So 25-year-old rich kid and MBA-in-training Jared Kushner bought the Observer today, and, wanting to be taken very seriously right from the start, released this (partial) statement, with lots of big, important-sounding words, to its staff:

We find ourselves at a crossroads in the newspaper business. The balance of printed and online content is undergoing an unprecedented adjustment and the way we deliver our product—first-rate journalism—continues to evolve. Together we will navigate this challenge with perseverance and innovation. The only promise I will make on the business front is to keep a completely open mind. At 25 and with only non-publishing related business experience, I am now equipped with two of the finest tools that a publisher could ever have; (sic) this fine staff, and the inquisitive energy needed to tackle convention.

Convention indeed, Jared. You need a complete clause after a semicolon. What you wanted was a colon.

A hard-won first lesson in championing a print media empire: run it past an editor before you run it anywhere else. They don’t teach you that at Stern, kid.

From the Central Park Zoo official website. I took a screenshot so I can be less devastated when they fix it. Since the print is so tiny on the graphic:

“The new zoo is divided into several different sections which provide the
animals with homes as close to their natural habitat as possible. These
include tropic, temperate and polar zones that house everything from tiny leafcutter ants to the hugely popular polar bears. The zoo is also actively involved the preservation of endangered species, providing a home for rare tamarin monkeys, Wyoming toads, thick-billed parrots, and red pandas. Rumors of a secret exhibit featuring English-speaking cab drivers have never been confirmed.”

Someone is soooo getting fired over at Central Park. And someone (hopefully the same someone) is totally getting the blow job he was promised.

Now that we have the Lance Bass Madness out of the way, we can get to the really important thing that happened today: my second day of cooking class. Today was fish and herbs. We started by learning about the herbs, and I am now the proud owner of a chart detailing many different kinds of herbs and their many different applications, the entirety of which is largely meaningless to me. For instance, I am now armed with the knowledge that rosemary is appropriate for Mediterranean dishes, but I am totally defenseless when faced with knowing what constitutes a Mediterranean dish. I can’t name a one. But they’re great with rosemary!

So on to the fish. I learned about lots of fish-cooking words today, like poaching (cooking in simmering liquid), braising (cooking in a larger amount of simmering liquid), sauteeing (cooking in oil), pan frying (like sauteeing but with more oil), and steaming (I didn’t take a note on this one). As of this afternoon, I would have identified all these words as synonyms. No more! This class is totally paying off.

Nandita and I selected Red Snapper in Thai Green Curry with Rice today, and (of course) we rocked it. Not really being a fish aficionado, I had plowed gracelessly through life under the faulty assumption that all fish dishes taste essentially the same. This is not true! Our class made eight different fish dishes, all of which tasted way different and way good. This will probably not result in me ordering more fish over the course of my life, but right now I like to tell myself that it will.

Also I am going to start a running tally of how many times during a 3-hour class our teacher, Miss May, can say the words “much more delicious.” I took a quick sample today, and she said it 6 times in 5 minutes. She says it a lot. “You can buy your herbs dry, but if you buy them fresh they are much more delicious,” or “The fish will be much more delicious if you buy it whole and then skin it,” or “If you grill the green beans first they will be much more delicious.” In fact, I don’t know that Miss May ever says the word “delicious” without prepending the qualifying “much more.” She’s a fascinating and multi-layered character, that May.

Next week I believe we do poultry, so stay tuned for more of my culinary adventures!

Never content to leave the boundaries of your reality unmolested, Alanis Morrisette and Ryan Reynolds are still groping one another in public places. It’s really too much for me to handle.

I suppose the better question is, why am I currently watching the Miss Universe pageant? Why did I TiVo it? But let’s let bygones be bygones and deal with the issue at hand: why, oh why, is Tom Green judging it? Some of the judges make perfectly good sense: Bridgette Wilson Sampras, a former Miss Teen USA; Patrick McMullan, photographer and socialite extraordinaire; or Amelia Vega, Miss Universe 2003. Some of them kinda-sorta make sense, like Santino Rice, milking that Project Runway stint until there ain’t nothin’ left; or Marc Cherry, who singlehandedly reintroduced pop culture to campy with the first season of Desperate Housewives; or Claudia Jordan, a relative unknown but at least a model; or even James Lesure, who people tell me is some manner of actor. Moving another huge step down the ladder of pageant relatedness we find Sean Yazbeck, the adorable Brit who won this season’s Apprentice (he called some dude a “wanker” during an interview and I have loved him ever since), who is at the very least international (and his presence is in large part explained by the fact that the Trump empire finances all these shenanigans), and NFL great Emmitt Smith, who has probably banged a lot of hot chicks in a lot of different countries.

Then we have Tom Green. Tom. Green. As far as I can recall, this guy hasn’t even seen the inside of a studio since 2002 (an IMDB check reveals that he’s done some cameos and failed pilots to pass the time), and the last time he was even marginally relevant to pop culture, he was singing — poorly — about all the places his ass had been. Even when we loved him, we loved him as a sort of national class clown, as the antithesis of everything beautiful and classy and articulate and helpful.

Now let’s say you’re a Miss Universe contestant. You’ve probably been on the pageant circuit your whole life, wearing bright red lipstick and earrings half the size of your body at age five in the Little Miss Bangkok competition, casting aside best friends and boyfriends and after-school sports and slumber parties and your family’s savings in the single-minded pursuit of this dream: you wish to be, for a year, recognized as the woman in this world is the very most beautiful, classy, articulate and helpful.

