What Good Is A Weblog? BlogHui, Wellington, New Zealand. March 2006. (quicktime, 3.2M)

"The Ultimate Aim of All Creative Activity Is the Weblog!" Why is this claim preposterous, while the Bauhaus manifesto raises no objection? Weblogs today are written and read by millions, and yet we have almost no useful discussion of weblog excellence. What shall we emulate? What should be deplore?

The romantic view of weblogs claims that we shouldn't worry about craft, that our weblogs are excellent because we ourselves are excellent. Skeptics and journalists tell us that weblogs are filled with mundane self-indulgence: "I ate a cheese sandwich." The cheese sandwich is indeed familiar to weblog readers; in this talk I explore the eight key uses of the cheese sandwich in serious weblog writing.

Danish media scholar Lisbeth Klastrup noticed some .mil and .gov visitors in her referrer logs after 9/11, and wondered whether the US government was watching her.

Checking a month of Eastgate's logs, I find that roughly 0.1% of our traffic comes from .gov and .mil respectively. That's about the same amount of traffic we see from Ireland and New Zealand.

The US government employs about 1.8M people. The work force of New Zealand is 1.8M people. The Irish workforce is nearly the same size. So it's probably just the effect of lots of people with diverse interests, and the effect of building a successful Web journal.

Adrian Miles makes several interesting observations about The Two Towers. First, that it's essentially a New Zealand film, and second, that it's Gollum's film.

"so gollum, the heart of the film. the rest is smoke and mirrors."

It's fascinating to read Miles on Tolkien, because he knows film and doesn't know The Lord Of The Rings backwards and forwards. I've read and reread Tolkien many times over the years, I used to be able to quote long passages by heart. For me, the first view of the film is inevitably exegesis; every speech that's moved to a new scene, every set detail that doesn't match the text, clamors for attention. (Remarkably, almost all the changes do work. I have no idea why Jackson added the elven archers at Helm's Deep, but the detour to the Fall of Osgiliath gives the art department a wonderful opportunity)

Edoras in the movie is beautifully, brilliantly done, and the equation of Wormtongue and Richard III is perfect shorthand. One thing that's missing, I think, is the shock readers should feel as they enter Meduseld, for here alone in the entire Trilogy we leave the realm of fantasy and touch upon the field we know: none of us knows what became of Gondor or Mirkwood or Buckland, but someday in the distant future another visitor will come to Edoras, a fellow named Beowulf.

Stuart Moulthrop's Victory Garden recalls that first Iraq war, and Dave Ciccoricco, writing in EBR, looks at its political critique.

A lot of this struck me as obvious -- I think the politics of Victory Garden and its tribute to Pynchon lie on the surface, where Ciccoricco seems to think readers might overlook them in the glare of Borgesian allusions. But Ciccoricco (who teaches at the University of Canterbury in Cristchurch, New Zealand) reveals an interesting and unremarked divide in the hypertext literature; many of the best-known recent readings of Victory Garden have been composed by non-American critics. Koskimaa, Klastrup. That's odd: Moulthrop is a very American writer.

New Zealand truffle farmer Gareth Renowden has a new blog, On The Farm. It's made with Tinderbox.

Peg (the amazingly charming truffle hound) had her last truffle-hunting gig of the year this morning ...

Two separate notes this morning came to the same conclusion about clafoutis: if you're making it at home, don't pit the cherries. (Restaurants need to worry about incautious diners, but you'll be careful, won't you?)

Gareth Renowden, a New Zealand truffle farmer, was the first to write. His latest post describes truffle pizza. Hmmmm.

S. Irene Virbila, who is restaurant critic for the L. A. Times, also advises us to leave the cherries whole.

"You don't have to pit the cherries: in fact, it will taste better if you don't. Part of the pleasure in this rustic dessert is rolling the stones around in your mouth and sucking off every bit of cherry juice.

"I once was staying with a friend in the Dordogne: her elderly mother lived in a small detached building. When I went over to visit, this blind woman in it must have been her late eighties had a clafoutis in the oven. She'd baked them every cherry season for so many years, she could tell when it was done by the smell (which is true, by the way)."

Thanks to all who sent supportive email about What Ended. It does help.

Special appreciation to blog responses by Prof. Matt Kirschenbaum (Maryland) and Prof. Lynsey Gedye (New Zealand).

I’m confident that the USA Government’s continuing vileness towards New Zealand is insignificant compared to the vileness and despicable lack of respect they’ve shown towards their own people.

