à nord, sud, de l'est à l'oest

During the last big snow storm Beth and I managed to get out of the house. We wanted to go see a movie and were headed to the Ritz but realized en route that they were closed. Weak. It always amazes me that AT&T has such a good signal down in the subway.  Instead of the eastbound transfer to the El we made the westbound transfer and headed for the Bridge in West Philly. When we got off the train everything along 40th St. was closed. We crossed Chestnut and all the Indian and Thai places were also closed. My heart was sinking.  I was cold, hungry and was not looking forward to going back home empty handed.

Then we saw people going in and out of Fresh Grocer and we noticed that Marathon Grill was open. I looked down Walnut St. to see that Capo Giro was still open! (I will destroy some gelato regardless of the weather.)  The Bridge was open but the only movie either of us wanted to see was Avatar. We missed the previous one by 30 minutes and the next one didn't start for 2 hours.  I made a quick phone call over to Local 44  and the guy said, "yeah, kitchen is open. we're on our regular schedule."

That was my first visit there. I was pleasantly surprised because, for some reason, I was thinking that their menu wasn't very veg. friendly.  I had a great stew and Beth got the veggie spring rolls and a veggie burger. I don't like to drink too much before a movie (especially a long one like Avatar) because then I have to get up 3 or 4 times to go to the bathroom. I also didn't want to watch a 3-D movie with a buzz. I went with a Yard's Brawler and followed it up with a PBC Joe Porter.  Overall the decor and vibe of the place reminded of the Royal Tavern . On the other hand it felt open and airy. The high ceilings and big windows of Local 44 take away the "big hallway" feeling I get at Royal Tavern.  It's a cool place deserving of the hype.

Avatar was a good movie deserving of the hype.  That was the first time in at least 15 years that I've seen a 3-D movie. I think it made for a better experience overall but after the first 90 minutes of the film it became harder and harder not to notice the large, heavy and uncomfortable 3-D glasses perched on my nose. The special effects were superb. I normally notice when it's used right away. The lines between what was shot live and what is CGI are so blurred with the characters that you don't notice when it's used anyplace else in the movie.

I had heard a lot of talk about the anti-imperialist narrative of the story.  I felt like it alternated between hitting you over the head with anti-imperialism and hitting you over the head with anti-industrialisation. But I also noticed that throughout there was a much more subtle narrative (intended or not) that had a far stronger message about environment, economy, family, community and the notion of nations and states.  After sitting on the idea for a few days I've come to think that a lot of big budget productions are like that so they'll have that mass market, black/white,  good vs. bad,  Hollywood appeal.  So the dudes who want to see a shot-em-up, action/adventure film get what they want and the people who are looking for a movie with a message get what they want.

It was an adventurous day. We went out at 2 pm, while it was still snowing, and didn't get home 'til after 9 when all was quiet and unplowed.

The next morning we got up early and had brunch at Green Eggs. Most of their savory side had meat as a major or minor ingredient and didn't want to mess with "can you hold the sausage ?" for a first meal so I just ordered the stuffed french toast. Holy Crap! Stuffed with ricotta and blueberry and friggin' delicious. Beth had the equally delicious pancakes topped with blueberries, strawberries and creme anglaise. We got there before 11 so we were seated right away. It seemed like a bit of a wait before someone came to the table but once we ordered we were served relatively quickly and otherwise had attentive but unobtrusive service.

Crabgrass Frontier

A new phrase has been coined to describe the ghettoization of the suburbs - Slumburbia.  If you've known me for a while then you've probably heard me talk about it at one point or another over the last decade. It's one of those things that, after a few beers, will really get me going.  The Atlantic ran an article on it about 2 years ago detailing the fallout of the still unfolding sub-prime crisis. Now that the dust is starting to clear there is more data . . . and this op-ed piece from the NYTimes.  The author of the Times article seems to think that 1. people will continue to immigrate to the US (with its failing economy) in record numbers and 2. that they will fill up all of these empty houses in the suburbs and exurbs. I disagree on both points.  Immigrants these day are generally moving to central cities or the inner-ring of suburbs. In the case of Philadelphia that means places like South Philly or inner-ring, suburban places like the Northeast and towns like Upper Darby and Maple Shade.

