G. Michael’s After Dark

Last night after the Symphony performance we headed back to German Village for some noshing at G. Michael’s, the terrific bistro located within a few blocks of our new home.  We wanted to sample some of their “small plates” — which seemed like a wise option, as opposed to a full-blown meal, after 10 p.m. on a Friday night.

Guess what?  The G. Michael’s “small plates” aren’t in fact, very small . . . but they are incredibly tasty.  Kish and the CCC each got the shrimp and grits, which is one of the bistro’s signature dishes, and shared a side of brussel sprouts and couldn’t finish it all.  I got the housemade sausage stuffed strudel, with low country red beans and pepper jam, pictured above, which was both huge and fantastic, with a very pleasant spicy kick that more than held its own against a good glass of red wine.  I ate every bit of it.

At the end of the meal our great waitress gave us good news and bad news.  The bad news is that the G. Michael’s autumn menu will be ending in a week or so, and the excellent sausage strudel will be cycling off the carte.  (Noooooo!!!!!)  The good news is that the talented chefs at G. Michael’s no doubt have already created new, equally tasty concoctions to replace it — well, in a manner of speaking — on the menu.

Incidentally, the late-evening dining ambiance at G. Michael’s is very enjoyable.  We got there as most of the supper crowd was clearing out, and we enjoyed sitting in the quiet, candlelit, white tablecloth-topped dining room, listening to some mellow jazz selections on the sound system and hearing the clink of glasses as the bartenders prepared to close up shop while we finished our drinks and dessert.  It’s another reason why G. Michael’s is one of Columbus’ very best restaurants.

The New Maestro Milanov

Last night Kish, the Carroll County Cousin, and I went to the mighty Ohio Theater for a performance of the Columbus Symphony.  It was the debut of the next Music Director for the Symphony, Rossen Milanov, who comes to Ohio’s Capital City after stints with the New Jersey Orchesta and as assistant conductor of the Philadelphia Orchestra.

Milanov  technically is Music Director Designee — his four-year contract as Music Director begins in the 2015-16 season — but last night’s performance suggests he is already very much in charge.  With a contagiously enthusiastic demeanor, a demonstrative conducting style, and a very cool looking quasi-Nehru jacket, Milanov led the CSO through a selection by Edward Elgar that he described as a personal favorite, a new cello concerto by Mason Bates that the Columbus Symphony helped commission and that featured some terrific playing by the talented Joshua Roman, and finally Saint-Saens’ excellent and moving Organ Symphony.  Roman also unexpectedly treated us to the sublime Prelude to Bach’s Cello Suite No. 1 as a kind of personal encore after the Bates concerto was concluded.

It was a very enjoyable program and drew a pretty good Friday night crowd, even though the announced playlist didn’t include any of the big-name composers, like Mozart and Beethoven, who typically fill the seats.  It also reminded me that, as enjoyable as classical music is on an iPod or a CD, there is nothing quite like watching a full orchestra playing in unison and experienced, and relishing, the powerful sound it produces.  Kish and I decided that we need to come back to another Symphony concert soon, and we’re betting that Maestro Milanov will make our next visit an equally enjoyable one.

At The Ohio

We’re at the Ohio Theatre with the Carroll County Cousin for some organ music with the Columbus Symphony Orchestra.

529’d

State of the Union policy proposals come, often in rapid-fire fashion, and go.  President Obama’s proposal to tax “529” college savings accounts, announced only last week and withdrawn this week, may have set a record for the quickest skedaddle.

The “529” plans, named for the section of the Internal Revenue Code that addresses their tax treatment, allow people to squirrel away money to pay for a family member’s college tuition.  The money gets invested, taxes on any gains are deferred, and the money that accumulates in the account can later be used to pay for a beneficiary’s college, tax-free.  That’s why savingforcollege.com says that 529 plans offer “unsurpassed income tax breaks.”

