Baltimore

Yesterday on the Yes Network's broadcast of the Yankees game, former pitching great Jim Kaat, commenting on Baltimore pitcher Adam Loewen's long deliberations with catcher Raul Chavez over pitch selection, said that the coaches used to say, "Study Long/Study Wrong." This is probably helpful for a lot of disciplines. A contractor friend likes to say, "It's always the first thing you think of, that's the right answer." It's the spirit we respond to in writing, too, when the writers are instinctual. Can it be learned?

LAURIE: Ladies, gentlemen, listen up. You want all of your wedding vendors, and especially your cake maker, to think like (or be) Duff Goldman.

"I'm kind of the anti-wedding industry wedding vendor," said Mr. Goldman, proprietor of Charm City Cakes in Baltimore, Maryland. "The wedding industry is designed to rip people off. There's so much nasty stuff that goes on, so many line items. 'You want us to smile? That's a dollar a person. You want real silver or china? That's an extra fifty dollars a person.' The best wedding party I've been to was when a friend of mine got married in Alaska. They came back and we had a camp-out bonfire in rural Pennsylvania. Everybody wore shorts and T-shirts and we roasted a pig. The whole thing was potluck. I made his wedding cake, which was a huge totem pole. It was great because there was none of that weird wedding pressure to do the 'right thing.' Of course, weddings are our bread and butter, so I don't want to say that people shouldn't have weddings. But, you know, people are financing their weddings. Why are you gonna start off your new life together in debt, just because you wanted to have a big fancy party? Go to the justice of the peace, spend the money on a down payment on a house or go on a blowout vacation."

Bread and butter indeed: Goldman said that wedding cakes account for about seventy percent of his business at Charm City. In his massive workspace, peopled with his friends, who are also his employees, you'll see stoner cakes, pink cell-phone cakes (paging Paris Hilton!), handgun cakes. What kind of cakes won't he do? "The whole round- square-round-square thing," he said. "It's totally lame, and it doesn't look good. It doesn't have the effect that people want it to have." Also: cupcakes. "They're a pain in the ass. It's just not what we do." Amen to that. What about, you know, dirty cakes? Silence. Then: "No comment." Then: a knowing laugh. "Yeah, we've done a lot of that." Not so much for weddings, though. Mr. Goldman recalled a tattooed Baltimore rock musician who requested that an S&M-style ball gag be crafted from black gum paste and placed atop his wedding cake. "I was like, 'I can, but I would rather not,'" he said. "It's like, your grandma's gonna be there, dude." Duff Goldman doesn't need to be known among his core client base as they guy who upset the elderly guests with his dirty sex cake. The musician wisely reconsidered.

"This week we're doing a Mercury DA cop car, like a totally random cop car," Mr. Goldman said. "We're doing a space shuttle. We got a craps table. We got a bushel of crabs. Everyone's into what they're into." What would he refuse on principle? "If someone came in and asked for Hitler's birthday cake, I'd fucking step on their neck, and my whole staff would back me up," he said. "My last name is Goldman, for Christ's sake."

Mr. Goldman has a television show on the Food Network, called "Ace of Cakes." Fortunately, the allusion to poker in the show's title is just an attempt by Food Network types to attract the college educated Girls Gone Wild demographic; the host doesn't perform card tricks or play 5-card stud with Andy Dick or roadtrip to the Borgata on the air.

It's a show about him and his friends joking around and nursing hangovers and cursing a little bit while they make really impressive personalized cakes, which they then deliver. It is obvious that they take pride in what they do, and are very good at it. Ace of Cakes is currently my second-favorite TV show. (First place: Fresh Meat. ) However, as talented as he is, Mr. Goldman will not be baking my wedding cake. Stay tuned for the story of that very special confection queen.

