Burlaki [back] on the Hudson

Guess who hit double-digits today!?
 

Celebrations

Either I am exceedingly lucky or I don’t understand at all complaints of other people about O’Hare airport. I flew there and back quite frequently in my pre-England years, and just made a second trip this year, and I don’t seem to ever get stuck going through O’Hare. Going in or coming back, flights depart on time and arrive on schedule (although, truth be told, we did wait almost half an hour for take-off on the way back – but, apparently, that is “built into the schedule”, according to our pilot). No long delays on my memory.

I suppose now I jinxed it. My next trip to Chicago will be nightmarish, no doubt.

Walking through the airport, I was momentarily surprised with seemingly overwhelming interest Americans pay to the soccer World Cup. Every TV in every O’Hare bar was tuned to the broadcast of the live game. The teams playing? South Africa versus Uruguay. Wow, I thought, if a game between those two opponents is being universally watched, then Americans must truly be soccer aficionados nowadays.

Then it hit me. The game was on ESPN. Likely, the default channel on in any bar.

I was overly cautious about the Chicago traffic and the ensuing security controls, and found myself at the gate with more than an hour to spare before boarding time. So instead, I went to one of the nearby eateries, procured a seat at the bar, and ordered a glass of wine. The bartender asked me for an ID. When I commented that I did not think I looked that young, my neighbor at the bar chuckled and explained that at this particular bar they seemed to be carding everyone. Over the next hour, quite a number of fellow passengers – almost invariably in their forties or beyond – stated their delight at being carded, only to have their joy deflated when someone would tell them they were not really special that way. Quite amusing.

Chronicles

I finished Kimmy’s birthday movie with over a week to spare. Go me! It turned out pretty good, if I say so myself, but I’ll be sure to post here the raving reviews I’m certain to receive after its premiere this coming weekend.

Of course, I spent so much time focusing on that one project over the last three months, that a ton of other projects piled up behind it.

And as if I needed any more things to distract me, something really important and non-negotiable in nature sneaked up on me – The World Cup.

I recognize that most of my readers have little care for The Beautiful Game – feel free to skip the rest of this entry. I’ve been so neglectful a blogger recently that I deserve to be ignored when I finally find something I deem worth spending time on writing up.

Actually, it is a bit too early for any strong impressions of this Cup – 12 of the 32 teams are yet to take field for their opening games. I have to say that I am slightly disappointed by the quality of football that I’ve seen so far, but no major surprised have occurred, a few title favorites that have already played confirmed their claims, a few weaker teams were exposed as prime candidates for group stage elimination.

What I am mostly incredulous about is the quality of commentary and analysis on ESPN/ABC. I suppose I should not be complaining overall, with every single game available on prime channels live in magnificent HD. Furthermore, with British Sky network apparently not getting any broadcast rights for the Cup, ESPN/ABC hired several Sky commentators and talking heads to spice up the proceedings. I happened to like a number of those guys while I was a Sky subscriber.

Here in the States, they show immediate signs of degradation. Led by ESPN anchors who are all in love with the sound of their voice and can never condone asking a question that does not have several sub-questions and not take three time as long to ask as to answer, all of these commentators slide into meaningless platitudes, cliches and occasional sweeping over-dramatizations. They spend more time reminding the viewer of the upcoming coverage (ending each such reminder with the inane tagline: “Remember, one game changes everything!” – WTF?) than actually commentating. They try to sensationalize things as much as they can at the expense of the game analysis.

And what about those slo-mo close-ups of footballers’ grimacing faces every couple of minutes? Must be the next bright idea someone had about making football more appealing to an average American viewer: Inject emotions into the broadcast! Hey, this is not golf. You want to fill the pause in proceedings, show me a replay of the last key moment in the game, rather than what the broadcast director feels is the example of the players “feeling it”.

