The American question: Health care

Sorry, one more post about American politics. A timeline:

December 5: Atrios emails Booman to suggest liberals should feign coolness to the Medicare buy-in compromise.

December 13: Lieberman comes out against the compromise

December 15: Lieberman says he opposed Medicare buy-in because liberals, notably Anthony Wiener and Howard Dean, supported it.

December 16: Howard Dean pens an op-ed (to be published the following day) saying that now the bill is unsupportable.

December 16: Jay Rockefeller calls Dean's comments irresponsible.

As the poet says, "Same night, same fight, but one of us cats ain't playin' right." Am I the only one coming to this suspicion?

If you haven't yet read them, and you care to, I think Nate Silver's comments on all the bill is ("To claim that a health care bill without a public option is anything other than a huge achievement for progressives is, frankly, bullshit.") and Matt Yglesias's on all it ain't ("That's what leverage looks like. Supposedly pro-reform Democrats have failed to exert any real leverage in this fight.") are worth a read.

My own thoughts? The president, in his address to Congress earlier this year, said somewhat aspirationally, "I am not the first President to take up this cause, but I am determined to be the last. " If one were to take that as a goal, this bill is a failure---more action will clearly be required by future presidents, because the compromises made in getting a bill passed will need to be fixed. But it's oddly unfair to the president to take him at his word on this; he was speaking almost certainly rhetorically. I think that what liberals should think of the compromise really should turn on whether one thinks the present bill would provide a platform for that future action, or else short-circuit popular support for more drastic change and further entrench an imperfect system. I suspect most experts believe the former, but I really have sympathy for the latter. But honestly, what the heck do I know?

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Update: In which I repeat myself in comments, and Ezra Klein ignores me. Dead to me, Ezra. Dead. To. Me.

Fahrrad mishugoss

So a few months ago I locked my bike outside a bar on Mariannenstrasse (called, perhaps too transparently, the Bar on Mariannenstrasse), wheel-to-frame but (significantly, as it'd turn out), not locking the frame to the already-full bicycle rack.  A few hours later I returned to find it... not there anymore.  Someone with a pair of bolt cutters or (more likely) a van to haul it away had come across it and taken it.  It's a story I'll tell perhaps at another time.  For now, I only bring it up to introduce an old and familiar truth, that one forms attachments to a bicycle, like one does a pet or a favorite childhood toy, or maybe the girlfriend who you break up with because you didn't want to be tied down but you never knew how good you had it until after three horrible relationships later, when something someone says some beery night reminds you of her.  Especially when you got it second-hand, you gradually begin to think of all the curious features of the thing, like a malfunctioning bell or the awkward slope of the handlebars, less as shortcomings and more as quirks or oddities, and eventually the things you love most about it.  I paid only thirty-five euros for the thing, but as I put twenty-euro repair after twenty-euro repair into it, I became more and more invested (fiscally and emotionally).  The night it was stolen, I had gotten to the point where I had never loved a bicycle as much as I did this one.

The new one's all right, though.  The light doesn't work and the handlebars are shorter than I'd prefer.  The first one had these long sloping handles, the curve of the handlebar was really a thing to behold, and the handles just came off the end looking like a decorative hilt of a samurai sword.  The new one's got short functional handles, as long as my hands are wide with not an inch to spare.  Spare, that's a good word for them.  Functional, with nothing to spend on grace.  It's got a boxy feel to it; the frame is this huge imposing triangle, all straight lines and hard edges, and you have to swing your leg out to get on or off; the old one had a curve to its frame and you could sort of step-through to get on.  I got this one at the Flohmarkt for forty euros and should have known I'd put more into it soon.  The front tire blew out on the way to the library one day, and the rear wheel started making this awful scraping sound afterwards.  Just this awful sound like grinding your teeth against a chalkboard with your fingernails poking into a wet unhappy housecat.  Awful.  The guy at the bikeshop down the street said it was the axle and replaced it, but two days later the sound came back; turns out the whole wheel was beschädigt and had to be replaced.  He did give me a discount roughly equal to the price of the axle I'd already bought.  I had put a lot of money into the first bike, and never knew how good I had it.  Ah, I never should have broken up with that girl.  Bicycle, I mean.  

