Tutti Barese

Well, the president is coming to town today. I usually know this without having to watch the news -- the Sheraton across the street is, for some reason, a popular venue for political events. Even the Clintons used it... a lot. And every time they were here they tied up the streets and made for an infuriating walk home. Secret service people can be nasty -- and the process of keeping the prez in his protective bubble operates without regard to the disruption it creates. Any regard.

Mostly that's the libertarian in me, doing all that complaining. The inconvenience that Buch causes will probably bother me less than the inconvenience Clinton caused -- mostly because I greatly disliked Clinton, and less so because Bush doesn't come around much. I can only remember one other time he was in the neighborhood. Clinton seemed to be here every other week (maybe he was looking for the peep shows in Times Square, but no one had told him that Giuliani had shut them all down).

So now I'm looking out my window, 20 floors above 53rd Street and Seventh Avenue, watching them erect the limousine tent at the hotel's side entrance. If this event goes like the last one, a motorcade will literally circle the block, they'll drive the limo right into the tent, close the flaps, and the prez will make his entrance/exit without being seen. All under the watchful eyes of well-fed agents (Secret Service? Marshalls?) stationed on nearby rooftops.

It's mildly interesting to watch. Still, I gotta make sure I get my work wrapped up as soon as I can so I can get outta here before they tie up the streets. I'm all for state security, but getting barked at by cops as I try to cross the street tends to inspire adolescent feelings of contempt for the establishment.

If you have to get stuck in PA for any reason, stop in Loch Haven. It's near State College. Be sure to have dinner at the Chinese restaraunt on the main street through town. I had to stop there because of fog a number of years ago and the food was great. It was family-run: the mother cooked but understood no English. The son took the order.

Isn't technology amazing? They can extrude pretzels surrounding a flavored center. Remarkable.

Driving past the area of the Buckhorn exit we ran through a truly ridiculous downpour of rain. Hope we don't hit more of that.

We seem to have driven into a raging monsoon (which shouldn't be surprising, given the weather we've ben having for weeks). Or perhaps it always rains upon Buckhorn?

There are a handful of Combos now left at the bottom of the bag. Seeing them makes me queasy.

BTW, my laptop is online via a Sprint wireless Internet card -- and I'm shocked to even have a signal out here in the forgotten hills near Harrisburg. I'll ride it as long as it works.

It's almost noon and we're out on Interstate 80 on our way to Ohio. We left sometime around 9:30 this morning, and there's still most of Pennsylvania to yawn our way through.

At the Exxon just now I suddenly found myself jonesing for junk food -- got a big bag of Combos, and even opened a bag of chips we'd brought. Maybe puking will make the Pennsylvania experience... less boring, at least.

The boys have been quiet so far. Even took a brief nap as we crossed the Delaware Water Gap. But they're up now, seeking snacks and juiceboxes.

Yeck. Already ate too many Combos.

More later.

Vito used odd names for us as well. However, we never noticed a pattern: he'd call out: "Hey Clyde," "Klondike!," "Harry, get over here...," etc., and it would never be clear who he was addressing. We could usually rely on non-verbal cues to figure out that part. It never struck me as in any way extraordinary -- just another of those Mastandrea-isms that you take for granted

And I do, somewhat vaguely, recall a brief Vito-Vin colloquy on the subject (an exchange that may have predated, or in fact inspired, Vin's present-day naming conventions):

Vin: When you call them, you use everything but their real names.

Vito: When I use their names they don't answer.

Vin: Oh.

Can someone please get Jenia signed up on this thing? The poor man needs to blog in his own defense!

I finished lunch about two hours ago, and I still haven't eaten a banana!

This is mortifying. I must learn to abide by mealtime protocols.

I suspected the grill would be "underpowered" at best since I've built a number of computers and I usually end up increasing the capacity of the power supply. Two hard drives, a CD-player and a CD-burner may be enough to sap the average "stock" power supply (depending on your processor speed). Deduct processor and drive power demands, and there's not enough current remaining to cook faster than an "Easy Bake Oven."

My favorite online April Fool's Day gag was a few years ago, although the evidence has long been removed. It was an advertisement for a "compaq laptop dynamouse," which allegedly generated power to run your laptop each time you moved the mouse.

Let the buyer beware.

Actually, there is no such thing as a USB cooking grill. It was all an elaborate (and rather funny) April Fool joke at my favorite geek-gear site www.thinkgeek.com. Got some great stuff from them over the last few years -- including a few cases of Bawls. Drank a lot of that stuff last summer as we were relaunching the company website. It's no wonder I spent last autumn describing heart palpitations to a cardiologist.

I do have USB work-lights. And I have seen USB cooling fans. Can USB kitchen appliances really be far behind?

Do you know anyone who has used one of those gadgets? Powered by your USB port? That sounds like the moden version of the "Easy Bake Oven." No way it's cooking anything that fast!

Count your blessings, you won't find selection like that here in Nebraska. If I want a sausage roll with peppers and cheese baked in, it's a special order at Mama Alvino's or Giovanni Santion's New York Pizzeria. Maybe I should open a pizza joint.

My office needs new gadgetry. Maybe with one of these, I would eat lunch more often at my desk. Would be much better than the bogus friggin' panini that seem to be all the rage at the trendy midtown lunch counters. Imagine my dismay at the newly-opened Cafe Europa (some months ago), when I pointed out the nice-looking mozzarella with prosciutto on focaccia bread, and the attendant plucked it out, ran to the back, and dropped it into a trouser press! When he was done, he handed me a flat remnant of the sandwich I had selected and I walked back to my office in utter disgust.

