This is cheating, because…

…these photos are from Thanksgiving. No matter. Here they are. Happy New Year.

Sorry about the long absence. Buying a co-op, and the subsequent renovations, moving, and unpacking, have pretty much swallowed all my free time over the last two months.

A number of restaurant reviews have gone unwritten. Several of the next few posts will be rather sketchy, as in some cases I have photos and/or vague recollections, but not enough detail to write a full review.

Now that I’m settled in, reviews should start appearing again at the usual intervals.

My son and I are off to California to visit my brother’s family. After a couple of days there, we’ll take a long drive up the Pacific Coast Highway.

Blog posts will be either scarce or non-existent for the next 10 days.

 So much for that! Our trip started out as a comedy of cancellations.

In the first place, my son was supposed to fly from Tampa to New York on Friday night. Then, we would have flown together from New York to California on Saturday. His trip to New York was cancelled (JetBlue, natch!), so I spent another $280 to fly him on Delta from from Tampa to California direct.

Then, my flight to California on American was cancelled too. Now, here’s the rub: when there are a bunch of cancelled flights during a busy travel period, you’re usually stuck for several days, because all of the later flights are pretty close to fully booked. So, I can’t get out to California till Monday.

Assuming no further snafus, we’ll at least get most of the vacation we planned, although I’ll only have one evening with my brother’s family before we hit the road. 

“Study Finds That Marriage Builds Wealth.” So says an article I found today on Yahoo! News.

Unfortunately, the corrollary is that divorce destroys wealth:

Marrying for money, it turns out, works. A study by an Ohio State University researcher shows that a person who marries — and stays married — accumulates nearly twice as much personal wealth as a person who is single or divorced.

And for those who divorce, it’s a bit more expensive than giving up half of everything they own. They lose, on average, three-fourths of their personal net worth.

“Getting married for a few years and then getting divorced is clearly not the path to financial independence…”

Boy, oh boy, ain’t it true!

I’m now all caught up with posting my restaurant reviews, after a year in which I posted rather irregularly. Regardless of the posting date, all reviews were written within a few days of the visit. Most of the reviews are on eGullet also, although the ratings appear only on this site.

The ratings are my impression of what a restaurant critic should award, if the restaurant always performed as it did when I visited. (In most cases, I have only one visit to go on, and obviously a professional review would need to be based on several visits.) My rating system is the same one-to-four star scale that the New York Times employs, although I allow half-stars. I also rate food/service/ambiance separately, in addition to providing an overall rating.

Why blog? Everyone blogs, or perhaps it only seems that way. On the Internet, to blog is to be. I had to have a blog.

What to talk about? This blog is about my passion for New York City ... its restaurants, its neighborhoods, its transit system, its theatre, its opera companies, its museums.

Along the way, I'll probably editorialize about politics, law, travel, and other topics that interest me. After all, it's the Supreme Blogger's Right to follow fancy's whim, and write as one pleases.

Yet, I do hesitate. Blogging seems so hopelessly self-indulgent. The Internet is full of blogs read by no one, serving no purpose but to satisfy the blogger's desire to see himself talk.

But I decided to give it a try anyway. Whether anyone's reading is beside the point ... but hopefully somebody will be.