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Isley Brothers

I Can Sea Clearly Now

See the world below you with remarkable clarity in this 2 person canoe. This hard shell transparent canoe provides 100% visability. It weighs only 40 lbs., and is lighter than most aluminum or wood canoes.

This canoe is beautiful and has a highly functional design. And it's tough. It's made out of the same polycarbonate material used in the production of bulletproof glass. The seats provide excellent back support and comfort. This canoe comes with a retractable skeg system that improves tracking which among other things, makes it easier to paddle long distances.

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A Woman Who Stood for Something

by Carl Sferrazza Anthony

A pro-choice Republican feminist, who used her first lady role to help transform our culture.

It would be easy to say that Betty Ford has one great claim to fame, as the leader of the national movement for substance abuse recovery because of the famous southern California treatment center that bears her name. Given the celebrity-soaked media, the pipsqueak actress Lindsay Lohan now seems to have more association with the name "Betty Ford" than does the woman herself. In reality, alcohol and drug treatment is but one in a number of issues that Mrs. Ford became a world-recognized trailblazer of by simply being herself – which is to say, speaking out honestly and rationally.

With her death at 93 on Friday, Betty Ford should command respect not for the coincidence of being married to the only President who was never even elected as a Vice President, or that she survived cancer, alcoholism and chronic osteopathic pain to become the third longest-living First Lady in history (Bess Truman died at 97, Lady Bird Johnson at 94) but rather for what she did with the public role she was thrust into and the values of justice and compassion she lived with all her years.

It might also be easy to label her a middle-American, middle-class political housewife who burst into prominence. As a child, however, she told me that Eleanor Roosevelt and her frank public opinion on a variety of political issues was just as important a role model for her as her own mother, who'd introduced her to the needs of disabled children. Volunteering as a young teenager in local clinics and hospitals where those with disabilities were treated, she taught them confidence and grace through the movement of dance, which she'd already had considerable training in. That passion drove her to pursue the rigor of training with the then-radical theories of modern dance with the legendary Martha Graham herself. She supported herself in a Greenwich Village walk-up by working as a print ad model. Later she saw to it that the modern dance movement leader was given the respect shown the traditional performing arts with a Presidential Medal of Freedom.

In the brief sweet spot of the so-called "Me Decade" that marked her tenure as First Lady, an era that also saw the mainstreaming of "personality" and traditional gossip columns with the creation of People magazine, Betty Ford deftly managed to shape her public persona directly from her private person, drawing on real experiences from a life never intended to be nationally broadcast. When she had breast cancer and a mastectomy, she went against tradition to publicly disclose the details because she recognized the visibility of her persona might save the lives of millions of other women who were living with it undetected until it was too late. She spoke openly about the value she'd gained from seeking the professional services of a mental health therapist and broke another taboo, hoping to reduce some of the stigma that had been socialized against it. She discussed her first marriage and divorce.

Her support on a variety of other women's health-related issues, including lupus and a woman's right to make decisions about their own bodies (she was careful to never endorse or criticize abortion but to instead support a woman's right to that choice) was at the core of her conscience, stemming from an ironclad belief in the equality of women and men. This conviction also emerged from personal experience. Before, during and after her first marriage, she had earned her own living, from a women's clothing buyer for a large department store to an assembly-line, frozen-food factory worker.

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Yogi Berra Will Be a Living Legend Even After He's Gone

by Joe Posnanski

No man in the history of American sports—perhaps even in the history of America—has spent a lifetime facing more expectant silences. And it is happening again. Another afternoon. Another silence. Strangers stand at a respectful distance and wait for Lawrence Peter Berra to say something funny and still wise, pithy but quirkily profound, obvious and yet strangely esoteric. A Yogi-ism.

It ain't over till it's over.

When you come to a fork in the road, take it.

You can observe a lot by watching.

In this case the strangers waiting in the silence are a mother and son. They had been touring the Yogi Berra Museum in Little Falls, N.J., in anticipation of having the boy's bar mitzvah here. The family had decided that there is no better place for a boy to become a man than in the museum of the greatest winner in the history of baseball. And when they got word that the legend himself was present, they had to meet him, of course. They found him here, in the museum office, looking for a glass of water.

