Foodies' Getaway

Katherine was taken by thoughts of gardens and gardening on our recent trip to Justin and Aubra's wedding in Berkeley. I was more taken by the end results of that gardening: the restaurants.

You have to understand that any trip we take is mainly an excuse to go out to great restaurants. Going to New York City is about seeing Nate and Ashley, but it is also about eating at Babbo, or following Nate for a food tour of the lower east side. It was wonderful spending time with Ken and Franny in Kauai, but the tasting menu at the St. Regis and tapas at Bar Acuda added a lot to the experience. So yes, we were in northern California to celebrate a wedding and rejoice in the beautiful ceremony, but before we left we made sure to score dinner reservations at some memorable places.

Before we leave for a trip we like to go out to some nifty place in Denver in order to make the evening before the plane ride an easy one. This time we had an early dinner at Z Cuisine in the Highlands area. Z Cuisine is a small french bistro occupying a tiny space on 30th, so you have to get there early since they don't take reservations. Katherine specifically wanted to go there because we had lunch reservations at Bouchon, Thomas Keller's version of a bistro in Napa, and she wanted to compare their respective onion soups. Yes, that is the kind of thing we think about when traveling.

(I have to insert here that I despise reading food critics for the most part because they labor to come up with new verb choices in their effort to relate every nuance of every dish. Things are always getting slathered, drizzled, adorned, ornamented, topped-off, etc. I don't care about stuff like that. I just want to know what the place feels like.)

I am happy to report that Z Cuisine feels great. The evening's offerings are always written in someone's gloriously ornate handwriting on a large chalkboard. The tables are small, but well spaced. There is an inviting bar with five or six stools and there is a wine bar next door while you wait for your table. Like at all good restaurants (Z Cuisine is good, not great) the waitstaff exhibits great pride in the food and drink they bring and delight in filling you in on the particulars of the evening's fare. There are suitably frenchlike posters and knick knacks on the wall and the uni-sex restroom, even though it opens out brazenly into the middle of the room, is tastefully appointed, rising above the obsolete plumbing that defines places like this. By the way, Katherine's onion soup was quite good with the bowl crusted over with the melted cheese that ran over the top, just right for nibbling. My lamb was huge and just okay and the wine by the glass menu was well-priced and adequate. This was a nice way to start our trip.

After arriving in San Francisco and somehow getting over the Golden Gate Bridge, we stopped off in Sausalito on our way to visit Ken's family in Santa Rosa. We stopped off at a sea food restaurant right on the harbor aptly named Fish.

(Don't you love the new trend of naming restaurants exactly what they are. There is Toast in downtown Littleton serving breakfast. The Kitchen in Boulder serving, you guessed it, food out of a kitchen. Tyler Florence has a place in Manhattan called The Cafeteria. There is probably a cafe some place called Meat and Vegetables, another one tersely called Food, although there might be a copyright on that one. If I ever opened a restaurant I would like to specialize in organ meats just so I could call it Offal. I think it would be a sensation.)

Anyway, Fish was the perfect place to recuperate from the drive through the maze of San Francisco. You order your food at a counter that doubles as a fish market. The "catch of the day" is clearly indicated and the choices are huge and tempting. I had three huge fish tacos and Katherine had a hearty clam chowder. Our only regret was that we didn't order the french fries as we saw one heaping serving after another go by to the crowd of diners on the deck overlooking the impressive array of yachts and fishing vessels.

We had a great visit in Santa Rosa which Katherine has already elaborated on in the previous post. The tour at Kenwood will become a permanent memory. I'm still trying to get my head around the volume of wine produced by less than an acre of pinot noir: 56,000 bottles! Multiply that by the tens of thousands of acres in cultivation and one wonders how people could consume that much wine. We certainly try to do our part.

