My English Times

Publicity Shy Tycoon Forging Modern Peru Amid Expanding Economy

2011-08-05T01:51:00.003-05:00

By Edward Robinson - Aug 3, 2011 5:00 PM GMT-0500
Bloomberg Markets Magazine

As confetti and balloons fall from the ceiling, scores of bankers dressed as characters from TV shows and movies hit the dance floor in a circus-sized party tent in Lima, Peru. Jedi knights from Star Wars wave glowing green light sabers while the Flintstones groove to blasting techno-pop. Carlos Rodriguez-Pastor, one of Latin America’s least known billionaires, joins the throng, wearing a white wig, a silly hat and a big smile.
Rodriguez-Pastor, who normally shuns publicity, is hosting the costume party on this June evening for 4,000 employees of IFH Peru Ltd., the Lima-based financial services and retail conglomerate he has built and run since 1995. His top managers, made up as Batman, Herman Munster and Happy Days’ Fonzie, perform musical skits that showcase corporate values such as innovation and teamwork, Bloomberg Markets magazine reports in its September issue.
“This is the best team-building exercise I know,” says Rodriguez-Pastor, 52, as members of his bank’s board of directors, dressed in Star Trek uniforms, dance behind him. “We can all be ridiculous together.”
The tycoon, little known outside Peru, belongs to a new breed of Latin empire builders who are capitalizing on a decade- long boom in the region. Rodriguez-Pastor has cobbled together a family of companies that offers everything from credit cards to groceries to mutual funds, making him worth about $3 billion, according to data compiled by Bloomberg on his various holdings.
Wave of Wealth
“Our sweet spot is the emerging middle class,” Rodriguez- Pastor says. “Our big bet is that it’s going to take off.” He granted Bloomberg Markets his first extensive interview to highlight how his company’s growth reflects the rising fortunes of Peru, one of South America’s most impoverished nations.
Rodriguez-Pastor’s story shows how the industrialization of Asia and the commodities boom in Latin America have set off a wave of wealth creation reaching from Beijing and New Delhi to Sao Paulo and Lima.
After enduring debt meltdowns and hyperinflation in the 1980s and 1990s, governments in Brazil, Colombia, Peru and other Latin American nations have embraced free trade and fiscal discipline. Even left-leaning leaders such as Luiz Inacio Lula da Silva, Brazil’s president from 2003 to 2010, have produced budget surpluses and repaid International Monetary Fund loans early.
Latin nations cleaned up their act just as China’s explosive growth drove demand for the natural resources found in abundance in the region. While corruption and income inequality still plague Latin America, not even the global financial crash in 2008 could derail its robust economies. The region’s GDP grew 6 percent in 2010, and the IMF forecasts it will expand another 4.7 percent this year, compared with an average of 2.3 percent for the Group of Seven nations.
A Different Reality
No major Latin American country has grown more than Peru since 2001, according to the IMF. Its mineral-rich, $168 billion economy jumped 73 percent from 2001 to 2010. Peru, which defaulted on its sovereign debt in the mid-1980s and suffered years of runaway inflation and the terrorism of the Shining Path insurgency, now boasts a solid government-debt-to-GDP ratio of 23 percent compared with 93 percent for the U.S.
The World Bank reports that Peru has lifted more than 65 percent of its 29 million people out of poverty from less than 50 percent in 2000. And Lima, a sprawling city of 9 million that has long been emblematic of Third World misery, is today bristling with construction cranes and new shopping centers. The Plaza San Martin, in its historic center, which used to be overrun by child thieves known as piranhas, is now ringed with bustling sidewalk cafes.
State of Crisis
“Our generation grew up in a constant state of crisis, and for the first time, we see a different reality,” says Luis Enrique Pardo-Figueroa, 48, a Lima-based lawyer who represents industrial companies. “We feel like Peru is a viable country.”
Rodriguez-Pastor has focused his conglomerate of supermarkets, department stores, fast-food restaurants, hotels and movie theaters directly on Peru’s rising tide of consumers. The group, which is on course to produce $3 billion in revenue this year, has even started developing for-profit private elementary schools that immerse students as young as 3 years old in English. Rodriguez-Pastor and his family control these assets through IFH Peru, a private holding company.
Intergroup Financial Services Corp. (IFS), his flagship, is a consumer-banking and insurance group that trades on the Lima Stock Exchange. Known as Interbank in Peru, the company is the country’s No. 4 financial services firm, with more than $8 billion in assets.
106 Percent Return
The bank’s return on equity, which shows how well it manages its capital, was 32 percent in the first quarter compared with an average ROE of 7.7 percent for U.S. retail banks. As of Aug. 3, Intergroup’s shares had returned 120 percent since the company’s initial public offering on June 20, 2007.
The stock’s performance has made Rodriguez-Pastor a billionaire: IFH Peru owns a 71 percent stake in Intergroup Financial. In March, he also raised a $350 million private- equity fund with outside investors under the name Nexus Group, which buys stakes in many of IFH Peru’s companies.
“Carlos Rodriguez-Pastor understood that our economic growth would require modernized offerings,” former Peruvian President Alan Garcia, who was set to step down on July 28 after completing his second non-consecutive term in office, said in an interview at the presidential palace in Lima. “He built shopping centers in parts of the country where none had existed before. I believe Interbank is, perhaps, the most modern company in Peru.”
Growth in Jeopardy
This new Peru was thrown into doubt on June 5 when Ollanta Humala, a former army lieutenant colonel, was elected president after promising more programs to help the poor. Humala has long- standing ties to Venezuelan President Hugo Chavez, and in the past, he embraced the socialist firebrand’s policies of nationalization. Humala supports steep tax hikes on mining operators to fund anti-poverty initiatives and the introduction of a national pension system financed solely from tax revenue. He has pledged not to nationalize Peru’s natural gas reserves and to respect private enterprise. The Lima Stock Exchange has increased less than 1 percent from the election through Aug. 3, and Intergroup slid 10 percent.
“People feel our growth could be in jeopardy,” says Pedro Pablo Kuczynski, Peru’s finance minister, who was prime minister from 2001 to 2006 and a presidential candidate this year for a center-right coalition party.
Fled by Foot
Rodriguez-Pastor says he’s confident that Peruvian consumers will keep spending. IFH Peru’s real-estate development arm, headed by Carlos Casa-bonne, is building Interbank villages in Peru’s provinces that bring together the company’s numerous businesses in one location to maximize sales.
In Chimbote, an industrial city on the north coast, the company is financing the construction of 5,000 houses around a town center that features a new courthouse. Interbank will supply home-owners with their mortgages, and the $170 million development will be anchored by the company’s Plaza Vea supermarket, its InkaFarma pharmacy and its movie theater, private school and burger joint.
“We are in full development mode, and unless there are some crazy things that happen in the next five years, I see no need to slow down,” Rodriguez-Pastor says. “We only have Plan A; there is no Plan B.”
Savored the Action
Rodriguez-Pastor was 9 years old when General Juan Velasco Alvarado seized power in a nonviolent coup in 1968. Rodriguez- Pastor’s father, Carlos, chief executive officer of Peru’s central bank, resisted Velasco’s efforts to nationalize industries. When Velasco ordered his arrest in March 1969, Carlos Sr. fled by foot across the Ecuadorian border and eventually settled with his wife and six children in Lafayette, California, a suburb east of San Francisco.
Carlos Sr. went to work as an international banker at Wells Fargo & Co. (WFC) Rodriguez-Pastor enrolled at the University of California, Berkeley, in 1979 and worked as a teller in a Wells Fargo branch for four years to pay for school. He forced himself to overcome his shyness by taking a job conducting marketing surveys in a suburban shopping mall.
After earning a bachelor’s degree in social studies, Rodriguez-Pastor went on to receive an MBA at Dartmouth College in Hanover, New Hampshire, in 1988. He then moved to New York and became co-head of the emerging-markets sales and trading desk at Citigroup Inc.
He savored the action on Wall Street, and in 1993, he jumped at the chance to set up a New York-based hedge fund at Banco Santander SA (SAN) with fellow Citi alumni Hari Hariharan and Manuel Balbontin. Called New World Investments, the firm focused on emerging markets.
Returns to Peru
By 1994, Carlos Sr. had returned to Peru and led a group of investors that acquired a distressed 98-year-old firm called Banco Internacional del Peru from the government for $51 million. The next year, he asked his son to come and help him run it.
Rodriguez-Pastor, then 36, was torn. He was determined to make his own way without his father’s help, and he loved his hedge-fund career. He also had a long-standing agreement to work with his dad once they each managed about the same amount of money. Rodriguez-Pastor was overseeing $1 billion at New World compared with the $600 million that Carlos Sr. managed in Lima. He agreed to return to Peru for a spell.
“I wanted my independence, but my heart was always in Latin America,” he says, sitting at a table heaped with platters of grilled octopus and other Peruvian delicacies at Central, a Lima eatery. “So I said, ‘Let’s see how this goes.’”
Assumes Full Control
Four months after father and son joined forces, Carlos Sr., then 60, suffered a fatal heart attack on a treadmill during a business trip to Detroit. Rodriguez-Pastor, who had invested in the bank, now assumed control of the company and considered selling it. Peru, then in the throes of President Alberto Fujimori’s autocratic rule, was roiled by corruption scandals and the aftershocks of the war on Marxist insurgencies.
Yet the government had curbed inflation largely through introduction of a new currency, the nuevo sol, and gross domestic product had rallied almost 13 percent in 1994. Rodriguez-Pastor bet that Peru was stabilizing and opted to stay at what is now Interbank. There was only one problem: He didn’t know how to run a retail bank.
So Rodriguez-Pastor called Thomas Brown, an analyst at Donaldson, Lufkin & Jenrette Inc. in New York who took clients on tours of U.S. banks. Rodriguez-Pastor showed up for Brown’s 1996 trip with five deputies in tow, and they visited Commerce Bank and Wells Fargo. They quizzed executives on everything from customer service to credit card management, to locating ATMs.
Balloon-Filled Playrooms
“What he really wanted to know was: How do you get engaged front-line employees? How do you get them motivated?” says Brown, who now runs a New York-based hedge fund called Second Curve Capital LLC.
Rodriguez-Pastor figured that the only way to break into a market dominated by Banco de Credito del Peru was salesmanship. Emulating marketing maestros such as former Southwest Airlines Co. CEO Herb Kelleher, he cultivated a loose corporate culture that turned branches into balloon-filled playrooms for kids and encouraged employees to sell products with humor.
Rodriguez-Pastor, who shuttles between Lima and an apartment in Manhattan, has surrounded himself with Ivy League- trained Peruvian executives willing to perform in company talent shows. He introduced his management philosophy by riding a Harley-Davidson on stage dressed as Elvis Presley at the company party in 1996.
Sense of Urgency
He’s also an exacting, detail-obsessed boss who’s fond of posing as a customer in his supermarkets to see how well clerks know their shelves. And he imparts his sense of urgency on his managers, says Luis Felipe Castellanos, the retail bank’s CEO and a former investment banker at Salomon Smith Barney in New York.
“I can come out dressed as a clown one day, but we have to hit our goals every month,” says Castellanos, 40, a Dartmouth grad.
Rodriguez-Pastor’s push into retailing came about almost by accident. In 1996, he negotiated a deal to place Interbank mini branches in stores operated by Grupo de Supermercados Wong, the No. 1 grocery chain in Peru. He dressed up as a giant carrot and handed out credit card promotions at the markets. By 2003, Interbank was operating more than 20 percent of its outlets inside Wong supermarkets. Negotiations to renew the deal stalled.
A Serious Threat
“That posed a serious threat,” says Juan Carlos Vallejo, head of Interseguro, Interbank’s insurance unit. “So Carlos decided to go out and buy our own supermarkets.”
In 2003, Interbank acquired a troubled chain of 30 Peruvian supermarkets owned by Dutch retailer Royal Ahold NV for only $70 million and transferred its mini branches from Wong stores. Eight years later, Interbank’s Supermercados Peruanos unit, with 68 stores and plans for nine more, expects to record $1 billion in revenue in 2011 compared with $787 million for the bank.
Rodriguez-Pastor says he wants to take his retail group public in the next 12 to 24 months. And his real-estate unit, in partnership with a Peruvian builder, plans to break ground next year on IFH Peru’s most ambitious venture to date: a $500 million project designed by Pritzker Architecture Prize-winning architect Jean Nouvel that will place three office towers, a luxury hotel, 300 residences and a shopping mall featuring IFH Peru stores on 16 acres of the Lima waterfront.
Sheepish Billionaire
Rodriguez-Pastor’s big plans might backfire if Chinese demand for metals, Peru’s No. 1 export, ebbs. And should Humala, who was to take office on July 28, pursue radical tax and spending policies, investors may export their capital to more- favorable countries.
There’s no sign of worry inside the mammoth tent at IFH Peru’s annual party. Several young women dressed as Morticia Addams ask Rodriguez-Pastor, beer in hand, to pose with them for a smartphone photo. The billionaire looks sheepish afterward.
“I’m a very public figure inside my company but not on the outside,” he says. As IFH Peru grows more influential, and Rodriguez-Pastor’s wealth mounts, his days of anonymity are coming to an end.

