Adventure is just bad planning. - Roald Admundsen

Got tu Have a Primer to Get '[title of show]' By ERIK PIEPENBURG

August 24, 2008
Theater
Got tu Have a Primer to Get '[title of show]' By ERIK PIEPENBURG

Correction Appended

WHEN Tom Stoppard's mammoth trilogy "The Coast of Utopia" played at Lincoln Center Theater in 2006, it was the snob hit of the year. Like many of Mr. Stoppard's plays it required of the viewer substantial intellectual agility; a certain fluency in Russian history, literature and philosophy helped, too. So to aid in understanding the rush of names being thrown around by Mr. Stoppard's historical characters, many sought out "Russian Thinkers," the 1978 collection of essays by Isaiah Berlin, which became so popular during the trilogy's early run that it virtually disappeared from the city's bookstores.

The idiosyncratic, meta-minded musical "[title of show]" may not match "The Coast of Utopia" as a snob hit. But the show, which opened on Broadway last month at the Lyceum Theater, has its own rich lexicon of insider jokes and obscure references — about musical theater lore instead of the 19th-century Russian intelligentsia. Where Mr. Stoppard tossed around names like Turgenev, Herzen and Belinsky, the creators and two of the co-stars of "[title of show]" — Hunter Bell and Jeff Bowen — ask of their audiences a familiarity with flopsicals, Broadway gypsies and Gen X miscellany. Mamie Duncan-Gibbs? "Got tu Go Disco"? Shields and Yarnell? Anyone?

To ensure that no reference goes unappreciated, Mr. Bell and Mr. Bowen agreed to sit down and do for "[title of show]" what Isaiah Berlin's book did for "Utopia": create a cheat sheet for audiences not quite so in the know, explaining some of the names and shows that crop up during the musical. A home video of the young Hunter Bell performing a short play called "A Puzzling Obsession" in a relative's basement about 1981 can be found at left, along with links to the original reviews in The New York Times of the shows mentioned. ERIK PIEPENBURG

The People

MARY STOUT

A steadily employed actress who has done dinner theater, Disney voice-overs and practically everything else theatrical; Broadway credits include "Jane Eyre," "Beauty and the Beast" and "My Favorite Year."

Hunter Bell: "I think of her as the consummate Broadway character actress. She came onto the radar because, unfortunately, she was struck by a hot dog cart in the city. ... She was there on our opening night. She's an awesome talent. I like that she's game to be in the show."

DEE HOTY

Starred in the 1994 Broadway flop "The Best Little Whorehouse Goes Public" (the sequel to "The Best Little Whorehouse in Texas"), which ran for 16 performances. Received a Tony Award nomination for her performance, as well as nominations for her performances in "The Will Rogers Follies" (1991) and "Footloose" (1999).

Mr. Bell: This is an example of "when amazing performances are in shows that may not last very long; Dee Hoty is a rock star."

DINAH MANOFF

Lee Grant's daughter; won a 1980 Tony Award for best featured actress for her performance in Neil Simon's play "I Ought to Be in Pictures." Also played Marty Maraschino in the film version of "Grease" and on television played the roles of Elaine Lefkowitz-Dallas on "Soap" and Carol Weston on "Empty Nest."

ROMA TORRE

News anchor and theater critic on NY1 News, New York City's 24-hour local news channel.

Jeff Bowen: "My character's ambitions are all the way from being in the Macy's Thanksgiving Day Parade, a big Broadway thing, to meeting Roma Torre, a really specific thing that only Broadway people would get to do. It means something to the character."

MAMIE DUNCAN-GIBBS

Broadway gypsy who has worked with Liza Minnelli in "Steppin' Out at Radio City Music Hall" and Gregory Hines in "Jelly's Last Jam"; Broadway credits include "Kiss Me, Kate," "Chicago" and "Cats." Also works as the executive and artistic director of Youth Theater Interactions, an after-school performing arts group in Westchester County.

Mr. Bell: "That one is kind of intentionally obscure. In the scene, these guys are flying over New York, and they see the Naked Cowboy, Red Lobster, everything that everyone knows. Then Hunter gets excited because he sees Mamie Duncan-Gibbs, and Jeff calls him out on it. But she is beautiful, sassy and super talented."

Mr. Bowen: "If you're going to pick one gypsy that probably everybody on Broadway has either worked with or knows or has respect for, grab Mamie Duncan-Gibbs."

SHIELDS AND YARNELL

Mime/comedy duo best known for their television appearances in the late 1970s; hosted their own television variety show on CBS in 1977. Starred in the Broadway flop "Broadway Follies," which opened and closed on March 15, 1981.

Mr. Bell: "If they went into a pitch meeting at CBS and were like, 'We're two mimes and we do a seven-minute piece in the Oval Office about pouring coffee for the president,' I can't imagine CBS would be like, 'Get the contract out.' Yet they had variety specials, they were on 'The Muppet Show' and on 'The Carol Burnett Show.' [Pause] They were mimes, for god's sake. ...They affected our world. A Shields and Yarnell variety show? That shouldn't happen at all. '[title of show]' shouldn't happen at all, yet here we are."

The Shows

"BAGELS AND YOX" (1951)

Synopsis: A Yiddish-flavored music, comedy and dance revue.

Fact: Ran for more performances than the Broadway revival of "Oklahoma!" the same year.

Times review: " 'Bagels and Yox' maintains an even level of noisy mediocrity."

Number of performances: 208

Mr. Bowen: "It was one of those borscht belt humor revues that were big in the '50s, kind of vaudeville style. 'Borscht Capades' was another one that was around at the time."

"KWAMINA" (1961)

Synopsis: A white American doctor falls in love with a black tribal leader in Africa.

Fact: Richard Adler ("Damn Yankees") wrote the music and lyrics, and Agnes de Mille created the choreography.

Times review: "There is a fiery theatricalism in the deployment of this company made up largely of Negroes."

Number of performances: 32

Mr. Bowen: "It was a biracial coupling, happening in the mid-'60s, which was pretty risqué. 'No Strings' was happening at the same time, but that was a black woman and a white man. I read a lot about those shows and how at the time it was somehow more acceptable for a white man to be with a black woman than it was for a white woman to be with a black man. Not that that's any reason why the show may have closed or not. It has a beautiful score."

"HENRY, SWEET HENRY" (1967)

Synopsis: Two wealthy teenage girls stalk a philandering composer; based on the book and film adaptation of "The World of Henry Orient."

Fact: Bob Merrill ("Carnival!") wrote the music and lyrics, and Michael Bennett was the choreographer.

Times review: "For Mr. Merrill to write a musical like this is tantamount to Karlheinz Stockhausen's trying to compose in the style of Mendelssohn."

Number of performances: 80

Mr. Bowen: "For a lot of people who became big in the '70s, it was their gypsy show of the late '60s."

"GOT TU GO DISCO" (1979)

Synopsis: "It was about disco and having to go do that," Mr. Bowen said. "That's about it."

Fact: Irene Cara made her last Broadway appearance in this show, one year before skyrocketing to "Fame."

Times review: "The dancing, the music and the performances ... may well recreate what is to be found in discos. But that is just the trouble."

Number of performances: 8

Mr. Bowen: "The story I remember is that they couldn't afford to pay to load the set out, so it sat at the Minskoff Theater for a very long time. And I want to say the marquee was up for a really long time. It has a really great logo, like a messy paint thing that's really active. I love that about it."

"RUTHLESS!" (1992)

Synopsis: Spoof about a little girl hellbent on becoming a star.

Fact: The original Off Broadway cast featured Laura Bundy (now Laura Bell Bundy, formerly of "Legally Blonde: The Musical") and, as understudies, Britney Spears and Natalie Portman.

Times review: A "campy musical farce that will do almost anything for a laugh."

Number of performances: 342

Mr. Bell: "I never saw it, but I fully have an opinion about it."

Correction: August 31, 2008
An article last Sunday about Broadway trivia that is referenced in the musical "[title of show]" referred incorrectly to Pia Zadora's appearance in "Henry, Sweet Henry" (1967). It was her third role on Broadway, not her first. (She made her Broadway debut in the short-lived 1961 run of "Midgie Purvis.")

http://www.nytimes.com/2008/08/24/theater/24intropiepenburg.html?sq=Got%20tu%20have%20a%20primer&st=cse&scp=1&pagewanted=print

http://snipurl.com/7sju4

Oliphant Political Cartoon

Forrmer Russian States: Caspian Sea (Georgia, Armenia, Azerbaijan, Kazakhstan, Uzbekistan, Turkmenistan, Tajikistan, Kyrgystan

A Taste for the Natural, and Celestial By VIVIEN SCHWEITZER

August 17, 2008
Music
A Taste for the Natural, and Celestial By VIVIEN SCHWEITZER

OLIVIER MESSIAEN, the visionary French composer who died in 1992, experienced a form of synesthesia, sensing colors when he heard certain sounds or harmonies. Much of his music can certainly have a synesthetic effect on the listener, who during the third movement of "Des Canyons aux Étoiles" ("From the Canyons to the Stars," 1971-74) might imagine multicolored paintballs exploding against a white canvas in a Jackson Pollock-like frenzy.

This glittering 12-movement orchestral suite was inspired by Messiaen's 1972 visit to southern Utah and commissioned by the patron Alice Tully in honor of the American bicentennial. It is included in a six-CD boxed set of recordings of works from different periods of his life, originally released on Montaigne and now reissued on the Naïve label in honor of the Messiaen centenary.

Messiaen, a practicing Roman Catholic, described "Des Canyons" as "an act of praise and contemplation" that "contains all the colors of the rainbow." A composer with a distaste for cities, he was deeply interested in the cosmic, the religious and the natural worlds. Nature, he said, "never displays anything in bad taste." He had a particular fascination with birds, which he called "the earth's first musicians," and this ornithological obsession manifested itself in the transcriptions of bird songs that feature prominently in many of his works. In "Des Canyons," he represents varieties of orioles with piano, xylorimba and woodwinds.

Reinbert de Leeuw and the Schoenberg Ensemble evoke the striking canyon panoramas with energy and finesse. Marja Bon, a pianist, makes impressive contributions, as does Hans Dullaert in a haunting horn solo. The musicians bring the requisite awe to the finale, "Zion Park and the Celestial City," which intersperses an ecstatic brass chorale with bird song and conjures a blinding sunrise with a triumphant A major chord of shimmering strings. A peak in Utah was later named Mount Messiaen.