The highlight of our foodie tour of northern California was Saturday night at Chez Panisse. Chez Panisse is a kind of culinary shrine for people who care about such things. Started by Alice Waters after she toured France as a young woman, it is the first restaurant that emphasized locally grown, sustainable product, and thus it started what has become known as California Cuisine. When I was a kid, I remember my uncle Carl taking us out to dinner at Gartner Haus in Estes Park, the fanciest restaurant in town. There we would have prime rib, baked potatoes, and the adults would splurge and order a bottle of Lancers. Oh yes, and we all had the shrimp cocktail to begin the meal, except Carl: he had the marinated herring. That was fine dining in the early sixties.

Alice Waters and her funky little restaurant changed all that. Today most good and great restaurants proudly tell you where each item of food originated. They give you the names of the farms and tell you on what the cows grazed. There are fast food joints that tell you where the day's french fries originated. All of that, like it or not, started with Chez Panisse.

As opposed to The French Laundry, another culinary shrine in St. Helena, Chez Panisse serves five straight forward courses in a fixed price menu that changes every day, depending on what product looks best on any given day. The French Laundry is all about presentation; Chez Panisse lets the food talk for itself. We started with a glass of champagne from Rheims, the only thing on our menu that was not locally sourced, moved to crostinis with halibut, incredible heirloom tomatoes, and chicken liver. Next came a raviolini (I call them tortellini) in brodo (little raviolis in brown chicken stock). Then came a spit roasted pork loin on locally farmed beans that might be the greatest thing I have ever tasted. Finally a dessert that was good but still just a dessert. I'm not much into dessert. We had two bottles of the same champagne and Alice Waters personally comped our first bottle. It pays to hang out with a White House staffer who has made friends with the first lady's personal chef.

If you ever find yourself in the bay area, try to score a reservation at Chez Panisse.

The next morning, before the wedding ceremony, we drove over to Fisherman's Wharf with Franny and Ken and browsed around the markets at the Ferry Building. See the photo above. Mushrooms I've never seen, nor heard of. Great oysters. A cheese shop that we are going to start shopping at on line. Ditto a store that serves any kind of pork preparation you can think of and some you can't. If the Ferry Building were in Denver I would want to sell my house and move to some place within walking distance.

After the wedding Franny and Ken went back to the east coast and Katherine and I headed up to St. Helena in Napa. On the way we stopped at Bouchon where we had one o'clock reservations for lunch. This is one of the great restaurants of the world, at least in my experience. It is another french bistro kind of place with the freshest oysters I've ever had--even better than the Oyster Bar in Grand Central Station. I ordered steak frites which might be the best meal I had, excluding Chez Panisse, on the trip. Katherine had the onion soup. It was on a completely different plane than the onion soup a few nights earlier at Z Cuisine.

Then it was on to Meadowood where we intended to park the car and spend the next two days and three nights playing tennis, dabbling at croquet, and eating every meal on site. Meadowood has the highest Michelin rating of any restaurant in Napa Valley and for good reason. The room is incredibly sophisticated, the wine list is alarmingly huge, and the service is impeccable. Not only do they bring you a new napkin every time you leave the table, but on the way back the hostess greets you with a "Welcome back" and ushers you back to your table. Of course, the food is beautifully presented and ingenious. On our last night there the general manager of the place gave us a beautifully wrapped bottle of Roederer champagne (crisp, clean, and characterized by the tiny bubbles that shout "THIS IS A GREAT BOTTLE OF WINE").

The next day we somehow crossed the bay bridge during rush hour and made it to the airport with time to spare. The ride home was mercifully short. That night, after unpacking, we went to Tres Potrillos and had margaritas, Negra Modelo, and wonderfully greasy enchiladas. That menu always gets our digestive systems back on track.

Garden Thoughts, California, Justin's Wedding, and Hamlet

Katherine today.

I've had gardens on my mind for a while. I like them.

We were in California for a week to see Justin Garland get married. It was wonderful and gardens certainly were pivotal in the event. We were touring gardens with Franny and Ken's family around Santa Rosa before we made it to the wedding with all of its garden connections. After the wedding we headed up to a resort in St. Helena in the heart of more gardens. I can't imagine someone having lived our week in California without coming home and yearning to become a bigger and better gardener.