The Bilingual Advantage

2011-06-01T10:44:00.001-05:00

www.nytimes.com
May 30, 2011
By CLAUDIA DREIFUS
A cognitive neuroscientist, Ellen Bialystok has spent almost 40 years learning about how bilingualism sharpens the mind. Her good news: Among other benefits, the regular use of two languages appears to delay the onset of Alzheimer’s disease symptoms. Dr. Bialystok, 62, a distinguished research professor of psychology at York University in Toronto, was awarded a $100,000 Killam Prize last year for her contributions to social science. We spoke for two hours in a Washington hotel room in February and again, more recently, by telephone. An edited version of the two conversations follows.

Q. How did you begin studying bilingualism?

A. You know, I didn’t start trying to find out whether bilingualism was bad or good. I did my doctorate in psychology: on how children acquire language. When I finished graduate school, in 1976, there was a job shortage in Canada for Ph.D.’s. The only position I found was with a research project studying second language acquisition in school children. It wasn’t my area. But it was close enough.

As a psychologist, I brought neuroscience questions to the study, like “How does the acquisition of a second language change thought?” It was these types of questions that naturally led to the bilingualism research. The way research works is, it takes you down a road. You then follow that road.

Q. So what exactly did you find on this unexpected road?

A. As we did our research, you could see there was a big difference in the way monolingual and bilingual children processed language. We found that if you gave 5- and 6-year-olds language problems to solve, monolingual and bilingual children knew, pretty much, the same amount of language.

But on one question, there was a difference. We asked all the children if a certain illogical sentence was grammatically correct: “Apples grow on noses.” The monolingual children couldn’t answer. They’d say, “That’s silly” and they’d stall. But the bilingual children would say, in their own words, “It’s silly, but it’s grammatically correct.” The bilinguals, we found, manifested a cognitive system with the ability to attend to important information and ignore the less important.

Q. How does this work — do you understand it?

A. Yes. There’s a system in your brain, the executive control system. It’s a general manager. Its job is to keep you focused on what is relevant, while ignoring distractions. It’s what makes it possible for you to hold two different things in your mind at one time and switch between them.

If you have two languages and you use them regularly, the way the brain’s networks work is that every time you speak, both languages pop up and the executive control system has to sort through everything and attend to what’s relevant in the moment. Therefore the bilinguals use that system more, and it’s that regular use that makes that system more efficient.

Q. One of your most startling recent findings is that bilingualism helps forestall the symptoms of Alzheimer’s disease. How did you come to learn this?

A. We did two kinds of studies. In the first, published in 2004, we found that normally aging bilinguals had better cognitive functioning than normally aging monolinguals. Bilingual older adults performed better than monolingual older adults on executive control tasks. That was very impressive because it didn’t have to be that way. It could have turned out that everybody just lost function equally as they got older.

That evidence made us look at people who didn’t have normal cognitive function. In our next studies , we looked at the medical records of 400 Alzheimer’s patients. On average, the bilinguals showed Alzheimer’s symptoms five or six years later than those who spoke only one language. This didn’t mean that the bilinguals didn’t have Alzheimer’s. It meant that as the disease took root in their brains, they were able to continue functioning at a higher level. They could cope with the disease for longer.

Q. So high school French is useful for something other than ordering a special meal in a restaurant?

A. Sorry, no. You have to use both languages all the time. You won’t get the bilingual benefit from occasional use.

Q. One would think bilingualism might help with multitasking — does it?

A. Yes, multitasking is one of the things the executive control system handles. We wondered, “Are bilinguals better at multitasking?” So we put monolinguals and bilinguals into a driving simulator. Through headphones, we gave them extra tasks to do — as if they were driving and talking on cellphones. We then measured how much worse their driving got. Now, everybody’s driving got worse. But the bilinguals, their driving didn’t drop as much. Because adding on another task while trying to concentrate on a driving problem, that’s what bilingualism gives you — though I wouldn’t advise doing this.

Q. Has the development of new neuroimaging technologies changed your work?

A. Tremendously. It used to be that we could only see what parts of the brain lit up when our subjects performed different tasks. Now, with the new technologies, we can see how all the brain structures work in accord with each other.

In terms of monolinguals and bilinguals, the big thing that we have found is that the connections are different. So we have monolinguals solving a problem, and they use X systems, but when bilinguals solve the same problem, they use others. One of the things we’ve seen is that on certain kinds of even nonverbal tests, bilingual people are faster. Why? Well, when we look in their brains through neuroimaging, it appears like they’re using a different kind of a network that might include language centers to solve a completely nonverbal problem. Their whole brain appears to rewire because of bilingualism.

Q. Bilingualism used to be considered a negative thing — at least in the United States. Is it still?

A. Until about the 1960s, the conventional wisdom was that bilingualism was a disadvantage. Some of this was xenophobia. Thanks to science, we now know that the opposite is true.

Q. Many immigrants choose not to teach their children their native language. Is this a good thing?

A. I’m asked about this all the time. People e-mail me and say, “I’m getting married to someone from another culture, what should we do with the children?” I always say, “You’re sitting on a potential gift.”

There are two major reasons people should pass their heritage language onto children. First, it connects children to their ancestors. The second is my research: Bilingualism is good for you. It makes brains stronger. It is brain exercise.

Q. Are you bilingual?

A. Well, I have fully bilingual grandchildren because my daughter married a Frenchman. When my daughter announced her engagement to her French boyfriend, we were a little surprised. It’s always astonishing when your child announces she’s getting married. She said, “But Mom, it’ll be fine, our children will be bilingual!”

"Diary of Facebook" Preview

2011-03-31T13:52:00.000-05:00

Jennifer Aniston - Goes Viral - Smartwater

2011-03-10T10:43:00.000-05:00

Sex Symbol Jennifer Aniston + Smartwater = Viral YouTube Marketing

Full Transcript

("Like A G6" is a song from Far East Movement's 2010 album Free Wired)

Like a G6, Like A G6
Now – Now – Now – Now – I’m feelin so fly like a G6

Jennifer Aniston (born February 11, 1969): Cut Cut Cut! Hi

Keenan Cahill: Hi

JA: How you doing?

KC: I’m good

JA: What are you doing?

KC: I’m lip singing!

JA: Ya, I know that, and that’s really really adorable! But ah, do you – do you know any songs about water?

KC: No

JA: Hi, I’m Jen Aniston and I’m here to talk to you about SmartWater. But in this day of age apparently I can’t just do that, can I? I can’t just tell you that SmartWater is the smartest, best tasting water that’s out there. I have to make a video apparently that turns into a virus!

Internet Boys: Viral

JA: So,

Internet Boys: We need the video to go viral

JA: Right, sorry viral! Thank you. This is why I have these three lovely internet boys here to help me, so, apparently well, animals are huge on line, do we have animals.

(Jennifer Aniston - Holds Pupppy)
JA: Oh your, ah, (kisses the puppy) so sweet!

(Jennifer Aniston - Parrott on arm)
JA: Can you say: “I love SmartWater”

(Jennifer Aniston - Pupppies jump in her crossed legs)
No, no, no, out of there

(Jennifer Aniston - Parrott on arm)
“I love SmartWater”

Parrott: Rachel I love your hair

(Jennifer Aniston surrounded by puppies)

JA: That’s enough, I don’t want, lets try to think of something else.

(baby annimation dancing in sync)

JA: Okay, well that’s adorable, look at you guys! Look at them, this, wait! (babies dancing samba) What are you doing? No No No! No dirty dancing babies.

Internet Boys: It will get us more views

JA: It will also get us arrested

JA: Babies stop that, you really can’t do that, yet, where’s the mommy?

(Paul Vasquez - HungryBear9562)
Full on. Double rainbow all the way across the sky!

JA: What’s going on?

PV: Oh, my god

JA: Hi, honey, are you okay?

PV: Its so beautiful! (sobbing with amazement)

JA: Come on, let’s get you up! Here have some SmartWater,

PV: (sobbing with amazement)

JA: What did they do to you?

JA: Anything else? What’s left?

Brad Wollack: Oh, my god, Jen Aniston, I’ve been in love with you forever.

(Jennifer Aniston kicks Brad Wollack in the private area)

JA: Sorry, apparently, that’s worth about 100,000 hits!

BW: Not for me

JA: God, is it, is it hot in here? (swings hair and drinks water) (laughs) I’m fired! Well in closing I would like to say that SmartWater is the purest tasting water there is! What are we gonna call this video?

Internet Boys: Jen Anniston’s sex tape!

JA: I love it!

(Glaceau - SmartWater - smart because it's made that way)

From lybio.net

Mario Vargas Llosa's Nobel Prize speech

2010-12-08T08:40:00.001-05:00

Longing for the Lines That Had Us at Hello

2010-10-22T21:20:00.000-05:00

http://www.nytimes.com/

By MICHAEL CIEPLY
LOS ANGELES — Have we heard the last (truly memorable) word from Hollywood?

Probably not, but it’s been a while since the movies had everybody parroting a great line.

Like, say, “Go ahead, make my day.” That was from “Sudden Impact,” written by Joseph Stinson and others, more than 27 years ago.

Sticky movie lines were everywhere as recently as the 1990s. But they appear to be evaporating from a film world in which the memorable one-liner — a brilliant epigram, a quirky mantra, a moment in a bottle — is in danger of becoming a lost art.

Life was like a box of chocolates, per “Forrest Gump,” released in 1994 and written by Eric Roth, based on the novel by Winston Groom. “Show me the money!” howled mimics of “Jerry Maguire,” written by Cameron Crowe in 1996. Two years later, after watching “The Big Lebowski,” written by Ethan and Joel Coen, we told one another that “the Dude abides.”

But lately, “not so much” — to steal a few words from “Borat: Cultural Learnings of America for Make Benefit Glorious Nation of Kazakhstan.” Released in 2006, that film was written by Sacha Baron Cohen and others and is one of a very few in the last five years to have left some lines behind.

Maybe it’s that filmmaking is more visual, or that other cultural noise is drowning out the zingers.

“I’m at a loss, because the lines for a while were coming fast and furious,” said Laurence Mark, who had us at “hello” as a producer of “Jerry Maguire,” and is a producer of “How Do You Know,” which is written and directed by James L. Brooks and scheduled to open just before Christmas. (In 1987 Mr. Brooks mapped the media future in seven words from “Broadcast News”: “Let’s never forget, we’re the real story.”)

If film lines don’t stick the way they used to, Mr. Mark said, it is not for lack of wit and wisdom in Hollywood. “What I don’t believe is that the writers are less talented,” he insisted. “I don’t think that’s true, I just don’t.”

Speaking by phone recently, however, Mr. Mark was hard-pressed to come up with a line that stuck with him in the last few years. “I will try my darnedest to think of one,” he promised.

It may be that a Web-driven culture of irony latches onto the movie lines for something other than brilliance, or is downright allergic to the kind of polish that was once applied to the best bits of dialogue. Thus one of the most frequently repeated lines of the last year came from “Clash of the Titans,” which scored an unimpressive 28 percent positive rating among critics on the Rottentomatoes.com Web site after it was released by Warner Brothers in April.

“Release the Kraken!” thundered Liam Neeson as Zeus — spawning good-natured mockery on obscene T-shirts and in Kraken-captioned photos of angry kitty cats.

In truth, a good deal of thought went into the line. “When we came on, one of our conditions was that the line had to be in the movie,” said Matt Manfredi, who, with his writing partner, Phil Hay, joined in revising a script by Travis Beacham.

A predecessor film in 1981, written by Beverley Cross, had used the line, alongside another formulation that called for the Kraken to be “let loose,” Mr. Manfredi recalled. “In terms of poetry, ‘release’ worked for us,” he said.

“Machete don’t text,” from “Machete,” written by Robert Rodriguez and Álvaro Rodriguez, also traveled well on the Internet this year. But “can you imagine comparing that to ‘round up the usual suspects?’ ” said Mr. Mark, invoking a much-quoted line from “Casablanca,” the 1942 film that marked the golden era of movie quotations.

Written by Julius Epstein, Philip Epstein and Howard Koch, based on a play by Murray Burnett and Joan Alison, with uncredited work by Casey Robinson, “Casablanca” placed six lines in a list of 100 top movie quotations compiled by the American Film Institute in 2005, with help from a panel of 1,500 film artists, critics and historians.

“Frankly, my dear, I don’t give a damn,” was first on the list. Those words, of course, come from “Gone With the Wind,” whose screenplay, based on the novel by Margaret Mitchell, was written seven decades ago by Sidney Howard and a number of uncredited writers.

Only one post-’90s line made the institute’s ranking. That would be “My precious.” The line came in 2002 from “The Lord of the Rings: The Two Towers,” written by Fran Walsh, Philippa Boyens, Stephen Sinclair and Peter Jackson, based on a novel by J. R. R. Tolkien.

When the film institute updates its list in another five years, at least a handful of lines from the current era will perhaps have aged into greatness, alongside classics like “Forget it, Jake, it’s Chinatown,” from “Chinatown,” with a screenplay by Robert Towne, in 1974, and “Hasta la vista, baby,” from “Terminator 2: Judgment Day,” written by James Cameron and William Wisher Jr., in 1991.

“I drink your milkshake” is a possibility, said Bob Gazzale, the institute’s chief executive. Those words, connoting triumph, came from “There Will Be Blood,” written in 2007 by Paul Thomas Anderson and based on a novel by Upton Sinclair.

Great movie lines might communicate insouciance (“La-di-da”), rage (“You talking to me?”) or something more cosmic (“May the Force be with you”). But they are almost never so much about Noël Coward-like turns of phrase as simply capturing “indelible character moments,” says Tom Rothman, a chairman of the Fox movie operation, who has also introduced regular showings of classic films on the Fox Movie Channel.

