Ralph Gardner Jr.

With apologies to Charles Dickens, Tuesday night in New York City was both the best of times and the worst of times. The worst because an unhealthy haze had descended on Manhattan from Canada’s wildfires, bathing the city in an eerie light that left the distinct impression that all was not right with the world.

The death of the great British novelist and satirist Martin Amis last week at the age of 73 provoked a cascade of thoughts and emotions. Sadness first of all. I’d only read a couple of his books but was impressed and not a little envious about the pure brio of his writing – the brilliant sense of humor, the off-the-cuff erudition. I resisted telling my wife the news after it popped up on my phone for fear I might choke up.

It took more than a decade but my orchid finally called it quits. It threw in the towel. It cashed in its chips. I remember exactly when I acquired the plant because I wrote a story in the Wall Street Journal associated with it that came to include a published correction. I bought the orchid at a plant sale at the Brooklyn Botanic Garden on May 5th, 2010.

My baby carriage is once again being called into service, almost seventy years after it first tread New York City’s sidewalks, parks and playgrounds. The last time it saw the light of day occurred when my older daughter Lucy was an infant some thirty-four years ago. Since then it’s been living in the cobwebbed gloom of our basement, stoically battling the inexorable forces of time, nature and mildew.

Once a year Maureen Dowd relinquishes her New York Times column to her conservative Republican brother. I find his take on things annoying but I’m really not qualified to pass judgment since I usually drop out after the first couple of paragraphs.

My knowledge of the history of African-Americans in Columbia County was limited to one person when I was a child – singer and civil rights activist Harry Belafonte. He was also the only celebrity I’d heard of with a home in the county when I visited my grandparents here in the 1960’s. Belafonte owned a 160-acre estate in Chatham, NY. It was called Day-O Farm after the lyrics to a traditional Jamaican folk song he made famous in the 1950’s. Mr. Belafonte sold the farm in the 1990’s.

There’s only one place where I always order tomato juice, other than in a bloody mary, and I don’t drink many bloody marys. It’s from the drinks cart on an airplane once it reaches cruising altitude. Turns out there’s an entire body of online literature, loosely speaking, about why tomato juice tastes great in the sky but arouses little excitement at sea level.

Everything Everywhere All At Once isn’t just this year’s big winner at the Academy Awards. It’s also an apt description for the snow dump we received early this week. Not all that long ago I thought the winter would end without a single backdoor cross-country ski outing, one of my preferred forms of exercise; these days as rare as a total solar eclipse.

I’m sure you’ve heard the distressing news by now. The Swiss legislature determined that Toblerone, the distinctive triangular chocolate bar, is no longer sufficiently Swiss to label itself so; or to employ Swiss symbols such as the image of the Matterhorn. The mountain appears on the package and the chocolate bar’s distinctive shape mimics it. In the future Switzerland’s most famous peak will be replaced by a generic mountain.

I was unfamiliar with the Men’s Underwear Index – the MUI – until I heard it discussed this week on National Public Radio. Perhaps on the Marketplace Morning Report on WAMC. Or some similarly unassailable repository of economic news and analysis. The theory – I believe it was first proposed by former Federal Reserve chair Alan Greenspan – is that you can gauge consumer confidence by how robust men’s underwear sales are.