"I cannot believe it's really you!" the woman says to Yogi Berra.

"It's really me," he says.

The woman pauses for a moment. Is that it? Is that the Yogi-ism? What did he mean by "really me"? Was he being existential? Could he be summoning Delphic wisdom from the temple of Apollo, that phrase which translates loosely as "Know thyself"? It's hard to tell. Yogi Berra is looking for water so he can take his medication. He is supposed to take it in about 45 minutes. He's getting nervous about it. Berra hates being late for anything.

It gets late early out here.

(At Yogi Berra Day in his hometown of St. Louis in 1947) Thank you for making this day necessary.

A nickel ain't worth a dime anymore.

"This is such an honor," the woman says after a moment or so. Berra nods sheepishly. Again there is the silence. The silence always surrounds Yogi Berra. It smothers him. Imagine having every word you say analyzed like bacteria in a petri dish. Imagine facing that look of wide-eyed anticipation whenever you are about to say something, anything. Once a man and woman came up to him at the museum and asked him to invent a Yogi-ism, on the spot. He told them it doesn't work that way. He does not just divine these phrases. He said, "If I could just make 'em up on the spot, I'd be famous." The couple laughed happily. Yogi Berra did not know what was so funny.

If people don't wanna come out to the park, nobody's gonna stop 'em.

If you ask me anything I don't know, I'm not going to answer.

I ain't in no slump. I just ain't hitting.

The silence has become stifling. Yogi Berra, decked out in a Yankees hat and jacket, holding the water that he plans to use for his medication, looks out the window. Rain falls. The woman walks over to give him a hug, which he graciously accepts as the conclusion to the conversation. The woman repeats a few more words about how wonderful it is to meet him, and Yogi Berra continues to stay silent and stare out the window.

"How do you think the Yankees will do tonight?" she asks.

Yogi Berra shrugs. He doesn't make predictions. He hopes it will stop raining by game time.

From here on this will be a story without quotes. Well, there will be two Yogi Berra comments at the end, but that will be about it. There will be no new Yogi-isms. There will be no bits from others about how much Berra means to baseball. There will be none of that.

Yogi Berra is 86 years old, and he is probably the most quoted athlete of the last 100 years. The sampling above represent only a few of the dozens and dozens of quips and one-liners and bits of wisdom that have been attributed to him. Yogi Berra has now crossed into that American realm—with Mark Twain, Abraham Lincoln and Will Rogers—in which just about any famous collection of words gains prestige by being connected to his name. Just throw "As Yogi Berra says" in front of anything and, voilà, you're ready for the banquet circuit.

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We Do Not Need Another Cat

We are down a cat. It's still too upsetting to talk about (rural life, tentative open window policy, probable coyote, lifetime of horrible, horrible guilt for not sticking to indoor cat guns), but we used to have two cats, the correct number of cats, and now we have one cat. An indoor cat.

And we can't really face the idea of acquiring a second cat, because a) we're having a human baby in a few months, and b) First Cat never really liked having a second cat, and now that she's Only Cat, she's super-stoked about it and prances around like she owns the place, and c) that would involve formally admitting that Second Cat is gone for good.

But, you know, I read the shelter intake emails every morning, even though Second Cat has been almost certainly deceased for a month now, and so I literally page through dozens of pictures of homeless cats on a daily basis, and it makes me feel like a ghoul. Even though, bless 'em, homeless cats usually put on great bitchface for the camera, you know? The dogs have that plaintive "where's my mommy?" thing going, and the cats are all "get that out of my face. I don't need you! I don't need anyone!"

And you start thinking, maybe an elderly boy cat? Just some big orangey lump? But then First Cat is all, "I tolerated Second Cat because she was from the same Brooklyn feral cluster as me. We were basically sisters. Don't push your luck. Did you see what I did to the stuffed bobcat you bought for your nieces?"