Well, of course I've been using the new bike since then.  Locking it quite carefully, one will note.  I've even been riding it a lot just for exercise, since I hurt my knee my first attempt at a run since eleven miles in Barcelona, the night of history's worst-ever for-lack-of-a-better-word-I'll-call-it-a-date, which is a story I really gotta tell when I get a chance.  The knee appears to be okay, although I'm keeping to shorter distances to be safe---this took me twenty and a half minutes today, good for a seven-minute pace---and for longer bouts of sweating I've been keeping to the bike.  

This is of course in addition to the use I get out of the bike just in terms of getting around town.  In medium traffic I move as fast as cars (in heavy traffic, faster), and I don't need to look for a parking space, just a signpost, and if it gets too cold or I'm running late it only costs 1.50 to take it on the U-Bahn.  I absolutely love having my bicycle as a transit option---which it is in Berlin, and isn't a lot of other places, because of the accommodations Berlin makes to cyclists, like plentiful bike lanes and especially car drivers who know bicyclists are on the road and look out for them.  I don't mean to belabor this point, but it is a real difference between the Germans and Dutch et al, and the Americans.  Also:  Foreshadowing!

Some of the improvements I'd paid for with the first bike were removable front and rear lights.  I'd unclipped them and slid them into my bag when the bicycle was stolen, so I still have the heavy bits that make the light, but they are missing the clamps by which they're attached to the bike itself.  Since those clamps are only for sale in kits for the entire light set, I haven't replaced them and have been riding lichtlos.  I know that's against the law.  I don't know how serious an offense it can be, technically.  But I'm an immigrant without work or, really, any visible reason I'm living in this country, and it's not so far to the time I was here without a visa and technically subject to deportation if anyone had found out, and that mindset doesn't shake off all at once.  Once you live like that there's an edginess that creeps back up whenever you see a police car, a fear no matter how irrational that lingers, makes you wonder if they're not coming for you, finally.  

I say this by way of explaining why, once I determined I wasn't hurt, I didn't wait for the police to come or insist on exchanging numbers or otherwise make a big deal of it when a motorist collided with me as I came around the corner of Dresdener between Oranienplatz and Kotbusser.  Right about here.  The way it happened was, I was coming from the west and veered right onto Dresdener as a car that was parked to my right pulled out of its spot, its driver looking the other way.  Given the turn and (as I remember it) what must have been a truck or other obstruction, neither of us could see each other from far away, although I was definitely the first to see him, as he kept rolling after I'd started veering to my left.  I was going too fast to turn any more, but I think he eventually did see me and brake, and the collision---right on the knee, natch, but not the one that's been hurting---felt pretty soft.  I fell over, but caught myself on the way down.  I got up, stepped on both legs; they were fine.  The other guy pulled back into his parking space.  He didn't turn off the engine right away, but stayed there, lights off, the motor humming.  As I watched him it was as though I could read his mind, so clear it was what he was thinking.  Drive away, quick, before anyone sees.  I would have been thinking it, too.  But then he killed the engine and got out and I told him I was fine.  His car might have been scratched, I guess, but if so I didn't see it and he wasn't terribly interested in checking.  I told him he could go and he did, quickly.

At the time I thought the bike was completely intact, too.  Well, this little plastic claspable case that sits under the seat, and the purpose of which I've never been able to figure out, had fallen off.  But it's a cheap thing that I didn't particularly want.  I'd walked it the few steps to the curb and everything seemed completely fine. It was only as I went rolling away did I hear that sound again of something grinding against the rear axle, not the same noise exactly as what the axle had been making that precipitated two replaced parts, but damn if it didn't make me think of just that.  And as I pedaled through the streets of Berlin with a satchel of groceries slung across my back, all I could think about was that I really don't know how much more I can afford this city, how I keep thinking I have a budget I can sustain only to find out there's a dozen incidental costs of things that I hadn't planned on, and how much longer can I keep this up, and how much worse it could have been if I had medical costs, good lord.  But I've taken two bikes into the shop I don't know how many times now, and I'm tired of paying for it, and I'm just getting ready for this one to be a full chain and gear or something more expensive than another crappy wheel.  I notice the sound only comes when I pedal and not when I coast, so I do that, coast, as much of the way home as possible, pedaling furiously and then just leaning forward as long as I can, feeling like I can drift forever as the city grows darker and colder.  The sun had gone down long before.  

