Chez Chesler

It's around 1966 or 1967. I might be in nursery school or kindergarten, but that's not a big part of my life. We still live in the apartment building at 651 West 171st Street, Washington Heights. It's probably early fall or spring. We don't go to Chinatown in the summer, the heat and humidity make the smells too much. We drive downtown. Those years my father had a champagne Mercury Monterey, but I don't pay much attention, because like the apartment it's the only one I've ever known. I'm probably riding in the back with my younger brother, my mother is up front. We take the Henry Hudson Parkway down, and it soon becomes the West Side Highway. Riverside Drive is up on the left. We pass billboards for an orange drink, and the Strick truck up on a roof, level with the highway. We park in Foley Square. We walk up Worth Street. Kids are playing in Columbus Park. Chatham Towers are still new. I find the sand-colored poured concrete so ugly that it makes me physically ill. We walk through Chatham Square to Doyers Street (or do we come in through Mott and Pell Streets? I remember the Bowery end was foreign territory.) We go down the steps to Wah-Kee, in the basement of number 16 Doyers Street. At that time I thought that whereever you were, at least in Manhattan, if you dug underground you'd hit concrete. That's what was under the apartment building, in the basement with the dryer that took dimes. The staircases on Fort Washington Avenue led down to the subways. Once I dug as deeply as I could in the sandbox at J. Hood Wright Park, until I got to the bottom, which was concrete. I think I thought that parks were created by dumping soil onto a concrete foundation. The restaurant was no exception. We walk past the kitchen to the back room, and get a table on the side. The room is illuminated by pink and green lights, built into the walls, facing the ceiling. I don't remember where the bathroom fit in, but it has urinals that go all the way to the floor. The sinks have separate faucets for hot and cold water. My father washes his face with pure hot water, but I have to use cold mixed with a little hot to wash my hands, otherwise it will burn. The towel is a continuous cloth roll, looping down from a box mounted on the wall. The first dinner course is wonton soup. It has dark green leaves in it, and little red slivers of pork. We add some fried noodles to it, the same noodles we were eating dipped in duck sauce while we waited. Then the appetizers come. Spare ribs, fried wonton, and egg rolls. There is a little dish of crusty hot mustard. We use so little that I never realize it isn't reused the way a ketchup bottle or salt shaker would be. My mother mixes a little hot mustard with the duck sauce, to dip the egg rolls in. The main course is sweet and sour something -- chicken? shrimp?. It comes with red and green maraschino cherries. I have no idea that maraschino cherries start out as actual cherries. And chow mein of some sort, and white rice. The food is served on a metal tray, covered with a metal bell. We eat with chopsticks. The chopsticks are round on the bottom, but square on the top, imprinted with Chinese characters. Dessert comes. The ice cream is almost like sherbert. Green pistachio, and a light brown chocolate. Stirred together they melt in the bowl. And kumquats in syrup, and little squares of pineapple with toothpicks in them. Probably fortune cookies too. After dinner we walk to Pell Street and turn onto Mott Street, to the Chinatown Fair. We play tic tac toe with the chicken. There are no video games yet, but the place is noisy with pinball machines. There are SkeeBall games in the back, the kind without a zero-points moat. On the side towards the back are poker games: roll a soft rubber ball until it falls into a hole. Each hole makes a light on the back glass light up, and after the game tickets come out, the same as with the SkeeBall. The poker game costs only a dime. There's a machine to stamp coins, and machines to test strength. The last game we play is a little crane, you manipulate it over a sand pile, drop the clamshell bucket, pick up a load of sand, and drop it in a hopper. Before we go we take the tickets and redeem them for a prize. Sometimes it's a magic trick, a plastic egg cup with a false top to make the egg disappear. Sometimes it's rubber stamps and a pad. Then we walk back to the car, and drive home. When we get upstairs I play with whatever prize we won.

One of the things I love about baseball is its sense of its own history. As the Herald-American recognized, this weekend the Boston Red Sox played their crosstown rivals, the Atlanta, formerly Milwaukee, formerly Boston Braves.

I guess this is old news to anybody who reads the sports pages. I tend not to. Here are the matchups for MLB's crosstown interleague weekend.

Yankees	Mets	Subway!
White Sox	Cubs	Chicago
Astros	Rangers	Texas
LA? Anaheim? Angels	Dodgers	LA
Arizona	Detroit	Why?
Tampa Bay	Florida	Florida
Washington	Toronto	formerly Montreal
Philadelphia	Baltimore	If they say so
Cleveland	Cincinnati	Ohio
Colorado	Pittsburgh	Why?
St. Louis	Kansas City	I-70
Milwaukee	Minnesota	Upper Midwest
Oakland	San Francisco	Bay
San Diego	Seattle	Why?