We started our week in garden-land in Santa Rosa at a BBQ hosted by Ken's eccentric cousin Steve. He has a big room off his kitchen that is totally papered in photographs of his favorite memories and postcards that connect to artwork he is passionate about--artists like Frida. I noticed her stuff a lot because I'm currently intrigued by her work. I was sad there was never the right moment in the crowd of folks to ask Steve about the Frida postcards placed throughout the photographs.

This same room is bordered in all directions by multi-colored Christmas lights and 1950's furniture and Mexican pottery and dishes. This is an eclectic place. It moves all over the place. So does Steve.

You leave this room and enter a garden designed and tended by the lady Steve shares his life with--LaVonne. It is a glorious garden. Herbs and lilies mingle together and there was a rosemary bush I envied tremendously because the scent was so powerful and good. There were vegetables and medicinal plants and all varieties living in some sort of perfectly ordered harmony that might make sense only to its creator.

The room was so Steve and the garden so LaVonne. I was glad we were included in the family reunion orchestrated because Franny and Ken were in town.

The next day we went to a redwood forest named for a General. My past experience tells me there are lots of individual redwood trees named for generals. This time the whole grove was named for General Armstrong. It's a California state park. It's lovely.

We walked amongst the trees and ultimately all of us--Ken's mom and brother, Franny and Ken, Jim and I--were in a quiet amphitheater surrounded by the redwoods and it was ever so slowly raining golden leaves down. Nobody said anything. A really nice garden moment.

We had a quick lunch at a great deli at Korbel and did a tasting of several champagnes. There were gardens, but LaVonne had called and we needed to meet her at Kenwood to see a full "crush" of some grapes just being delivered.

LaVonne works for the Korbel group of vineyards and got us in at Kenwood to see the grapes arrive in giant steel trucks and then watch them dump them into a crusher vat where a nasty looking coil churned the grapes around and turned them into mush and juice. We tasted the grapes--so sweet and the juice from the first pressing was sweet too. The best grape juice I've ever tasted. We wandered amongst tanks and watched a guy happily stirring a tub of yeasty water with his bare hands. We learned how the bees that arrive with the grapes get filtered out of the wines (a great relief at the time). We learned that folks who had been working with the harvest were really happy people. I really do think gardens help people be happy.

The next evening we ate dinner with Franny and Ken at Chez Panisse in Berkeley where the whole locally grown movement began. Alice Waters began a whole movement with this one beautifully simple restaurant in a simple house. We had a wonderful mean based on what was fresh in Ms. Water's garden. We got to tour the kitchen. Ahhhhhh.

Sunday was Justin's wedding. It was the first Jewish ceremony we ever witnessed and it was beautiful. The blessings made my heart sing. The ceremony took place in a redwood grove that is part of Berkeley's botanic gardens--very holy and quiet and just enough breeze to have leaves fall on the knitted covering for the wedding space that Cindy had created. The design of the covering was based on garden images as well. There are correct and sacred words for the covering C. made and for the space the ceremony took place and I've forgotten those words already. It was a perfect place in spirit and in aesthetics. I never saw C. that I didn't cry for the happiness of it all.

The reception was at a very "green" place with very hard floors, but the food came straight from gardens and the folks who attended certainly all believed in fruits and vegetables and food. It was a good time.

On Monday we headed up to the Napa Valley to "camp" alone at Meadowood. We found it years ago when we first looked into that book about all the places you are supposed to go before you die. We were doing pretty well (we knocked off four anyway) when we discovered we liked some places so much we needed to go back. Meadowood is one of those places. Anyway, Meadowood is a definite splurge and we stayed two days.

