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As good as my dim sum lunch on Saturday was, I'm not sure I would have passed it up in favor of what they served at the White House this weekend.  The menu for Sunday night's state dinner honoring the country's governors includes:

• "Confit of Locks and Celery";
• "Colorado Lamb Lion";
• "Winter Spinach Saut"; and
• a salad that includes "Fris e."

So I had a pretty decent weekend.  All I need's a bit of sleep to catch up.

Friday I went to my local with Chico, who has a new Treo he was anxious to show me.  We geeked out right at the bar as I beamed him contacts and various & sundry other things.

On Saturday, Chico, Pyrimyd, B. and I headed down to Chinatown (no, we did not kick the gong around) for a marvelous dim sum lunch at Golden Unicorn.  Roast pork, shu mai, greens, snails in black bean sauce, fried turnip cakes, buns galore, et cetera, et cetera.

We hadn't realized that the New Year celebrations were still going on, so we were pleased to discover several dragons running around.  Basically, a group of 15-20 people would arrive at a store, cordon off a small area with sticks, and play drums and cymbals (or sometimes pots & pans) to accompany a two-person dragon or two.  The dragons would dance in front of the stores, and sometimes even enter them.  The shop owners gave them red envelopes (gifts?  blessings?  dragon protection racket?) and sometimes offerings of lettuce and oranges.  We saw one dragon feint around a head of lettuce for a while, then lunge for it.  After the guy inside the dragon head furiously shredded the lettuce with his hands, the drummers would play a drumroll and at the climax, the dragon would spit the shreds of lettuce back out.

One dragon was even perched on a maybe twenty-foot steel pole (with a second pole behind him to hold up his tail.)  He was lunging for a head of lettuce hanging from a string tied to a pole -- it looked for all the world like fishing for dragons. 

Of course we had to wind up our meal at the Chinatown Ice Cream Factory (home of "regular flavors" like lychee, durian and green tea and "exotic flavors" like chocolate and vanilla.)  Bayard Street was blocked off, people were firing off confetti cannons -- the streets were ankle-deep in streamers -- and there was a generally festive atmosphere.  We headed home not long after we finished our cones, took a nap, and regrouped (together with our friends Patty, Val, & Jon) that evening at the Brick Cafe for a long, somewhat drunken evening.  Conviviality reigned.

Alas, Sunday morning arrived quickly, and B. had to go off to work, while I went off to church.  After church, it was back down to Chinatown to pick up a marionette dragon that B. had admired.  Chinatown was packed, with parades going down Mott Street (including Year of the Pig ice sculptures and pig races sponsored by the Daily News)  After a quick New Green Bo lunch (for the first time in my life, I passed up the soup dumplings -- not a Lenten sacrifice, but I simply didn't have room), I headed back home.  Pyrimyd and I took in a showing of the wonderful Army of Shadows at the Museum of the Moving Image, and walked home through swiftly falling snow. 

And last night, our friend Tops was passing through town on his way from New York to St. Kitt's (there's the life), so we dragged him out to the Half King for some more conviviality.

I think I'm looking forward to spaghetti at home tonight, and going to bed early.

Warm (and frankly, incredibly-long-overdue) congratulations to Marty Scorsese.  It's about damn time.  I haven't yet seen "The Departed" -- I want to rewatch "Infernal Affairs" first -- but really want to.  ("GoodFellas" losing to "Dances With Wolves" in 1990 was an outright travesty.)

And congratulations to Helen Mirren and Forest Whitaker, whose joint wins for "The Queen" and "Last King of Scotland" will, I'm sure, set off a slew of bad Hollywood-royalty puns...I haven't left the house yet this morning, but I'm sure the tabs have already come through on this score.

But in the midst of all your revelry, spare a thought for sound engineer Kevin O'Connell, will you?  Last night marked O'Connell's nineteenth Oscar nomination without a win.  This time around, he was nominated for his work on "Apocalypto", but "Dreamgirls" got the nod.  Hopefully next year the streak will be broken, but till then he's got an Emmy (for his work on "Lonesome Dove") to console him.

Nice beaver.

Also, memo to the Times copy desk:  WTF?

Then on Wednesday, the biologists were able to videotape the animal on film, swimming up the river looking for more material to insulate its home.

First off, "videotape the animal on film"?  Not possible.  You're either videotaping,  or you're filming.  Depends on what kind of camera you have.

Second:  the biologists were swimming up the river to find more material to insulate their homes?  You'd think they'd just swing by Home Depot.

Grrrrrr.

(/pedant)

Today is the centenary of the birth of W.H. Auden, one of the greatest poets of the twentieth century (and a personal favorite, alongside Yeats and Wallace Stevens.)  I wish I could go to the Cooper Union event tonight, but there are lots of commemorations around the world.

In prepping a MeFi post about Auden, I discovered lots of interesting Audenania on the web, including collections of his poems,  audio files of Auden's readings, an interesting essay on the poet's public and private faces,  a remarkable transcript of a freewheeling Q&A with Swarthmore College students, a chart explicating his symbology and beliefs, an essay on and list of his travels, his reviews of Tolkien in the New York Times (1, 2), and even his library requests and a picture of his typewriter.