I don't know.

by Nicole Cliff, The Hairpin |  Read more:
Image: uncredited
[ed. Repost]

The World’s Narrowest House

Architect Jakub Szczęsny has laid out design concepts to fill in a small crack between an old tenement building and tower building in Warsaw, Poland with plans to erect the world’s narrowest house, which will be 60 inches in width.

Talented Israeli writer Etgar Keret is a symbolic patron of the project and he will be given “the main pair of keys” to the house. After the house officially opens on Feb 4, 2012, Keret will spend the first month there and later on will share it as a studio for a select few creative and intellectual individuals from around the world. At the center of what Szczesny considers an art installation that he has aptly entitled, “Ermitage” or hermitage in English, is the residency program that will house these individuals and hopefully, foster a worldwide creative and intellectual exchange.

The architect has shared with Home-Designing some exclusive pictures of this project.

The house has one bedroom, bathroom, lounge, kitchen all on two floors, yet little room for one’s personal possessions and furniture. A ladder will also need to be used in order to move through the two floors. Its interior will come to 52 inches (133 centimeters) at its widest spot. “I saw the gap and just thought it needed filling. It will be used by artists.” Says Szczesny of the inspiration for his designs.

Opium Made Easy

By Michael Pollan

[ed.  A very long and interesting read.  Originally published in Harpers, April, 1997.]

Last season was a strange one in my garden, notable not only for the unseasonably cool and wet weather—the talk of gardeners all over New England—but also for its climate of paranoia. One flower was the cause: a tall, breathtaking poppy, with silky scarlet petals and a black heart, the growing of which, I discovered rather too late, is a felony under state and federal law. Actually, it’s not quite as simple as that. My poppies were, or became, felonious; another gardener’s might or might not be. The legality of growing opium poppies (whose seeds are sold under many names, including the breadseed poppy, Papaver paeoniflorum, and, most significantly, Papaver somniferum) is a tangled issue, turning on questions of nomenclature and epistemology that it took me the better part of the summer to sort out. But before I try to explain, let me offer a friendly warning to any gardeners who might wish to continue growing this spectacular annual: the less you know about it, the better off you are, in legal if not horticultural terms. Because whether or not the opium poppies in your garden are illicit depends not on what you do, or even intend to do, with them but very simply on what you know about them. Hence my warning: if you have any desire to grow opium poppies, you would be wise to stop reading right now.

As for me, I’m afraid that, at least in the eyes of the law, I’m already lost, having now tasted of the forbidden fruit of poppy knowledge. Indeed, the more I learned about poppies, the guiltier my poppies became—and the more fearful grew my days and to some extent also my nights. Until the day last fall, that is, when I finally pulled out my poppies’ withered stalks and, with a tremendous feeling of relief, threw them on the compost, thereby (I hope) rejoining the ranks of gardeners who don’t worry about visits from the police.

It started out if not quite innocently, then legally enough. Or at least that’s what I thought back in February, when I added a couple of poppy varieties (P. somniferum as well as P. paeoniflorum and P. rhoeas) to my annual order of flowers and vegetables from the seed catalogues. But the state of popular (and even expert) knowledge about poppies is confused, to say the least; mis- and even disinformation is rife. I’d read in Martha Stewart Living that “contrary to general belief, there is no federal law against growing P. somniferum.” Before planting, I consulted my Taylor’s Guide to Annuals, a generally reliable reference that did allude to the fact that “the juice of the unripe pod yields opium, the production of which is illegal in the United States.” But Taylor’s said nothing worrisome about the plants themselves. I figured that if the seeds could be sold legally (and I found somniferum on offer in a half-dozen well-known catalogues, though it was not always sold under that name), how could the obvious next step—i.e., planting the seeds according to the directions on the packet—possibly be a federal offense? Were this the case, you would think there’d at least be a disclaimer in the catalogues.