Meanwhile, NPR reports that nobody seems to have kept track of where all the hospital and nursing home patients were sent, and the master list is now being compiled by the guy who fixes computers for a local government agency. The Times Picayune says there's no plan for collecting and identifying the dead.

The National Archives sent a team of experts to salvage the city's historical records. The archivists were turned away at a checkpoint. They're apparently still waiting.

WWL reports that the First Lady commented on the radio last night that "many of the people at the Astrodome were 'underprivileged anyway.'"

Next March, I'll be going to BlogHui, the first international weblog conference in Wellington, New Zealand. (Here's the call for papers.)

The theme is "Activate!", and it's going to be an interesting two-day event (with a third day of workshops, too!) Can't wait.

It's a long plane trip from Boston. If you're in New Zealand -- or anywhere in that hemisphere -- and you'd like to arrange a lecture or workshop next March, email me.

Registration for BlogHui (Wellington, New Zealand, 17-18 March 2006) is now open. I understand that space is quite limited, so you might want to sign up early.

I'll be speaking about weblogs, money, audience, storytelling, and scale....

Some paper abstracts are starting to appear on the BlogHui blog, part of the ramp-up to next month's weblog extravaganza in Wellington, New Zealand. Today's additions are an interesting small-scale ethnographic study of weblog writers and readers, and a look at the place of a national library in harvesting and conserving weblogs.

Torill Mortensen's speaking at BlogHui, too. A lot of her work, lately, has been studying the way people act in Worlds of Warcraft.

She leaves for New Zealand on Sunday -- a week earlier than I -- in order to see a bit more of the nonvirtual world of the fabled South Pacific.

The 10 days before Blog Hui will be spent in a campervan with a friend. I am excited and happy, [will] carry a digital camera and hope for internet connections on the way. Prepare for travel-blogging of the 'what can possibly go wrong with two middle aged women driving a camper van for the first time on the other side of the road in a foreign country?'-kind.

Torill is already in sunny New Zealand. She got half way 'round the world quickly; her luggage didn't.

Romantically rewriting my plight, I imagined myself a heroine running from the government spies - only I left WAY too many card-purchase traces.

Speaking of which, what happened to isabella v?

On March 2, 2003 at 4:12 pm, I disappeared. My name is isabella v., but it's not. I'm twentysomething and I am an international fugitive.

She's been silent since November. I've often speculated that She's A Flight Risk is a weblog thriller; going dark seems the most spontaneous and unexpected move she's made. It's way out of character -- which, curiously, adds to the sense of authenticity.

I tried the butternut squash risotto again last night. It was much better this time, sweeter and richer with more depth. What was the difference?

• Half of the broth was fennel broth I made the other night. The other half was chicken (from a box: I'm drawing down supplies before the New Zealand expedition).
• The recipe uses a lot of wine -- 1.5c. I used some Lindeman's chardonnay, also left over. From my earlier comments, the wine's acidity balances the squash's sweetness, but this wine isn't striking acidic.
• It's a lot later in the season, so perhaps the squash was a bit sweeter.
• It was a big squash.

I had forgotten how fussy this recipe is, even allowing for the Cook's shortcut of adding half the broth at once. The little preliminary steps -- cleaning and chopping the squash, browning the squash, sauteeing the seeds -- don't look like much on paper but they do push dinner toward the late side.

I'm off to New Zealand and BlogHui.

Walking into the airport is always exciting: now you're home in Boston, but in a few hours you'll be somewhere else. But this somewhere is especially else: first Dallas, then Los Angeles, then Auckland, then Wellington. For Jack Aubrey, it'd be six or seven months. It's still half way 'round.

Last year, I argued that we need to take care to cultivate and nurture the long tail of weblogs that receive modest traffic.

It's really important to make sure we can glance at the other 5 million blogs when we want to. Adding one or two additional regular readers to every blog in the Long Tail makes a huge difference in the economy of the blogosphere: if everyone gets that reader or two, then most of the weblog reading that happens will happen in the Tail and the Tail will matter. If people don't generally get that extra reader or two, then all the reading is concentrated in the A List and, well, it'll be Mr. Murdoch and his five best friends, all the way down.