We played tennis surrounded by vines that grow on the fences while we listened to woodland creatures moving around in crisp, fallen leaves. We played croquet in the officially required white and/or khaki clothing while we bemoaned the fact that our croquet game was off because some leaves and pine needles had fallen on our otherwise perfectly groomed croquet playing field. We ate at The Restaurant and The Grill where all the fruits and vegetables are grown on farms on the property. We sat on our porch and watched ferns under old oak trees and wondered how the management got the pretty little stag with his pretty little antlers to walk by us on our first evening there. Gardens everywhere.

I'm home now. My garden is dead and yesterday I made dinner out of its last production--harvested just before we left. I'll miss my garden.

Hamlet compares Denmark to an unweeded garden and notes that rank and gross things possess it. That's the charm. You have to look at your garden all the time and you have to tend it and get rid of weeds and rank and gross things like slugs and aphids, and you have to love your garden and notice if it's feeling perky or blue and you have to worry about bugs and critters that want to eat what you've grown and you have to look with joy at the flowers and blooms and fruits and vegetables you've managed to get to your table for viewing or eating. Hamlet doesn't tend his garden and his Denmark garden just plain sucks. If I pay attention to my garden, it thrives. I have no clue what I'm doing, but I know if I just pay attention I manage to grow stuff and it is a happy thing. Hamlet just needed to be a better gardener.

STAR ISLAND - Carl Hiaasen

Hiaasen's newest novel is right up there with Skinny Dip and Sick Puppy, my favorites. It is the story of Cherry Pye, an amalgam of Lindsay Lohan, Brittney Spears, and Paris Hilton, and the attempts to hold her minimal talents together as she succombs to every drug induced temptation that gets in her path. Cherry is not the main character, however. That distinction goes to Annie DeLusia, an aspiring actress who earns a goodly income standing in for our pop diva whenever Cherry is too incapacitated to perform for the paparazzi. One Paparazzo, Bang Abbot, kidnaps Ann in hopes of holding her ransom for a swap with the real thing. He wants an exclusive photo shoot that he feels will make him rich and somehow enhance Cherry's tenuous hold on a career.

Like all Hiaasen novels, there is a steady stream of bizarre characters and an underlying environmentalist theme which result in all sorts of bizarre situations and sick, albeit hilarious, acts of retribution. We have an ex-governor hiding out for years in Florida's swamps, the botoxed public relations twins, the psycho body guard who, after losing his left hand to a baracuda, has replaced it with a weed whacker (People tend to take him and his lawn implement seriously), Cherry's enabling parents, and a succession of shady characters who prey on the rich and famous.

At the end everyone gets just what they deserve and the reader is left waiting for Hiaasen's next hilarious dissection of Florida politics,

REPLY TO OBAMA'S LATEST CALL FOR SCHOOL REFORM

I just finished a piece posted on THE DAILY BEAST talking about Obama's recent call for longer school days and the firing of all bad teachers, the implication being that this would go a long way toward making schools better.

It reminds me of the Woody Allen joke at the beginning of Annie Hall. Two ladies at a Catskill resort are talking.

"The food here is just awful," the first one says.

"Yes, and the portions are so small."

I guess that is the newest received wisdom to cure all that is ailing public education. The teachers are bad and need to be fired, so let us expose our children to them for even longer periods of time.

I've written about this before, but how many bad teachers are we talking about? 80%? 60%? Less than 50? One or two? How many "good" teachers taking the place of "bad" teachers will we need to compensate for rotten and disinterested parents, aging schools with antiquated connectedness, unfunded mandates, and tests that only serve to impede instruction in inner cities while doing nothing for affluent suburbs, who don't need the help anyway?

I suspect that the percentage of bad teachers, whatever that means, in education is about the same as the percentage of bad doctors, lawyers, parents, plumbers, gas station attendants, 7-11 clerks, businessmen, and POLITICIANS. I say fire them all and let illegal immigrants do the job. Their image couldn't be much worse.

I obviously think Obama is way off the mark on this one, but I'm still not ANGRY. I don't think he is a fascist, or a Colonialist from Kenya. If I had the money and the time I would still love to attend John Stewart's Reasonable Man March, or whatever it is called. I just wish that teachers would stop serving as the scapegoat for the failings of the other institutions of society, like the Family, to name just one.

