Product placement

My Dell's a sad animal, although using a different power cord helps. Today I very nearly got a MacBook, but indecision followed by confusion on the part of a credit card company have postponed this slightly. To compensate, I went to Joe, the coffee place near campus that I'd read in "Time Out" makes a great granita. But while Joe was still open, the granita machine was done for the day. To compensate for this failed attempt at compensation, I headed over to Citarella, the nearest gourmet food store, and bought a lot of completely unnecessary cheese. Insert obligatory "it's a hard life" comment here.

In other news from the vibrant area around West 4th Street, there's a sign up at the Barnes and Noble for Mireille Giuliano's latest oeuvre, French Women for All Seasons, which Will Baude criticizes but is more generous with than I imagine I'd be with the book if I were to read it. Seems Giuliano remains convinced that French women have the secret to thinness, and that this secret lies in their philosophy of eating, not in the fact that Paris is one big smoke-filled boutique where an American "zero" is the largest size available.