Prime Suspect 5
Another Helen Mirren-as-hard-boiled-detective-fighting-in-a-man's-world tale. These Prime Suspect episodes are always fun to watch!
The Checklist Manifesto
I finally managed to finish a book! While Penelope was sleeping, of course, and I was on vacation. And on my Kindle. This book is well worth reading: it is all about how professions need to be systematized, because only well-run systems can cope with the complexity of modern life (be it engineering, flying airplanes, or practicing medicine). It reminded me what I dislike most about libertarianism: which is that it focuses much more on the individual than on the systems/groups of individuals that exhibit emergent behavior due to the interactions of the individuals. But that's a topic for another post. This book focuses on why the medical "system" fails in the particular subfield of surgery, which is that modern surgery is too complex to avoid errors, without systematizing how surgery is run (which Dr. Gawande argues implicitly is best done by a team, and not by one doctor). His recent New Yorker article on reducing health-care costs reinforces that latter point (and you should read that article if you haven't already).
Wolfsonian
This fascinating little museum had an interesting exhibition on the concept of "speed" in the 20th century titled Speed Limits. Pretty interesting, including the bit about kitchen design and efficiency.
Snow in Syosset
Here's a photo (taken from my iphone) of the big pile of snow in the Syosset LIRR parking lot. It's as high as some of the buildings in the area!
LIRR absurdity
Talk about lousy customer service. Tickets are only good within 14 days of purchase. Fine, you say, if I changed my plans I'll just return the tickets. Well, there is a $10 return fee for tickets: so if you buy a round-trip ticket for $10, you effectively can't return it! No wonder everyone complains about the MTA.
Snow!
Record snow this January, and it's not yet over! I'll try and post a picture if I can get a good one. 90 minutes of shoveling this morning to get our 2 cars cleared.
Salt
Wow. What a bad movie. Before watching it, I thought it wouldn't be a brilliant work of art, but at least I had hoped it would be entertaining. But the movie was disjointed and broken into about 3 different parts, with little interesting action. And it became obvious who the real villain was just by the pacing of the movie.
Liev Schreiber was so much better on Broadway when I saw him there...
Jets
Oh well, they had a nice run this year. I didn't think they would make it to the Super Bowl: they have played too inconsistently to get by the better teams on a regular basis, and they just ran out of luck (by making too many mistakes) against the Steelers. They did an admirable job of coming back in the 2nd half to make the game interesting, though!
Blogger mobile templates
Hey, I enabled mobile templates on my blog (and Penelope's blog). The blog looks great on my iPhone now!
Lower Costs and Better Care for Neediest Patients : The New Yorker
Lower Costs and Better Care for Neediest Patients : The New Yorker
Atul Gawande's writing is always thought-provoking. I read this article on my commute this morning, and thought it was worth a blog post. Revolutionary thinking about redefining a doctor's job!
Cincinnati Contemporary Arts Center
This nice little museum was worth a visit: it had some interesting international art that we liked. Their web site is kind of sparse, though, so I don't have any good pointers.
Cincinnati Art Museum
We attended a beautiful wedding in this cute little art museum. We did not get to see much of the museum, but the building itself was gorgeous.
Cincinnati starchitecture
This building is by Daniel Libeskind (the architect in charge of the Freedom Tower). It is in Cincinnati, and looks kind of empty at night.A Single Man
We watched this beautiful film on DVD (from Netflix, of course; all other sources of DVDs seem to have gone out of business). Colin Firth was wonderful, even though I always think of him as Mr. Darcy. I found the film gorgeously filmed, written, and acted, and yet somehow less compelling than I would have liked. Maybe this film was just too focused on the main character's interior lives for my taste. In any case, I did enjoy watching it.
The Lost Room
This 6-episode series (sadly, no more were made, although a comic is apparently in the works) is a fun bit of television that appeared on the Sci-Fi Channel (the former name of Syfy). Based on the premise of a mysterious set of objects that have "super" powers ranging from the mundane to the incredible, this is a well-done series with a bunch of character actors that I've seen before in various other series/movies: Chris Bauer (The Wire), Julianna Margulies (The Good Wife), Dennis Christopher (Deadwood), April Grace (Magnolia), Margaret Cho (yes, the comedian) to name the obvious ones. I enjoyed it for the unpredictability and the eerie sense of drama.
Eat Pray Love
An ultimately boring movie about finding oneself (and love) by traveling to exotic places and hanging out with beautiful people. The movie had some nice moments, but overall it was painfully predictable. I hope the book that the movie was based on is not as dully self-congratulatory as the movie.
La Cage aux Folles
This revival with Kelsey Grammar is entertaining, but doesn't blow you away. (Although I think I'm getting maudlin' in my old/middle age: some of the songs did move me.) Kelsey Grammar does a passable job, although he is so well-known as Frazier Crane that it felt like Frazier was playing the part. The understudy for the Albin role, Chris Hoch, was great, modulo some microphone trouble during his solo at the end of Act One. Overall, it's good entertainment, but there is probably better stuff on Broadway if you're a connoisseur.
Tao
We had lunch at this fancy Asian-fusion restaurant. Peking-duck spring rolls, yum! Truly excellent food: expensive, but not overly so (although I would not go very frequently: I'm still pretty cheap when it comes to food). Worth an occasional splurge, though. And the restaurant itself is spectacular: we were seated on the second floor with a view overlooking the giant Buddha statue.
Love and Other Disasters
A cute but predictable movie. Good enough to watch on streaming Netflix while winding down after a long day of childcare...but I wouldn't have wanted to pay to watch this movie in the theater. Some cheesy, if amusing, movie-within-a-movie scenes.
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