Dear reader, I have let you down. June should have been full of exciting columns. My mother's wonderfully successful art show. The spa holiday at the Lake of the Ozarks. A report on the buzz of St. Louis in the run-up to the All Star Game and my shopping nirvana at Busch Stadium. Memories of high school brought on by a posh Midwestern garden party. Pondering on the wonders of American retail, with stories of how I beat the Wal-Mart empire and got new luggage below cost. And, of course, complaints about Missouri weather and amazement that I made it through my formative years there.
But I have been drowning in life. That entry, far less interesting, would talk about the trials of being an only child of a divorced mother, 5,000 miles away, dealing with her serious illness. The paralysing fear of a family home filled with paperwork, knick nacks, fine furniture, art and just plain junk that could take years to sort out. It would layer on an intense job, filled with reorganisations, cataclysmic change and gut-gnawing fear for the future. It would discuss how down time at the moment really needs to be "down" for mental survival. Sleep, catching up on the BBC on iPlayer or reading a good book in my hammock ... nothing so taxing as crafting proper copy.
So, dear reader, I ask your indulgence. We're just going to forget about June. If I can catch up, at some future date, and write up any of the items mentioned above ... I'll do it. But no promises. Instead, look for a fresh, new entry on Saturday when I report on the ironic delight of hosting a 4th of July party within yelling distance of the Queen's weekend residence.
Hope she enjoys the fireworks.
Tuesday 30 June 2009
Friday 12 June 2009
Proof of recession? I just had a cheap dinner in New York City.
There I was again in New York, the city that keeps trying to grow on me. I notice the treeless canyons less and the architecture more. My ever-growing circle of friends is so lovely, they overshadow the aggressive nastiness of the natives. And I'm never there long enough to be off London time so I ... never a morning person ... am up and taking my morning walk at 6am when the city, to my eyes, is at its best.
This was a mostly-manic business trip, with few moments available for personal time. Thanks to those early mornings, I managed to carve out a few fine rambles. This included a particularly lovely walk up Fifth Avenue (no time for shopping, but I could check out the windows) and a loop through the edge of Central Park. I grabbed breakfast with a dear Northwestern classmate in a classic, if unremarkable, little diner. Dinner on my first night, between arrival and crashing from jet lag, was with a sorority sister I hadn't seen for 18 years. No food could have bettered the joy of that reunion, but the Brazilian place on restaurant row did a mean tilapia fillet.
There was only one other night for dinner out, organised by the colleague I was catching up with. And what I fine choice she made.
Vong's. 200 East 54th Street. Sophisticated, French-influenced Asian food in elegant surroundings. Four course tasting menu for a remarkable $35. (My coffee and bagel in the hotel for breakfast didn't cost that much less.) Need I say more? Perhaps just a few words...
For that price in the Big Apple I was expecting un-remarkable, and mass produced. What came out of the kitchen was delicate, carefully prepared and of top quality. I started with the peekytoe crab spring rolls, which were definitely a step up from your usual Thai restaurant mass produced items. Next up, wild striped bass on top of some wok-fried cabbage. The sinus-draining spices here weren't for the faint of heart, but I was feeling both satisfied and quite virtuous by the last bite; a healthy dish I'd love to re-create at home. On to roasted lemon grass chicken, also on the spicy side, served over green beans. Then all the good health and virtue went out the window as the dessert arrived. The trio of individual sweets was the kind of thing I've paid top price for in other restaurants. Having it thrown in at the end of a reasonably priced tasting menu was truly amazing.
Here is a recession-friendly place. Accountants will have no problem signing off a relatively modest expense request, while diners will get tastes and experiences worth a bigger price tag. Next time I'm in New York ... especially if I'm there on my own money ... Vong's will be top of my return list.
This was a mostly-manic business trip, with few moments available for personal time. Thanks to those early mornings, I managed to carve out a few fine rambles. This included a particularly lovely walk up Fifth Avenue (no time for shopping, but I could check out the windows) and a loop through the edge of Central Park. I grabbed breakfast with a dear Northwestern classmate in a classic, if unremarkable, little diner. Dinner on my first night, between arrival and crashing from jet lag, was with a sorority sister I hadn't seen for 18 years. No food could have bettered the joy of that reunion, but the Brazilian place on restaurant row did a mean tilapia fillet.
