The Amazing Race: Brazil

Ten teams travel from Salvador, Brazil to Fortaleza, Brazil.

Tina and Terence are easily the least likable of the twenty players. They are also both insane. I feel sorry for their respective partners, Ken and Sarah.

Terence begins the leg by getting hit in the head with the car trunk door. He insists to Sarah that he's bleeding. He makes her blow on his forehead and put a band-aid on his boo-boo. He is cranky for most of the leg.

Terence experiences a minor transformation when the mother-son team point them to the taxi stand that he and Sarah missed. Sarah is vindicated: it is okay to talk to other teams.

Tina credits herself when the airline to switches the flight to a bigger plane, allowing room for all ten teams. Tina lets everyone know that they owe her. The other teams are incredulous and pissed off. But all teams get on the same flight.

After arriving in Fortaleza, the teams ride yellow dune buggies on the beach to the Detour: Beach it or Dock it. Everyone hoots and hollers and all have fun for once.

I am rooting for the geeks, Mark and Bill. They are good-natured; they get along, and seem to carry no emotional baggage. They are the only team who choose to Dock it. They end up in the lead, thanks to their attention to detail.

Read the Clue, Sherlock

The divorcees freak out, thinking they need to find some "container" after the Beach It task. But they were mixing in instructions from the Dock It option. They waste a lot of time, digging in the wet sand. When they figure out their mistake, they are still in the middle of the pack. Despite reciting their lesson: "read the clue," they don't read the next clue and don't have their taxi wait while they perform the detour.

Mark and Bill end up in a footrace with Ken and Tina for first place. Mark and Bill don't stand a chance and end up arriving second. But all four are happy and gracious, even Tina.

Though the divorcees make the most egregious mistakes, they come in 7th. It is Anthony and the marriage-hungry Stephanie who come in last and get eliminated. In post-elimination reflection, Anthony rattles off all the things he is thankful for. He lists his looks third, and finally, Stephanie, fourth. I don't hear wedding bells for them.

For Students Failing Math & Economics

I don't need a calculator to figure out this tiny box is not 950 square feet. Is the 2nd floor missing from the floor plan?

The apartment on West 111th Street claims 950 square feet and two bedrooms in the listing. The floor plan shows 565 square feet and one bedroom. (I did use a calculator, estimating the jug-handle hall to be 8.5 x 3.)

Possibly the wrong floor plan was put in by mistake. Or maybe the 950 is a misprint. Or maybe the sellers think the students in the area are fools.

With a hefty $649k asking price, the realtors are banking that the prospective buyers don't have a calculator or a newspaper.

I do love the built-in bookcases and the North and South windows. You'll need all those windows to toss out your stuff that doesn't fit into the non-existent closets.

Apartment Watch: A Single Tick Up

In these alliterative economic times, with the "credit crunch" and the "mortgage mess" blanketing the news, prices in Manhattan are finally coming down. Slowly. Very slowly.

It took an "economic earthquake" and a "bank bust" to make it happen. Yet in these "terrible times," there is a little "buyer's bright spot."

The Little Studio That Could increased its asking price from $275K to $300K. That little studio is in 96 Schermerhorn in Downtown Brooklyn, a building that I have a soft spot for.

Bravo, seller, bravo! As the only price increase in any of the apartments I have been watching, I must applaud the move. I mentioned the apartment was underpriced in my post a few weeks ago.

If it were any other apartment, I would be shocked at the gall, my perpetual state since 2005. Since Brooklyn has more gall than Manhattan, the ride down might be even slower on the other side of the bridge.

Pundits are calling this a buyer's market, but I don't know too many people buying. And what is going to happen to the New York market when there ain't no money to be borrowed?

The Amazing Race 13 Debut

The makeup of the eleven teams vying for the million dollar prize on this season's The Amazing Race offered few surprises. Notable exception: the long-maned, white-haired, hippie beekeepers.

Filling some of the predictable roles are the bickering couple (Ken and Tina), the Blondes (Marisa and Brooke), the newly-dating couple (Terence and Sarah), and the long-distance dating couple (Aja and Ty).

Ken and Tina, the bickering couple, are married but separated due to Ken's infidelity. I shifted my sympathies to Ken as Tina blamed him for everything and gave him credit for nothing on this race's first leg where teams should be the least tense.

This season's blondes don't have the energy or personality of previous blonde teams. The geeks (Mark and Bill) are going to be stronger competitors than you think. The frat boys (Andrew and Dan) are less fratty than you expect.

Terence and Sarah promise the most unpredictability of the racing teams. They seemed nice and normal in the intro; their opposite personality types acknowledged. But they have something major in common--they are both pyscho, but in opposite ways. Sarah tries to make friends with everyone, (sounds normal, right?) but then is instantly angry when one of the racers doesn't acknowledge a comment she made. The comment didn't appear to be aimed at anyone. Terence, who wears a faux-hawk and was id'd as a free spirit is wound tighter than a bedspring.