The article raises another good point - one I discussed with some neighbors recently - that this mess was caused, in part, by the idea that everyone should be a homeowner.

My neighborly discussion began because some non-profit group is trying to build a 120-bed halfway house (on the 1400 block of Snyder Ave.) for people recently released from the prison system.  My position was, "we have enough of this crap already with the mentally ill and recovering addicts. I know it needs to go somewhere but we have enough. Some other neighborhood can take their turn." Then I said something like, "we really need to figure out just how many institutional beds this neighborhood can handle." My neighbors insisted that it wasn't quantifiable.  I called BS.  It might take more resources than the three of us have but it's definitely quantifiable.

I mentioned something about home ownership and my one neighbor said that he disagreed with the assumption that neighborhoods can only be good when most people own their homes. He's right. Go to NYC or even Center City, where most people rent and you'll find thriving neighborhoods where crime is low and the streets are clean. My initial assumption was to throw some European cities in there for good measure but it's actually not true. I knew rates of homeownership in Western Europe were comparable to those in the US but I didn't expect it to find it in so many European cities. For comparison the rate of homeownership in the US is about 67%, in Philadelphia it's 65%, NYC is 31%. In France it's 63% but in Paris about 30%. In Spain it's 85% and in Barcelona it's 68%.  The Netherlands as a whole and Amsterdam are both around 55%. This is sort of surprising to me because Barcelona is like NYC or Paris in that it's largely a city of walk-up or high rise apartments. One would expect Barcelona to follow the pattern of housing tenure in NYC or Paris but instead it has fewer renters than rowhouse cities like Amsterdam or Philadelphia.

Having lived in and around NYC from 1978-1992 it wasn't always Sex & the City and Disneyfied Times Square. It was way worse than it is in Philadelphia these days. And don't go too deep into the boroughs because you probably won't like what you see there today either.  Manhattan and much of Brooklyn has cleaned up in the way that it has in part through sweeping demographic changes over the last 20 years but largely through countless Special Services Districts.  The rates of homeownership in  NYC hasn't changed much. The difference is that there's now a hidden tax that pays for what, in European cities, are basic municipal services. People don't think they're paying for it because it's usually funded through the neighborhood business community but the costs are always passed on to the consumer. Europeans don't need BIDs or SSDs to have successful neighborhoods and shopping districts because the services are already funded through their sales and use taxes.

The rate of homeownership in Philly is slightly below the national average but near the top in terms of big cities. We can look around this city and compare neighborhoods where the number is more than 10% above or more than 10% below the average and you find strong corollaries with most of the hallmarks of a stable neighborhood.  Even within my neighborhood we can find sharp distinctions between blocks with high rates of ownership vs. those with high rates of renters.

I'm not anti-apartment. I just think that it's reasonable and fair to say- in a country, in a state, in a city where nearly 2/3 of households are owner-occupied - that the number of rental units in our neighborhood should not exceed 50% of total units.

I also think it's fair to point out that the State aimed to save money by "privatizing" a lot of social services. The social workers dealing with the parolees are still getting paid the same.  The State saves a lot of money by externalizing the other costs. For instance, since they're not in jail anymore the State isn't paying guards to watch them. Now it's on us.

When the federal government, vis-a-vis Ronald Reagan, defunded the mental health system a lot of states responded by closing down their mental hospitals. In and of itself it's not a bad thing. There were a lot of people in those hospitals that really didn't need to be.  The problem is that most of these hospitals were in rural or exurban areas and when they shut down and simply let people walk out the front door they didn't stay in those rural or exurban areas. The suburbs wouldn't allow outpatient facilities so they wound up in big cities, sleeping on the streets. In fact up to 50% of the homeless on streets in big cities are mentally ill.  That should be intuitive to any one who passes panhandlers on a daily basis.