And the information graphics that comes up on the screen a la baseball stats is sometimes simply laughable. Every other fact is bound to be incorrect, from Holland listed as getting 4th place as their best result to-date (in fact, it was a runner-up not once but twice) to the names of clubs to which players belong misspelled or probably invented (how one misspells “Alaniya” to get “Kublan” for one Nigerian midfielder who plies his trade in Russia is beyond me).

It all looks so amateurish it is not even funny.

Reminds me of the Soviet TV coverage of the 1990 World Cup. Then, as one star player from each country would give a short immediate postgame interview, somebody in the TV hierarchy decided that it would be a grand idea to include those interviews in the broadcasts. The interviews were conducted in each player’s native language. For whatever reason, nobody cared to actually hire proper interpreters. Instead, the live sound stream would be sufficiently diminished to make the actual words coming out in Spanish, Italian, German, French, Portuguese, etc, practically indecipherable, overlaid with a bright young voice sounding as if it was translating.

One small problem. Football players have a habit of exchanging jerseys after completion of important matches. Hygienic considerations notwithstanding, a fair number of players would put the opponent’s jersey on when exiting the pitch – I suppose they want to keep their hands free for whatever reasons. So, an Uruguayan player puts on a jersey he obtained from his Italian opponent before coming on for his interview. Italy won 2-0. The behind-the-screen “interpreter” works off the sight of an Italian jersey and proceeds to talk about “elation”, “hard-won battles”, “scoring when we needed to”, “giving credit to the tough Uruguayan team”, etc… But anyone who’s just seen the game knows that the player in front of the camera is actually Uruguayan, and he is probably talking about “disappointment”, “missed chances”, “mistakes in defense”, “bad refereeing decisions”, “giving credit to the deserving Italians”… It was such a blatant attempt to deceive the viewers, exposed in such a simple but spectacular fashion. Every time I see an attempt at broadcast sophistication where incompetence is brightly shining through, I think back to that.

Just as with the Olympics, I have little choice in the matter. I want to watch – I’ll have to do my best to tolerate.

Chronicles, Sports, TV

Children of the age of technology acquire the weirdest mannerisms. Becky, for instance, has gotten into a habit of saying “LOL” when she is amused, rather than, you know, bursting out laughing.

I’m starting to call her Lola.

My other daughter, meanwhile, resides in pool heaven. She always has been very partial to water-based activities, and having a pool in her own backyard is a true boon to her.

She is now privately known as The Frog. Or The Duck. Or The Fish. Or whatever other water-dwelling member of the animal world comes to mind when we need to talk her into getting out of the pool.

I joined her on a couple of occasions over the weekend. I have to admit that was awfully pleasant. Even if the damn pool causes me more grief maintenance-wise than I ever expected…

Children & Schooling, Chronicles

Where do you think I’d go for my first real vacation since repatriating? Duh! Europe, of course!

We did not manage to visit Prague while we lived in Europe, even though it kept my designation of “The Most Beautiful City” bestowed upon it after our first visit there. We always wrapped that trip into some nonsense about it being a present to Becky on her 10th birthday (it was, in fact, her very first trip to Europe, but we went while she was still a few weeks short of the milestone, and Prague was at the top of our list of destinations, regardless of whether we could attach it to a momentous occasion). As my youngest also approached her 10th birthday, it felt appropriate – and very symmetrical – to use that as a pretext for a return trip to the Czech capital.

We had a marvelous time, did a fair share of sightseeing, went to a number of places that we did not manage to visit on our first journey, and mixed that up with periods of un-tourist-like idleness in parks or playgrounds. Prague remains as beautiful as I ever remembered, and what it may be lacking in terms of major museums, it compensates with its overall ambiance.

I don’t mean to imply that Prague is short on sightseeing attractions. Far from it. It has a splendid cathedral, a wealth of architectural gems, from the incomparable Charles Bridge to striking palaces of Bohemian nobility, an evocative compact circuit of synagogues, a number of pleasant parks, squares and gardens opening different perspectives on the town… It is a “walk-and-be-awed” type of city, and walk it we did.

