Over-pursuing

Sunday with the New York Times....

Ships in the night
The Love Boat for Policy Wonks, Henry Alford:

I’M dancing on the top deck with a 71-year-old feminist and psychotherapist whom I’ve come to think of as the Twirler. We’ve spent two days attending seminars on The Nation magazine’s Alaska cruise; we’ve talked about the Bush presidency and prison reform and single-payer health care. Now, at almost midnight, my fiercely intelligent and opinionated new friend Charlotte is putting all the heady political talk behind her by bodily twirling.

“If I start to get dizzy then I twirl in the opposite direction,” she tells me as the live band revs up its throbbing Motown beat. ...

The five hours of discussion provided ample opportunity to see some of the cruise’s speakers in action; by day’s end it was clear that the encyclopedic and oratorically gifted Mr. Nader was gradually winning people over, and that most of the cruisers thought the Nation publisher and editor-in-chief Katrina vanden Heuvel was, as one gentleman put it to me, “a total fox.”

At one point, the director of the Nation cruise addressed the audience and told us that the cruise sponsored by the conservative National Review was one day behind us. Warning us about being prompt when reboarding the ship at each port, he said: “If you miss the ship, you’re going to be with National Review tomorrow. That’s your penalty — you’ll have to spend time with John Bolton.” ...

FUELED by these two anecdotes, I searched in vain for examples of kicky, unhinged Nation-based fun. Instead, I saw much seriousness of purpose — I saw one Nation reader, apparently unfinished with his conversation with Ralph Nader in the hallway, follow Mr. Nader into the men’s room; I overhead another cruiser express disappointment to his wife that the casino’s roulette “has a double zero, thus giving a 5 percent advantage to the house in the game that already has the worst odds for the player.”

What about Sesame Street?
Is PBS Still Necessary?, Charles McGrath:

If you’re the sort of traditional PBS viewer who likes extended news broadcasts, say, or cooking shows, old movies and shows about animals gnawing each other on the veld, cable now offers channels devoted just to your interest. Cable is a little like the Internet in that respect: it siphons off the die-hards. Public television, meanwhile, more and more resembles everything else on TV. Since corporate sponsors were allowed to extend their “credit” announcements to 30 seconds, commercials in all but name have been a regular feature on public television, and that’s not to mention pledge programs, the fund-raising equivalent of water-boarding.

Talking himself off the ledge
So Who Wins the Big Prize? It’s the Host, Joe Rhodes:

THE audience members, 325 people who had waited outside for nearly three hours, shivering in the wet breezes of a California midwinter storm, were going nuts before he even walked onstage, screaming as if they were at a pep rally, dancing in the aisles, chanting his name, making so much noise they barely even noticed that he’d begun speaking, that Drew Carey was already asking, “What’s the first item up for bids today on ‘The Price Is Right’?”

The ratings for “Price,” America’s longest-running game show are down — by 9 percent since Mr. Carey took over as host from Bob Barker in October — but you’d never know it from the enthusiasm of the crowds that still pour into Studio 33 (since last year also known as the Bob Barker Studio) of CBS’s Television City complex in Hollywood. They show up wearing their homemade “Drew Is the Man” T-shirts, erupting with high-decibel elation whenever Rich Fields, the announcer, asks one of them to “come on down!” ...

“And for every single person that makes it onstage, it’s like a Joseph Campbell journey, an everyman plucked from obscurity to attempt a journey, with obstacles placed in their way. And I just want to be a good guy for them, so they can win money. I’m there to help them on their journey.”

Mr. Carey, 49, said that in the past two years he has undergone a “huge spurt of spiritual growth,” having immersed himself in texts from the Bible to books by Wayne Dyer and Marianne Williamson. The result is a changed attitude about comedy, show business and himself.

“I’ve thought about changing my name, I’ve changed so much,” he said, “If Drew Carey now met Drew Carey from 5 or 10 years ago, I wouldn’t recognize him.”

Although he was known as a generally good guy, famous for those big tips and hanging out with fans before and after stand-up shows, Mr. Carey said he was carrying a chip on his shoulder through all the successful years of his sitcom. In his 1997 autobiography he wrote about a difficult childhood and adult battles with depression. He was not as carefree as he seemed.

“That chip on my shoulder, that’s a fear of not being accepted, a fear of not being good enough,” he said. “It was like: ‘Here’s little Drew Carey from Cleveland, and they’re not recognizing that I’ve done something with my life. Hey, why aren’t you recognizing it?’

People's candidate
Out of Office, Will He Be Out of Sorts?, Diane Cardwell:

Six years of wielding the power of government office and reveling in the ego boost of broad support from ordinary New Yorkers have fueled Mr. Bloomberg’s desire to run the country, these associates say, and diminished his excitement over his oft-stated plan to pursue a full-time career in philanthropy.