BostonHerald.com - Herald Columnists: MCAS fails to recognize courage The Boston Herald has been running stories, opinion pieces, and letters about kids (and one kid in particular, Lisa Williamson, the subject of the Peter Gelzinis column cited. Columnists are available to Herald subscribers, or ask BugMeNot for a login) who are unable to pass the MCAS even though they've tried hard. A bill was proposed for special-needs student Tracey Newhart, who has Down syndrome and can't get into a culinary school to which she's otherwise been accepted without a high school diploma, which is dependent on passing the MCAS. The Federation for Children with Special Needs, quoted in that article, states its position on the Massachusetts Comprehensive Assessment System here. The MCAS was originally proposed as a means of assessing schools, but as its opponents predicted, it morphed into a means of testing students, and became a requirement for graduation. New York State has long had the Regents exams, and they are fairly well suited to their task, assessing whether students have mastered the fundamentals of a subject. The MCAS doesn't have that legacy, and it is still being shaken out. Nevertheless, there is nothing wrong in principal with a standard requirement for a diploma, which in turn means that a diploma certifies that its holder has achieved to a certain standard. Some students, no matter how worthy, no matter how much they've overcome, no matter how hard they've tried, will not be able to pass a standardized exam. Too bad. No matter how hard I try I'll never be able to play ball well enough, run fast enough, and so on to be a professional baseball player. I'd love to have that as my job. Should I insist on getting that job because I'm worthy?

Today on Middlesex Turnpike I drove behind a truck upon which was painted

"Your Primary Source for Secondary Metals."

Great slogan. I think secondary metal means recycled scrap metal.

This past weekend I took my kids to the Woburn Boys and Girls Club's annual visit of the Dean and Flynn Fiesta Shows carnival. Last year I watched kids and cheerleaders riding the bungee thing. I don't know the name of this ride. It costs $6, no tickets, no all-day passes. Four people at once are strapped into seat harnesses, one on each side of a square apparatus, and connected at both their hips to bungee cords, which are then tightened to that their rest point is a few feet above a crash pad. Once the rider gets bouncing, like on a trampoline, a good push off the crash pad brings him high enough that he falls through the rest point close enough to the crash pad that he can push off again. Most first-timers need to be pulled down by the attendant to get started: they don't jump hard enough as they're being raised into place. Some kids can do flips, one little girl was consistently getting a double back flip with each bounce. My older son was going to try it, but he changed his mind, and I took his place. I didn't have croakies so I took off my glasses. I still love heights, but without my glasses I didn't get much advantage from that. The last time I fell that far was off the 10-meter platform at Christopher Morley Park, in my teens. I don't like free-fall as much. I now get butterflies in my stomach on a big playground swing. I haven't been on a rollercoaster lately. And I'd eaten the wrong dinner too soon before. Worst part is none of my trampoline skills were usable. I think the attendant didn't want to get too friendly, or the harness was too small, but I was being supported by my inner thighs rather than my groins. I couldn't do a flip, or even start one, and I couldn't walk straight for a couple of days. I'm feeling very old.

There is a cute commercial currently airing on Discovery (don't know where else, how long, etc.) for GE "Eco-engineering" or somesuch. It features a CGI baby elephant dancing in the rain (to "Dancing in the Rain" of course) while other (apparently real) jungle animals (parrot, monkey) are watching. This got me thinking of some memorable commercials: For irony: Citibank, about 5 years ago, some guy complaining that his bank keeps changing its name. He's had one name all his life, why isn't that good enough for his bank? I don't know if this got cancelled when married women complained, or when somebody pointed out they used to be First National City Bank. Also for irony: The AAMCO Transmission commercial, maybe 20 years ago, where the salesman is being nice to the customer's kid, by taking the toy car, and bringing it back, saying "All it needed was a simple adjustment, just like your Dad's". Yup -- that's what will happen if you bring your car to AAMCO -- they'll take it in back, wait a few minutes, do nothing with it, bring it back, and present you with a bill and some gibberish. Probably cancelled for bad taste: A man is hit by a car and goes to Heaven. I think this is also about 20 years ago. I think it was for Prudential Insurance. He looks down on his family, and as he enters the Pearly Gates he, or the greeter, is glad that he had the foresight to make sure his widowed and orphaned family is at least secure financially. I only saw that once. Probably cancelled for too much sex: And again from maybe 20 years ago. A well-built guy gets up and starts a workout on his Bowflex or similar apparatus. He works every station. This must be an hour workout. After he's worked out a very sexy young woman comes out of the bedroom, wearing nothing but his shirt, and still groggy from the fact that whatever she'd been doing all night in the bedroom it wasn't sleeping, and she says "Wow -- do you do that every morning?" Current odd commercials: - Benjamin Moore color paint samples: Call 1-888-BM-COLOR. Maybe it's because I grew up with Mister Rogers, but when I think of BM Color I don't think of something I want to paint my house with. - Some local bank is asking me whether my mortgage is an asset or a liability. What is this, a test in Generally Accepted Accounting Practices?