In the case of ex-cons, I'm not anti-guy-made-a-mistake-now-he's-trying-to-get-back-on-his-feet. This neighborhood could probably support 24 of those beds in a rowhouse here and a rowhouse there. Stick the another 24 beds in Gladwyne and see what Allen Iverson and M. Night Shyamalan have to say about it.

If 3/4 of the metro population live in the suburbs. 3/4 of these beds should be in the suburbs. Most of the junkies running around on Market and Filbert are there because 1. that's where the methadone is and 2. most of them are from the suburbs and that's where the train stations and bus terminals are.  At some point they become part of the city's homeless problem because they lose their house or apartment and/or can't afford to keep going back and forth. I'm not suggesting that the city doesn't have more than enough homegrown addicts to go around but if you hang around 10th & Filbert or 8th & Market and listen to the conversations you know most of those people had problems long before they wound up in Philadelphia. I'm also not saying that we should turn away people who need help just because they're driver's license says Montgomery County but at the same time we aren't a dumping ground for everything suburbanites think they're too good for.

And how else have the suburbs enjoyed 60 years of supremacy? By taking the good (along with a lot of state and federal money) and then sending or trapping the bad stuff (like incinerators and prisons) in places like Camden, Norristown, Bristol, Chester, etc, etc.  But the gravy train has ended and court rulings like the Mt. Laurel Decisions make it harder to site the bad stuff in the city.  Now high energy prices - in neighborhoods that are 30 miles from the nearest employment center - in an economy where employment centers are shrinking spell big trouble.

It's going to take a long time for a lot of suburban people to come around to the idea of metro revenue sharing . . . and I think by the time they do the big cities will be in a position to say, "No thanks."

Holy Shit!

I googled "Holy Shit!" expecting to find a link to the Against Me! song of the same name. Imagine my surprise when I instead see a picture of Keith about to chow down on a soft pretzel. More surprising is that it's on Sara's flickr stream. Way more creepy is that google offered it as from my "social circle." 

I've spent the last week trying to decide whether or not I want to drop this habit.  A lot of my posts were personal in nature and it read more like a journal than I liked. I wasn't sure where I was going with it and if I was going to have enough time to keep up with it. I thought about just cutting my losses. I decided instead to refocus . . . and change the name.  Fans of the "Let's Go" travel series will know where I'm coming from.  I'm going to be posting a lot more about planning & transportation - but maybe with a more Philadelphia focus.

I'll still have personal anecdotes and the occasional rant about the Phillies. 

So, here we are. Well, here I am again after having my cursor on the delete button a few days ago and here I go with another 'journal' post. In all likelihood you're reading this blog in reverse chronological order.  I'll give you the short-short.  We visited a midwife, two birth centers and a Pennsylvania Hospital based OB. We're going the midwife route. Or, in the words of Talib Kweli - "we went the hospital route, we know what they all about."  

We were at the midwife's office last week and she busted out the little doppler fetal monitor and boom. there it was. for a split second. the heartbeat. holy shit! Having never heard it before and having never seen one of those doppler devices before I still recognized the sound right away.  The midwife kept moving the doppler around trying to pick up the sound again and occasionally you could hear the echo of Beth's heart as a pretty slow and steady - psshew . . . psshew . . . psshew. Then there it was again. El Niño. It almost sounded like our dishwasher on the rinse cycle. It was really fast and strong and loud and kinda awesome. Our dishwasher is not awesome. It is fast, powerful and incredibly loud.  Before that moment it was all kind of abstract. The baby - not the dishwasher. Hearing the heartbeat was the "oh shit, there really is something in there and in a few months it's gonna want to come out."  The only thing close to that feeling is like getting a call back after an interview. "I got the job! I start on Monday! Oh shit. I start on monday!? I now have 48 hours to master Illustrator, Sketch-Up and ArcGIS." 