The other major work here is the luminous "Transfiguration de Notre Seigneur Jésus-Christ" (1965-69), a majestic piece for large choir and orchestra and seven instrumental soloists. Mr. de Leeuw leads the Netherlands Radio Symphony Orchestra and Choir and the Brussels BRTN Choir.

Based on texts from Thomas Aquinas, the Gospels and the Latin liturgy, the composition reflects Messiaen's many musical influences (among them, Debussy, Indonesian gamelan and Greek and Indian rhythms) and his stylistic trademarks (frenzied, rhythmically complex outbursts, kaleidoscopic and exotic percussion, modal harmonies, lyrical interludes and dramatic chord clusters). The fiendishly virtuosic piano writing is played excitingly here by Yvonne Loriod, Messiaen's second wife.

There is plenty of bird song intertwined with the transcendent music of "Transfiguration," from calm melodies to the almost cacophonous "Candor Est Lucis Aeternae," in which it sounds as if rival bird gangs were battling it out with one another and the singers. The ensembles sound luminous in movements like "Choral de la Sainte Montagne" and "Choral de la Lumière de Gloire." The choruses sing their plainsong-inspired music with passionate solemnity, and the soloists and vast orchestral forces illuminate the complex score's myriad colors with fervent devotion.

The almost dizzying palette of "Sept Haïkaï" (1962), inspired by a visit to Japan, is brilliantly illuminated by Pierre Boulez (a student of Messiaen, whose pupils also included Karlheinz Stockhausen and the English composer George Benjamin), the Ensemble Intercontemporain and Ms. Loriod.

Messiaen's sensation of colors was integral to "Sept Haïkaï," in which he described particular sonorities representing varying hues, like the "green of the Japanese pines, the white and gold of the Shinto temple." It also inspired "Couleurs de la Cité Céleste" (1963), a work for piano and small orchestra in which Messiaen musically expresses his vision that "the light of the city was like crystalline jasper." The musical brushstrokes are conveyed by Ms. Loriod and the ensemble, who also vividly explore the intricacies of "Oiseaux Exotiques" (1955-56) and "Un Vitrail et des Oiseaux" (1986). These performances were recorded live at a 1988 concert celebrating Messiaen's 80th birthday at the Théâtre des Champs-Élysées in Paris.

The boxed set also includes "Visions de l'Amen" (1943), a piano duo that hints of the marvels to come in "Vingt Regards sur l'Enfant-Jésus," the mammoth solo work Messiaen wrote the next year for Ms. Loriod. "Visions" is performed here with sensitivity and startling muscularity by Maarten Bon and Mr. de Leeuw. The final movement sounds as though hundreds of bells were pealing simultaneously over the playing of a jubilant organist.

Messiaen, whose prose was as colorful as his music, described those moments as evoking "the entire rainbow of the precious stones of the Apocalypse ringing, clinking, dancing, coloring and perfuming the light of life."

http://www.nytimes.com/2008/08/17/arts/music/17schw.html?sq=Taste%20Natural%20Celestial&st=cse&scp=1&pagewanted=print

http://snipurl.com/7sjxh

At School, Technology Starts to Turn a Corner

August 17, 2008
Essay
At School, Technology Starts to Turn a Corner
By STEVE LOHR
COUNT me a technological optimist, but I have always thought that the people who advocate putting computers in classrooms as a way to transform education were well intentioned but wide of the mark. It’s not the problem, and it’s not the answer.
Yet as a new school year begins, the time may have come to reconsider how large a role technology can play in changing education. There are promising examples, both in the United States and abroad, and they share some characteristics. The ratio of computers to pupils is one to one. Technology isn’t off in a computer lab. Computing is an integral tool in all disciplines, always at the ready.
Web-based education software has matured in the last few years, so that students, teachers and families can be linked through networks. Until recently, computing in the classroom amounted to students doing Internet searches, sending e-mail and mastering word processing, presentation programs and spreadsheets. That’s useful stuff, to be sure, but not something that alters how schools work.
The new Web education networks can open the door to broader changes. Parents become more engaged because they can monitor their children’s attendance, punctuality, homework and performance, and can get tips for helping them at home. Teachers can share methods, lesson plans and online curriculum materials.
In the classroom, the emphasis can shift to project-based learning, a real break with the textbook-and-lecture model of education. In a high school class, a project might begin with a hypothetical letter from the White House that says oil prices are spiking, the economy is faltering and the president’s poll numbers are falling. The assignment would be to devise a new energy policy in two weeks. The shared Web space for the project, for example, would include the White House letter, the sources the students must consult, their work plan and timetable, assignments for each student, the assessment criteria for their grades and, eventually, the paper the team delivers. Oral presentations would be required.
The project-based approach, some educators say, encourages active learning and produces better performance in class and on standardized tests.
The educational bottom line, it seems, is that while computer technology has matured and become more affordable, the most significant development has been a deeper understanding of how to use the technology.
“Unless you change how you teach and how kids work, new technology is not really going to make a difference,” said Bob Pearlman, a former teacher who is the director of strategic planning for the New Technology Foundation, a nonprofit organization.
The foundation, based in Napa, Calif., has developed a model for project-based teaching and is at the forefront of the drive for technology-enabled reform of education. Forty-two schools in nine states are trying the foundation’s model, and their numbers are growing rapidly.
Behind the efforts, of course, are concerns that K-12 public schools are falling short in preparing students for the twin challenges of globalization and technological change. Worries about the nation’s future competitiveness led to the creation in 2002 of the Partnership for 21st Century Skills, a coalition whose members include the Department of Education and technology companies like Apple, Cisco Systems, Dell and Microsoft.
The government-industry partnership identifies a set of skills that mirror those that the New Technology Foundation model is meant to nurture. Those skills include collaboration, systems thinking, self-direction and communication, both online and in person.
State officials in Indiana took a look at the foundation’s model and offered travel grants for local teachers and administrators to visit its schools in California. Sally Nichols, an English teacher, came away impressed and signed up for the new project-based teaching program at her school, Decatur Central High School in Indianapolis.
Last year, Ms. Nichols and another teacher taught a biology and literature class for freshmen. (Cross-disciplinary courses are common in the New Technology model.) Typically, half of freshmen fail biology, but under the project-based model the failure rate was cut in half.
“There’s a lot of ownership by the kids in their work instead of teachers lecturing and being the givers of all knowledge,” Ms. Nichols explained. “The classes are just much more alive. They don’t sleep in class.”
IN Indiana, the number of schools using the foundation model will increase to six this year, and an additional dozen communities have signed up for the next year, said David Shane, a member of the state board of education. “It’s caught fire in Indiana, and we’ve got to have this kind of education to prepare our young people for the future in a global economy that is immersed in technology.”
The extra cost for schools that have adopted the New Technology model is about $1,000 per student a year, once a school is set up, says Mr. Pearlman of the foundation. After the first three years, the extra cost should decline considerably, he said.
In England, where the government has promoted technology in schools for a decade, the experiment with technology-driven change in education is further along.
Five years ago, the government gave computers to students at two schools in high-crime neighborhoods in Birmingham. For the students, a Web-based portal is the virtual doorway for assignments, school social activities, online mentoring, discussion groups and e-mail. Even students who are suspended from school for a few days beg not to lose their access to the portal, says Sir Mark Grundy, 49, the executive principal of Shireland Collegiate Academy and the George Salter Collegiate Academy. Today, the schools are among the top in the nation in yearly improvements in students’ performance in reading and math tests.
Sir Mark says he is convinced that advances in computing, combined with improved understanding of how to tailor the technology to different students, can help transform education.
“This is the best Trojan horse for causing change in schools that I have ever seen,” he said.

Basics: The Record of Your Life as a Digital Archive By ERIC A. TAUB

The New York Times
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August 16, 2007
Basics
The Record of Your Life as a Digital Archive
By ERIC A. TAUB

WHEN Hurricane Katrina hit New Orleans, Karen Duncan was ordered to leave her uptown neighborhood.

Among the possessions that Ms. Duncan, a lawyer, and her family took on their evacuation to Mississippi and later to Baton Rouge were two large trunks, filled not with clothes, but with the stacks of paper that recorded their life: photographs, birth certificates and their dog’s immunization records.

“This is not going to happen again,” Ms. Duncan said. “The next time, I’m carrying a digital flash drive — not trunks — loaded with my pictures.”

Ms. Duncan, like millions of other Americans, has her feet firmly straddled across two technologies: embracing the new digital era but still hanging on to the paper records of the fast-disappearing analog age.

There are many reasons to digitize one’s precious records and store them on a PC: to preserve them from aging, to make multiple copies that can be kept in separate places, and to create multimedia slide shows, perhaps to show future generations.

Digitizing records, whether documents, old photographs, or favorite LPs, “preserves history and lets people tell their stories,” said Mark Cook, marketing director for Kodak Gallery, a Web site that stores consumer photographs.

“People want to use their content with today’s tools, like iPhoto and YouTube,” to create new forms of entertainment, Mr. Cook said.

Today, virtually any traditional document, movie or musical recording can be inexpensively and rapidly digitized and stored on a hard drive. And for those who do not want to spend the time, low-cost commercial services will do the job for you.

DOCUMENTS AND PHOTOGRAPHS So-called all-in-one printers have become the norm, with machines that print, scan and handle faxes available for under $100.

Optical character recognition software, included with such devices, will recognize printed text and convert it into a form that can be edited by a word processing program.

Photographs can be scanned and saved in the JPEG format at resolutions of at least 1,200 dots per inch. Once in a PC, software like Adobe Photoshop Elements ($80 for the Mac version; $100 for the PC version) can enhance faded colors, remove scratches and crop the image, just as with pictures shot with a digital camera.

Hewlett-Packard’s all-in-one printers can scan in one pass as many photographs as will fit on the scanning tray, then save them as separate images.

Epson’s Perfection 4490 ($350) includes a 30-page document feeder and scans up to three black-and-white pages a minute; it also scans 35 millimeter slides, negatives and photographs.

H.P.’s Scanjet G4050 ($200) scans up to 16 slides or 30 negatives simultaneously, and saves them as separate files. It does not, however, include an automatic sheet feeder for documents.

