Notes From Nowhere

Today I went to Citarella, to store up on things that I might want to cook in the next couple of days or weeks, which promise to be super-busy. I love buying eggplant ravioli and gnocchi and throw them in my freezer. This is what I eat when I have zero time: a little bit of Pomi Strained Tomatoes, a hint of cream, a sip of white wine, and a leave of sage, mixed into a tolerably nice tomato sauce. You can take part of a Citarella portion of ravioli or gnocchi out of the container and leave the rest in the freezer. This is a meal made in 5 minutes, and it’s perfectly fine.

But I was prompted to send Jens this entry for a different reason. Some of the people at the meat counter at Citarella — the Upper West Side store — are just marvelous. They are the incarnation of people taking care and tending to meat. Sometimes, I make an Italian dish that I associate with a place where I ate it in its ideal form, Villa Tuscolana near Frascati, a few kilometers from Rome.

Villa Tuscolana is a beautiful hotel, which I found by accident. I had booked a couple of nights in another Frascati hotel, which turned out to be a nightmare (disco music until the early morning hours). My friends and I took off in our car the next morning, looking for something better, and we found the Villa Tuscolana. There we had very thin-cut beef over rucola, with olive oil and lemon. The absolutely perfect summer meat dish, fresh, hearty, and lovely; however, not easy to reproduce: the meat needs to be perfect. Today, when I asked the guy at the meat counter at Citarella’s whether he could cut one beef steak into several thin slices, he suggested that he could cut it into five slices! This is the spirit, I thought, and was thoroughly impressed. I said “four is enough,” and he cut see-through-thin layers of beef. I love this kind of craftsmanship. Five stars for Citarella *****.

A photographer, in a public space, makes a photo that includes a sculpture created by a third party. The sculpture is an integral part of the photo. The photographer licenses the photo for commercial purposes via an agency. The creator of the sculpture finds out about this, settles with the agency, then sues the photographer. Story, and some online discussion, here. Now enter the New Journalism, with readily available expert views on every issue under the sun:

“I’ve argued before – and I’ll happily do it again – that leaving cases of fair use to the judges (and to politicians who write the laws) is the worst possible solution for art.“

The quote is from the ever-conscientious legal blog extraordinaire “Conscientious,” here, and promotes a truly novel approach to the violation of rights. When judges judge thieves, I’m sure the thieves think: What do judges know about stealing? Or think of some chemical company dumping their waste in some river. Who are the courts, the judges, to insert themselves? As if they knew anything about business. Consider the politicians who write the laws, say, to protect the environment. For “Conscientious,” who tells us to side with the ‘insider,’ they are likely to be intruders. On the whole, people tend to be happiest if only they themselves assess their actions. As a legal theory, this idea is so neat, I cannot think of one reason why nobody thought of it before.

Oh, brothers and sisters – where’s a good editor when you need one?

Apparently becoming lazy, I looked into the options of how to best synchronize email on the phone, the computer, and webmail. That way, I can make short trips to the supermarket, etc., without lugging my notebook along, and not feel cut off from the world during the process…

Apple’s “MobileMe” I was prepared to like, for its uncluttered design and smooth integration. But who wants to send mail with the domain xyz@me.com showing up in the header? Please, make it as simple as possible, but not simpler! For the ambitious, there seem to be complicated workarounds, which I find ironic. For now, this is for kids only.

Gmail has this domain problem too – how serious can you take ‘professional’ email sent from a gmail.com account? However, Google just came up with a great mobile web app for mail, here. So perhaps the thing to do is use Google Apps (the Standard Edition is free) and link it to your domain. Same as gmail, but without the dreaded gmail-address. Google provides good help files to set this up. Those, and the simple information from here and here (it only took me three days to find these…), and things will work as they should.

Which leaves only one question for me – is Google going to be the next AOL, or are they unstoppably heading for world domination? Since I care for those who (can) read my email, I hope they’ll be somewhere in between.