The next day I walk it down the street.  My German's at least better here and I can explain what was happen with the passive "was hit (by a car)"/,,wurde von einem Autofahrer geschlugen."  It has much less of an effect than I had assumed, and he just flips it onto its seat, turns the pedals with one hand while watching the chain, and in two quick movements bends a metal plate until the chain no longer rubs against it.  So my bikeshop guy thinks I'm retarded.  "Oh, you have a problem with your bike again?  This problem here, that disappears when I apply pressure with my hand?  Yeah.  Wow.  Those can be a killer. 

Today, though, I noticed that I'm liking the new bike more.  The short handles even; they kind of feel right, you know?  Spare.  Economical.  Practical, minimalist, no pointless flourishes.  

Sigh.  This thing'll be the death of me.  

,,Hat nummer sechs keinen Witz bekommen?'' ,,Doch,'' sagte der Bartender, ,,aber du erzählst ihn falsch''

Small complaint, but I have to get this off my chest: In Deutschkurs we did a few days involving humor, Witze, Scherzen, und so weider. Supplemental homework was to learn a joke, each member of the class being expected to tell one over three days. Well, I don't know any German jokes, but how different could an American or English joke sound in translation?

Pretty different, it turns out. I volunteered on the first day, so I had completed my obligation. Nearly no one else even attempted to come up with one, however, which left a lot of dead time at the end of the second day, when it was obvious our instructor had counted on the tell-a-joke exercise to eat up a good twenty minutes that she otherwise would have had to spend teaching. Well, not to brag, but I'm one of the better speakers in the class, so I offered to tell a second one the next day, and then today when the clock showed minutes still left with no volunteers, the instructor came back to the well a third time.

Three days, three chances to tell a joke, three times I got it all out without any curse words and no grammatical mistakes so gruesome that they would have made it impossible to understand. Three jokes. Not one person laughed, not one time.

"I would, but I really need the eggs." "My dog, he has no nose." Nothing. Fuck you, humorless language students---how's that for a joke?

,,Halt es mal nicht für Krebs. Halt es mal für Krebs-chen.''

Language courses continue. It seems that's the only verb the noun "language course" can take. It cannot "succeed" or "come to completion," only "continue." I still find it often difficult to say exactly what I want, or that when I believe I have succeeded I've in fact conveyed something quite different from what I intended, but I believe I'm getting better. The class does not seem to be moving as fast as it could. I missed a solid week with what could have been the flu or a bad cold, or even food poisoning. I'm insured but don't go to the doctor for the three days, and on the fourth I cannot find the right clinic at first, and on the fifth my symptoms seem to be on the decline. When I return to class the following Monday I appear not to have missed much that I can't recover immediately. I wonder how much I'm paying for this, but then set about relearning the subjunctive past tense. Ich hätte gerne, einen verschiedenen Kurs zu nehmen.

Full moons, or else the damp chills that these days seem permanent in the city, bring foul moods, and tempers don't flare but smolder beneath the surface during the section on interrogatories and statements of the form, Er/sie fragt, warum du ... hast. Our teacher asks the bubbly Spanish woman who always wears fashionable boots why she's incapable of punctuality. The Spanish woman in cute boots asks our fifty-something teacher why she has never been married.

The next subject is getting sick and seeking medical treatment. It comes a few days after I have returned from my own illness, and I brood over the ironies that the first immediately practical bit of language we have learned has come precisely when I can no longer use it. My own poor mood takes as its object our coursebook and its silly examples of patients who are incapable of sustaining a conversation any real human being is ever going to need. "Doc, you gotta help me---I get these terrible stomach pains after about my fifth cup of coffee that don't subside even if I have a second apfelkuchen." Du isst nie Frühstück, weil du musst zu früh nach Arbeit, täglich trinkst du nur Kaffee und isst selten Mittagessen, und manchmals du kommst nach Hause um neun oder später, und du weisst nicht, warum dein Magen dir weh tut? Meine Diagnose ist Schwachsinnig-heit.