Staying at a B&B literally 50 meters from the Charles Bridge put us within short distance of all major sights. It also provided me with an easy nightly diversion of lingering on the bridge after the children had gone to bed. I suspect I don’t know many other places in the world where I could linger every night for a couple of hours, doing nothing but people-watching and enjoying the surrounding vista.

Here is an 180-degree panoramic view of the bridge, looking towards the Old Town side. I did not have time or energy to edit out a couple of unfortunate stitching artifacts caused by my less-than-perfect photography, but I figured it was still a pretty nice picture. Click to embiggen.
 

 
Four days passed in a flash, and then we flew to London for a day, so that the kids could catch up with their old friends. Becky spent almost an entire day with half a dozen of her former classmates around Central London, while Kimmy met up with two of her own best pals on a Southbank playground. That last part of the trip was undoubtedly one both of my children desired the most, and they were suitably saddened when it ended. I had a chance to catch up with a couple of friends as well.

Back to the grind now. Next trip has not yet been planned, so far…

Travel

I enjoy our by now traditional semi-annual КСП outings. I happen to have a good time while I am there. Then I get back home, recognize the fact that I slept for probably 6-7 hours cumulatively over the course of the weekend, and fight fatigue for the next couple of days. It’s worse than a jet lag, honest.

A few other notes from the festival.

My personal playbook contains several hundred songs, of which I can play by heart – or by ear – roughly a hundred (the rest are complicated enough that if I want a smooth performance, I need to have the book in front of me; the playbook is a weighty folder 250 pages long – not exactly a handy object when you sit with your guitar on a log around a fire). You would think nearly a hundred songs should be more than enough to never get short on numbers to perform at any given point in time. And yet, after going through a dozen of my favorites, I always end up “forgetting” which songs I know. We alternate leads between three or four guitars, so now it’s my turn, and I can’t find an answer to “What else can I play?”

Something about spontaneity that my brain objects to. Good thing that I am almost invariably the weakest musician around the fire and others can play by ear practically anything, so if one of the listeners blurts out a request while I’m still searching for my next number, I can draw on my vast knowledge of lyrics and lead the singing, even if I can’t exactly keep up with the the accompaniment.

On a different note, it turns out to be quite important to stay away from elaborate knots if you know you’ll have to untie them. I ended with the primary responsibility for putting up the tarpaulin cover over our campsite on Friday, and I managed it splendidly, acknowledged by all participants as “the best tarp we ever had”. This was my first time at that particular job, and I emphasized securing the thing to the trees at the expense of simplicity. Then, Sunday morning, I entertained half the campground repeatedly balancing on the top step of the ladder and cursing the knots, “What cretin tied this damn thing this way? Oh, sorry, I think I did it myself!”

Finally, sleeping in adjacent tents with someone who loudly snores feels as if they are sleeping in the same bed with you. You try and tell me if there is any difference.

Must have contributed to my lack of sleep.

Repeat in the fall. Although I might skip the rainier/colder instance this year.

Chronicles

This is a really cool optical illusion. You’ll see how your brain mis-interprets perspective about 35 seconds in.
 

 
Via Exler.

Found On The Web

This weekend, chauffeuring our guests around Brooklyn, I found myself for the first time in ages on the Brooklyn Heights Promenade. In our early days in America, my Mom said on occasion that the view of Manhattan from there is worth coming to New York City all by itself. It is definitely one of my most favorite viewpoints in the world.
 

 
Don’t forget to click on the picture for a larger view.

New York City & Environs, Pictures

After a short but intense rain at the end of the day, the street is saturated with brilliant colors. I’m not sure how well a formatted-for-web picture can relay it, but I figured I’d try. I only resized it, no other enhancing manipulations were performed here.
 