A number of services will do the conversions for you, either at storefronts or by mail, like Scanmyphotos.com. For those who are concerned about letting their precious memories out of sight, Kodak offers batch digitizing of photographs and other documents through its ScanVan, a vehicle that is currently on tour in the Eastern United States.

HOME MOVIES The simplest way to digitize those shoeboxes full of Super 8 movies is to use the technique perfected by movie pirates: project the image on a white wall, set up a digital camcorder on a tripod, and then shoot the film.

This is one case where you won’t get the best results if you make it a do-it-yourself project. The different frame rates of movie film and a camcorder could cause annoying flickering of the final image. Send your movies to a commercial transfer service like Audio Video Memories (audiovideomemories.com), Digital Transfer Systems (digitaltransfersystems.net), and Just8mm.com that uses a telecine machine, a much more sophisticated version of the same home technique.

Movies arrive back on DVDs, ready to be imported into the PC for editing with a program like Apple’s iMovie ($79, part of iLife ’08) for Macs, or for PCs, Adobe Premiere Elements 3.0 ($100).

VHS TAPES To transfer VHS footage, which is analog, into a computer, the PC needs to receive the data digitally. One way to check if your PC is so equipped to do that is to look at the computer’s ports. If it has the familiar RCA inputs — the yellow, white, and red connectors — then it most likely is analog ready.

If not, analog images must first be converted to the digital format. To do so, combination VHS/DVD player/recorders are one of the simplest ways to get your home movies off your aging video tapes and onto more permanent DVDs. Available from Panasonic, Sony and others, prices start at under $200.

Alternatively, connect a stand-alone VHS player to a DVD recorder to make a digital copy.

VHS tapes can also be recorded onto a computer’s hard drive by plugging the VCR’s output cable into a digital camcorder that offers a “pass through” mode (most do). The signal is digitized within the camcorder, and then passed on to the PC’s hard drive.

Sony’s $229 VRD-MC5 is specifically made to record DVD copies of VHS tapes, or recordings from any camcorder or digital video recorder, without using a PC. VCRs and camcorders are plugged into the device, which resembles a portable DVD deck.

If you do not own a camcorder or DVD recorder, but you have loads of valuable tapes, consider an intermediary conversion product, such as the DAC-200 ($184; synchrotech.com); Dazzle Hollywood DV Bridge ($300; omegamultimedia.com), and VHS to DVD 3.0 ($80; honestech.com). Each product includes hardware and software that converts analog signals to digital,.

LPS, EIGHT-TRACKS, AND CASSETTES Getting your old Country Joe and the Fish albums into your PC is one of the easiest conversions to do, according to Tom Merritt, executive editor of CNetTV.com.

Assuming you still have a phonograph turntable (or eight-track or cassette deck) and it is not the console type from the 1950s or earlier, plug the audio output from the turntable’s amplifier/receiver into the minimike port found on virtually all home computers.

While commercial audio editing software is available, Mr. Merritt recommends installing Audacity (audacity.sourceforge.net), a free program available for Macs, PCs and Linux/Unix machines that will manage the files, convert them into a specific format (for example, WAV or MP3), and remove clicks and crackles.

For those who value their time more than the fun of connecting cables and reading manuals, there are plenty of commercial companies happy to do the converting for you. Cassettes2CDs.com will convert audio and video tapes, LPs and 45s to digital format, storing the data on a CD, DVD or MP3 format for iPod use. The company does not handle 78 r.p.m. records, reel-to-reel or eight-track tapes.

If the thought of gathering up boxes full of photographs or phonograph records to digitize is daunting, here is one other compelling thought: your treasured memories will be in a digital format that can still be easily converted to the next video and audio formats that will invariably show up in the coming years.

State of the Art: Your Photos, Off the Shelf at Last By DAVID POGUE

The New York Times
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August 14, 2008
State of the Art
Your Photos, Off the Shelf at Last
By DAVID POGUE

A recipe for Toxic Photo Soup: Layer 1,000 photos in a large, watertight plastic storage tub. Place high on basement shelving unit. Fail to notice small, leaky basement window nearby. Marinate, unattended, three to four years. Open and serve.

Yield: 1,000 blank sheets of sopping photo paper and four gallons of black, stinky, toxic rainwater-chemical soup.

That’s a recipe for disaster. And it’s exactly what happened to the entire photographic record of my wife’s college and med school years. To this day, I have no idea what she looked like back then. For all I know, she could have had an eye patch and a mohawk.

The horrible discovery of her liquefied photo collection underlines two important points about photographic prints. First, they’re generally precious and one of a kind. You can easily lose them forever to fire, flood, misfiling, carelessness or divorce.

Second, most of them are sitting, at this moment, in boxes someplace where nobody ever looks at them. Is that really the proper fate for a photo?

Digital photos, of course, are another story. They can be instantly and inexpensively duplicated a million times, stored in lots of different places, stashed online, sent around to relatives. And the modern world of screen savers, slide show software, digital frames, DVD burners, photo books and other digital products make it infinitely easier to show your pictures — which, you could argue, is the whole point of having them.

So if you, like millions before you, have a collection of prints somewhere, it’s probably crossed your mind that they really ought to be scanned — converted into digital files, both for protection and for ease of displaying. In that case, you, like millions before you, have probably even decided when you’ll do all that scanning: someday.

Because let’s face it: scanning hundreds or thousands of photos yourself, one at a time, on a home scanner, is a time drain the size of the Grand Canyon.

You could send them away to a company that does the scanning, but that’s incredibly expensive; most charge 50 cents or even $1 a photo.

You’d be forgiven, then, for raising an eyebrow at the offer made by a California company called ScanMyPhotos.com. It says it will professionally scan 1,000 photos for you, the same day it receives them, and put them on a DVD for $50.

So what’s the catch?

Actually, no catch, but lots of fine print.

ScanMyPhotos relies on a certain commercial Kodak scanning machine, which processes hundreds of photos a minute. There’s no reason other companies couldn’t buy the same machine and set up similar services. Indeed, some have, although most charge 12 to 16 cents a photo, compared with the 5-cent ScanMyPhotos rate.

Because it must feed your photos through this machine, ScanMyPhotos has set some rules. Photo sizes can range from 3 by 3 inches (Polaroids) to 11 by 14.

The photos must be put into similar-size bundles (4-by-6 prints together, for example) with rubber bands. The only way to label the batches is to write on index cards, which are scanned along with the photos like title cards. If you want the bundles scanned in a certain sequence, you can number the index cards.

The photos can’t be in albums or scrapbooks. That’s understandable, but it can be heart-wrenching to have to dismantle photo albums that somebody once spent a lot of time and effort creating.

Your photos can’t be in envelopes, either. For my test, I submitted about 20 years’ worth of pictures. (I found out later that there were more than 1,800 in all. I had no idea it was that many; those bundles look deceptively small.) They came from dozens of drugstore envelopes, meaning that I had to separate them from their negatives, probably forever, given that matching 1,800 prints with their original envelopes would take the rest of my life. And my descendants’.

The photos are scanned exactly as you send them. If one is upside down or backward, that’s how it winds up on the DVD. Similarly, you’re supposed to ensure that all horizontal photos are upright, and all vertical photos are consistently rotated 90 degrees the same way.

Finally, you pack your bundles into a box, stuffing it carefully to avoid shifting.

The company’s Web site offers copious photos of the right and wrong ways to pack up your pictures. The bottom line is, ScanMyPhotos will do the scanning. But you have to do the prep work, and it’s not insubstantial.

Fortunately, the results are well worth it. The company ships your original photos back to you by Priority Mail (two or three days), complete with a nicely custom-labeled DVD. It contains standard 300-dots-per-inch JPEG photo files, ready for copying to your computer. There’s no option to get TIFF files instead, and the JPEG files are moderately compressed to fit the disc. In other words, these are not scans suitable for billboards.

Still, the scans look very good — not as sharp as digital photos, but pretty much what you’d expect of scanned ones (you can see samples at nytimes.com/personaltech).

ScanMyPhotos probably isn’t getting rich by charging only $50 for 1,000 photos. Clearly, the real money is in the optional services, some of which are ingenious and nearly irresistible.

For example, for $125, the company will send you a preaddressed shipping box that holds 1,600 photos (4 by 6); the price includes scanning and prepaid shipping both ways. If you buy two, you get a third box free, making the deal, when you consider postage, even better than the $50 offer.

For $65 per thousand photos, the company will go through all your pictures and rotate them into the correct orientation. For $10, you can order a second copy of the DVD. For $20, the company will set up a custom Web site that displays your photos for 30 days. For $50, it will color-correct your photos, a process that works best on old, faded ones. For another $50 per thousand, it’ll scan the backs of your photos too, so you won’t lose your grandmother’s precious annotations.

And for $60 per thousand photos, you can order a hardbound, custom-printed book containing every single scanned picture; the company even rotates the vertical shots upright for you. The layout is not fancy — the pictures are small and numbered — but in my family, this book was a huge hit. (“Yes, children, it’s true. We had weird hair back then.”)

The company can also scan slides or negatives, scan at resolutions greater than 300 dpi, and even convert VHS tapes to DVDs. But there are plenty of other companies that can do these jobs; ScanMyPhotos’ price isn’t anything special. Nor is its Web site, by the way; its plentiful typos and clashing fonts may cause involuntary browser closing in some patients.

But don’t be dissuaded, and don’t underestimate the emotional component of this service. There’s the joy (or shock) of unearthing all those photos and showing them to people who’ve never seen them, and there’s the immense comfort of knowing that they’re all digitized and easily backed up.

There is also, however, the terror of sending away your valuable photographs. ScanMyPhotos asserts that it has scanned more than eight million customer photos, and has never lost or damaged a single one. But there’s always a first time; consider the fate of DigMyPics.com, a rival company. In May, a fire burned its headquarters to the ground, destroying almost everything inside — including some customers’ original photos.

Yet there’s a risk of doing nothing, too. Photos kept in a dry, cool and dark place don’t deteriorate nearly as quickly as audiotape, videotape and film reels. In fact, properly stored, they can last a century or more. But because photos are still susceptible to a wide variety of destructive or negligent forces, the ScanMyPhotos service could turn out to be the best $50, plus shipping and optional services, you’ll ever spend.