So it seemed to me that I could remain safely on the sunny side of the law just as long as I didn’t attempt to extract any opium from my poppies. Yet I have to confess that this was a temptation I grappled with all last summer. You see, I’d become curious as to whether it was in fact possible, as I’d recently read, for a gardener of average skills to obtain a narcotic from a plant grown in this country from legally available seeds. To another gardener this will not seem odd, for we gardeners are like that: eager to try the improbable, to see if we can’t successfully grow an artichoke in Zone 5 or make echinacea tea from the roots of our purple coneflowers. Deep down I suspect that many gardeners regard themselves as minor-league alchemists, transforming the dross of compost (and water and sunlight) into substances of rare value and beauty and power. Also, one of the greatest satisfactions of gardening is the independence it can confer—from the greengrocer, the florist, the pharmacist, and, for some, the drug dealer. One does not have to go all the way “back to the land” to experience the satisfaction of providing for yourself off the grid of the national economy. So, yes, I was curious to know if I could make opium at home, especially if I could do so without making a single illicit purchase. It seemed to me that this would indeed represent a particularly impressive sort of alchemy.

First U.S. Open or 31st, Challenge is the Same

Mariel Galdiano, 13, left, and Betsy King, 55, right, have converged at the United States Women’s Open.

[ed. Sadly, it looks like neither lady will make the cut this weekend.]

by Karen Crouse

In 1998, Mariel Galdiano was born in Honolulu. That same year, Betsy King became the first golfer to surpass $6 million in career earnings on the L.P.G.A. Tour.

Galdiano, 13, and King, 55, are from eras as far removed as Venus is from Mars. Their worlds have converged at the United States Women’s Open, where Galdiano, a four-time Hawaii state junior champion, started the week on equal footing with King, a three-time tour player of the year.

They met on Wednesday on the practice range, after Galdiano made a guest appearance at a clinic run by Annika Sorenstam, the Hall of Fame golfer who won the Open the only other time it was held here, in 1995.

King said she laughed when Sorenstam asked Galdiano about her daily routine and heard Galdiano say, “I go to school and then my dad picks me up after school and takes me to the golf course.” King, who is using a putter that is 14 years older than Galdiano, said, “That’s when it hit me how young she is.”

It is the first Open for Galdiano and the 31st — and almost certainly last — one for King, the 1989 and 1990 champion. Galdiano, who had a morning tee time, played 13 holes in six over par before play was suspended because of inclement weather. King was among 72 players who did not tee off before the round was suspended.

Of the two, one was predictably so nervous in the days leading to Thursday that she had a recurring nightmare in which she was standing on the first tee but could not make a free swing because a towering pine stood in her way.

That would be King, whose personality developed a sandpaper edge from grinding during tournament weeks.

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Bon Dance

[ed.  It's Obon Festival season.  One of the best evenings of my life was spent at a Bon dance on the island of Lanai.

Bon Festival (Wikipedia)

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Invasive Species

by Rick Sinnott

On a country road through the rolling hills of western Kentucky, I pointed out a white-tailed deer to our two nieces and nephew in the back seat. The doe, unfazed by our moving vehicle, remained stock-still a few yards off the macadam.

As we zoomed past, 8-year-old Chirana mused, “It’s actually very natural … the countryside.”

Chirana was experiencing Kentucky from the opposite end of the spectrum from Alaska, where I call home. She lives in south Florida, arguably one of the least natural environments in the United States. In Florida, citrus groves, sugarcane fields and other agricultural monocultures increasingly dominate the interstices between sprawling urban areas. Its subtropical climate is burdened with the second highest conglomeration of invasive species of the 50 states, second only to Hawaii.

An invasive species is one that does not naturally occur in an area and whose release is likely to cause economic or environmental damage, including harm to human health. Exotic birds, mammals, reptiles, fish and plants have infested the unique North American panhandle like ticks on a farm dog. Over 515 exotic plants and 250 animals, mostly birds and reptiles, have been reported.

But I don’t want to talk about Florida.

My wife and I were visiting our families in three Midwest states. It’s rare for us to leave Alaska. The last time I visited America’s heartland was seven years ago. Each time I return to my boyhood haunts, the people are more or less the same, but the natural world has changed significantly.