Pictures

I’d like to think that I am long past having to come up with excuses for the absence of any blogging activity. I simply ignore the blog these days when I’m too busy. And I am very busy. Employment-related busy-ness aside, we are currently entertaining house-guests who’ve never been to the States before and whom we haven’t seen in a long time, not counting several converging creative endeavors of personal nature for which I have inflexible deadlines. I found inspiration for one literally at the 11th hour, and am still searching for a similar breakthrough for another, running out of time ahead of the next weekend. Thinking about writing a blog post is not too high on my list of priorities right now. Sorry about that.

At least, you now all know that I’m alive and kicking…

Chronicles

When I first settled in New York City, the single public transportation fare was $1.10. Today, it’s $2.25. More than 100% increase over the course of nearly 20 years. Adjusting for inflation, however, it comes to only about 32% over that time.

At the beginning of this month, New Jersey Transit effected a fare hike. 25% increase across the board, for trains and commuter buses. The monthly commuter bus pass from my zone that used to cost $259 now costs $324.

I can appreciate the fact that in these days of state budget holes and continuing economic duress, raising the public transportation fares is one way to lessen the state’s financial pains. I also cannot truly begrudge a fare increase after it has remained unchanged for a decade. After all, adjusting for inflation, $259 10 years ago happens to be the equivalent of roughly $320 today, which means the prices are just catching up to the inflation.

Except…

I work remotely often enough that the most advantageous fare for me was not the monthly commuter pass, but rather the 10-trip pack. On my route, it was offered at 33% discount to the single fare per each trip. More importantly, it was priced at a 25% premium to the single ride cost as calculated against the monthly pass cost (assuming 22 work-days in a month; the premium was considerably lower in, say, 19-day February). In other words, I had to work from home as few as 2 and never more than 6 days in any given month – depending on the actual number of work-days – to make the 10-trip option the cheapest for me.

I work out of my home office easily twice a week nowadays. My bus ticket cost hovered around $200 for the last six-seven months.

With the fare hike, the equation changed. The 10-trip pack is still available, but its cost was raised by whopping 60%. It is now offered at a mere 17.5% discount to the single fare per each trip (whose price has gone up by 25%). The premium over a single ride cost as calculated against the commuter pass for a 22-day month ended up at nearly 60% as well, which theoretically makes the monthly pass considerably more attractive – 14 days of commuting a month and I spend less with the pass than I’d spend with the 10-packs. But given that that’s right about the number of days I come to Manhattan in a given month, no matter whether I continue to buy 10-packs or switch to monthly passes, my new commuting expense will be about the same – 60% higher than it was before.

Ouch! My share of plugging the state’s financial hole seems a bit disproportional. The gradual increase of the NYC Subway fare over the years pales in comparison…

Apropos of

Kept assembling the various piece of furniture that the wife had bought.

Wrote checks for ungodly sums of money to various home service providers.

Discovered a couple of inevitable future expenses related to the house equipment and services.

Cleaned the pool, worked on the backyard, drove back and forth for supplies…

This home-ownership gig is more demanding than I remembered from the past.

Oh yeah – officially opened the pool season. After all that hard work on Sunday, it was immensely refreshing.

I suppose it’s all good, on balance.

Chronicles

I think I’d do really well as a blogger if all I did was to borrow content from Exler. So here it is, two appropriations in a row.

This is Axis of Awesome with an awesome demonstration that a huge number of modern hits are written with only the same four chords.

That makes me happy. I kinda play guitar that way…

Warning: Three or four occurrences of the f-word. Nothing excessive, but not safe for small children.
 

Videos & Music

I’m far from being prolific in my blogging these days, for a great number of reasons. Instead of recounting those reasons, I’ll just borrow content elsewhere on this occasion. This clip is nothing short of brilliant.
 

 
Via Exler.

Found On The Web, Videos & Music

Even if the assembly manual for a fairly complicated contraption explicitly states that two people are needed to successfully complete the work, a determined and resourceful individual should be able to come up with ways of achieving the desired end result all by himself.