(In a window display at the headquarters of the Writers Guild of America West and the Writers Guild Foundation here, some of the more elaborate wordsmithing comes from Billy Wilder and his various associates. Even Mr. Coward would be hard-pressed to one-up a line from a script by Mr. Wilder and Charles Brackett for “The Major and the Minor.” The line is spoken by Robert Benchley, and Mr. Wilder attributed it to him, although Mr. Benchley, in turn, apparently attributed it to his friend Charles Butterworth: “Why don’t you get out of that wet coat and into a dry martini?”)

And Mr. Rothman cautions against believing that the great lines are all behind.

“It just takes a little time to sort the wheat from the chaff,” he said in an e-mail last week. Mr. Rothman predicted, for instance, that “Wall Street: Money Never Sleeps,” with a script by Allan Loeb and Stephen Schiff, would have a keeper with “Stop telling lies about me, and I’ll stop telling the truth about you.” (Written by Stanley Weiser and Oliver Stone, the original “Wall Street,” from 1987, will ever be remembered for declaring that “greed, for lack of a better word, is good.”)

Meanwhile, a call to Eric Roth, the veteran screenwriter behind movies like “Munich” and “The Curious Case of Benjamin Button,” found him scratching to find an unstoppable one-liner in “The Social Network.”

That film was written by Aaron Sorkin and directed by David Fincher, and in a bit of dialogue that inspired Web parodies galore, it has the Facebook co-founder Mark Zuckerberg “talking about taking the entire social experience of college and putting it online.”

Mr. Roth said that he deeply admired “The Social Network,” and that he thought that it could secure its place in history with a simple bon mot.

But “is there a great line” in it? he pondered. Its best lines, Mr. Roth said, were not as “sophomoric” as his own much-quoted speeches from “Forrest Gump.” Who could forget “Stupid is as stupid does”?

Neither are they quite as angry as Paddy Chayefsky’s mad-as-hell work in “Network,” from 1976, he noted.

But, Mr. Roth said, there is still time for viewers to find a word or two that will sum up “The Social Network” — much as “plastics” did for “The Graduate,” with a script by Calder Willingham and Buck Henry, in 1967. Besides, memorable words have a way of popping up when they are least expected. “The minute you write this, you’ll be proved wrong,” Mr. Roth predicted.

As Quentin Tarantino wrote in “Inglourious Basterds,” just last year, “That’s a bingo.”

Nine months after the ski trip

2010-09-09T08:03:00.000-05:00

www.livinginperu.com

Jack decided to go skiing with his buddy, Bob. So they loaded up Jack's minivan and headed north.

After driving for a few hours, they got caught in a terrible blizzard.

They pulled into a nearby farm and asked the attractive lady who answered the door if they could spend the night.

"I realize it's terrible weather out there and I have this huge house all to myself, but I'm recently widowed," she explained. "I'm afraid the neighbors will talk if I let you stay in my house."

"Don't worry," Jack said. "We'll be happy to sleep in the barn, and if the weather breaks, we'll be gone at first light." The lady agreed, and the two men found their way to the barn and settled in for the night.

Come morning, the weather had cleared, and they got on their way and enjoyed a great weekend of skiing.

But about nine months later, Jack got an unexpected letter from an attorney.

It took him a few minutes to figure it out, but he finally determined that it was from the attorney of that attractive widow he had met on the ski weekend. He dropped in on his friend Bob and asked, "Bob, do you remember that good-looking widow from the farm we stayed at on our ski holiday up north about nine months ago?"

"Yes, I do." said Bob

"Did you, er, happen to get up in the middle of the night, go up to the house and pay her a visit?"

"Well, um, yes!," Bob said, a little embarrassed about being found out, "I have to admit that I did."

"And did you happen to give her my name instead of telling her your name?"

Bob's face turned beet red and said, "Yeah, look, I'm sorry, buddy, I'm afraid I did. Why do you ask?"

"She just died and left me everything."

The Wife and The Maid

2010-08-12T13:59:00.000-05:00

The maid asks for a salary increase. The wife was very upset about and decided to talk in private about her request.

The wife said, "Now Isabel, why do you want a pay increase?"

Isabel: Well Señora, there are three reasons why I want an increase. The first is that I iron better than you.

Wife: Who said you iron better than me?

Isabel: Your husband says so.

Wife: Oh.

Isabel: The second reason is that I am a better cook than you.

Wife: Nonsense, who said you are a better cook than me?

Isabel: Your husband did.

Wife: Oh.

Isabel: The third reason is that I am better at sex than you. Now the woman was furious and red in the face.

Wife: Did my husband say that as well?

Isabel: No Señora, the gardener did.

Wife: Oh. So how much of a raise did you have in mind?

The Name of the Game

2010-07-18T04:15:00.001-05:00

from www.newyorker.com
by Hendrik Hertzberg
July 12, 2010

F.A. (Football Association) Do Americans hate football? Not regular football, of course. Not football as in first and ten, going long, late hits, special teams, pneumatic cheerleaders in abbreviated costumes, serial brain concussions—the game that every American loves, apart from a few, uh, soreheads. Not that one. The other one. The one whose basic principle of play is the kicking of a ball by a foot. The one that the rest of the world calls “football,” except when it’s called (for example) futbal, futball, fútbol, futebol, fotball, fótbolti, fußball, or (as in Finland) jalkapallo, which translates literally as “football.” That one.

The question arises now—as it has arisen periodically for eight decades—on account of the World Cup, the quadrennial global tournament of the sport that goes here by the name of soccer. “Soccer,” by the way, is not some Yankee neologism but a word of impeccably British origin. It owes its coinage to a domestic rival, rugby, whose proponents were fighting a losing battle over the football brand around the time that we were preoccupied with a more sanguinary civil war. Rugby’s nickname was (and is) rugger, and its players are called ruggers—a bit of upper-class twittery, as in “champers,” for champagne, or “preggers,” for enceinte. “Soccer” is rugger’s equivalent in Oxbridge-speak. The “soc” part is short for “assoc,” which is short for “association,” as in “association football,” the rules of which were codified in 1863 by the all-powerful Football Association, or FA—the FA being to the U.K. what the NFL, the NBA, and MLB are to the U.S. But where were we? Ah, yes. Do Americans hate it? Soccer, that is?

Here’s one plausible answer: we don’t. The non-haters include the nearly twenty million of us who stayed indoors on a balmy Saturday afternoon to watch Ghana join England, Slovenia, and Algeria on this year’s list of countries beaten or tied by the United States in the World Cup. We were disappointed—Ghana won, 2-1, sending our team home from South Africa. Still, 19.4 million, the number registered by the Nielsen ratings service, is a lot of people. It’s not just more people than had ever watched a soccer game on American television before. It’s also more people than, on average, watched last year’s World Series games, which had the advantage of being broadcast live in prime time. It’s millions more than watched the Kentucky Derby or the final round of the Masters golf tournament or the Daytona 500, the jewel in NASCAR’s crown. And we don’t just watch. We do. An estimated five million grownups play soccer in these United States on a regular basis. Kids are mad for it, especially little ones. More American children play it, informally and in organized leagues, than any other team sport.

Soccer may be an import, as is our entire nonaboriginal population, but it’s well on its way to becoming as American as pizza, tacos, and French fries. (And motherhood: Sarah Palin notwithstanding, “soccer moms”—a term introduced to the political world in 1996, by a Republican consultant—are the proverbial key demographic.) Of course, soccer has its challenges here, many of them owing to its relative newness in the arena of American commerce. The enthusiasm of toddlers and post-toddlers is all very well, but, if that were enough to do the trick, Nike would have a division devoted to dodgeball. Compared with its established rivals, big-time soccer is ill suited to televisual exploitation. The game’s continuous, almost uninterrupted flow of action denies it a steady supply of intervals for the advertising of beer and the fetching of same from the refrigerator. The expedient of selling space on the players’ bodies—plastering their uniforms with corporate logos from neck to navel—is less than fully satisfactory. Also, the soccer pitch is vaster than the gridiron or the diamond, and the choreography of the game demands the widest of angles. On TV, the players are tiny—a problem for those as yet unequipped with enormous high-def flat screens.

Do Americans hate soccer? Well, some of us dislike it immoderately—not so much the game itself as what it is taken to represent. This spring, anti-soccer grumbling on the political right spiked as sharply as the sale of those great big TVs. Back in 1986, Jack Kemp, the former Buffalo Bills quarterback turned Republican congressman, took the House floor to oppose a resolution supporting America’s (ultimately successful) bid to host the 1994 World Cup. Our football, he declared, embodies “democratic capitalism”; their football is “European socialist.” Kemp, though, was kidding; he was sending himself up. Today’s conservative soccer scolds are not so good-natured. Their complaints are variations on the theme of un-Americanness. “I hate it so much, probably because the rest of the world likes it so much,” Glenn Beck, the Fox News star, proclaimed. (Also, “Barack Obama’s policies are the World Cup.”) What really bugs “silly leftist critics,” the Washington Times editorialized, is that “the most popular sports in America—football, baseball, and basketball—originated here in the Land of the Free.” At the Web site of the American Enterprise Institute, the Washington Post columnist Marc Thiessen, formerly a speechwriter for George W. Bush, wrote, “Soccer is a socialist sport.” Also, “Soccer is collectivist.” Also, “Perhaps in the age of President Obama, soccer will finally catch on in America. But I suspect that socializing Americans’ taste in sports may be a tougher task than socializing our healthcare system.” And then there’s G. Gordon Liddy. Soccer, Liddy informed his radio listeners,

comes from Latin America, and first we have to get into this term, the Hispanics. That would indicate Spanish language, and yes, these people in Latin America speak Spanish. That is because conquistadores who came over from Spain—you know, tall Caucasians, not very many of them—conquered the Indians, and the Indians adopted the language of their conquerors. But what we call Hispanics now really are South American Indians. And this game, I think, originated with the South American Indians, and instead of a ball they used to use the head, the decapitated head, of an enemy warrior.

Liddy’s guest, a conservative “media critic” named Dan Gainor, responded cautiously (“soccer is such a basic game, you can probably trace its origins back a couple of different ways”), while allowing that “the whole Hispanic issue” is among the reasons “the left” is “pushing it in schools around the country.”

Do we hate soccer? That depends on who we think “we” are. One of the things that Franklin Foer’s charming book “How Soccer Explains the World” explains is how soccer, along with its globalizing, unifying effects, provides plenty of opportunities for expressions of nationalism, which need not be illiberal, and for tribalism, which almost always is. The soccerphobia of the right is tribalism masquerading as nationalism. One in four of those twenty million viewers of the U.S.-Ghana match was watching it on Univision, America’s leading Spanish-language network. The three others were—well, who knows. Liberals, probably, or worse. Enough. A yellow card is in order here, maybe a red one. Soccer may never be “America’s game” (though it’s already one of them), but America is game for soccer. We’re the Land of the Free, aren’t we? Can’t we be the land of the free kick, too?

Pad Thai

2010-04-21T15:42:00.000-05:00

Recipe: Pad Thai
Time: 25 minutes

4 ounces fettuccine-width rice stick noodles
1/4 cup peanut oil
1/4 cup tamarind paste
1/4 cup fish sauce (nam pla)
1/3 cup honey
2 tablespoons rice vinegar
1/2 teaspoon red pepper flakes, or to taste
1/4 cup chopped scallions
1 garlic clove, minced
2 eggs
1 small head Napa cabbage, shredded (about 4 cups)
1 cup mung bean sprouts
1/2 pound peeled shrimp, pressed tofu or a combination
1/2 cup roasted peanuts, chopped
1/4 cup chopped fresh cilantro
2 limes, quartered.

1. Put noodles in a large bowl and add boiling water to cover. Let sit until noodles are just tender; check every 5 minutes or so to make sure they do not get too soft. Drain, drizzle with one tablespoon peanut oil to keep from sticking and set aside. Meanwhile, put tamarind paste, fish sauce, honey and vinegar in a small saucepan over medium-low heat and bring just to a simmer. Stir in red pepper flakes and set aside.

2. Put remaining 3 tablespoons oil in a large skillet over medium-high heat; when oil shimmers, add scallions and garlic and cook for about a minute. Add eggs to pan; once they begin to set, scramble them until just done. Add cabbage and bean sprouts and continue to cook until cabbage begins to wilt, then add shrimp or tofu (or both).

3. When shrimp begin to turn pink and tofu begins to brown, add drained noodles to pan along with sauce. Toss everything together to coat with tamarind sauce and combine well. When noodles are warmed through, serve, sprinkling each dish with peanuts and garnishing with cilantro and lime wedges.

Yield: 4 servings.

www.nytimes.com

Portraits by Mario Testino: Photography Exhibition

2010-04-15T16:42:00.001-05:00

For the first time in his career, one of the most influential personalities in fashion, photographer Mario Testino, will present an exhibition in his homeland, Peru. Portraits gathers 90 superb photographs of celebrities like Madonna, Angelina Jolie, Kate Moss, Julia Roberts, The Rolling Stones and Brad Pitt, and was first presented in London, in 2002, very much appraised by the international community. It then went on to Milan, New York, Amsterdam, Tokio and other parts of the World, and is now known to be Testino's most celebrated exhibition.When: Tuesday to Sunday, 10 a.m. - 8 p.m., Saturday, 10 a.m. - 5 p.m. Until May 23Where: Museo de Arte de Lima - Paseo Colón 125, Parque de la Exposición, Cercado de LimaCost: General: S/.6, Students, Child.
www.livinginperu.com

Fiesta de La Vendimia in Ica - Festival

2010-03-04T07:31:00.000-05:00

From www.livinginperu.com

Every year, Ica celebrates the Fiesta de La Vendimia, a festival traditionally known for its celebrations, musical concerts, parades, contests and, of course, the election of the festival's queen. The Fiesta honors Ica's most important agricultural jewel, the grapevine, from which grapes are harvested to make some of the world's most exquisite wines and piscos, and takes place every year during the time of harvest. The whole city participates, and it is estimated that over 200 000 tourists will travel to Ica to be a part of this magnificent festival.