I now suspect I was completely wrong, and that the Long Tail was a mistake or a fraud. My worries about ensuring discoverability (and so an audience) for low-traffic weblogs ignores two obviously key facts about intimate or nobitic weblogs:

• Intimate weblogs recruit their natural readers. Your mother is going to find your weblog. It doesn't matter whether people link to you or not; she's been finding your stuff since you were two. And you'll find the weblog of your graduate advisor, your favorite writers, and of people who share your esoteric interests. Between Google and the telephone, intimate weblogs will find their natural readers.
• Valuable writing tends to seek the right readers, not merely a lot of readers. Whether we're talking about public policy or graph theory or scissor-tailed flycatchers, the audience that matters is the group of people who understand and care about the topic and who can do something with it or about it.
• Advertising is a good way to reward some weblog writers, but one advertising broker now owns so much attention that it distorts many people's vision of the economics of the blogosophere. Advertising is merely one of many routes to economic reward.

Journalists (and politico-journalism exiles) wanted to watch the Long Tail because, if you're financing public service news coverage through advertising, circulation makes everything possible and your rival's circulation can make everything futile.

The A-List likes to measure the Long Tail because it reassures them that they matter. The romantic myth of weblogs -- that weblogs succeed because we ourselves are so intrinsically wonderful -- creates a sort of redemption through blogging. When that reassurance stops delighting them, they give up and go home and the Technorati 100 shuffles slightly.

I got fooled because I spend a lot of time thinking about hypertext publishing -- especially hypertext fiction -- and fiction is anomalous.

• Anyone may read a story about a girl who died or the the plate that time forgot. The jump (just a few letters!) from "anyone" to "everyone" tempts lots of writers.
• A few fiction writers do get everyone, or nearly everyone. and that vast box office drove the fiction world in the 80s and 90s even though none of the hypertext people write the sort of work that can become a Hollywood blockbuster.
• The people for whom The Old Neighborhood or Sons and Lovers are going to make a huge difference are not a huge crowd but they could be almost anyone. And you don't know you need Ulysses until you've read it.

Anyone, everyone, someone, the right one. BOS->DFW->LAX->AUK->WLG.

Long trip.

For the long trip, I downloaded a set of Bach motets and a performance of the Goldberg variations. I don't believe I've heard Jesu, Meine Freude since grad school. Too long.

Is it just bad luck, or are the motets spectacularly unfashionable? You never hear them on the radio.

The day before I leave for New Zealand, Linda and I hop over to the Gardner for a one-day symposium on "Pirates, Pizza, and Painting" -- a discussion of cultural interchange in the Eastern Mediterranean in the 14th and 15th centuries -- especially the interchange between the Ottoman court after the fall of Constantinople and Venice.

At the request of a Sultan who was, apparently, deeply interested in the new advances in representational art in the barbaric West, Venice dispatched a prominent artist (Gentile Bellini) with their embassy, along with an assortment of prints. We still have Bellini's work, and we still have those prints. Someone colored them, and someone pasted them into an album of Turkoman patterns resused as a sort of scrapbook, and there they are still.

Lots of interesting questions, asked by some intriguing scholars. Kathryn Kopman-Appel asks, "what did the Jews think of all this art stuff, that seemed so intriguing to the Muslims?" The answer is that they decided early on that two-dimensionsal art wasn't forbidden, but they also decided that Christians were idolaters (though one commentator observed that Byzantine art was do bad that, apparently, Christians were no longer very good at idolatry!) Ironically, the 13th-century Christian attack on the Talmud led Jewish scholars to learn more about Christianity, and that led Jews into using illustration much more freely in their manuscripts.

Nancy Jenkins gave a delightful tour of the development of pasta -- often ascribed to Marco Polo. She believes the Chinese origin of noodles is a mix; once you have wheat cultivation, she thinks, both bread and pasta follow inevitably. You're making porridge as usual, the goats get loose, by the time you catch the goats the porridge has begun to ferment but it's too late to start over and so you cook the stuff and hope no one notices. Put it in the fire and you've got bread; boil it and you've got pasta.

The afternoon was spent with some fine close-reading of drawings and paintings. It's good to know there are people who know so much stuff. There was lots I didn't follow, like the lovely drawing of a Venetian galley attributed to Raphael (and labeled on Deborah Howard's slide "But surely not!" for reasons doubtless immediately evident to those in the audience who belonged there and who weren't software designers out of their element.

Attending symposia out of your field is often more fun and more instructive than sticking to what you know. People worry too much, I think, about what they won't understand. If some of the talk is too technical or too sophisticated, the odds are good that the preceding parts will have been new and fascinating.

Yes, sometimes is gets out of hand. Humanities people in their element sometimes assume that everybody speaks English, French, and Italian. Occasionally in the sciences you'll hit a talk that absolutely requires some math you don't possess. But these mishaps hardly ever happen.

