Freeze Tag

I have to admit that the prospect of having been tagged (see horrid logo, left) has very nearly stopped me in my tracks, given that it presented the appalling prospect of having to display this image and then talk about myself.

Well, we've been over this ground before, but Peenee (predictably, what with being evil incarnate and all) showed no mercy, and he was even joined in his devil's work by the 'til now comparatively benign Felix.

So, it seems I've been double-tagged, which - as with so much in life - turns out to be not nearly the naughty romp it sounds like it ought to be. herewith, even so, my turn at the Kreativ Blogger Meme Award, or whatever it's called.

1. Thank the person who nominated you for this award.

Thank you, Peenee and Felix. And damn your eyes, while we're at it.

2. Copy the logo and place it on your blog.

Done, over my better judgment.

3. Link to the person who nominated you for this award.

See 2, above.

4. Name 7 things about yourself that people might find interesting.

...And this is where it gets appalling. I've not been nearly as sharing (to put it kindly) as some people (looking at Peenee), but having been writing about myself in drips and drabs for the past year and a half, it's hard to come up with too much that's terribly fresh. I think I'll just free associate for a bit and hope for the best:

(1) My Arabic has been improving of late, to the point that at times I will pretend to understand less than I do, mostly so I can listen to Mr. Muscato chat with friends while they think I won't get it all. Not that he's ever really come out with anything amazingly indiscreet (although the friends occasionally do, mostly on the Appalling Conspiracy Theory front), but I've kind of got to like being the silent one when we're out with the boys.

(2) I worry that we've gotten too comfortable living in a comparatively quiet and provincial place, and that when and if the opportunity arises, we'll end up being boring country mice anywhere slightly more happening.


(3) The most amusing Big Lady I ever got to work with, hands down: Tyne Daly. Smart, funny, foul-mouthed, and amazingly talented. She can sing an adagio version of "There's No Business Like Show Business" that will, as she herself has said, make strong men weep (never thought about it as a slow song? Believe me, it works - that's a lyric that can be sung sad). She's the real deal. That said, she's not the one I loved the most. But that's another story.

(4) I have been mugged or assaulted five times - twice with a gun - and been burgled twice (once with arson for that extra frisson). Yet the most that any of the idiot failed criminals ever got off me was $5, a ring with a cracked amethyst, and a small bowlful of change and subway tokens (leaving contemptuously behind the small bowl itself, a rather good piece of Georgian sterling courtesy of Grandmother Muscato). The fire, admittedly, got a good deal more, but that hardly benefited the perp.

(5) On a brighter note, I have never in more than twenty years of at times essentially continuous travel had a moment's (knock wood) difficulty, not anywhere from Tokyo to Ouagadougou, despite having now and then been, to be kind, a fairly Easy Mark. Strangers have benevolently put me in taxis and sent me back to the occasional hotel; I've found myself by happenstance in neighborhoods neither accustomed nor welcoming to new faces; small coups, even, have broken out nearby - but to date I've sailed serenely through. Here's to twenty years more...


(6) I may not be freakishly double-jointed like some people, but my first ballet teacher (a small and ill-tempered Russian woman) declared with satisfaction on first looking me up and down that I possessed the best natural turnout she had ever seen in a boy. Sadly, that forever after remained my principal terpsichoric distinction, and it only gets one so far, but it did serve as her principal, if steadily less encouraging, talking point about me for the next five years.

(7) 2010 promises to be a year of changes that may or may not provide the chance to revisit some - I profoundly hope not all - of these issues. Watch this space.

5. Nominate 7 Kreativ Bloggers and post links to the 7 blogs you nominate.

But this is where I reap the benefit of being so terribly late in accepting my tag - I truly think this is one meme that has run its course and needn't be inflicted on anyone further. At least until somebody comes up with a better logo.

Top of the [Meme] Pops

Have I mentioned lately that I hate Kevin? Not only, as proprietor of The Lisp, is he sending trashy ecclesiastical traffic my way, but he's putting the jpg equivalent of earworms in my head, via his latest bright idea, the Album Meme.

It's fast, he says. It's easy. Well, you can head right over for the directions, but in the meantime I've been caught up in trying to create the latest Sgt. Pepper, or at least the 2009 Breakfast in America. The basic idea is that you generate a random band name, album title, and accompanying graphic, and try (using, in my case, the most rudimentary of graphic skills and most elderly of software) to mash them together as an LP cover.