Speaking of really being in there, there was a little confusion as to the due date. The usual signs and symptoms didn't support a September 3rd due date. Oh, it's showing, y'all just haven't noticed yet or were too polite to ask.  It turns out that August 11th is more like it. That would make today the end of week 14. According to one baby book that would make the little nugget about the size of a lime.  Come back in 2 weeks and we'll have an avocado.  

Sorry, I can't really let the term "baby book" enter any part of my brain without immediately thinking of that scene from 'Knocked Up'  and, unfortunately, the best video I can find is an amateur reenactment. It's a good thing I own the DVD.

1513 Decision Street

It's friggin' cold out and there's snow on the ground. Not a lot of snow but just enough to be annoying. I need to go to the grocery store, to the gym and I really want to check out the new brunch spot around the corner - Green Eggs. I also really feel like going to see a movie.  It's already 1:30pm and doing all of them won't leave much time for anything else today. I feel pathetic agonizing over petty decisions when we haven't yet decided where our baby will be born.

We went to the Birth Center in Wilmington last week and I left having come to a single conclusion.

Delaware is weird.

The Wilmington Birth Center was in some Victorian twin like you'd see in West Philly or Germantown. In fact, the neighborhood reminded me a lot of Germantown or Mt. Airy. It was half a block from a hospital with a maternity ward. Except, they only take you there in cases of emergency. If there are no major complications and the labor is just failing to progress or it's going to be a breach birth they take you to Christiana Hospital which is a good 15 minutes away.

The Wilmington Birth Center also had a much different vibe than the Bryn Mawr Birth Center. Wilmington was very hippie. The orientation there had maybe 10 couples and most of them already had kids. It seemed like most of the people at the orientation had moved there from other parts of the country. Apparently, a home-birth without an attending physician is illegal in Delaware so a lot of people at the orientation didn't really need to be sold on the idea of midwifes. They were just at the Birth Center because doing it at home in Delaware is too difficult.

When we went to Bryn Mawr there were closer to 30 couples, it seemed like everyone was around our age, this was their first child, and most people were local. A lot of people at the Bryn Mawr orientation really didn't want to deliver at a hospital but weren't entirely sold on the Birth Center and had a lot of questions about safety and that sort of thing - like a half an hour worth of Q & A.  In Wilmington I think there were 3 or 4 questions the whole night (again, probably because most of the people there had already been through it before.)  BTW - If you haven't seen Ricki Lake's documentary 'The Business of Being Born' you should definitely check it out.  

So, in case you haven't figured it out yet, Wilmington is out.  There will be a lot of appointments between now and the big day and even though Bryn Mawr is a little bit longer of a drive (50 minutes vs. 35 to Wilmington) but it's also a block from the train station. I'm sure the rush hour train ride is much quicker than a rush hour car ride.

But right now the home birth option is at the top of the list. We still need the particulars on insurance and emergency transport. We live within 2 miles of 5 hospitals with 3 trauma centers and 3 NICUs so all of those bases are covered.  It's the logistics and under what circumstances that we need to clear up.

Decisions.

Shifting Demographics

I've been waiting to post for a few reasons. Mainly because our super trashy neighbor is finally moving out. What does that have to do with high-speed rail, you ask? Well, bear with me, it's but one example of something happening every day in neighborhoods all over Philadelphia and in cities all over the country.

The house next door to us has been chopped up into something resembling a rooming house.  For the 4 years we've lived here there have been the same Vietnamese people living on the top two floors. There's a cute older couple that speak zero english on the 2nd floor.  We were doing some plumbing work in our house once and our cat, the Cheat, managed to climb into the hole in the wall and reappear in the ceiling of their kitchen 4 days later. Our neighbors were very gracious as we cut a hole in the ceiling of their closet. They then took good care of the Cheat when she finally decided to jump down. The guy on the 3rd floor is super friendly but he thinks he has a much better grasp of english than he actually does so talking to him is laborious to say the least.  What can I say? He goes to work really early in the morning (to a paper factory in Chester) comes home pretty late, and spends most of his evenings with a six-pack of Heineken and a karaoke machine. The man certainly earns his beers.

