I think it's safe to say that no one could have foreseen, when we got into this, that we'd still be there now, disgruntled and discouraged, with the costs soaring ever higher, and no end in sight. I'm speaking of course of the New Yorker cartoon caption contest. At first it seemed like a nice enough diversion: instead of the usual back page content, each week a cartoon in need of a caption, and the finalists from the previous week, and the winner from the week before that. But it's been going on for months now. The captions sometimes reach the comic level of the normal cartoons, but as a whole it's nothing compared to the soothing satisfaction of a Roz Chast piece letting you know you have completed another issue. In my layman's opinion the page layout is about the most cluttered and jarring that you'll see on any New Yorker page. Please, let it end.

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In the October 24 issue of the New Yorker, one of the "Briefly Noted" book reviews used one of my all-time favorite words, one included in my rare word dictionary: interlarded. Here's the relevant passage, from a review of "A Year in the Life of Shakespeare: 1599."

"The approach proves illuminating for the overtly political plays. Lines in "Henry V" allude to a rebellion in Ireland that Elizabeth I had recently sent the Earl of Essex to suppress. Chapters on "As You Like It" and "Hamlet" revert to more conventional textual analysis, interlarded with biographical speculations and digressions; for instance, Rosalind's journey to Arden may derive from Shakespeare's annual trip to Stratford to see his wife and daughters, and the "limbs with travel tired" of the twenty-seventh sonnet perhaps reflect the poor condition of English highways."

The definition that I had in my dictionary was a cooking process whereby meat is prepared with alternating layers of fat packed into it. Apparently it can also mean, generally, a construction process with alternating types of elements stacked or layered. In fact this is the more common usage today. I'm glad to know that since it makes it a much more useful word in general conversation. Interlarded was a Dictionary.com Word of the Day back in 2001.

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Much as I love it, the New Yorker has been absolutely ruinous to my general reading habits lately. At this point I read everything but the Fiction pieces, and sometimes the Dance and Theater reviews. I'm too much of an obsessive completist to skip any but the most boring articles that couldn't possibly have any information of interest to me, and those are few and far between. The only times I get to read are during my relatively short commute and other transportation time, and at night before I go to sleep. I can rarely finish an issue in less than 6 days, and the seemingly increasingly common extra-thick issues take about 8. Ever since I had to take three trips in quick succession in August I've been about a week behind, starting an issue just as the next one arrives. This isn't so bad, since it means I'm never left with nothing to read, though it does mean that I always find out about events I've just missed whenever I read "Goings On About Town." But I do have at least 5 books that I really want to read right now and there's just no room for them in the schedule. I may therefore do the unthinkable and let my subscription lapse in the next month or two when it comes up for renewal, giving me a little window for other reading while allowing me to hold out for a better renewal price.

From Netflix:

P3K: Pinocchio 3000

Malcolm McDowell and Howie Mandel lend their voices to this retelling of Pinocchio set in the futuristic city of Scamboville, where high-tech tinkerer Gepetto dreams of being a father. With help from cyberpenguin Spencer and holographic fairy Ciberina, Gepetto builds a robot son dubbed Pinocchio. True to the classic tale, the adventure takes off as the naive young automaton finds himself alone in the big city on the path to becoming a real boy.

I'd been to the Brooklyn Heights promenade several times at night recently, and looked down curiously at this area, but not until I was finally there during the day did I realize this is supposed to be a memorial garden for 9/11. I'm sure the intentions were good, but have you ever seen a more miserable garden? It's right under a highway. It's surrounded by industrial waterfront, with an ugly perimeter fence. The only indication of its purpose, other than the shape of the towers, is a rather tacky real estate-style billboard. And I'm no botanist, but it appears to my untrained eye to be largely filled with weeds (though I suppose it's to the gardener's credit they got different weeds to grow inside the tower shapes). You could say that any garden, or any memorial garden, is better than nothing, or better than the gravel and debris that might otherwise be here. But I think this constitutes a pretty strong counterargument.

PS here's a photo of what it looked like in November 2002. Better, to be sure, but still not what I would readily call a garden, except perhaps in the Zen sense.

I've been seeing ads for an upcoming TV Movie on A&E called Knights of the South Bronx, starring Ted Danson. It's about a guy named David MacEnulty who was the coach of my junior high school chess team for a time. The movie is about how a business man was inspired to teach chess to 'inner city kids' in the titular neighborhood and give them a chance at some sort of greater success. Our school was on 107th Street in Manhattan, and while there were underprivileged kids there, none of them were on the chess team. We were in a gifted and talented program that was essentially its own school within the larger one. So I doubt the movie is about us.

The thing I remember most about MacEnulty was a day when, to make some point, he sat us all down around one side of a chess board with him on the other side. He asked us all to "suggest a move" for our side. Quickly seeing the absurdity of playing chess by committee, we started making the wackiest first moves imaginable, none of which are all that wacky--I'm sure some Grand Master has played each of them at least once for the hell of it. He asked us to stop being silly and I guess we pushed it too far and he just walked out of the room and didn't come back that day. When our parents found out they made us apologize to him, and he returned to being our coach, but I don't think he taught us for any more than a year, if that long.

Our team was a scrappy bunch. We were proud of holding our own in state and national tournaments against schools like Hunter and Dalton, about which we heard tales of recruiting programs, as if elementary school chess were college football. In retrospect I don't know if the results we got justified our attitude, but we certainly had some triumphs.

When we started we were at P.S. 9, and our team name was the Knights of Nine. When most of us went on to I.S. 54, we often joked that we'd have to become the Knights of Nine Times Six. I don't know if anyone outside the team ever would've gotten that, but surely it was better than what we ended up with: "Equites," Latin for 'knights.' When we printed our team T-shirts the name was in a Roman-style font like the one used on the Museum of Natural History facade, meaning that "EQUITES" looked a lot like "EQVITES." Whenever we had those shirts on at tournaments we had to endure the question "What's ekveits?"