The 529 plans are such a good deal that more than 7 million of them have been created.  President and Mrs. Obama have them for their daughters, for example, and put $240,000 into those plans back in 2007.  And while the Obama Administration argues that the tax benefits for those plans predominantly favor “the rich,” it all depends on how you define “middle class” in modern America.  As the New York Times points out, 10 percent of 529 plans have been established by people with incomes below $50,000, and 70 percent of the total number of 529 accounts are owned by households with annual income below $150,000.  Is a two wage-earner family that makes $140,000 really wealthy?  My guess is that most families in that category don’t look at things that way.

The President’s 529 tax plan was a trial balloon that quickly was shown to be a lead balloon, opposed not only by the people who set up the 529 accounts, and the entities that hold and manage those accounts, but by Democrats and Republicans alike.  House Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi reportedly personally lobbied President Obama to ditch the 529 tax plan on a recent plane flight.  And the optics of the proposal aren’t that great, either.  For generations, a cornerstone of American policy has been to help citizens get their kids to college — and now we’re going to tax those industrious folks who plan ahead and save for college for their kids and grandchildren, rather than letting them be saddled with crushing student loan debt as they go forward into their adult lives?  Of all of the tax breaks available in the endless Internal Revenue Code, this is the one we’re attacking?

You can argue, I suppose, about whether the 529 tax plan was good policy, but there’s no doubt that it was bad politics.  I’m guessing that “529’d” might become part of the dictionary of political slang, to be used in the future whenever an ill-conceived proposal gets raised, quickly torpedoed, and then flushed forever down the memory hole.

To Infinity (Or At Least The Far Edge Of The Solar System)

Those of us over a certain age learned that Pluto was the ninth planet in the solar system, and the one farthest from the Sun.  In 2006, however, Pluto was “de-planetized,” when the know-it-alls at the International Astronomical Union concluded that Pluto should be relegated to “dwarf planet” status.  Pluto itself could not be reached for comment.

Since it was dissed nine years ago, tiny Pluto has stolidly borne its politically incorrect “dwarf planet” label.  Still, it’s an intriguing object.  It’s tiny (smaller than our Moon), its orbit is different from that of any other planet, it’s unimaginably far away (on average, 3.6 billion miles from the Sun, 40 times farther away than Earth) and its deeply mysterious because we’ve never gotten a good look at it.  Even though Pluto was discovered in 1930, we still don’t have any decent picture of the object.

That’s about to change.  Recently, NASA’s New Horizons spacecraft entered its Pluto exploration zone.  It was launched in 2006 and has traveled more than 4 billion miles to get near Pluto.  For most of that time, the spacecraft’s active systems have been “sleeping.”  Now, New Horizons has been awakened, and last Sunday it began to take its  first pictures of Pluto.  It’s closest pass will come in July.

As New Horizons transmits its photos back to Earth, we’ll learn far more about Pluto than we’ve ever known before.  I’m rooting for little Pluto, which has basically been ignored in favor of studies of Jupiter, Saturn, and Mars.  I’m hoping that Pluto turns out to be the most fascinating object in the solar system.  Who knows?  Maybe Pluto is small and weird because it’s not a planet at all, but instead an alien spacecraft, or a marker like The Object in 2001.  Probably not . . . but a Plutophile can dream.

Pinocchio

I’m pretty sure that Pinocchio was the first movie I ever saw in a movie theater.  In those pre-video and pre-DVD days, the classic animated Walt Disney films were reissued to the movie theaters on a multi-year rotation basis, there to be enjoyed by a new generation of little kids.  The Webner kids saw Pinocchio on one of the reissuances, in a full-sized movie theater with a huge screen and top of the line sound system.

