I heard that this was going to start at some point, and am excited to start reading it.  What I have read so far is very interesting inasmuch as it is very mundane.  Small details and observations, rather than long rambling thoughts (like I tend to log).  I guess this has to do with the nature of the logging that is going on.  I have known writers who keep small notebooks at hand at all times just so they can write down that overheard sentence, or draw a small sketch of someone interesting walking down the street.  It might be fun to try this myself at some point as there are now and again very odd things that I see just walking/biking around the city.

I am interested to read the entries from the war years.

This past weekend I took a road trip with Emily, Noel and Margot to visit Emily’s family at their summer cabin on the Upper Peninsula of Michigan (Yoopie!). The trip was a lot of fun, and I managed to take some halfway decent pictures while I was there. Other than rock climbing and bonfires there was much swimming, hiking, and good food that was not caught on camera.

This flower, as we found out, is called the Death Lily, and all parts of it are poisonous to eat

This is the view from an outcrop of rocks that we decided to climb. Margot and Noel stand on a smaller outcropping to the side.

Emily and Noel survey the bay as Evan makes his way back down.

Bonfire! Margot managed to create at least one (maybe two?) smore(s) each using a whole bar of Hersheys. It was a little unbelievable. I think that’s Emily’s dad off to the side.

Anywho, moral of the story: vacation is awesome, and pictures are pretty fun too!

And…  In this corner… Weighing in less than 3.56 lbs:  12.1 inches, 2.4 GHz Intel Core 2 Duo, 2 Gigs RAM, 160GB 7200 rpm Hard Drive …

In truth I haven’t come up with a name yet.   Right now I’m waffling between Llyr and Primo.  Llyr cause It’s an awesome name (and a Norse Water God), and Primo because this will be my first PC.  If people have other ideas for names lemme know.  I’m totally open to suggestions.

I’ve taken down two posts recently because I realized they were not as well thought out as I originally intended. I’ve been really busy, and I think my thoughts have been a little bit scattered because of it. I plan on reposting both of them in some form as soon as I can, but for now I’d rather have them off the site than say something silly (or incomplete) that I don’t actually mean.

One week and one day ago two of my best friends from college got married. The wedding was wonderful, the reception was a blast, and I’ve already told at least three people it was the most condensed fun I’ve had in, well, probably forever.

Later on I was talking to Yo about the toast that Duff, the best man, made. He said that Ryan was one of the few people to ever show true “Christ-like Love.” Now, I was raised Christian, and have some understanding of what “Christ-like Love” should mean.  But I re-discovered the idea in a interesting way while talking to Yotam.

Marriage is a Self-sacrifice. But it means more than being willing to compromise with your spouse, to put off watching the canonical “Game”. I think that marriage is a sacrifice of your Self. You promise to give yourself up unconditionally to your spouse . But what does this mean? What does it mean to give up your Self? Do you completely lose your entire identity into this new person? I don’t think so, but I do think there is a drastic paradigm shift that occurs, and that giving yourself up so completely would effect the very rules and morals that you live by.

But what does it mean to give up one’s morals? Well, ask yourself this question: Would you kill another person to save yourself? This example is dramatic, and to be frank I don’t like it; but it does the job. If you had to make such a decision on the spot, what would you do? Your answer is necessarily driven by your personal morals. Perhaps you say “Yes,” perhaps you say “No,” but either way it is a reflection on the boundaries you set in your life, and the principles that guide you.

But now I have a second question: Would you kill to save your entire family? I think most people who answered “No” to the first question would would change their answers to “Yes” for the second question. The way I see it, the answer to both questions should be the same, by all rights, but they aren’t. When you commit yourself to a family, you give up your chance to stand apart. You have committed yourself completely to them, on some level disposed of your own self-identity. Therefore, when you think of yourself, you are thinking of your family, and when you think of your family, you think of yourself. You are now living for two people, and the decisions that you make need to reflect that. Because of these heightened stakes, I think most people would back away from answering “No” to the second question.

This idea, of investing yourself in another at the expense of others exists in the traditional Christian wedding vows. I’m not completely sure these are word for word the vows that Ryan and Mia gave each other, but the principle I want to demonstrate remains:

Will you love her, comfort her, honor and keep her, in sickness and in health, for richer, for poorer, for better, for worse, in sadness and in joy, to cherish and continually bestow upon her your heart’s deepest devotion, forsaking all others, keep yourself only unto her as long as you both shall live?