FREEDOM - Jonathan Franzen

These are tough days to be a liberal. We just take ourselves too seriously and so when the inevitable waves of criticism come we get confused, fight back for awhile, and then go off into a corner and pout. How can all those nasty republicans and nutwing tea partiers not understand what we all know to be true? Don't these people read papers? Don't they value logic and facts?

When we come into power, we lose our sense of humor. When John Stewart skewered George W. Bush back in the good old days of a republican administration, we got the joke and laughed uproariously. But when he skewers Obama, we feel angry and betrayed. When The New Yorker published its infamous cover before the last election of the Obamas dressed like Muslims fist bumping each other, we were outraged. We got the joke, sort of, but knew that all those stupid conservatives out there weren't smart enough to see satire when it hit them in the face. No wonder our detractors say we are elitist. They say it because we are.

The current political climate is a good one for reading Jonathan Franzen's new book. It focuses in on all those themes that are keystones for liberals and anathema for conservatives: Environmentalism, Corporate Greed, Conservative Insensitivity, and of course, Freedom versus Liberty. And just like in real life, none of those themes and conflicts get resolved. Every one ends up selling out.

Briefly, it is the rambling story of Patty and Walter Berglund, their life long rock and roller college chum and iconoclast, Richard Katz, and their son Joey. There are other characters, much too numerous to mention here, who have the same significance as single episode crew members on the USS Enterprise. They help move the plot and give the main characters someone to play against, but that is all.

Patty is the main character here, mostly because her therapeutic autobiography supplies the reader with all the essential history to understand the tensions that energize the plot. A misunderstood daughter of liberal wealth. A teenaged rape victim. A basketball star at the U. of Minnesota. A desperate housewife and all that implies. And a cloying mother of a rebellious son. Patty is all those things.

Walter is the hero. A passionate environmentalist. A sell out to the 3M corporation. A disillusioned father. A betrayed husband. A monumental rationalizer. A victim of circumstances he helps create. That is Walter.

Richard is the brooding third side of this improbable love triangle. A talented guitarist. A slave to his selfishness. A person with impulse control issues. A collosal womanizer. An object of love for both Walter and Patty. Richard is the soul of this novel.

The intricacy of the plot is worthy of Joyce Carol Oates. It meanders from the suburbs of the twin cities, back to college days and before, to Washington D.C., to the mountain destroying coal mines of West Virginia, to the gulf war, to South America, and back to Minnesota. The characters fall in and out of LIKE with one another and at the end everything, except the state of the country and the world, seems to be working out.

It is a very topical novel. Most of the action takes place during Bush II and eventually ends up with the Obama administration. Bush II doesn't come off very well; the jury in the book, as well as in real life, is still out on Obama.

My reaction to the whole thing has been keeping me up nights ever since I finished it about a week ago. It was impossible to put down and I finished the 562 pages in two glorious days. It was also the first book I've read since Underworld that I felt compelled to underline.

The main reason the book has been keeping me up nights is because I feel a little guilty about liking it so much. It really isn't a work of art in the sense that DeLillo's tour de force is. It is more like journalism and I always feel like I've cheated myself somehow when I read something that isn't ART. I loved Stieg Larson's trilogy, but I'm a little ashamed to let people see me reading it. I also love John Irving and Pat Conroy, but after reading something by those guys I feel the same sheepishness I feel after eating a Quarter Pounder with Cheese.

Then I get angry at my reaction and the similarly snobbish reactions of elitist reviewers for The Atlantic or The New Yorker. I mean what exactly is wrong with a compelling story? Why does a book have to be hard to read in order to be great? Why is journalism (my snobbish put down word for non-art) any less worthy than art?