When people think of Pinocchio, they typically think of the charming and friendly Jiminy Cricket and the helpful Blue Fairy, of Pinocchio’s funny nose growing with each implausible lie, of Pinocchio dancing with Geppetto and his squeeze box, and of the great songs — Give A Little Whistle, Hi-Diddle-Dee-Dee (An Actor’s Life for Me), and of course When You Wish Upon A Star.  Not me.  I thought Pinocchio was terrifying, and even now when I think of the movie the little boy inside still cringes.

Of course, Pinocchio is a morality tale; real boys are supposed to be honest, good and true and listen to their consciences.  But the real eye-opener for this little kid was the notion that there are bad people lurking out there who act like your friends but are ready to lure you from school, clap you into a bird cage, make you sick with a cigar at Pleasure Island, and turn you into a donkey.  Used as I was to walking to school every day with UJ in our tidy Akron neighborhood, that notion was astonishing.  And even though I was pretty sure that little boys who misbehaved couldn’t be turned into donkeys, the scene where Pinocchio’s big-talking miscreant pals are transformed into frightened braying jackasses still had a huge impact.  What if the seemingly nice people I encountered during the day were like the initially jolly Coachman who turned out to be evil incarnate?

I haven’t seen a Disney animated movie since Richard and Russell were little, so I don’t know if their films still have scary characters and scenes.  Pinocchio packed a punch because the bad guys were truly frightening and the terrified realization of the boys changed forever into donkeys seemed indisputably real.  I’m not saying Pinocchio cured me of bad behavior — Mom and my siblings would certainly dispute that notion — but the scary parts introduced new concepts about the potential costs of naivete and naughtiness and the presence of wickedness in the world that had a real impact.

I thought of Pinocchio and the awful Coachman the other day when I was reading about the latest bad person to take terrible advantage of trusting people.  The lesson endures.

Water Main Break

Your intrepid reporter was walking down East Town Street, heading in the direction of the Columbus Commons, when he happened upon this apparent water main break.  Water was bubbling out of the underground pipes where some work was being done, flooding the street and flowing downhill toward Fourth Street.  In the cold, of course, the risk is that the water freezes over and turns part of the downtown road system into a skating rink.

All this means is that some poor maintenance workers are in for a cold and wet evening  battling the water main break.  Thanks in advance to those under-appreciated workers whose tireless patchings and repairs keep our infrastructure in shape!

The Chintz Room

Some Columbus restaurants from days gone by have achieved legendary status. The Kahiki, with its dry ice drinks and over-the-top Polynesian decor. The Jai Lai, with its big photo of Woody Hayes and its “In all the world there’s only one” slogan.

The Chintz Room, located high in the Lazarus department store downtown, is one of the legends. Countless central Ohio kids of the ’40s, ’50s, and ’60s got dressed up and trooped into the Chintz Room with their grandmothers for a lunch break during a downtown shopping trip. There they self-consciously ate chicken salad in the company of prim, hat-wearing ladies, ever-mindful of the need to keep their elbows off the table.

Now the Chintz Room is back. It’s still in the old Lazarus building, but now it’s moved to the ground floor with a street level entrance. It’s decorated with mannequins, ladies’ hats, photos, and other memorabilia that recall its glory days at the center of the Columbus department store shopping world. And it still serves chicken salad, apparently made from the original recipe.

I don’t like chicken salad, so it’s fortunate for me that the Chintz Room serves other, more modern options. On my trip there yesterday with the Damages Dude — who did go for the chicken salad — I got the Tuscan pizza. It was excellent, with a crunchy crust, figs, prosciutto, three cheeses, and extra virgin olive oil, and large enough to satisfy a lunch-time appetite without being overwhelming. At $11.50, it’s price tag wouldn’t cause your grandma’s hat to go spinning off her head, either.

I’m glad the Chintz Room, with its echoes of Columbus’ past, is back and available for the downtown lunch rotation.

Cereal Dreams

Last night I had one of those vivid dreams where every element and action seems to be etched in exceptional clarity.  It was so realistic that I woke up feeling guilty and shaken about my dreamland activities.