The beekeepers were the first to be eliminated, before I got a chance to see their faces. Their sweet farewell made me sorry to see them go so soon.

Oh, did I mention the racers went to Brazil?

Jane Goodall's Harvest for Hope

In her 2005 book subtitled "A Guide for Mindful Eating", Jane Goodall proves she is more than just the chimp lady.

Goodall's lifelong study of chimpanzee behavior naturally led to her concern about their habitat and their dwindling population. The logging trade and the raising of cattle are causing the disappearance of the chimp's forest habitat. The bushmeat trade is causing the chimp's potential extinction. Chimpanzee meat is a delicacy in parts of the world. Imagine browsing in an African market and pawing through severed chimpanzee hands to find your dinner.

Gentle Jane's early chapters start with easy talk about animal diets and differences in human diets around the world. The reader is lulled by a seemingly basic primer on animals and diet. Chapter 2, "A Celebration of Cultures," is a happy chapter indeed.

Then Jane packs her punch.

Our happy, indulgent cultures encourage businesses to pesticide-proof crops with chemicals. As added bonus, we eat the chemicals too. Plus, we get bigger, stronger crop-eating pests. So now, companies like Monsanto, are modifying the DNA of the crops themselves.

Our lifestyles have also brought about the horrors of factory farms, the modern-day replacement of family farms. You don't need to accept that animals have souls, just that they suffer, to recoil at the treatment of the cows, pigs and chickens in these assembly-line hell-houses.

Chickens are crammed together so they can't stretch their wings, starved and denied water when egg production is down. Cows are branded, castrated, wallow in feces. Tailless pigs are shot up with growth hormones and weakened by lack of exercise. Sometimes their tiny legs break trying to carry their own weight off to slaughter.

If you are callous enough to not care about the animals' suffering, you might care that you and your family eat all the hormones and antibiotics the animals are injected with. (We've learned the consequences of too much antibiotics: super-bugs.)

Jane recalls the farms she knew as a child, where animals were loved and roamed free. Crops were rotated so that the soil remains fertile. These farms were compact ecosystems that worked without wearing out the land.

Jane's message: if you are going to eat meat, eat small-farm, local and organic. Better yet, don't eat meat and let people eat the grain that feeds the livestock.

Can you handle that? If not, then you won't know what hit you when the water crisis lurking around the corner appears.

Never Let Me Go

In Kuzuo Ishiguro's fictional world, human cloning has been going on in the UK since the 1950s or 60s.

The reader meets Kathy H., Tommy D. and Ruth as children, their story told in flashback by Kathy H. Something is unusual about these kids at Hailsham. Are the children in boarding school? Or are they orphans? Are they specially gifted children?

They live among kind, caring guardians who nurture their creativity. A mysterious Madame carts their best art away.

Gradually, the reader realizes the future that is set out for these special kids as "carers" and "donors". Even more gradually, you realize where they came from and why they were born. Despite the cynicism of others, their humanness is real.

Ishiguro illustrates this by focusing on the small misunderstandings between them, what's said and unsaid that changes the air between them. Feel the awkwardness of your own childhood in this story: the bullies, the leaders, the misfits.

Kathy, Tommy and Ruth grow up but remain children; childless, motherless children who dream little dreams and search for explanations with the little energy and will they have. They face final disappointment in the answers and face their fate with the resignation.

Why don't they try to escape? Because their bonds are the bonds of conformity, some of the strongest kind.

Tough Guys Don't Dance

I had never read a word Norman Mailer wrote; I only knew him as a celebrity hothead and occasional public embarrassment. I knew that Mailer got away with stabbing one of his wives. (He only stabbed the one--there were five others.)

Misogynist behavior and rantings are turn offs for me, so why would I ever pick up one of his books? If Mailer wasn't a good celebrity, why would I think he was a good writer?

Tough Guys Don't Dance changed my tune. The second of two books I bought for a buck each at the Lower East Side book fair (see A Widow for a Year post), TGDD turned out to be a great read.

Mailer passed away last November and according to The New York Times obit:

. . . Mr. Mailer said his favorite novel, if not his best, was “Tough Guys Don’t Dance,” a mystery thriller he wrote, under extreme financial pressure, in just two months in 1984. He was in tax trouble, he explained, and needed to crank something out quickly. “I was prepared to write a bad book if necessary,” he said, “but instead the style came out, and that saved it for me.”

Mailer is beautiful writer, even when writing from the perspective of a "tough guy" who may or may not have committed murder during a drunken blackout.

Hell-Town

Anti-hero Tim Madden rattles around an off-season New England beach town. He is a man who doesn't seem to belong there.

Madden lives on the edge of "Hell-Town," a half-real, half mythical place where demons whisper in his ear. Madden fears his capacity for violence and a reader has every reason to believe he committed a murder or two when in the clutches of bourbon.

When Mailer introduces the Madden's fellow townies, everyone becomes a suspect. Through lyrical prose and raw violence, the events of the forgotten night are pieced together.