This is my first post by Blackberry, so bear with me. I’m waiting for an award ceremony to begin. My daughter Alice, 18 next month, is about to receive several Scholastics awards for her artwork. She takes in stride what has me about to burst, as though it’s up to me to enjoy the moment on her behalf. That’s what parents do, right? Well, there’s a lot more to it and this poem (written years ago) says it better.

Tags: creative writing, family & parenting by Christopher Guerin
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600,000 Americans lost their jobs last month. 30,000 of them worked in the restaurant business. For those of us still employed in the hospitality sector, things are getting pretty scary. We are all looking to cut expenses and for lots of people that means fewer meals in restaurants. The restaurant industry is in a near panic and as a desperate act they are offering you amazing bargains.  If you are one of the few New Yorkers who still has some disposable income, take this opportunity to eat in places you never could have afforded before.  Here are my top five recommendations:

1- JEAN GEORGES – 59th street and central park west; A very fancy, beautiful dining room with really comfy chairs.  French/Asian menu.  Offering a $28 lunch and a $35 dinner from 5:30-6:30 and 10-11

2- LE CIRQUE-58th street between lex. and  third; Choose between the fancy dining room or the casual cafe area.  French with American influence and Italian inspiration.  Offering a $24 lunch and $35 dinner weekdays. 

3- 21 CLUB-21 west 52nd street; Choose to sit in the bar, lounge or formal dining room.  Classic American fancy food…Steak, lobster, delicious desserts.  Offering a $35 lunch menu and $40 dinner menu before 6:30

4- KITTICHAI- 60 Thompson street; Beautiful dining room, very romantic.  Incredibly delicious Thai-French food.  Offering a $24 lunch menu and $35 dinner menu weekdays. 

5- PICHOLINE- 35 west 64th street; Quiet, conservative dining room with gigantic chandeliers. Seasonal Mediterranean food.  $20 for half-portion entree or three small plates.

Tags: money, recipes & food by Jessica Alfreds
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When Falls the Coliseum is now on Twitter. So you can follow us, or twit us, or re-tweet us, or whatever the hell it is people do on Twitter. Go here and click “follow” and then share the love (you can choose how to receive updates — mobile phone, Web, RSS feed).

Our Coliseum Twitter Team will post links to entertaining and interesting sites and news and strangeness from across the Web throughout the day. Follow us. Tell your friends. You know you want to.

What is Twitter, you ask? We have no idea. But Wikipedia knows all.

Tags: announcements, technology by Coliseum
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Dear Ruby,
My wife and I still have our jobs, but we’re putting in longer hours. I used to get home and help my daughter with her homework, but now sometimes it’s too late, and her math grades are starting to slip a little. She’s old enough to stay home alone, but school is hard for her and I think she gets frustrated and just blows through it so she can watch TV. I can’t spend too much time on the phone with her after school either, and right now there’s no money for a tutor. Can you help us get her through the rest of the school year?

Thanks, Tony

Tony,
As a former latchkey kid, I look back fondly on the hours I spent between 3 and 6, making popcorn and chocolate milk, watching M.A.S.H., doing my homework, losing my virginity. Good times. But then again, I did flunk algebra.

Every time a parent gets busier doing non-parent stuff, it’s necessary to ramp up the organizing. A few steps should make you feel more on top of this situation.

1. Call her teacher(s), especially for classes she has a hard time with and explain your situation. Would he/she send you an email alert if homework quality dips below a certain level? How about a promise to send all graded work home on Fridays? 
2. Create an after-school schedule. Snack, homework, chore, playtime. If you know what she’s doing and when, maybe that’s when you can schedule a productive 15 minute phone call and get caught up. 
3. Check homework when you do get home, with or without her. Don’t correct it, but make a few notes to yourself on what’s happening and whether she’s getting it.

None of this solves the actual doing of homework, but today’s kids have a few more options than I did. For example, on YouTube you can watch adorable puppies and gory skateboard accidents AND you can learn how to divide fractions. Some nice person out there makes these extremely useful math videos that not only help your child, but they’re a great face-saving tool for adults who couldn’t do 5th grade math if you held a gun to their heads. There are a million links out there to free worksheets, free tutorials, free quizzes, and free homework hotlines, even.

So, hook her up with some of these. You’ll have to trust her online, so set up some rules and post them by the computer. For best results, tell her you can find out everything she views online, whether it’s true or not. And then,

4. Give up a little bit of weekend. After a good breakfast, bring the daughter and her previous week’s homework to a quiet coffee shop where you can spend 1 or 2 hours away from the laundry and the football game and everything else you want to do during your precious little time at home. It shouldn’t cost more than a coffee and a Coke and may end up being some of your favorite memories.