We move on from the doctor's office to the workplace. We learn about jobs that are selbständig, autonomous, and those that offer Aufstiegmöglichkeiten, or opportunities for advancement. Our Lehrerin expresses her opinion that lawyers have excellent control over their working conditions, Arbeitsbedingungen, such as their hours, and have excellent prospects for advancement. I unwittingly am recalled to the four years I spent in those salt mines, the nights and weekends I was literally ordered to be in my office, and the dozens of associates who were fired or driven to quit before one was made partner. I chuckle bitterly to myself as I sip from my coffee, which I have dosed heavily with cream and sugar, but which is black again when it leaves my lips.

We are asked to list verbs that take the dative case, or the dative plus the accusative. I find the exercise very difficult, coming up with only the most obvious examples: "to be pleasing (to someone)" and "to seem (to someone)" in the former category, and "to give (someone) (something)" and "to show (someone) (something)" in the latter. The class lists off their entries, and I am apparently alone in having this trouble. After the fact I come up with schmecken, to taste good (to someone). Ja, says our Lehrerin. That is very important, wichtig. The next suggestion is winken, to wink. I think this has an exclusively flirtatious connotation, but I am not sure. Our Lehrerin responds Ja, but that dass ist nicht wichtig. The Spanish girl in cute boots begins to laugh and cannot stop herself. While she stifles the noise as best she can behind two hands, our teacher explains passen. "When I shop for clothes, I find, 'these pants are too small, these pants passt nicht.'" The Spanish girl in cute boots loses it completely.

I have now learned to translate the active voice to the passive, whether or not it makes the slightest bit of logical sense. "One is not permitted to beat children" becomes "children are not permitted to be beaten," which invites the question how to translate a Homer Simpsonic "...'cause if they do..." and accompanying shaken fist, into German (other than, of course, unwisely). Kinder dürfen nicht geschlogen werden, und wenn sie so tun, dann bekommen sie ein Schlagen!

My writing proceeds slowly, frustratingly. I have finished a draft of one short story and shown in to a few friends. One has returned a verdict (negative). It's entirely of my own making, but for the moment I'm trapped between two languages: I can't immerse myself in German while I'm devoting so much of the day to English, and I can't really get the work done in English while I spend half the day in German-mode. Each proceeds slowly, in its own way, for the time being, and I have decided (evidently) to let it be. Eventually I shall have to make a decision, I think. But for the time being I'm pretending I don't know that.

Lock the door on the Hall of Fame: The leader boards

Can it be? a baseball post?  After I up and moved to Europe?  Well, it's this or nothing from me, so quit your damn yelping.  It's award season, and I'm thinking of history.  

Zach Greinke, the best pitcher in the American League, won the Cy Young award, which is supposed to go the best pitcher in each league.  That qualifies as news, because the voters are not widely thought of as able to identify the best pitcher, and pretty much everyone was waiting for them to give it a pitcher who achieved more wins by virtue of not pitching for the woeful Kansas City Royals.  As Joe Posnanski noted, a pitcher with as few wins (16) as Greinke had really not won the Cy except in very odd circumstances.  Joe Mauer overcame the handicaps of leading the league in all three triple-slash scores (average, on-base, and slugging) and playing the most demanding defensive position to win the AL MVP despite not playing for the Yankees, and accordingly lacking the mystique and aura that are widely known among baseball people to follow truly great players.  Lincecum beat Carpenter and Wainwright for NL Cy honors and Pujols winning his third MVP, which aren't as interesting for being either too hard a question or too easy of one, respectively.  

Anyway, for reasons I don't recall right now, I was looking at this list of the players with the most career runs scored, all time.  Probably it was because I was arguing with a friend over whether Rickey Henderson, recently elected to the Hall of Fame, or Greg Maddux, not eligible for a few years yet, was more deserving of a unanimous Hall ballot, which as you sure know, no player has ever received.  My argument:  Maddux did everything right, pitched to contact while still striking out a ton of batters, avoided the walk, won 300 games---there's no argument against him, whereas Rickey was a great player who still had a curious lack of power from a corner spot and wasn't the best outfielder in baseball during the time he played---not even the best left fielder.  The counter-argument:  What records has Maddux broken?  Rickey is #1 in runs, #1 in steals, and while maybe Bonds was a better left fielder, no one's ever been a better leadoff hitter.  Well, he's also #1 in being caught stealing, and being #1 ain't necessarily all you think it is---the pitcher with the most strikeouts is one of the weakest Hall selections in history.  So I decided to look at the rest of the guys with the most runs scored in their careers, hoping to find some guilt by association with which to besmirch the good reputation of my dear friend.  