Who decides? Tom Green.

How does this happen? Could they really find no one better? Does Donald Trump have some sort of vested interest in Tom Green’s career? Does anyone? Did someone more appropriate pass, like Paul Reubens, or oh, say, John Ramsey? I understand that folks aren’t exactly lining up to get on board Mr. Trump’s sinking ship o’ pageantry, but Tom Green?

I welcome your thoughts on the matter.

This is probably the greatest website I’ve seen in awhile. It’s like mySpace for goths. My first instinct was to point and laugh, and I spent some time clicking through all the profiles getting a kick out of the heavy-duty angst. But after awhile I noticed something — there’s a sense of real camaraderie here, to an extent I’ve never seen matched by another networking site. It smacks you right in the face, perhaps because it’s so unexpected when juxtaposed with dark art and occult screen names. It’s obvious from the profiles that a lot of these kids (and some adults) are having a less-than-ideal time coping with life right now, but it’s cool that they have this forum to express themselves and rally around one another while they try to find their way. Score one for the Internet.

Those of you who know me well understand that I am terrified of flying. Those of you who have actually flown with me understand it at an even deeper level, because in my drugged-up drunken haze I have probably done something gracious like stabbed you in the eye with a pencil or poured my wine on your lap. A typical day in which I have to fly goes something like this:

T-12 hr: cry, try to determine whether it is feasible to drive instead
T-5 hr: continue crying, realize it is not feasible to drive instead
T-4 hr: begin drinking
T-3 hr: take the first half of my anti-anxiety medicine (never, ever to be mixed with alcohol)
T-2.9 hr: continue drinking
T-2 hr: arrive at airport
T-1.8 hr: take the second half of my anti-anxiety medicine (never, ever, ever, to be mixed with alcohol)
T-1.7 hr: arrive at airport bar
T-1.75 hr: drink
T-0.5 hr: board airplane and immerse myself drunkenly in a crossword puzzle
T-0 hr: panic, order drink, panic

Clearly this is not ideal. It is an extremely stressful process for me, and I blame it exclusively for the two wrinkles I have discovered on my forehead. Honestly, my heart rate has picked up just writing about it. Just thinking about having to be on an airplane sends my body into panic.

So I, the empowered young up-and-comer that I am, have decided to do something about it. I did a lot of research on phobia therapists in the Los Angeles area, and I decided on this one, the Virtual Reality Medical Center. They use a desensitization process, like most phobia therapists, but instead of taking lots of trips to the airport, they use a virtual reality environment to simulate being on a plane. It sounded pretty cool, and their results have been great. It’s pricy ($200 for a 45-minute session), but I decided that if it could help me it would be worth every penny.

I started going there for treatment a couple months ago, and during our first few sessions we worked on using abdominal breathing to control my heart rate. My doctor hooked me up to a biofeedback device, which monitors breathing, heart rate, temperature, etc, so I can watch it all on a computer screen. I learned to breathe using my abdomen rather than my chest, and if I timed the in-and-out just right, I would start to see my heart rate drop to very low levels. It produces an incredible calm, and I started to understand why people want to join monasteries and meditate all day. You’d be so relaxed all the time you wouldn’t even mind that you are a monk.

Once you are a breathing superstar (and I am — my doctor was quite pleased at how well I could lower my heart rate — and I am such a freaking Lisa Simpson that I called my mother later to brag about this and receive accolades), you get to take your first virtual flight. Today was that day for me. I was psyched.

My doctor took me into my normal biofeedback room (which, I should mention, has several rows of airplane seats set up in it), seated me in the front row of the airplane and hooked me up to the biofeedback equipment. Then he loaded up the VR software. The menu had all sorts of options for a range of phobias — virtual airplane, virtual large crowd, virtual storm, virtual Vietnam (at this point I wanted to be like “screw the airplane, I want to play the Vietnam game!” but decided that would seem insensitive). We spent about 5 minutes working on my breathing, and then he put the VR helmet on my head.

This shit is super cool. All of a sudden, I was on a grounded airplane. I could turn my head around and look up, down, out the window, behind me, anywhere. There was a magazine in the virtual seatback and I had half a mind to pick it up and read it (I eventually decided that wouldn’t work and I’d look stupid). Now normally seeing the inside of an airplane — even on television — sends my body into panic mode, but I kept doing my breathing and I felt fine. We began taxiing (the seat starts to rumble a little), and I still felt fine. Eventually we took off, and — wait for it — I still felt fine. The plane kept cruising to a higher and higher altitude, and I was looking out the window (something I would never, ever do on an actual plane flight), and I was still okay. Part of me thinks that this was because I was aware that the environment was simulated, but I normally have a very physical reaction to anything about airplanes — seeing them in the sky, in a movie, reading about them, even writing this blog entry — anything airplane-related quickens my breathing and starts my heart racing. But as long as I continued to do my special breathing (at which I am a superstar), I was amazingly calm even in the simulated airplane environment.

I am clearly not cured — as I’d mentioned before, even writing this blog entry has my stomach in knots — but this is a very, very good start. During our next session we are going to deal with turbulence, weather phenomena, and landing, so we’ll see how I handle that. But in general I am very pleased with my progress, and would encourage anyone who has a fear of flying or Vietnam to consider this approach.