Standard Operating Procedure

so Errol Morris, the Oscar winning director of The Fog of War, has a new movie that was released April 25^th and I can't go see it because I'm in the wrong country. It’s called Standard Operating Procedure, a documentary about the people who made the Abu Ghraib photographs and how they came to light. He’s also written a book on the subject with Philip Gourevitch, the author of We Wish to Inform You That Tomorrow We Will Be Killed with Our Families: Stories from Rwanda.

I really enjoyed going to see The Fog of War with my father when it came out, and I'm hoping this will me more of the same intense confrontation with reality. Morris has a unique approach to difficult subject matter, he said on the Salon.com podcast : "I don't see it as my job to get people to say they’re sorry. I don’t want to hear your confession, I don’t want to hear you apologize... I just want you to tell me your story!" I have a lot of respect for someone who attacks a problem without seeking to lay blame or exonerate.

As for the other half of this pair, I finally finished Gourevitch's book about Rwanda last summer and it was one of the most heartbreakingly bleak books I've ever read. And I'm really glad I read it. It was a gripping, well written account of an incredible tragedy. It's hard to face the darkest parts of who we are as human beings sometimes, and I'm thankful that we have people like him to help us try to understand.

Oh and did I mention that Danny Elfman composed the score? One of the things that made Fog of War so intense was the relentless score by Philip Glass, a mad genius of noise/sound composing. I don't really know how to describe his work, go check out his site. but embarrassingly enough, I've loved Danny Elfman since his Oingo Boingo days and I've been consistently impressed by his work in film, and I can't wait to see this movie.

Unfortunately, my geographical location makes it somewhat improbable that I'll be seeing it any time soon. In the meantime I'm going to be reading Morris and Gourevitch's recent New Yorker article on Abu Ghraib, that my brother recommends. But I don't have time to tonight because I have to learn il congiuntivo and I'm going to Brussels for the weekend. Ciao!

A Taste of Orzo

So I’ve been in Italy since February. My mother already knows all about the exciting/stressful series of events that brought me from one continent to another and, since I’m pretty sure she’s the only one reading this, I’m not going to bother catching you up. Instead I’m going to write about the holy grail of caffeine consumers: Italian coffee.

Before you say to yourself: “wait, the last time this woman wrote about coffee, she was expounding the joys of Nescafe…” let me just explain two things about Italian caffeine intake.

First: Italians aren’t obsessed with coffee. I haven’t met any that drink more than 2 – 3 a day. Most commonly Italians drink a latte or a cappuccino in the morning and that’s it until maybe an espresso after dinner every once in a while. And let me stress that the portions are much, much smaller; we’re talking about a couple of tablespoons of coffee in a big cup of hot milk here.

Americans have a different set of ideas and expectations about Italian coffee than Italians do. There are bars full of people drinking cappuccinos and lattes all afternoon in the piazzas in Florence, and they’re almost overwhelmingly tourists.

All of the foreigners I meet gush about how good the food/coffee is here. Don’t get me wrong, I’m not complaining about the coffee. I just think you could hand a tourist a foul, totally off cup of coffee (maybe Nescafe) and because they’re in Italy it would be transformed into a spectacular liquid joy.

Second: Orzo. What, you might ask, is orzo? Orzo is the Italian word for barley, or Hordeum vulgare. In Italy, it’s roasted, ground up and steeped to produce a dark, coffee like substance that many people drink in the morning as a substitute. I believe that it was widely used during WWII as a coffee alternative because the actual stuff was unavailable.

Why are Italians drinking burned grain product? I don’t get it. I tried some, in the spirit of scientific inquiry, and it tasted pretty much like it smelled. I felt like I was drinking a cup of whole wheat toast that had been cooked until it was just barely shy of being a lump of charcoal. Mmmm, nutty.

More Web Fun

Once again I find myself thinking that some people have entirely too much time on their hands. Hey at least this guy is getting creative with it.

Some friends sent this one my way, so thank them and then kick back and enjoy yourself for a few minutes. After all you probably deserve it.


Animator vs. Animation by *alanbecker on deviantART

Yeah yeah, 5 million people have watched this already and you might well be one of them. If so was it worth watching it again?

I like the sky, thanks.

This afternoon I was desperately in need of some fresh air, so I escaped from the office for a stroll around the neighborhood (Dupont South, at least that's what I call it). It was a gorgeous afternoon and I really enjoyed my bit of time outdoors, especially the sun and sky, the fresh air, the wide streets, the flowers being planted around the trees in the sidewalks, the fact that I wasn't shuttered in and oppressed by behemoth obnoxious skyscrapers.

So when I was once again cloistered away at my desk you can imagine my disappointment when I saw that Matt Yglesias was attacking my fair city. Matt seems to think that we should have taller buildings and destroy the character of our city, I couldn't disagree more.

I was born and raised and currently reside in Takoma Park (right by the metro, and yes that means I get to say that I'm actually from here) and I don't know any locals (natural born or long term enough to have raised kids) who would even consider the possibility of constructing taller buildings in DC. The suggestion that we need taller buildings always seems to come from someone from away, quite often from the land of early twilight and vertigo itself.