By the way, this is advice for a kid who just needs some extra help, not a kid who needs a diagnosis. If there’s more going on here than your coaching can fix, then ask her teacher or pediatrician and maybe start checking out sites for this sort of thing, like Mel Levine’s All Kinds of Minds website.

Good luck, Tony, and if your jobs seem pretty secure, maybe think about that tutor. There are lots of families out there that could use a little extra income.

The rest of you? Write Ruby. What else? 

Tags: advice by Ruby Mac
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Robert Reich comments on the current economic situation:

Regardless of your ideological stripe, you’ve got to see that when consumers and businesses stop spending and investing, there’s only entity left to step into the breach. It’s government.

This is like saying that if you won’t jump into the pit, we’ll just push you.  [Read more →]

Tags: money, politics & government by Jason Sterlace
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10. Going in, didn’t realize it was a contact sport with lots of pushing and shoving.

9. Overly cocky after winning the coin toss.

8. Couldn’t stop laughing at those half-time Doritos ads.

7. Under the mistaken impression there was going to be a fifth quarter.

6. Team members so excited about seeing The Boss, they completely lost their focus.

5. Cardinals Head Coach Ken Whisenhunt, who plays a lot of golf, got confused and thought low score won.

4. ‘Steelers’ sounds so much more macho than ‘Cardinals.’

3. Thought, with six games to go, there was still plenty of time to win the series.

2. For some reason, felt oddly “out of sync” after watching Faith Hill and Jennifer Hudson perform.

1. All part of long-range plan to make the Steelers feel overconfident for Super Bowl XLIV.

Tags: Bob Sullivan's top ten everything, sports by Bob Sullivan
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January 19, 2009
I dream I finally discover why my father hasn’t been himself for a few years. He admits to having died several years earlier and to be keeping himself alive through a kind of voodoo. He has been concealing his own dead body and now feels guilty about it. To set things straight, he agrees to take me to the amusement park to celebrate. I am happy to go to the amusement park and I tell myself that I’ll go easy on him and take him to the animal show instead of making him go on the roller coaster.

July 5, 1998
I dream my computer is going nuts with images of Snoopy and since I am to pick my father up from the hospital I am anxious. Suddenly, my father and a social worker appear at the door. My father is crying and disoriented. I ask the social worker why they are here, since I am supposed to pick him up at the hospital in a couple of hours. The social worker snidely tells me that, if I want, he can take my father back to the hospital and I can pick him up in a couple of hours. I tell the social worker I don’t need sarcasm and if he likes sarcasm I’ll give him some. Then, I start jumping around the room telling the social worker how magnificent he is.

December 19, 1995
I dream I am in an apartment with my father and some Comedysportz people. My father wants to put some ice cream on the fire escape. He jumps out the window and onto the fire escape, but there is no floor to it and he falls several stories to his death. He reappears months later in a large, white car.

Tags: Fred's dreams by Fred Siegel
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Each week I will feature a few simple meals that can be prepared in 45 minutes or less (often much less).  So, put down those take out menus and get in the kitchen!

Roasted Salmon with Lentils: Serves 2

Ingredients: 1/4 of an onion, 2 cloves of garlic, a little olive oil, 3/4 cup dry lentils, salt and pepper, 2 pieces of salmon (5-9 oz. each, depending on how hungry you are), a little store bought chutney (for this dish I prefer plum chutney but use what you like). 

Finely chop 1/4 of an onion and 2 cloves of garlic. Warm a small saucepan (whatever you use to make rice for 2 people) on a medium low flame. Add 2 Tbsp olive oil (does not need to be extra virgin… save your expensive olive oil for something else), then add the onion and garlic. Wait 30 seconds then add 3/4 cup dry lentils (I prefer organic red lentils but any dry lentils will work). Stir once or twice. Add enough cold water to cover the lentils by one inch. Keep cooking lentils at a medium-low heat and stirring frequently. When the water is almost evaporated, add a pinch of salt and a little freshly ground black pepper. Taste the lentils.  If they are not tender yet, add more water. Continue doing this until lentils are tender, and even a little mushy. Taste again and add more salt and pepper at the end if needed.