I think I have an answer, at least for me. I saw Frida the other night, a wonderful movie about the love of Diego Rivera and Frida with Trotsky thrown in for good measure. I thought it was obvious (not to mention one of the points of the movie) that Frida's tortured canvases were art, while Rivera's magnificent murals were merely journalism. Hamlet said one should hold a mirror up to nature, but an artist, I think, does more than that. Frida took reality and deconstructed it, threw it up in the metaphorical air, rearranged it, and made us look at it in completely new ways.

Underworld is a greater artistic achievement than Freedom because it does the same thing. It reinvents the way stories are told by playing with chronology, point-of-view, and even questioning reality itself. Freedom never approaches that and therefore only reaffirms what we already know to be true. There are no new insights. But the reaffirmations are wonderful and I loved every one of them.

I have two paintings (posters actually) by Ray Knaub hanging in my home. One is a commision he did for the Georgetown railroad showing the train going over a bridge suspended over a gorge. It is a wonderful piece constructed on an epic scale. The other is a still life of three pots, the background all awash in shades of amber. It plays with realism a little and ends up being a painting not about three pots, but about all pots and all southwestern art. I love it.

I'll stop rambling now. Freedom is a wonderful book. The three main characters are unforgettable. The insights about conservatism, capitalism, liberalism, and the nature of the artist are compelling and true. Read this wonderful book.

Let me end with the essential conundrum of the novel:

What was over was over. His delight in the world had died, and there was no point in anything. To communicate with his wife, as Jessica was urging, would have meant letting go of his last moments with Lalitha, and he had a right not to do this. He had a right, in such an unjust universe, to be unfair to his wife, and he had a right to let the little Hoffbauers call in vain for their Bobby, because there was no point in anything.

In The Magus, Conchis tries to explain to Nicholas that Freedom was the RIGHT to do all and the prohibition not to do all. Freedom examines the same paradox.

Life in the Maintenance Lane

Katherine here today.

I learned a long time ago that life is basically maintenance. I tried to teach Pirsig's Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance a number of times and it certainly taught me to maintain the bits and pieces of my life in any number of ways. I'm not sure what my students got out of it, but it always helped me.

I get up and I just start maintaining things in between what I do to earn a living. I maintain teeth, skin, hair, my weight, my fitness, my brain (I hope), my clothing, my relationships with friends and family, my nails, my emails, my car, my garden, my yard, and our finances. I maintain the lists I make of the stuff I have to maintain. If I had a motorcycle, I'd maintain it too just like Pirsig's book suggests.

Normally this maintenance business doesn't bother me too much. I just get up and start doing what needs to be done. I've even done pretty well when the maintenance demands have escalated. Stuff like cancer got in my way and increased my daily protocols, but I managed to keep plugging away like a good little soldier.

Last week I collapsed though. Two new sets of protocols entered the picture and the result was two days where I lived on the verge of tears when I wasn't actually crying. I wasn't sure I could take any more maintenance chores than I was already doing and I simply crashed and burned. I'm doing better now though thanks to Jim and C. Fite and Christine (my beautiful daughter-in-law) who somehow said and did the right things at the right time. No one else really knew I was in trouble at the time.

I have "frozen shoulder." Mastectomy patients like me and band leaders get it. Last spring my shoulder seized and I couldn't raise my left arm straight up and I couldn't put my left arm behind my back. I could hike and kayak though, so I decided to take weeks off from knitting and anything else that required my shoulder to go up or my arm to go behind my back. I was pretty sure rest would fix the shoulder.

Resting did not work. Now I see a physical therapist regularly and do all sorts of new maintenance work. She warned me it could take up to 18 months for my shoulder to return to normalcy, if it ever did. She taught me my stretches and exercises and 40 new minutes of protocols were added to my daily duties.

Three days later I stabbed a thorn under my right thumbnail while putting on my gardening gloves. I thought I removed the thorn. Two days later my thumb was a mess and I had a substitute doctor (mine is out of town) removed more of the thorn. Another two days passed and things were worse and I went in for a LONG procedure or a SHORT surgery where another substitute doctor lifted my thumbnail and dug around for remaining thorn fragments. This hurt a lot. This also added three 15 minute thumb soakings and four rounds with a heat pad to my daily protocols. This was when the good little soldier just died inside me.