When: March 5 to 15
Where: City of Ica, Ica

New Year's resolutions

2010-01-14T14:38:00.000-05:00

>
Dan: Hello and welcome to this week’s 6 Minute English. I’m Dan Walker Smith and today I’m joined by Kate.
Kate: Hi Dan. Happy New Year!
D: And Happy New Year to you!
K: So what did you do on New Year’s Eve?
D: Well, this New Year I went to a party in East London with lots of friends; lots of dancing. Good times really.
K: That sounds great fun - a great way to bring in the New Year!
D: It was. It was very good indeed. And, of course, as well as celebrations, New
Year is also the traditional time to make resolutions, which are plans to improve yourself. So what were your resolutions this year?
K: I don't actually think I've made any yet, but I suppose now I think about it, I'd like to do more exercise, be healthy and travel more.
D: They sound like good resolutions. The aim of most resolutions is to ‘turn over a new leaf’. That is, to make yourself better by changing your routines and habits. It’s making a fresh or new start in your life.

So the question for this week is:
What is the most common goal for people making New Year’s Resolutions?
Is it:
a) to sort out their finances and money
b) to lose weight
c) to learn a new language?

K: Hmm, that's a tricky one. But thinking about it, we've just had Christmas-time, where people tend to eat an awful lot or overindulge themselves. So I'm going to go for b, to lose weight.
D: OK, we’ll see if you’re right at the end of the programme.

Now generally, there are two main types of resolution:
To give up something is to stop it, such as when someone says they’re giving up smoking or giving up fattening foods.
K: And to take up something is to start a new activity for the first time. For example you can take up the guitar, or take up a new sport. A lot of people say that their New Year’s Resolutions are to give up a bad habit or to take up a new hobby.
D: Now we’re going to hear some of the resolutions a British radio DJ has made for 2010. You're going to hear the expression 'carry on'. Can you explain what this means Kate?
Kate: Sure. Well 'carry on' means to continue to do something as you were before.
So if, for example, last year I went swimming every day, I could say 'I want to carry on going swimming', which means just to continue the same actions as you were doing before.
D: OK, so let's listen. What resolutions does the speaker have for this year?

Extract 1
Right, New Year's Resolutions 2010. It's the end of a decade. I think that what I would
just like to do is carry on working hard; carry on being happy and healthy. So keep on
exercising in the park, keep on eating well and keep on sleeping well. And that’s about it
– nothing else. Nothing too big, nothing too heavy, ‘cause experience tells me that if you try to ask yourself to do too much stuff it will eventually not happen.

K: OK, that was a bit different, as she’s not giving up or taking up anything, but she wants to carry on or continue what she’s already been doing. There are some pretty common or usual resolutions there: doing exercise, eating healthily and sleeping well – quite similar to the ones I made actually.
D: Well, she's not exactly turning over a new leaf in the New Year, but just keeping herself healthy with resolutions she can achieve.
As well as keeping healthy, one of the most common New Year's resolutions in the UK each year is to stop smoking.
K: Yes, and it’s also one of the hardest resolutions to keep, so this year the British government is launching a new campaign for people who want to stop smoking. Have a listen to the next report. Can you hear how many people tried to give up smoking last year and how many actually succeeded?

Extract 2
More than three quarters of a million smokers tried to give up last New Year. But fewer
than 40,000 have managed to keep that resolution.

K: Oh dear, not a great success rate then. Only around five per cent of the smokers managed to keep their resolution.
D: Resolutions are basically promises to yourself, and like promises, you either keep them or break them. That is, you either successful in keeping to your plans, or you're not and you go back to your old habits.
K: Well we’re almost out of time now, so let's go over some of the vocabulary we’ve come across today:
First of all, we had resolution, which is a kind of promise you make to yourself to improve yourself or your actions.

To turn over a new leaf is an expression meaning to make a new start in your life.
To give up something means to stop it.
Whereas, to take up something is to start it for the first time.
Then we heard to carry on, which means to continue with an action that you’re already doing.
And finally to keep or break a resolution, is either to persist with your new changes or to go back to your old routine.
D: Oh and there’s just time to answer the question I asked at the beginning of the show: What is the most common goal for people making New Year’s resolutions? Is it:

a) to sort out their finances and money
b) to lose weight
c) to learn a new language

K: And I said b, to lose weight
D: Actually it's both a and b. Most men want to sort out their finances and most women apparently want to lose weight in the New Year.
K: Ah, a trick question then.
D: A trick question indeed.
K: But I'm sure there must be some women out there who want to sort out their finances.
D: And there must be some men who want to lose weight.
K: Of course! So Dan can you tell me if you have any resolutions for the coming year?
D: I've actually signed up to run a marathon, so I'll be doing that in April. I'm training quite a lot at the moment; it's beginning to kick in.
K: Wow, well that's very impressive. Good luck with this year's resolution.
D: We'll see how it goes in April.
So from all of us here at BBC Learning English, thanks for listening. I hope you're sticking to your resolution and have a very Happy New Year! Goodbye!
K: Goodbye!

Gold vending machine

2010-01-13T17:04:00.000-05:00

From http://www.bbc.co.uk/podcasts/series/how2

Dima: Hello and welcome to this edition of 6 Minute English with me, Dima Kostenko.
Kate: and me, Kate Colin.
D: Kate will be our language guide for today.
Today we'll hear a fascinating report about a new vending machine that's unlike any other. But first - Kate, how would you describe what a vending machine is?
K: Responds...(short dialogue to introduce synonyms, slot machine, dispenser, soft drinks-snacks-newspapers-transport tickets-Mars bars)

D: Well Kate, if you're only using vending machines to buy things like chocolate bars, you are in for a surprise! As Steve Rosenberg, the BBC's correspondent in Berlin has discovered, a German company is planning to install some very different dispensers at stations, airports and shopping centres. Would you like to hear more?

K: Well, hearing all these phrases from you - 'very different' and 'unlike any other'. I must say I'm a bit intrigued.
D: You won't be intrigued for too much longer because in a moment we'll hear from Steve Rosenberg to find out what those machine will be selling. I'll say just one thing: it's something really valuable.
K: OK, let's listen, and as you are listening, try to find out what it is. Also, listen out for these words and phrases. 'On the go goodies', meaning small things that we buy and consume without stopping - like chocolate bars, crisps and other snacks, for example. And - 'precious', which means very expensive and valuable.
D: Here's Steve Rosenberg:

Clip One
I'm standing next to a vending machine at a Berlin railway station. It offers a typical selection of on the go goodies. There are fizzy drinks and crisps, chewing gum... But very soon machines like this one could be selling something far more precious than a packet of peanuts.
As well as chocolate bars you'll be able to buy...gold bars.

D: So Kate, what is it that the new vending machines will be selling?
K: Steve says it isn't going to be 'on the go goodies'. Not chewing gum, not packets of peanuts. It will be the precious metal...gold! Well, sounds interesting, but I am not quite sure I understand… Why would anyone want to by a gold bar from a slot machine?

D: Well apparently, with the global financial crisis more and more people decide that they can no longer rely upon stocks and shares the way they used to.
K: 'Stocks and shares' - that's a useful expression, often heard among business people. It means part of the ownership of a company which people can buy as an investment.

D: Indeed, they can. But in reality many start turning to other types of investment, which they consider safer - like buying precious metals. And with this new slot machine, buying gold simply can't be easier! The price will be adjusted daily, and in the next part Steve Rosenberg quotes some prices at current rates. And here comes your challenge for this week: what currency unit is mentioned?

a) euro
b) dollar
c) pound

Kate, which of these three currencies would you expect to hear in a report about gold, recorded in Germany by a reporter of a British broadcaster?
K: Responds...

D: We'll check your guess later, but first, what's your language point for the second part of the report Kate?
K: It's the expression 'to keep a close eye on', meaning to watch closely. Steve says 'built-in video cameras will be keeping an especially close eye on all the customers', so his word of warning is, watch out how you behave when you use them:

Clip Two
The machine will dispense a gram of gold for about 40 dollars and a 10 gram bar - for just under 350 dollars. But one word of warning: if you put in your money and nothing comes out, don't start banging your fist on this treasure chest - built-in video cameras will be keeping an especially close eye on all the customers.

D: That was our correspondent Steve Rosenberg at a railway station in Berlin.
Now, before we talk about the answer to this week's question, do you mind going through some of today's vocabulary again Kate?
K: Responds...We began by talking about vending machines - that is machines from which small items such as packaged food or drinks can be bought by inserting money. Because cash is inserted through a slot, they are also known colloquially as slot machines. And another synonym is dispensers.

We then mentioned the phrase on the go goodies meaning small things that we buy and consume without stopping - like chocolate bars, crisps and other snacks, for example. And then, the word precious which means very expensive and valuable. We talked briefly about stocks and shares, which means part of the ownership of a company which people can buy as an investment. And finally, the expression to keep a close eye on, meaning to watch very closely.
D: Thanks Kate. Finally, back to our question. Which currency was used in the report to talk about the price of gold?
K: Responds (the choice was euro, dollar and pound and I said… which was correct/wrong…)
D: Responds...I'm afraid that's all we have time for today. Until next week.
Both: Goodbye!

No Country for Old Typewriters: A Well-Used One Heads to Auction

2009-12-01T07:37:00.000-05:00

By PATRICIA COHEN from http://www.nytimes.com/

Cormac McCarthy has written more than a dozen novels, several screenplays, two plays, two short stories, countless drafts, letters and more — and nearly every one of them was tapped out on a portable Olivetti manual typewriter he bought in a Knoxville, Tenn., pawnshop around 1963 for $50.

Lately this dependable machine has been showing irrevocable signs of age. So after his friend and colleague John Miller offered to buy him another, Mr. McCarthy agreed to auction off his Olivetti Lettera 32 and donate the proceeds to the Santa Fe Institute, a nonprofit interdisciplinary scientific research organization with which both men are affiliated.

“He found another one just like this,” a portable Olivetti that looks practically brand new, Mr. McCarthy said from his home in New Mexico. “I think he paid $11, and the shipping was about $19.95.”

Mr. McCarthy, 76, has won a wagon-full of honors including a Pulitzer Prize, a National Book Award and the MacArthur Foundation’s so-called genius grant. Books like “Blood Meridian,” “All the Pretty Horses” and “The Crossing” have propelled him to the top ranks of American fiction writers.

Even nonreaders are familiar with his storytelling since his two most recently published novels, “No Country for Old Men” and the 2007 Pulitzer winner “The Road,” have been made into movies. (“No Country” won best picture and three other Oscars last year.)

Christie’s, which plans to auction the machine on Friday, estimated that it would fetch between $15,000 and $20,000. Mr. McCarthy wrote an authentication letter — typed on the Olivetti, of course — that states:

“It has never been serviced or cleaned other than blowing out the dust with a service station hose. ... I have typed on this typewriter every book I have written including three not published. Including all drafts and correspondence I would put this at about five million words over a period of 50 years.”

Speaking from his home in Santa Fe, Mr. McCarthy said he mistakenly thought that the typewriter was bought in 1958; it was actually a few years later. He had a Royal previously, but before he went off to Europe in the early 1960s, he said, “I tried to find the smallest, lightest typewriter I could find.”

Mr. McCarthy is known for being taciturn, particularly about his writing. He came to realize that not only his working method but even his tools are puzzling to a younger generation.

He remembers one summer when some graduate students were visiting the Santa Fe Institute. “I was in my office clacking away,” he said. “One student peered in and said: ‘Excuse me. What is that?’ ”

“I don’t have some method of working,” he said, adding that he often works on different projects simultaneously. A few years ago, when he was in Ireland, “I worked all day on four different projects,” he said. “I worked two hours on each. I got a lot done, but that’s not usual.”

Glenn Horowitz, a rare-book dealer who is handling the auction for Mr. McCarthy, said: “When I grasped that some of the most complex, almost otherworldly fiction of the postwar era was composed on such a simple, functional, frail-looking machine, it conferred a sort of talismanic quality to Cormac’s typewriter. It’s as if Mount Rushmore was carved with a Swiss Army knife.”

The institute is in a rambling house built in the 1950s that sits on a hill overlooking Santa Fe. “It’s been under not-so-benign neglect,” Mr. McCarthy said.

He is working to help upgrade parts of the house, like the library. It turns out that architecture is one of the many odd jobs that Mr. McCarthy said he had had in his life.

He joined the institute at the invitation of its founder, the physicist Murray Gell-Mann, whom he met at a MacArthur Foundation meeting years ago. “It’s just a great place,” said Mr. McCarthy, whose primary responsibilities at the institute are eating lunch and taking afternoon tea.

He still has a house in Texas. If he had his druthers, he would live there now, except “they wouldn’t move the institute.”

