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The Hersch

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  1. The Hersch
    You capitalize pronouns in titles because the Chicago Manual of Style tells you to. There can be no more compelling reason than that. However, in your title, "his" in "His Knowledge and Wit" is a possessive adjective (note how it modifies rather than replaces a noun), not a pronoun, and you capitalize that also because the Chicago Manual tells you to. This is really orthography, not grammar, by the way.
  2. The Hersch
    All of my grandparents were born in the 1890s, although I think they were all born after 1896. The last of them, my father's mother, died sometime in the 1980s, I believe, probably about ten years after my father, who died age 55 in 1975, to the relief of all. My father and his mother hated each other (he often remarked that she was too mean to die), and of course all of my father's children hated him, and were not particularly fond of his mother either. My father's mother and her younger (gay) son moved together to Hawaii (from California) sometime in the late 1960s, I believe, and ended up hating it there, mostly because of the large non-white population, which tells you a bit about what kind of people they were. Some time in the early 1980s, I think, her other son having presumably been taken out of the picture by himself dying, my mother got a horrifying letter from my father's mother in which the old dame proposed planting herself on my mother permanently. I remember my mother saying something like "that's it; my life is over". I advised her simply to ignore the letter, which she did, and I don't think she ever heard from the old bat again. Ah, family! (My mother's parents were lovely people.)
  3. The Hersch
    I don't think I watched the Oscars after Johnny Carson's last stint, which I can't be bothered to look up. On a related note, I never saw a James Bond film that didn't star Sean Connery, and I didn't even see all of his. I best remember the late Roger Moore as the Mavericks' English cousin.
  4. The Hersch
    International Square is two conjoined buildings, one fronting on the southern side of the 1800 block of I St NW (just above one of the entrances to Farragut West Metro Station), the other fronting on the north side of the 1800 block of K St NW. It is not an attractive edifice, although it offers many thousands of square feet of office space, a great deal of which is rented by the Board of Governors of the Federal Reserve System, along with another building on the other side of K St., where I believe Dr. Yellen now delivers her perorations, while the Martin Building (one of the three buildings the Board actually owns) at 20th and C undergoes a massive remodeling (I'm afraid nothing they can do to it will make it pretty).
  5. The Hersch
    I'd like to put in a word for Shanghai Lounge, a sort of hidden treasure next-door to Bistrot Lepic on Wisconsin. I got take-away from there this evening, and had to wait at least ten minutes for my order. Everything I saw coming out of the kitchen looked good. The "dry pots" were plentiful, and still not on the English menu. The main dish I ordered, called "Spicy Fish Broth" and described as "fish filet and veggie cooked in Sichuan spicy broth. Hot and spicy." was the best Chinese-restaurant dish I've had in several years. And there was a lot more fish than broth, so with a starter it could easily have served two people, and was gently priced at $14.95. ETA I also don't find any xiao-long-bao or "pork soup buns" on the English menu.
  6. The Hersch
    Johnny Carson was a whole lot better than Bob Hope. He was, actually, the best. (At practically everything he did. Johnny, we hardly knew ye.)
  7. The Hersch
    Um...Johnny Carson?
  8. The Hersch
    You don't have to sell me on how great Obelisk was. There was a period of a couple of years when I would gladly have named it the best restaurant in the world. We have nothing like that now.
  9. The Hersch
    I've been running a little experiment for the last 2 or 3 weeks. Chalin's (downtown) is now on GrubHub,and their "Chinese" menu sections are clearly marked online. I've been ordering the "Chinese" stuff every few days, and I must say what I've received (as a GrubHub punter, no telling what a Chinese diner might get) has been food of unrelieved mediocrity. The "boiled chicken in chef's spicy sauce", or whatever it was called, was the only dish actually served in the gelatinous brown glop that almost all American Chinese food comes swimming in....I had envisioned chicken boiled simply on the bone, with a spicy dipping sauce, but what I got was the typical slivers of boneless, skinless white meat swimming in the familiar brown glop with the obvious vegetables. While none of the other dishes came in brown glop, none was worth eating. For what it's worth.
  10. The Hersch
    I find All About Eve very entertaining to watch, and also almost too silly for words.
  11. The Hersch
    Obelisk is a wreck of its former self. What happened?
  12. The Hersch
    The absolutely best rock concert I was ever at was a free outdoor concert at the Hatch Shell on the Charles River Esplanade in 1970. I had just recently arrived in Boston to start my university education, and the J. Geils Band, which was sort of a BU band and had just become really big, gave a free concert as a sort of thank-you to Boston. They weren't the best rock band around, but that concert was just totally electric, and one of the best bits of my life. The energy emanating from the stage shook me to pieces.
  13. The Hersch
    Have you seen "It's a Mad Mad Mad Mad World"?