It was bad, but not nearly as horrific as several years ago when I went to he Ray's Pizza down in the East 20s, ordered a nice-looking sausage roll (with the peppers and cheese baked in -- it looked great). I got to my seat, took a big bite, and realized it had been made with breakfast sausage! I was appalled. Who could make such an egregious culinary error? I remember calling Big Vin that very night to tell him of my lunchtime plight. He shared my outrage -- and then some:

"Whoever made that deserves to get 16 bullets in his head!"

I'm not one who normally seeks out street justice, but I had to concur with the sentence he handed down.

Finally getting some sunshine here in NYC. Well, in fits and starts, at least. Would be nice to go out and take a little walk, but I feel bound to my desk. And the news sites and blogs.

I'm fascinated by today's golpe at the New York Times. I say let the heads roll! I used to read the Times regularly (back in the days when it costs 50 cents on weekdays) and it's disgraceful what they've done to the paper over the years. The paper is perfectly unreadable. Between the loaded headlines and the selective inclusion (usually non-inclusion) of key facts, reading it gets me too annoyed.

I get the New York Post to the house, and The Wall Street Journal to the office, and that sets me up just fine with the daily dope. Add to that The Economist once a week and the Internet every minute of the day, and it's a wonder that the pretentious blowhards who write at the Times can even defend their relevance in the modern world (but challenge them, and they will -- at great length).

Anyway, I have a feeling it's all about style anyway. The Times sees itself as a keeper of a culture, and I think its readers buy into that. And it's a pop culture, one that places a premium on outward appearances. I think that's why so many Hollywood types feel so comfortable mouthing off about politics -- it's a cheap way to build street cred, not much different from making sure you're seen wearing the right clothing label or drinking the proper designer vodka. Or maybe it's more like a schoolkid who burnishes his status by taking shots at those with lesser status. In any event, NYC is full of such tolerance bullies: they're all for acceptance of diverse points of view -- except those that conflict with their worldview. And the Times is their propaganda organ. Clean house, I say! Send every reporter and editor packing, and bring in people with true viewpoint diversity. Maybe then I'll start getting the Sunday Times again -- the Post is good enough throughout the week, but it's pretty slim on weekends.

You'd think I would know better than to walk thru Rockefeller Center in the morning as I walk to the office from Grand Central. Every morning, even in foul weather, there are idiot tourists congregating outside the Today show studio, chattering in the cold with the signs, peering thru the tinted glass, hoping to touch the hem Al Roker's giant winter cloak. Shouldering thru them is hard enough. On top of it they periodically hold special event: a flower show, a concert, etc. Today it was a car display. Very annoying. Maybe I should start driving to work. Have my own car show.

(And they better cover up some of those classic convertibles -- the skies look menacing right now, and it should start raining anytime now.)

Drove out to LaGuardia Airport earlier to pick up Alane on her return trip from Denver. The website said her 7:00 flight would land at 6:30, but I should've known better (last time I landed early it was the return trip from West Palm Beach, following the infamous Roto-Virus tour of Spumoni Gardens South back in Dec. 2000 -- we touched the ground 20 minutes early, and then spent the next 30 minutes waiting for a gate... idiots).

So I idled at curbside, trying to keep the boys entertained, finding it somewhat ironic that there were so many Port Authority police personnel and police vehicles sitting around that it was pretty hard to get to the friggin curbside.

I'm all for security and all that, but I can't believe these guys are accomplishing much of anything (except waving me back onto the access roads, since I'm not supposed to sit at curbside unless I'm actualy loading a passenger). Still, they're probably more useful than the TSA screws who terrorize the gates. I used to travel a lot; no more. I'll be surprised if commercial air travel ever recovers -- and it'll be the fault of gutless politicians who hear people say "don't just stand there, do something" and then make it a competitive (and repetitive) sport.

The pricks.

Driving back from Brooklyn on the FDR Drive earlier tonight I passed alongside the U.N. and it made me think of the New York Times. Wasn't sure why I was making the connection, then I remembered what I'd heard about the newspaper's response to their current, er, credibility crisis. They named a committee!

Now look, I don't work there, and I don't know the people who run the place, but committees are usually the handiwork of cowardly leadership. And it's no way to solve a problem. Especially a big problem. Earth to senior management and executive editors: you're already the committee charged with quality control (and I can say that without even knowing the internal strucutre of the organization -- bcause if it's not true then they either have the wrong people in those positions, or their editors have not received a sensible mandate).

"Hmm, we publish a newspaper, and people have good reasons to disbelieve everything we print... Let's form a committee to figure out what to do!"

And I suppose that's dynamic that I picture first whenever I think of the U.N. Except there it takes place in slow motion. And subscribers aren't even free to cancel their accounts.

Oh well, I stopped believing the NYT years ago. But it's interesting to see how many people still trust the U.N. with the world's toughest problems.

Mmm. Good burgers. But Detroit is threatening to tie the Yankees. So Vito might put his burgers back on the table.

Maybe I should open some wine.

Okay, it's all figured out: the Mastandrea Macaroni Dish will continue as is. Anyone whose name is anything other than Mastandrea will post here. You don't have to be Barese to have a skull with a menacing brow and jawline!

Right now, Helen and Vito are here, helping me tend to the boys. In a few minutes, I will put burgers on the grill -- maybe a few bell peppers alongside. It's all fresh -- I just got back from Stew Leonard's.

In order to reduce the likelihood of stroke (and to keep the boys from learning some rather salty new words), I'm gonna have to get my dad away from the Yankee game radio-cast (thanks to Gerge S., all Yankee games are premium). Anyway, time to make burgers.