And as his presidential hopes have appeared to fizzle of late, friends say, Mr. Bloomberg has been acting grumpy as he faces decisions about what to do next.

“He was extremely successful, and then he was extremely successful as mayor,” said Michael H. Steinhardt, a hedge fund manager turned philanthropist, and a longtime friend of Mr. Bloomberg’s who played host to an early presidential strategy session. “Now where does he go from here? He doesn’t really care that much about his philanthropy. I think he likes hearing himself talk publicly — terrible way to put it, but I think that’s right.” ...

Some of those close to him say that Mr. Bloomberg gets a charge out of being able to change things and was itching to take advantage of the elaborate operation created by his political aide, Kevin Sheekey, to support an independent presidential campaign.

Even his denials of interest in running for president show how he has been bitten by the bug of government influence.

Being mayor is “a real executive job,” he said at a forum at Cooper Union in September. “I’d say, ‘Tomorrow I want Fifth Avenue to run northbound rather than southbound.’ It may be a dumb idea, but tomorrow morning, there’d be a cop on every corner. Every sign would be changed. I mean, it would go northbound. That’s pretty heady stuff.”

Bumbling, stumbling
Where You Going With That Monet?, Randy Kennedy:

THE plots of art heist movies are about as multifarious as the canvases of the paintings pilfered by their main characters — the postmodern heroin-cool of Nick Nolte in “The Good Thief”; the playboy-billionaire boredom of Pierce Brosnan in “The Thomas Crown Affair.” But one thing art theft movies tend to have in common is that they dwell on the heist and not on the aftermath, for reasons that are probably more than cinematic: art is an exceedingly dumb thing to steal.

The most valuable examples, usually paintings, are also the most highly recognizable and therefore almost impossible to resell or to display anywhere. When thieves try they are often caught. And so most real art bandits don’t exude quite the élan of a Nolte or Brosnan or even of a good, methodical jewel thief. In fact, they are often found pretty far down the ladder of professional purloining, acting on impulse or opportunity in a world in which museums are still relatively unguarded public spaces. And in many cases, to put it bluntly, art thieves are just not very good.

They are more like a Dutch man named Octave Durham — a k a the Monkey — who was sentenced to prison in 2004 for stealing two paintings from the Van Gogh Museum in Amsterdam two years earlier. He and an accomplice had little trouble breaking into the museum but then left behind a feast for crime scene investigators — ladders, ropes, cloths, hats — that easily provided the DNA evidence that led to their arrests.

In the latest heist to shake the art world, three men wearing ski masks walked into the E. G. Bührle Collection in Zurich on Feb. 9, grabbed a Cézanne, a Degas, a van Gogh and a Monet together worth an estimated $163 million, and tossed them into a van and sped off. Though one thief brandished a gun, there were signs that the job was probably not up to robbery’s highest standards: the most expensive of the collection’s paintings were left behind (the four that were stolen were in one room) and the police said the stolen paintings appeared to be poking out of the back of the white van the men used to make their getaway.

“No one theory can fit all examples of art theft, but I think it’s often an I.Q. test for not-so-smart criminals, and a lot of them fail,” said James Mintz, the principal of a corporate investigations firm with offices in New York, London, Zurich and other cities that has handled art cases. ...

Thomas McShane, a retired F.B.I. agent who led many art investigations in the 1970s and 1980s, said the motivations and methods of many of the thieves he came across could only be described as humorous. One man tried for years to fence a Rembrandt stolen in 1971 from a museum in France, dropping his street price from $5 million to $25,000, Mr. McShane recounted in his 2006 memoir “Stolen Masterpiece Tracker,” written with Dary Matera. “His only accomplishment,” Mr. McShane wrote of the criminal, a would-be Mafioso nicknamed Johnny Rio, “was expanding the ever-widening circle of people who knew he had it.” (He was caught and served a short prison sentence.)

What's the barrier to stupidity?
Neighbor vs. Neighbor, Josh Barbanel:

IMAGINE a letter slipped under an apartment door, and then a warning of a lawsuit in the offing: “As you may not be aware, we are both lawyers and both litigators, for whom the usual barriers to litigation are minimal.”

That was the curt beginning of a lawsuit at the Ansonia, a condominium on Broadway and 73rd Street, filed this month by two Ivy League-educated lawyers against a neighbor, a restaurateur, over secondhand smoke they said was wafting into the hallway from her apartment. Jonathan Selbin, whose field is class-action cases, and his wife, Jenny Selbin, represented themselves, without a fee, according to state court filings.

The case has raised concern among managing agents and lawyers about secondhand smoke in co-ops and condominiums as well as the appropriateness of lawyers’ using their knowledge of the legal system to take on neighbors.

“It is not unethical — it is unneighborly,” said Stephen Gillers, a law professor at New York University who specializes in legal ethics. “It is contrary to what we think of when we use the word cooperative. It is unwise, unless you are desperate.”