Especially a negative restaurant review. How many really negative restaurant reviews have you read?

Here’s one. Let’s see how he does it.   We’re in Toronto, by the way.

“Walk of shame” usually refers to showing up at work in last night’s clothing. It means you got lucky. It also alludes to bed head, missing buttons and incriminating clothing stains.

Basically, looking and feeling like crap.

It also describes the strip of Bloor [Street] between Bathurst and Spadina.

The Annex is no stranger to bad restaurants. The neighbourhood nearly owns a patent on the concept.

Cheap sushi joints line the street, each as barely adequate as the last. The ‘hood’s most popular sushi restaurant was closed down in March for three days by health inspectors. This month, an investigative report by the Star found it was selling tilapia as snapper. [Nice, very precise details.  Sort of amusing.]

Pubs and coffee shops sit in the shadow of the Brunswick House, where a fist fight can be had for the price of a pint. All of it is fuelled by a steady supply of undergrads from University of Toronto’s student ghetto.

T cafe, a new tea and tapas spot, is unlikely to improve the neighbourhood’s reputation.  [SOS likes the way the writer sketches the restaurant’s low-life setting before reviewing the restaurant itself.  Gives the reader a sense of the larger reality in which the place sits.]

The site – the corner of Bloor and Borden – was the home of Dooney’s for more than 20 years. In the mid-’90s, the cafe scored a victory over coffee giant Starbucks. Locals and regulars rallied their support when the property’s owner leased it to the coffee giant. After a lot of bad press, Starbucks leased the property back to Dooney’s and quietly opened up shop down the block.  [Again, a little history is good — though SOS had some trouble understanding the sequence of events as written.]

Perhaps the food at T cafe would be better if it were a Starbucks. I would rather eat one of its prepackaged ham sandwiches than another meal here.

On each visit, it’s difficult to pass the intoxicating perfume of cumin wafting from Ghazale, a wonderful Middle Eastern place across the road.

There are a few pleasing bites at T Cafe. [It’s always a good idea to start an attack with whatever positive you can think of to say.  Makes you look less nasty, more fair.]  Onions, fried with a green-tea speckled batter, are not without their charm ($4.25). Rosti are freshly fried, topped with bits of goat cheese and green-tea smoked salmon ($6).

But that’s just an attempt to say something nice.  [Refreshing directness.] Most of the food has the sprightliness of leftover wedding hors d’oeuvres.

There are cold goops of roasted zucchini and peppers ($4.25) and overcooked lamb chops ($9.25) with mate tea honey mustard. Frico (thin, baked crisps of cheese) are served as “Asiago chips” ($6). Except they are nothing like a chip. They are thick and gummy like a tougher, cheese version of a fruit roll-up.  [Goops.  Gummy.  Excellent icky words.]

The “creamy salsa verde” with won ton chips ($5.25) is yogurt with chopped peppers. Sliders with pancetta ($7.50) are straight out of a caterer’s page #1 selection. That’s the page you flip back to after you see the page #3 prices and say, “People like mini-hamburgers. I guess sliders are good enough for our guests.”

This place even manages to FUBAR something as simple as a bowl of cold soba ($4.99).  [Hold on.  Gotta look up FUBAR.  Fuck Up…?  Ah.  Fuck Up Beyond All Repair. Who knew.]  I can’t imagine how it is even possible to get soba to the consistency of licorice. I’d rather not know.  [Instead of the windy I can’t imagine how it is even possible… maybe something more direct instead:  How do you get soba to the consistency of licorice?]

Nearly all the food has tea in it. Yet nothing tastes of tea. Except for the tea, which is quite nice ($4.50).

But if I were coming here just for tea, it would infuriate me that all the teapots drip.

It’s shocking because good restaurateurs put a lot of care into these things. [Shocking overstates things and risks making the writer sound like a snot.]  A friend who owns a coffee shop has gone through three milk jugs and three sugar bowls in search of the perfect paraphernalia.

When I visit, most guests are drinking tea – couples on laptops; a boy with a stack of textbooks; a woman reading a magazine article titled “Decluttering Your Sewing Room.” A teapot and its drips clutter every table.

The only menus are placed at ceiling level over the counter, in tiny type. A server brings our food, but not cutlery or napkins. “It’s over there,” she says, motioning with her head.  [Excellent bit here.  It’s the details that do the trick.]