And here we are. We left LA at Sunday dusk and arrived twelve hours later. It's early morning Tuesday.

Auckland! Back in the long white zone -- the part of the world where coffee is long white instead of au lait or white or melange or, in the old Boston parlance, regular. Waiting in the Qantas club for my short hop to Wellington, I listen to a televised interview with the new physician for the All Blacks. (All Blacks, as I understand it, are Red Sox of a different color)

The morning sky is just beginning to turn light grey and the hills are growing distinct across the bay.

Wherever I go, it seems that soon after I arrive people start asking me for directions. Here in Wellington, it took about six hours.

Just for fun, I cooked up a quick RSS feed for this Bloghui expedition. I don't have an net connection right now, so breakage might occur.

The morning began with a quick trip to the University for email and a quick trip to the shoe repair store for an urgently-needed hardware patch. Then, off to the City Museum, which has a wonderful room on 20th century Wellington, explained with a tiny little story for each year. There's the year of ghastly murders, the year the All Blacks beat Australia 11-6, the year of ill-advised urban renewal, the year of the failed (but influential) general strike.

There's also a nifty exhibit of Plimmer's Ark, which started out as a nifty new sailing ship, ran aground, was salvaged and beached to make an important downtown store. The store was eventually replaced by sturdy brick buildings, and when these buildings were renovated in the preservationist aftermath of the year of ill-advised urban renewal, there in the basement was the keel of the ship that ran aground so many years before.

Then, quite by accident I ran into the Gedyes -- the BlogHui organizers -- on Cuba Street, and somehow we spent the afternoon going to a succession of dazzling places all around the harbour. Terns, gulls, shags (shags!) and, yes, that was a penguin, sitting on a rock!

Within a few kilometers of dowtown Wellington, the Karori wildlife reserve is making a remarkable effort to reclaim some land formerly used for reservoirs. New Zealand's wildlife has been transformed by the introduction of species from elsewhere that have tended to crowd out the native species; at Karori, very clever efforts are being made to redress the balance.

Here's a Tui; they wear bow ties and sing a lot.

The key is a fence -- a very sophisticated fence that keeps mammals out. Cats and possums can't climb it. Stoats can't cross it. Mice can't burrow under it. So, the inside of the sanctuary is essentially free of small mammals -- just as New Zealand used to be. And that means lots of species that had been isolated on scattered, remote islands can no come back and flourish.

Quite a day of birding -- especially since all the birds are new to me, as is the field guide.

1. Black shag
2. Mallard
3. Silvereye
4. Paradise Shellduck
5. Fantail
6. Tui
7. New Zealand Robin
8. Stitchbird
9. ?Chaffinch
10. Blackbird
11. Kaka
12. Bellbird
13. New Zealand Scaup
14. Welcome Swallow

Last year, I mentioned the clever naturalist who named the Superb Blue Fairy-wren. I think the author of the Welcome Swallow deserves some credit, too.

On Monday, I'm hoping to visit New Zealand truffle farmer Gareth Renowden. His farm's weblog, On The Farm, has recently been reengineered with Flint.

Update: visit blogged here.

At BlogHui, there seemed to be a good deal of interest swarming around my contention that the blogger/journalist debate over professional standards is a red herring, because journalism is not a profession. This sparked even more raised eyebrows last night at my talk at Christchurch.

Lots of blogging, too, about the role of journals and journal-making in everyday live. Marica Sevelj has a lovely tribute to her new Florentine journal. Lynsey Gedye suggests that adopting an elephant is a great way to spark your partner's interest, but barring a handy elephant, starting a journal will do. Lindsey suggests making a strong cup of tea, and then drawing the teacup in tea....

A delightful day driving in and around Queenstown, viewing vistas and carrying Linda's tripod. Dinner at The Bunker. Linda had a vertical Caesar salad for dessert (and I had a fig creme brulée for a second dessert) and she enjoyed a very nice goat cheese entrée, and the roast lamb with lamb shoulder confit was really delightful.

Last night, we had a lovely venison at Solera Vino, with a bottle of Chard Farms pinot noir. The road to Chard Farm today was a challenge.

On the roadmaps here, you find some strange places. Amon Hen. Isengard. Someday, people will wonder where these names came from.

I think it was Donald Matheson who pointed out, after my talk at Christchurch, that my approach to blogs was primarily literary where a lot of people approach weblogs through sociology. It's a useful distinction.