On our previous visit, I saw stray cats and feral cats everywhere. Cats were not content just to patrol farms or rural homesteads, where a hard-working feline might find house mice or rats and benefit humankind by killing these age-old pests, among the first recorded invasive species. Instead the cats had elected to become an invasive species themselves. At night, their bright eyes winked and flashed from the shoulders of interstate highways far from the nearest house, and not a few were pummeled by passing vehicles and flattened on roads like the raccoons and opossums they were slowly replacing.

Cats are perhaps the least domesticated of domesticated animals, little changed from their common ancestor with African wildcats. Depending on how you feel about cats, it may or may not surprise you to know they are on the list of the 100 world’s worst invasive alien species. Experts estimate that there are more than 77 million pet cats and 60 to 100 million stray and feral cats in the United States. Cats in America kill hundreds of millions of wild birds and more than a billion small mammals every year. They may be the nation’s most abundant medium-sized predator. Unlike most wild predators, even well-fed cats kill.

But I don’t want to talk about cats, either.

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Prince

Irish Polar Bears

by Amina Khan

All polar bears alive today are descended from a female brown bear that most likely hailed not from Alaska, as widely presumed, but from Ireland, scientists said.

The discovery, reported online Thursday in the journal Current Biology, suggests that polar bears and various species of brown bears probably encountered each other many times over the last 100,000 years or so as climate change forced them into each other's territory. On some occasions, those meetings produced hybrid offspring whose genetic signature lives on in polar bears today.The findings were made by analyzing the mitochondrial DNA extracted from 242 bear lineages. Some of them were polar bears and some were brown bears. Some lived recently and others have been dead since the late Pleistocene, which ended nearly 12,000 years ago.

Polar bears and brown bears are uniquely suited to their habitats. Polar bears have white coats to help them blend in and sneak up on prey, a carnivore's fearsome set of teeth, and they are superb swimmers. The smaller brown bear, which includes grizzly and Kodiak bears, lives on land in warmer climes and eats plants and small animals.

Based on fossil evidence and genetic analysis, scientists had thought that polar bears' closest relatives were the brown bears living on islands off the coast of Alaska.

Although members of the two species can, and have, met and mated — as evidenced by the occasional "grolar bear" hybrid popping up in the Canadian Arctic — those couplings are extremely rare and thought to be brought on by global warming, as melting glaciers force polar bears into brown bears' habitat and brown bears encroach northward into polar bears' Arctic refuge.

So imagine study leader Ceiridwen Edwards' surprise when she analyzed mitochondrial DNA in the bones of extinct brown bears collected from Irish caves and discovered that it most closely resembled the DNA of modern polar bears.

Unlike nuclear DNA, mitochondrial DNA is passed down essentially unchanged from mother to child and provides a clear record of maternal lineage. Using mitochondrial DNA, scientists had already determined that all living polar bears could trace their roots to a single "Eve."

But to think that she was an Irish brown bear?

"I thought maybe I'd made a mistake," said Edwards, an archaeological geneticist at the University of Oxford.

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If You Knew Sushi

by Nick Tosches

In search of the ultimate sushi experience, the author plunges into the frenzy of the world's biggest seafood market—Tokyo's Tsukiji, where a bluefin tuna can fetch more than $170,000 at auction—and discovers the artistry between ocean and plate, as well as some fishy surprises.

It looks like a samurai sword, and it's almost as long as he is tall. His hands are on the hilt. He raises and steadies the blade.

Two apprentices help to guide it. Twelve years ago, when it was new, this knife was much longer, but the apprentices' daily hours of tending to it, of sharpening and polishing it, have reduced it greatly.

It was made by the house of Masahisa, sword-makers for centuries to the samurai of the Minamoto, the founders of the first shogunate. In the 1870s, when the power of the shoguns was broken and the swords of the samurai were outlawed, Masahisa began making these things, longer and more deadly than the samurai swords of old.

The little guy with the big knife is Tsunenori Iida. He speaks not as an individual but as an emanation, the present voice, of the generations whose blood flows in him and who held the long knife in lifetimes before him, just as he speaks of Masahisa as if he were the same Masahisa who wrought the first samurai sword, in the days of dark mist. Thus it is that he tells me he's been here since 1861, during the Tokugawa shogunate, when this city, Tokyo, was still called Edo.