“I think for The Sun, and for most papers our size, that the mission is to be the definitive s  read more »

“I think for The Sun, and for most papers our size, that the mission is to be the definitive sourc  read more »

I am a Yankee hater (I grew up in Baltimore). My friend Dan Swanson is also a Yankee-hater, of the Chicago White Sox variety. I polled him on his feelings following the Yankees sweep of the world champions this past weekend in the Bronx:

I don't worry about it. I barely paid it any attention. I did record all the people who made nasty comments to me or left messages on my answering machine. I will retaliate at a time of my choosing. At a time of my choosing.

A smirk is alright. Or saying, Hey what happened to you guys? But the people who make nasty comments are people who are sure that their team will win all the big games. They should know that the time to gloat is not in July. The time to gloat is the end of the season, when you have a whole winter's gloating before you.

This fan looks at the standings. The White Sox are the second best team in baseball right now. The Indians are below us, but a few mistakes and we could be in their position. I have sympathy for you; we have never been a losing team for ten years in a row. Your fortitude is remarkable. But Yankee fans have a sense of entitlement, based on their being in the playoffs every year since '95. They don't have gratitude for that, as you or I would. We are thankful just to get into the post-season, they think that's their right. They've been in every year, including two years ago, when they had what most people would agree was the biggest collapse in the history of sport.

A week or so back I did a snarky take on Laurel Snyder's new book, Half-Life: Jew-ish Tales From Interfaith Homes and a reading she had at Makor , then walked away whistling. But after trying to comment on my post and being foiled somehow by the Observer's system (apologies), Snyder sent me a (generous and fair and maybe wise too) response.

Here it is:

[T]hough I appreciate that you think I'm pretty, your physical description of me didn't make me feel any better and it didn't seem terribly relevant.

If nothing else, I feel I should be allowed to correct the inaccuracies of your blog post (i.e. that my son had a hospital circumcision , that I "chose" Judaism, etc) I'm not sure how/where you got these ideas... but they're untrue , and anyone present at Makor on June 22 could tell you that. I hope you didn't just dream them up to stregthen your remarks about me.  read more »

That would be poor journalism I think.

In trying to look past your creative revision of the event at Makor, I'd like to say that regardless of your dislike for me, I'm glad you enjoyed Maya Gottfried's reading. No matter how your blog might have hurt my personal feelings, there are bigger things at stake with a book like this, and if you got something out of the event, that's far more important than my little ego.

On Charlie Rose, that is. The outgoing Harvard President was on for an hour, rebroadcast just now. It was interesting to see him up close at last. Some observations:

Summers seems a business executive by temperament. He's too tan and doesn't miss meals. He's bold. The strongest impression of the hour was how often he rode right over Charlie Rose when he tried to make a point, or cut in. Summers's voice would rise and Rose would have to shut up. An executive's way. It's kind of amazing that Harvard wanted him, but I guess this has a lot to do with money.

Summers lacks tone. His accent is unfinished, reminds me of middle-class friends from Baltimore who never became that worldly. He has that "dt" problem—pronouncing "t's" with an extra consonant in there. The lack of tone extends to his ideas. He has an executive's impressive grasp of large ideas, forward-thinking ideas—to his great credit, he has no problem with the vision thing—but lacks subtlety. There was no sensitivity or elegance to his expression.

Summers is unhealed. He had worked on some smooth turns about how it was his fault too for being too aggressive, and he didn't handle things well, but when it came down to it, he couldn't really talk about what an abrasive personality he is. Rose seemed to me to actually dislike Summers, which is rare on his part, and kept pushing Summers to take responsibility for his lack of finesse. "You were Treasury Secretary, you should have understood the fishbowl," he said. Or he pushed Summers about his highhandedness and, using the third-person to refer to Summers, said, "You wonder... for all his brilliance.. he may not be the world's most—whatever the offense was." He meant "arrogance," a word Rose also managed to drop in. Summers didn't cop to it.