My thumb procedure was last Monday and it's Friday now. Jim has hovered and brought me my favorite ice cream (Salted Butterscotch by Sweet Action Ice Cream Co.) and loved me in so many ways through my grumpy two weeks. He's even worried that I can't knit for now. How this logical fellow can love me like a pure romantic I'll never know, but I'm so glad he can. We are a perfect odd couple somehow.

C. Fite actually stopped by the house with flowers and a perfect card. The only card I've ever saved. Christine listened to me when I hurt and called me with good news about herself like she was truly my daughter. My heart soared. The world started getting better again and my little soldier self began to return.

Even though my heart hurt and I felt like I would never get back to having a normal shoulder and thumb, I never skipped a single protocol along the way--I just started resenting all the maintenance. Jim and C. and Christine made me remember that I should never resent the stuff keeping me here to love and be loved.

The seeds that Jim and C. and Christine planted all last week bloomed into a lot of hope this morning. Their love combined with finishing a wonderful book while sitting in my knitting den seemed to put me all back together. My little soldier inside is feeling pretty darn perky right now.

I promise to write about the book when my thumb is up to more typing. It is The Swan Thieves by Susan Kostova. I plowed through all 661 pages this week and it ended perfectly for me. I'm such a romantic idealist and it's rare for an ending to heal my heart in the way this book did. That's a lot.

I'm not sure what my point is today. If you're reading this, I hope you'll keep maintaining your motorcycle or the little soldier inside yourself even when you're feeling sad. You discover people love you and it's only your perception that is screwed up. I learned that long ago from Sissy Hankshaw and her huge thumbs in Even Cowgirls Get the Blues (Tom Robbins). I just forgot to follow every lesson I ever taught.

Twitterpated

I was being interviewed on SKYPE the other day for some kind of generational reality road trip show with Nate when the interviewer asked me what I thought of Facebook and Twitter and the like, hoping to get some kind of old codger reaction to all this new-fangled technology that is ruining the world. She wasn't disappointed.

I told her I thought Twitter was basically a work of the devil and then said a bunch of random things because I was flustered by the crappy sound on SKYPE and the -at least- thirty second lag between my statements and her reception of them. It is hard to be articulate in that situation, at least it is for a technologically challenged person like myself.

As a result, I spent a sleepless night trying to come up with a better response, and I came up with the real reason I hate Twitter in particular and most electronic communication in general. It looks ugly! I hate the abbreviations and the typographical short hand that all proficient Twitterers use.

LOL
:)
:(
R U OK?
L8 for appt
Gr8 to hear from U

Yuck. That was not an abbreviation, just my reaction to the whole thing.

I know I am an old English teacher and therefore the worst kind of cultural dinosaur, but I just love the way a page looks when it is filled with blocks of beautiful print. I like the way Starkeyland looks, even though I know I could make it look much more modern by having sidebars and scrolls and links all over the place and adding all sorts of nifty colors, but I hate that.

Even though I hate the content of The Wall Street Journal, I love the way it looks. Watching Fox News always makes me nauseous and not just because of its content. I much prefer watching talking heads on PBS. Back in the good old days I was proud of the way The Ram Page looked compared to all of the other glitzed up high school publications that other journalism programs produced. True, we didn't clean up with awards at Colorado Press Day, but I always just attributed that to the rotten taste and values of the judges.

I appreciate the Tod Helton/Dexter Fowler Rockies commercial where they are sitting in the lockerroom and Tod asks Dexter "What's a Tweet?" Fowler explains and Helton's reaction is the same as mine. "You mean you tell people your daily schedule?! Who cares what you are doing? You're basically still a rookie."

8am rewriting Gr8 Gatsby

10am running marathon LOL

11am lunch w/K

etc. etc. etc.

YUCK