Fondue for Nothing

As Frank correctly asserted, the Melting Pot is a big fat rip-off. Fortunately, Friend Kate had a $100 gift certificate which she generously donated to our four-person cause, AND Jill and Kate were nice enough to take us out for dinner as a belated engagement gift. Very belated. So the meal was AWESOME - cheddar-garlic cheese fondue, mushroom salads, steak and shrimp and fish topped by an oreo/fluff/dark chocolate dessert fondue (dipped-in by cake, strawberries, bananas, and mysteriously cookie-coated marshmallows). Mmmmmmmgood, and the price from the beck and Nyet perspective was a-okay.

And the company was grand, too. Kate is up to her usual hilarity, dating a seven fingered giant from Wichita Falls by way of Iowa. She has known him for three days and is now making Iowanian hotel reservations. This would be funny were it not so true. But she is otherwise sane and looking for a house up by her new internship / residency digs in Northwestern Mass. Jill is doing well, too, getting ready to lead what sounds like a highly cushy life in her transition year en route to an even cushier life in radiology at UPenn. It's enough to make you want to stay in med school. Or not. She continues to inquire about cute boys attending the wedding, after which I continue to advise her to stay away from internet chatrooms and stick to the handsome men her own age. So, gentlemen in attendance, the tall pretty lady who is on the prowl at our wedding is quite a catch, and it is apparent that she would rather her next Date be followed by coffee and cuddling than "line NBC: To Catch a Predator."

Went home after the dindin and crashed after another in a long series of moronic episodes of House. And today is another in a long series of disappointing classes - Walnut seniors have officially checked out. Oh, well, c'est la vie.

The news, as in media news, quickly shifted from a moronic Imus scandal to the horrendous shooting that occurred at Virginia Tech on Monday. I've got nothing to add to the fray other than to say it's exhibit 134673824-A.127 of life's cruel and random potentialities. I heard on the radio this morning that one of the victims, a professor, was a *Holocaust survivor*. I heard someone else on the radio, the U.T. director of security, discuss how impractical it would be to shut down the campus in the event of domestic violence cases even if gunfire is involved. People clearly want to impose order on a implicitly disordered situation and their course, completely disregarding notions of everyday propriety, is to blame someone while simultaneously implying that the situation was obviously preventable / controllable and that the world does not contain fear-inducing, erratic elements. I'm not saying that the blame is wrong or that some aspect of this tragedy could not have been prevented by better action by the University's leadership, just saying that people's snap reaction is to look for a rational chain of events even when a primary cause is so plainly irrational. Some friends of mine have discussed how relatively non-discussed this event has been in their respective workplaces, and I think beyond the typical "people are desensitized" explanations lies something more insidious about people's inability to deal with an apparent aspect of this story: that sometimes very, very terrible things happen, and they don't have a good explanation beyond their inevitability due to bell curve dynamics. It's admirable that we try to do everything we can to prevent such things, but we still need to allow for the potential falsehood of the baseline assumption that they are actually preventable.