In my futile search for our landlord’s cat a few days ago, up the street and around the corner, I ran into a person who I have run into numerous times before. This time I learned that his name is George and he lives on the next block over. He’s lived in the neighborhood for twenty-some years and he had his large dog with him. In the past he helped me dig my car out of the snow with his gas-powered snowblower.
He helped me try to find the cat in the dark (as it was 10:30 pm) and he thought that his dog would be of assistance. Neither he nor his dog were of assistance.
George is a floorer. He refinishes, retouches, and lays down floor in old houses in Brooklyn. He said his back is gone, his knees are shot, and he is now being priced out of the market in Brooklyn because he charges $3.00 per square foot while others, who do unprofessional work, charge $1.75 per square foot. George sands the floors down just enough so that he can put three or four layers of oil-based varnish on the floors; he takes superb care to make sure that dust does not settle during the varnishing and ensures that the finished floors are perfect in every way.
I said that you would think that with all of the wealthy newbies coming into the neighborhood, they would want a quality restoration job done on their fine wood floors. He said that they were invariably cheap and that they just wanted it done fast and prettily without regard for the historical or functional nature of the flooring. He and his partner may move to Lancaster County so that he can afford to live and ply his trade.

APB Aunt Pearl Boardman
My grandmother passed away early Friday morning, at the birth-and-death time of 4:33 a.m. I miss her dreadfully.
Aunt Pearl, so-called by me and my cousins because she is my step-grandmother, was a passionate, active, beautiful, and well-opinionated woman who would walk into a room and you immediately knew she was there. I remember coming to her house or to the “Club” so many times for Passover (about 35 times in my life) and, as I walked through the doors, there she was, arms outstretched, dark glasses on, long sleeves draping down, saying, “Hello, Bubbelah.”
Aunt Pearl was not an easy person and she would often say things that would hurt you, even if that was the last thing she wanted. But mostly she had an uncanny ability to know exactly at what station in life you were and she could, in just a few seconds, gather what was bugging you and immediately jump to your aid. In college, she urged me to not worry so much. In grad school, she sent me a generous check for money to buy pans and furniture. Most recently, she advised me about business, parenting, real estate, life.
A heavy smoker, she succumbed to some form of small-cell cancer, which devoured her body in a little less than three weeks. She was diagnosed with lung cancer in September 2003 and the chemo given six months ago gave her the life she needed to die with dignity, ordering her life so that others may live more orderly.
I’m struggling very deeply with her absence. I know I should have called her more over the past eight months, when she was sick yet living. I miss her advice, both requested and unrequested. She was one of those people that seemed so invulnerable, who projected an air of certainty and elegance, who never seemed to be in pain, that, even until three weeks ago, I thought she would continue for a long, long time.
I wonder if she was ready to die. Friends and family at today’s funeral said she had prepared herself these past few months — probably in ways that few of us could ever enjoy.
But here’s the harder part for me. As one eulogist more eloquently noted today, her life was a dedication to the family’s continuity, to compassion for others, and to leaving the world a “better place than it was when one inherited it.” As the matriarch of the family (her husband and my paternal grandmother died in 2000), she always put others before herself. But now there is no one ahead of herself. There is, in fact, no one ahead enough to take ownership of the family, to lead its gatherings, to create its ritualized Passovers, to organize its occasional occasions.
She stood alone because she was the head of the family. She now resides next to my grandfather, who she disinterred only a few weeks ago in preparation for her passing. They are head-to-head, feet apart. Their two souls, from which our small family gained so much love, sustenance, assurance and stability, are together. And I mourn.

The timing of the Cassini spacecraft showing beautifully detailed black and white images of Saturn’s rings couldn’t be better. These pictures show our solar system unfolding in improbably delightful ways.
But here’s the thing about the timing: Just when the United States seems to be at the point of self-parody, when much of the world is questioning the veracity of every U.S. foreign policy statement, and when the lies and fabulous assertions fall hollow (e.g. solving AIDS in Africa, sending humans to Mars, ending the Middle East crisis) — American ingenuity, resources, and technology bring us these images of our brother planet Saturn. It’s a relief to me, to know that Saturn’s rings are as magical as they told us they were in grade school. Happy Fourth.

I always believed that I am an essentially soulful creature, a person that lives to observe and act within a world of wonder. But lately I’ve been thinking about the untold effects of technology on the soul, the way that the divine in all of us is formally extracted, divied up, sliced apart and thrown to the dogs.
I take for an example the cell phone, which I use constantly for both personal and business use. “Use” is the proper word because I feel both “useless” without it and I increasingly feel “used” by it. The cell phone, in its portability, its persistence and its practicality intersects my every move. When I carry it I feel an urge to be on it. When I’m not carrying it, I feel an equally awful urge to have it.
Moreover, I know this is a common complaint and I don’t hold a patent on the idea of spiritual loss through technological gain. But what I’ve been feeling lately is that email, the Web, cell phones, and telephones generally are ways to cut up our interior lives into smaller, undigestible chunks — components that can never been integrated again that will die within us and refuse to be made whole. They fracture our experiences of the world and its unfolding.
I used to create attachment with a place (or build presence of mind) through staring at a spot on a floor or an object or area. For me, staring creates certainty. It focuses the mind. It pushes the objective present into the subjective future. And it seems to calm frayed nerves. It seems harder to do this lately what with the demands of life and work, the actual ringing of phones and email arrivals. But further, staring (or rather, just being) is hard because of the immense anticipation of interruption. The division of the divine within all of us is real and I need to find out more before the operation is over. Any suggestions are greatly welcomed.