Rafael Benítez's job is safe despite Liverpool's Champions League exit

2009-11-25T10:49:00.000-05:00

by Andy Hunter from http://www.guardian.co.uk/

Wednesday 25 November 2009

Rafael Benítez has been assured his position as Liverpool manager will not be undermined by Champions League failure as he admitted the 2005 winners and 2007 runners-up had only themselves to blame for a damaging group-stage exit. The unequivocal support arrived from the Liverpool managing director, Christian Purslow, who insisted the Anfield club could withstand the financial impact of their early elimination.

David Ngog's fourth-minute goal gave Liverpool victory over Debrecen but a first win in six matches was rendered irrelevant by Fiorentina's defeat of Lyon. The result in Tuscany ensured Fiorentina progressed at Liverpool's expense, and prompted Purslow to issue firm backing for Benítez before his future at the club could come under scrutiny again.

"This will have no bearing on Rafa whatsoever," Purslow said. "He signed a new five-year deal four months ago and in those terms he is four months into a five-year journey. You don't deviate from long‑term plans for people and the way to take the club to the next level because of two late goals against Lyon, and that's what it boils down to."

Purslow is currently searching for new investors willing to meet Tom Hicks's and George Gillett's asking price of £100m for a 25% stake in Liverpool. While that process may be complicated by demotion to the Europa League, Liverpool are expected to suffer a budgetary shortfall of only £2.4m for this season as a consequence of their group exit.

"We budget for a level of performance that maybe fans would not like to be at, it's prudent," the managing director added. "If we have three home games in the Europa League we are equivalent to what we budget for in the Champions League.

"We are very disappointed but we could have played one home leg, one away leg and been out. I like to think we'll be taking 40 or 50,000 fans to Hamburg in May and if we get halfway to doing that we will make more money than we would from one round in the Champions League. It is a missed opportunity financially but it has no effect on budgeted performance, and that's the key thing. Budget prudently and then you don't get negative surprises if football doesn't go the right way."

Purslow's guarantee was the only tangible consolation in Hungary for Benítez, who now travels to Merseyside rivals Everton on Sunday with qualification for next season's Champions League an absolute priority. The Liverpool manager, whose players gathered around a screen to watch the closing minutes from Florence, pinned the blame on his team's exit on Lyon's stoppage-time winner at Anfield, their 90th minute equaliser at Stade Gerland plus a poor first-half display in Italy.

The Liverpool manager said: "You have to be disappointed. We knew we had to win and we did. We can't change what happened in the other match, but at least we did our job. If you look at the games, two late goals made a massive difference. We were not any worse in them than others but we paid for the two late goals against Lyon. It's part of football but it's difficult to control.

"We made mistakes in those games in the last minute, so it's our fault in the end. I'm really disappointed because we had chances in all games and could have won them all."

Benítez also claimed Liverpool's previous success in the Champions League had clouded analysis of this season's struggles in the group. "We have been so good in the last years that people think it is easy to go through in this competition. They think it has to be every year. We could have done it but have to be positive now. Now we have a massive game on Sunday and we have to be ready for it.

"It really hurts, especially in the way we went out. We're in a very bad position and can't win the Champions League now so we will just have to do our best in the next game. A lot of teams don't even reach the Champions League. Because we have qualified for five years in a row people think it's easy, but it's not."

Steven Gerrard, the Liverpool captain, admitted the task of winning the inaugural Europa League in Hamburg next May represented a dispiriting consolation. "The main prize has gone and to be playing in the Europa League is disappointing but we have to accept that, move on and try to win that competition," he said. "The only consolation in this is if we go on and win the secondary one."

Xstrata says Peru projects moving ahead on target

2009-11-25T08:06:00.000-05:00

from http://www.reuters.com/

LIMA, Nov 23 (Reuters) - Xstrata Copper (XTA.L) said on Monday its projects in Peru, among the largest in the country's crisis-tinged mining sector, are on track.
Peru's President Alan Garcia met with top Xstrata executives to discuss the company's developments, which include Las Bambas and Antapaccay.

The meeting included Mick Davis, chief executive officer of Xstrata; Charlie Sartain CEO of Xstrata Copper; and Jose Marun, head of Xstrata operations in Peru.

Xstrata sees production starting at Antapaccay by the end of 2012 or the beginning of 2013, while it expects Las Bambas to be operational by the close of 2014.

Both are copper projects and, together, are forecast to cost some $5.1 billion to develop.

"We're finishing studies in line with prior projections -- without delay. We're moving forward," said Marun.

The investments would be among the biggest since before the start of the global economic crisis and show that large miners are moving to build new mines before the next big upswing in prices.

Peru, a major metals exporter, is the world's third-largest copper producer.

Also on Monday, Marun said weeks of area protests had not affected production at Xstrata's Tintaya copper mine.

Protesters, worried about the security of water supplies, had been blocking roads near the mine for weeks. By Monday, most highways were clear.

"There have been some entry problems at the mine obviously, but operations are calm," said Marun.

Union starts strike at Repsol's Peru oil refinery

2009-11-25T07:57:00.000-05:00

from http://www.reuters.com/

LIMA, Nov 24 (Reuters) - Workers at Repsol's (REP.MC) La Pampilla oil refinery in Peru said on Tuesday they had started a two-day strike to pressure the company for better benefits and to end forced overtime.
La Pampilla, located near the Pacific coast, has a precessing capacity of some 107,000 barrels per day, and is Peru's largest refinery.

The country is a net oil importer and the government is encouraging foreign investment in the sector to boost output.

"It's a 48-hour (strike)," union leader Jose Guerrero told Reuters outside Repsol's corporate office in Lima, Peru's capital.

Roughly 100 workers, wearing blue and orange Repsol vests, were outside the office mid-Monday, carrying protest signs and chanting strike slogans.

Company officials were not immediately available to comment.

On Monday, Repsol said it had taken precautions so that production would not be "significantly affected" by a strike.

FIFA turn down Ireland's replay request

2009-11-20T09:16:00.000-05:00

from http://edition.cnn.com/

London, England (CNN) -- The governing body of world football, FIFA, has turned down the request from the Irish Football Association (FAI) to replay their deciding World Cup play-off game against France.

The controversial match, that was played on Wednesday, has caused a diplomatic storm after French forward Thierry Henry admitted to illegally using his hand to set-up the goal that gave his team a 2-1 aggregate victory to seal qualification to the tournament.

But despite a letter sent to FIFA by the FAI, and calls from both the Irish prime minister Brian Cowen and Irish justice minister Dermot Ahern for the game to be replayed, the sport's organizing body has refused the request.

In a statement on their official Web site FIFA stated: "The result of the match cannot be changed and the match cannot be replayed. As is clearly mentioned in the Laws of the Game, during matches, decisions are taken by the referee and these decisions are final."

Irish football officials lodged an official complaint with FIFA on Thursday and sent a letter to the French Football Federation (FFF) in a bid to get the game reconvened. The world's worst football injustices

"The governing body of world football have to step up to the plate and accede to our call for a replay," FAI chief executive John Delaney told reporters.

The FAI pointed to a precedent set in 2005 when a World Cup qualifier between Uzbekistan and Bahrain was replayed after the referee was found to have committed a technical error in the application of the laws of the game.

But a FIFA spokesman said the precedent did not apply because the referee in the match "saw the incident in question and simply failed to apply the proper rules".

Irish prime minister Cowen raised the issue with French president Nicolas Sarkozy at a European Union (EU) summit in Brussels, where the two leaders were meeting to vote for the next president of Europe.

Cowen told the Irish Independent newspaper: "I didn't ask for a replay. I said, you know: 'What do you think?' and he said: 'Look, I understand totally the sense of disappointment that you feel about the game. I'm not trying to mix politics and sport in this respect. We just had a chat. [But] it's not going to be resolved by he and I."

Mr Sarkozy, however, said he did not want to get involved: "I said to Brian Cowen, who is a friend of mine as you know, that I was sorry for them and how I was struck by the talent and vigor of the Irish team.

"Now do not ask me to stand in for the referee of the game or the football decision -- be they in France or in Europe," he said.

"What will be done will be done. But leave me out of it, please. And to be perfectly frank with you that is the sort of answer I want to give," he added.

Despite Sarkozy's comments, French finance minister Christine Lagarde said she supported moves for a replay.

"I think it's very sad. I'm of course very happy that the French team will play in the World Cup, but I find it very sad that it did qualify with... you know... an act of cheating," she told RTL radio station.

But former captain Roy Keane accused the FAI of hypocrisy, claiming that Ireland had benefited from other poor refereeing decisions in their qualifying campaign.

"Ireland had their chances in the two games (against France), and they never took them," Keane told Sky Sports News.

But it's the usual FAI reaction -- 'we've been robbed, the honesty of the game."

Keane went on to put the blame on the Irish defense for the controversial winning goal.

"I'd focus on why they didn't clear it," he said. "I'd be more annoyed with my defenders and my goalkeeper than Thierry Henry. How can you let the ball bounce in your six-yard box?

"How can you let Thierry Henry get goal-side of you? "If the ball goes into the six-yard box, where the hell is my goalkeeper?"

The game between France and Ireland was one of six play offs played on Wednesday which decided the final 32 teams heading South Africa in 2010.

Video replays showed Henry used his hand to stop the ball going out of play in extra-time, before he passed to William Gallas who booked his nation's place with a headed goal.

The draw for next year's finals is due to be made in Cape Town on December 4.

How to Market Your Business With Facebook

2009-11-19T09:00:00.000-05:00

Quick Tips:

Identify a short list of goals before you begin.
Show some personality in your page.
Don't shill. Use your page to engage-and trust that sales will follow.
Use Facebook data to analyze your customer demographics.

from www.nytimes.com

By KERMIT PATTISON

Business owner, you might want to friend Facebook.

A growing number of businesses are making Facebook an indispensible part of hanging out their shingles. Small businesses are using it to find new customers, build online communities of fans and dig into gold mines of demographic information.

“You need to be where your customers are and your prospective customers are,” said Clara Shih, author of “The Facebook Era” (Pearson Education, 2009). “And with 300 million people on Facebook, and still growing, that’s increasingly where your audience is for a lot of products and services.”

Start Small

For most businesses, Facebook Pages (distinct from individual profiles and Facebook groups) are the best place to start. Pages allow businesses to collect “fans” the way celebrities, sports teams, musicians and politicians do. There are now 1.4 million Facebook Pages and they collect more than 10 million fans every day, according to the site.

Businesses can easily create a Web presence with Facebook, even if they don’t have their own Web site (most companies still should maintain a Web site to reach people who don’t use Facebook or whose employers block access to the site). Businesses can claim a vanity address so that their Facebook address reflects the business name, like www.facebook.com/Starbucks. Facebook pages can link to the company’s Web site or direct sales to e-commerce sites like Ticketmaster or Amazon.

Facebook offers an array of tools and networks, and it’s easy to wander down too many paths. Ms. Shih recommends that newcomers start by asking themselves a simple question: What is your basic objective? Is it getting more customers in the door? Building brand awareness? Creating a venue for customer support? Once you have set your goal, you can strategize accordingly.

“You can waste a lot of time on Facebook,” said Ms. Shih, founder of Hearsay Labs, a Facebook marketing software company. “But if you’re a business, you don’t have any time to waste. Figure out your objectives first, start small and do things that help you accomplish your objectives.”

Ms. Shih suggests that businesses ask friends and family to become fans of their pages so that they display a respectable crowd of supporters when they debut. Pages can grow organically by word of mouth — the average Facebook user has 130 friends on the site — or by advertising or promotion.

You can enliven your page with photos, comments and useful information. As you grow more comfortable, you can add videos or business applications. Flaunt your personality. The page of an ice cream parlor should feel different than that of a funeral parlor. “The pages that are most successful,” said Tim Kendall, the director of monetization at Facebook, “are the ones that really replicate the personality of the business.”

It’s Not All About Selling

Art Meets Commerce, a New York marketing firm, has struck up a never-ending conversation with fans. The company uses Facebook as a crucial part of its publicity campaigns for theatrical productions. Its Facebook page for the show “Rock of Ages,” for example, has more than 13,000 fans.

Staff members constantly update the page with new photos, videos and quotes from the cast. They’ve also learned what not to do: Once they posted a video of Paris Hilton plugging the show and got negative feedback from fans who professed to be sick of her.

But it’s not just about marketing — or, at least, it’s not just about selling. “You end up moving away from being an Internet marketer and go into almost customer service,” said Jim Glaub, creative director at the agency. “A lot of times people use Facebook to ask questions: What’s the student rush? How long is the show? Where’s parking? You have to answer.”

Some basic rules: Buy-buy-buy messages won’t fly. The best practitioners make Facebook less about selling and more about interacting. Engage with fans and critics. Listen to what people are saying, good and bad. You may even pick up ideas for how to improve your business. Keep content fresh. Use status updates and newsfeeds to tell fans about specials, events, contests or anything of interest.

These interactions can take a vast amount of time — the “Rock of Ages” page has 300 to 600 interactions every week — but they can also provide a big payoff. Facebook is one of the show’s top sources of new ticket sales.

Last year, Art Meets Commerce introduced a Facebook ad campaign to promote an Off Broadway run of the musical “Fela!” The campaign aimed at Facebook users with interests like theatrical shows or Afro beat. According to the company, it generated 18 million impressions, more than 5,700 clicks and $40,000 in ticket sales — all for $4,400 spent on advertising.