Meanwhile, hopefully you have purchased 2 beautiful, fresh pieces of (preferably wild) salmon. Season both sides of the salmon with salt and pepper. Pre-heat your oven to 375 degrees. Heat an ovenproof skillet over a medium flame with 2-3 Tbsp olive oil. Add your salmon to the pan skin side down. Cook three minutes, then flip. Cook three minutes more. Put the saute pan with the salmon in it into the oven. Roast salmon for 12-20 minutes, depending on how well done you like it.  [Read more →]

Tags: recipes & food by Jessica Alfreds
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Texting while you drive is dumb. I mean, you don’t need to be a rocket scientist to realize that your eyes should be on the road and your hands (hopefully both of them) should be on the wheel. I have people close to me who text while they drive and it infuriates me. It would be one thing if all you were doing was taking your life into your hands, but you’re not! Philippa Curtis found out, while driving in England, you might just kill someone else on the road.

Curtis, 21, made a couple of calls, sent a flurry of text messages, and then smashed into Victoria McBryde’s car, which was stopped because she had a flat tire. Even after McBryde’s death Curtis claimed she could send and receive messages without taking her eyes off the road. Is that just a bad defense? I mean, I can probably send a text message without looking at my phone, but does anyone know how you would receive a message without actually looking at the phone? And I don’t mean just accepting the text, I mean, how did she know what to write back if she didn’t read the text?

Curtis told the court “I can’t really describe in words how bad I actually feel. I just feel awful that I was involved and I can’t really imagine how the family must feel.” Honey — you weren’t only involved — you were the cause of the accident. Had you not been on the road and had you not been using your phone, this 24-year-old woman would likely still be alive today. Certainly, you wouldn’t have killed her. Twenty-one months in jail and a three-year driving ban does not make up for the young life lost.

People, if you need to send a text, just pull over or let the person on the other end of the line wait. It’s not Jack Bauer waiting for information that will save the world. Really, what you have to say is just not that important.

Tags: on the law, technology by Amy Boshnack
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“And it is all so sad and yet so sweet to muse over the past.” So wrote the composer Tchaikovsky to his “beloved friend” and patron, Nadezhda von Meck.

Theirs was a peculiar relationship. They never met, but poured out their hearts and souls to each other in their correspondence. The reference to the sweetness and sadness of musing over the past occurs in a letter he sent in connection with his fourth symphony, which he wrote when he was 37 and dedicated to von Meck.

I think the age factor is significant. I was perhaps most conscious of time passing and time past when I was in my 30s, and I suspect that is not unusual. But I was aware of Tchaikovsky’s letter long before that, thanks to the liner notes on the 1958 recording of the fourth symphony by Leonard Bernstein and the New York Philharmonic, which was one of the first classical LPs I owned.

I first heard the symphony when I was a junior in high school, not long before the Bernstein recording was released. I knew what the critics thought of Tchaikovsky’s music. But what they complained about — bombast and emotional excess — is precisely what put it so much in harmony (as it were) with my own adolescent Sturm und Drang. [Read more →]

Tags: getting older, that's what he said, by Frank Wilson by Frank Wilson
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10. Raymour & Flanigan salesman specializing in seats.

9. Professional liar.

8. Environmental activist (after changing first name to ‘Erin‘).

7. Stand-up comedian with routine “Seven words you can say on the telephone.”

6. Spokesman for Jacquin’s Peach Schnapps with catch phrase “It’s im-peachy keen!”

5. eBay auctioneer.

4. Corrupt private citizen.

3. Ethics advisor to Wall Street executives.

2. Spokesman for Alberto VO5.

1. Prison laundry.

Tags: Bob Sullivan's top ten everything, politics & government by Bob Sullivan
2 Comments »

If I had a girlfriend who made me leave a Super Bowl party in the middle of the game, I would break up with her on the spot. 

After almost heading out of my Stamford residence to watch the game in my native Queens, I was invited to a party at the last minute by one of my co-workers. Great shindig. The food was flowing; the guests were great to be around… it was a fantastic time. Well, not everyone was enjoying themselves — on the couch sat a couple I didn’t know, and while they seemed nice enough, the girl forced the guy to leave within the opening minutes of the 3rd quarter.            

Excuse me? Leave a Super Bowl fiesta early? She must be insane. Even worse was the fact that her boyfriend went along with it! When you’re bolting an event like that, there has to be a reason put on the table. It’s not like they had to go to Home Depot or Lowes at such an odd hour. No, there was no explanation. They simply picked up, said a few brief goodbyes, and left. The guy put up no fight.   

Embarrassing. Rest assured, their union was a hot topic in the post-game discussion.

Tags: his & hers, sports by Glenn Giangrande
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