The 1st floor in that house, on the other hand, has been a revolving circus show. At some point last spring this white guy moved in and tried to put up a great front about what a good guy he was and how the landlord had hired him to fix the place up.  I guess he was thinking that I hadn't been in there before. No one with any talent or skill and a grasp of the english language, who wasn't also a total fuck-up, would live in that hovel. A few days later I met his girlfriend "Dawn" and their two dogs. She seemed pleasant enough despite the vaguely stripperish name and general comportment.

A few days after meeting the dynamic duo one of their dogs ran away. Dogs don't generally run away (and not come back) unless they're a) retarded or b) don't like their owners. This dog was not the former. That was the only drama there for a while. The dude was cleaning up the backyard, he strung some lights up, put some plastic furniture back there and acted like a normal neighbor.

Then the fighting started. The two of them, well, mostly her, would scream bloody murder for the better part of an hour. Then we saw her with a black eye. Then the fights got louder and more frequent. The cops were there a few times per week. Now the dude is in jail for battery and related domestic violence offenses. As soon as he went away we had 2-3 weeks of tranquility.

Then a whole new level of trash started hanging out there and the fighting continued but this time it was dudes fighting with each other and then with her . . .  and her screaming for people to "get the eff out of my house." But then after all the drama she would have the same dudes back there a few days later.  Last weekend we had the cops over there 3 times in one night.

I'd had enough. Finally,  I got in touch with her landlord, told him the deal and he gave her a week to vacate. He knew that her boyfriend had gone to jail but had no idea that she was still living there rent free.

Apparently she grew a pair and, feeling a certain sense of entitlement,  comes over,  knocks on my door and says, "Can I talk to you?"
 I said, "about what?"
 "David told me what you said. I just want to talk to you for a minute."
"OK. How 'bout you come back when I'm not eating?" *slams door*

First, while she's standing there I'm looking at her and am mesmerized at how absolutely filthy her glasses are. Then I notice the meth sores on her face. Then I'm back to her glasses and the fact that they're broken. No, not like she accidentally sat on them and taped the frame together, the actual lens had a crack all the way across. WTF? Eyeglasses aren't even made of glass anymore! That chick is a hot friggin' mess and I feel sorry for her new neighbors.

Don't care where you go sweetie - but you can't stay here.

What's happening in Newbold is indicative of national trends. Not the crazy-bitch-next-door trend but the not-putting-up-with-her-shit-anymore trend.  Actually, a lot of the trashier elements in the neighborhood are relatively recent arrivals. The neighborhoods just to the east (and north) of here kicked most of them out in the last 3-4 years and more than a few have landed here. So now we have to go through the process and watch what they do in the neighborhoods just west of here. Point is, the neighborhood is becoming one of the "been here since 1920" old folks, immigrants and then the young,  college educated set (american and foreign born).

Cities are resurgent anyway but high-speed rail is a shot in the arm.  National demographic trends favor cities over the long term but even on the local level the changes are dramatic.  Some people think it's a conspiracy. Some call it the Caucasian Invasion. As if at the 1996 annual Conference of White People it was decreed 'we would all move downtown.' The reality is simple economics and it's people wanting to be close to where they work and where they hang out. So the census data will start to trickle in at the end of this year and we'll see Philly trend younger and more affluent -  as with most big cities.

The country as a whole is trending older and more "metro".  Put another way, as a percentage of the population, there are fewer young people but more of them are living in cities and there are more older people and more of them are living in cities. To people who follow this sort of stuff it's not really news that  the automakers are on the ropes. You have an increasing number of old people who can't or don't want to drive. You have an increasing number of young people who can't afford to or don't want to drive.