“We can advertise all day, but if we don’t give them what they want they will not be a fan anymore,” said Mark Seeley, a marketing associate at Art Meets Commerce. “Even though we represent the shows as marketers, we don’t want to constantly tell people to buy tickets. You talk to them like you talk to your friends on Facebook.”

Aim at Potential Customers Only

Some guys use Facebook to find single women. Chris Meyer used it to find women who are already engaged.

Mr. Meyer, a wedding photographer in Woodbury, Minn., had had little luck with traditional advertising. A full-page ad in a bridal magazine generated zero leads and a trade show yielded only four bookings, barely covering the cost of his booth. But Facebook proved a digital bonanza.

Mr. Meyer aimed at women ages 22 to 28 who listed their marital status as engaged in the Minneapolis-St. Paul metropolitan area. He estimates that he has spent about $300 on Facebook ads in the last two years and has generated more than $60,000 in business. He says about three-quarters of his clients now come to him through Facebook, either from ads or recommendations from friends.

“I’d be out of business if I didn’t have Facebook,” Mr. Meyer said. “Especially with this economy, I need to stretch each marketing dollar as much as I possibly can.”

Facebook enables small businesses to engage in targeted marketing that they only could have dreamed about a few years ago. Facebook users fill out profiles with information like hometown, employer, religious beliefs, interests, education and favorite books, movies and TV shows — all of which can help advertisers deliver messages to specific demographic slices.

As you create an ad, you can add demographic criteria and keywords and see how many Facebook users fall into your target audience and modify it accordingly to get the most bang for your buck. Advertisers can elect to pay per impression or per click, set maximum budgets and schedule the ad to run on specific dates.

Thus a coffee shop in San Francisco can display advertisements only to local people whose profiles or group affiliations suggest they like coffee. According to Mr. Kendall, Facebook’s director of monetization, ads can also aim at people based on social exchanges, like a person who sends a message to a friend, “let’s get together for coffee” or who posts a status update about just having awakened and needing some java.

“We can help you find customers before they even think about searching for you,” Mr. Kendall said. “We’re very, very well-positioned to generate demand, based on the fact that we know a tremendous amount about a user.”

The Facebook ad system provides instant feedback with metrics like the number of impressions and clicks-through. This reporting allows Mr. Meyer to improve his advertising; if one ad doesn’t generate enough hits within 24 hours, he pulls it and tries something new.

Give Away Cupcakes!

Charles Nelson has an M.B.A. and is a former investment banker who owns a growing national chain of stores. Yet this 40-year-old entrepreneur checks Facebook with the frequency of a college student. Up to 30 times a day, he logs onto the social networking site via his laptop or Blackberry.

For Mr. Nelson, this is serious business. He and his wife, Candace, own Sprinkles, a cupcake bakery that relies on social media in lieu of traditional advertising. Mr. Nelson considers Facebook marketing essential. “People are out there talking about your business everyday, whether you’re looking or not,” he said. “This gives people a place to come and speak directly to us.”

Sprinkles uses Facebook to give customers a whiff of what’s cooking. Every day it posts a password on Facebook that can be redeemed for a free cupcake. Since April, its fan base has risen tenfold to 70,000.

Mr. Nelson and his wife previously worked as investment bankers in the technology sector and were keenly aware that, even for a traditional business like a bakery, social media is a crucial ingredient. His advice: make it relevant to the customer, keep it fresh and remember that the return on investment may come slowly.

“Be patient with it,” Mr. Nelson advised. “People are not going to flock to your social media site overnight. Technology is about the network effect. It takes time for those connections to build.”

Obama says he met with half brother while in China

2009-11-18T09:30:00.000-05:00

from Associated Press

By TINI TRAN, Associated Press Writer

BEIJING – President Barack Obama said Wednesday that he met briefly with a half brother who lives in China and who recently wrote a semi-autobiographical novel about the abusive Kenyan father they share.

Obama, who spent three days in China during his first official tour of Asia, acknowledged the meeting in an interview with CNN. He offered no details. An aide said later that the meeting took place Monday night after Obama arrived in Beijing, the Chinese capital.

The White House had declined to say whether the president and Mark Ndesandjo would meet. And no White House official mentioned the visit until Obama did when asked about it.

"I don't know him well. I met him for the first time a couple of years ago," Obama told CNN. "He stopped by with his wife for about five minutes during the trip."

Describing the meeting as "overwhelming" and "intense," Ndesandjo told The Associated Press in an interview Wednesday that he had long anticipated the chance to welcome his famous brother to China.

"I think he came directly off the plane, changed some clothes and then came down and saw us," Ndesandjo told AP Television News on Wednesday. "And he just gave me a big hug. And it was so intense. I'm still over the moon on it. I am over the moon. And my wife. She is his biggest fan and I think she is still recovering."

In the CNN interview, Obama said he hadn't read his brother's book, "Nairobi to Shenzhen," in which Ndesandjo says Barack Obama Sr. beat him and his mother. The president also wrote about his father, who had abandoned him as a child, in his best-selling memoir, "Dreams from My Father."

"It's no secret that my father was a troubled person," Obama said. "Anybody who has read my first book, 'Dreams from My Father,' knows that, you know, he had an alcoholism problem, that he didn't treat his families very well. Obviously it's a sad part of my history and my background but it's not something I spend a lot of time brooding over."

Ndesandjo said he bought tickets months ago to fly to from the southern boomtown of Shenzhen, where he has lived since 2002, to Beijing, in hopes of reconnecting with his brother. The two last met in January when Ndesandjo attended Obama's inauguration as a family guest.

The three chatted, with Obama being introduced to Ndesandjo's wife, a native of Henan, China, whom he married a year ago, he said. He gave few details of what they discussed.

"All I can say is, we talked about family, and it was very powerful because when he came in through that door, and I saw him and I hugged him, and he hugged me and hugged my wife. It was like we were continuing a conversation that had started many years ago," he said.

The two men did not grow up together. Ndesandjo's mother, Ruth Nidesand, was Barack Obama Sr.'s third wife. Before arriving in Beijing on Monday, Obama had been in a townhall-style meeting with students in Shanghai, and joked that a family gathering at his house "looks like the United Nations."

President Obama's father had been a Kenyan exchange student who met his mother, Kansas native Stanley Ann Dunham, when they were in school in Hawaii. The two separated two years after he was born.

The senior Obama married Ndesandjo's mother after divorcing the president's mother. They returned to Kenya to live, where Mark and his brother, David, were born and raised.

Obama Sr. died in an automobile accident in 1982 at age 46.

Ndesandjo lives near Hong Kong and earns a living as a marketing consultant. For most of that time, he has maintained a low profile, with few people knowing of his connection to the U.S. president.

Lunch with M.

2009-11-17T18:47:00.000-05:00

Undercover with a Michelin inspector.
by John Colapinto

from http://www.newyorker.com/

One afternoon last month, a woman in her early thirties, with shoulder-length blond hair and large brown eyes, arrived at Jean Georges, on the ground floor of the Trump International Hotel, in midtown Manhattan. The restaurant, which is owned by the chef Jean-Georges Vongerichten, and is one of the highest rated in the world, has an understated décor, with bare white walls and floor-to-ceiling windows. The woman took a seat at one of the tables in the center of the room. She wore a light-blue dress with a high neckline, little makeup, and no jewelry. There was nothing remarkable about her appearance, and her demeanor was quiet and unassuming, as if designed to deflect attention—a trait indispensable for her profession as an inspector for the Michelin hotel-and-restaurant guide.

Conceived in France at the beginning of the last century, the Michelin guide today has editions in twenty-three countries and is one of the best-selling restaurant guides in the world. It operates on the principle that only reviews by anonymous, professionally trained experts can be trusted for accurate assessments of a restaurant’s food and service. Major newspapers like the Times aspire to anonymity for their restaurant reviewers but rarely achieve it. In his recent memoir, “Born Round,” Frank Bruni, who served as the Times’ restaurant reviewer from 2004 until earlier this year, describes his efforts at camouflage—using aliases, wearing a wig and fake mustache—which were mostly futile once the dust-jacket photograph from one of his early books was posted on the Internet. Photographs of Bruni’s successor, Sam Sifton, doctored in several ways to suggest what he might look like in disguise, began to circulate on foodie Web sites like Eater months before he took up his duties.

Michelin has gone to extraordinary lengths to maintain the anonymity of its inspectors. Many of the company’s top executives have never met an inspector; inspectors themselves are advised not to disclose their line of work, even to their parents (who might be tempted to boast about it); and, in all the years that it has been putting out the guide, Michelin has refused to allow its inspectors to speak to journalists. The inspectors write reports that are distilled, in annual “stars meetings” at the guide’s various national offices, into the ranking of three stars, two stars, or one star—or no stars. (Establishments that Michelin deems unworthy of a visit are not included in the guide.) A three-star Michelin ranking—like that enjoyed by Jean Georges—is exceedingly rare. Only twenty-six three-star restaurants exist in France, and only eighty-one in the world.

In 2005, Michelin launched its first foray into North America, with the publication of the 2006 New York City guide. (It has also published guides to Los Angeles, Las Vegas, and San Francisco.) Since coming to America, Michelin has learned that its brand of Gallic opacity and unapologetic gastronomic élitism has been a tougher sell here than it was in Europe or Asia. (The Tokyo edition of the guide, which débuted in 2007, sold more than a hundred thousand copies on its first day.) Five years after its arrival in New York City, Michelin has failed to knock the Times from its perch as the premier arbiter of restaurants in the city, or to outsell the Zagat guide, which relies on customer surveys for its restaurant rankings.

This fall, in an effort to promote what the managing director of the guides, a forty-eight-year-old Frenchman named Jean-Luc Naret, calls a “better understanding” of the guides’ means and methods, Michelin launched a Web site, Famously Anonymous, to explain to Americans the concept of the Michelin inspector; it has also recently opened Twitter accounts for its reviewers. But by far the most salient sign of Michelin’s new openness was its decision, this fall, to allow me to meet—and to eat with—one of its New York-based inspectors.

Naret joined me and the inspector for lunch. He has a handsome, darkly tanned face, and favors designer suits with flared-collar shirts and no tie. Although the inspector was never identified to the staff, Naret, who eats often at Jean Georges and is well-known to the restaurant’s staff, considered her anonymity compromised; she would never pay an inspection visit to the restaurant again. As a precondition of our interview, I was told that certain details of the inspector’s personal life would be obscured—or not divulged to me at all. When I asked her name, the inspector laughed nervously. “No,” she said. “Let’s not even say it. Make something up.”

I suggested the first thing that came to mind. “Maxime?”

Naret smiled, and then, with a soupçon of extra secrecy, began referring to her as M.

Maxime is a New Yorker. She said that speaking to me about her work felt “surreal.” “We spend all our time not letting people know who we are,” she said, but admitted that she had told her husband what she does for a living. “He’s an attorney; he knows all about confidentiality.” For most others, she keeps her occupation vague. “We try not to lie,” she said. “You say you’re ‘in publishing,’ something like that.”

The waiter, a young man in a dark suit, handed us menus. I asked Maxime how she chooses what to order.

“You’re looking for something that really tests a number of quality ingredients and then something that’s a little complex, because you want to see what the kitchen can do,” she said. “We would never order something like a salad. We rarely order soup.” She decided to try the foie-gras brûlée, “although I usually avoid it, because of the calories.”

Maxime eats out more than two hundred days of the year, lunch and dinner. She eats the maximum number of courses offered—at Jean Georges, we were having three courses, plus dessert; that way, she said, “you really get to see the most food”—and she is required to eat everything on her plate. It is a regimen that calls to mind the force-feeding of the ducks that supply Vongerichten with his velvety foie gras, but Maxime, blessed with a quick metabolism, had managed to avoid obesity, an occupational hazard.

She was tending toward the Arctic char for her main course but couldn’t decide about her second course. The waiter reappeared and asked if he could answer any questions.

“Can you tell me about the crab toast?” she asked.

“It’s Peekytoe crab, a chiffonade of tarragon as well as chives topped with white sesame seeds, toasted in the oven, finished with a miso mustard, and a pear salad on the side,” he said.

“It’s new?” she said.

“About a week on the menu.”

She asked the waiter to give her a minute and then leaned in to me. Inspectors love it when they ask a question and can tell that a waiter has made up an answer, she explained, adding, “That never happens here.”

The original Guide Michelin was developed by André Michelin, an engineer, and his younger brother, Édouard. Born into a wealthy manufacturing family in Clermont-Ferrand, the brothers, in 1895, presented a new design for a pneumatic tire for cars. Automobiles were still a rarity on roads in France. The brothers had the idea that a guidebook to hotels in the French countryside would encourage people to climb into a car (equipped with Michelin tires) and hit the open road. The first edition, published in 1900, was a five-hundred-and-seventy-five-page alphabetical listing of towns throughout France and the distances between them, with recommendations for hotels and places to refuel, and instructions on how to change a flat. In a preface to the first edition, André wrote, “This work comes out with the century; it will last as long.” In 1933, the Michelin brothers introduced the first countrywide restaurant listings and unveiled the star system for ranking food, with one star denoting “a very good restaurant in its class”; two stars “excellent cooking, worth a detour”; and three stars “exceptional cuisine, worth a special journey.”