E-mail: pogue@nytimes.com

The Wrong Force for the 'Right War' By BARTLE BREESE BULL

August 14, 2008
Op-Ed Contributor
The Wrong Force for the 'Right War' By BARTLE BREESE BULL

London

BARACK OBAMA and John McCain have plenty of disagreements, but one thing they are united on is promising a troop surge in Afghanistan. Senator McCain wants to move troops to Afghanistan from the Middle East, conditional on continued progress in Iraq. Senator Obama goes much further, arguing that we should have sent last year's surge to Afghanistan, not Iraq, that Afghanistan is the "central front" and that we must rebuild Afghanistan from the bottom up along the lines of the Marshall Plan.

Defense Secretary Robert Gates is on board, too. He has endorsed a $20 billion plan to increase substantially the size of Afghanistan's army, as well as the role and numbers of Western troops there to aid it. Polls show that nearly 60 percent of Americans agree with the idea of an Afghan surge. A recent Time magazine cover anointed the fighting there as "The Right War."

But what are the real prospects for turning fractious, impoverished Afghanistan into an orderly and prosperous nation and a potential ally of the United States? What true American interests are being insufficiently advanced or defended in its remote deserts and mountains? And even if these interests are really so broad, are they deliverable at an acceptable price? The answers to these questions put the wisdom of an Afghan surge into great question.

Destroying the Taliban regime after 9/11 was just and rational. And it was done in an effective and proportionate manner: over just six weeks in late 2001, with several hundred American special operatives on the ground, American air support and our allies in the Northern Alliance.

Since then, however, the mission has grown. Today there are 71,000 NATO troops in Afghanistan, yet things are getting ever worse. There were 10 times as many armed attacks on international troops and civilian contractors in 2007 as there were in 2004. Every other measure of violence, from roadside bombs to suicide bombers, is also up dramatically. Our principal ally at the beginning of the war, the Northern Alliance, controlled more of the country at the end of 2001 than President Hamid Karzai, our current principal ally, effectively controls today.

The United States must certainly punish those who attack it and those who give sanctuary to such people. This is why the Afghan war has always had popular support. But our initial goals — dethroning the Taliban and disrupting Al Qaeda — have been as thoroughly accomplished as is possible given the porous frontier that Afghanistan shares with Pakistan.

Thus the creeping mission in Afghanistan has fed on a perception of four further American interests: the denial of sanctuary to global terrorists; the projection of American power in a sensitive part of the world; support for modernity in the global struggle for the Muslim mind; and cutting heroin exports. Each needs careful reconsideration.

Denying sanctuary to terrorists — in Afghanistan and everywhere else — is undoubtedly an American interest of the first order. Accomplishing it, however, requires neither the conquest of large swathes of Afghan territory nor a troop surge there — nor even maintaining the number of troops NATO has in Afghanistan today. Counterterrorism is not about occupation. It centers on combining intelligence with specialized military capabilities.

While the Taliban is certainly regaining strength, it could provide Al Qaeda with a true safe harbor only if its troops retake Kabul. But they have little hope of returning to power as long as we train the Afghan Army, support an Afghan state generously in other ways and maintain our intelligence and surgical strike capacities.

Besides, even if the Taliban were to return to power and give Al Qaeda the sorts of safe havens it enjoyed in Afghanistan in 2001, this would probably make little difference in America's security. Rory Stewart, a former British foreign ministry official in Afghanistan and Iraq who now manages a nongovernmental group in Kabul, argues that the existence there of "Quantico-style" terrorist facilities teaching primitive insurgency infantry tactics had little to do with 9/11. "You don't need to go to Afghanistan to learn how to use a box cutter," Stewart has told me. "And Afghanistan is not a good place for flight school."

One could argue that the key Al Qaeda training for 9/11 occurred not in the Taliban's Afghanistan but in Jeb Bush's Florida. And in terms of terrorist planning, 9/11 would have been better avoided with an occupation of Hamburg, where most of the essential plotting for the attack occurred.

In any case, American counterterrorism interests in Afghanistan appear to argue for something far more restrained than our current commitment there, maybe 20,000 Western troops maximum. In the long run, it needs to be seen as the remote, poor and ungovernable country it is, albeit one with a history of ties to Al Qaeda and located next door to Osama bin Laden's current base of operations, Pakistan. Still, a very light American presence operating through embassies and aid organizations should be able to collect the intelligence needed to allow special forces to eliminate terrorist threats as they appear.

So much for counterterrorism. What about the second reason given for expanding our presence: projecting American power in an unstable area? Yes, maintaining a substantial armed presence in a corner of the world that borders Pakistan and Iran (and, barely, China) is undoubtedly valuable. But all that is needed to achieve this is an airfield at our disposal, enough special forces troops nearby to achieve limited military goals and a complaisant government in Kabul. Besides, it is unclear why Afghanistan is the necessary partner in this; the United States already has safer, less expensive and strategically more important basing arrangements elsewhere in inner Asia, as in Uzbekistan and Mongolia.

As for the broader struggle toward a modern and healthy Islam, Afghanistan's global importance is negligible. It is a backwater of the Muslim faith. The Prophet Muhammad and his successors did not conquer or proclaim there. No great Islamic civilization, such as the Baghdad caliphate, was based there. Unlike Iraq, no great saints of Shiism were martyred or buried there. Defeating Wahhabist Sunnism in its Taliban variant is of very little symbolic value.

The last argument for expanding this Afghan war — stopping the poppy growing — is equally weak. Neither presidential candidate has mentioned heroin use as a pressing domestic issue, and there is even less reason it should be a major international one. In any case, our demand for heroin is not the fault of the Afghan peasants who would take the financial hit for our interdiction efforts. Liberal democracies cannot win counterinsurgencies against the wills of local populations, and denying a livelihood to the poor farmers of southern and eastern Afghanistan is no way to persuade Afghans to our side.

For those who remain unconvinced that anything short of ambitiously remaking Afghanistan would imperil America's basic interests, here's the big question: What sort of commitment are you willing to make? Dan McNeil, the American general who was NATO's top commander in Afghanistan until he left in June, said shortly before concluding his tour that according to current American counterinsurgency doctrine, a successful occupation of Afghanistan, which is larger, more complex, more populous and very much less governable than Iraq, would require 400,000 troops.

How many of them would be killed? Except for the initial invasion and the isolated flare-ups in places like Falluja in 2005, Iraq has not been a "hot" war, but a slow-running insurgency. Were we to attempt to pacify all of Afghanistan, on the other hand, however, it would be nothing but heat, as Russia and Britain before us have discovered to their great cost. We're already seeing higher death rates for our troops in Afghanistan than in Iraq. Episodes like the successful escape by more than 1,000 prisoners from a jail in Kandahar in June, or the overrunning of an American outpost by militants near Wanat in July, in which nine Americans were killed and 15 were wounded, have never occurred in Iraq.

The invasion of Afghanistan was a great tactical success and the correct strategic move. Yet since then it seems as if the United States has been trying to turn the conflict into the Vietnam War of the early 21st century. Escalating in Afghanistan to "must-win" status means, according to General McNeil's estimate, deploying three times as many troops as were sent to Iraq at the height of the surge. If Americans really believe — as Senator Obama in particular argues — that Afghanistan is the right war and a place appropriate for Iraq-style nation-building, then they must understand both the cost involved and the remote likelihood of success.

Bartle Breese Bull, the foreign editor of Prospect magazine, is writing a history of Iraq.

http://www.nytimes.com/2008/08/14/opinion/14bull.html?sq=Wrong%20Force%20Right%20War&st=cse&scp=1&pagewanted=print

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The Social Network as a Career Safety Net