Another way of looking at this: I prefer to investigate specific weblogs closely, where a lot of weblog research tries to learn from weblogs in the aggregate -- from their patterns of interconnection, or their population in the wild. And in a Belgian Bar in Wellington, I think I came close to grasping the root of Torill's position on games and on weblogs, which does focus on what people do with games rather than on what games can be.

How do you move from research to action? I like to try to make things better by making better things -- to look at that things like weblogs want to be, and then to make tools that try to bring out new facets and new affordances, tools that help people do new things. Those tools are always going to be challenging and quirky and strange, at least at first, because their new tools to do new things.

If you innovate from sociology, you get polished tools that help people do what everyone is already doing, but that use new shapes and new techniques to make things simpler and more comfortable.

After Queensland, we drove over the the West coast of the South Island. That's got to be one of the most spectacular drives I've experienced. Beautiful weather -- sun, nice clouds, fresh air. Open roads. One-lane bridges.

We had too little time in Franz Joseph, our hiking boots had been sacrificed to Travelling Light, and it was Linda's birthday. So first we walked up Sentinel Rock for early-morning glacier-gazing

and then we took a backseat helicopter spin up to the top of Fox Glacier.

The glacier itself is a lot of snow. A lot of snow. The pinnacles and chasms are impressive. And you see a lot of blue in the glacial ice -- a color which, as I understand it, comes from a 2nd-harmonic absorption band (meaning that the blue is incredibly weak and requires a lot of path to be noticeable. (Or is the blue in glaciers Tyndall scattering? )

That's Linda at left, camera in hand. She's got some good shots; she'll be working on the prints for months.

The Flemings have two charming alpaca, Zach and Cherokee. After meeting these kindly camelids, I might have alpaca too, if I had the requisite grass, space, and climate.

When the alpaca are paying attention to you -- when, for example, you're holding an apple from the tree that's just outside their pen -- they look at you and make sure you know they care about you. When they aren't paying attention, they make it clear that they're doing something else right now. Being gentle, kindly, and helpful beasts, they'll be happy to pay attention to you if you want, of course.

That's a lesson for airlines and hotels and customs officials. Coming into the US seems to get worse and worse.

• The passport inspection station at LAX has a whole bunch of nifty, new multi-color LED displays. The displays have wireless. They're easy to program. I know this because nobody has bothered to read the instructions, and so they're running their demo program instead of helping visitors stand in the right line. If you don't know how to use them, turn them off.
• The customs form, we are told, must be filled out in English and, if you make a mistake, you will be sent to the back of the line. This invites retaliation by countries and individual airport staffs who feel like getting even. Would you like to go to the back of the line for making a mistake in your Mandarin, or your Turkic? And isn't it a diplomatic custom to accept French in all such circumstances? US passports are bilingual French-English, and I don't think that has anything to do with Quebecois sensibilities.
• The roof at the LAX terminal was leaking. I know it doesn't rain that much in LA, but still -- it makes the US look like a third world country, and it can't be doing the structure any good.
• The luggage carousel at the LAX customs terminal stalled, and the second carousel also had some mysterious problem. As a result, almost everyone's bags were delayed, and the economy-class bags started to arrive before the business-class bags. The AA rep tried to explain everything, but made things worse when she said that they didn't want to delay the economy class bags just so the first-class luggage would arrive first. This indicated the idea had arisen; a better stance would pretend that the thought would simply never have ocurred to anyone. Everyone understands that first-class passengers pay for priority service, but everyone should be served as quickly and efficiently as possible.
• A physician standing next to me was doing a slow boil (and his partner was way past simmering) because he was coming close to missing his connection to JFK. So were we. "There are lots of flights to New York", I said. "You don't have to operate on someone at 4am tomorrow," he answered. With lots of running and the help of a very efficient AA desk rep, we did get on the flight. When last seen, the doctor was a customer relations time bomb with a short fuse: getting someone to stand there, listen to his problems and to be seen trying to make arrangements would probably have solved it. Push the panic button and get someone to pitch in and lend a hand.
• The AA rep called across to the TSA checker, "Maria, I've got two hot pax!" and she sent us right upstairs. There, however, the AA rep was a distant memory and we faced long, long lines and very slow inspections by slow-moving and slouching people in uniforms who smiled when talking to each other and looked bored when talking to the public. I am unconvinced that the TSA inspections are effective at anything but creating inconvenience and scaring people who might vote Republican. Inspectors seem to be getting slower and less polite again -- perhaps because it's not an election year, or perhaps because their unpopularity is grinding them down.
• Two of our bags weren't loaded at Kennedy. The AA rep handled this fairly well, but dropped the ball twice. First, the instructions for following up were printed out on a 12x7 dot matrix printer that must be 15 years old; this is an airline, and and airline doesn't want its customers thinking 'old, unreliable, obsolete equipment.' Spend $50, buy a modern printer, keep the old equipment backstage.
• Then, she explained that "Sometimes, they can't get all the bags" on the small jets they use for this run. That's the B answer (and it's much better than 'we'll trace the bags and let you know', which you usually hear.) The A answer is to have circumstantial detail: 'We're incredibly sorry, but we simply had to get a transplant organ on the very first plane, and we ran out of space, but we'll drop your bag at your house tomorrow morning." Or whatever. I'd be delighted to be inconvenienced if I knew it was really helping someone, or even if I was making the airline a lot of money or helping them out of a jam. "The post office contract says they can always ship two bags, but today the two bags were 500 pounds of gold bullion" is fine, too.