Over the years, other publications attempted to challenge Michelin but without success. To offset the expense of sending inspectors to restaurants across the country, rival guides were obliged to accept free meals, or to offer favors, like free advertising in the guides’ pages. Michelin’s inspectors faced no such quid pro quo. A century after André and Édouard created their first tire patent, Michelin has grown into one of the most successful multinational corporations in the world, a company more than three times the size of Goodyear. Michelin’s profits help to defray the costs of food inspectors’ salaries, travel budgets, and restaurant bills (which can run into real money at the upper end of the gastronomic scale: six years ago, at Bernard Loiseau’s La Côte d’Or, a three-star restaurant in Burgundy, the chicken stuffed with carrots, leeks, and truffles was two hundred and sixty-seven dollars). This independence, coupled with the jealously guarded anonymity of its inspectors, is what gives Michelin its aura of incorruptibility. The French chef Paul Bocuse, who helped create nouvelle cuisine in the nineteen-sixties, and whose restaurant near Lyons has held a three-star Michelin ranking for a record forty-five years, has said, “Michelin is the only guide that counts.” Indeed, in France publication of the guide each year sparks the kind of media excitement attendant on the Academy Awards. The days and weeks leading up to publication day are given over to endless debate, speculation, and rumor on TV and in newspapers over who might lose, and who might gain, a star. The results, revealed in early March, provide either a very public triumph or a very public humiliation for the chefs concerned, and a corresponding rise or drop in revenues for their restaurants.

Not everyone, however, is convinced that anonymous experts with bottomless expense accounts are the key to a dependable restaurant guide. “We’re coming at it from a completely different perspective,” says Nina Zagat, who dreamed up the idea of a customer-driven food survey with her husband, Tim, in their Upper West Side apartment thirty-one years ago. Today, Zagat covers more than ninety cities worldwide, is available as an iPhone app, and remains the top-selling restaurant guide in New York. “We’ve never believed that there were experts that should tell you what to do.”

“I’d love to know what their training is,” Tim Zagat added, speaking about Michelin’s inspectors. “Usually, the experts—for example, the major critics for the major papers—you know what their background is. But this business of making a virtue out of not knowing? I question it. How are you supposed to judge their expertise if you don’t have any idea who they are?”

Bernard Loiseau, the chef and owner of La Côte d’Or, once told a fellow-chef that if he ever lost one of his Michelin stars he would kill himself. Loiseau had made a life’s ambition of becoming a three-star chef, a goal he achieved in 1991, seventeen years after arriving at La Côte d’Or. His ranking led to a line of frozen food bearing his name and likeness, and the Legion of Honor, awarded by President François Mitterrand. But by 2002 Loiseau’s classic cooking was losing ground to trendier fusion styles, business was slowing, and he was swimming in debt. As Rudolph Chelminski relates in his 2005 book “The Perfectionist,” the food writer François Simon published a story in Le Figaro hinting that Loiseau was on thin ice with Michelin. Loiseau, who had suffered periodic depression for years, sank into despair. In early February, 2003, he was notified by Michelin that he would keep his third star. Still, Simon wrote another piece, in which he suggested that Loiseau and his third star were “living on borrowed time.” Two and a half weeks later, after a day at work in the kitchen, Loiseau killed himself with a shotgun blast to the head. He was fifty-two.

Loiseau’s death ushered in a dark period for the guide. In early 2004, an inspector named Pascal Rémy broke the company’s code of silence when he published a book based on a diary that he had kept of fifteen years on the road as a Michelin inspector in France. (Rémy, having notified Michelin of his plans to publish, was fired; he later sued.) Rémy’s book, “L’Inspecteur Se Met à Table” (“The Inspector Sits Down at the Table”), described the inspector’s life as one of loneliness and underpaid drudgery, driving around the French countryside for weeks on end, dining alone and under intense pressure to file reports. Michelin had always hinted that it employed roughly a hundred inspectors to cover Europe, but Rémy claimed that it employed only eleven within France when he was first hired, in 1988—a number that had shrunk to five by the time he left, in 2003. Contrary to Michelin’s assertion that every starred restaurant was revisited several times a year, Rémy said only one visit every few years was possible. Furthermore, he wrote, the guide played favorites—most notably with Bocuse, whose restaurant in Lyons was known, according to Rémy, to have declined drastically in quality yet continued to hold three stars. Rémy’s revelations made the front page of Le Monde. Derek Brown, the director of the guides at the time, denied Rémy’s assertions in an interview in the Times, but he remained vague about how many full-time inspectors the guide employs in France and offered an anemic rebuttal to Rémy’s claim that certain three-star chefs were untouchable: “There would be little sense in saying a restaurant was worth three stars if it weren’t true, if for no other reason than that the customer would write and tell us.”

The Rémy affair occurred during Brown’s final year at the guide. As his successor, Michelin hired the charismatic and outgoing Naret, who worked for many years as a hotelier, but whose professional focus has not been food. He boasts of giving more than two thousand interviews a year, in which he tells journalists how many inspectors Michelin employs in France (about fifteen), throughout the world (ninety), and in the United States (ten).

Naret introduced the idea of expanding into North America and chose New York City as the best place to start. The first New York City guide, which appeared in November, 2005, was created by a team of five European inspectors, who examined fifteen hundred restaurants in all five boroughs, and selected five hundred for inclusion. Their selection was criticized, by some, as Francocentric. The Times noted that more than half the restaurants that received at least two stars “could be considered French.” Among the one-star restaurants was the now defunct La Goulue, which one highly regarded New York food critic describes as “this dinosaur of an outdated, mediocre kind of French bistro on the Upper East Side.” And the 2006 guide failed to award stars to Eleven Madison Park (Danny Meyer’s haute-cuisine restaurant), Craft (the “Top Chef” head judge Tom Colicchio’s take on contemporary American food), “or any number of celebrated restaurants,” the critic adds. “It was one of those things, like, only a bunch of French people could respond that way.”

Naret, who says that he never intended to continue to use European teams, established an office in New York for the next year’s guide and began recruiting New Yorkers. He received thirty-five hundred applications.

Though born in New York City, Maxime moved with her family to a nearby “rural countryside” town, which, she says, has “an extraordinarily active foodie community.” Maxime’s family was discerning about food, and came into the city frequently to sample the restaurants. “I ate falafel at Mamoun’s and bagels and lox from Russ & Daughters before I’d even heard of a peanut-butter sandwich,” she said. The family also travelled abroad, and she learned early about the Michelin guide. “Other kids wanted a Barbie or something. I wanted to go to a three-star restaurant in Paris.” Maxime’s fascination with food was not confined to haute cuisine. “It’s a global food passion,” as she put it. Big Macs, tacos from “these divey little delis in Sunset Park,” Chinese food from “a Szechuan restaurant that’s a total dump,” even hot dogs from Papaya King’s grimy corner kiosks in Manhattan elicit groans of pleasure: “Oh, fantastic hot dogs!”

Linda Bartoshuk, a professor of community dentistry and behavioral science at the University of Florida, has for more than three decades done research into genetic variations in the perception of taste. Through studies of the disposition and the density of taste buds on the tongues of test subjects, Bartoshuk has divided people into three categories: supertasters, tasters, and non-tasters. Most food and wine experts would fall into the “taster” category. (Supertasters, despite their name, have too many taste buds and are thus oversensitive to flavor, and tend to prefer bland foods; non-tasters can eat an exquisite risotto and say, “Eh.”) I asked Maxime if she believed that she had some biological advantage when it came to tasting and discerning flavors. “You could argue that the inspectors have some biological makeup, or you could argue that they eat so much that they have the grounds for comparison,” she said. “And they have their training, the professional training.”

A degree in hospitality, hotel management, or cooking is mandatory for Michelin inspectors. Every job that Maxime held, from high school on, had been in the domestic food, wine, or restaurant industry. She got a master’s from N.Y.U. in food studies, and obtained a sommelier’s certification. Six years ago, she was working in a food-and-hospitality job in a city far from New York when she learned that Michelin was recruiting inspectors to produce a New York City guide. “I immediately started stalking Jean-Luc,” she said. She had several preliminary interviews in New York, during which she was warned about the rigors of life as an inspector—the travel, the regimen of constant eating, the pressure to fill out meticulously detailed reports on time, the enforced anonymity, the low pay. (“Let’s just say it’s not about the money,” she said.)

“The interview process is a bit like trying to scare you off,” she went on. “You really have to be committed. It’s your life. It’s not like a nine-to-five job.” Nor is it all about three-star dining. “The stars are only ten per cent of the selection,” she said. “The vast majority of the time, we’re hiking around the Upper East Side, we’re eating at neighborhood restaurants, we’re hiking around Brooklyn.” Assigned specific areas of the city to cover, Maxime, who lives in Manhattan, spends weeks riding the subway out to the farthest reaches of Queens to make her way through a selection of Thai restaurants, eating two meals a day, every day, and she typically eats alone, since talking with a spouse or friend is frowned upon.

After making the first cut, she was obliged to order and eat a series of dinners in New York restaurants under the scrutiny of seasoned European inspectors. “You don’t know what you’re doing, so you’re, like, What do I pick? What do I eat? And then they show you the wine list to see what wine you choose.” After the meal, she was required to write a paper analyzing the experience, while an inspector looked on. “And then there’s also the kind of covert-ops part,” she said. “You never know the name of the person you’re meeting, you never know where they’re meeting you until right before, so they call you up and say ‘Meet me at the corner of XYZ and XYZ.’ ”

All candidates are flown to France to take part in the Michelin training program. “You’ve got to go to the mother ship to understand the origins of the system,” she said. The fundamentals include not only the star rankings but also the couverts: the crossed-knife-and-spoon icons used to rank the ambience, comfort, and service of a given restaurant. The couverts range from one to four, in ascending order of quality, and they can be in black or red ink. (Red ink denotes exceptional service and décor.) After their time in France, trainees receive additional instruction in another European country. Maxime was sent to England, where, she says, she contracted her only bout of food poisoning, from a pork-belly dish.

When she returned to New York, she was required to apprentice under one of the European inspectors. “There’s no point in sending you off on your own if you’re going to come back and say, ‘I don’t know if it’s a two-couvert or a three-couvert’ or ‘Oh, I thought it was a star’ ”—only to have the senior inspector go back to the restaurant and discover that the food is, as she put it, “junk.” This period of apprenticeship generally lasts three to six months, but at any point an applicant can be told that he or she is not working out.

The waiter arrived and placed before Maxime a large white plate. At the center was her foie gras, a short pillar of puréed duck liver on a piece of crisp toast with a lacy web of caramelized sugar on top; the sides were studded with cherries and sprinkled with pistachios, and a transparent sauce, made of white port gelée, surrounded the entire creation like a moat. She considered the dish for a few moments, as if trying to determine the best angle of attack. With the side of her fork, she broke off a piece of the complicated construction, and tasted it. The dish, which I later tried, activated every sense with which humans are equipped: the foie gras was smooth and as rich as butter, its silky texture contrasting with the caramelized sugar, which shattered like a pane of microscopically thin glass against the teeth and tongue, its sweetness offset by the sour cherries, the rounded aromatic flavor of the toasted nuts, and the texture and taste of the port gelée.

“Excellent,” Maxime said.

I asked her what she liked about it.

“It’s not really a ‘like’ and a ‘not like,’ ” she said. “It’s an analysis. You’re eating it and you’re looking for the quality of the products. At this level, they have to be top quality. You’re looking at ‘Was every single element prepared exactly perfectly, technically correct?’ And then you’re looking at the creativity. Did it work? Did the balance of ingredients work? Was there good texture? Did everything come together? Did something overpower something else? Did something not work with something else? The pistachios—everything was perfect.”

When her second appetizer arrived—the crab toast topped with toasted sesame seeds—she dipped the tines of her fork into a thick line of dark-green sauce that bisected the narrow rectangle of crab toast, and touched it to her tongue. Her eyes grew wide.

“This sauce is really good,” she said. “It’s so Jean-Georges. He does this French-and-Asian thing.” She warned me that she would need a few seconds to figure out its precise ingredients. (She refused to divulge them, on the ground that Vongerichten would consider the recipe “a trade secret.” I later learned from one of the waiters that the ingredients include powdered English mustard and soy sauce.) “It’s so complex,” she said. “It makes me smile.”

Her Arctic char arrived, on a bed of watercress rémoulade, and accompanied by a julienne of apple. She took a bite. “It’s perfectly cooked,” she said, excitedly. “I mean, it’s textbook.”

For New York City’s chefs—particularly those raised and trained in France—the arrival of the Michelin guide was both a blessing and a curse. Eric Ripert, the chef and co-owner of Le Bernardin, a three-star Michelin restaurant in midtown Manhattan, attended culinary school in France and trained in several three-star restaurants there. “Most of us very young cooks were aspiring to be one day a three-star chef,” Ripert told me. “Very few of us were aspiring to have a bistro.” But when Ripert joined Le Bernardin, in 1991, Michelin did not yet have an outpost in New York, and there were no plans to open one. “I remember sometimes chefs here, especially the French ones—and even some American ones—we were a bit frustrated that we will never be judged by Michelin,” Ripert said. “But at the same time we were a little bit, like, more relaxed because obviously the Michelin puts pressure on chefs and restaurateurs to be excellent.”

Le Bernardin was one of only four restaurants in New York (along with Jean Georges, Thomas Keller’s Per Se, and the now defunct Alain Ducasse at the Essex House) that earned three stars in the début issue of the Michelin guide, and it has held on to its three stars ever since. Ripert estimates that revenues increased by eighteen per cent when the first guide came out, but the pressure to hold on to his stars has also escalated. “Today when I wake up and I go to work I don’t think guide, I don’t think stars,” he insisted. “You can’t. When I go to work, I think about my day and about what I have to achieve during my day as a chef.” Still, Ripert admitted that, just before the publication of a new guide, he gets nervous. “It’s not in my mind until a week before, and then every day I think about it,” he said.

