Hmm, does anyone know of any good lunch places around the Tappan Zee? We're driving to Maryland Friday and it looks like that might be a good halfway lunch point.

I'll ask my mom if she has any recommendations. Are you thinking of anything in particular, or particularly cheap, etc.?

Too bad you can't go to the CIA in Hyde Park, but it's out of your way by too much.

I am fascinated by NCIS, partly because it's so Republican and also because the show is so not as straight as it thinks it is.

Criminal Minds is all about the Tragedy of modern life, wherein every third person is a startlingly intelligent serial killer. The CSIs are just funny, and occasionally good for an interesting guest star. It's kind of like "where are they now?" for erstwhile TV luminaries.

yeah, L&O is like that too. Lara Flynn Boyle was on this week's, although I almost didn't recognize her because she had those wierd lip injections and her mouth was all lopsided and wierd.

WHAT!?!?!?!?!~? NOOOOOO!!!!1!1111one! ABBYnPROBEE4EVAH!

Yess! Also, the first Ray Vecchio was in one episode of NCIS. And Jan from The Office was in another. So that's fun too.

I like Grissom and Willows and Greg from the original CSI, and I don't mind Nick or Warwick or Sarah (most of the time). CSI Miami, on the other hand, should be called "CSI Caruso moves into the shot in profile and takes his sunglasses off." And the crossover, with Willows and Warwick meeting up with the Miami team, was pure comedy gold. Reeediculous!

I have a friend whose barely competent manager has decided that the solution to all their problems is to drag the whole department to some outdoor/nature center that does team building programs next week. (Including the person with skin cancer and the person with some sort of porphyria disorder, naturally.) Wonder what neat tricks they'll come up with.

Lord of the Flies was set out in nature, wasn't it?

DH's philosophy is that our species has spent nearly 4 million years trying to get OUT of nature. No way in hell he's going back.

OK, my room is clean.

And now, to the visible parts of the kitchen, and the cooking, and the Getting to Know Saturnalia Better part of the evening.

I'll ask my mom if she has any recommendations. Are you thinking of anything in particular, or particularly cheap, etc.?

Just a nice lunch spot. Tom loves old school diners. (other factors that might help: good beer; bbq- but I think that in Jersey, the diner angle is probably the best!)

And the crossover, with Willows and Warwick meeting up with the Miami team, was pure comedy gold. Reeediculous!

The most reeeediculous is the Miami/NY crossover that launched NY. The cinematographers for NY had decided on a cool, blue pallet, and Miami has always been primarily orange. They generally used the Miami pallet in Miami, and the NY pallet in NY, but there was one eye-stabbingly bad scene between Sinese and Caruso in Sinese's apartment that involved cuts back and forth between the two characters. Sinese, standing by his apartment window at night, was in the deepest, most melancholy blue light of the entire episode, and Caruso, standing by the front door, had found the only pool of orange light in all of NY to stand in.

It was bad.

Are parents really as fearful about letting their kids out of sight as this article suggests?

Why I Let My 9-Year-Old Ride the Subway Alone

And he did. He came home on the subway and bus by himself.

Anyway, for weeks my boy had been begging for me to please leave him somewhere, anywhere, and let him try to figure out how to get home on his own. So on that sunny Sunday I gave him a subway map, a MetroCard, a $20 bill, and several quarters, just in case he had to make a call.

...

Long story short: My son got home, ecstatic with independence.

Long story longer, and analyzed, to boot: Half the people I’ve told this episode to now want to turn me in for child abuse. As if keeping kids under lock and key and helmet and cell phone and nanny and surveillance is the right way to rear kids. It’s not. It’s debilitating — for us and for them.

And yet —

“How would you have felt if he didn’t come home?” a New Jersey mom of four, Vicki Garfinkle, asked.

Guess what, Ms. Garfinkle: I’d have been devastated. But would that just prove that no mom should ever let her child ride the subway alone?

No. It would just be one more awful but extremely rare example of random violence, the kind that hyper parents cite as proof that every day in every way our children are more and more vulnerable.

...

These days, when a kid dies, the world — i.e., cable TV — blames the parents. It’s simple as that. And yet, Trevor Butterworth, a spokesman for the research center STATS.org, said, “The statistics show that this is an incredibly rare event, and you can’t protect people from very rare events. It would be like trying to create a shield against being struck by lightning.”

Justice Department data actually show the number of children abducted by strangers has been going down over the years. So why not let your kids get home from school by themselves?

“Parents are in the grip of anxiety and when you’re anxious, you’re totally warped,” the author of “A Nation of Wimps,” Hara Estroff Marano, said. We become so bent out of shape over something as simple as letting your children out of sight on the playground that it starts seeming on par with letting them play on the railroad tracks at night. In the rain. In dark non-reflective coats.

The problem with this everything-is-dangerous outlook is that over-protectiveness is a danger in and of itself. A child who thinks he can’t do anything on his own eventually can’t.