*Same vows for the bride. [link]

So you are to “[forsake] all others,” to “bestow your heart’s deepest devotion” upon one single person. You give yourself, your Self, up to that person sin embargo. But being so bound means that sacrificing yourself is identical to sacrificing both of your lives. Perhaps the majority of ways in which you have to change your morals are minute. I think for many people this would be true anyways. It seems improbable that you would decide to marry anyone with polar morals to your own. But I think the principle of the thing is what matters here. It is important that you give yourself up on the most basic (or perhaps axiomatic) level to this other person.  But this sacrifice, this ultimate compromise seems works both ways. There is comfort and support in knowing that you have another person who you can always go to, who will always listen to you, and stand up for you.

Following marriage I think this idea grows with the addition of children. If you succeed at marriage, this love can be extended again into your children in the same way you once shared it with each other. Growing up I always looked at my parents as a single unit, a team. They always supported each other, and rarely would fight without making amends. The love they showed my sister and I was (and is) constant and united.

So try and imagine extending this idea not only to a spouse, not only to children, but to all people: to give your Self to humanity without reservation; to have full faith in humanity and the decisions we make as a human race; to love us when we make mistakes and war against each other; to try and show us the way to solve our strife; to be able to sacrifice yourself completely so that we might have a chance, only a chance, at salvation. That is what I think Christ-like Love is.

Let this be my toast to you: To the both of you, wherever you may be on your honeymoon, in life, congratulations again, and I hope you stand together and your love continues to grow and prosper with each other, your children, and everyone you meet.

Work was hard.
Walked the long way home.
Watched end of Avatar.
Washed dishes and sang along to Graceland.
Will read myself to sleep.
This was a good day.

A friend sent me this great link. It’s a musical in three (short) acts about a mad scientist. I’ve only seen the first act thus far, but it’s worth posting about. It is tropolicious, at least in the first act, but the production quality is great, and the music is fun as well.

Also, Mal from Firefly plays Captain Hammer. He is very silly.

Also, like EVERYTHING ELSE EVER, the third act is released on July 19th. =D

I first learned about rent control this past summer on my first day, first hour even, in New York City. My father and I had just arrived in the city by train to Penn Station. We were picked up by Kevin, a friend of my father’s from college. The two of them decided to give me a tour, as I had only even been in manhattan for about a week total in my life, and only then on the upper east side in and around the apartment of a good family friend.

We started the tour by visiting Chelsea, where my father lived with some of his friends in the 70s. We arrived in the neighborhood and started walking around, slowly making our way to the building where my father used to live on the corner of 20th St. and 8th Avenue. As we approached there were two people standing in the stoop of the apartment, an old woman wearing jeans and a red long-sleeve shirt, and a slightly heavyset man in a button down shirt and jeans. As we got closer my dad perked up and asked Kevin if the lady was Mary.

It was indeed Mary, as we found out. Mary lived in the apartment building when my dad and his friends were living in the building and working in Manhattan the few years after college. She had, and in fact still did, live in the apartment above where my father had lived. My dad approached her and said, “Mary? It’s me, Chris Faraone, I lived here years ago, back in the mid seventies.” He continued to describe himself and his roommates as they were back in the seventies. She vaguely remembered them, the three young men who lived downstairs from her and her sister, and always invited them over for parties. It seemed like she was having a little bit of trouble separating the three long lost twenty something boys until she said, “Hmmm, there was one of you who showed up at my door one day with a bottle and asked, ‘Mary, have you ever tried ouzo?’”

Many of you perhaps know that I have a soft spot for ouzo, and perhaps also that I have inherited my taste for the liquor from my father. As soon as she said this my dad’s eyes lit up and he announced “That was me!”

We stood chatting for about an hour, hearing all sorts of wonderful stories from Mary. At one point my dad mentioned that It was pretty amazing that Mary had been able to hold onto the apartment for so long, especially since the price of Chelsea had ballooned in the intervening years. He remembered that about the time he was moving out of the apartment she had been fighting to keep the apartment under rent control.