It's only really annoying if nobody seems to care much, if they delayed your bag or inconvenienced you because they didn't feel any particular interest in paying attention.

A warning sign in Haast, NZ

Narrative is everywhere. Notice, for example, this charmingly non-standard warning sign: in order to decode it, you must reconstruct a story. The danger is not "look out for falling bicyclists" (as in the similar 'falling rocks" warning); you have to think things through, and all the requisite clues are nicely presented.

The journals of Sir Joseph Banks, the young naturalist who sailed with Cook in 1768 toward Tahiti, New Zealand, and Botany Bay, has been transcribed online.

December 1769

24.Land in sight, an Island or rather several small ones most probably 3 Kings, so that it was conjecturd that we had Passd the Cape which had so long troubled us. Calm most of the Day: myself in a boat shooting in which I had good success, killing cheifly several Gannets or Solan Geese so like Europaean ones that they are hardly distinguishable from them. As it was the humour of the ship to keep Christmas in the old fashiond way it was resolvd of them to make a Goose pye for tomorrows dinner.

25. Christmas day: Our Goose pye was eat with great approbation and in the Evening all hands were as Drunk as our forefathers usd to be upon the like occasion.

26. This morn all heads achd with yesterdays debauch. Wind has been Easterly these 3 or 4 days so we have not got at all nearer the Island than we were.

You don't know what will turn out to matter. You've got to write it all down, and share the best parts, and hope what you write and what you share turn out to be what people will eventually need and want. This is Kawasaki's point about the way, sometimes, you make the blog and sometimes the blog makes you. Nothing much happened on these days, because the wind kept the ship from going where they wanted to go. And Banks seems to have been in a bad mood, since his journal entries for the previous days are unusually terse. Still, we see lots of fun things that it's good to know. For example:

• Banks, educated at Harrow, Eton, and Oxford, and one of the leading scientists of his generation, couldn't spell.
• The first goal is to collect specimens and to describe new species. But if the specimens happen to be good to eat, that's nice, too.
• Sailing in confined waters and tricky winds, off an uncharted coast, was not considered a reason to prevent all hands from drinking. "As drunk as our forefathers" is an interesting expression as well.

Most of all, though Banks has little or nothing of consequence to report, he finds something to post to his weblog. Consistent updates help keep the narrative moving.

It makes sense that, when I finally tried tournedos Rossini, it was at an amusement park.

I first read about Tivoli Gardens in the context of War and THE vanished world. Exodus, I think, or maybe War and Remembrance. I can't check, because the Marriott wants $30/day for internet. But Tivoli for me was an image of a lost world. I wasn't expecting much.

It's really surprisingly good. Just about what you'd expect, if you took the 18th-century pleasure garden and added electricity.

I hadn't expected Tivoli to be a place you go at night. But there were lots of kids. Great family portraits: the oh-so-adult nymphet sitting beside the bored younger brother, sitting beside the astonished 6-year-old. (I thought Danes still kept farmer's hours, also known as American meal times?) And I'd never imagined that it would be packed with white-tablecloth restaurants serving things like fjord shrimp and tournedos Rossini.

And you know, it was pretty good. The meat was lean European beef, and so the kitchen cooked it very, very gently. But, given the available materials, that's probably the right approach. The foie gras was lovely. I think that the truffles were summer truffles, alas, but this is summer and this is Denmark, and I believe that all Danish truffles are summer truffles. (I was holding out a sneaking hope that they'd be New Zealand truffles or something like that, but no luck.) The chef compensated by adding a nice sauté of mixed mushrooms.