August 14, 2008
Basics
The Social Network as a Career Safety Net
By SARAH JANE TRIBBLE
IF you have avoided social-networking sites like LinkedIn and Facebook with the excuse that they are the domain of desperate job hunters or attention-seeking teenagers, it’s time to reconsider.
In a world of economic instability and corporate upheaval, savvy professionals like the technology consultant Josh So epitomize the benefits of brushing up your online image and keeping it polished.
When Mr. So, a 32-year-old from Dublin, Calif., learned he had 45 days to find a new job before his company eliminated his division, he turned to friends online.
Within hours of updating his job status on the social-networking site LinkedIn, Mr. So won four job interviews through his contacts there. Within a week, two of the interviews resulted in offers. And within less than a month, his employer counteroffered with a position in another division and a $25,000 bump in his annual salary.
The old business adage that it’s not what you know but who you know takes a twist in the Internet era: it’s what you know about social-networking sites that can get you ahead.
“Build your own inner circle of people you know are good — people you know will get you places,” Mr. So said.
While it lacks the glamour of more popular sites like MySpace and Facebook, LinkedIn “is the place to be,” said the JupiterResearch media analyst Barry Parr, if you want to make professional contacts online. LinkedIn is a “Chamber of Commerce mixer,” he said.
LinkedIn has more than 25 million members, and it is adding new ones at the rate of 1.2 million a month — or about one new networker every two seconds.
With that kind of mass demographic, LinkedIn is hard to ignore. But with that kind of scale, can it be useful? It can be if you use it judiciously.
LinkedIn is intended to appeal to its average user: the 41-year-old white-collar professional with an income of $109,000 a year. User pages are spare: a brief professional summary, a photo and a résumé.
As you create your network, the site shows you people you may know through past jobs or educational institutions. (Facebook also suggests contacts, but it starts with lists from your e-mail or instant messaging accounts.)
And there is a search function so you can find people you don’t know but would like to — for instance, at a company where you want a job.
You might be shy about calling or e-mailing people you have neglected, but the social-networking sites let you avoid that. You are simply renewing the connection when you add a contact.
Bernard Lunn, a Web technology entrepreneur in New York, describes LinkedIn as the ultimate Rolodex.
“I’m no spring chicken,” said Mr. Lunn, 53. “I’ve been in business for almost 30 years. I had lost touch with a lot of people and had spent time in different industries.”
The Web site did the work of finding people for him, providing a list of likely connections by searching its own database of people who had overlapped with him at past jobs. All Mr. Lunn had to do was review the list and select contacts he wanted to add to his network.
“Some of them are now doing very useful jobs,” he said.
That’s the point. You don’t have to fear you’ll be perceived as using them; they are on the site for the same reason. They might well intend to use you.
Even so, don’t go crazy trying to connect with everyone you brushed past in the hallway 20 years ago, or friends of friends. Too many people can weaken your network.
“We try to discourage promiscuous linking,” said Kay Luo, a spokeswoman for LinkedIn.
But don’t be afraid to network strategically. You want to connect to people who can get you jobs. “People usually invite up — people above them in hierarchy,” said Ms. Luo. “When you’re talking about a professional network, quality is so important.”
So if the No. 1 tactic is to connect with people who are useful and successful, how do you make sure you’re one of their worthy connections? There are a few helpful approaches.
Ask for recommendations. Mr. So, who so quickly parlayed his connections into job offers, said that having updated recommendations with his résumé on LinkedIn was crucial to being noticed.
“The only way to get recommendations is to go out and ask for it,” Mr. So said. “It’s kind of a weird system. I typically go to my bosses and peers and say, ‘Do you mind?’ ”
The flipside of that system is that it behooves you to be generous. Jeremiah K. Owyang, senior analyst at Forrester Research, has watched the growth of online social media since 2005 and advises social-networking users to follow an 80-20 rule. “Give information and answer questions 80 percent of the time, and 20 percent of the time ask for help,” he said.
When a contact asks for a recommendation, write it graciously and promptly. If you think that person isn’t worth a recommendation, think again about being connected to that person.
And remember the other social-networking sites. If LinkedIn is the Chamber of Commerce luncheon, then Facebook is the after-hours party (and MySpace is the all-night rave, which may make trolling for business connections there a bit trying). “Facebook seems a more natural way of communicating,” said Debra Aho Williamson, senior analyst for eMarketer in Seattle. “LinkedIn seems more formal.”
Facebook, which began in 2004 as a way for college students to communicate, has more than 80 million active users. The fastest-growing segment is now those 25 years old and older, according to the company.
The site makes it easy to carry on a casual conversation or ask group questions. The easiest way to use it professionally is to join your employer’s network. And it helps to post interesting links that are relevant to your job.
The site features classified ads in the Facebook Marketplace, and there are job-hunting applications on the site, like Jobster. There are also tools for building a professional profile or online business cards. And you can use one of a handful of applications, liked LinkedIn Contacts, to connect your Facebook profile to LinkedIn.
But the social ease of Facebook makes it easy to look frivolous, all of the experts warned. If you tend to overshare, people in your network will quickly learn about the breakup of your marriage or your love of Jell-O shots. (Facebook now offers fine-tuned privacy settings, on the upper right side of the home page.)
So perhaps the best tip of all for online social networking would be: Keep the social separate from the networking.

Ruling Is a Victory for Supporters of Free Software

August 14, 2008
Ruling Is a Victory for Supporters of Free Software
By JOHN MARKOFF
SAN FRANCISCO — A legal dispute involving model railroad hobbyists has resulted in a major courtroom victory for the free software movement also known as open-source software.
In a ruling Wednesday, the federal appeals court in Washington said that just because a software programmer gave his work away did not mean it could not be protected.
The decision legitimizes the use of commercial contracts for the distribution of computer software and digital artistic works for the public good. The court ruling also bolsters the open-source movement by easing the concerns of large organizations about relying on free software from hobbyists and hackers who have freely contributed time and energy without pay.
It also has implications for the Creative Commons license, a framework for modifying and sharing creative works that was developed in 2002 by Larry Lessig, a law professor at Stanford.
That license is now used widely by organizations like M.I.T. for distributing courseware, and Wikipedia, the Web-based encyclopedia. In March, the rock band Nine Inch Nails released a collection of musical tracks under a Creative Commons license.
The ambiguity facing open-source licensing has been one of the hurdles facing the movement, said Joichi Ito, the chief executive of Creative Commons.
“From a practical business perspective when big companies and their legal teams look at Creative Commons there are a number of questions,” he said. “It’s been one of the things their legal teams throw at us.”
The appeals court decision reverses a San Francisco federal court ruling over the misappropriation of a software program by a company that publishes model train hobbyist software.
The free software, or open source, community has quarreled for several years with Matthew A. Katzer, a Portland, Ore., businessman who owns Kam Industries. Previously, Mr. Katzer has sued free software developers for patent infringement and the free software community has argued that he had failed to disclose earlier technology, known as prior art, in his patent filings.
A lawyer for Mr. Katzer did not return calls asking for comment.
In March 2006, Robert G. Jacobsen, a physics professor at the University of California, Berkeley, filed a lawsuit against Mr. Katzer claiming that his company was distributing a commercial software program that had taken software code from the Java Model Railroad Interface project and was redistributing the program without the credits required as part of the open-source license it was distributed under.
The decision to appeal the lower court ruling, which said that the terms of the open-source contract were overly broad, was intensely debated within the free software movement. Some open-source advocates had worried that a loss before the appeals court would have been a disaster for the community, which has grown as an economic force during the last quarter century.
“I was terrified that we would lose,” Mr. Jacobsen said. “But I thought it was the right thing to do.”
There has long been a link between model train hobbyists and the free software movement. During the 1950s, for example, hobbyists who worked on the wiring of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology model railroad club project were informally known as “hackers,” according to “Hackers: Heroes of the Computer Revolution” by Steven Levy. The term evolved to include people who developed and programmed computers and who passionately believed that software codes should be freely shared.
Mr. Jacobsen said he believed that the court’s ruling was significant for the free software movement because it had thrived not on monetary gain but on individual credit for contributions.
“We don’t charge for this and so all we really get is credit,” he said, adding that anyone is free to use and modify the programming instructions created by his group as long as they retain the credit and distribute them with the programmer’s instructions.

Singing! Dancing! Adapting! Stumbling! By CHARLES ISHERWOOD

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August 10, 2008

Singing! Dancing! Adapting! Stumbling!

By CHARLES ISHERWOOD

HOLLYWOOD has a long history of bungling the movie versions of hit Broadway musicals, but believe it or not I held out hope for “Mamma Mia!” In retrospect this seems a little deranged, but let me explain.

The story of my responses to the Abba musical onstage is a strange one, moving through several phases, sort of like those stages of grief famously diagnosed by Elisabeth Kubler-Ross. I first saw the show shortly after it opened in London in 1999 to giddy reviews from the local critics. My reaction was a mixture of bafflement and dismay as I watched rows and rows of middle-aged Englishwomen — and quite a few mildly embarrassed-looking Englishmen — bouncing to their feet with glee to join in the megamix finale. There was sorrow too at what I immediately perceived as a dubious but obviously popular new genre of musical theater.

A few years later the musical splashed down on Broadway. Perhaps that initial vaccination had inoculated me against continued irritation. I still found it deeply silly, but also tolerable fun. And really, in contrast to the run of karaoke musicals that had by then begun to inundate the stage, “Mamma Mia!” does have a sweet little mother-daughter story nestled inside its iPod shuffle score of Abba tunes.

Still later I saw another production, this time in what I have come to consider the musical’s natural spiritual home, Las Vegas. The third time was the charm. Maybe it was the novelty of the cup holder at my seat, into which I nestled one of those luridly colored frozen drinks they serve you in big, cutely shaped plastic vessels. But at last I succumbed entirely to its ditzy glory, achieving serene acceptance. I saw the light, though I still refused to sing along. So I can honestly say I looked forward to the movie version with at least a happy sense of anticipation, intrigued by the curious casting of Meryl Streep in the leading role.

I really should have known better. Every few years, with depressing regularity, a hit Broadway musical makes the leap to the big screen and goes splat! Or thud. Or zzzzz. “Mamma Mia!” does a little of all three, to a frantic disco beat, becoming yet another milestone in Hollywood’s repertory of enjoyable stage musicals transformed into lumbering messes on screen.

The movie is actually doing strong if not superhero-size business, despite receiving some of the most amusingly awful reviews meted out to any movie this year. Even Ms. Streep, the country’s Greatest Living Actress by the reckoning of many, got knocked around. Many critics seemed to want to avert their eyes from the sorry spectacle of the great Streep cavorting in the Aegean with such frenetic zeal. I share the general mortification. The movie has brought me full circle in my “Mamma Mia!” journey, back to Stage 1: bafflement, dismay and sorrow.

For the uninitiated “Mamma Mia!” is set on an idyllic Greek island that doubles as both a funky resort and a lunatic asylum for people suffering from a distinctive disorder, the compulsive need to sing Abba songs at all hours of the day and night. The movie follows closely the plot and pacing of the original show, but the hard gaze of the camera puts into queasy relief the inanity of people lurching suddenly from natural conversation to leaping around singing lyrics with a mighty tenuous relationship to the situation at hand, as synthesizer chords churn away in the background. (For instance, when Ms. Streep’s character, Donna, evinces clear signs of emotional distress, a girlfriend opens her mouth and sings, “Chiquitita, tell me what’s wrong.” Chiquitita? Who she?)

Leaping isn’t the half of it either. I wouldn’t want to say Ms. Streep gives the worst performance of her career, as some aver, but it has got to be the scariest. When she is called upon to sing the title song — just after stumbling upon three ex-boyfriends she hasn’t seen for years — she flies into a spasmodic frenzy that concludes with her writhing on the roof of a goat house. Later she sings a syrupy ballad, “The Winner Takes It All,” with an operatic intensity that’s unsettling. It’s not exactly “Rose’s Turn,” after all, or even “My Man” from “Funny Girl.”

Staunch fans of the stage musical as an art form regularly have to weather scorn from nonbelievers when the movie versions of Broadway shows go galumphing across the screen. The subtext of many reviews is a smirky disdain for anything with its roots in old-fashioned theater, an unspoken belief that musicals and even plays are quant relics of another era beloved only of octogenarians, nostalgists and the irredeemably unhip.

The problem is, on the evidence of the movie versions of most musicals — and you have to keep in mind that only the most popular musicals warrant attention from Hollywood — their disaffection is hard to refute. If you saw the movie version of Mel Brooks’s musical “The Producers,” you’d have little notion of what a gut-busting joy the Broadway show was. The filmed “Rent” was a blunt, literal-minded translation of material that really had a sizzle onstage. “The Phantom of the Opera” was numbingly dull. Even “Mamma Mia!” — which I can now soberly see was never exactly “South Pacific” on the stage — might have made for a spryer, funnier, more zesty movie.