  14. The Hersch
    I've never seen this movie, but based on your commentary I want to. Just a minor point, though: There are two kinds of evidence in a trial: direct evidence, which means eye-witness testimony, and circumstantial evidence, which includes forensic evidence. Eye-witness testimony is notoriously unreliable, although juries tend to be swayed by it. DNA evidence, which is circumstantial, is nowadays the very best kind of evidence there is in some kinds of cases, and there's no getting around the number of people convicted on direct evidence and later exonerated on circumstantial (forensic, DNA) evidence. I was once the victim of a serious crime, armed robbery, while working in a movie theatre (many years ago). Two young thugs, who appeared to be so nervous about what they were doing that I was afraid they might shoot me without even meaning to, cleaned out the meager till and fled, their handgun not fired. I couldn't have identified either of them afterward to save my life, but many people in such situations go ahead and pick out people of roughly the same size, shape, and age and convince themselves, and often a jury, that their identification is correct. I'm inclined to think that eye-witness testimony should be disallowed in criminal trials.
  15. The Hersch
    Yes, tastes differ. To convey some sense of what I enjoy and admire in (male) film actors of Hollywood's golden age, these are among my very favorites: Cary Grant James Cagney Charlie Chaplin (for the handful of talkies he made) Fredric March (If you want to see an example of how great Fredric March was, watch the American Film Theater production of The Iceman Cometh, which was his last film appearance, in the role of Harry Hope.) Laurence Olivier
  16. The Hersch
    Bork was rejected because of his history, his ideological disposition, and his disastrous hearing in the Senate Judiciary Committee. His nomination was reported out of committee to the full Senate, where he was rejected by a vote of 58 to 42, with six Republicans joining all but two Democrats voting against his confirmation. To say he "fully deserved to be voted onto the Supreme Court" is to assume facts not in evidence. His confirmation would almost certainly have harmed the Republic. Nothing in the Bork saga compares to the refusal of the Senate majority to even consider President Obama's nomination of Merrick Garland, whose only failing was to have been nominated by Barack Obama, whose own principal failing was to be President while black, and whom the Republicans in both Houses of Congress were determined to thwart on every issue, even those that had been favored by Republicans in the past. Remember that after the Senate rejected Bork, they confirmed Anthony Kennedy by a vote of 97 to 0.
  17. The Hersch
    There are two major Hollywood stars whose screen presence and acting style I simply can't bear, and consequently make it very difficult to enjoy any of the films they were in. One is Henry Fonda, the other is James Stewart. I can't really explain what I find so annoying about them, but they make my skin crawl every time I see them. And really, Stewart wins the best actor Oscar for "The Philadelphia Story" and not Cary Grant? That just disgusts me. I don't think I've ever seen "The Wrong Man", but I'm not a big Hitchcock fan, and Henry Fonda makes my flesh creep, so I'm probably not going to see it in the future.
  18. The Hersch
    Any word on what has become of the Grill Room since the departure of its stars? It certainly is still wickedly expensive: The cheapest main course on their online menu is roast chicken for $30.
  19. The Hersch
    I was in Prague in January. I highly recommend the Charles Bridge Palace Hotel if you want to stay in a pretty fancy hotel. Nearby, the even fancier Pachtuv Palace/Smetana Hotel has a wonderful little restaurant called the Café La Crème, where I had probably my best meal in Prague, a dish of grilled veal liver with an oniony-winey sauce and tiny little potatoes with little dollops of house-made mayonnaise for dipping, and a couple of glasses of excellent local red wine. Also a view of the river and the Charles Bridge and the castle across the river, along with a sleek, lovely interior and quietly excellent service provided by handsome waiters. And yes, go to Kavarna Slavia, which is a charming place in its own right, apart from its history. It's directly across the street from the National Theater, and commands superb views. I had a bowl of very good soup there, which cost next to nothing, and gave me squatting rights for a couple of blissful, peaceful hours. Then if there's opera on, you have merely to totter across the street to claim your place.
  20. The Hersch
    From the ever-valuable Roy Edroso: "Chuck Berry: 1926-2017"
  21. The Hersch
    I'm sure I remember reading that the entire cast of "Gilligan's Island", an equally stinky popular TV show of the same era, thought it was a stupid piece of shit, which it was. But acting is among the most tenuous of occupations, and turning down good money because the material sucks is a good way to starve. Your comment on Robert Reed seems monstrously unfair to me.
  22. The Hersch
    As someone once remarked, if it weren't for the laugh-track, you wouldn't know which parts of The Brady Bunch were supposed to be funny. God, what an awful stinker of a show.
  23. The Hersch
    Chuck Berry was the founder of rock-n-roll. He wasn't among its greatest practitioners, frankly, but he created it, and wrote a bunch of its most classic songs. Hail hail, rock-n-roll!
  24. The Hersch
    My experiences of both Al Tiramisu and Tosca are pretty old, but based on what memories I have of them, I'd say Tosca is at least twice as good as Al Tiramisu. No, I retract that. Tosca is infinitely better.
  25. The Hersch
    But how do you get the Internet signal into your home? I could drop cable TV, but I'd still need Comcast's cable to connect to the Internet, or the Xfinity WiFi hotspot in the building next door that requires that I have a Comcast subscription to use it. (I hear Fios is finally coming to my neighborhood, but I hate Verizon every bit as much as I hate Comcast.)
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