In the dream, I was eating a gigantic, heaping bowl of Froot Loops.  I was relishing each sweet, crunchy mouthful of the multicolored morsels, but was wracked with regret at the same time.  I recognized with horror that, on a low-carb diet, a colossal serving of Froot Loops and milk was absolutely verboten.  And yet, confronted with a bowlful of diet-destroying deliciousness, my dream self could not resist temptation and dug in anyway.

So, I’ve  reached the point where my anxiety dreams no longer are about the young me being chased by monsters, or the teenage me being exposed to terrible humiliation, or the young adult me forgetting about a crucial law school test until the very day of the exam.  Now my subconscious has exposed a new vein of concerns that, having lost some weight, I’ll promptly backslide and end up right back where I started.

It’s kind of pathetic that Froot Loops would be my forbidden fruit, but I think my subconscious got this one right.  Ever since my grandparents took UJ and me to Battle Creek, Michigan for a tour of the Kellogg’s factory that ended with a Froot Loops sundae, I’ve been a fan of Toucan Sam.  We haven’t had a box of any breakfast cereal — much less Froot Loops or, even worse, Frosted Flakes — in our house since I started a low-carb regimen in August precisely because I don’t think I can trust myself around it.

I have to say, though — that big bowl of Froot Loops sure looked good.

Time To Book That Trip To Europe

If you’ve got a trip to Europe on your “bucket list,” you might want to go for it now.  For Americans, travel in France, Germany, Italy, and the other members of the Eurozone will be as cheap as it has been in years — for the next few months, at least.

The value of the Euro — the collective currency of the Eurozone — has been in free fall against the American dollar over the past few months.  On Friday, the Euro fell to $1.12, which is its lowest level in 11 years.  That’s a very sharp decline from earlier in the year, when the Euro was trading at around $1.40.

European economies are weak, and the European Central Bank has announced that it will be engaged in a “quantitative easing” program that will seek to expand the money supply — and, inevitably, have an inflationary impact — in an effort to spur economic growth.  And because the ECB has just announced its program, and it will take some time for all of the details to be absorbed by the financial markets, we can expect the value of the Euro to continue to fall against the dollar in the near future.

All of this is good news for Americans who are interested in visiting Europe.  Because the  Federal Reserve Board has already completed the quantitative easing program in the U.S. and has announced that it will be raising interest rates in the near future, the dollar should remain very strong against the Euro.  That means American tourist dollars will get better exchange rates at currency stores and will have more buying power on the streets of Paris and Rome — which will bring down the real cost of lodging, meals and museum fees.

Couple that with the ever-present European interest in encouraging tourism, and it’s not hard to forecast that bargain-hunting U.S. travelers will have a field day in 2015.

Scrapping Along

Today the OSU basketball team won their first game of the season against a ranked opponent, beating Indiana 82-70.  It’s a nice win, but it sure took a while to get it — a lot longer than we’ve come to expect during the Ohio State career of Coach Thad Matta.

This year’s Buckeyes squad has had a scrappy journey so far.  The Buckeyes have three key seniors — Sam Thompson, Shannon Scott, and Amir Williams — and many fans have been disappointed in their play.  Williams, in particular, has been hard to figure out; he’s got the size, but seems to lack the competitive fire that has characterized some of Coach Matta’s other products, like David Lighty and Aaron Craft.  It is noteworthy, perhaps, that today’s win came in a game where Williams did not play at all.

Coach Matta is trying to mix the seniors in with some stellar freshman that include D’Angelo Russell and Jae’Sean Tate, who led the Buckeyes in scoring today, redshirt freshman Kam Williams, and sophomore Marc Loving.  It’s fair to say that the Buckeyes are a work in progress, and the gears don’t really seem to be meshing yet.  Trying to make the pieces fit and motivate the players who don’t seem to be giving it their all, and win a few more key games in the process, will be one of Coach Matta’s toughest assignments.