I asked for adivce choosing a glass of wine to go with the fjord shrimp. I thought this a sensible thing to ask: surely, lots of visitors to Tivoli aren't exactly sure what wine goes well with fjord shrimp? After all, I ordered the fjord shrimp because, back where I come from, we have no fjord shrimp, or fjords.

The waiter thought I was bats: 'Which wine do you feel like?' Not the answer I expected, but perhaps a wise answer anyway. Zen and the art of table service. Another waiter kept sprinting across the balcony, trying to stay out of the drizzle, and causing various sorts of mild havoc, which reminded me of the passage from The Making of a Chef where the CIA students are taught never, ever, to run in the front of the house: it makes the patrons worry that the place is on fire.

It began to pour as I finished, and having been up pretty much continuously for 36 hours, after two mostly-white nights this week (hi Mom!), I didn't stay for either of the concerts or for a peek at Alvin Ailey. (Alvin Ailey in an amusement park? Nice!)

We started with bluefish paté and a few cheeses, served on a nice box of biscuits that Amazon grocery had sent us in a promotional care package. This was a fine excuse to try the Chard Farms Judge and Jury Chardonnay we carted home from New Zealand earlier this year. A merry time was had by all.

Then, gigot a sept heures, much like last year, but better. A nice Colorado leg of lamb, tightly sealed in a dutch oven (grouted with bread dough so it's really sealed) along with lots of thinly sliced onions, plenty of diced carrots, and a generous cup of white wine. And don't forget the duchess potatoes, which plenty of cream and bubbling with Emmenthaler cheese, or the very pleasant Bordeaux.

Meryl made a lovely ginger cake for dessert.

Then, back to the kitchen — not just to clean, but to prep the morning's caramel French toast and to brine tomorrow night's roast chicken.

by Robert A. Heinlein

Get the book.

I loved Heinlein when I was in high school. Sure, I was already anxious about his politics, but in fact he seemed to be catching up with the world, repudiating his old right-wing leanings. He sure could spin a tale, and his ideas about the social order of the future were awfully intriguing.

Then I went to college, where I and all my best friends learned how complicated a really complicated communal life could be.

But the new Stross is based in some way on Friday, and by the time this novel appeared in 1982 I was too busy learning at first hand to have a lot of time for Heinlein. And, let’s face it, though Stross is right that the big late Heinlein’s are special, they’re also creepy, filled with wise and handsome sages in bed with beautiful daughter figures.

And then, of course, came the plague; late Heinlein is all about the joys of sleeping with people, and Friday was published in the year AIDS was recognized.

If Stross’s The Jennifer Morgue is an explicit romp in the world of Bond, Friday is a Strossian inversion: the eponymous heroine is a Bond girl with a gender switch, who beds handsome old men instead of glamorous Bond girls. (She beds lots of young women, too) We start with an action scene just to get things moving and show us how skilled our heroine is – and how dedicated her organization is to saving her – and then check in with HQ for buckets of exposition. (The opening action scene includes a rape that is now beyond the pale; since I still want to think Three Days Of The Condor is a terrific movie even despite its abduction, forgiving it because they just didn’t know better, I think Heinlein gets a pass here. Barely.)

The catch about Friday is that she’s an Artificial Person, a Living Artifact. She’s bio-engineered, and essentially all earth societies have decided that Artificial People aren’t really people. This seems strange today; she's not a robot, she’s just in vitro. But we’re also supposed to take it in stride when a New Zealand family disowns their 20-something daughter for marrying a Tongan, because Tongans aren’t white and, while Maori are treated as white, Tongans aren’t Maori either. Things were different, then, and perhaps Heinlein himself was falling a decade or so behind the times. The effect, really, is like watching Guess Who’s Coming To Dinner in modern dress; if you don’t remember the time, you begin to wonder what everyone is fussing about.

by Robert A. Heinlein

I loved Heinlein when I was in high school. Sure, I was already anxious about his politics, but in fact he seemed to be catching up with the world, repudiating his old right-wing leanings. He sure could spin a tale, and his ideas about the social order of the future were awfully intriguing.

Then I went to college, where I and all my best friends learned how complicated a really complicated communal life could be.

But the new Stross is based in some way on Friday, and by the time this novel appeared in 1982 I was too busy learning at first hand to have a lot of time for Heinlein. And, let’s face it, though Stross is right that the big late Heinlein’s are special, they’re also creepy, filled with wise and handsome old sages in bed with beautiful daughter figures.