Lucky for us that the White House announced today the recipients of the much awaited high-speed rail grants. If you live in a city that's getting new service it's going to make a big difference.  Somewhere along the lines of your city's airport getting a new, full-service airline.  Except, you don't have to drive 30 minutes to the airport then stand around for another 90 minutes waiting to get on your plane.  I mean, people in the backwater of Merced, CA are all abuzz over what new high speed rail service will mean for their city . . . once they're within an hour commute of San Francisco.  It's going to have profound impacts on the residential real estate markets in those smaller (read:cheaper) cities and it will completely reshape office markets in bigger and smaller cities alike.

What will high speed rail will mean for you? Initially, I think you'll see increased competition from airlines trying to stay on top of the short-hop markets. You know them, the $39 r/t tickets to Pittsburgh or Providence that are always on offer at Southwest. Eventually, high speed rail will replace those short-haul flights under 500 miles.  Ed Rendell seems to agree that it's a "lofty" goal.

I guess if you already live in NYC or Philly or DC it's hard to imagine this as a game changer. It's how we live anyway. But we're in the midst of a big, paradigm shift. 1945 - 1995 was the suburban half-century. The pendulum is now swinging the other way. It's just a simple matter of energy prices, an aging population, shrinking household sizes, a rejection of the suburbs, and a desire to reduce ones carbon footprint.

that run down feeling

It's kinda morbid but I came across this google map today - Camden County Pedestrian Fatalities
When you look at the other counties it's a clear pattern that most people getting run down and succumbing to their injuries are being hit along major highways (at high speeds).

I'd be interested to see where all of the car/ped accidents are happening - not just those where people are dying as a result. I'm just curious to know if the presence of more pedestrians in certain areas makes things safer for people walking around those areas or if it's simply the highway speeds that are killing people.

Why is it so hard to get good data on this stuff? This country averages about 17,000 murders per year and about 43,000 traffic deaths. I can find all kinds of stats on murder victims, their attackers, their relationship, etc. and only limited national stats on people who die on the road.

The Public Works: Places: Design Observer

There's been a lot drama lately about the bank bailouts. Obama "bailed out Wall St." blah, blah, blah. It's just kinda funny because it wasn't a choice. Had the banks failed, and they would've fallen like dominoes, we'd all be standing in line, pieces of plastic in hand, staring at empty ATMs. Standing in front of shuttered shops. Marching up and down Broad St., banging on pots and pans like this was Buenos Aires circa 2001. The only difference between 1929 and 2009 was the TARP program. I'm not defending Wall St.  Just defending dinner on the table. And not on a table in a soup kitchen. You put out the fire then you worry about catching the arsonist.

This article has more to do with our infrastructure than with banks per se The Public Works: Places: Design Observer but it all sort of comes back to how we spend our money and how we as a people have come to relate to government and to the public realm in general. The writer takes specific aim at privatization of public assets. Most governments have long since sold off the enterprises that were profitable - power generation, telephone networks, etc. - and have turned to doling out contracts for services that aren't profitable. So, for instance, instead of paying taxes to run the local library you are paying taxes so a private company can run your library, or your train or your park. The idea of extracting profit from something that isn't profitable has always intrigued me. Not because I don't understand where the profit is coming from (my pocket) but because they get away with it.

Speaking of profit-making . . . the Mrs. and I have been running the birth circuit. Last week we talked with a home birth midwife and then went to the Birth Center in Bryn Mawr. The Birth Center was crazy in that professional hippie kind of way. I don't mean full-time hippies. I mean hippies who found something they like to do and are really professional about it. So this week we went to visit the OB who is part of Penn Health. They were all really nice. I'm not knocking the people - just the process. We weren't there but 5 minutes and they have Beth filling out marketing crap for infant formula. Similac, the product on offer, is a subsidiary of the pharmaceutical company Abbot. Beth politely said, "oh, no thanks" but then the nurse insisted, "you never know." Like we couldn't find formula at the grocery store if we needed it. It was just a weird experience all around. Maybe it's my own hippie upbringing but when every piece of stationery has a drug ad on it I get a little creeped out. The environment was also a lot like being in an emergency room but in slow motion. Like it's a 9 month emergency. Like they see the car crash coming so they're getting all of your paper work in order and paging the anesthesiologist. That reminds me of a great book, 'The Long Emergency' by James Howard Kunstler.