"Musée des Beaux Arts" is the poem that introduced me to Auden (reading ahead in my eighth-grade lit book), and it's totally worth a read if you're new to his work.  Make sure you scroll down to see the Brueghel that Auden references in the poem.  His hilarious take on commencement addresses is a great little bagatelle as well.

As his literary executor Edward Mendelson put in yesterday's Wall Street Journal, Auden's poetry "has a 'visionary quality' that involves 'seeing the infinite value of what's right in front of you.'"  This is something we can all learn from.

If you've traveled to or lived in the Netherlands between 1966 and oh, 2000 or so, you've carried Ootje Oxenaar's artwork in your pocket:

I was really very pleased when they asked me, when I got the whole series. You’re making something that lasts for decades and is in everyone’s pockets, every shop; it’s a fantastic feeling. And a great feeling, especially, when you can do it in your own way. I was very proud when the first one came out in circulation. I could lay it next to the sketch and see that it was virtually the same. In the later part of the series they asked me to remake the five guilder, and then later the 100 note. I changed our war criminal – the grand admiral – to a snipe.

Creative Review has a fascinating interview with Oxenaar.

Can I still call myself a blogger?  I certainly haven't been doing much of it for a while.  First there was the massive amount of travel over a week, then a couple of days of work (work's hard when you haven't done it in a while!) and then a couple of days of much-needed relaxation and not doing much of anything. 

The travel was exhausting -- that week stressed me out/took more out of me than I'd anticipated.
Seeing my cousin Beth get married was great -- we're pretty close and have traveled together -- but sandwiching it in between two funerals made for a, shall we say, intense sort of week.  (My great-aunt Polly's funeral was one of the most uplifting that I've been to; sad, yes, and everyone was choked up, but she really was an amazing lady who had a great life.  (Her obit was on the front page in the local paper, even!))

After all this travel, we wound up at the Rivah overnight, then headed to Richmond's airport in an attempt to get home this past Wednesday.  Of course, this was when the ice storm hit -- our Delta flight to LGA was cancelled, then they put us onto a US Airways flight to LGA (this was a little scary, because it certainly seemed that the Delta ticket agent was now officially making us Somebody Else's Problem), which was cancelled, then US Airways sent us back to Delta, which put us onto a flight to JFK.  Then our original flight showed up on the monitors again, right as Delta cancelled our JFK flight and booked us on a 7pm flight to LGA.  When I observed to a Delta ticket agent that incorrect information on the monitors (several other flights that had been cancelled were still showing up as "On Time") was worse than no information at all, her response was to agree with me and turn off the monitors. (!)   

They told us that the 7pm flight was going to be cancelled as well, so I had them book us on a 10:45am flight the next morning.  But my frustration point was rapidly approaching (I understand it when gate/ticket agents don't necessarily know everything -- they have a tough job.  But don't lie to me or blow smoke), so I called Amtrak and found that we could get two seats on a train to New York that left in an hour.  So then all we had to do was extract a refund from Delta (which was surprisingly easy to do, barring the fifteen-minute wait on hold), extract our bags from same (from a harried but very helpful and sympathetic baggage agent), dash via taxi to the train station, and get on the train.  Seven and a half hours later, we were home.  And the unused portions of our Delta tickets paid for the train fare, and the taxi was cheaper than a motel would have been, so we actually came out ahead, which was good.

So...then a couple of days at work, and then two solid days of not doing much worth noting here.  Nice.  Last night, B. returned from Connecticut, and I roasted a chicken.  We had it with a nice salad and a bottle of the Trader Joe's 2006 Vintage Ale (made by Unibroue, and incredibly good when you consider it's $4.99 a bottle), and watched Copy Goes Here and some other short films from the nice and ultra-cool folks at Coudal Partners (sent to me when I won their Friday Drink Links contest by submitting the recipe to a Corpse Reviver No. 2.)

And now I'm off to celebrate our Presidents by earning some dead ones, and heading to work.

Hit "pause" for a moment, and remember the inventor of the remote control.

Sky-Blue Winglet, originally uploaded by Vidiot.

As alluded to below, I've been doing a lot of travel this week. Got home late last night and I hope to start posting more.

Blogging's already sparse, but about to get even sparser -- family events, alluded to in the title, will have me on the road for quite a bit of the next week.  (LGA-DCA-ORD-MKE-ORD-BWI-western MD-eastern WV-RIC-LGA.)

Neat article in today's Times about what happens to all those "SUPER BOWL CHAMPION" T-shirts and hats...that are made for the losing teams.

Do you know your jughandle from your Michigan left?

Panorama: Manhattan, originally uploaded by Vidiot.

I see (in the Times) that the Panorama of the City of New York at the Queens Museum is re-opening on Sunday. This will be most welcome; I always enjoy dragging my out-of-town visitors to check out the city this way. You get a sense of the sheer scale of the place, and just how much of the city is taken up by the oft-dismissed outer boroughs.

This new "multimedia presentation" (I guess it's an updated version of the old son et lumière presentations) sounds pretty cheesy. Hopefully it won't interfere with the simple joys of gazing out over the entire city and picking out your favorite locations. What is it about models that's so appealing? Dollhouses, model train sets, fake tilt-shift photography, Matchbox cars, Bourton-on-the-Water...there's something quite satisfying about regarding a miniaturized version of the familiar.