The only individual in the Harvard community he spoke of in the 50 minutes I watched was a 19-year-old student who had had the temerity to challenge Summers's data head-on in a class. Summers admired the kid, but I thought it was narcissistic. The kid plainly reminded Summers of himself.

I also think Summers misrepresented the forum for his controversial comments about women and science in January 2005. He repeatedly called it "a seminar." Later: "a private academic seminar."

But per the Washington Post, it was "a speech... at a session on the progress of women in academia organized by the National Bureau of Economic Research." According to the Boston Globe, which broke the story, the conference, on women and minorities in the science and engineering workforce, was "a private, invitation-only event, with about 50 attendees. Summers spoke during a working lunch." Not exactly a seminar.

P.S. In the New Republic this week, Martin Peretz, sore over Summers's departure (which he ascribes in part of course to "anti-Israel and even anti-Jewish animus"), desires to punish the university for Summers's departure and so plays the money card. "...[M]y own impression of wealthy alumni who were once my students is that Summers made them more generous... I know of at least three gifts in the $100 million range that were very likely to materialize and now are dicey." Note to journalists: always be vague when throwing around the $100 million figure, throw in an "at least" or two. You don't want anyone to try to pin you down.

Troubled Amtrak has long worked well in the Northeast Corridor--Washington, Baltimore, Philadelphia, New York, various Connecticut cities, Providence, Boston.

So now the Bush administration, according to The New York Times, has a new solution: Charge surplus-addled commuter rail systems in those cities for their use of Amtrak facilities--tracks, stations, etc.

The plan, according to The Times,

could hit New Jersey Transit hard, because it operates many trains over long routes. The Long Island Rail Road could be charged more for using Pennsylvania Station in New York City. Metro-North Railroad, which terminates in New Haven, runs on tracks owned by New York and Connecticut, but the Shore Line East, which runs east of New Haven, operates on Amtrak tracks and could be hit for more. Septa, which serves the Philadelphia area, and the commuter systems serving Boston, Wilmington and Baltimore would also be subject to new charges.

But can they actually do this? The commuter rails already have arrangements with Amtrak for the use of their facilities.

And in New York, where a greater portion of commuter rail is already funded through fare-paying customers, are Amtrak trains serving the region to be partially subsidized by suburban commuters?

As it is, the successful New Jersey Transit and Long Island Railroad lines are likely to be the ones footing the bill for the new Penn Station--which will be across the street from Amtrak's old "vomitorium," Penn Station. Remember the big plans for a rail hub that would welcome commuters to the city? To paraphrase Vincent Scully, now suburban commuters who already work in the city will be entering like emperors, while tourists slither in like rats.  read more »

- Tom McGeveran

One of Bill Weld's donors is an indicted Massachussets pol, Tom Finneran, the Boston Globe reports. And Uptown Assemblyman Adriano Espaillat shares a byline in Baltimore with blogger/activist David Sirota, calling for states to force employers to offer health insurance.  read more »

Mike has been, it seems, quietly soft-pedalling his Health Department's approach to this messy, sad story of a mohel who may have infected babies with a form of herpes, one fatally. The Jewish Week reports that, after suggestions of banning a particular practice that involved a mohel putting his mouth on the open cut, or of barring this particular mohel from performing circumcisions, the Bloomberg has handed it off to a religious court. This draws a scathing response from a Baltimore institution which which the Mayor is more than passingly familiar: "[It] is a major public health hazard," declared Dr. Jonathan Zenilman, a professor of epidemiology at the Bloomberg School of Public Health -- the Johns Hopkins University education and research center named for New York's philanthropist mayor, its biggest financial supporter. Zenilman, who grew up in an Orthodox family in Woodmere, L.I., warned that allowing the practice known as metzitzah b'peh "is actually crazy" due to the potentially fatal danger of transmitting herpes to vulnerable newborns. "Actually crazy?" One has to wonder what Tom Frieden thinks about this decision, and I've left a message asking.  read more »

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