I think I have a new hobby.

He's having a contest, and having done the most I can do in one sitting, now so am I. Tell me which of these three you like best, and I'll submit it to the Dread Taskmaster for his consideration before the November 7 deadline. Will it be:

1. The one I've decided is the sixth and final album of an outsider loner, a onetime child prodigy on the oboe who spent his 30s and 40s rarely leaving his Hell's Kitchen studio and creating dense, multi-layered sound collages that are equal parts Satie and Gary Numan; or

2. This offering, by a highly Pink Martini-influenced Bryn Athyn, Pennsylvania, wedding band, which features their daring jazz/lounge reimaginings of MOR classics like "Always a Woman to Me" and "Sometimes When We Touch"; or

3. This indie release out of Boston, by a neo-ska quintet of white guys who desperately wish they were the love children of Me'shell NdegéOcello and The Specials.

You be the judge. In the meantime, I'm off to hit "refresh" on one more set of possibilities and see what transpires...

To Tell The Truth

Damn Peenee! The evil creature has sentenced me via blogtag to write ten honest things about myself. Given that to me the whole point of blogging is a certain amount of obfuscation, this runs against the grain; add in the whole WASP “never begin a paragraph with ‘I’” background, and you have recipe for, if not disaster, then certainly discomfort.

Even so, when duty calls…

Herewith, my answers to the Honest Blogger Tag:

1. Just in case any of you were worrying/wondering: there really are a Mr. Muscato and a Koko the Wonder Dog, although neither is likely to respond if called by those names. They are both as wonderful as you might think from my feeble attempts at description, which sometimes leaves me gobsmacked at my good fortune. I may not be as beguiling as advertised, but they easily are, or more so.

2. I love our life here, but there are times – and they are usually trying times – when I truly, deeply, madly wish we lived somewhere more interesting. It’s a stunningly beautiful place, and the people are lovely, and we live lavishly…and there’s absolutely nothing to do on a weekend night. A slight exaggeration, but only slight. I miss old movies in rep houses, I miss live theatre of any kind, and concerts, and dancing, and smoky dark cabarets. I miss wandering around a neighborhood of clever little restaurants and trendy boutiques, and, alright, I’ll say it: I miss drinking in public – a glass of wine at a sidewalk café, say, and I miss drinking that wine while eating a pork chop and wearing shorts.

3. The weight: really must do something about it. And every passing month makes it harder to lose.

4. I might be the biggest walking stereotype you’ll ever meet. I really do love Judy Garland, and I do cry every time Beth dies in Little Women, and I can’t throw a ball to save my soul. I listen to Bette Midler albums and I quote Joan Crawford, and the way that I’ve most identified with my semi-adopted culture, Egypt, is by getting crushes on its divas and Big Movie Ladies. I’ve spent untold hours eradicating my sibilant “S” (having lived the childhood described by David Sedaris in his essay about speech therapy), and sitting in Big Serious Business Meetings I doodle random ideas for what I think Kate Middleton should wear when announcing her engagement. My wrists? Don’t ask; those hands are all over the place. My principal compromises with conformity and advancing age have been renouncing high-maintenance hair, my earring, and most cosmetics. I miss them all.

5. Egypt. I really do love the place in some way that approaches the mystical. When I was in third grade, like many kids, I went through an Egypt phase, but in my case it never went away. I was obsessive and weird, and I spent my teen years memorizing pharaonic succession tables and trying to teach myself Ancient Egyptian (note to any weird, obsessive teens reading this: you can’t). When I finally, as middle age approached, got to Cairo, it was everything I had thought it would be and more. And right there waiting for me was the love of my life, which when you think about it is almost too neatly tied up.

6. There is nothing in the world I like eating so much as well made mashed potatoes. Necessities: well-cooked potatoes, cream, butter, salt, pepper, maybe just a little garlic. Atrocities: cheese, bacon bits, chives, and the most horrendous of all possibilities, the addition of other root vegetables. My Great-Aunt Edna once tried to slip parsnips into hers, and I’m still recovering from the shock four decades later.