New England's first execution in 45 years was carried out within the past hour Eugene Volokh blogged about the death penalty a few weeks ago. While there are people I'd gladly strangle with my own hands, I'm generally against capital punishment for the argument he didn't mention, that it brutalizes us. (He makes a similar argument against, that it's good to have limits on government, but here I'd suggest it's more directly to the benefit of the governed, if our government represents how we'd be in our ideal, rather than in our basest.) While he and others make strong arguments against being merciful to the unjust, I like the ideal that there are just some things that we don't do, and cold-blooded killing is one of them. I'm open to the cost and efficacy arguments. And I favor the talmudic notion that it's acceptable to have capital punishment on the books, but a court that puts even one person to death in seventy years is tyrannical. Volokh also asks why we pursue, punish, and sometimes execute old Nazis., and see the entry next below on Statutes of Limitations. Popularly it's said "there is no statute of limitations for murder." Suppose there were? How long would it be?

Consider the mathematician who is sentenced to death. He is told that he will be killed some time in the next n days, and, because this is a humanitarian court, to spare him some dread, he will be killed on a day when he does not expect it. He is sent back to his cell. He realizes that if he makes it to the nth day, he will know that since that is the last possible day to execute him, that that is the day. But since he can't be killed on a day when he expects it, he can't be executed on that day. This means that on the day before that, there are only two days open for his execution. Since it can't happen on the following day, the nth day, he must be executed on that day, the (n-1)th day. But since he will have realized this, he will expect it, and he can't be executed on that day either. By induction, this applies to the (n-2)th day and so far, all the way back. Secure in the knowledge that he can't be executed he goes to sleep. The next morning the jailer wakes him up and hangs him.

If the statute of limitations for murder is to be finite, we will want it to be particularly long. I don't think we'd want a murderer trying to beat out the last few months until 20 years, or his 65th or 80th birthday, trying not to get indicted until he can beat the rap on a technicality. Whereever there is a bright line, being just over that line will be perceived as a technicality.

Retired priest Desilets guilty of sex abuse If Rev. Paul Desilets had remained in Massachusetts instead of retiring to Canada in 1984, it would have been too late to prosecute him for molesting altar boys between 1978 and 1984. Instead he was extradited from Canada in 2005 and entered a guilty plea. Similarly Father James Porter was prosecuted in 1992 for bad acts committed 25 years prior, because he had left Massachusetts in 1967 for New Mexico and Minnesota. In 1992 his lawyers unsuccessfully argued that "the statute should distinguish between defendants who leave the state specifically to avoid prosecution and others." Why is there a statute of limitations at all? I can see that in an earlier age it would have been easier to avoid prosecution by being elsewhere, Canada and Minnesota are no longer as far away as they once were. Prosecution of these two priests would have been just as easy (or difficult) in the intervening years as prosecution of any of the other accused priests, or any other accused persons, who remained in Massachusetts. Any reasons for the statute of limitations apply just as much intrastate as interstate.

Once again it was time to visit Lady Grace to buy post-mastectomy breast prostheses. They come silicone and non-silicone. The silicone prostheses are heavier -- eliminating, for the formerly-large-breasted, one of the major beneficial side effects of a mastectomy, the end of backaches and shoulder pain. But the salewoman explains "They feel so much more natural!" I want to know "Who is going to be feeling them?"

Wilbanks wasn't married, she didn't have any children, she wasn't a minor. There's nothing illegal about being a jerk to your loved ones and taking off. All the anger seems to be about the wasted resources in searching for her. If she'd gotten off the bus, done what she wanted, and phoned the cops at some point and said "I just needed to take a long bus ride" just as many resources would have been wasted, but she'd have committed no crime, and the mayor of Duluth would have no claim against her for the resources he wasted. That she messed up in the 911 call after the fact doesn't make her any more liable to him.