As it turned out, my father was the reason she had been able to keep her hands on the apartment. He had worked as a para-legal at a law firm in the city, and as a parting favor had ut her in touch with some lawyers who were willing to do a bit of pro-bono work. She had gotten in touch with the lawyers, fought her landlord in court, and managed to keep the rent-controlled status that she had already maintained for years at that point.

At this point it was getting late, and my father and I hadn’t eaten anything since we boarded the train in Albany hours before. Mary gave us a recommendation for a restaurant just a few blocks away and turned our invitation to join us down on account of having t take care of her dog. It seemed like a weak excuse, but the prospect of walking away from your home with three rather burly men who profess to remember you from twenty or thirty years ago is a daunting one, and we let that lie as the tacit excuse.

We arrived at the restaurant, whose name escapes me, but sits on 25th St. and 10th Ave. It was a wonderful, small, dark Italian restaurant from the front, and an even more wonderful, small Itailan restaurant when we found they had a small garden in the back of the building, past the kitchen. The three of us got a bottle of wine, ordered our food and began enjoying ourself. We got a second bottle about the time the food arrived, and started in. A few minutes later Mary walked in, holding a small envelope in her hand.

She said that she had gone back up stairs and rustled through a few of her old photos, finding something we might enjoy. It was a black and white photograph of her and my father, his arm over her shoulder with both of them laughing uproariously. It was taken at the wedding of one of my dad’s roommates all those years ago. we passed around the photo and she joined us in finishing the second bottle of wine.

This is probably as much fun as my first night in Manhattan could have possibly been, and I think I will always remember it, but I digress. I learned about rent control, and the benefits that it bestows on people who moved into an area decades ago, who would otherwise not be able to continue living without some form of subsidy or outside help. I am in favor of such a thing.

Two days ago this article ran in the New York Times. It’s about Senator Charles Rangel, Chairman of the House Ways and Means Committee, who was found to be renting 4 rent stabilized apartments in The Lennox Terrace apartment building in Harlem, Manhattan. The problems here break down into three distinct issues: 1) is it fair that a man supposedly work 1 million dollars should only pay $3500 monthly rent for four luxury apartments, one of which is used as his campaign headquarters? 2) Is it fair for him to live in four different apartments at once? and 3) Is there the possibility of foul play in his situation given his social stature and connections in the city and government?

Now, Rangel has been living in Harlem for something like 60 years, and has been in the same apartments for the great majority of that time. In this way he is just like Mary, who lived in Chelsea back when it was a fairly disreputable neighborhood. Yesterday, another article was released describing Rangel’s response to the allegations that had been leveled against him. He said that he was proud of the fact that he had never left Harlem, his home. He was able to go to college on the G.I. bill, and return to his home years later with an education and law degree. He had found his home in Lennox Terrace, and never left. This devotion to his neighborhood works in his favor, at least as I see it. The point of rent control/stabilization is to allow people to stay in the communities that they consider home. I have great respect for him in that way.

Having read this far into the article I wondered what the problem was. I likened him almost exactly to Mary, and could not tell how he was possibly in the wrong. There are distinct differences between Rangel and Mary though. Like I mentioned before, Rangel has an estimated worth of of just over a million dollars. Also, he has 4 apartments: 2 of them make up the main apartment, having been conjoined before he moved in. The third, a studio he uses as a den and study, and the fourth is used as his campaign headquarters. The first three of these could be argued for, but the last is illegal under rent-stabilization rules. The rent-stabilized housing must be used a as a primary residence, not for any other purposes. That’s a strike against him.

But the article began in the fllowing manner “While aggressive evictions are reducing the number of rent-stabilized apartments in New York, Representative Charles B. Rangel is enjoying four of them, including three adjacent units on the 16th floor overlooking Upper Manhattan in a building owned by one of New York’s premier real estate developers.” It seems to me that this opening suggests that the rent-stabilized housing is disappearing (true), but also that it is somehow unfair or unethical for Rangel to be under rent stabilization

Does he actually need the other three adjacent apartments? Probably not. I would hate having that much space, but there are probably many other senators who have much larger houses that don’t happen to be in metropolitan centers. If there were huge luxury housing demand in Harlem, then it would be a problem, but that’s not the impression from the article. If this were the case, it seems like the landlord would have simply not renewed either the den or the campaign headquarters. Also, the number of apartments that he has is a separate issue from whether or not the apartments are rent-stabilized to begin with.