7. I have drifted away from far too many old friends simply by virtue of living so far away from them. It’s hard to keep up, and somehow all the new technologies don’t make it, really, any less so. The hard truth is that you are not there for either the good or the bad times, and the bank of shared memories that makes for great friendship becomes too rarely replenished to sustain the connection. I miss many of them, but in an increasingly abstract way that probably seems harsh and uncaring. I don’t think it is, but maybe I am harsh and uncaring.

8. Odd vanity: my elbows. I remember, when I was a young boy-about-town, thinking that the saddest sign of aging was ugly, wrinkly, loose-skinned elbows. It therefore makes me unreasonably, secretly proud of my taut, boyish arm joints.

9. When it comes to Barbie, I’m with Peenee, although I can go him one better: not only was she a guilty pleasure of my queer boyhood, but in the mid-80s I was, for a spell, a rabid collector (you should have expected that, I suppose, from #4). Somewhere in storage I have more than 50 Barbies, Midges, Teresas, various tragic knockoffs, a battered Julia, and even a coveted Billy Boy Barbie (that's her, albeit not actually mine, to the left - the most fab 80s outfit imaginable, although almost all now have lost their original glam updo as the rubber bands rot. Why do I still know this?). And lots and lots of clothes and tiny shoes.

10. This was surprisingly a great deal easier than I had expected. Perhaps I ought to sit down and think about myself more often. Since one of my greatest fears is succumbing to what I have always thought was potentially crippling narcissism, this idea is making me very anxious.

Time to go have that glass of wine, even if I can’t do it on the sidewalk…

Now I have to tag people: I'm going sic this one on Angry (and I bet she does it, 'cause she's a good sport) and MJ (who definitely is not and probably will not, but whose tantrum about not doing it will be as amusing as if she had).

In Which Your Host Reveals All

Or at least some.

Bloggerista Extraordinaire Shirley has turned us on to the Interview Me Meme. Always eager for an excuse not to have to think of my own content, I volunteered. Here's how it goes:

You have to link back to the original post and also to your interviewer's post and include the following:

Want to be part of it? Follow these instructions:

1. Leave me a comment saying, "Interview me."
2. I will respond by emailing you five questions. I get to pick the questions.
3. You will update your blog with the answers to the questions.
4. You will include this explanation and an offer to interview someone else in the same post.
5. When others comment asking to be interviewed, you will ask them five questions.

The five really quite thoughtful and wonderful questions Shirley sent me are:

1. You and Mr. Muscato are being chased out of town. Where are the expats going to land next?

Quickly throwing the family silver, my manuscripts (memoirs, of course – didn't Oscar say one should always have something scandalous to read on a journey?) and a few other essentials into our ragtag assortment of suitcases, and bundling Koko and ourselves into the MuscatoMobile, we set off into the desert. Presuming we make it past the border guards unravished (alas), we arrive in glittering Dubai – and immediately depart, as the idea of spending more than the odd weekend there is infinitely dreary.

I suspect that in the real world we would end up back on the Nile in dear old Cairo, preferably in a high-floor flat with views in the glam Zamalek district. In my dreams, where one needn't worry about dull things like jobs and income, it would be a tidy little Regency maisonette in a quiet street in Maida Vale or St. John's Wood, London, with a winter getaway on the Red Sea.

2. You and everyone at the Café are so glamourous and elegant. Having said that, what has been your most unglamourous and inelegant moment?

Two answers, one up, one down; both involve bruising, although neither in any of the ways your dirty mind immediately assumed.

Light-hearted version: I was appearing in a woeful revival of a creaky and never quite first-rate musical, twenty-odd years ago. It was opening night. My character was the first to enter after a brief number at the top of Act Two. This entrance followed a fairly elaborate stage change, in which flats representing a Greenwich Village street had to fly up and platforms that combined to create an apartment set had to roll downstage. The leading lady and some comedy policemen did their bit, exited... and nothing happened.

Silence reigned. After a few moments, the stage manager pushed me out, hissing "do your scene on the street!" As this involved a lot of business with on-set props, that would have been a challenge, but I followed orders.

Just as I passed the threshold of one of the set's doors, the crew got their act together and hastily raised the flats. Unfortunately, they raised me, too, by one leg, caught in the doorframe. I vaguely remember sailing up toward the flies, and even thinking how interesting it was to see the horrified expressions on the faces of the people in the front row of the balcony from their level. I also realized that the flies into which the flats flew were quite narrow – a great deal narrower than I – and that I was not all that interested in being sliced to bits. I disengaged my leg, let go (I'd grabbed the door jamb with one hand en route), and fell. Remarkably, I landed on one of the daybeds in the apartment set that was then rolling out under me. Unbowed, I stood, walked to the edge of the platform, and actually started the scene.