Iida-san is the master of the house of Hicho, one of the oldest and most venerable of the nakaoroshi gyosha, intermediate wholesalers of tuna, or tuna middlemen, if you will.

The tuna that lies before Iida-san on its belly was swimming fast and heavy after mackerel a few days ago under cold North Atlantic waves. In an hour or so, its flesh will be dispatched in parcels to the various sushi chefs who have chosen to buy it. Iida-san is about to make the first of the expert cuts that will quarter the 300-pound tuna lengthwise.

His long knife, with the mark of the maker Masahisa engraved in the shank of the blade, connects not only the past to the present but also the deep blue sea to the sushi counter.

Everything around him seems to turn still for a breath as he draws the blade toward him and lays open the tuna with surgical precision. And everything around him is a lot, for we are in the frantic heart of a madness unto itself: the wild, engulfing, blood-drenched madness of Tsukiji.

Until the summer of 1972, bluefin tuna was basically worthless to American fishermen. Nobody ever ate it, and its sole commercial use was as an ingredient in canned cat food. The only tuna that people ate, the white stuff, also in cans, was processed from smaller, albacore tuna, and even that probably would not have gotten into the American diet if a California cannery hadn't run out of sardines and begun selling it in 1903.
Theodore C. Bestor is the author of Tsukiji: The Fish Market at the Center of the World, the standard work on the subject. He, the chair of the Anthropology Department of Harvard, and I, the chair of nothing, spent some time together in Tokyo. It was Ted who taught me how to correctly pronounce the name of this place: "tskee-gee." (In her new book, The Sushi Economy, Sasha Issenberg says it's "pronounced roughly like 'squeegee,'" but it's not. Her book, however, is an engaging one.)

"I grew up in central Illinois," Ted told me, "and as a kid I don't remember ever eating fresh fish. I'm not sure I ever even saw one. As far as I knew, fish came frozen, already breaded and cut into oblongs for frying. And tuna, of course, was something that appeared only in cans like hockey pucks and ended up in sandwiches. I had absolutely no idea of what a tuna looked like, its size or anything else."

Tuna is the main event at Tsukiji, but everything from the sea—fresh fish, live fish, shrimp—is auctioned and sold here. At five in the morning, preceding the tuna auction, in another hall, there's the sea-urchin-roe auction. The most prized uni come from Hokkaido and its islands, and it's said that if you want to taste the best, freshest uni you must go there and eat it straight from the sea. But much of the uni laid out here in little boxes, often repackaged in Hokkaido, comes from California or Maine. Only in July, when sea urchins from the United States aren't available, are these boxes of uni not present. Color means more than size, and men roam the hall before the auction, smoking cigarettes and drinking coffee from paper cups, searching for uni of the most vibrant orange-golden hues. The northern-Japanese uni can fetch about ¥7,000, or about $60, for a little, 100-gram box, while the Maine uni go for much less, from a low of about ¥800 to a high of about ¥1,500, or between $6 and $13. Being from Newark, I wonder if they ever douse these things with dye.

This place, the all of it—formally the Tokyo Metropolitan Government Central Wholesale Market, a name by which few know it—is, as Ted Bestor puts it, the "fishmonger for the seven seas." Its history reaches back 400 years, to the Nihonbashi fish market, which was located not far from the present site of Tsukiji, in the Chuo Ward. On September 1, 1923, Tokyo was devastated by the Great Kanto Earthquake, which killed more than 140,000 people. Nihonbashi was gone, and a new market came into being in the town of Tsukiji, within Tokyo. Tsunenori Iida, whose great-grandfather had a fish-selling stall at the old market, is one of only four men whose family businesses began at Nihonbashi and are still in operation at Tsukiji today.

It's hard to say how much of what is sold at Tsukiji is exported to high-class sushi chefs abroad.

"My guess, and it is a guess," says Ted Bestor, "would be that the total amounts are probably on the order of a thousand or two kilograms worldwide each day. This is minuscule by comparison with the roughly two million kilograms of seafood Tsukiji handles every day."