Harlem is apparently undergoing a wave of gentrification (a problem for another post). This has incited landlords to try and make the best of their investments and try and turn over rent-stabilized housing for market value housing. For example, Rangel has been paying $3,894 monthly rent under the stabilization. The same market value rate for the same apartments is estimated around $7,465 to $8,125, more than double what he is paying. The article describes the landlords as evicting tenants of rent-stabilized housing. I checked this out, and I think it is actually non-renewal as per the terms described here.

Anyways, the question remains as to why he has been left untouched by this while his landlord has been taking part in these evictions. The answer as the paper sees it: scandal! I;m not so much convinced that the article was written in the spirit if the Yellow Papers. “Hey, this guy has a big house that he doesn’t pay that much for! He must be doing something bad!” The writing is fine, but the authors seem to be bringing in a lot of unnecessary and sometimes confusing information that makes their exact thesis unclear. Yes, It’s a little odd that he is untouched in a storm of evictions, and yes, he has been using one of the apartments illegally, but that seems like more of a sidenote in the articles, as opposed to the central point. Also, the slant of the article seems to make the defining point of the problem that he is in fact a senator, and enjoys the apartments as some sort of extra benefit above and beyond reasonability.

The article does bring up one very good point about his senatorial standing, but does nothing it it. “The use of multiple apartments that might not normally be available to other tenants could pose legal or ethical problems for Mr. Rangel. The House Ethics Manual [pdf] defined a gift as ‘a gratuity, favor, discount, entertainment, hospitality, loan, forbearance, or other item having monetary value.’ But Mr. Rangel dismissed the notion that his housing arrangements could be construed as a gift.” It seems to me that this should be the crux of the article, at least the way it seems the Times wanted to write it. If they want to focus on his station, then that is what they should approach the morals of what he is doing with regards to his station, because it does not seem to me that there is anything unethical about his housing situation other than the campaign headquarters, and maybe the studio he uses for a den, though I could probably argue that point either way. Unfortunately there’s not much more to say on the point of whether or not it can be construed as a gift. They don’t have any sort of testimonial from the Landlord, and so they have to take Rangel’s word (which I would assume/hope to be good). If he isn’t lying, then I see no problem. If he is, then fine, you have your story.

But assuming that Rangel isn’t lying about his house being a gift of one kind or another, I really don’t see this as grounds for public damnation (which many articles like these have proven to be in the past).

I’m not quite sure why this article stuck out so much at me, but it seems like sloppy reporting to me. Rangel may very well not be in the Right, but as I see it he is only in the Wrong for something that is utterly tangential to the main point of the article. They sould have written either on the rash of unfair evictions OR on Rangel’s campaign headquarters being illegally rented instead of trying to tie the two together into some sort of human interest piece about the corruption of an old man with a big house.

A few weeks ago Yotam and I were hungry and decided to deal with the various leftovers that we had in the fridge. I saw a variation on this done with couscous at some point earlier this year, and decided to try it out. First I made a rice pilaf by sautee-ing mushrooms, zucchini, olive oil, salt and pepper, then mixing in tomatoes and two cups worth of rice.

The Pilaf was great on it’s own, but since the two of us are “growing boys” (in the loosest sense) we needed a little bit of meat in our meal. I got two filets of whitefish which I layered into the baking pan and drizzled with a little bit more oil before adding the pilaf. The Pilaf was still hot when I did this, but I think that doing this with a cold pilaf would work just as well. On top of the pilaf I sprinkled parmesan cheese and stuck the entire concoction into the stove for 20-30 minutes. The rice helped to cook the fish, but also keep it very moist.

The casserole (that’s the best word I can think of for this) was also very good as leftovers when we broke up the fish and mixed it in with the rice, and although I didnt try it would probably have been very good mixed cold with a little bit of vinegar. The only real problem that I found with the dish was that the fish could have used just a little more salt. When I make this again I think I am goingto try to salt and pepper the fish before adding the rice.