The Back Patio as Lunchspot, as Marketplace of Ideas

I can't remember why I wasn't eating lunches on the office's back patio last summer. There are always a few coworkers out there, though it's been trending more intern-heavy of late. Besides the conversation, you learn where other people get their food from; I've picked up on a decent sandwich shop, and a sidewalk cart with okay Thai food, and most importantly an excellent falafel/shawerma place, all a brief walk away from the office. Plus the gelato place, of course.

Also I heard that there's a movie coming out later this summer with the kid who played George Michael in Arrested Development, and that the preview looked hilarious to whoever it was on the back patio who'd seen it. For that matter, the movie Knocked Up is supposedly really funny; I heard this from a coworker who's eight months pregnant, so I figure she knows what she's talking about.

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Do you work around editors?

downtown farmers'/farmer's/farmers (a case could be made for each, I think) market starts this Wed.

Part of a casual email someone in the dept. sent around last week. There's some light irony to be read into it. The editors are, as I've said before, admirably non-fussy most of the time.

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Occasionally it occurs to me that there was a really interesting article about ketchup in the New Yorker a couple of years ago, and I looked this up last week finally and found it again. It's by Malcolm Gladwell, which I'd forgotten. In it you'll learn that ketchup stimulates all five essential taste senses and appears to defy the sort of high-end reinvention that Grey Poupon brought upon the mustard world in the 1980s.