Like Ripert, Jean-Georges Vongerichten trained in three-star restaurants in France, and he was eager to know how its inspectors would rate him internationally, yet he also dreaded that knowledge. At a party thrown by Michelin at Rockefeller Center on the evening that this year’s star rankings were announced, I spoke to Vongerichten, a dapper man with slicked-back dark hair and intense dark eyes. He was “happy and relieved,” he said, to have retained his three-star ranking for Jean Georges, but he added, “Ah, but we lost a star, too—for my restaurant JoJo.” He was referring to the moderately priced restaurant he runs out of a town house on East Sixty-fourth Street. In the previous four guides, JoJo had earned one star. Now it had none. Vongerichten was determined to get the rating back. “I will ask for the report on JoJo,” Vongerichten told me. (Michelin will, on request, supply to chefs the inspectors’ written report on their restaurant.) “I will study it. The good thing is, you have a year to make it better!”

Also at the party was the chef Daniel Boulud, a short, dark-haired man in a double-breasted suit, who bustled through the crowd, happily accepting congratulations from all who recognized him. That morning, Boulud had received a call from Naret informing him that, for the first time, his restaurant Daniel had been promoted from two stars to three. To many in the food-and-restaurant industry, it was overdue. Daniel consistently drew top rankings in the Zagat guide and for years had earned the Times’ highest rank of four stars. During my lunch with Maxime, I had asked about Michelin’s ranking of Daniel.

“We got beat up a lot the last five years for not giving him three,” she said. “But it wasn’t there.”

“In terms of consistency?” I asked.

“Consistency—and accuracy,” she said. “It’s just technical. I mean, cooking is a science, and either it’s right or it’s wrong. And that’s something that’s very objective. Either a sauce is prepared accurately—or it’s not. A fish is cooked accurately—or it’s not. There’s the talent, the creativity that has to be applied to get a three-star—he has to be a very talented chef—but there was just a lot of inconsistency.” This year, she added, “it was so obvious. It was so solid.” Michelin sent inspectors back to eat at Daniel eight times over the year, Naret told me. At the stars meeting, which he oversees, every inspector’s report described the restaurant as faultless.

I talked to Boulud a couple of days later. Like Ripert and Vongerichten, he trained in multiple three-star restaurants in France. He pronounced himself “proud and happy” to get his third star, but I sensed a less immediate embrace of the Michelin system. When I told him that Naret and the inspector had said that the restaurant, in previous years, lacked consistency and accuracy, he didn’t exactly disagree. But he bridled a little, saying, “My restaurant is extremely chef-driven and extremely market-driven, and so the menu changes a lot—to the pleasure of my customers. Maybe the success I have today is because we keep giving pleasure in very simple ways or sometimes in a very spontaneous way and without thinking, Oh my God, am I perfectly consistent with that dish? I mean, Did I create the masterpiece where I don’t need to change anything? I just need to program it now?”

Boulud’s comments called to mind criticisms often levelled against Michelin: that its approach to restaurants and food is too wedded to an ideal of formal, technical accuracy that is not applicable to restaurants outside France. “When I lived abroad, in Rome, the Michelin guide was not, to be utterly candid, very helpful,” Frank Bruni, the former Times restaurant reviewer, told me recently. “The kinds of restaurant in Italy that Michelin smiles on are restaurants that feel sort of fussily French.” He added that the New York guide seemed to be trying to address this. “In New York—maybe because Michelin is trying to Americanize—you see the inspectors trying to move beyond that. Right from the get-go they gave a star to the Spotted Pig”—the chef April Bloomfield’s upscale pub-food restaurant. “In years since, they’ve given stars to places like Dressler, in Brooklyn”—a restaurant that serves contemporary American food with a French twist. “So you can see them trying. . . . But I wonder if a certain sort of chromosomal stodginess can ever really be completely leached out of the Michelin guide and the system.” He added, “The other thing that has always made me wonder about Michelin rankings is that they claim a lot of science to them, but is there a lot of soul to them? When Michelin describes its own system, I think, Where is the allowance for just a visceral, emotional response to a restaurant?” Bruni is also no fan of the couverts and other icons that Michelin uses: “Those crosses and spoons and all those symbols—it’s like hieroglyphics, it’s like cave etchings.”

The waiter arrived with dessert. He placed a rectangular plate before Maxime. He pointed to one end, where a small piece of strawberry gâteau rested. “It begins on the right, with cumel-macerated strawberries, cream-cheese sponge cake, and pear-de-vanilla-center crème fraîche; to the left is strawberry sorbet swirled with lemongrass glacée and lavender crisp; and, lastly, a blueberry soda with fresh blueberries, which you can drink directly from the glass.”

She thanked him, and the waiter moved off.

If she were on an inspection visit, she said, she would go home directly after finishing dessert and paying her bill, and begin filling out her report, which is made in the form of entries in a classification form supplied to all Michelin inspectors. She would list every ingredient in everything she ate, and the specifics of every preparation. She would rate these according to several criteria, including quality of the products, mastery in the cooking, technical accuracy, balance of flavors, and creativity of the chef. Then she would fill out the section that deals with setting, comfort, and service—and that determines the number of couverts the restaurant will earn. “I’ll talk about the service, the crowd, the décor, the ambience, the wine list, the sake list—whatever is applicable,” Maxime said. “The salt, the glasses, everything about the experience you had from the second you made the phone call to book the reservation, to when you walked in the door, when the hostess greeted you—or didn’t greet you—to whatever little goodies you have at the end of the meal.” For a restaurant like Jean Georges, filling out the reports would take two to three hours. A Chinese restaurant might take an hour.

It was three o’clock by the time we emerged onto the street in front of the restaurant. I couldn’t recall ever feeling so full. I asked Maxime what she would do with the rest of her day. She said that she had to work that night, reviewing a restaurant in another borough.

Which one? I asked.

“I’m sorry,” she said. “I can’t tell you that.” ♦

The Domino Effect

2009-11-17T16:47:00.000-05:00

The Domino Effect.mp3

From http://englishdesk.blogspot.com/

We often celebrate birthdays at school. We sing ‘Happy Birthday’ and share some cake together. And we usually circulate a birthday card that everyone can sign. It’s a pleasant custom that is repeated in offices and schools and homes everywhere. But yesterday it was a little different. It was a quiet afternoon when Sylvia came into the class at about 2 o’clock, just before our break. She said it was Kim’s birthday so she was going to bring in a cake for her. Kim is a cheerful, helpful woman who works in the office and many of the students know her. Sylvia rounded up some of the other people at the school and they started coming into the classroom. It’s not too difficult to find people when cake is going to be served! Sylvia brought in a big, rectangular slab cake. It was a chocolate cake, with chocolate icing. There was a little owl piped onto the cake with Kim’s name because Kim loves owls. In fact, she collects them. Sylvia put some candles on the cake and lit them. And the secretary, Ruth, went to get Kim. Kim looked pleasantly surprised when she walked into the room and everyone started singing. But her look of surprise turned to shock as she leaned forward to blow out the candles and her long, blonde hair caught fire. Well, there was a domino effect. One thing led to another. First, Sylvia quickly reached out to put the fire out with her hand. As she did so, the cake flew out of her other hand. It sailed through the air and flipped up-side down. Judy, who had been standing nearby, lunged forward and stuck out her hand. Amazingly, she caught the cake with one hand. Luckily, it didn’t fall on the floor. And fortunately, Kim’s hair was only singed a little bit on the end. After everyone recovered from the shock and stopped laughing, we all had some cake. It was really quite delicious, too!

To Harvest Squash, Click Here

2009-11-12T13:56:00.000-05:00

From www.nytimes.com

By DOUGLAS QUENQUA

AT high schools and colleges across the country, students are hard at work, tilling their land and harvesting their vegetables.

“It is clear this obsession with FarmVille is an issue, especially since it is taking away time from studying and schoolwork,” Danielle Susi wrote this month in The Quad News, a student newspaper at Quinnipiac University in Hamden, Conn.

Adults, too, are blaming their problems on FarmVille, an online game in which people must tend their virtual farms carefully. On blogs like FarmVille Freak (slogan: “I can’t stop watching my crops!”) and others, people share tips on fertilizer and complain about, for example, a spouse’s addiction. An anonymous blogger who said she was pregnant wrote: “I was starving ... and he told me I’d have to wait a few more minutes so he could HARVEST HIS RASPBERRIES! I waited ... in the car and waited for his stupid raspberries to be harvested.”

That there are actual farmers who spend less time on their crops is beside the point. FarmVille has quickly become the most popular application in the history of Facebook. More than 62 million people have signed up to play the game since it made its debut in June, with 22 million logging on at least once a day, according to Zynga, the company that brought FarmVille into the world.

Crazes on Facebook seem to come in waves — remember sheep-throwing, Vampire Wars and lists of “25 Random Things About Me?” — but devotion to FarmVille has moved beyond the social network. Players gather online to share homemade spreadsheets showing which crops will provide the greatest return on investment. YouTube is rife with musical odes to the game, including versions of its theme song. There is a “Farmville Art” movement, in which people arrange crops to resemble the Mona Lisa or Mr. Peanut. And many a promising dinner date has been cut short to harvest squash.

“I can’t hang out with any of my friends without talk of apple fields and rice paddies,” said Taylor Lee Sivils, a student at the University of California, Riverside, in an e-mail message. “I have to wait for my friends’ soybeans to grow, because we can’t chill until they’ve been harvested. All I want is to be able to go back to talking about anything tangible, but FarmVille overcomes.”

The game starts off simply: You are given land and seeds that can be planted, harvested and sold for online coins. As you accrue currency, you can buy things, from basics like rice and pumpkin seeds to the truly superfluous, like elephants and hot-air balloons. Impatient players can use credit cards or a PayPal account to buy more money, although purists tend to frown on the practice.

But like The Sims and Tamagotchi pets, FarmVille soon becomes less of a game than a Sisyphean baby-sitting assignment. Crops must be harvested in a timely fashion, cows must be milked, and social obligations — like exchanging gifts and fertilizing your neighbor’s pumpkins — must be met.

The game seems to have mesmerized people from all walks of life. Every night for the last two weeks, Jil Wrinkle, a 40-year-old medical transcriber in the Philippines, has set his alarm for 1:30 a.m., when he will wake up, roll over and harvest his blueberries.

“I keep my laptop next to my bed,” he explained by phone. “The first thing I do when I wake up in the morning is harvest, then I harvest again at 10 in the morning, then again in midafternoon, then in the evening, and then again right before going to bed.”

Robert Thompson, a professor of popular culture at Syracuse University, said he had seen the craze firsthand among his students.

“Just like Guitar Hero lets you feel a little like being a rock star — you get to pose and dance a little while you’re doing it — with FarmVille there is a real sense that you’re actually doing something that has a cause and effect,” he said. “The method of dragging food out of the ground and getting something for it is really satisfying.”

FarmVille isn’t the only popular farm-theme game on Facebook. MyFarm and FarmTown, which are made by different companies, also have huge followings. Some academics have gone so far as to suggest that their collective popularity points to a widespread yearning for the pastoral life.

“The whole concept of ‘I’m sick of this modern, urban lifestyle, I wish I could just grow plants and vegetables and watch them grow,’ there is something very therapeutic about that,” said Philip Tan, director of the Singapore-M.I.T. Gambit Game Lab, a joint venture between the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and the government of Singapore to develop digital games.

Of course, real-life farming is quite a bit messier and more dangerous than FarmVille (perhaps just one reason that FarmVille players outnumber actual farmers in the United States by more than 60 to 1). Yet some of the game’s biggest fans are farmers.

“I was having all these deaths on the farm and hurting myself on a daily basis doing real farming,” said Donna Schoonover, of Schoonover Farm in Skagit County, Wash., who raises sheep, goats and Satin Angora rabbits (real ones!). “This was a way to remind myself of the mythology of farming, and why I started farming in the first place.”

Zynga, which is based in San Francisco, specializes in games that are easy to learn but hard to walk away from. It also makes Mafia Wars (25 million players) and Café World (24 million), the second and third most popular games on Facebook, respectively.

Mark Pincus, the founder and chief executive, said that Zynga earns money from advertising, sponsorships and players who buy in-game cash. Zynga has been profitable since 2007, he said.

“It’s really the same formula that makes Facebook successful,” Mr. Pincus said, “the ability to connect with your friends, to express yourself, and to invest in the game.”

FarmVille takes advantage of Facebook by allowing — nay, nagging — players to become “neighbors” with their friends, even those who have not joined the game. Players can earn points by helping with their neighbors’ work. They can also irritate friends who don’t want to play FarmVille with endless notifications and invitations to join, which has led to a vocal backlash.

Cropping up alongside fan blogs like Farmville Freak, which after just one month is getting 25,000 unique visitors a day, are Facebook groups for people who are tired of listening to their friends talk about their eggplants. On “I Hate FarmVille,” the largest of the anti-Farmville affinity groups on Facebook (it has more than 17,000 members), one person commented, “No, I will not give you a tree! No, I will not be your neighbor!”

Saying goodbye

2009-11-12T12:24:00.001-05:00

- Ok...bye.
- Yes...goodbye.
- See you tomorrow.
- Not tomorrow. Saturday.
- Oh yeah. See you on Saturday.
- See you.
- Goodnight.

saying goodbye.mp3