Theater is a stylized medium. We know that the guys up there fighting with swords are not going to draw real blood, and we don’t flinch when purportedly real people burst spontaneously into song. The great musicals from the glory days of Hollywood — the Fred and Ginger movies, the Arthur Freed classics from MGM — likewise offered up frothier visions of contemporary life. They emerged during an era when movies gussied up reality for purposes of enhancing their escapist appeal.

But since the 1960s film’s ability to capture the sights and sounds of the world more or less as they meet the eye and ear has been its signature aesthetic, at least for mainstream fare. The conventions of musical theater tend to assume a ludicrous aspect in this context; in life as we know it people do not communicate in song, trailed by a personal orchestra. (Those superhero movies are obviously pure fantasy, but they achieve their intense appeal by seeming to take place in a version of the real world.)

Theater is at the same time an intimate art form, allowing actors to make a direct connection to the audience and send complex messages. Watching the stage version of “Mamma Mia!” you often got a sense that the actors were in on the gag, fully aware of how patently ludicrous it was for their characters suddenly to bust out a flimsy but catchy 25-year-old pop song.

That sense of complicity in a collective joke can’t make it easily past the impersonal barrier of the movie screen. Winking at the camera is not really allowed. (Although I’m told there is collective audience participation at some screenings of the movie: When Pierce Brosnan first breaks into “S.O.S.,” his big number with Ms. Streep, viewers explode in mirth.)

A similar give-and-take between performers and audience basted the hoary jokes in “The Producers” in a shared warmth. The performances of Nathan Lane and Matthew Broderick, which fed happily on a live audience’s affection onstage, seemed canned and forced on film. “Rent” would have made a far more effective movie if it were filmed concert style, I expect. (And my hopes are high for Spike Lee’s planned movie of the sadly underappreciated “Passing Strange.”)

In the long history of stage-to-film transcriptions, Hollywood has found all sorts of ways to make mincemeat out of solid successes. On many occasions the decision to shunt aside the magnetic stage performer at the center of a show and cast an established movie star has proved fatal, as when Rosalind Russell replaced Ethel Merman in “Gypsy,” or Lucille Ball took over from Angela Lansbury in “Mame.” Even the great Marlon Brando and Frank Sinatra didn’t do much for the movie version of “Guys and Dolls.”

Entrusting musicals to esteemed film directors with no affinity for the material has often been a sure path to disaster. John Huston was all wrong for “Annie.” Ditto Richard Attenborough for “A Chorus Line” and Sidney Lumet on “The Wiz.” On the other hand, stage directors handed a camera to replicate their success on screen have also come a cropper with some regularity, as Harold Prince did on the notoriously awful film version of “A Little Night Music,” and later by Susan Stroman on “The Producers” and now Phyllida Lloyd, the director of “Mamma Mia!” on both stage and screen. Theater and film speak different languages; very few directors are fluent in both. Bob Fosse is one, and his film adaptation of “Cabaret” might top my list of the best stage-to-film translations. (Notably Fosse eliminated the “book” songs in which characters spontaneously sing, retaining only the numbers at the nightclub.)

I also particularly admire Norman Jewison’s “Fiddler on the Roof,” William Wyler’s “Funny Girl” and Carol Reed’s “Oliver!” Stanley Donen, a stage hoofer who became a skilled filmmaker, profitably teamed with the stage vet George Abbott to direct the likable films of “The Pajama Game” and “Damn Yankees.”

In recent years there has been a marked upward trend in the general quality of stage-to-film transcriptions. The more successful recent movie adaptations of popular musicals — “Chicago,” “Dreamgirls,” “Hairspray” and “Sweeney Todd” — only fitfully captured the energy and excitement of the stage versions, but they were respectable as movies, and entertaining.

“Chicago” is probably the best, although the movie was mostly Fosse-derivative and drained away a fair amount of the stage version’s snazzy wit. “Dreamgirls” felt to me like a two-hour montage, a frenzy of scenes and images that never really found a natural rhythm. The stage-size humor of “Hairspray” often clunked on screen, and the charm of Harvey Fierstein’s drag performance as Edna Turnblad lost much of its camp appeal when John Travolta was squeezed into a weirdly porcine fat suit. “Sweeney Todd” turned Mrs. Lovett into the title character’s goth twin, stripping away the contrast that gave their relationship such fizz and the show its variety. But each had its merits, and none was a disaster, suggesting — at least until the advent of “Mamma Mia!” — that an ongoing aesthetic rapprochement was being achieved.

Still, in my view the best movie musicals of the past few decades were not based on stage shows at all, in keeping with history. (“Singin’ in the Rain” is possibly the best movie musical of all time.) Herbert Ross’s “Pennies From Heaven” and Baz Luhrmann’s “Moulin Rouge!” both used film’s endless flexibility to enhance the stylized nature of the material, to thrilling results.

And, most promisingly, a small movie coming out of nowhere managed to make the old-school conventions of musical theater bloom naturally in a strictly realistic, indeed even grungy environment. The indie movie “Once,” which ultimately won an Oscar for best original song this year, depicts a romance between two street musicians in Dublin. The scruffy Irish protagonist and his Czech girlfriend glide into their music with the ease of Fred and Ginger wafting onto the dance floor, reminding us that at its best, onstage or at the movies, the marriage of music and drama feels not just natural but inevitable.

David Pogue’s Gadget List of 2008

August 7, 2008, 4:22 pm
David Pogue’s Gadget List of 2008

Two years ago, totally strapped for a column idea, I resorted to raiding my own e-mail Inbox. There I found a reader request:

“I would love to see a feature where you list what you personally use. Call it Pogue’s List or something. It would be great to see what someone as plugged in as you uses personally. Everything tech — watch, laptop, TV, car, digital camera, film camera, like that.”

What’s really surprising to me is how many readers have written to request an update of that list, especially lately.

Actually, the time is probably right. This year alone, I’ve bought several of the products that I reviewed in my column. So here it is: Pogue’s List 2008.

* Camera. When the picture counts, I grab our Nikon D80 and its Amazing 11X Image-Stabilized Lens (Nikon’s 18-200mm zoomer, which cost almost as much as the camera). It’s a fast, loaded, prosumer digital S.L.R. that takes jaw-droppingly beautiful pictures. (I sold my old D50 to my sister.)

But the Nikon is big and bulky, so my wife carries a Canon SD700 IS shirt-pocket camera; it’s also a rockin’ machine. It has image stabilization, it’s fast (processing and focusing), it takes really great movies and the pictures are superb for a little cam. Unfortunately, its autofocus just died this week. So I’m pretty sure I’m going to replace it with the Canon SD890 (5X optical zoom–unheard-of in pocket cams) or the SD950 (which has a 0.6-inch sensor, much larger and therefore better than the usual 0.3-inch or 0.4-inch sensor in pocket cams).

* Camcorder. No question here: Canon HV30. It’s a hi-def tape camcorder that doesn’t kid around with image quality; when they say high definition, they mean it. And it’s got everything: top-loading tape door, mike jack, headphone jack.

To me, all those non-tape camcorders (hard drives, DVDs, memory cards, etc.) have two huge drawbacks. First, all of them–ALL of them–compromise image quality, even the ones that claim to be hi-def, because they have to compress the image to fit the limited storage.

Second, I don’t understand where people think they’re going to store all their movies. Once the hard drive or memory card gets full, you have to empty it onto your computer’s hard drive. And then what?

I have a drawer containing 200 MiniDV tapes, documenting the lives of our three kids. I’d need NINE 300-gig hard drives to store all that. And what are you going to do when the drive dies?

* Cellphone. I occasionally grumble about Verizon, but never about its network; the signal stands head and shoulders above the other companies.

I’ve been a longtime fan of LG’s Verizon phones. When my 8100 died, I treated myself to the 8700, a silver, brushed-metal, superthin flip phone; it was the best-looking phone in the store.

As I wrote last October: “The sound quality amazing. The screen is brilliant. And I took some sample shots with the 2-megapixel camera and found it even better than my own LG.”

Unfortunately, “the darned thing is so thin and slick, it’s hard to hold; a rigid thin slab is not actually very easy to hold in your round, fleshy palm.” Oh, and this phone erased the magnetic strip on two hotel-room key cards before I got smart and started keeping them in different pockets.

I concluded: “If I had to it over again, I would not have bought this expensive, classy, impractical two-seater roadster. I’d have bought the Toyota Camry that my wife did: the LG8300. It’s a nearly perfect cellphone.”

(Why don’t I own an iPhone? Because AT&T has feeble coverage where I live, and because I’m on a two-year Verizon family plan.)

* Computer. I live on a MacBook Air. In the five months I’ve owned it, I’ve missed having the built-in DVD drive once; missed having FireWire about six times; missed the speed of a more serious machine about 20 times.

But I still consider those small sacrifices for the pleasure I get out of this machine the rest of the time. I use it like a glorified Palm Pilot. You pick it up with one hand. It turns on instantaneously. I’ve even read through e-mail while standing in the X-ray line at the airport.

I also just bought a Dell Inspiron 530s (total, delivered and taxed: $497). It’s a tiny little box that you can lay horizontally under your monitor, which is exactly how I have it. My favorite feature is the front panel: memory-card slots, USB, audio in, headphones, and so on. I’m constantly plugging and unplugging stuff, so it makes total sense.

I really shouldn’t reward Dell with any more business, considering how furious I am to this day about the design of my previous machine, a Dell Dimension 4550 tower. It had front-panel USB jacks, too, but they were hidden behind a door that was hinged at the top and only opened about two inches. You had to crawl on the floor with a flashlight every time wanted to plug something in. I sure hope that designer has found some other career.

* Mobile Internet. This is the greatest splurge, and the greatest convenience, in my entire portfolio: a Sierra Compass 597 cellular modem from Sprint. It’s a tiny, 2.5-inch stick of plastic that slides into the MacBook Air’s USB slot and gets me online at impressively high speeds.

The service costs $60 a month, which I find slightly outrageous–it’s clearly designed to gouge corporate drones on expense accounts.

