hopes there will be better technology/methods to preserve that color in the future.

In Tribute to the Late Great...

Pavarotti singing Ave Maria by Schubert. Enjoy!