Despite the window sign promising a “unique tapas menu,” this is no restaurant.

No one inquires about our half-eaten food. We have leftovers wrapped up to feed someone on the street. But the container leaks red oil on my pants and the stain does not come out (thanks a lot, Shout Triple-Action).

A restaurant is a business – a big investment. It’s hard to fathom the bank employee that would approve a loan for a restaurant, in any neighbourhood, serving tea-infused tapas dishes.

The Annex doesn’t needs [typo] this, period. There is already a tea shop across the street, All Things Tea. There is no shortage of options for chicken wings. A merging of the two (chai chicken wings with peach green tea plum sauce $8) is far less than the sum of its parts.

Despite being in possession of Dooney’s’ liquor licence, there is no alcohol. Maybe this is for people who love wings but hate beer.

I might feel guilty picking on T cafe, but there are plenty of people around town working their bums off to make the best food they can. There is no excuse for this.

Popcorn at the Bloor theatre is a better meal.

… is a man of the cloth. Or speaking for the cloth.

Peter Jennings, the press secretary to Archbishop Vincent Nichols, has apologised after he stunned guests by verbally abusing a 22-year-old student during the dessert course [at a university dinner], repeatedly calling him “a —-“.

He is also alleged to have called Matthew Tye, who is half-Vietnamese, “a peasant”.

The timing of the outburst threatens to embarrass Archbishop Nichols, who will be installed as the Archbishop of Westminster on Thursday. It also comes only one month after Mr Jennings called a Telegraph reporter “a total —-” for writing a story about letters sent by two English bishops complaining that Father Nichols would be a divisive choice for the job.

… The press officer has already been dismissed as a spokesman for the campaign for the beatification of Cardinal Newman, the 19th century Anglican cleric who converted to Catholicism.

The altercation unfolded at the college of Blackfriars during an event organised by the Aquinas Institute, a religious institution. Among the distinguished clergy to overhear the tirade was the British Ambassador to the Vatican, Francis Campbell, who gave a lecture on ‘faith and foreign policy’.

Mr Tye is a student previously known to Mr Jennings through a work placement with the Birmingham Oratory. In his letter to Archbishop Nichols, Mr Tye claimed he was called “a —-” by Mr Jennings more than twenty times as well as “a worthless piece of —-” and “a low-life peasant”.

Mr Jennings yesterday said he “deeply regretted the incident and any embarrassment caused” but said Mr Tye’s account was an exaggeration. “I may have called him a —- once or twice, I don’t recollect how many times…”

*************************

Jennings’ proposed Newman campaign slogan:

Only a total shit wouldn’t think he’s a saint.

… but it could be much, much worse.

Politics at Manchester was ranked 2,064th in [a survey in which British students were asked to rank best and worst courses at various universities] but, despite this, there are plans to reduce teaching time.

Manchester University admitted there had been problems and said it was reviewing all its teaching.

“We have had instances of students saying they have not seen any academic for two years. That is not acceptable,” a spokesman said.

… is still  flying high with the book.

… with UD’s immediate, uncensored, unedited reactions in parenthesis:

New York Times columnist Maureen Dowd has admitted to using a paragraph virtually word-for-word from a prominent liberal blogger without attribution. [Wish I’d been that blogger.] [And they wonder why newspapers are dying.]

Dowd acknowledged the error in an e-mail to the Huffington Post on Sunday, the Web site reported. [A moral error, to be sure. Hard to see – paging Doris Kearns Goodwin! – how it could have been done in error. We call this plagiarism.] The Times corrected her column online to give proper credit for the material to Talking Points Memo editor Josh Marshall. [I read him all the time during the presidential election.]

The newspaper is expected to issue a formal correction Monday. A request for comment made by The Associated Press was not immediately returned by the Times late Sunday. [Sluggish, as always. Bloggers are quicker. And they usually come up with their own material.]

The error appeared in Dowd’s Sunday column, in which she criticized the Bush administration’s use of interrogation methods in the run-up to the Iraq war.

In the original column, Dowd wrote: “More and more the timeline is raising the question of why, if the torture was to prevent terrorist attacks, it seemed to happen mainly during the period when the Bush crowd was looking for what was essentially political information to justify the invasion of Iraq.”