Today I dismantled, packed away, and put away the crib. It was time for it to go. My parents had purchased it for us and we got great use out of it, except for the times when our child would refuse to sleep in it which was about every night.
I have such mixed feelings about it. The crib was beautiful — all stained cherry with large, slatted rails and wheels jutting out from below. The top side panels were flat and cups of milk or juice could be placed there during the night. If they were ever needed, and they were, those flat sides could be counted on in the dark, amidst the crying and the kicking.
But now the crib is gone and in its place is an off-white toddler bed, which looks like it stepped out of the country and into our city apartment. It has little slatted sides and the old, barely used crib mattress fits snugly into the new bed. The new bed is close to the ground, sweet and low.

A new book called Osama’s Revenge: The Next 9/11 by Paul L. Williams will be sitting on bookshelves very soon. In it, Mr. Williams essentially tells us we are doomed to nuclear holocaust by Mr. Bin Laden and that it is only a matter of time that he will unleash the weapons he holds within the U.S. While I’m shaking in my boots as I write this, I am shrewd enough to know that an author seeking to make a good amount of money on a book could do worse than writing about the coming doomsday. Just for good measure, here are more books, most of them very recent, on the lovely subject.
(I realize that I’m one of the few people around that actually worry publicly about these issues and, for the life of me, I know not why.)

I was (very probably) wrong.
Many months ago, I argued in this monologue that war in Iraq, despite its likely ill effects, was relatively worthwhile. I bought the bottom line of the journalists while also questioning the veracity of the administration. It was a thinking-man’s line of poor thought: if the papers and the government say it’s true, it must be pretty true. I was wrong and I’m willing to admit that war in Iraq was built on trumped-up charges of state sponsored terrorism, fear-mongering, and logic based on belief instead of evidence.
Leon Wieseltier writes in this week’s The New Republic a similarly kind of weak-kneed mea culpa. Much of the piece is typically astringent and non-linear journalism but one paragraph, with regard to the murder of children, spoke to me clearly, thoughtfully, and elegantly and I wish it were mine:
Of course one’s own dead mean more than the other’s dead, but the other’s dead cannot mean nothing. The primacy of the obligation to one’s own, the natural solidarity of the same, the love that precedes principle: These fundamental attainments of human association should not be taken to suggest that moral consciousness is essentially tribal. Indeed, the knowledge of our own mystic bonds is what enables us to imagine the mystic bonds of others. Since we are particular in our affections and our affiliations, we can understand particularity of affection and affiliation in general. A general understanding of particularity: That is a fine definition of universalism, and there are no escapes from universalism, except willed ones.

I can’t help but compare the aesthetics and insanity of the superbly hyped Subservient Chicken with many of the photos taken at Abu Ghraib. Milliions of people have recently “discovered” the Burger King-sponsored site, which allows visitors to control, punish, or humiliate a person in a chicken suit. By typing in commands within the site, the chicken-man abides, slowly, deliberately, and reluctantly. The photos taken at the infamous Abu Ghraib seem to show the same basic disregard for life, the same lack of shame, and the same power-wielding effect on how others are seen and can be seen.
(Susan Sontag recently wrote about the photos in the Times’ Magazine but her argument is more political than it is philosophical; it is also less interesting than it could be because of this. While she does talk about the photographs of torture and sex in the context of contemporary pornography, she somehow loses track of the “artistry” of these photographs and what the aesthetic of humiliation means to all of us.)

I’ve noticed a trendous amount of political and other subterfuge lately, much thanks to the ongoing secrecy and strangeness of the White House and those surrounding it lately. It reminds me a bit of the time when books like Pranks! were hits, back in the early 90s.
This was interesting: The Yes Men kind of make a mockery of things at a Heritage Foundation conference by nominating Ed Meese for President.
I saw today a woman today on the subway wearing a headscarf with a t-shirt underneath that obviously read “I am a Muslim.”
Leonard Lopate had an American serviceman on his show today who openly but gently criticized the war in Iraq, which is unheard of, literally, during wartime.
A colleague also put together this funny little site on the Bush record.
I can’t say I am in full agreement with any these actions but I can say I’m impressed that the courageous few are standing and speaking and being heard.

Companies often point to the true efficiencies gained due to their implementation of technologies, their use of new products, or their laying off of workers. There’s no question that all of these can produce more value at lower cost.
But I’ve always wondered about the (even more) true efficiencies of social interaction, at least in our modern capitalist economy. Efficiencies, taken without ethical considerations, are interesting because they work outside of the norms of behavior but are somehow part of them. Here are some examples, and they are Benthamist in bent and general in general:
1. Having people over to share a meal. It is highly likely that, because one is sharing food with others, that one will not poison the others through the serving of breakfast, lunch, dinner or snack. The reason is that it is difficult to assign and always be sure of which plate of food contains the ill-gotten goods.
2. Driving one’s car. It’s likely that an accident on the road is just that. People do not, generally, swerve purposely into someone else’s car because it would prevent them from being effective — from getting to the next place.
3. Setting fires. While it’s nice to look at fire often, it does not serve one’s immediate needs to set a fire in one’s neigborhood as there’s a good chance your possessions will be lost in the mix.