But – I got only one line in before somebody backstage got the idea (perhaps from the howling audience) that something was wrong – and yanked the platform back to see what the matter was. That pitched me straight forward on my face onto the stage. I lay there for a second or two, and then realized with concern that the apartment-platform (the crew having found nothing amiss aside, I suppose, from the mussed daybed) was now heading back at me. I hastily rolled downstage and avoided falling right into the orchestra pit only because the conductor pushed me back up. After a brief pause to assess whether I'd broken anything and for the audience to settle down, we finished the scene and the act.

Later, I didn't remember a thing after being pushed by the conductor, and I was quite completely black-and-blue on one side from shoulder to ankle. I also had total subservience from the crew, who had come so close to killing me, for the (blessedly short) duration of the run. I've never again been able to listen to any recording of this particular show, even though the original stars one of my idols.

Gritty urban version: walking home up Ninth Avenue at 4:00 in the morning in the rain after having been beaten up by a mugger and then having to spend two hours in the Times Square police station. Black eye, loose tooth, various other contusions. No fun.

3. In your opinion, who is the ultimate diva, present or past?

Time is an essential factor in such things, so I would argue that no living person can claim "ultimate" status. Modern technology has rendered fame comparatively achievable in ways that would have been unthinkable in the past. We may think that Madonna or Britney are famous, but they've got nothing on people like Mary Pickford or Charlie Chaplin, whom the whole world knew at a time when there weren't any other such superstars. Stars like Crawford, Streisand, Garland – all astonishing and hugely influential, but all hark back to earlier models.

You have to go back before mass media to find the ultimate, the ones who set the pattern and the expectations. Then you have to choose the one of those who still has some kind of relevance, some currency, as compared to greats like Pavlova, Jenny Lind, or Maria Malibran, who were pioneering megastars and are still known to some and well-known to a few, but who don't particularly resonate otherwise.

For sheer diva-dom, total excess, extraordinary longevity, and breadth of impact, I don't think you can do better than the divine Sarah Bernhardt, the greatest of all femmes fatales. In a career that stretched from the 1860s to the 1920s, she was not only a star actress, but also a sculptor, producer, writer, and teacher, a woman who had huge influence on opera, literature, fashion, and international pop culture in general.

She had pet leopards decades before Josephine Baker walked her cheetah on the Champs-Élysées, she exploited a penchant for things Gothic a century before Cher (a famous photo shows her sleeping in her favorite coffin), and her string of lovers was said to include the Emperor of France, the Tsar, the Prince of Wales, and the Pope (beat that, Paris Hilton!) – not to mention at least one fetching young girl painter. She parlayed odd looks (skinny by the day's standards and with a mop of frizzy red hair) and an angelic voice into a long life that took her from illegitimate birth as daughter of a Paris courtesan to every great theatre in the world, the Legion of Honor, and a state funeral.

Without Bernhardt there would be no Bara (she was the first vamp), no Garbo (she was the first Camille), no Callas (she was the first Tosca, albeit non-singing), maybe even no Yves Saint Laurent (she was notorious for going out and about in her own variations on men's evening clothes – the original le smoking pour femme!).

She is the role model, knowingly or not, for every diva since, in every medium, from the greatest soprano the most disposal pop starlet, and she still utterly outfabs all but a very, very few. Brava Sarah!

4. It's Oscar night and you just won the coveted award. Without disclosing your age or dress size, who are you wearing and what will you say?

Hmmm. If I'm getting Best Supporting Actor (I'm a realist – and definitely more a character than a leading man; and it's probably for playing the heroine's gay best friend, Nathan Lane having proved unavailable) – a conservative black evening suit, black patent-leather gentleman’s pumps with grosgrain bows, highly starched Mao-collared linen shirt, my grandfather's studs and cufflinks – and a smashing Van Cleef & Arpels diamond and emerald brooch.

If it's Best Actress (in dreamland) – pre-war black velvet Schiaparelli, towering Roger Vivier strappy sandals, a dramatic full-length ermine cape (left at my seat, of course, as I go onstage) and as much smashing Van Cleef & Arpels diamond and emerald loot as my publicist can secure, plus a couple of knee-length ropes of pearls (I subscribe to the Queen Mary, more-is-more school of bijouterie. Hell, I don't see why more nominees don't go for tiaras).