Marshall last week wrote virtually the same sentence. But where Dowd’s column used the phrase “the Bush crowd was,” Marshall used “we were.” [The “Bush crowd” change makes it clear that this was not a mistaken importation of someone else’s sentence. She — UD bets it was one of her assistants — took the sentence and gussied it up a bit.  UD bets that, like all those Harvard law professors who plagiarize, Dowd’s a victim of her dependence on assistants who do much of her writing for her.  She sweeps in toward deadline, perhaps, and Dowdizes it here and there, and she relies on her staff to write the body of the thing and not to plagiarize while they’re doing it.  This is the most elite form of plagiarism, if that’s any comfort to Dowd.]

Dowd, who won a Pulitzer Prize for commentary in 1990, told the Huffington Post that the mistake was unintentional. She claims she never read Marshall’s post last week and had heard the line from a friend who did not mention reading it in Marshall’s blog. [Well. Now we’re paging Nancy Pelosi.  UD‘s a big fan of Pelosi, but she doesn’t believe her version of events in terms of what she knew about torture.]

In the updated version on the Times’ site, Dowd’s column had this note: “An earlier version of this column failed to attribute a paragraph about the timeline for prisoner abuse to Josh Marshall’s blog at Talking Points Memo.”

… from Québec, where he
delivered a paper – in French!
– at the Hôtel du Parlement.

The Université Laval sponsored
the conference, on the subject
of constitutions.

Mr UD wore his Université
Laval tie, inherited from his father, to
whom Laval gave an honorary doctorate.

La Kid’s visiting a friend in Scotland.
She is, according to her Gchat message,
“very happy.”

… anything but happiness.

On the matter of happiness, she’s with Adam Phillips, a British psychoanalyst. Here are some Phillips snippets:

Sanity involves learning to enjoy conflict, and giving up on all myths of harmony, consistency and redemption… A culture that is obsessed with happiness must really be in despair, mustn’t it? Otherwise why would anybody be bothered about it at all? It’s become a preoccupation because there’s so much unhappiness. The idea that if you just reiterate the word enough … we’ll all cheer up is preposterous… The cultural demand now is be happy, or enjoy yourself, or succeed. You have to sacrifice your unhappiness and your critique of the values you’re supposed to be taking on. You’re supposed to go: ‘Happiness! Yes, that’s all I want!’ But what about justice or reality or ruthlessness – or whatever my preferred thing is?”

“The reason that there are so many depressed people is that life is so depressing for many people. It’s not a mystery. There is a presumption that there is a weakness in the people who are depressed or a weakness on the part of scientific research and one of these two groups has got to pull its socks up. Scientists have got to get better and find us a drug and the depressed have got to stop malingering. The ethos is: ‘Actually life is wonderful, great – get out there!’ That’s totally unrealistic and it’s bound to fail.”

“Darwinian psychoanalysis would involve helping you to adapt, find a niche and enable you to reproduce. Freudian psychoanalysis suggests that there is something over and above this. There are parts of ourselves – that don’t want to live, that hate our children, that want ourselves to fail. Freud is saying there is something strange about humans: they are recalcitrant to what is supposed to be their project. That seems to me to be persuasive.”

“One of the things I value about psychoanalysis is that it acknowledges that there are real difficulties in living, being who one’s going to be, and that no one’s going to be having a lobotomy. There isn’t going to be a radical personal change, which doesn’t mean that people can’t change usefully, but really that psychoanalysis is against magic. Ideally it enables you to realise why you’re prone to believe in magic and why you shouldn’t, because to believe in magic is to attack your own intelligence. [S]uffering is not essential. It’s just unavoidable. All forms of suffering are bad but some are unavoidable. We need to come to terms with them or be able to bear them. …[Y]ou really did have those parents, you really did make of it what you made of it, you really did have those siblings, really did grow up in that economic climate. These are all hard difficult facts. Redescribed, they can be modified, things can evolve. But it isn’t magic.”