But I have to tell you, in my travels, I’ve seen every kind of Wi-Fi hot spot under the sun. And Sprint’s cellular Internet beats the nation’s network of increasingly flaky hot spots any day of the week; in many a hotel room, it’s turned out to be much faster than Wi-Fi. Not to mention that it gets me online anywhere, even in the 99.9 percent of America where there is no Wi-Fi signal.

I’ve never found a dead spot, and the software is much slicker (and requires less time to connect) than the equivalent modems from Verizon.

* Movies. I bought the Vudu box this year ($300). Its hard drive contains the first 30 seconds of 5,000 movies. When you pick one to watch, it starts playing immediately–and the next section of movie downloads in the background. Great quality, huge selection, elegant software.

The best part: no monthly fees. Movies cost $2 to $4 to rent, or $15 to $20 to buy, meaning that they stay on your Vudu hard drive forever. So when life gets busy, I don’t pay anything.

The service keeps improving since I reviewed this thing last September. More hi-def movies, more TV shows, better features.

I canceled my HBO and Showtime subscriptions–something like $240 a year–which made very little economic sense for us. If I’m lucky, I have time for two or three movies in a month, so it’s much more economical to pay as I go.

* Car. Toyota Prius. Wow, what a great car. In April, I tried to buy a second Prius–and was told there’s a 10-month wait. Thanks a lot, gas crisis.

* TiVo. I bit the bullet and bought the Tivo Series 3, the hi-def masterpiece machine (which has, grrr, already been discontinued). Runs like a Swiss watch, has never let us down. Still the best DVR software and features on the planet. Subscribes to my favorite Web videos. When I’m away, I can program it from across the Internet.

Looking over this year’s Pogue List, I can see that, in my middle age, I’ve gotten fancier in my tastes. A few years ago, you wouldn’t have caught me dead with that $60-a-month cellular modem.

But life is short, travel is hard. And at its best, technology makes the most of both.

Speak Up, a Computer Is Listening By DAVID POGUE

August 7, 2008
State of the Art
Speak Up, a Computer Is Listening By DAVID POGUE
Of all the high-tech fantasies that sci-fi movies tantalize their escapist audiences with, surely that bit about giving your computer spoken orders is one of the most alluring. Ever since “Star Trek,” we’ve dreamed of being able to say, “Computer, display all known sources of dilithium crystals in the Kraxon Nebula!”

So far, the closest we can get is strapping on a headset and dictating, using a program like Dragon NaturallySpeaking to do the typing. This software is great for anyone who can’t type or doesn’t like to. And it lets you speak the names of menu commands and “click” links on a Web page.

But that’s not the same as telling the computer what to do in conversational English.

NaturallySpeaking 10, available Thursday, takes some baby steps in the right direction. It doesn’t turn your computer into the “Star Trek” mainframe; it doesn’t know what you mean by, for example, “Make this document shorter and funnier.” But in its timid, conservative way, it takes voice control unmistakably closer to that holy grail of computing.

NatSpeak’s principal mission, though, is to type out, into any Windows program, whatever you say. And in version 10, its maker, Nuance, claims to have eked out yet another 20 percent accuracy improvement.

I installed the program, donned the included headset and clicked “Skip initial training.” (In the early days of speech recognition, you had to read a 45-minute sample script to train the program to recognize your voice. Today, the software is so good, you can skip the training altogether.)

As a quick test, I read aloud the first 1,000 words of “Freakonomics” into Microsoft Word. Impressively enough, NatSpeak effortlessly transcribed words like “Ku Klux Klan” and “Punic war.” It did, however, mistype seven easier words (“addition” instead of “edition,” for example, and “per trail” instead of “portrayal”). Accuracy tally with no training: 99.3 percent. Not too shabby.

Then I tried a second test: I read one of the five-minute training scripts (a Kennedy speech), which is recommended for even better initial accuracy. I again read the first 1,000 words of “Freakonomics,” and the program mistyped five words. Accuracy this time: 99.5 percent.

In both cases, the number of spelling mistakes was zero. People who use NaturallySpeaking never make typos, only wordos.

As you correct the mistakes with your voice — a speedy, streamlined procedure — the program learns. Whether you skip initial training or not, accuracy inches toward perfection over time.

One way that Nuance has improved accuracy is by acknowledging, for the first time, that not everyone speaks alike. Version 10 recognizes eight accents: general (none), Australian, British, Indian, Great Lakes (Buffalo to Chicago), Southeast Asian, Southern United States and Spanish. If you don’t specify, the program will identify you automatically.

Isn’t that somehow politically incorrect? Should a software program treat you differently depending on how you sound?

Ah, the heck with it. It’s dictation software. A little stereotyping can go a long way.

Speed is another virtue in version 10. The program still waits for a pause in your talking before it types, so that it can use context to choose, for example, the correct homonym (there/they’re/their). But that waiting period has been halved; text appears almost instantaneously at each pause.

Second — and here’s where things start to get Star Trekky — the program understands more “natural language” commands.

For example, italicizing something you’ve already typed, say, the phrase “gas prices,” used to require three separate commands. First, “Select gas prices.” Then, “Italicize that.” Finally, to move your insertion point back where you stopped, “Go to end of document.”

In version 10, a single command does the trick: “italicize ‘gas prices.’” The program makes the change and returns to where you stopped, all in a blink. The same trick also works with the verbs “bold,” “underline,” “delete,” “cut” and “copy.” (Yes, “bold” is a verb now.)

You can speak a series of new Search commands, beginning with “Search computer for ...,” “Search the Web for ...,” “Search e-mail for ...” and so on.

For example: “Search maps for Chinese restaurants near Hoboken.” Or “Search Wikipedia for Bay of Pigs.” Or “Search images for Gwyneth Paltrow.” These shortcuts work 100 percent reliably and do truly save you time and typing. Next version: more of them, please.

And now, the NatSpeak Frequently Asked Questions:

“Does NaturallySpeaking work on a Mac?” Yes, but only when the Mac is running Windows and you’re using a U.S.B. headset adapter. It works fantastically in Boot Camp and fast enough in VMware Fusion, an emulator program.

Of course, it might be simpler just to buy MacSpeech Dictate, a Mac program that uses the same Dragon recognition technology. The current version is fast and accurate, but it lags behind NatSpeak in features and power; it doesn’t even let you make corrections by voice, and therefore the accuracy never improves. But a 1.2 version, with voice correction and voice spelling, is in testing now.

“Can I transcribe interviews with it?” No. NatSpeak knows only one person’s voice: yours. It also requires a clean audio signal, like the one from a headset mike half an inch from your mouth.

“Can I dictate with a wireless Bluetooth earpiece?” Yes. In fact, version 10 greatly expands the number of compatible earpiece models (18 so far, listed at nuance.com). Accuracy may take a hit, though.

“Can I dictate into a pocket recorder and transcribe it later?” Yes. The setup is more involved, though: only some recorders are compatible, and you have to record 15 minutes of training.

“Doesn’t Windows Vista come with speech recognition?” Yes, and it’s really good — quite similar to NatSpeak, actually. But Nuance says that, oddly enough, Vista has had virtually no effect on NatSpeak sales.

I’m guessing that obscurity is part of the reason; most people aren’t even aware that Vista offers such a feature. Vista doesn’t come with the required headset, either. Nor does the Vista version offer the same accuracy, features or power of NatSpeak, and it isn’t available in other languages (French, Italian, German, Spanish, Dutch and so on).

NatSpeak is available in a number of versions. The Standard edition ($100) has the same accuracy as the others, but it’s just for bare-bones dictation.

To get the more advanced goodies described in this review — the natural-language commands, Bluetooth mikes and recorders — you need the Preferred edition ($200). It also lets you set up voice macros that type out boilerplate text. For example, you can say, “Buzz off,” and it will type: “Thanks for thinking of me! Unfortunately, I’m afraid I’m unable to accept your kind offer at this time.”

There are also medical and legal editions ($1,600 and $1,200, yikes), as well as a Professional edition ($900) for corporate administrators who want to manage many NatSpeak installations from a central server. The Pro version also recognizes natural-language commands for Microsoft Outlook, like “Send e-mail to Mom” or “Schedule a meeting with Barack Obama and John McCain.”

Apart from Vista, NatSpeak really has no competition. Philips has dropped out of the American market. I.B.M.’s own ViaVoice hasn’t been updated since 2003, and its sole distributor is, get this, Nuance.

Maybe that’s why Nuance makes only small, confident changes from one version of NatSpeak to the next. Without any rivals, why add bells and whistles that risk mucking up the program’s virtues?

As a result, existing NaturallySpeaking owners can usually afford to skip a generation between upgrades. Version 10 is a healthy leap ahead of version 8, but version 9 owners shouldn’t feel compelled to upgrade.

And now, if you’ll excuse me, I have some real work to do: “Search maps for dilithium crystals near New York City. ...”