Wow, that was circular.

One more stop before decision time. Today the niño (or niña) is the size of a kidney bean. We gotta get this all figured out because before we know it, it's gonna be the size of a lemon. Seriously. One of the baby books I've been reading compares the fetus to various nuts, legumes and pieces of fruit all the way up to week 20. We're going to check out the birth center in Wilmington next week for a few reasons, one of which is that, while it's further distance-wise it takes less time to get there than Bryn Mawr. If it's as cool as Bryn Mawr then that might be where we end up.

Park Once

hugeasscity

Not many people I know get very excited about this kind of shit. But I certainly do. First, huge-ass-city is an awesome name for a blog. Second, this concept is great. For those of you not willing to click and read for yourself here's the summary; It's a proposal in Portland to build a giant parking garage on the edge of downtown. The idea being that they'll need to consolidate a lot of parking in one location as they start to build condos, apartments and stores where smaller, scattered parking lots and garages now stand. Eventually,  in an effort to make the downtown more bicycle and pedestrian friendly, they'll start closing streets to traffic one-by-one. I've seen it in a few places before. New Brunswick, NJ is the first place I had seen the "park once" concept. You can drive right up to the outskirts of New Brunswick, park your car, and take a shuttle bus into town. You know, instead of driving around, looking for parking, then going back to your car to take it with you to your next destination a few blocks away. Believe it or not, a lot of downtown traffic in most cities is just people circling the block looking for parking. Oxford, England is another example. Oxford being more relevant here because most of the streets in the town are now closed to car traffic. Buses and deliveries are all that get through.  Hmmm . . . yeah . . . I have a picture of that somewhere . . . ohh, there it is

old movies.

My grandparents generation intrigues me. They were all big city folk so, in a lot of ways, their life wasn't much different than mine.  All of the modern conveniences that I consider essential were already around. They had telephones, washing machines, air conditioning, subways, trolleys, trans-continental airlines and you could still get from Philly to NYC on the train in 80 minutes. At the same time, it's crazy to think that, outside of big cities a lot of people didn't have electricity or running water, horses were still a common form of transportation and most roads were not paved.

Now everyone has a cell phone, air conditioning, running water and paved streets. My grandparents even email me their birthday wishes.

Over the last few years I've come to appreciate the big band music and movies of their jeunesse. It's a small window into their world and, wanting to see more, I've been stocking up on the classics.  I just watched '12 Angry Men'.  It never fails to amaze me how little politics have changed in 50 years (and how far the acting profession has fallen.)  The movie is about a jury in a murder case. The defendant is some nameless italian kid from the 'hood. The jury goes to deliberate and takes an 11-1 vote. They deliberate for a few more hours and over the course of the movie the vote swings the other way. Change the ethnicity of the kid, shuffle some accents and wardrobes and it could be any courthouse, USA ca. 2010.


I was also a fan of 'On the Waterfront'. Another movie about integrity.  Marlon Brando is the anti-hero that can break the mob's grip on the longshoreman's union. But will he stand up? It's depressing in the same way that '12 Angry Men' is . . . that industries come and go and the faces of the corrupt change but people still struggle unnecessarily and for the same reasons they did when our grandparents were our age.

Next up are the musicals. I had always wondered why Hollywood dropped the song and dance. Apparently, the rise of television and what audiences were coming to expect had a lot to do with it.  It's just crazy, though, that 60 years later my grandparents still know most of those songs.