“Happiness is fine as a side effect. It’s something you may or may not acquire, in terms of luck. But I think it’s a cruel demand. It may even be a covert form of sadism. Everyone feels themselves prone to feelings and desires and thoughts that disturb them. And we’re being persuaded that by acts of choice, we can dispense with these thoughts. It’s a version of fundamentalism. [H]appiness is the most conformist of moral aims. For me, there’s a simple test here. Read a really good book on positive psychology, and read a great European novel. And the difference is evident in one thing — the complexity and subtlety of the moral and emotional life of the characters in the European novel are incomparable. Read a positive-psychology book, and what would a happy person look like? He’d look like a Moonie. He’d be empty of idiosyncrasy and the difficult passions.”

****************************

All of which is why reactions to the decades-long Harvard Grant Study, which followed a group of Harvard undergraduates throughout their lives in terms of their happiness, have been like this:

♦ The lives were too big, too weird, too full of subtleties and contradictions to fit any easy conception of “successful living.”

♦ Their lives were too human for science, too beautiful for numbers, too sad for diagnosis and too immortal for bound journals.

♦ Education, marriage, moderate alcohol intake, and exercise are fairly reliable predictors of happiness; so are certain “mature adaptations” taken in responding to challenges, such as maintaining a sense of humor and channeling aggressive feelings into more healthful channels like athletics. As for offering any definitive answer as to how to live the good life, no convenient elixir is forthcoming. To deny the Grant Study its ambitious objective to pinpoint the causes of happiness has a whiff of the wet blanket about it. But there’s something even more miserable about thinking that our happiness can be defined by the jobs we choose, or what we eat for breakfast, or how many miles we run each week. Freud himself pointed out that the only thing normal is pathology, which makes applying a bell-curve-style prescription for joy more than a little reductionist. Even if all the indicators in our lives point to success, a craving for something indefinable may persist.

Here’s an example of how weird, strange, disturbing, and difficult we are:

[P]eople tell psychologists they’d cross the street to avoid someone who had given them a compliment the previous day.

In fact, [explains one of the Harvard Grant Study researchers], positive emotions make us more vulnerable than negative ones. One reason is that they’re future-oriented. Fear and sadness have immediate payoffs — protecting us from attack or attracting resources at times of distress. Gratitude and joy, over time, will yield better health and deeper connections — but in the short term actually put us at risk. That’s because, while negative emotions tend to be insulating, positive emotions expose us to the common elements of rejection and heartbreak.

To illustrate his point, he told a story about one of his “prize” Grant Study men, a doctor and well-loved husband. “On his 70th birthday,” Vaillant said, “when he retired from the faculty of medicine, his wife got hold of his patient list and secretly wrote to many of his longest-running patients, ‘Would you write a letter of appreciation?’ And back came 100 single-spaced, desperately loving letters—often with pictures attached. And she put them in a lovely presentation box covered with Thai silk, and gave it to him.” Eight years later, Vaillant interviewed the man, who proudly pulled the box down from his shelf. “George, I don’t know what you’re going to make of this,” the man said, as he began to cry, “but I’ve never read it.” “It’s very hard,” Vaillant said, “for most of us to tolerate being loved.”

Amen, brother. Some of UD‘s most difficult moments in life involve her confrontation with extremely high appraisals of UD.

Don’t get her wrong. She wouldn’t trade these beautiful appreciations — often written as if after lengthy consultations with UD‘s most embarrassingly grandiose narcissistic fantasies about herself — for the world.

But since she knows herself to be much less impressive and much more unpleasant than what she’d like to think she is, part of her responds to beautiful appreciations with fear. “If you only knew,” she wants to say to the writers. “If you only knew, you’d be so bitterly … so vengefully? … disappointed.”

I think that’s why we cross the street.

… of university sports.

A reader sent this in to Dave Barry:

Q. While viewing ESPN‘s Sept. 18 broadcast of the Indiana-Kentucky football game, did you hear an example of language usage so excellent that it caused you to spew beer from your nose?

A. Yes. The color commentator referred to a former coach as “a living legend when he was still alive.”

…  Beaverton.

My dog killed and semi-ate a baby squirrel this afternoon.

I heard the baby’s muffled shrieks quite clearly, since I was in my bedroom (reading James Agee: Selected Poems, sent to me by its editor, Andrew Hudgins, an old friend of this blog who read of my enthusiasm for Agee here) and the dog was in his fenced-in yard just outside the bedroom’s sliding doors.