If said individual has a history of back problems directly linked to working with heavy objects, there is no surer way to a relapse than an attempt to do something that normally requires two people all by oneself.

Chronicles

I wonder how many Parisians visit Louvre more than once in their adult lives, if ever. Or Londoners National Gallery. Or Madrileños Prado. Outside of a small group of art students and fanatical art lovers, I doubt that the majority of local population ever finds time in their busy daily routines to come in and admire the magnificent collections in their top museums.

I’ve lived in or around New York City for nearly two decades (with the obvious notable interruption of three recent years). During the first months of immigration, I visited Metropolitan Museum of Art at least half a dozen times. And yet, the last time I’ve set foot there was probably sometime in 1992.

On Sunday, having left the children in the care of willing grandparents, Natasha and I went for a day in the City. The main aim of the outing was to get together with our cousins who reside in Manhattan and whom we see much too infrequently. But when we were contemplating our specific plans for the day, Natasha had a brilliant idea: Why not spend a couple of hours at the Metropolitan before proceeding to our usual combo of food, drinks and catching up.

I don’t offer any resistance when a trip to an art museum becomes a possibility. And I’ve long felt a tinge of embarrassment that I had visited many of the Old World’s foremost art collections in the last 7-8 years, but neglected the one in my own backyard for so long. It was high time to rectify that.

We started with the respectable Impressionist collection, headlined by several wonderful Monets and Renoirs, but also including works by Van Gogh, Signac, Manet, Degas, Gauguin, Seurat, Cézanne. We then proceeded to earlier centuries, to Caravaggio and Rembrandt, Titian and Goya, Rubens and Ruisdael, van Dyck and Lorraine, Vermeer and Tintoretto, and scores of others. There is only one Canaletto in the collection, but several Guardis, which do just as nicely.

We also visited the Musical Instruments rooms and walked through the Greek Sculpture section and the Middle East art section.

I do not feel knowledgeable enough to lend an opinion on whether the Metropolitan can fully compete with Louvre or Hermitage on the strength of its art collection, but there is little doubt that said collection belongs to the top tier in the Western World. We probably covered less than 5% of what is on display at the museum. We were very much impressed by what we saw, having forgotten how good the Met’s collection was after all those years.

The Metropolitan is one of two museums in New York City that work on “suggested” admission-fee basis, i.e. you can enter it virtually for free even though there is a posted “recommended” adult admission price of $20. And here is what I find weird. In London, many major museums have free admissions and they are truly “free” – you walk in and simply proceed to the exhibits that interest you (except for “special” exhibitions, which carry a separate admission price). Each exit at such museums is adorned with a large donations box, and after a pleasant visit, you can’t help it but feel compelled to put some money in.

The Metropolitan works differently. You have to get a ticket. You come to the ticket desk, tell the person who sits behind it how many of you are there, and hear her respond with the total, “Eighty dollars”. You feel that you are entitled to pay less, and yet are confronted with the embarrassment of having to actually transact with someone who will know that you paid less. I am no psychologist, but I am pretty sure that most people would view themselves as not donating under these circumstances but rather as falling prey to extortion. I suspect that a fair share of people feel sufficiently embarrassed and pressured in this situation to fork over the full suggested amount (to say nothing of people who possess neither enough English skills nor the advance knowledge of the museum to realize what “recommended” admission price means), even though they are completely within their rights to pay next to nothing for entry. Quite possibly, this helps to at least partially cover for all of those visitors who pay no heed to the unspoken shaming and give the person at the ticket desk just a dollar or two. She will still welcome them to the museum and give them the bright lapel pins that perform the function of tickets…

Anyway. After having fed our inner art lovers for a couple of hours, we moved to another part of Manhattan, for a nice repast at an Italian bistro in SoHo. A couple of years ago in London, such trips combining a museum visit and a great meal out were a staple of our weekend routine. It was nice to recapture the feeling a little bit in New York City.