There was only one other night for dinner out, organised by the colleague I was catching up with. And what I fine choice she made.
Vong's. 200 East 54th Street. Sophisticated, French-influenced Asian food in elegant surroundings. Four course tasting menu for a remarkable $35. (My coffee and bagel in the hotel for breakfast didn't cost that much less.) Need I say more? Perhaps just a few words...
For that price in the Big Apple I was expecting un-remarkable, and mass produced. What came out of the kitchen was delicate, carefully prepared and of top quality. I started with the peekytoe crab spring rolls, which were definitely a step up from your usual Thai restaurant mass produced items. Next up, wild striped bass on top of some wok-fried cabbage. The sinus-draining spices here weren't for the faint of heart, but I was feeling both satisfied and quite virtuous by the last bite; a healthy dish I'd love to re-create at home. On to roasted lemon grass chicken, also on the spicy side, served over green beans. Then all the good health and virtue went out the window as the dessert arrived. The trio of individual sweets was the kind of thing I've paid top price for in other restaurants. Having it thrown in at the end of a reasonably priced tasting menu was truly amazing.
Here is a recession-friendly place. Accountants will have no problem signing off a relatively modest expense request, while diners will get tastes and experiences worth a bigger price tag. Next time I'm in New York ... especially if I'm there on my own money ... Vong's will be top of my return list.
Tuesday 9 June 2009
Gr8 2 c u, tks 4 lesson
I am no stranger to the "we're going to hell in a hand basket" camp of future gazing, especially when considering use of the English language.
A case in point: On my recent flight to New York, the stewardess made an announcement not once ... but three times ... not to conjugate in the aisles. I don't know what was more disturbing, the flubbing of what's actually a very important security announcement, or the fact that I was the only person laughing at the mistake. Surely someone else must have noticed, and then shared my image of passengers rebelling against airline authority by rising from their seats to declaim "amō, amāre, amāvī, amātum..."
I realise few people these days are as particular as me when it comes to words. (I am, after all, the type who still cringes at the mis-use of decimate. It is a beautiful word that means, quite precisely, to reduce by 10 percent. No other single word means that. Why must people bastardise it to mean total destruction, when we already have so many words that mean the same?) But I'll stubbornly keep arguing that precision is important. Language, after all, is one of the defining elements that separate us from the rest of the animal kingdom.
Many people lay the blame for linguistic decline solidly on the shoulders of the Net Generation, those born since the '80s who've grown up surrounded by technology. They communicate on a massive scale, but by text, twitter and snippet. They truncate. They abbreviate. Punctuation is a waste of space. It is unlikely that they conjugate.
This week, however, I must lay down my love of tradition and defend them. I've just attended a conference on innovation in New York. (It's the centrepiece of a major sponsorship I manage and is well worth exploration if you're interested in the topic. Go to xprize.org for full conference coverage.) Don Tapscott, author of "Born Digital" and an expert on societal change sparked by our networked world, was the special guest at our customer lunch and gave the conference's keynote address. He is wonderfully upbeat about this generation and positive about what we can learn from them.
The best proof point came from the conference itself. Attendees were older than the 20-something net gen average, but because the topic was innovation, most had a net gen sensibility when it came to the online world. These are people who love collaborative technology. Twittering, texting and skyping is as natural as breathing. More than 200 people attended the conference and at least 30 of them were tweeting throughout. (For the uninitiated, Twitter is a service that lets you broadcast short comments, or "tweets" to anyone who subscribes to be your "follower".)
My generation (I scraped into the baby boomers by three and a half months) was taught that doing anything other than paying attention during a presentation was the height of rudeness. Even if contravening that norm, we do it surreptitiously, sneaking a quick peak at our blackberries while pretending total engagement. Not the net gen. At this conference, the norm was for laptops to be open and blackberries in use. Were they being rude? Not paying attention?