Wow, is it not there.  Looking at the runs leaders, one does not easily find any irregularity in terms of quality.  In fact, up until #74, the list comprises three and only three subsets:  Hall of Famers; active players or recent retirees not yet eligible for a vote, and Pete Rose (okay, Tim Raines is in there, too, but he should make it in during the next few years); and dead-ball era guys whose last game was in 1903 or earlier (well, Arlie Latham came back for four games as a pinch hitter and late-inning replacement at second in 1909 after a ten-year absence; he batted zero in two trips but must have reached on either an error or a fielder's choice, as he stole a base and scored a run; he fielded the ball cleanly and made the throw to first on both of his defensive chances---how's that for reading a century-old box score?).  Finally at number 75 you get a real omission by the Hall of Fame, someone who played during what I'll call the Hall Era and who has become eligible, in Dwight Evans.

Well, that seemed interesting to me, that the top 75 run scorers would all be Hall guys, except for the last one.  It's a curiously round number, no?  How 'bout RBI leaders?  Excluding Hall of Famers and ineligibles, you start with #29 Harold Baines (who's still eligible for a vote but only squeaked by with 5.9% last ballot), then #34 Andre Dawson (who collected the most votes after the two inductees with 67%, and has two more years to get 75%), and at #51 (Dave Parker) or maybe #53 (Rusty Staub) you start to see the picture start to look mixed.  Home runs? it's more complicated, as you start with #32 Jose Canseco, but you follow that up shortly with #35 Dave Kingman, then #42 Darrell Evans, and at #48 (Dale Murphy) it peters out into a steady drip of non-Hall players, plus you got Fred McGriff and Juan Gonzalez and Andres Gallaraga mixed in there, who aren't eligible until next year but who have shaky cases and who almost certainly won't all make it in.  

So by runs, the Hall has inducted more or less all the 75 career leaders that it can, and looks to induct the remainder when their time comes; in runs batted in, it's the top 50; and in home runs, the top 35.  What about absolute numbers?  There you notice something interesting, as the cutoff for runs is 1,475, maybe 1,480.  Runs batted in goes to 1,500 (between Mickey Mantle and Dave Parker).  Home runs could be anywhere from 443 to 451 (the collar around Bagwell).  So let's call it 1,500 for R and RBIs, 450 for HR.  That seems about right; when you imagine a BBWAA voter looking at a generic player, it's easy to imagine him being impressed by the big round numbers.  The homers number is a little weird, and perhaps by coincidence sits directly between the 400 that represented a lock before the for-whatever-reason homer-happy 80s and 90s (I'm not avoiding attributing it to steroids, but I'm not absolving the new parks or expansion-era pitching, either) and the 500 that it became after.  With hits it departs from the round-number pattern, as it's the 45 with 2,800 (again, excepting current and recently retired players, Pete Rose, and Harold Baines), or 2,775 if you assume Dawson and Griffey are in.  Clearly anyone with 3,000 is an A+ lock, and it looks like for practical purposes, the Hall recognizes how out of reach that milestone is for even the greatest players and is willing to fudge that number for an A-minus student, as well, but won't give a full 10% discount.  (Yeah, that's the best rationale I could come up with.)  

First thought:  What's particularly curious to note is that the runs leaders are comparatively overrepresented relative to the sluggers; I would have bet anything that the contrary were so, just based on the voters' reputation for overvaluing homers and ribbies in doling out the MVP awards.  I suspect that the reason for this is that players who have great mashing seasons aren't especially likely to have great mashing careers, but true quality players score runs consistently across their seasons.  That is, the RBI bias might result in a Justin Morneau MVP campaign for the length of a season, but it's unlikely to sustain a Hall of Fame career, whereas the skills that get ignored over a single season reveal themselves in the fullness of time to be more truly valuable.  