I didn’t know I was hearing my dog killing a squirrel. My house sits in the middle of a wide, long, heavily wooded lot, and from my bedroom I often hear, late at night, animals tormenting and killing other animals. My vague assumption is that I’m hearing foxes killing rabbits. Along with coyote and deer and owls and raccoons and hawks and opossums and turtles and crows and mice and mourning doves and cats and bats and rats and minks, many foxes and rabbits live on our half-acre. I assumed this was a late afternoon version of the fox/rabbit scenario.

But how could that be? I looked up from my book. In the fox/rabbit scenario, the shrieks aren’t muffled. They’re piercing.

From my bed I saw my dog leap about in an unfamiliar way. Something flapped in his mouth.

♦♦♦♦♦♦♦♦♦♦♦♦

As I dealt with this problem, I began a mental reckoning of the whole animal thing around here, a green corner of urban Bethesda, Maryland.

Around here. Just on our property.

There are the massive holes in a neat straight line down the sides of our wood house, put there by generations of woodpeckers. There are the slightly less massive holes, in no particular pattern, behind our house, above the sliding doors to the deck — the work of generations of carpenter bees.

I’m always batting away spider webs on my way out of the house.  Dead snakes make concentric circles in the street.  Beetles and potato bugs and worms swarm when you shift a particle of dirt.  Don’t get me started on mosquitoes.

When you turn on the basement light on your way to the washing machine, teams of crickets hop up your legs.

Birds are always hurling themselves against our sliding glass doors.  Sometimes they die.

Sometimes hundreds of crows come to town and caw for days.

Faithful readers will recall that last summer, returning from a week in Upstate, New York, Les UDs discovered a dead deer a few feet from their back steps.

There’s almost always something living in the attic, making housekeeping sounds.  Last time Mr UD was up there, he called down to UD.

“Know those snorkel fins?  Something ate them.”

Something very big is up there at the moment.  Gotta call animal control again.

And yes.  Every time they come they nail shut more entry points.

♦♦♦♦♦♦♦♦♦♦

Sure, there’s an upside.  During the summer, on very dark nights, when you walk out back, you drift into a golden field of fireflies.  Butterflies and hummingbirds buzz the plants out front.

A few years ago, a charming toad took up such long residence beside our front door that I named her —  Elpheba.

When you sit on our green Adirondack chairs, cats appear out of nowhere and kiss your knees.

Portions of the property are well-established settlements.  The mourning doves gather to cluck and coo in a clearing a few steps up the hill behind the house.  The foxes have their dens on the other side of the fence at the top of the property, in the narrow strip of wood before the land drops down to the train tracks.  The rabbits inhabit a stand of honeysuckle halfway to the hilltop.  The deer can be found lying at leisure in groups of four or five way up the hill, in a thick copse.

♦♦♦♦♦♦♦♦♦♦♦♦♦

To some extent, the animals have succeeded in keeping me off my own property.  Since my dog goes apeshit when he sees deer, I have to retreat when I’m walking him out back and deer appear.  Which is often.  This afternoon, a large rabbit insisted on staying put close to us, and I had to place my body between the rabbit and the dog to keep the dog from rushing the rabbit.  The noisy carnage out there in the evenings discourages me from night walks.

This writer sets them out for us, in all their all-American glory.

…College sports at the highest level (meaning Division I revenue programs) is mostly about money. Those at the top of professional and major college athletics — whatever pure PR stance is taken, and has to be — understand gambling is part of why their sports thrive. Bottom line, it adds to the interest…

University of Toledo: You Can Bet on It!

… with each other, or with themselves, it ain’t pretty. It can even become, as at North Carolina State University, a bloodbath.

So far the hacks and cronies who gave the wife of the scandal-ridden ex-governor a cushy job at a North Carolina campus and, soon after hiring her, upped her salary eighty-eight percent, have suffered two losses: The provost has had to go, and the chair of the university’s board of trustees is on the verge of going.

The president of the University of North Carolina system has asked McQueen Campbell, chairman of the N.C. State University board, to resign immediately after learning this week that Campbell played a role in hiring former first lady Mary Easley.

Erskine Bowles told The News & Observer on Thursday that Campbell phoned him earlier this week and “went through a whole mea culpa,” then recounted telling Chancellor James Oblinger that Easley was looking to change jobs before N.C. State hired her in 2005.