Two million kilos is about four and a half million pounds, more than 2,000 tons. The Fulton Fish Market, in New York City, the second-largest fish market in the world, moves only 115 tons a year, an average of less than half a ton each working day.

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Friday Book Club - This is Where I Leave You

I haven’t laughed out loud like this from a book in a long time – once even laughing until I was crying. Ordinarily this would be a good thing, except I read this on a packed plane from Tucson to Chicago a couple of weeks ago. My husband was in the middle seat, with nowhere to shrink from his embarrassment as I banged on the seat in paroxysms of hysteria, shoving the book at him and saying over and over, “Oh, read this page, just one more, you have to read this!”…

Here’s the bizarre thing about this book: it has a very similar plot to that of The Believers by Zoe Heller, which I absolutely hated. Tropper, unlike Heller, understands how to get you to love a very, very dysfunctional family.

This Is Where I Leave You begins with the death of the father, Mort Foxman, from metastatic stomach cancer. Their mother Hillary informs them that their atheist father’s last wish was that they “sit shiva” for him. This is a Jewish custom requiring that the family spend seven (“shiva”) days together in mourning before they get back to their regular lives. (The purpose is not only to honor the dead, but to cut off the mourning process, so that families do not spend too much time focusing on death instead of celebrating life.)

So the Foxman children, Judd (34) – the narrator, his older sister Wendy, older brother Paul, and younger brother Philip gather at their mom’s house for the shiva. Paul’s wife and Wendy’s husband and kids also come, along with Philip’s latest girlfriend. Judd’s wife, Jen, is not there because they have separated; he moved out of their house two months before after finding Jen in bed with his boss.

The book takes you through the seven day ritual. Over the seven days, the family, long scattered by school and marriage and jobs, gets to know each other all over again. While this may not seem like a setting for hilarity, it very often is.

There are so many funny things about this book, and so many comical passages that I ran out of stickies twice just marking the ones I wanted to quote. (So I guess I won’t be using all of the quotes!) But the problem is, if I conveyed all the funny bits to you, I would spoil it for you. I want to give you a flavor for the writing, however, so I’ll steer clear of the humor (not easy to do) and go for the bittersweet. In this passage, Judd is imagining having a conversation with his boss. He begins by talking about how he and Jen were wildly in love… at first. Then he continues:

I want to tell him how he and the love of his life will slowly fall into a routine, how the sex, while still perfectly fine, will become commonplace enough that it won’t be unheard of to postpone it in favor of a television show, or a late-night snack. … how he’ll feel himself growing self-conscious telling funny stories to their friends in front of her, because she’s heard all his funny stories before; how she won’t laugh at his jokes the way other people do; how she’ll start to spend more and more time on the phone with her girlfriends at night. How they will get into raging fights over the most trivial issues: the failure to replace a roll of toilet paper, a cereal bowl caked with oatmeal left to harden in the sink, proper management of the checkbook. How an unspoken point system will come into play, with each side keeping score according to their own complicated set of rules. I want to materialize before that smug little shit like the Ghost of Christmas Past and scare the matrimonial impulse right out of him.”

Evaluation: I enjoyed this book immensely. And while I laughed quite often, it is a book about leaving – whether through death or separation or leaving the past behind or even physically leaving – getting in the car and just driving. So it has some sad moments as well. But really, not too many; it’s more like a Seinfeld episode, in which pathos is just an excuse for another comedy routine. Highly recommended!

Note: The New York Times reports that Steven Spielberg is adapting a film version of this book.

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AntiGravity Yoga

by Ali Taylor Lange

The fitness world has seen plenty of crazes, but AntiGravity yoga is one of the oddest. Created in 2007 by world-class gymnast Christopher Harrison, the workout takes place a few feet above the ground inside a silk hammock. Sound a little too West Palm Beach and wheat grass for you? Harrison swears by the spine and hip stretching techniques, especially for runners and cyclists. Proponents claim that balancing on the swinging silk enhances abdominal workouts and encourages your body to stretch that extra inch. Still sound too gimmicky? We called Harrison for a little bit more background.

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