Second thought:  The round numbers of lock-candidates on the respective lists reflects an artificial symmetry, and one what's really on the brink of collapse.  The HR/RBI numbers include a lot of players suspected or proven of using steroids, and Mark McGwire (who never failed a test) has been passed over twice now; it certainly seems that more of the leaders will wind up being excluded from the Hall for suspicion of using PEDs.  Additionally, even though he's not thought of as a steroid user, Harold Baines appears right in the middle of the hits and runs-batted-in lists, but he'll be kept out of the Hall because those career numbers were because of a long career in a high-scoring era, and in spite of average rate stats.  If you reexamine the lists for likely exclusions, the bottom of the "lock" lists becomes defined by (in each case: ballpark career numbers, number of Hall members-last guy kept in, first guy left out) the following, and forgiving/ignoring Rose and Bonds because you really have no choice:  

• Hits:  North of 3,000, #23-Lou Brock, Raphael Palmeiro, or if you ignore Raphael, 2,800, #39-Babe, Baines
• Runs:  1,700, #25-Bill Hamilton if you end the chain at A-Rod; #29, Winfield if at Palmeiro; or #33-Ripken, Sheffield
• Runs batted in:  1,800, #13-Ted Williams if you end at Palmeiro; #18-Frank Robinson if at Manny; #20-Honus Wagner if A-Rod or Frank Thomas
• Home runs:  #5-Griffey if Sosa; #7-Frank Robinson if McGwire or A-Rod; #10-Killebrew if Palmeiro; #14-Mike Schmidt if Manny

Third thought:  All told, I think this points to a welcome trend of the voters (in the aggregate if not individually) really internalizing a lot of the new knowledge of baseball.  Whether it's in spite of themselves, as you see with runs being valued relative to RBIs, or as a result of the schismatic episode of the steroids era, or (my personal theory) the more traditional view, as reflected in the round numbers-test, simply becoming obviously unworkable as the historical context evolved, there is at least a hint of baseball's highest honor being awarded more rationally.  It's only a hint, still, but in light of a pleasantly sane bit of year-end voting, it seems that we may finally be on the right side of the arc of history.  (Well, Jeter did get another Gold Glove, so there's still a lot of work to do.)

Me and E. (an email correspondence)

Me:  You know, I'm actually liking the Dune miniseries (I'm watching the second one, Children of Dune, now)

Me:  On a totally unrelated note, the actresses who play Alia, Princess Irulan, and Chani are all totally number fours.  Oddly, they're quite a bit older than you'd expect for actresses (Alia, who I think is the h4wtest of the three in a contest where placing third is really no shame, is 43...). . 

E.:  I didn't know they made a second one...

Me:  Yeah, I guess.  2003.  It encompasses the books Dune Messiah and Children of Dune, I think.  

E.:  I'm getting old.  Like, old for the earth.  I thought the Dune miniseries was recent...

Me:  Nine years ago ain't recent enough for you?  The Yankees had just won the World Series, a Democrat was in the White House and Republicans were spreading crazy stories about how he was going to murder people... feels like yesterday.  

The New Yorker Swimsuit Issue (a.k.a., the food edition)

The New Yorker Food Issue just arrived in my inbox, and I've been spending the last hour or so reading about, inter alia, Thanksgivings abroad.  

[Sidenote:  I've been describing said issue over IM all day, and the absence of convenient italics therein forced me to experiment with capitalizations I found less than ideal.  "The New Yorker Food Issue" is clearly deficient, suggesting as it does a single title, and while I settled on "The New Yorker food issue," I didn't like the casualness of that lower-casing of the issue.  This is all by way of confessing my intense punctuation-and-style geekdom, that the availability of italics in this medium comes as a genuine relief.  Also the reader kindly will note that while standard Bluebook style is not to italicize Latin phrases such as "inter alia," that rule follows the policy of underscoring vocabularies the reader is expected to find unfamiliar extends only so far as the presumption that a legal audience will be familiar with them.  In other words, it's a genre-specific rule that really shouldn't be leaned upon for more than... oh, I'm sorry, is this boring you?  Hey, fuck you, then.]

Anyway, here are the annals of a day in the life of a Michelin restaurant critic:

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

"Excellent," Maxime said.

I asked her what she liked about it.

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

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

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

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

I don't know if I have a whole lot to say about this other than something just below the surface itches, that I'm pretty sure it pisses me off.  I'm no ascetic---hell, I'm a fat guy---but there's something intensely respectable about the Buddhist credo that one should eat in order to live, not live in order to eat.  That is, it goes without saying, completely incompatible with a carmelized sugar crust atop a slab of foie gras studded with cherries and pistachios.