The Buckeyes’ next game, against a pretty good Maryland team, will tell us a lot about whether today’s result was a fluke — or maybe the start of something better.  We’ll see whether Coach Matta can pull another rabbit out of a hat.

When A Reporter’s Story Makes A Difference

Earlier this week The Associated Press reported that the federal healthcare.gov website — the portal that many Americans have used to search for health care plans under the Affordable Care Act — was sharing private information about users with a number of third-party entities that specialize in advertising and analyzing internet data for marketing purposes.  The AP reported that the personal information made available to those entities could include age, income, ZIP code, and whether a person smokes or is pregnant, as well as the internet address of the computer that accessed the healthcare.gov website.

The federal government responded that the point of the data collection and sharing was simply to improve the consumer experience on the healthcare.gov website and added that the entities were “prohibited from using information from these tools on HealthCare.gov for their companies’ purposes.”  The latter point seems awfully naive — once data gets put into detailed databases on powerful computer systems, who is to say it is not used to help a third-party company better target pop-up ads for their other clients? — and in any case ignores the ever-present risk of a hacking incident that exposes the personal information to criminals.  Privacy advocates and Members of Congress also argued that the extent of data collected went beyond what was necessary to enhance customer service.

On Friday the AP reported that the Obama Administration had changed its position and reduced the release of healthcare.gov users’ personal data.  Privacy advocates remain concerned about the website’s data collection and storage policies and the available data connections with third parties — connections which conceivably could be used to access personal information — but the Administration’s response at least shows some sensitivity to privacy issues and is a first step toward better protecting personal information.

It may not amount to a huge matter in the Grand Scheme of Things, but it’s gratifying when an enterprising reporter’s story can expose a troubling practice and cause a change in a way that benefits the Average Joe and Jane.  It’s how our system is supposed to work, and it’s nice to see that it still work when journalists do their jobs and do them well.

Overpromising And The K-Tel Effect

At the library last week I saw a CD with a title that promised so much I just had to check it out.  It’s called Inner Peace for Busy People, and the back cover says “Music Guaranteed to Relax and Renew Body, Mind and Soul!”

Well, that’s quite a guarantee, isn’t it?  Listen to a CD, achieve inner peace, and have your mind and soul renewed in about an hour!  Good thing, because as a busy person I don’t have more time to devote to achieving inner peace and a renewed mind and sould than that.

So, I put the CD on and gave it a listen this afternoon.  Candidly, I really don’t feel any different sitting here in front of the computer — but maybe when you’ve realized life-changing inner peace and had your soul renewed you just don’t notice it.

Anybody who grew up watching late-night TV in the ’70s — specifically, any commercial touting a compilation of songs by K-Tel Records — has necessarily been hardened to brash, over-the-top promises of auditory greatness.  When I was a kid I remember ordering a K-Tel compilation that claimed that it was The Greatest Collection Of Rock ‘N Roll Music Ever Assembled and being vaguely disappointed when it didn’t have some of my favorite songs on it.  Still, even K-Tel stopped short of guaranteeing inner peace.

The CD music was selected by Joan Borysenko, Ph.D, who wrote Inner Peace for Busy People, and Don Campbell, who wrote The Mozart Effect.  If you want to achieve inner peace on your own, just play the following selections in this order: The Lark Ascending by Ralph Vaughan-Williams, Berceuse, Opus 116, by Gabriel Faure, Lute Concerto in D Major – Largo, by Antonio Vivaldi, Symphony No. 35 in C Major – Andante, by Mozart, Concerto Opus 9, No 6 in G Major for Two Oboes, Concerto Opus 7, No. 9 in F Major for Oboe, and Concerto Opus 7, No. 1 in D Major for Oboe, all by Tomaso Albinoni (who must have been pretty inwardly peaceful himself), Piano Concerto No. 1 – Romance/Larghetto, by Chopin, and Piano Concerto No. 3 in C Minor – Largo, by Beethoven.