The quick background, if you need it - and it turns out I did, self-professed low skyline lover that I am, I had always bought into the urban legend that no building could be taller than the Capitol dome with the exception of the Washington Monument. Actually, in 1910 a building called The Cairo went up and dwarfed its neighbors and generally upset folks around town. Congress got in the mix and passed the Height Act of 1910 which stipulates that a building's height cannot exceed the distance between it and the building across the street, plus 20 feet.

Paul Schwartzman wrote a great article on the history of the limitation and some modern-day challenges to it last May, there are fantastic graphics involved as well, check it out. Paul also handles the principle arguments for and against taller buildings in town.

Roger K. Lewis had what amounted to a response later that same month, reminiscing about being shouted down by Jonathan Yardley, lo these many years ago, for suggesting that DC needed taller buildings. Roger has a great summation of the choice made though:

People offended by the Cairo made a definitive value judgment: The building fabric of Washington was to remain uniformly low-rise. There would be a memorable skyline but no skyscrapers. The Height Act of 1910 ensured that Washington's streets and neighborhoods would remain airy, sunlit and protected from soaring buildings that are inharmonious with their surroundings.

And so we live in a great town, with a unique character and feel that has a lot to do with how tall the buildings are and the sense of openness and freedom that they help impart upon us.

Like I said in my comment to Matt, if you're jonesing to be hemmed in by some tall, oppressive buildings take it across the river.

Who Needs TV?

If you're missing your daily ration of the boob tube with the writers on strike, just fire up the web - there's something for everyone.

And if you think that online video/shows/shorts aren't any good, you clearly haven't been looking very hard...

Don't Get Hooked

This is a copy of the email that I sent to Washington Post food critic Tom Sietsema.

Hi Tom,

This is mostly a gripe although I'll attempt to frame it as a question since I am genuinely curious as to why this happens/what could be done about it.

A few weeks ago (Saturday after thanksgiving) I had dinner with friends at Hook, we were a large party, 10 of us from high school who still get together when we're all in the area. Some of the food was quite good (the entree's) some of it wasn't so good (the appetizers and crudo) and the service was poor at best.

Our sever disappeared for long periods of time, constantly left us searching for attention to get more wine, order dessert, etc. When he did come by he was more interested in telling us the score of the Missouri college football game that was on at the time. Descriptions of the food were lacking even when in response to detailed questions, if specials are served at Hook (which may well not be the case) we certainly didn't hear about them. We ordered two complete rounds of the crudos which were unceremoniously dumped on our table without any explanations or descriptions leaving us to guess what each might be, we repeated the detective work with cheese plates later in the evening.

While it wasn't anything we were interested in making a scene over, the caliber of the service certainly detracted from our enjoyment of the meal and the overall experience and we would have liked to reflect its quality or lack thereof in the gratuity. Unfortunately when our check arrived our server had already included a 20% tip for himself. The general feeling at the table was that our server had decided to plug in a 20% tip from the start of the meal and simply phoned in the rest of the evening.

The question I've formed is twofold.

Where and how did the practice of adding the tip in for checks at large tables originate? I understand the possibility of getting shorted by a large group exists and that many restaurants follow or allow their servers discretion in using this practice and often say so on the menu (I don't know if Hook had a printed warning or not). We can't be the only group that's ever felt taken advantage of on this front though. In an unscientific survey of our party, the six of us who have waited tables in the past all claimed to have never added a tip on to a check, choosing to trust our customers instead.

Besides griping to your local restaurant critic and telling your friends that there are better places to get a good piece of fish, ones where the food is also well prepared, the service is up to par, and your dollar will go quite a bit further (Blacks in Bethesda comes to mind - full disclosure I have worked there), is there something else we could or should have done.

Thanks for taking the time to read this, I apologize if I was a bit long winded. Voicing my complaint to someone with a lot of weight in the local food scene was very cathartic.

Cheers
Henry Coppola

Do You Yahoo?

Sorry, can't say that I do. I mean yeah, I have a Yahoo mail account and I play fantasy sports on Yahoo, I even occasionally fire up a game or two from Yahoo's extensive collection of ways to waste time. But no, I don't Yahoo.

There are some things that I do, quite a few when I stop and think about it actually. You probably do at least a couple of them as well. I never feel alone when I Google something or somebody. No one has ever misunderstood me when I told them I needed to Xerox a couple of pages. When my girlfriend and I hear about a movie we want to see, we Netflix it. My friends who still watch television Tivo almost everything important, after all ads are so passe these days. If something or someone is getting Hoovered its probably a dirty joke, but I doubt that an explanation would be required. If you need it over night or just across the country I'll Fed-ex it too you, but the odds are good that the postman will be bringing it. Want to change one of your photos, hide the evidence or maybe just plant some, easy I'll Photoshop it for you.

Why is it that some nouns, and not just any old nouns but trademarked ones, get verbed and others don't? Even more interestingly why do concerted efforts to verb trademarks fail? Recently, and by that I mean sometime in maybe the last five years, Yahoo pushed really hard to verb themselves and came up empty. Do you even remember when you got asked if you Yahoo'd? I suppose that this phenomena is organic and viral and inherently resistant to being told what to do, the internet is after all, about freedom.

My friends and family happily pass Kleenex to me, and I bet you would too. Most of us owned a Discman somewhere along the way, my first one was an Aiwa though. Words enter our lexicon from all sorts of places and angles and many people have written more extensively and eloquently on the subject than I will pretend to. If you don't believe me just google it.