Daily Blague

It took me about minus ten seconds to decide to buy the NeatReceipts scanner. (It was written up the Times' "Circuits" section this morning.) I've been downloading American Express transactions into Quicken in lieu of typing in all those little bits of paper, but the downloads are rarely properly categorized - key to good budget planning - and I have to go through the register by hand. Diner's Club doesn't even have a download service, at least one that I can find.

Don't miss Maureen Dowd today. She wonders if Condoleezza Rice may be proof that Lawrence Summers was right to disparage the mathematical abilities of women. To me, Ms Rice will always be proof that creativity is not necessarily a blessing when it comes to the naming of children. If you take the first "e" in the concoction with which her parents saddled her, and replace it with a "c," you get the musical marking con dolcezza, "with sweetness." Now, "Condolcezza," pronounced properly (as always in Italian, the "c" before an "e" thickens into "ch"), would have been a very snazzy name, and it would have proclaimed Ms Rice's family's love of music. It would also have been literate, which "Condoleezza," with it's doubled "z," simply isn't. (Indeed, the spelling is often unconsciously "corrected" by writers who omit a "z.") With this in mind, and because "Condi" never fails to remind me (perversely) of "Heinz Ketchup," I propose that those of us who don't know the lady start calling her "Dolci." After all, she has promised to give diplomacy a try. "The time for diplomacy is now"?

The Spiridellis Brothers are back: see "Second Term" at Jib Jab. These guys are getting to be an institu-shee-on.

Meanwhile, at home... I'm stuck with the refrigerator today; it's got to be cleared out and cleaned. Quite a while ago, I thought I'd just wait until we got back from Istanbul to tackle this job, so ain't I got fun. A day in the kitchen, though, is a day watching, or at least listening to, DVDs. "Do you mind if I look at your armpits?" This is one of countless zany lines from David O Russell's Flirting with Disaster (1996), a movie that repeatedly penetrates the bland American exterior to mine its extraordinary loopiness. Mel Coplin's search for his birth parents takes a first-rate ensemble cast into the heart of our national eccentricity: family life. This is the film that made me fall in love with Téa Leoni; I've never quite gotten used to her as a blonde.