Hey, what have you got to lose?

Weighing The Different TV And Internet Options

We’ll be moving into our new house in a few weeks, and one of the key impending decisions for us is:  what to do about TV and internet coverage?

At our old house we went with cable-based service provided by Time Warner.  Our TV and internet coverage was generally reliable, but it was expensive and we really grew to dislike — actually, “hate” is more accurate — Time Warner and its employees’ collective attitude about customer service.  They seemed to revel in making us jump through stupid hoops for no apparent reason.  We won’t go back to TW because we know we’ll just end up infuriated.  WOW is the other cable provider in Columbus, but its on-line reviews seem extremely mixed — it’s great or it’s awful, with not much in between.

The second option is a satellite service.  Our new house already has a dish on the roof.  I think it for DirecTV, but I haven’t paid attention because I don’t like the idea of a dish on my roof.  Now I think it needs to be considered as an alternative.  However, satellite services seem to only provide TV and “partner” with another company to offer internet — which just means, apparently, that we’ll have to deal with two providers rather than one.

A third option is AT&T U-Verse “internet TV,” which would provide one-stop internet and TV.  The house we’re staying in now has it and we haven’t had any service problems, but the TV offerings are limited and don’t include some of the “basic cable” channels that we’ve come to like, such as the Big Ten Network.  Of course, that may just be a matter of getting a different package.  The more high-end TV channels, too, aren’t simple to get to and involve juggling multiple remotes.

And the final option is:  only internet service and no TV.  Since we’ve been at this house, I’ve gone for days without watching any TV.  We’ve got friends who’ve forsaken TV and seem perfectly content.  Maybe that’s an option — but I think we’d regret it when the next seasons of Game of Thrones and The Leftovers start and I want to watch a football game.

We want to make an informed decision in selecting among a confusing array of choices.  I’d be very interested in any thoughts on these options, and particularly in personal experiences with WOW, DirecTV or Dish, and AT&T U-Verse.

Cancer, And Bad Luck

Cancer, in all of its many forms, is a terrible disease, and when you are part of a family where cancer has taken its grim toll you come to dread the very word.  It is not surprising that many people — whether cancer sufferers or survivors and their family members, cancer charities, doctors, or researchers — have passionate views about the disease.

This was illustrated earlier this month when Cristian Tomasetti and Bert Vogelstein of Johns Hopkins University published an article in the journal Science that attempted to quantify the role of random chance — what we might call “bad luck” — in the process that causes normal cells to mutate and become deadly agents.  They found that while there were clear causes for certain forms of cancer, such as smoking and lung cancer and exposure to sunlight and skin cancer, more than half of many cancers appear to be the product of random mutation.

The notion that random mutation plays a role in the development of cancer is not a new idea; our bodies have 50 trillion individual cells, and in a number that enormous there are bound to be anomalies.  Nevertheless, the Science article provoked a huge outcry.  Some people accused the researchers of being shills for industry and overlooking or excusing the possibility that foods, chemicals, and other products and substances that we are exposed to are the cause of the cancers.  Others depict the article as socially irresponsible, because the quantification of the significant role of simple “bad luck” may cause people to throw up their hands and forsake steps that can reduce the occurrence of cancer.  And still others — such as parents of children who have battled cancer — were grateful for the suggestion that the cancers that have affected them and their families wasn’t their fault.

It’s an arbitrary world out there, and bad things happen for reasons, but also for no reason at all.  We would like to think that we can control everything that might affect us, but obviously we can’t.  When it comes to cancer, that reality doesn’t mean we should rush off to buy a pack of cigarettes, but it does mean that we should accept that bad luck plays a role and not reflexively blame the victim, their lifestyles, and their genes.  Avoiding cancer-causing agents remains important — but the unfortunate reality of random mutation and bad luck means that early detection is crucially important, too.