Adventures in Switzerland

I'm not sure how I feel about Betty yet. The cookbook has a lot of cool recipes full of butter, cheese and a lot of other ridiculously fattening ingredients. So it's certainly exciting and everything I've cooked so far has at least smelled delicious.

The book itself is kind of a pain in the ass. It seems as though it was translated perhaps from French to German and then into English. Not that the steps matter here. The end result is that the instructions can be incredibly difficult to make sense of. That and all of the measurements are metric . . . ahh, the metric system.

Metric measurements may make a ton of sense (oh no i didn't) in the fields of science, industry and commerce but I feel like, in the kitchen at least, our english system is far superior (if you're not a scientist.) It's just intuitive and comfortable. It uses regular household items and asks you to divide by two. Even the Swiss have to revert to folk terms like "teaspoon" and "tablespoon."  What the hell does 40 ml look like? How does that relate to my day to day? It's just sterile and scientific. It make's cooking feel like a chemistry experiment.

I'm exaggerating the problem a bit. My measuring cups all have the metric equivalents stamped on them as does my food scale. The only real problem is in the possible differences between an american tablespoon/teaspoon and the spoons that Betti Bossi is using. But she'd be happy to sell me a set of her spoons if I need them.

Now that I've explained all of my excuses for failing miserably at these recipes here's how they went down:

1. Baked Cheese Puffs

These are your basic dinner rolls - like a Swiss biscuit - except with 3/4 pound of cheese folded in and a little cayenne and nutmeg. I used a little too much cayenne. The recipe called for two pinches. I think my pinches were just a little too big. I also made the mistake of just dumping the eggs into the mix rather than beating them in slowly. It took me forever to get the dough to thicken up. They cooked OK, a little dense maybe, but they were a pain to handle when trying to get them onto the cookie sheet. Oh, and the recipe also called for Jura cheese. I used an aged gruyere which worked just as well.

2. Fish Soup

For a landlocked country there are a lot of fish recipes in this book. I never cared much for fish but I thought I'd give it a go with a few modifications. The soup was butter, leeks, onions, garlic, tomatoes, carrots, celery, white wine, water, parsley, lemon juice, a bay leaf and salt & pepper. You cook the fish in all of that for a few minutes then you pour off the liquid, bring it to a boil, then add more butter, flour and what the book calls "double cream".  In Britain that's a cream that's 48% fat so I've just been using heavy whipping cream instead.

For the 'fish' I went up to Huong Vuong at 11th & Washington (you may know it as the 'Vietnamese supermarket'). They have a freezer aisle and one of the doors there's a random label that says "health foods".  You'll find lots of frozen oddities in there. For this occasion I grabbed the 'veggie fish ham'. It's this slab of tuna shaped seitan wrapped in nori.

This went off problem free - except to say that it's incredibly thick and rich and I could barely finish one serving. It was great, I just pushed the leftovers on my brothers.

OK, there are more recipes to come but for now, the sun is shining and the thermometer says 51. That doesn't happen very often in January so I'm going to get my ass outside and enjoy it.

Welcome

So - I finally decided to take the blogging plunge. The impetus had been slow and building but I had always found excuses for putting it off. Then came two Christmas gifts that gave me the inspiration I needed. 

The first gift was a Swiss cookbook from Beth's "cousins" in Basel.  And by "cousins" I mean they are her grandmother's 2nd cousins, twice removed. Or something like that. 

The second gift was finding out that I'm going to be a dad. It's still weird to say. It's not at all what I was expecting for Christmas but it's awesome. Beth broke the news by buying a copy of "The Expectant Father" and wrapping it up with my other gifts. The whole thing is exhilarating and terrifying all at the same time. Well, I'm excited. Beth is excited too but mostly just tired and nauseous. So yeah, there will be a lot more about all of that later. 

Hopefully, if I can keep up with this while keeping you interested, I'll manage to share with you some info that you might find helpful at some point. Expect to hear about: my adventures in the kitchen, news and observations around town, imminent parenthood and a little bit about the world at large. 

Thanks for reading!