Now, the speech. What to say? I think I'd go the Ruth Gordon route. Short, snappy (but working in the title of the picture - Forgotten Beauty, a biopic of Kay Francis - to boost ticket sales!), and thanking only my director, my vaudeville grandmother, and Mr. Muscato.

5. Everyone has guilty pleasures. What is one of your guilty pleasures?

Aside from Upen Patel and imagining myself (or him. Or myself and him) in knee-length ropes of pearls? Blogging. No one IRL knows I do. I’m starting to find that strange.

So now you know. Who's feeling brave? Just ask, and I'll send you five questions...

26 Movies

The evil incarnate that is Mr. Peenee has tagged me with Blog Cabin's Alphabet Meme, under the draconian rules of which I am obliged to list a favorite picture for every letter of the alphabet, ignoring initial articles, filing numbers by first letter, and providing a link back to Blog Cabins.

Being a list-fiend and a world-class procrastinator, I of course immediately put aside all potentially profitable activities and set to work.

Herewith, the Café Muscato 26:

1. Anastasia (Bergman, Hayes, Brynner, shameless melodrama and Martita Hunt!)


2. Babette's Feast (sheer beauty)


3. Come Back to the Five and Dime, Jimmy Dean, Jimmy Dean (Cher beauty)


4. Dostana (or, Come Back to the Villa Muscato, John Abraham, John Abraham)


5. Eyes without a Face (High-fashion creepiness)


6. Follow the Fleet (Ginger sings "Let Yourself Go"! Randolph Scott! Harriet Nelson!)


7. The Gang's All Here (Every single bloated, delirious minute of it)


8. Holiday (or, Why Hollywood Couldn't Sell Early Hepburn, but still a very wonderful thing)


9. Imitation of Life ("Oh, Mother – stop acting!" – I wasn't aware that she had started)


10. Judgment at Nuremberg (Dietrich, Garland, Clift, Tracy, and an indictment of fascism – what's not to love?)


11. King Kong (love me some Fay Wray)


12. Love Actually (I confess – I cry every time, several times)


13. Milk (haven't seen it yet, but I have a feeling it belongs here)


14. Night of the Hunter (the film sublime)


15. Opening Night (Rowlands and Blondell, by Cassavetes; very eccentric sturm und drang)


16. Parting Glances (see 12, above)


17. The Queen (I find myself unable to distinguish between Mirren and the real thing at times)


18. The Rose (protean Midler, before Disney discovered her)


19. Star Struck (the ultimate 80s musical)


20. Taxi zum Klo (the ultimate 70s underground gay German watersports movie)


21. Under the Cherry Moon (so there, Peenee! It's not good, but it does have Kristin Scott Thomas)


22. Victor, Victoria (never as good as it was in memory, but still great fun, isn’t it, Pookie?)


23. The Whales of August (I bet you're surprised it's not The Women; it's not a great movie, but the combo of Gish/Davis/Sothern/Price is irresistible)


24. Xanadu (like there was that much choice…)


25. The Yacoubian Building (a reminder of the glory of Egyptian film, a genuinely moving exploration of everything that's wrong and hopeful about the country)


26. Zoo in Budapest (one of only a handful of films in which I can tolerate Miss Loretta Young)

So there you have it. I had thought about finding a piquant illustration for each and every choice, but Mr. P., even my devotion has its limits.

I'm It! Part III: The Reckoning

Peenee strikes again! And with a far more devilish task than ever seen before: The Mrpeenee Auto Haiku Tag Meme:

• In five syllables, no more, no less, describe the worst movie you can think of.


• In seven syllables, no more, no less, describe your worst date. Bonus points if it was sordid.


• In five syllables, no more, no less, describe the worst job you ever had.
  Put it all together and you have a haiku of life’s low points.

So:


Sextette. You can really consider it a laff-riot campfest only as long as you can keep out of your mind the knowedge that Mae took it very, very seriously. I suppose you can admire the old girl for carrying on, but in the end no one ever participated so thoroughly in the trashing of her own reputation.

Grandma goes berserk.