“He said, ‘I did tell Jim Oblinger in passing that Mary Easley was going to change jobs and he may not even remember that.'” Bowles said. “And I said, ‘What?’ That was about the end of the conversation. I was surprised.”

Campbell was prominently featured in a two-part series last weekend in The N&O, which recounted his friendship and influence with Mike and Mary Easley. Campbell flew the governor often in his planes, sometimes for free, and bragged of his influence in getting key development permits. The governor twice appointed him to the N.C. State Board of Trustees, where he rose to chairman.

Campbell had insisted that he played no role in Mary Easley’s job at N.C. State. He denied having even a single conversation with university officials or Mary Easley before she got a three-year contract at $80,000 a year in 2005, or when she received a five-year, $850,000 contract that touched off controversy.

That story changed with his call to Bowles. Bowles then phoned Oblinger, who said in an interview Thursday that he did not recall being told by Campbell that Mary Easley would be available. Oblinger said he does not deny it might have happened…

The article goes on to cite the idiot head of trustees bragging about how his political connections allow him to break rules and skirt laws. Plus he’s on record lying to a reporter about his involvement in the Easley case. Just the sort of person you want at the helm of a university.

So far the bloodbath has bypassed the governor’s wife, understandably eager to retain her amazingly lucrative position. But the president of the North Carolina system now says, rather darkly, that she “will be reviewed in the appropriate manner especially as we look at where we’re going to place our budget going forward.”

*************************

Update:  McQueen Campbell (great name) obliges.

… writes T.S. Eliot, in The Waste Land.

On the Liffey, however, Samuel Beckett connects Sir John Rogerson’s Quay with North Wall Quay.

Like his mentor, James Joyce, Beckett now has a Dublin bridge named after him:

The Samuel Beckett Bridge, at 120 metres long and 48 metres high, will link Sir John Rogerson’s Quay on the south side of the river Liffey with Guild Street and North Wall Quay on the north side.

Dublin’s newest bridge was designed by Santiago Calatrava, and will be his second bridge in the capital. The James Joyce Bridge, near Heuston Station, opened in 2003.

The new bridge, costing about €60 million, will be capable of rotating through an angle of 90 degrees to facilitate maritime traffic.

It has four traffic lanes, cycle tracks and footpaths.

It arrived on a barge into Dublin Port on Monday morning having charted its way from Rotterdam, across the English Channel and Irish Sea in a week-long journey.

It was constructed for Dublin City Council by an Irish/Dutch joint venture consortium Graham-Hollandia.

The design evokes the image of the Irish harp lying on its side…

What would Beckett say?

“Bridge to nowhere.”

*****************************

They put up a bridge for Sam Beckett
And his characters came out to check it.
Vlad and Estragon waited.
And waited and waited.
Then Lucky and Pozzo both wrecked it.

Her critics become more and more shrill as Karen Wagner’s deception generates outrage; yet Wagner, like the university that employs her, remains absolutely silent.

The University of Texas has issued a few We don’t know shit but uh when we get a chance we’ll look into it statements in response to Senator Charles Grassley’s repeated letters to it about the vice-chair of the psychiatry department’s way-lucrative, hidden conflicts of interest, and of course the campus can’t be happy that Grassley  just reported her to the Health and Human Services inspector general.

In his latest letter, the Iowa Republican says that the amount Wagner didn’t report may be as high as $230,000. The university’s counsel told the Dallas Morning News last week that it has been investigating Wagner for two weeks -– though it got the first letter on the issue eight months ago.

But hey.  If you were an office of sponsored research guy, and you had a choice between going to a football game and staring at a big ol’ Adzillatron, and shuffling through disclosure papers from Wagner in which she makes a fool of you to the tune of hundreds of thousands of dollars, what would you do?

That Texas Adzillatron — the world’s largest — has UD thinking.  What if, during major athletic contests, with the whole nation watching, the university were to pause the stream of ads for a few moments and flash the names of its professors who’ve lied about outside income?  You know – list their names, departments, and the amount of money they didn’t tell anybody about over, say, the last ten years.  Also any sanctions imposed.  If UT takes disclosure seriously, this would be real disclosure.   It would also embarrass Wagner and others, thereby discouraging fellow professors of psychiatry from following their path.