I wonder if I will have the same positive impression of the Hermitage when I finally decide to visit St Petersburg. The last time I visited was in 1990…

New York City & Environs

It has been almost a year and a half since I performed my review of three photo-book services (MyPublisher, Picaboo and Blurb). Since then, I did not have much time to engage in projects that would either involve any of the aforementioned services or bring me in contact with something new. And then, several weeks ago, a representative from Adoramapix reached out to me with an offer that I could not pass up: A free book in exchange for the review of their service and product.

I played around with the Adoramapix photo-book builder, created a neat highlights album of our European travels, and in the process got myself a new favorite for future photo-book-making.
Read more…

Technology & Gadgets

One of the things that we always liked the least in Europe is the intent of people in the service sector to have lives outside of their shops. What do you mean, you are closed for three hours in the middle of the day? Are you so dumb as to lose potential customers by madly waving your hands at them and shouting J’ai fermé! at 4:58pm on a perfectly good Monday1? Used to – spoiled by it! – having places of commerce in America stay open late into the night and practically never “enjoying” days off2, we were constantly rubbed the wrong way by shops closing early on a weekday or never opening on a Sunday in most of the places that we’ve been to3.

Contrast that with a run-of-the-mill experience in our neck of woods.

We need to buy some stuff at a local Home Depot. For one reason or another, we are only able to get to the store around 9pm on a weekday night. 9:03, to be precise. The store schedule posted at the door suggests that the place closes at 9pm, but the doors slide open, a couple of cash registers are operating, and a store worker does not exhibit any displeasure with late walk-ins asking for assistance in finding whatever it is that they are looking to get. There are probably no more than a dozen shoppers all together in the huge store at this hour, and I have no clue whether their combined spend that evening covers the expense of staff wages and electricity to keep the store open, but, at the very least, there is little doubt that each one of those late customers will come back and spend at this store again and again.

For all of my natural inclination to European lifestyle, I am perpetually baffled why this notion of doing something extra for the customer so that they keep bringing back their business remains a largely foreign concept in the good old Europe.

—————————
1 True story – happened to us at a random shoe store in Avignon.

2 Northern Jersey’s Bergen County has inane local regulations that keep shopping centers closed on Sundays. I am pretty sure similar examples elsewhere in this big country do exist, but they are mostly exceptions, in my experience.

3 Prime tourist locations normally operate in more American-like way. Shops on Champs-Elysées stay open pretty late into the evening. But step a few blocks away, and Paris – or any other top destination in Europe – is not much different from the rest of the Old World: Closing early, staying shut on Sundays, etc.

Expat Topic, Re-pat's culture shock

My eldest daughter seems to be the primary source of material for my blog lately. At her request, I am putting up another of her drama class projects, so that it is publicized to my considerably larger audience.

The assignment was to select 3 words that either described the person, evoked a specific emotion or simply had a certain meaning, and then display them in a 10-second video-clip in some creative way. Becky’s pick was technically 4 words – but who’s counting? – and her presentation idea was to actually perform the action somewhat opposite to the words being shown.

Here’s how it turned out.
 

 
Uncredited editing by yours truly.

Children & Schooling, Videos & Music

Becky has recently taken to riding her bike around the neighborhood. Weather being what it’s been the last few days, she obviously doesn’t wear track-suits on her rides.

We live about half a mile away from a synagogue. There are some people who drive to services there, but many people walk, so on Saturdays and on holidays, we see a greater number of pedestrians on the streets than usual.

Imagine a group of adolescent Jewish boys, in their formal temple-going attire, walking to attend a service. Towards them, in the opposite direction, comes a leggy, pretty teenage girl on a bike, wearing shorts and a tank top.

They stare. She notices. She smiles and waves. They keep staring.

One of them walks into a tree.

Oy!

Chronicles