I never really was, as grandmother would have put it, Fast, but even I was young once, and out and about in the bars. One night, as the Pointer Sisters wailed in the background and the friends and I lounged around in only slightly dated Wham!-wear (yes, it was a long time ago), I was approached by a rather dashing figure. The jeans and flannel struck a piquant note, as did the more than passing resemblance to Al Parker (sigh).

We got friendly; we got friendlier; we got into his pickup; we got into my apartment; we got into, not to be indelicate, each other's pants.

Then:

Hot trucker reveals lace thong.

And a predilection for spanking, but that's another story.

My nastiest and shortest-tenure job was as assistant at an academic non-profit of vague purpose. The director was a shambling old queen whose primary functions seemed to be fudging the numbers on grant applications and enraging the members. It paid nothing, my desk was actually in a hall closet, and he treated me like dirt.

Lackey to a sot.

And thus:

Grandma goes berserk;
Hot trucker reveals lace thong.
Lackey to a sot.

Yup, that's just about as bad as my what-passes-for-a-life has gotten. What a cheerful way to start our weekend (for in these parts, Thursday is Saturday, and if that doesn't keep you good and confused, not much will).

Now I'll have to mull over the tagging victim. Hmm.....

I'm It - Again!

I don't know about this whole tagging meme thing - it seems fishily like a chain letter, and yet - for the moment - it's such fun.

In any case, I've been remiss, as Suburban invented a Tag and hit me with it earlier this week. Now this morning I have another one waiting, from Peenee. Will it never end? But, such is my good WASP guilt, I've done them both. Suburban first:

• Go to your refrigerator, and describe the contents in the style of a movie tag line;


• Locate the least popular condiment in and tell us what it is;


• Name the most embarrasing thing in your fridge / freezer and justify its presence there.

The context for my response is that, children, unless you've lived in a dry country with a still-developing retail industry, you haven't walked in my shoes. On top of that, Mr. Muscato and I were badly scarred by two years in Africa, where you and, it seemed, every other foreigner in town spent all day Saturday combing what passed for "supermarkets" for things like sugar, clean flour, and - that holy of holies - butter.

Let's just we say stock up.

So:

• Diet Coke and Clotted Cream: A Different Kind of Love Story!


• Faseekh. It's a kind of half-rotted salted fish - "a semi-putrid form of salted and dried Grey Mullet," according to one authority, who adds that it is known for its "distinctive stench." Not, I suppose, technically a condiment, but it's in the fridge, and it's every bit as appetizing as it sounds. What can I say? Egyptians love it, and he did go two years without it for me.


• My name is Muscato, and I have six bottles of Absolut in my freezer. See justification above - it's a dry country, darlings, and you never know where your next one is coming from!

Now, I'm going to fudge a little, because one of the points of tagging, I know, is to pass it on, like, indeed, a chain letter, or the brandied-fruit cult that my mother got involved in in the seventies (it needed a starter, kind of like sour dough, and you always had to be passing part of the batch on, and, oh, I don't really remember, I just can't get the horror of it out of my head...). Be that as it may, and for reasons shortly to be revealed, life at the Café is rather stressy - but in a good way, darlings - at the moment.

So I'm going to finish up tagging and choose one lucky recipient, who can decide whether Suburban's or Peenee's tag sounds more appealing. Wait and see.

I'm It!

That blasted Peenee! I've been tagged. The task:

Pick up the nearest book.

Open to page 123.

Locate the fifth sentence.

Post the next three sentences on your blog and in so doing...

Tag five people, and acknowledge who tagged me.

Well, I turn to the pile of book-I-mean-to-read (or in his case re-read) that sits next to my armchair and find on top E.M. Delafield's The Provincial Lady in America. Page 123, sentences 6-8 are:

In any case, why Mary Queen of Scots? No possible connection with remote village in Devonshire. Can only suppose that Lady B. can think of no better way way of displaying her pearls.

Somehow, it seems very apt.

They're really lovely books, the Provincial Lady series - a kind of gentler E.F. Benson, or slightly sharper Barbara Pym. Excellent February afternoon books, or the sort of thing to read in front of a fire. Do find them, but read them in order.

And now to to find five not-already-tagged-with-this victims. How about TJB, Wesley Darling (perhaps it will encourage him to jumpstart his excellent blog), Craig of Colet and Company, Undercover Dragon, and Suburban? That should be a fairly dazzling array of books, I think.