E-mail: pogue@nytimes.com

A Good Appetite / An Apricot in Hand, an Overflowing Bowl / By MELISSA CLARK

August 6, 2008
A Good Appetite / An Apricot in Hand, an Overflowing Bowl / By MELISSA CLARK
WHEN it comes to fresh summer apricots, a fruit-obsessed friend and I have an ongoing debate.
She swears by cooking stone fruits to bring out their flavor: poaching them in sugar syrup, baking them into a tart crust, or nestling them under a nutty crumble.
I like my apricots ripe, raw and straight up, eaten over the sink to catch any nectar that dribbles too fast for me to lick off my hand.
Because of this divide, my friend has a stash of well-loved apricot recipes, while I have — well, a stash of apricots that I eat one after another as they soften.
But every few years, tempted by her effusive descriptions of elaborate creations filled with melting apricots, I break out of my happy rut and whip up a recipe or two.
While they are always good, the fruit condensed and rich from time spent exposed to heat, they’re never quite compelling enough for me to want to make more than once, especially when the effortless, over-the-sink option beckons.
This summer, though, with a harvest producing apricots so luscious, juicy and abundant, I decided it was time again to step away from the sink. Besides, I had an overflowing bowl of red-dappled fruit ripening all at once, and I needed to do something before all that quivering, fragrant flesh succumbed to the circling fruit flies.
So what to make?
Because I’ve yet to upgrade the faulty air-conditioner in the kitchen, baking was out of the question. This left me with poaching or sautéing on the stove top.
I thought of my friend and her syrup-poached apricots, and decided to give that method a try. I liked the idea of encouraging the juicy factor of the fruit, instead of evaporating all the sweet drippings in a hot skillet.
After poaching, my plan was to toss them with whatever rich dairy product I had in the fridge, which turned out to be Greek yogurt (though crème fraîche or sour cream could have also worked), and some toasted nuts for crunch.
My friend likes to poach her apricots with aromatics, like split vanilla beans or lemon verbena leaves, so I followed suit, adding a pinch of ground cinnamon and a few gratings of lemon zest to my apricots and sugar.
As I was about to pour in the water and set the mix to simmer, I paused to watch the apricot juices saturate the sugar and begin to break it down into syrup. If the apricots and sugar were already forming syrup on their own, without the aid of heat, why should I even bother turning on the stove? I knew that if I left the mixture alone the acids and moisture from the fruit would eventually dissolve the sugar crystals nearly as effectively as a flame. And by not adding water, the syrup would be thick and clingy instead of diluted.
I nibbled a piece of apricot after it had macerated for a few minutes. It was coated in syrup and deeply suffused with the flavors of cinnamon and lemon, which I combined because the Greek yogurt sparked a baklava fantasy, and my favorite version calls for those ingredients.
With baklava images lingering, I chose walnuts to layer in the bowl with my apricots and yogurt.
Sublimely syrupy as the apricots were, the yogurt was bracingly tart, almost too much so. My little creation needed a touch more sweetness to mellow out the tang.
The baklava connection made me reach for a jar of good Greek honey. A few sticky drips were all that was needed to pull everything together.
Juicy, creamy and crunchy, with golden veins of honey rippling through the yogurt and over the fruit and walnuts, this was one apricot recipe good enough to compete with raw fruit over the sink. And not much more difficult, either.



August 6, 2008
Recipe
Honey-Apricot Parfait With Greek Yogurt, Walnuts and Cinnamon
Time: 10 minutes
10 ounces apricots, pitted and cubed (about 2 cups)
1 to 2 tablespoons sugar, depending upon sweetness of apricots
1/4 teaspoon lemon zest, optional
1/4 teaspoon ground cinnamon
1 cup Greek yogurt
Good honey, for drizzling
1/2 cup chopped toasted walnuts.
1. Toss apricots with sugar, lemon zest, if using, and cinnamon. Let rest for a few minutes to bring juices out in apricots.
2. Stir yogurt until creamy. Divide half of it between two bowls or parfait glasses. Drizzle with a little honey and sprinkle with nuts. Spoon apricots into each glass, saving a few cubes to garnish tops. Repeat layering of yogurt, honey and nuts, then garnish with reserved apricot cubes. Serve immediately.
Yield: 2 servings.

The Minimalist/ Rich, Luxurious, French (Not to Mention Vegetarian)/ By MARK BITTMAN

August 6, 2008
The Minimalist/ Rich, Luxurious, French (Not to Mention Vegetarian)/ By MARK BITTMAN
NICE, France
FROM the outside, there is nothing very unusual about La Zucca Magica, a restaurant by the harbor here. At most, you might notice the words on the awning: “restaurant au légumes, oeufs et fromages” (vegetables, eggs and cheeses).
But once you enter, its unusual character begins to become evident. The restaurant is decorated almost exclusively with gourds and artwork made from them: sculptures, bowls and other containers, masks, puppets and toys. Gourds are featured in paintings, photographs, tapestries and posters, and on mirrors. They hang from the ceiling like salamis at Zabar’s.
This is not a gourd restaurant, but the décor and the name (“zucca” may refer generically to any squash or gourd, though in Italy the word is also used specifically for a small, pumpkin-like squash) are tied to the cuisine. The cooking at La Zucca Magica is vegetarian.
In itself this is not so extraordinary, but there is the matter of its location. (The French can be quite hostile to vegetarianism.)
Most unusual of all are the quality and the consistency of the food. Zucca has few equals among well-known Western restaurants serving no meat or fish. Nor are there many that can so readily satisfy omnivores, because Zucca’s owners, Marco Folicaldi and Rossella Bolmida, believe in sizable portions, many of them, and extremely rich food. If you associate “vegetarian” with “meager,” this place will change your mind.
Ms. Bolmida is from Turin, and her husband, Mr. Folicaldi, is from Rome, where they met. Their vegetarianism evolved slowly. “When I was growing up,” Mr. Folicaldi said to me, in a combination of French, English and Italian, “we ate meat, meat and more meat.” To hear him tell it, he first became tired of eating it. Then he met Ms. Bolmida, and the two became self-described animal lovers. Finally, he says, “We said ‘basta!’ to trying to pretend the slices did not come from a nice little pig.”
They decided to open a restaurant, whose vegetarian nature and location — the quality of vegetables in southern France and nearby Italy is unsurpassed — followed naturally. The name, as they said in an e-mail, “is evocative, that of a vegetable but something more, a touch of magic. The zucca brings nourishment to the limited winter table, and is even useful when dry — you can use gourds for water, utensils, containers, even musical instruments.” (There are some of those hanging in the restaurant as well.)
What is really magic is the daily evolution of ever-changing five-course meals. Mr. Folicaldi believes in using “too much” garlic, and he’s not shy about large quantities of olive oil or cheese either, so the food is consistently strong-flavored and rich.
But the vegetables never stop changing. And the flavors of just about everything, from cabbage to olives to basil to tomatoes, are just stunning, with the intensity for which the region is justifiably known.
In midwinter, I ate orange slices topped with crushed olives, oil, and fennel seeds — that simple — and they nearly took my breath away. I ate cabbage and beans with garlic and oil, and even that was mesmerizing.
There are dishes more complex as well: the risotto- and mozzarella-stuffed chard leaves, not that difficult to make but gorgeously scented and flavored; a variation of the locally famous fougasse, this one essentially a sandwich of thin pastry, loads of soft cheese, and pitted local taggiasca olives; stuffed vegetables, a classic of Provence, made in seemingly infinite ways; artichoke lasagna, also laced with cheese; fresh pasta (or almost anything else) featuring Mr. Folicaldi’s genuine pistou, a blend of not only basil but also at least a touch of whatever wild herbs are growing in the nearby hills. (“My pistou can be yours,” he said to me. “It’s a little different every time I make it.”)
In fact, if you’re accustomed to eating in this region’s good restaurants, the food at Zucca is in some ways unremarkable: there is creativity here, but it’s hardly trendsetting. The food contains top-notch ingredients prepared well and traditionally.
The results are delicious, and you leave completely stuffed. It is true that fish and meat are not served, but neither is there much fuss about their absence. And the abundance of local cheese, eggs and cream — this is no more a vegan-friendly restaurant than any of its neighbors — is a constant reminder that vegetarianism is far from synonymous with asceticism.



August 6, 2008
Recipe
Chard Stuffed With Risotto and Mozzarella
Adapted from La Zucca Magica, Nice
Time: About an hour
6 cups vegetable broth, more if needed
1 cup arborio rice
Large pinch of saffron
2 lemons, zested
2 tablespoons butter
1/2 cup grated Parmesan cheese, more for garnish
Salt and freshly ground black pepper
6 big chard leaves
1/2 pound mozzarella cheese
Extra virgin olive oil for drizzling.
1. Cook rice in vegetable broth, starting with one cup; add broth in stages, using about 3 cups total, until rice is barely tender. Reserve unused broth. Dissolve saffron in juice of one lemon. Add to rice, along with butter, Parmesan, zest of one lemon, salt and pepper to taste. Allow rice to cool a bit. Recipe can be made up to an hour in advance at this point, but do not refrigerate rice.
2. Poach chard leaves in about 2 cups remaining broth for about 30 seconds. Take out, drain on a dishcloth, and cut out the hardest part of central stem. Reserve cooking broth.
3. Preheat oven to 400 degrees. With wet hands, form 6 balls of rice 2 to 3 inches across. Dig a hole in ball and insert a piece of mozzarella. Wrap each ball in a chard leaf.
4. Put balls in a close-fitting oven pan, with enough reserved broth to come about a half-inch up sides of balls; bake 15 minutes. Serve balls topped with a little more broth, more lemon zest, Parmesan and olive oil.
Yield: 6 servings.




August 6, 2008
Recipe
Tomatoes Stuffed With Pasta Salad
Adapted from La Zucca Magica, Nice
Time: About 45 minutes
4 large tomatoes
Salt and freshly ground black pepper
1 yellow pepper, minced
2 tablespoons olive oil, more for baking dish
2 cloves garlic, minced
Scant 1/4 pound spaghetti
3 tablespoons small black olives (niçoise), pitted and chopped
1 tablespoon capers, preferably salt-packed (rinsed with warm water)
12 basil leaves, chopped
2 or 3 marjoram or oregano leaves, or a pinch of dried
1/2 pound fresh mozzarella cheese, chopped.
1. Preheat oven to 425 degrees. Remove top third of each tomato. Scoop out some flesh and chop it, along with the top third. Salt inside of tomatoes and turn them upside down while you proceed.
2. Cook yellow pepper in a tablespoon of oil with half the garlic, until soft. Break spaghetti into little bits and cook in salted boiling water just until tender. Drain and rinse in cold water.
3. Mix together the chopped tomato, cooked pepper, spaghetti and all other ingredients except mozzarella. Stuff tomatoes, first with cheese, then with tomato mixture. Put in an oiled baking dish and bake for about 15 minutes, or until hot. Serve hot or warm.
Yield: 4 servings.



August 6, 2008
Recipe
Sage Frittata
Adapted from La Zucca Magica, Nice
Time: 20 minutes
6 eggs
1 tablespoon grated Parmesan cheese
2 tablespoons day-old bread crumbs soaked in 1/2 cup whole milk
12 sage leaves
Salt
2 tablespoons olive oil.
1. In a bowl, beat eggs with a fork. Add cheese, bread crumbs and sage and beat well, along with a pinch of salt.
2. Put oil in a 10-inch skillet over medium-high heat; add egg mixture and cook until sides are browned and top almost firm, about 8 minutes. Turn; slide frittata onto a plate, cover it with another plate, invert plates, and slide frittata back into pan. Turn off heat immediately and serve hot, warm or at room temperature.
Yield: 4 to 6 servings.