And then, of course, came the plague; late Heinlein is all about the joys of sleeping with people, and Friday was published in the year AIDS was recognized.

If Stross’s The Jennifer Morgue is an explicit romp in the world of Bond, Friday is a Strossian inversion: the eponymous heroine is a Bond girl with a gender switch, who beds handsome old men instead of glamorous Bond girls. (She beds lots of young women, too) We start with an action scene just to get things moving and show us how skilled our heroine is – and how dedicated her organization is to saving her – and then check in with HQ for buckets of exposition. (The opening action scene includes a rape that is now beyond the pale; since I still want to think Three Days Of The Condor is a terrific movie even despite its abduction, forgiving it because they just didn’t know better, I think Heinlein gets a pass here. Barely.)

The catch about Friday is that she’s an Artificial Person, a Living Artifact. She’s bio-engineered, and essentially all earth societies have decided that Artificial People aren’t really people. This seems strange today; she's not a robot, she’s just in vitro. But we’re also supposed to take it in stride when a New Zealand family disowns their 20-something daughter for marrying a Tongan, because Tongans aren’t white and, while Maori are treated as white, Tongans aren’t Maori either. Things were different, then, and perhaps Heinlein himself was falling a decade or so behind the times. The effect, really, is like watching Guess Who’s Coming To Dinner in modern dress; if you don’t remember the time, you begin to wonder what everyone is fussing about.

Fresh New Day: an exciting manifesto and gorgeous Web project from New Zealanders Marica Sevelj and Lynsey Gedye

From Ruskin’s The true and the beautiful in nature, art, morals, and religion, Volume 2:

Now in order that people may be happy in their work, these three things are needed : They must be fit for it: They must not do too much of it : and they must have a sense of success in it—not a doubtful sense, such as needs some testimony of other people for its confirmation, but a sure sense, or rather knowledge, that so much work has been done well, and fruitfully done, whatever the world may say or think about it. So that in order that a man may be happy, it is necessary that he should not only be capable of his work, but a good judge of his work.

For the recent Tinderbox Weekend, I did all my talks in Tinderbox. This was a bit of a stunt, because most of the time I rely heavily on visuals and tend to give Keynote a workout.

It went surprisingly well. Here, for example, is the “slide” for the agenda. It’s a Tinderbox map view – and it’s actually the map view I used earlier in the week to make sure all the segments fit into the program.

We’re having another Tinderbox Weekend in Boston, February 4-5. I think we’re already close to sold out. Please register soon.

We'd like to plan a Tinderbox Weekend in Western Europe, perhaps Paris or Amsterdam, next Spring. Other cities are possible, too. We’ve been talking about getting a Tinderbox event set up in Australia or New Zealand for ages: high time. Have a suggestion for a venue? Want to help? Email me.

I’m reading the new Adam Gopnik, The Table Comes First . In a chapter on wine and wine-writing, Gopnik repeats the off-told story of a study demonstrating that even experienced tasters, when tasting blind and blindfolded, could not distinguish red wine from white?

I thought that had been debunked. And, seriously, can it possibly be true? I can imagine that some red wines might possibly be mixed up with some white wines, but that isn’t what we mean here.

I’m not very skilled nor very knowledgable about wine, and my palate is not particularly fine. Still, I’m confident that I could reliably distinguish between pairs of distinct wines without seeing them or their labels. For example:

• a typical Sauternes
• a somewhat under-aged Cabernet-led Bordeaux

One has tannin, the other doesn’t. One has sugar, the other doesn’t. If you can distinguish apple cider from unsweetened black tea, you ought to be able to tell these apart. Or, take another pair:

• a malo-lactic fermented Napa Valley Chardonnay
• a characteristic McLaren Vale Shiraz

One has lots of butter. One has lots of pepper. They’re both rich wines with lots of body, but I can’t imagine getting them mixed up.

• an acidic, citrusy Sauvignon Blanc from New Zealand (about $10)
• a dry Amontillado sherry

First, the wines themselves tend to jump up and wave flags. Ones says, “I’m sherry!” If you opened a bottle of sherry and you got a light-bodied wine with grapefruit notes, no residual sugar, and not much finish, you’d be raising your eyebrows or summoning the gendarmes.

Now, I can imagine finding pairs that would be tricky. White wines with tannin. Light-bodied, fruit-forward reds, paired with big whites. Off-beat grapes. So, sure, I can believe you could set up some pairs that even experts would find puzzling. But can anyone confuse the common cases? “One of these is a typical Hermitage; the other is a Chablis. Can you distinguish them?”