On the contrary. Many were tweeting, and their actions added another layer to the conference. By searching i2i on Twitter you could pick up a live feed of all these tweets to see, in an instant, what people found interesting. No need to wait for journalistic coverage to see what the sound bites were. If 10 people tweeted the same quote, you knew that was the hot observation of the speech. If nobody tweeted for a few minutes, you knew the speaker was losing the hall. The kind of commentary that normally takes place in the breaks was happening real time, condensed into the presentation itself. Conference organisers regularly flipped the main screen from the speakers to the Twitter feed, so the whole hall could see this silent but tremendously active layer of participation taking place.
I have never attended a conference session that had this sense of buzz, engagement and participation. All that from a room in which it appeared that a chunk of the audience was messing around on laptops, paying no attention whatsoever. Clearly, there is more to this generation, and to social networking technology, than meets the eye.
So next time you see a kid with earphones on and eyes glued to a screen, don't immediately assume he's dropping out of the world. He may actually be contributing to it in a new and exciting way.
Just don't let him conjugate in the aisles. This, of course, would be a very bad thing.
A case in point: On my recent flight to New York, the stewardess made an announcement not once ... but three times ... not to conjugate in the aisles. I don't know what was more disturbing, the flubbing of what's actually a very important security announcement, or the fact that I was the only person laughing at the mistake. Surely someone else must have noticed, and then shared my image of passengers rebelling against airline authority by rising from their seats to declaim "amō, amāre, amāvī, amātum..."
I realise few people these days are as particular as me when it comes to words. (I am, after all, the type who still cringes at the mis-use of decimate. It is a beautiful word that means, quite precisely, to reduce by 10 percent. No other single word means that. Why must people bastardise it to mean total destruction, when we already have so many words that mean the same?) But I'll stubbornly keep arguing that precision is important. Language, after all, is one of the defining elements that separate us from the rest of the animal kingdom.
Many people lay the blame for linguistic decline solidly on the shoulders of the Net Generation, those born since the '80s who've grown up surrounded by technology. They communicate on a massive scale, but by text, twitter and snippet. They truncate. They abbreviate. Punctuation is a waste of space. It is unlikely that they conjugate.
This week, however, I must lay down my love of tradition and defend them. I've just attended a conference on innovation in New York. (It's the centrepiece of a major sponsorship I manage and is well worth exploration if you're interested in the topic. Go to xprize.org for full conference coverage.) Don Tapscott, author of "Born Digital" and an expert on societal change sparked by our networked world, was the special guest at our customer lunch and gave the conference's keynote address. He is wonderfully upbeat about this generation and positive about what we can learn from them.
The best proof point came from the conference itself. Attendees were older than the 20-something net gen average, but because the topic was innovation, most had a net gen sensibility when it came to the online world. These are people who love collaborative technology. Twittering, texting and skyping is as natural as breathing. More than 200 people attended the conference and at least 30 of them were tweeting throughout. (For the uninitiated, Twitter is a service that lets you broadcast short comments, or "tweets" to anyone who subscribes to be your "follower".)
My generation (I scraped into the baby boomers by three and a half months) was taught that doing anything other than paying attention during a presentation was the height of rudeness. Even if contravening that norm, we do it surreptitiously, sneaking a quick peak at our blackberries while pretending total engagement. Not the net gen. At this conference, the norm was for laptops to be open and blackberries in use. Were they being rude? Not paying attention?
On the contrary. Many were tweeting, and their actions added another layer to the conference. By searching i2i on Twitter you could pick up a live feed of all these tweets to see, in an instant, what people found interesting. No need to wait for journalistic coverage to see what the sound bites were. If 10 people tweeted the same quote, you knew that was the hot observation of the speech. If nobody tweeted for a few minutes, you knew the speaker was losing the hall. The kind of commentary that normally takes place in the breaks was happening real time, condensed into the presentation itself. Conference organisers regularly flipped the main screen from the speakers to the Twitter feed, so the whole hall could see this silent but tremendously active layer of participation taking place.
I have never attended a conference session that had this sense of buzz, engagement and participation. All that from a room in which it appeared that a chunk of the audience was messing around on laptops, paying no attention whatsoever. Clearly, there is more to this generation, and to social networking technology, than meets the eye.
So next time you see a kid with earphones on and eyes glued to a screen, don't immediately assume he's dropping out of the world. He may actually be contributing to it in a new and exciting way.
Just don't let him conjugate in the aisles. This, of course, would be a very bad thing.
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